Sun at Midnight (43 page)

‘No,’ Alice agreed.

Laure’s hand came up to her mouth. Her head was wobbling in astonishment. ‘My God.
You
did not know?’

‘Not when I arrived, no.’

‘And now we are trapped, and there is no doctor and no medical supply and no good shelter, and what if we must stay here for the whole winter?’

It was Alice who took Laure’s hand and reassuringly squeezed it. ‘The baby won’t come yet. They’ll get the helo in in a couple of days and we’ll be on the ship and back in the world in no time.’ She believed her own words. A wild, reckless happiness was singing under her skin. With the memory of Rook and last night in her head it was as if she had found something she had searched for all her life.

Nothing could touch her now; there was no threat and no uncertainty.

Laure rocked back on her heels. She stared at Alice in utter disbelief. ‘I thought you were cool and sensible. But you are not. You are a crazy, crazy madwoman.’

There was the sound of banging outside the tin door. It swung open and Phil and Russ crawled into the shelter. Alice just had time to raise one finger to her lips in a stern, forbidding gesture to Laure. It was a relief to share her secret with just one person, but none of the others need know. She would find a way to tell Rooker herself.

‘He’s lost it. Just totally lost it,’ Phil was saying.

‘Who?’ Laure demanded. She was shaking her head as if she couldn’t process any more surprises.

Russ lit the Primus. ‘Could one of you fix some porridge? It’s blowing a tenner out there. I don’t reckon much of our chances of getting workable antennae up today.’

‘
Who?
’

‘Our leader.’ Phil sighed. ‘He’s marching around like a robot, giving orders, listening to nobody, then dropping to
his knees in the ashes and scrabbling with his bandaged hands for some fossil.’

‘The gastropod,’ Alice said.

‘Russell?’ Laure begged for more comprehensible information.

Russell’s mouth set in a line. He considered for a second before he said, ‘I reckon maybe Richard is having some kind of a mental breakdown?’

Alice set a pot of water on the gas. She thought that they had probably guessed as much, all of them, without having given voice to their suspicions. She tore open a sachet from the ration boxes and sprinkled porridge oats into the water.

‘What shall we do?’ Laure asked.

‘Watch and wait,’ Russ answered.

‘And hope to get the fuck out of here asap,’ Phil added.

The next arrival was Richard himself. Snow and ash were mixed in his beard, and his lips were cracked and bloody under the soot. He lowered himself into his corner and wedged the mug of porridge that Alice gave him between his knees. He peeled off his mitts to reveal loops of filthy bandages. With the fingertips of his right hand he could just about manipulate a spoon.

‘Shall I help?’ she asked.

The look he gave her seemed to contain no element of recognition. ‘Everyone must help, and more. We’ll only get out of here if each one of us gives a hundred and ten per cent.’

Arturo came in. Snow and smuts blew in with him, and the tin door banged twice in the gale before he could secure it. ‘It is not the best weather for putting up radio antennae,’ he said. Of all of them, Alice thought, apart from Rook, Arturo was handling this best. He sat down in front of Richard and took the mug from him. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he began to feed him spoonfuls of porridge. Richard tasted it, mistrustfully at first, then
devoured it as fast as Arturo could spoon it into him. Afterwards Arturo wiped the remnants from his beard as if Richard were a child. ‘You were awake all night. You should sleep now,’ he advised him.

‘Sleep? With everything to do here?’

‘You will work better after sleep.’

Richard nodded his head. Obediently he turned sideways and curled himself up under a blanket. A few seconds later, it seemed, he was lost to the world.

The first batch of porridge was finished. To escape the oppressive atmosphere of the shelter Alice went for more water, but as soon as she was outside the blizzard assaulted her. There was grey daylight but the air was a thick, filthy mixture of snow and ash and oily smuts. She saw the hut wreckage with drifts already piling against it, and could just discern the struggling shapes of Rook and Valentin. Bent almost double against the wind, they were fighting to reerect a pole for the antennae. As soon as they raised it to the vertical and tried to anchor it with guy lines, the pegs tore loose and the pole toppled again.

Rooker didn’t see Alice until she grabbed at his arm. ‘Let me help,’ she yelled.

