Sun at Midnight (38 page)

Considering what had happened – Georgia and the woman in the pub and no doubt others – she didn’t think he did. After the accident of conception, the baby was hers. When she got home she would tell Pete what was happening and if he wanted it they would negotiate for him to have some share in its future, although it wasn’t clear to her yet what that role might be.

Her fingers rested on the keyboard while she reflected on what to tell him now. She looked down briefly at her bruised, chapped knuckles and the broken nails. It was like seeing
someone else’s hands grafted on to her own wrists, but when she came to think about it the arms didn’t feel like her own either, nor did the rest of her heavy, pregnant body. The other Alice, the familiar one who had been a scientist and Peter’s girlfriend and part of a trio with Jo and Becky, had gone and someone who would be a mother had crept into her skin in her place.

The floor, scuffed tiles gritty with dirt, suddenly seemed to drop away from under her feet.

Disorientation made her shiver. Home was far away and getting there was a series of obstacles. Nothing was ordinary any longer, none of the coarse or slippery textures of normality revealed themselves.

The only thing that was still real was Antarctica itself, that giant white mouth. She sensed it, outside the pathetic barrier of the hut walls, opening up to swallow her. She understood why the old explorers had found it so difficult to extricate themselves and why Margaret had never really escaped its thrall. Its raw power was such that it made the world beyond seem pale and slight.

She frowned now, trying to make herself focus on what she would say to Peter. It would be easy enough to spell out the words to tell him that she would come back and they could be together. The baby would have a father; she wouldn’t have to face the decisions that lay ahead on her own.

But it would not be
right
, and she was as sure of that as she was sure of the ice outside the hut. To try to make it so would be like falsifying research results to prove a thesis. The solution might briefly hold, but it could not endure.

Dear Pete, I was very glad to hear from you. I’m not angry, and I miss you too [all this was the truth].

I’ll be back in Oxford in about a month’s time, earlier than I originally planned, and I’d like to see you then, of course. I do know you love me and I love you too, in a way, but it’s not enough on either side, nor in the right way, for me to say what I think you want to hear. I’m sorry if this hurts you, and I honestly wish it were different
[how much easier the future would be, if only]
.

I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be back because of the weather conditions here. But I will call you as soon as I am.

Much love, Al

She read and reread this, wondering how to expand on it, but she couldn’t think of anything else that wouldn’t sound mysterious or offer him grounds for false hope. In the end she pressed the send button and the bleak message went on its way to Peter just as it was.

The hut was quiet. In their room, Laure was asleep. Alice took out the Polaroid of himself and
Desiderata
that Pete had sent her and examined it in the light of her head torch. She felt a complicated mixture of affection and warmth towards him, even though it was diluted by absence and distance and disappointment. Loneliness and regret wrapped round her as she reflected that they wouldn’t be bringing up their child together. She thought of the holidays and Christmases and school prize-givings and milestones they might all have shared. That togetherness couldn’t happen, she was certain of that, but alone in the chilly darkness she still yearned for it.

She couldn’t go to bed yet. She needed to talk to someone, not about Peter or home and certainly not about the baby secretly unfurling inside her, but just to have the affirmation of human company. She put the photograph away and went to find Rooker.

Russell had taken her place at the computer and Phil was idly throwing darts at a picture of Lewis Sullavan that
someone had pinned to the wall. There were dirty cups on the table and the CD of
Van Morrison’s Greatest Hits
had been played so many times that no one heard it any more, it was just white noise. She put on her parka and ran the few steps across to Margaret Mather House. She found Rooker in the empty radio room. He was reading, rocking gently in Niki’s chair. The little cubicle smelled of dust and heated metal, and in the background was the fluid, insistent pipping of Morse.

He looked up. ‘Hi. Has something happened?’

‘No. Do you have anything to drink?’

‘Sure. Scotch or bourbon?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Scotch, then.’

He poured whisky from a flask into a cup and gave it to her. Alice sat down in the only other seat, a rickety typist’s chair with brown rexine seat pads that looked as if it belonged in one of Pete’s sculptures. With a certain effort she hooked her feet up on the bench and took a mouthful of whisky.

