Sun at Midnight (34 page)

Most of the others were nodding in agreement. Niki grinned at the mention of Beverley, his long face brightening.

‘Unless I’m mistaken, she wasn’t under age,’ Rooker drawled. ‘And I’m certainly not.’

‘That’s enough,’ Richard snapped.

As Alice had guessed it would, the Beverley Winston affair had turned into a joke amongst the other men.

‘So we’re going to have our mugshots in the papers to make Sullavan look good again,’ Russell remarked.

But they were so far away, down here on the edge of the ice, that the teeming events of the warm world seemed hardly to touch them.

Only Richard was really concerned. His anxiety to make Kandahar a success that would improve Lewis Sullavan’s reputation led him to step up the work rate on the station. He introduced new schedules that involved longer hours for them all and took to supervising the progress of the research more closely. His interference annoyed everyone, and from being harmonious and productive, the atmosphere on the base turned sour again.

Another ripple produced by the bomb explosion beside a far-off swimming pool was that Richard decided the
gastropod discovery was so important that he must look for similar or related specimens in other sections of the fossil-bearing strata of Wheeler’s Bluff. He told Alice that they would be making another big trip into the deep field, this one to last two weeks. He had already spoken to Niki about radioing the pilots at Santa Ana to schedule an airlift.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked as she digested this information. They were in the lab, where Richard had been working at the microscope. Laure was in the next seat, labelling phials of penguin blood ready for refrigeration.

‘Nothing at all,’ Alice said hastily.

What was wrong was that she was gripped by anxiety about the dangers of the deep field. The weather problems they had encountered on the last trip had been no more than routine, but still they had been seriously delayed out at the Bluff. And the memory of Lewis Sullavan buried in the crevasse kept coming back to her, so that she couldn’t dismiss it. It had happened so quickly and it could so easily have been fatal, even on the doorstep of Kandahar. Pregnancy seemed to be loosening the tight strings of her body and sapping her courage as well. If anything happened to Richard when they were alone far out on the ice she doubted that she could deal with it properly. And if
she
were to be the victim, she wondered if Richard would be quick enough or decisive enough to take action. He might be too distracted by concerns outside Kandahar and the field, too determined to make a find at all costs that would satisfy Lewis’s desire for positive publicity.

The unwelcome realisation that she didn’t have proper confidence in him worked under her skin, chafing and scraping. ‘I think we should take a field assistant with us this time,’ she ventured.

She could read each successive thought in his eyes.

He knew she didn’t trust him.

And they wouldn’t be alone together.

And they couldn’t take the safety officer away from the base for two weeks because the personnel remaining at Kandahar would need Phil’s support.

So that only left Rooker.

‘Why is that?’ Richard demanded.

‘With an assistant, we’ll be able to work more efficiently. We’ll have more time if we don’t have to handle camp routine.’

It sounded convincing, in a way.

‘Maybe,’ Richard said stiffly. ‘I’ll speak to Rooker.’

Laure glanced up at Alice and looked quickly away again.

And so it happened. When Richard told her Rooker would be accompanying them back to the Bluff and that this time he would be staying, her heart made a startling leap into her throat.

The new camp was further along the Bluff to the south-east of the first ones. Richard determined the location, and Rooker obediently pitched two tents and reassembled the skidoo and sledge. When Andy and Mick and the Squirrel had lifted away again, Alice fumbled in her tent with the camp kitchen, trying to prepare a hot meal. The floor of the tent was covered with clods of melting ice, and the stove tipped and almost overbalanced when she put a pan of water on it. This site was even more exposed and inhospitable than the last one. The great crest of black rock was broken up by glaciers and winds roared down the chasms of ice, gathering speed under the pull of gravity to shriek and batter around the two tiny tents that lay in their path.

Whenever she left shelter Alice had to draw her parka hood tight round her goggles to cover every square inch of her face. It was so cold here that any exposed skin would be frostbitten within minutes. She moved slowly, patiently,
under the assault of the gale. She thought of the wind as a physical burden that she had to carry on her hunched back.

