The Sun At Midnight

Pam was both discreet and kind-hearted. But she also lived with Garry, who would make the final decision whether Jud would accompany Kathrin to watch the muskoxen. Kathrin said, sluicing the shampoo from her long hair, ‘If I tell you what happened, would you pass it on to Garry for me, Pam? I can’t go out with Jud tomorrow, I just can’t!’ Biting back the panic that had made her voice rise, she poured another bowl of water.

‘Garry makes his own decisions about the camp, Kathrin, you know that as well as I do—but he’s fair, too. Sure, I’ll tell him.’

Kathrin reached for the soap, lathered it on her facecloth and began to talk, deliberately detaching her emotions from the words she was recounting. ‘I grew up north of Toronto. My mother was the housekeeper on a big estate called Thorndean, owned by a man named Bernard Leighton. You may have heard of him—he’s a major entrepreneur with business interests all over the country: mining, forestry, a couple of newspapers. My mother was there for years, because my father had been the head gardener. He died when I was two, and my mother stayed on.’

She scrubbed her arms as if getting clean were her only care in the world. ‘Bernard Leighton had two sons. Ivor, the elder, by his first wife, and Jud, whom you’ve now met, by his second. Ivor was the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.’ She gave a rueful laugh. ‘I fell in love with him when I was about six, I guess...I thought the sun rose and set on him. He never paid much attention to me—he was eight years older, after all—so it was Jud I spent time with, not Ivor.’

‘Ivor’s better-looking than Jud?’ Pam interposed incredulously. ‘I’d get up at four a.m. any day of the week to make Jud Leighton his breakfast. It’s just as well I’m in love with Garry—Jud’s gorgeous, Kathrin!’

‘I suppose so,’ Kathrin said without much interest. She had never seen Jud in that light and wasn’t about to start now. ‘He and I were buddies, Pam. Friends. More like brother and sister than anything else, I suppose. When I flunked an English test and when I had to get braces on my teeth and when my best girlfriend moved away—Jud was the one I went to for comfort and advice. My mother and I were never that close, so I suppose it was natural that I gravitated to Jud. Besides, we both liked the same things—the outdoors and animals and roaming the countryside. And there were only four years between us.’ She stretched to scrub her back. ‘Jud always had a wild streak in him, something untamed and uncontrollable. He used to skip school on a regular basis because he couldn’t stand being cooped up.’ For a moment her voice faltered. One of the many thoughts she had smothered over the years had been how Jud, who had found the brick walls of the school a prison, had ever been able to stay sane in a real prison.

That was none of her concern, she thought fiercely, and picked up the thread of her story, only wanting it to be done. ‘Jud might have been wild. But he was—or so I thought—totally honest and trustworthy. If he was going to do something to you he’d do it to your face, never behind your back.’

‘That’s kind of the way he looks,’ Pam said thoughtfully.

‘It’s fake,’ Kathrin said curtly. ‘The summer I was seventeen, he was caught embezzling money from his father’s business. Caught red-handed. It had been going on for months.’

Pam padded over to the stove and helped herself to more hot water. ‘Are you sure? That’s so sneaky and underhanded. He doesn’t look the type.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Kathrin’s voice thinned. ‘There was an anonymous phone call tipping off the police. At the trial Jud tried to pin the call on Ivor. But Ivor was with me; he couldn’t have done it.’

Ivor and she had been in bed together, she thought, ducking her head in a wave of dizziness. ‘It’s awfully hot in here,’ she mumbled.

‘It’s a sauna,’ Pam said, reasonably enough. ‘You can’t stop there, Kathrin—what happened?’

With a complete lack of emotion Kathrin said, ‘Bernard—their father—was so upset that Jud could have accused Ivor that he had a stroke. A relatively mild one, but a stroke, nevertheless. The prosecution had already produced evidence that Jud had been systematically stealing for months, salting the money away in different accounts. He finally confessed, and he was sent to prison. End of story.’

Pam shook out her cluster of black curls. ‘You never married Ivor,’ she said, making it more question than statement.

Kathrin said rapidly, ‘Right after the trial Ivor told his father he and I had made love. Bernard fired my mother, and she and I left the next day. I never saw Ivor or Jud or their father again.’

‘Until tonight when Jud turned up at the kitchen table. No wonder you looked as if you’d seen a ghost,’ Pam said, obviously intrigued. ‘It all sounds terribly feudal...like one of those family sagas on TV. Didn’t his father think you were good enough for Ivor?’