‘Go on,’ Rooker said after a minute.

‘What?’ Then she smiled. It was cosy in here, hemmed in by the winking dials and glowing lights of the radio equipment, and the clutter of logbooks and Niki’s chessmen. ‘I haven’t come to say anything. You tell
me
something,’ she added recklessly.

Rooker put down his book. It was a thriller he had borrowed from Phil and it wasn’t very good. It occurred to him, startlingly, that talking to Dr Alice Peel – telling her something, even – was a much more appealing option than reading any more of it.

He started to speak but his voice dried up and he cleared his throat before taking a drink. ‘Where shall I start?’ The words came out without premeditation.

‘What about…when you were growing up. In New Zealand, before you went to live with Uncle Henry Jerrold?’

He was utterly amazed that she remembered all this. He had almost forgotten that he had mentioned it, in the tent out at Wheeler’s Bluff.

He began to tell her about the first thing that came into his head, his friend Gabby Macfarlane.

Gabby’s home was a couple of miles outside town. His dad was a farmer and his mother was a small woman with a pursed mouth who wore a nylon scarf over her hair to do the housework, and who stuck the head of her dusting mop out of the open windows and twirled it to send the cobwebs spiralling away in the sharp wind. At Gabby’s there were glasses of milk to drink and apples from a bowl on the kitchen sideboard. You weren’t allowed to come inside with your boots on; you had to take them off and walk around in your socks. Mrs Macfarlane looked at Jimmy’s black toenails sticking out of the ends of his and pursed her mouth even tighter.

It was a very clean and orderly house, Gabby’s, but it didn’t feel all that comfortable. Mr Macfarlane was a square, blocky man with a red face like a slab of meat. When he came in, Mrs Macfarlane and the children would go quiet. Once, Jimmy saw Gabby pull his father’s shotgun out of the cupboard beside the back door and take aim with it across the yard towards the orchard, thinking that his father was down at the barn. But he came out of the scullery and saw the boys with the gun. Gabby flung it down and tried to escape out of the door but he was too late. His father hoisted him by the neck and his socked feet dangled in the air. He hit Gabby in the face twice with the back of his hand, blows that made his head crack and jerk sideways as if his neck would snap, but Gabby never uttered a sound. He slipped back to the floor and staggered against the open door. Mr Macfarlane put his gun back in the cupboard and walked away.

Apart from when his father was around, Gabby was an
inspired wrongdoer. Jimmy and he had recognised each other almost at first glance, and they fell into a life of crime. They stole sweets and toys from the shops in town, and sometimes things they didn’t need or even want like tins of paint or nail brushes. Just because they were there and because they could. It was Gabby who decided in the end that this was stupid and they should plan their heists, and it was Jimmy who introduced him to the word.

‘Heistmeisters, that’s what we are,’ Jimmy said.

‘Yeah, that’s what,’ Gabby agreed without much interest.

So they graduated to records, targeting desirable singles in shiny sleeves from the Main Street Record Barn. They took these home to play at Jimmy’s house, and his mother would either try to dance with Gabby or she would waltz on her own, singing along with the words and laughing. ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, that was one of their trophies. She loved Elvis Presley. She never once asked where they’d got the records from.

Gabby and he liked setting fires. A match tossed on rags soaked in petrol from the can that Mr Macfarlane kept in the tractor shed made a
whump
and a wall of pure flame out of a pile of rubbish or even a deserted garden shed.

Gabby had three older sisters. One day he and Jimmy squirmed on their stomachs through the toetoe grass to a place where the two bigger ones were sunbathing in their knickers. Jimmy gazed through the screen of grass stalks at Joyce’s pale splayed legs and the way the bones of her hips poked up to make a kind of cradle of the flesh that spanned them. He thought how much he would like to rest his head in that cradle and then felt embarrassed to connect this hot unwieldy tenderness with Joyce Macfarlane, who had frizzy colourless hair and pink-framed spectacles.

That day, the same day, was the first time he went home and found Lester there.

‘Jimmy,’ she said to him, waving her glass and slopping some of the contents down the front of her silky blouse, ‘this is my friend Lester Furneaux and he’s a designer.’