‘No. We’ll have to wait until the wind drops.’

‘Come and get some hot food.’

‘Yeah.’

In the generator shed Niki was crouched with the radio components spread around him, working by the light of a head torch.

‘Niki? Come and have breakfast.’

‘In a few moments,’ he answered, not even looking up.

Alice fought her way to the water pipe that already had a tap rigged to it. She filled the canisters and battled back to the skidoo shelter. The skidoos themselves were little more than white-and-black-speckled humps.

Laure had made more porridge, and Rooker and Valentin were eating. Alice let her hand drop for a second on Rook’s shoulder, then sat where she could find a space. Richard was buried under his blanket and Arturo was nodding off too. There was a smell of bodies and burned fabric and grease, and the floor was gritty with dirt and puddled with water, but at least it was almost warm compared with outside. A heavy silence spread until Niki pushed his way in.

He took his mug of porridge and thoughtfully wrapped his frozen fingers round it. It was almost impossible to do intricate electronic work in the icy chamber of the generator hut, and the radio room itself was too wet and exposed to the wind through the burned wall and roof.

‘What d’you reckon?’ Russell asked.

‘I think, maybe,’ he answered. Phil gave a little whoop of satisfaction and Laure clapped her mittened hands. ‘And since we have not made this morning’s radio schedule with Santa Ana they will know now that we have some problem. But for making contact I must of course have antenna in place, and for now…’ His shrug was expressive.

‘Last night’s forecast was only one to two days of wind. Not a full-blown storm,’ Russ reminded them.

‘Let’s wait and see,’ Rooker said coolly.

There was no point, yet, in even speculating about when or if they could expect to be rescued.

The time passed very slowly. Their cramped confinement was miserably uncomfortable, but the close press of bodies did keep the worst of the cold at bay. The wind showed no sign of slackening and the grey daylight quickly faded into blackness once again. They had no books, not even a pack of cards, and Phil’s guitar had gone up in flames with everything else. At Russ’s suggestion they sang a couple of songs, but the unaccompanied voices soon petered out.

‘Then someone tell us a tale,’ Russ insisted.

Arturo told them about the restaurant his grandparents had owned, in one of the steep cobbled streets leading up to the hilltop magnificence of the Alhambra Palace. ‘My grandmother’s rabbit stew,’ he murmured. ‘With roasted potatoes flavoured with rosemary. That was marvellous.’

There were groans of longing. Between nine people, only two full days of field supplies now remained, so food was strictly rationed. They ate an evening meal of soup and two crackers apiece. They had to ration the gas too, but in the evening they allowed themselves a small pan of just-warm water each to wash the soot and grease off their faces and hands.

Alice sat quietly, occasionally shifting her weight on the hard floor. Laure kept looking speculatively at her, but she only smiled back. It was peculiar to think of happiness or even contentment in connection with their present plight, or to feel ambivalent about the idea of rescue, but each minute that slipped away brought closer the moment when she might have to part with Rook. Even though they hadn’t exchanged a single private word throughout the whole drab, worrisome day he was still close enough to touch. His eyes were often on her and she knew that he was waiting too. She heard his voice and felt his nearness prickle her thin skin through the foul layers of her clothes.

Richard went outside before the light faded and in his absence they agreed in low voices that all they could do was keep a watch on him. Phil went out too, ostensibly to stretch his legs.

‘Poor bastard,’ Russ muttered. ‘It’s gone haywire all right, his big Sullavan–EU Antarctic enterprise.’

When he came back the state of his hands told them that he had been sifting through the debris again.

Alice put her mouth close to his ear. ‘There will be other fossil finds. There are seasons still to come.’

‘I don’t know.’ There was such despair underlying his flat monotone that she wanted to take him in her arms and try to comfort him. Instead, she undid his ruined bandages and replaced them with the last two strips of Laure’s vest.

The night was even longer and more painful than the day, but the tilley lamp was blown out and Alice and Rooker were able to sit with their hands linked. It was almost as if they
were
talking, she thought. In the endless hours their histories and hopes and confessions seemed to flow through their joined palms.

No one slept very much. The talk murmured between them.