‘The housekeeper’s daughter? I should say not! He couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.’

‘He was nuts,’ Pam said succinctly.

Kathrin managed a weak smile. ‘That’s sweet of you. But Pam, you do see why I can’t possibly go out with Jud tomorrow—I don’t want to be anywhere near him!’

‘I’ll speak to Garry,’ Pam said decisively. ‘I’m sure he’ll understand.’

‘Thanks,’ Kathrin rejoined in true gratitude, ‘you’re a real friend. Now, are we going into the lake or not?’

The sauna was on the shores of Loon Lake, which was still partially frozen, and it was the custom of the more stalwart of the scientists to follow their sauna with a swim. ‘Not me,’ Pam announced. ‘The last time I did that, it took me the whole night to warm up.’

But Kathrin needed some kind of drastic action to shake off the mood of her story. She had told Pam the truth. But she had not told the whole truth, and it was the gaps in the story that were bothering her as much as its fabric. She flipped her wet hair over her shoulder and said, ‘Wait for me, I won’t be long.’

‘I bet you won’t!’

The air outside struck cold on Kathrin’s bare skin. It was one of the unwritten rules of the camp that the men stayed away from the vicinity of the sauna when the women were using it, so Kathrin didn’t even look around as she picked her way down the rocky slope to the lake. The ice was about fifty feet out. Not giving herself time to think, because if she did she would turn tail for the warmth of the sauna, she stepped into the lake.

It was, not surprisingly, ice-cold. Keeping a wary eye for rocks, Kathrin ran forward and plunged in, gasping with shock. Kicking as hard as she could, she swam to the very edge of the ice, let out a couple of whoops worthy of any loon, then stroked for the shore with an inelegant but highly effective degree of splashing. She was half-upright, her feet seeking a purchase on the bottom of the lake, when she saw something from the corner of her eye. Her head swung round.

Jud was standing on the shore watching her.

CHAPTER TWO

KATHRIN stood still, a rock digging into her heel. Jud was wearing a dark blue parka, a haversack thrown over one shoulder, and something in his posture made her heart skip a beat. Once, when he had been fourteen or fifteen, he had liked to hunt; and just so had she seen him waiting, statue-still in the woods, for his prey.

The coward in her, that part that subconsciously had hoped she would never see any of the Leighton men again, wanted to scurry up the slope and vanish into the sauna. But Kathrin was twenty-four now, not seventeen, and cutting through the turmoil in her breast was a clear, pure flame of anger. Earlier in the evening she had likened this place to heaven. She had been happy. But Jud, who had invaded her heaven, had by his very presence despoiled her hap-piness.

Neither hurrying nor bothering to disguise the fact that she had seen him, she straightened, her body a smooth interplay of pale curves against the dark waters of the lake. Her nudity scarcely bothered her; as a child, had she not swum naked with Jud in the lake on his father’s estate time and again and thought nothing of it? ‘You’re breaking the rules,’ she said crisply. ‘The men don’t come near the sauna when Pam and I are here.’

‘I’ve always broken the rules,’ he drawled. ‘You should know that better than anyone.’

‘Until they sent you to prison for it,’ she flashed. ‘You’ve never grown up, have you, Jud?’

He tensed; to Kathrin, it was as though he had raised a loaded gun to his shoulder. Clipping off his words, he said, ‘Don’t you dare tell me what I’m like! You know nothing of what’s happened to me the last few years. Nothing.’

‘And whose fault is that?’

‘Oh, you have your share of the blame,’ Jud said viciously. ‘Don’t play the innocent with me, Kit.’

Kathrin shivered, feeling the cold invade her flesh and the stones bite into the soles of her feet. He had become a stranger, she thought, an accusatory, angry stranger. Yet he was worse than a stranger. For hidden in the man’s body was the memory of the boy she had known, who had laughed with her and taught her to climb trees and fish for trout in the brook. ‘We know nothing of each other’s lives,’ she said tightly. ‘I’m not sure we ever did.’

Then, because she could not bear to prolong a conversation that seemed the very opposite of communication, she began wading to shore, moving with a grace that came naturally to her; and the whole time Jud watched her. Once she had climbed the rocky steps to the sauna door she was hidden by the wooden screen. Crouching low, she stepped inside.

Swathed in a towel, Pam was waiting for her. ‘You actually got in the—what’s wrong?’