He might well have been, but Jimmy never saw him design a thing in the whole of the year that followed.

‘This is my son. Say hello, Jimmy,’ she ordered.

He did as he was told, reluctantly poking out the word with his tongue. The man looked coldly back at him and they both knew that they were rivals for her affection and attention.

Lester. There had been years when he had been able to stop every avenue of thought leading back to him, so why did he have to intrude now?

‘What happened to Gabby Macfarlane?’ Alice Peel asked.

In the light cast by the small desk lamp her face was luminous. She wasn’t prying, she was just interested in his storytelling. He could see the faint down on her rounded cheek, the flat rose-pink cushion of her earlobe and a tendril of hair spun out by the lamplight into tiny metallic filaments. The memory of Joyce Macfarlane came back to him, and he felt the same unworded tenderness that was distinct from and much less resistible than lust. He was going to lift his hand and put it over hers, without making any calculation about what might happen next.

The radio gave out a loud burst of scrambled noise that made them both jump.

Instead of touching Alice’s hand, Rook picked up Niki’s headphones and pulled them over his head. The static shriek resolved itself into a human voice as he hastily adjusted the frequency.

‘Vernadsky, Vernadsky, I read you. This is Kandahar. Over.’

Vernadsky was a Ukrainian station on the peninsula. Niki regularly played radio chess with his opposite number, and
Phil and Russell were engaged in an honesty-darts tournament against the field assistants. ‘Bloody amazing darts players, these Russkies, I can tell you,’ Phil had said drily.

Tonight, though, there was no chess move or claim of a double top. Rooker listened intently to the torrent of Russian-English, then lifted the headset from one ear. ‘Go and get Niki. Our leader will want to hear this as well.’

Alice knocked on the doors of the bunk rooms and woke the two men. They spilled blearily into their windproofs and she followed them back to the radio room.

Niki took his seat and the rest of them waited behind him. Richard frowned at the gabble of Russian.

‘Ship? There’s no ship. What are they talking about?’

But there was a ship.

When Niki flipped a switch and quiet flooded into the room, Richard was already shaking his head. He leaned over and took the handset from Niki, stretching the black snake of flex. Rooker was watching every move.

‘Vernadsky, Vernadsky, this is Dr Shoesmith. Thanks for the kind offer. Much appreciated. But we’ll stay on base until our scheduled departure day. Over.’

The radio operator’s voice sounded startled in response. ‘Weather conditions, Kandahar, and the latest forecast, indicate increasing difficulty…’

‘Thanks again, Vernadsky. We have information. Out.’

Rook’s hand shot out and grabbed Richard by the wrist. He dropped the handset and it plunged off the edge of the desk. They all winced at another burst of high-volume static.

‘Call up again,’ Rooker ordered.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard.’ He stooped for the handset, picked it up and thrust it back into Richard’s hand. ‘You’re the expedition leader. The Ukrainians are making room on their relief ship to take all your personnel to safety, leaving in two days’
time. It’s still a manageable trek out over the ice. Make the right decision.’

Richard was white to the lips. ‘I have already made my decision. We stay here another nineteen days, until our scheduled departure. There’s work to be done. We couldn’t be ready to leave in forty-eight hours’ time, in any case.’

‘We could be ready in
four
if necessary. If it were a matter of life and death.’

Silence bled through the room. Niki’s bony fingers lightly rested on the dials, waiting.

‘It isn’t. It’s a matter of duty,’ Richard said softly. ‘And you’ll do yours, Rooker, along with everyone else.’

‘You are a fool,’ Rook snapped.

‘I’m the expedition leader,’ he repeated.

Rooker got up and walked away. He left the door of the radio room swinging open and a shaft of chill air struck in.

Niki sat with his head down. Alice met Richard’s eyes. There was a new narrowness that made him look cunning, even a little unbalanced.

‘Why don’t we leave with the Ukrainians, while we can?’ she asked.

His lips tightened. ‘I’d have thought
you’d
understand why not. You’re not a time waster. It’s what we have to do, Alice. It’s our job to stay here, to deliver what Lewis expects, to finish our work, to close down the base properly when the time comes and not to run away at the first sign of difficulty like rats off a sinking ship.’