Sun at Midnight (33 page)

‘Are you okay, Aleece?’ Laure called.

‘Yes.’

She should help with the breakfast, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the ship. It was a lifeline and a sentence of execution all in one. It could remove her from her present dilemma, but to allow it to do so would mean the end of her Antarctic life.

Stay
, a siren voice whispered in her ear.

Through the binoculars she watched the ship’s captain descend the metal steps with the first mate behind him. A minute later the dinghies, wallowing a little under the weight of their cargoes, circled away from the ship and ploughed back towards the shore. The link was easily made when the ship was here but once it was broken Kandahar would be wrapped in isolation again.

Richard and Russell and Arturo drank coffee and chatted in Spanish to the officers. The rest of them unloaded supplies and did a series of carries up the beach to the base stores. Alice stopped to catch her breath with a box of apples resting on the jut of her stomach.

‘Heavy?’ Phil asked as he came by with a tier of three boxes.

‘Not at all. Can you manage those?’

‘Pfff,’ he retorted.

At the end of the visit everyone strolled back down to the jetty. Six new gas canisters stood above the waterline, wrapped in a shroud of tarpaulin. The empties were stacked in the bottom of one of the Zodiacs, to be shipped back to Punta Arenas with the rest of the retro. The captain stood with his hands in the pockets of his windproof, proudly surveying his waiting ship.

‘Who’s coming? All aboard for civilisation,’ he joked in English as Rooker waded out to bring the dinghy close in to the jetty for him.

Alice’s inner voice muttered,
Wait, I am, I’m coming with you.

‘No takers,’ Richard responded.

She stood with her boots planted on the shingle, listening to the slap of waves and the rattle of brash ice. The packaged waste had already been hoisted into Phil’s dinghy and Rook waited in thigh-deep water for the ship’s officers to scramble aboard.

‘
Buenas días
,’ the first officer called. ‘
Muchas gracias
.’

Phil fired his outboard and headed again for the ship.

The captain beamingly shook everyone’s hand. ‘If you cannot be persuaded to leave now, we see you in March.’

Polar Star
was scheduled to return on 15 March, before the bay iced for the winter, to take them all back to Chile.

Alice was rooted to the beach. There was a chorus of goodbyes as the ship’s officers saluted, Rook opened the throttle and the outboard roared. The second Zodiac raced after the first and Alice swallowed hard against the mixture of emotions rising in her throat. Finally she got her breathing under control again.

There, it was done.

She hadn’t burned her boats, exactly, but she had just waved goodbye to them. The certainty filled her with a kind of reckless glee. Staying here was the most irresponsible thing she had ever done, no question, but as she stood watching Rook in the dinghy she knew it was what she wanted.

Now she would be here until the end of the season, two months away.

If she was already as much as twenty weeks pregnant – how this had happened she had yet to work out – it would
be a much closer-run thing than she had originally allowed for. But she would still be back home in good time.

Richard and Laure and the others walked back up to the hut but Alice stayed put, pulling the flaps of her hat down against the wind. She watched the officers going aboard and the boxes of waste being manhandled up the ladder. As soon as the Zodiacs turned away from her flank the ship began steaming out of the bay. She stood staring until her eyes watered, staring until the
Polar Star
had edged out of her sight.

Phil and Rooker shipped the outboards, hauled the dinghies up the beach and made them secure to the concrete mooring blocks. As they trudged past in their huge suits Phil called out, ‘Homesick?’

‘No. Not a bit. Fresh air, you know, it’s nice out here.’

Her voice rang falsely in her ears. She turned her back on the empty sea and hurried after them. Phil diverted his steps towards the skidoo shelter and she found herself alongside Rooker.

‘Rook?’

‘Yeah.’

She was glad of this opportunity to catch him out of earshot of the others and she hadn’t rehearsed her request. ‘You don’t always use your Internet time.’

His black eyebrows made a solid line and he gave her a glare as cold as a skua’s. Clearly, he took her observation as an intrusion into his privacy.

‘And I wondered…I’ve got some research…if, you know, I could trade some time? Do your kitchen duty, maybe, in return?’