Cursing her giveaway features, Kathrin said, ‘Stay behind the screen when you go outside—Jud’s out there.’

Pam scowled. ‘Garry must have forgotten to tell him.’

‘Garry shouldn’t have to. Spying on us like that, it’s loathsome!’

‘It could have been an honest mistake, Kathrin.’

‘Sure—muskoxen can fly.’

‘You’ve really got it in for this guy.’

Her body was tingling from her swim and perhaps that was what shocked Kathrin into indiscretion. ‘I trusted him, Pam! I would have trusted him with my life. And all along he was acting a lie, stealing from his own father.’

‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’

‘They proved it in court,’ Kathrin said shortly. ‘And besides, he admitted it, I told you that. We’d better get out of here, the others are waiting for their turn.’

She and Pam got dressed behind the screen, then walked back to the camp together. Jud was nowhere to be seen. Pam said, when they reached the kitchen, ‘Come on in and I’ll stoke up the stove. We’ll make hot chocolate while the men are getting cleaned up.’

Kathrin wanted nothing more than to hide away in her own little hut. But her hair was wet and it was extravagant to light her own stove when the kitchen was so warm. ‘OK, but I won’t stay long,’ she said.

To her great relief only Garry and Karl were in the kitchen; once they had gone, she began brushing out her hair, and by the time she had finished her cocoa and helped Pam clean up the supper dishes it was dry. ‘I’m going to get out of here,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got the energy to face Jud again tonight. ‘Night, Pam, and thanks for listening.’

The road between the two rows of tents and buildings was empty. Kathrin hurried across it and into her own hut. She pulled both the outer and the inner doors tight shut, and for the first time since she had come here wished she could lock them. After drawing the curtains across the windows, she hooked the room’s only chair under the doorknob. If Jud made up his mind he was coming in, it would not stop him; but it did make her feel a little safer.

It was well past midnight. She should go to bed.

She prowled around the room, sorting her dirty clothes, putting her notes and camera equipment on the desk, then changing into her fleece pyjamas. Finally she put dark plastic refuse bags over the windows to give at least an illusion of darkness. She did this only rarely, for usually she had no problem getting to sleep; but tonight, she knew, was different.

In the artificial gloom Kathrin lay flat on her back, staring up at the roof of the hut. Consciously she tried to relax her muscles one by one, starting at her toes and working up to her head. But, when she had finished, her fists were still clenched at her sides and her neck corded with tension.

Jud’s going to knock on the door. And if he does, I have nothing to say to him. Nothing. I want him to get on the first plane out of here and disappear from my life as thoroughly as he did seven years ago.

Because I’m frightened of him.

Her eyes widened a fraction. That was it, of course. She was frightened. Not for anything did she want to plunge back into all the pain and confusion of her love for Ivor, or the horror of Jud’s trial, or the dreadful day when she and her mother had left Thorndean. The past was over. She could not bear to live through it again.

From the direction of the sauna she heard men’s voices in a jocular chorus that grew louder and more distinct. The kitchen door opened and shut. Pam called something to Garry.

But no one knocked on her door.

* * *

In the morning Kathrin woke suddenly, with the sensation of having been dragged too rapidly from the depths of an ice-cold lake up into the air. Then the sound that had woken her came again: a peremptory rap on her door. She sat up, her heart racing, not sure whether she was awake or dreaming, and called out uncertainly, ‘Hello?’

‘Kit? I need to talk to you.’

The knob was turning on the inner door. ‘Go away!’ she cried.

Jud pushed against the panels and the chair that she had rammed under the knob scraped against the floorboards. ‘Open the door,’ he demanded. ‘I want to talk about our plans for the muskoxen.’

The chair clattered sideways to the floor, the door swung open, and Jud strode into the room, which immediately seemed to shrink. After he had closed the door behind him, he picked up the chair, straddling it and resting his arms on its curved back. He looked large, immovable, and—once again—angry.

Kathrin leaped out of the bunk and stood at bay, her cheeks still flushed with sleep, her hair a chestnut tangle on her shoulders; and perhaps if she had been fully awake she would not have spoken so hastily. ‘You’ve got one hell of a nerve,’ she seethed. ‘Bursting in here like a common crimin—’

As she broke off in mid-sentence, horrified by her choice of words, Jud snarled, ‘In your eyes that’s all I am, isn’t it? A common criminal.’

