Sun at Midnight (53 page)

Alice’s free hand suddenly flew up to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God. The journalist. And the photographer. Two o’clock. What time is it now?’

Jo looked at her watch. ‘Coming up to one.’

‘What journalist?’ Becky demanded.

‘
quoted
magazine. Writer and photographer. Coming here. Heart-warming exclusive story. Mum-and-baby pics. I promised Lewis Sullavan’s people. If I do this garbage for him he’ll have to help me to find Rooker, won’t he?’

‘
quoted
? You’re going to be in a photo spread in
quoted
?’

It was Lewis’s most popular and successful news and gossip title. Even Alice had occasionally leafed through it.

‘And look at you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that Lewis Sullavan won’t want Antarctic Drama Mum actually
looking
as if she’s just spent six months in somewhere godforsaken like Antarctica and then given birth in a helicopter, will he?’

‘Before crying for a solid hour.’

‘He’ll want you in full slap and straight from a blow-dry at Nicky Clarke’s. Are they sending hair and make-up?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What kind of a magazine is this? I’ll just have to do what I can. Let’s get going.’

They set to work. Jo ran downstairs for ice for an eye mask and Becky began tugging at her hair. Alice submitted, the way she had done when the three of them first became friends, and Becky and Jo had propelled her away from her books and into a world that contained mascara and David Bowie. She didn’t care about how she looked for
quoted
’s photographer, but it was a way for her old friends to draw her temporarily back into the circle.

They were not ready yet to acknowledge that she might not be the same old Alice any longer, and it was too soon for her to try to explain what had changed her. Perhaps no one would ever fully understand that, except Rooker himself. And Margaret. She suspected that Margaret did, somewhere in her heart.

The photo shoot gave them something to fix on.

Becky blotted out the windburn with matte foundation and erased the black lines under Alice’s eyes with Touche Eclat. They plucked and gelled her eyebrows, and applied coats of lash thickener and a hint of kohl. Jo squeezed something from a tube and scrubbed it over her mouth.

‘Ouch. Mind the baby. What’s that stuff?’

‘Lip exfoliant. Your mouth’s all chapped.’

‘I know that.
Ow
.’

‘Give me my goddaughter.’

‘What?’

‘Well, aren’t I? Isn’t she?’

‘Beck, of course you are, if you want to be. Wait, though. We’d better ask Pete what he thinks.’

They stopped for a moment, with Meg and the lipgloss and the mirror suspended between them, acknowledging that there were currents here that would require careful navigation.

Becky quickly nodded. ‘Of course. You’re right.’

Jo said briskly, ‘What shall we dress the First European Citizen in? The stripes? And a clean nappy, to start with. I’ll do it.’

At five minutes to two Becky held up the mirror. ‘What do you think?’

Alice stared at her glossed and tweezed reflection. ‘Who am I?’

They held each other’s hands and laughed. ‘Drama Mum.’

Jo peered out of the window. ‘They’re here. They both look about fourteen. And the photographer’s unloading a silver lighting umbrella. Maybe he’ll shoot you through a soft-focus lens.’

‘Go away, both of you,’ Alice begged. ‘And leave me to my fate.’

‘Another car’s just arrived,’ Jo said.

A moment later they heard a voice at the front door. ‘Hi. We met at the airport. I’m Lisa.’

‘Won’t you come in?’ Trevor said.

Alice hugged Jo and Becky. ‘Thank you. Thank you for everything and I’ll call later, and…I’m glad you’re here. Now
go
.’

Margaret’s wobbly gateleg table was pushed aside to make room for the photographer to set up his lights. The journalist
was dressed in black from head to toe, and when she settled on a chair a greyish mat of cat hair instantly attached itself to her back. Alice sat on the sofa with Meg in her arms, and Lisa perched on an ottoman after pushing aside a pile of Royal Zoological Society papers.

‘Don’t pay any attention to me,’ she ordered. ‘I’m just here to look after everything. You look so rested, Alice, you really do.’

Trevor and Margaret went and sat at the kitchen table.

‘Alice is a scientist, not a…
pop star
,’ Margaret sniffed.