The work was the same as on the first field trip, but Richard was even more driven and dogged in his searching of the fossil-bearing layers. They trudged through the snow and climbed through the bands of rock, measuring and noting and chipping out samples. Sometimes they worked for hours without exchanging more than a few words and these were shouted above the roar of the wind. Rooker drove the skidoo and hauled the sledge. He was very strong, seeming almost unaffected by the wind and cold. He handled the ropes whenever there was a glacier crossing or some exposed climbing to do, always checking Alice’s harness before she moved off. Once he saw that a narrow slice of her bare cheek was showing and he tightened the drawstring of her hood. The deftness of his big mittened paws surprised her and a flush of warmth mottled her hidden face.

In spite of the cold and ceaseless wind, Alice felt safe with Rook’s dark bulk close at hand. She was less conscious of the vast hostile distance from camp to base than she had been on the last trip. The work itself was unceasing but it had become familiar. Field life was a monotonous alternation of geology, performed under harsher conditions than anywhere else but still a practised routine, and short tent hours where they cooked uncomfortable meals, tried to keep dry in spite of the showers of ice and to warm up their bones after a day outside. Alice got used all over again to never taking off any clothing except the outer windproofs. She was glad of her baggy fleece layers because no one could have any idea of her shape underneath them, or any interest in speculating about it. The baby swam and turned somersaults inside her. Sometimes it prodded so hard that she had to cover up an exclamation of surprise. She shook out her fleecy camouflage like Margaret’s cat puffing out its fur at
the sight of Roger Armstrong’s Labrador, then smiled at this tiny memory of home. The two bearded men gazed at her over their tin plates of food. They had been eating in silence, the clink of spoons rubbed out by the shriek of the wind. Rook grinned back, but Richard’s glance flicked from one to the other as if he believed they were sharing a joke against him.

Their work might have been the same, but the atmosphere was not.

Richard and Rooker were working and living in close proximity, and sleeping in the same small tent. It was evident from every remark and every gesture that they loathed each other.

Richard’s anxiety was making him impatient and autocratic. Every minute that wasn’t spent out on the rocks was wasted for him, so he ordered early morning starts and called a halt later and later in the day. Rooker did what he was told, but in a silence that was more scathing than words. Alice tried to smooth over the hostility by being cheerful, but she was hampered by the knowledge that she was the cause of at least some of the trouble.

The intimacy that she had shared with Richard at the last camp was gone and when she thought back she couldn’t even recapture the quality of it.

I was a fool, she thought. I shouldn’t have let even that much happen.

She hadn’t understood, then, that the longing for intimacy, for the touch of another’s skin, was a reaction to the harshness of the ice. It affected them all, Laure and Valentin and Richard and Jochen and herself, and Beverley Winston too. It was the human instinct, in this overwhelming place, to draw close round the saving spark of sexual warmth, like hands cupping a match.

Rooker didn’t seem to feel it. But then Alice often looked
up and caught him watching her. Richard noticed it too and his frown deepened.

There was the twice-daily radio link with Niki at Kandahar. Richard crouched over the radio transceiver in his tent, exchanging details of the current weather conditions and noting the forecast. Then he asked searching questions about what everyone had done and whether they had kept to the work schedules. One evening Russell reported that Jochen had stomach pains and had spent the day resting in his bunk.

‘Really? I hope he’ll be fit tomorrow. His study’s not progressing that quickly as it is. Over.’

‘I’ve no idea about that,’ Russ’s voice crackled back. ‘He’s the doctor and I’m base manager, and between us we judged that he’s not well enough to work. Over.’

‘Of course. Yes. Well, give me another update in the morning.’

‘He’s losing it,’ Rooker said later to Alice.

After they had eaten their evening meal, Richard had taken to getting straight into his sleeping bag to write notes or read by the light of his head torch. The noise of the wind was such that a conversation a couple of metres away was as inaudible as if the distance were fifty miles. In the other tent Rooker was helping Alice to wipe plates and rinse cooking pots.

‘Losing what?’

‘Sense of proportion. Control. He’s going to get worse before we get off the ice.’