Striving for some semblance of dignity, which was difficult when she was clad in baggy pyjamas, Kathrin said, ‘I shouldn’t have said that—but you did wake me up and you did burst in uninvited. Jud, we can talk at breakfast once I’ve had a cup of coffee. Not that there’s anything to say. Because we don’t have any plans. I’m going back to the valley—you’re not coming with me.’

‘That’s not what Garry said yesterday afternoon.’

‘It’s what I say!’

‘Oh? I wasn’t under the impression that you ran the camp.’

Her breast rising and falling under her fleece top, Kathrin fumed, ‘I didn’t invite you up here, it should be entirely obvious that I don’t want you here, and there’s no way I’m heading out into the tundra with you. Have you got that straight? Now will you please get out of here so I can get dressed?’

Jud gave her a leisurely survey. ‘I won’t see anything I didn’t see last night.’

Like a hare startled by a wolf, she froze, every nerve taut, and again was aware of fear. ‘You know what? I don’t like what you’ve become,’ she said in a small, clear voice. ‘I never used to be afraid of you and now I am. So just leave, will you? Garry’s around somewhere, and he’ll tell you that you’re not going out with me.’ Unwisely she added, ‘He’s changed his mind since yesterday.’

‘Now why would he have done that, darling Kit? Because you’ve chosen to inform him that I’m an ex-convict?’ Jud asked silkily. ‘But he already knows that, you see, and I don’t think it’ll make him change his mind.’

‘Don’t call me darling! And he’ll change his mind for safety reasons. It must have been embarrassingly clear to everyone last night that you and I can’t stand the sight of each other. This is the Arctic—one of the most unforgiving environments in the world. It would be stupid to send us out together. Stupid and risky.’

To her fury Jud laughed. ‘You always were quick-witted in a crunch. That hasn’t changed.’ Then he went on with an air of calm reason that infuriated her, ‘However, much as I hate to disappoint you, Garry isn’t going to change his mind. It’s very simple. I need to photograph muskoxen. You know where the herd is. Therefore we’re going out together.’ He raised one brow in mockery. ‘But if you’d rather discuss our plans in public in the kitchen, that’s OK with me...by the way, you’ll never make it to the pages of Vogue magazine with those pyjamas.’

His eyes drifted down her legs, hidden by the thick green pile of her pyjama bottoms. Then suddenly his gaze sharpened. He got up from the chair and crossed the room, standing so close to her that she could see the individual stitches in his sweater. ‘That rug,’ he said, the tone of his voice altogether different. ‘I remember it—your mother made it, didn’t she?’

Kathrin fought the urge to step back. ‘Yes. The year you finished high school.’

Jud dropped to his knees, and unwillingly she looked down on his bent head. His hair was just the same, she thought, exactly as it had been since he was a small boy. She had always loved the ravens who nested in the tall beeches at Thorndean, admiring their adaptability and their fierce independence; and Jud’s hair had the same blue-black sheen as a raven’s wing. His fingers—the long, flexible fingers that she remembered so well—were caressing the blue strands of cloth interwoven in the rug. ‘My dad gave me that shirt,’ he said quietly. ‘I wore it until it was nearly falling apart.’

The words came out in spite of her. ‘You tore it the day you fell down the ravine. My mother mended it for you.’

‘Yeah...’ He glanced up, his eyes a much deeper blue than the faded fabric, and for the first time his face was unguarded and open, the face of the Jud she had always known. Kathrin’s breath caught in her throat. She said loudly, ‘Ivor’s cashmere sweater is part of the rug as well.’

As if prison bars had slammed shut, Jud’s face changed. He stood up, his gaze trained on hers. ‘I think you fell in love with Ivor when you were in the cradle,’ he said with a total lack of emotion. ‘So why didn’t you marry him, Kit?’

With all the dignity she could muster she answered, ‘I don’t want to talk about Ivor. The breakfast bell’s going to ring any minute and I’m not ready—it’s not fair to keep Pam waiting.’

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Jud said with a softness that rippled with menace. ‘It’s due time we talked about the past, you and I. About Ivor and my father and all that happened seven years ago. But not now. Not before breakfast. In that, at least, you’re right.’ He smiled at her, a smile every bit as menacing as his voice, and turned back to the door. But as he opened it, he looked at her over his shoulder. ‘You don’t think it’s coincidence that I turned up here do you, Kit?’ he said, and closed the door gently behind him.