‘I know that, dear. Maybe you should tell Lewis Sullavan.’

The journalist turned on her recorder and set it in front of Alice. ‘What was it like to be a woman in Antarctica?’

Alice smiled. ‘You should really ask my mother that, she was one of the very first.’

The other woman took this at face value. ‘I hope to be able to have a couple of words with Dr Mather afterwards. And we’d love a picture of the three generations of polar women, if that would be possible.’

‘If Dr Mather agrees,’ Lisa chirped.

‘You can ask her,’ Alice conceded.

‘Ready,’ the photographer announced. The lights flashed in Meg’s eyes and set off a wail.

‘What was it like to be a
pregnant
woman in Antarctica?’

Alice sighed. If this was going to be the price she would pay it.

When her turn came, Margaret dealt with
quoted
in crisp style. She gave a rapid résumé of her seal and penguin work, smiling patiently as the journalist struggled a little with the scientific language. She dismissed the suggestion that she had been a pioneering female by saying that everyone had been on the ice to do their work and that gender was an irrelevance.

‘But sometimes gender does raise its head, doesn’t it?’ the journalist pointedly put in. Lisa sat upright on her ottoman and gently cleared her throat.

Alice held up her hand. ‘I should answer that. I am a woman, but I went south as a scientist. I made a mistake, two mistakes if you like, in not knowing that I was pregnant in the first place and in staying on at Kandahar once I discovered it instead of coming home immediately. But anyone, woman or man, can make a wrong decision. All I can tell you is the truth. I stayed because I was proud to be part of the EU team at Kandahar, and Dr Shoesmith and I were doing useful work. So were all the other scientists. We made a good beginning and then lost some of the ground we made, but it
was
only a beginning and there are many more seasons to come. I was very lucky to be with everyone who was there, both as professionals and as people. More than lucky at the end. Blessed. Now I’m very relieved that we are all safely home again.’

Or safe somewhere, wherever he is.

‘Antarctica was the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, but I’m more than happy to be back now. And I’m very proud of my daughter.’ Alice held up her head and Meg’s black eyes opened wide. The photographer clicked again and the lights flashed.

‘Very nice, Alice,’ Lisa said approvingly.

Two weeks went by. At the end of that time the issue of
quoted
magazine appeared with its upbeat version of Meg’s birth and the European scientists’ eventual escape from the burned-out shell of their base. The fire was described as a dramatic accident and the survivors as polar heroes. The loss of most of a season’s data and samples was compensated for by Meg herself, as a perfect symbol of a successful European birth and flowering against all the natural odds
of Antarctica, and as the latest addition to what the journalist chose to call a polar dynasty. The helicopter episode was played down and the only mention of Rooker was as ‘brave stand-in pilot’.

Beverley Winston and Lisa telephoned to offer their congratulations and thanks, and another vast floral arrangement arrived from Lewis Sullavan. The Polar Office sent word that the story and pictures would be widely syndicated across Sullavanco media worldwide and that there had been some talk of a feature film of the events.

‘We weren’t heroes,’ Alice said with a sigh when she read the article. ‘Except for Rooker.’

‘Yes, maybe that Rooker. Any news of him?’ Margaret asked.

‘No. None.’

Trevor’s concerned gaze rested on his daughter.

The main picture, covering almost an entire double spread of the magazine, was of the three of them. Margaret stood up fierce and straight-backed in spite of her arthritis, with an emerald-green turban pulled down over her hair and one hand resting on Alice’s shoulder. Alice sat on the arm of the sofa, her face made neutral with make-up, and Meg lay in her arms, swathed in a blanket except for her little round red face with dark unwinking eyes.

‘How absurd,’ Margaret protested when she saw it. But she framed the copy that the Polar Office sent her and propped it on the windowsill in front of her work table, next to the pictures of what had, briefly, been Margaret Mather House.

‘That’s all that over with,’ Alice said with relief. It had lasted longer than fifteen minutes, but not much.

The end of April came, and then it was early May and the weeping willows along the river in the University Parks were in leaf, dipping green wands into the water. Meg steadily
gained weight, and small windows of space began to open up between feeding and nappy changing. When she was just over a month old, Alice looked into the Moses basket and was sure that she glimpsed the beginnings of a smile, but Jo insisted that it was much more likely to be wind.