Alice started to contradict him and then gave up the attempt. Richard’s diligence was sliding into obsessiveness. He would announce an 8 a.m. start and then brusquely order them to hurry up if they weren’t ready to leave camp at 7.45. He would begin a search of one section of rock, only to notice that another site a hundred
metres away looked more promising and insist that they shifted to that. Alice did her best to be patient with his erratic decisions and to deflect his impatience by being ready earlier and quicker to do whatever he asked. But Rook grew increasingly mutinous.

‘We only just got up here,’ he snapped when Richard decided that he wanted to move on from one inaccessible rock outcrop to another even more difficult spot.

‘Your job is field assistant. I decide where we work and you’ll get us there,’ Richard shouted back.

‘Not if I judge that it’s dangerous.’

‘You advise, Rooker. You don’t give the orders.’

‘Ah, fuck you,’ Rook muttered in exasperation. But he set up the abseil that lowered the three of them safely back down to the glacier. Richard never took his eyes off the undulations of the Bluff as they travelled on again, and he leaned forward into the searing wind as if by sheer willpower he could make them move faster and force the rocks to yield up their fossilised secrets.

As he became less reasonable, Richard’s physical resemblance to his grandfather increased. He was too impatient to eat properly because stopping for food meant that no work was being done. His cheeks were hollow under the rough spikes of his beard and his eyes sunk into their orbits. When she looked at him Alice kept seeing the pictures of Gregory Shoesmith.

‘Don’t judge him too harshly,’ she said to Rook.

She piled two of their three cooking pots next to the stove and lit the flame under the third to boil water for tea. Rooker poured whisky from a flask and handed her the tin mug. She took a long gulp of the spirits. It was warm enough in her tent now with the gas burning and Rooker’s body generating heat, but during the short clamorous hours of the night she felt too small and insignificant to fill the icy
space. She was always on the edge of a shiver, and whenever she hunched up to conserve warmth inside her sleeping bag a fine powdering of ice crystals fell from the nylon tent inner and drifted over her. When she shone her torch she saw the faint twinkle, like dim stars at the edge of a chilly firmament. Her own personal diamond dust.

She thought back to the last field trip when she and Richard had been living and sleeping side by side. It seemed a long time ago. She was afraid now, not exactly of Richard himself but of what might happen to him, and as her anxiety had grown her reliance on Rooker steadily increased. Rooker’s saving presence out here was like a rope leading out of a crevasse. The rope was within her reach. She could grasp it if she felt that she might fall.

He reclined opposite her, drinking whisky straight from the flask. Alice wore her fleece hood but he was bareheaded, as if minus twenty degrees was a mild summer’s night. Away from the base his hair was growing in a thick thatch. His beard was darker.

‘Why does he care about that jackass Sullavan or the European Union?’ he mused. ‘Do the job, yeah, if you must. But not like that.’ His head jerked towards the other tent.

‘It’s partly because he wants to deliver what Lewis Sullavan expects of him and to make a significant scientific contribution that will justify the existence of Kandahar as an EU base – to enable all of us to contribute – but I think those are only relatively superficial reasons.’ Alice tried to choose her words carefully but she guessed that to Rook she just sounded pompous. ‘He is so driven because of who he is.’

Rook gave a derisive laugh. ‘We all act the way we do because of who we are. That’s no justification.’

This was the first even remotely personal remark she had ever heard him volunteer. She stared at him in surprise.

‘I don’t know about you. I do know that Richard wants
more than anything to live up to his grandfather’s name.’ She felt disloyal, talking in this way about him.

Rook appeared to read her mind. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t repeat our conversation. But we are out here, the three of us. We have a degree of responsibility for one another.’

‘I know that.’

‘Shoesmith won’t live up to his grandfather’s name because he can’t and his trouble is that he knows it.’

Alice stirred one of their teabags in the pan of boiling water, waited for the brew to turn dark brown, the way Rooker liked it, then tipped it into two tin mugs. Without asking her whether she wanted it or not he added a generous slug of whisky to each of them. In any case, Alice was glad of anything that helped to keep the ache of cold at bay even temporarily. Rook drank his and added, ‘He isn’t a hero. It’s not his fault. He’s a neat-minded, anxious man who’s afraid to be ordinary just because his name isn’t Jones or Brown.’