Kathrin’s bare toes curled into the softness of the rug. With Jud gone, the room had resumed its normal proportions. Yet the silence within the four board walls echoed and pulsed with his presence, and with a sick feeling in her heart she knew that everything had changed. For she had not for one instant doubted the claim he had made on his way out of the door. Jud had indeed come here seeking her out. And he would not go away until he had achieved his purpose. Whatever that purpose might be.

With a raucous clang the breakfast bell split the silence. All her movements mechanical, Kathrin got dressed, not even noticing the small pleasures of a newly folded shirt and clean socks. Pulling on a pair of leather mukluks, she grabbed her jacket from the hook and left the hut.

It was a beautiful day, the breeze from the plateau tinged with real warmth. She’d do a wash this morning, she thought, and ask Pam to take it in for her. That way she could set off to find the muskoxen after lunch. Without Jud.

‘Kathrin! Got a minute?’

A wrench and an oil can in one hand, Garry was emerging from the white-painted building that housed the generator. She smiled at him, happy to see his bearded, pleasant face. No surprises with Garry, no hidden depths. ‘Isn’t it a wonderful day?’ she called, walking to meet him.

‘Supposed to stay like this until the weekend. Not that I ever trust the weather reports.’ He replaced the wrench in his metal tool box, which was sitting on the bench outside the hut. Then, without finesse, he plunged into what he had to say. ‘Pam told me about you and Jud. But it’s no go, Kathrin. Jud’s prepared to underwrite one whole research programme for us, and you know what that means.’

Kathrin’s heart sank. The research station received only minimal government support, depending on funds from universities and private donors. With all the cutbacks in recent years, the donors were becoming more and more crucial to the station’s survival. ‘He can’t have that much money,’ she said sharply.

‘He’s already given me a certified cheque—he made a small fortune on that prison movie he produced.’ At Kathrin’s look of mystification Garry went on, ‘You must have seen it, it came out a couple of years ago and did phenomenally well in the States.’

‘No, I never did.’ She frowned in thought. ‘That would have been the year I was taking honours and working part-time, I either had my nose buried in a textbook or I was trying to catch up on my sleep.’

‘Look, I know this is awkward for you,’ Garry said. ‘But in the interests of the station, I think you should be able to ignore any personal differences. All Jud wants is some shots of muskoxen. You’re the logical person to go out with him.’

She did not feel logical. She felt trapped and rebellious. ‘What does he want photos of muskoxen for?’

‘His next book will—’

Floundering in a sea of unknowns, Kathrin sputtered, ‘I didn’t know he was a writer.’

‘Well, you haven’t seen him for years, have you?’ Garry said patiently. ‘His first book, on west coast grizzlies, is due out next month. I saw the advance copy—some inspired photography and a really excellent text; the man knows his stuff. He’s even willing to plug the station in this Arctic book—so we sure can’t afford to antagonise him.’

As a boy Jud had always been fiddling with cameras; that at least was familiar territory. ‘All right, I get the message,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll take him out there and I’ll find him a herd of muskoxen if we have to walk thirty miles. But I’ll only be as polite to him as he is to me. And I won’t nursemaid him.’

Garry clapped her on the shoulder, and not until she saw the relief in his face did she realise he had half expected her to refuse. ‘Great!’ he said heartily. ‘He’ll carry all his own gear, and I’m sure he won’t be any trouble to you. Apparently he camped out in the Rockies for the better part of a year doing his first book—you won’t have to nursemaid him.’ He plunked the oil can beside the tool box. ‘Let’s go for breakfast. Pam’s making bacon and eggs.’

Every piece of information Kathrin was gathering about Jud only served to confuse her more and more. The Jud she had known when she was fifteen had certainly had the skills for wilderness camping. But the man who had cold-bloodedly stolen from his father and then spent four years in prison? How could that man have survived in the awesome silence of the mountains, alone and thrown upon his own resources?

Unhappily she trailed behind Garry to the kitchen. Inside, Jud and Karl were bent over a topographical map, Karl explaining the layout of the beach ridges, lakes and plateaux of the Carstairs lowland in his careful English. Turning her back on them, Kathrin helped herself to an orange and began peeling it. The delicious smell of frying bacon filled the kitchen. As Calvin offered her a freshly baked muffin and as she bit into the first sweet, juicy segment of orange, her spirits began to revive. She would hike as fast as she could to the herd. Once there, she would do her work and Jud could do his—after all, he was used to being alone. And she would not discuss with him anything that she didn’t want to.