His gaze didn’t warm. Alice quailed, wishing she had never raised the subject. She was allowing herself to admit that she was interested in him, but he frightened her too. There was a rawness under the layers of his self-containment.

At the very last second, as they reached the hut door, he jerked his head. ‘Have it. I don’t need to trade anything with you.’

That was all. There was no sign of the intimacy that had sprung up between them at Christmas. Rooker had retreated within himself again.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured, but it was to empty air.

Extra time to check a couple of websites, that was all she needed. Some privacy would have been ideal too, but that was definitely not forthcoming. She dreaded one of the others looking suddenly over her shoulder and seeing a lurid pink web page headed ‘Pregnancy and Baby’. Jochen had loomed the day before but she hunched forward to hide the screen.

He showed his gums when he smiled. ‘Okay, Alice, relax. I do not spy on you. What is it, love letters? Or perhaps a naughty porno site?’

‘Neither.’

He retreated, licking his lips. ‘Oho, secrets. How exciting.’

She scribbled her name in the access diary immediately above Rook’s. Now she had an hour. With any luck, that would give her fifty-five clear minutes before the next surfer started hovering behind her.

She typed and clicked, then read quickly as the pages came up.

From 14 weeks fluttering movements may be felt, but the first ‘quickening’ is typically experienced between 18–22 weeks…

The sensations she now regularly felt were hardly flutters, more like firm nudges.

At 15 weeks you will be beginning to show…

Beginning? Hardly. But then she was eating more heartily than she had ever done in her life, and she had had a small frame and a flat stomach. Once.

The measurement from pubic bone to fundus (the upper part of the uterus) will approximately equal the number of weeks you are pregnant. 20cm = 20 weeks
.

That was much more helpful. A tape measure, that was what she needed. Maybe Laure would have one.

Week 22. Sex may be very fulfilling at this stage, due to increased blood supply to the sexual organs…

She gave an involuntary cough of laughter at this. Chance would be a fine thing. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jochen look up from his book and raise an eyebrow, so she straightened her face again and read more about the importance of a healthy diet that did not involve eating for two, fresh air and plenty of exercise, throughout a normal pregnancy.

That’s all right, then, she thought. Couldn’t be doing more of the right things, except for the being stranded in Antarctica bit.

When exactly fifty-five minutes were up she logged off smartly and left the screen blank. She went to the bunk room in search of Laure, who was tweezing her eyebrows with the help of a compact mirror wedged against the window. ‘Laure, do you have such a thing as a tape measure?’

‘What is that? Ah, I know. No. I am sorry. What is it for?’

‘I, er, just want to measure something.’

‘Maybe a ruler, then.’

In the end Alice stretched a piece of twine from her pubic bone, digging in with her fingers to find it, to the top of her bulge. Then she laid the length of twine against her geologist’s steel measuring tape and read 18.5cm. It was maddeningly imprecise but in any case, now the ship had gone there was nothing to be gained from knowing the dates. She must trust to luck and her body, and in the meantime Antarctica held her in its tight grip. She watched the skies
and the colours painted by the sun as it dipped closer to the horizon, and even when the winds howled down the glacier to the sea, or the shoreline was hidden by the caprice of blizzards, she counted her blessings in being there. The disparate group of people at Kandahar had finally become a team and she was part of it.

In Oxford it was a raw and damp January. Margaret sat at her table in the window, rubbing her aching knees and checking her in-box for Alice’s bulletins. She read them eagerly, and in her mind’s eye she clearly saw the iceberg in the bay, the pack ice driven by the wind and the balls of silvery-grey fluff that were new-hatched Adélie chicks.

Alice wrote about her work, the great explosions of the weather, her daily walks to the little bay and the rocks she called the temple, the other scientists and their work, the small routines of life on the base. Margaret remembered her own times vividly enough, but these descriptions of Alice’s brought to the surface memories that had been silted over by the passage of time. In her dreams she was there again, pursuing seals between the pendulous grey stalactites that hung beneath the surface of the ice, or leaning into a wind that squeezed the air out of her lungs. When she woke up she was momentarily amazed to discover that she was old, hardly able to hobble across her own bedroom without wincing in pain. Alice’s journey was making her feel young again, even if it was only for brief moments. Margaret smiled as she read her messages, nodding in recognition and approval.