‘In the village where I come from, in the mountains in northern Bulgaria, the houses all are carved in wood,’ Valentin said. ‘It is a picture. The lakes are full of fish, and the wild honey…ah.’ They heard him kiss the tips of his fingers.

Laure whispered, ‘When I was a small girl, our family holidays were every year in Arcachon, near Bordeaux. In this place there is the biggest sand dune in the world. I remember slip-sliding from the top to the bottom, and near the foot of it there is a small seafood restaurant. Here you can eat
langoustines
, and
moules
, and
soupe de poisson
that is the best I have ever tasted.’

It wasn’t surprising that the memories they chose to share were of food and summer’s warmth.

Phil gave a deep sigh. ‘A long day’s climbing. The rock hot from the sun, jelly legs, a big thirst on. Sit down outside the pub and take the first pull on the first pint of the night. That’s the best taste in the world, followed by a fryup at Pete’s Eats in Llanberis.’

‘Rook?’ Laure said out of the dark.

‘No,’ he said. Nothing else. Alice held on to his hand.

The second morning’s weather was no improvement on the first. In the generator shed a makeshift radio table had been rigged up from salvaged planking and Niki had reassembled the radio components. After three missed schedules with Santa Ana there would now be concern about what was happening at Kandahar Station, but until the wind decreased and the visibility improved there was no chance that they would mount an air reconnaissance.

They ate the last of the porridge and some chocolate.

Apart from his nap after breakfast the previous day, Richard had not slept since the fire. He told them about his grandfather’s march with Captain Scott and his raggle-taggle teams of ponies to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, beneath Mount Shoesmith, where the ponies were finally butchered to feed the dogs on the onward journey. ‘My grandfather shot his pony after a day on soft snow, when the beast had been sinking almost up to his hocks with every step. He wrote in his diary that Samuel enjoyed his last feed and, until the last days when the severity of the constant blizzards wore him out, he had pulled with all his heart.’

Most of them were familiar with the story but they all listened in silence. Richard sat with his head thrown back against the shed wall and his burned hands hanging loose between his knees. There were tears in his eyes.

As the light faded again, the wind seemed to give a sigh of exhaustion. The double row of dejected figures stirred and looked at each other. An hour after that there was no more banging and battering against the hut walls.

The men filed outside to try to erect the pole.

‘Are you all right?’ Laure demanded as soon as they were alone.

‘I’m fine,’ Alice said smoothly. There were strange ripples of pressure chasing across her belly. Braxton-Hicks practice contractions, she remembered from her website reading. It was
very early to be having them. Even now she didn’t want to leave, but she had to get out of here. To escape from Laure she scrambled outside to see if she could help.

They worked by torchlight, digging a pit for the pole and clearing snow for ice screws to secure the guy wires. Eddies of snow chased across the serene landscape, where all the blackness of the fire had now been rubbed out. The wreckage was all soft, voluptuous white hummocks. Another pole was raised against the generator hut. Phil and Rook climbed up on the hut roof and the remains of the lab building with coils of wire. With a pulse beating in her neck, Alice held a torch steady as they ravelled a cat’s cradle of loops between the two poles. Niki was already at the table inside the hut with headphones clamped to his ears. The tilley lamp overhead swayed as the roof sagged under Phil’s tread.

There was a series of crackles interspersed with flat silences. Niki’s long fingers minutely tuned the signal. The rest of them crowded into the hut and crammed the doorway. A loud burst of static made them all leap.

Niki clicked the hand mike and began calling, ‘Santa Ana, Santa Ana, this is Kandahar Station. Do you read me? Over.’

The airwaves were a buzz of interference.

‘Santa Ana, Santa Ana, Santa Ana. Kandahar Station, do you read me? Over.’

Nothing came back but scribbled noise.

Niki was patient. ‘I will keep trying. What more can we do?’

Valentin and Russ and Phil hovered in the hut. Richard broke away as if he couldn’t listen any longer. He blundered back to the skidoo shelter, and Arturo patiently followed him.

Alice and Rooker stood outside in the billowing snow. The half of Margaret Mather House left standing was wreathed in garlands of white.