After some negotiations Alice’s tenants agreed to move out of the Jericho house a month early. It would be a relief to be able to take Meg home, along with the small mountain of baby equipment that they had already accumulated. The Boar’s Hill house had begun to seem very crowded, and too small for Margaret and Alice to occupy together.

‘I need to get on with work. But I do need to see my granddaughter at least every other day,’ Margaret fretted.

‘You will see her. She
is
your granddaughter,’ Trevor soothed her.

Every day, in whatever spare time she could capture for herself, Alice did everything she could think of to locate Rook.

The Polar Office grew resistant to her calls for more information. In the end they simply gave her all the contact details they had, for all the expedition members. There was nothing in Rooker’s file except the Ushuaia address and a reference from an Argentinian building company. She spoke to an uncomprehending personnel officer in Buenos Aires and an unhelpful American architect, neither of whom could tell her anything except that Rooker had worked last winter as site manager at a hotel development in Ushuaia.

Rooker had worked at McMurdo, too. After much effort she got through to an official at the American Office of Polar Programs in Arlington, Virginia. Yes, a James J. Rooker had been employed on the base in the 1970s. There was no further data now available.

Russell was at home with his wife and children in Dunedin, New Zealand.

‘Christ, Alice, how are
you
? And the baby? My God, when I think of it…’

It was an effort to keep the tremor of urgency out of her voice as she asked the question.

‘Rook? Nah. Haven’t a clue. He disappeared pretty much straight off the boat. That’s the way he is, isn’t it?…Yeah, I understand, Alice, I understand it’s important. But the way Rooker is, I don’t want to get your hopes up. I know he lived up in Christchurch, though. I’ll ask around a bit, see if anyone knows anything.’

‘Thank you, Russ.
Thank you
.’

Laure was back in her lab. She was working on the penguin blood samples that they had managed to salvage from the snow cave. ‘Yes, I am working, of course. I am lucky, to have this. Oh, Paul and I are still together, but nothing has changed.
Phh
. No, I am so sorry I have no contact for Rook. I think if he wants, he will know where to find you. Now, tell me some things about the little one?
What
a time that was.’

Valentin was in Sofia, Jochen was in Den Haag and Arturo was in Barcelona. They were all eager to hear news and exchange reminiscences but none of them had any information about Rooker. Niki was still travelling somewhere in South America. Phil was in North Wales, teaching climbing.

‘Jesus. That was an epic and a half. I’ll remember the way that bloody helicopter lifted off in a white-out until my dying day. Eh? Yeah, I’m sure you do. But if Rooker’s such a fucking mix-up that he doesn’t want to be found, what’s there to say? I liked him, yeah, ’course I did. But I’m not sure that he’s a prospect, if you want the truth. You’ve got the baby to think of. What? Yeah, ’course I will. Whatever I can.’

‘Thanks, Phil.’

Richard, she learned, was away in Greece. He was said to be resting and recuperating, and had not left a contact address.

Through a local history society she established that there had been a Northumberland family called Jerrold and eventually she tracked down a young solicitor in Morpeth whose father had looked after their affairs. In a brief telephone conversation he told her that Henry Jerrold had died in the 1980s and his wife ten years later. There were no living relatives, and although he believed there had been a sister who had emigrated to New Zealand in the Fifties she had predeceased her brother and he had no record of her having had a child. His father was now also dead.

She trawled the Internet for possible polar or Patagonian or New Zealand connections, but nothing ever came up linked to any version of his name. She fed all the combinations of key words that she could think of into Google, but still came up with nothing.

She replayed their conversations, trying to pick out clues as to where he might have gone. The last words rang in her head.

I am a murderer
.

He was not a murderer. That much she knew.

Her eerie sense that he might never have existed was intensifying. The trail had gone dead and she had only one prospect left.

Two days before Alice was due to move back into her own house, Margaret took a telephone call in the early morning. Three hours later a big car turned in at the gate and the chauffeur made the tight turn round the overgrown central flowerbed to the front door. Lewis Sullavan stepped out.