‘She seems happy enough down there, do you think?’ Trevor commented, anxiously reading over her shoulder.

‘I knew she would be. I told her it would suit her, didn’t I?’

Margaret didn’t notice that Alice wrote almost nothing
personal. Her daughter was a scientist: it was the science that mattered and the extraordinariness of a continent of ice, and the practical matters that enabled one to be briefly tamed for the benefit of the other. In her own day Margaret had ignored the hostility of most of her male colleagues and faced down her own loneliness. She expected nothing less of Alice.

Trevor read the messages for himself, frowning as he did so. It was his private opinion that there was too little of Alice in them, as if she was keeping almost everything back except what was obvious and therefore safe to pass on.

More photographs of the hut-naming ceremony had arrived from the Sullavanco Polar Office. Margaret slotted them into Perspex frames and arranged them on the windowsill in front of her desk table. Now when she looked up from her screen it was not to stare into the dripping black garden. She could see the carmine-red walls of Margaret Mather House instead, the sun turning her name plaque to a tablet of molten gold and Alice smiling in her weatherproofs with the black ovals of her glacier goggles masking her eyes. Lewis was standing next to her.

That same day Lewis Sullavan was in the news.

He had added a small chain of resort hotels in Bali and Thailand to his empire, but this had been of interest to no one until a bomb exploded near the swimming pool of one hotel on Ko Samui. A young British honeymoon couple had been killed and half a dozen other people injured. The bombing was the work of a tiny protest organisation claiming to act on behalf of the very young Thai girls and boys who worked in the sex trade at the resort. One twelve-year-old boy, it was reported, had recently died of an overdose of heroin given to him during an assignation with a German sex tourist.

There was no direct connection to Lewis Sullavan, but his company did own the hotel. The fact went unreported in his own newspapers, but there were plenty of rival publications eager to print his picture next to photographs of the devastation around a tropical-paradise swimming pool. He responded by calling a press conference to express his grief and sympathy for the dead and injured and their families, and to say that he was now taking personal steps to dismiss all staff at his hotels who had ever had anything to do with providing prostitutes of any age for guests.

Margaret and Trevor sat watching the television news. Margaret was fidgeting with the thin gold circle of her wedding ring. Her finger joints were knobbed and swollen with arthritis, and she couldn’t force the ring off over her knuckle. The skin where it rubbed was flaky and raw.

‘Sordid business,’ Trevor said.

At Kandahar, where no one wanted to use up too much of their Internet time on news sites, the details arrived late and in fragmentary form. Alice noticed that sports results always seemed to be with them almost instantly, world events took longer, and now it was clear that anything reflecting adversely on Sullavanco hardly filtered through at all. Then an e-mail memo to Richard arrived from Beverley Winston. In view of recent unfortunate events it would be most opportune if Mr Sullavan’s beneficial work for the EU in Antarctica could in some way be given an extra highlight. Some of the film footage and photographs from the recent visit might be released early, before the season’s end. And any major scientific discoveries would, of course, receive their proper wide coverage.

Richard rubbed his chapped face, his eyebrows knitting with anxiety.

Phil scowled over his mug of tea as they discussed it. He
said, ‘Sullavan can’t come over all righteous and pretend not to have known what goes on in those resorts of his. I’m sorry for that poor couple on their honeymoon and for kids who have to sell themselves to tourists, but the fact is that half the people who go out to those Thai places are after a bit of underage legover. Him sacking a couple of managers and hall porters isn’t going to make any difference. It’s the way the world goes round, rich old tourists, hungry young kids, that’s just a fact of life. And our Beverley can’t come on all proper, either, because she wasn’t averse to a bit on her Antarctic awayday, was she?’ His Welsh accent thickened when he felt strongly about something.