Sun at Midnight

This morning, Margaret was replying to a personal message from Lewis Sullavan.

There had been a succession of increasingly insistent communications from his staff and now there was one from the great man himself. She sat for a moment with her fingers resting beside the keyboard. She looked out into the garden without seeing the heavy trees that leaned over into the lane, then shook herself and began.

‘My dear friend, I really cannot accept your kind invitation,’ she recited as she picked out the words. ‘Much as I would like to. The fact is that I am now 77 years of age and I have severe arthritis. However, there remains the alternative proposal.’

The cat yawned and stood up to claw the sofa cushions. Margaret heard Trevor’s footsteps crossing the upstairs landing from the bathroom to his study. The floorboards creaked as they always did.

‘My daughter is very interested in the idea,’ Margaret typed and whistled through her teeth as she sat back to review what she had written.

‘We’ll see, eh?’ she said, addressing the last remark to the cat.

She heard a car and quickly looked up. Alice’s car rounded the overgrown circular flowerbed that blocked the space between the house and the gate to the road, and drew up outside the front door.

‘Soon enough,’ Margaret added. She saved her unfinished message to Lewis Sullavan and was hobbling away from a blank screen by the time Alice came in.

‘Ah, there you are at last,’ Margaret said briskly.

CHAPTER THREE

Alice had brought a bunch of bright orange lilies with chocolate-speckled throats, her mother’s favourite flowers. She wrapped her arms round Margaret, hugging her close. She saw that the room looked as it always did; it was her mother who seemed smaller, as if the disorder might finally be on the point of overwhelming her.

‘Hello, Mum. Here I am.’

After a brief embrace Margaret leaned away, apparently for a better view of her daughter.

Alice’s hair was thick and slightly wavy, the same texture and silvery blonde colour as Margaret’s had also once been. Margaret’s was white now, and she wore it bluntly chopped round her face They were both slightly built, but Alice seemed to grow taller as Margaret’s painful stoop increased. Margaret said that her daughter was much more contemplative and serious-minded than she had ever been, but Trevor insisted that she was so like her mother at the same age that they could have passed for twins. Neither woman believed him.

‘Mum, the music’s very loud. Can I turn it down a bit?’

‘Is it? All right.’

Margaret motioned to the CD player and watched with a touch of envy as Alice swung with an unthinking fluid movement and muted the sound.

‘How do you feel?’ Alice asked.

‘I’m grand,’ she answered, although the pain was bad today. ‘And we’re away on holiday in three days, even though we don’t do so much here that needs taking a holiday from.’

‘Come on, you’re just going to stay in a nice hotel in Madeira and enjoy being waited on for once. Why don’t you sit down?’

Margaret gave an impatient shrug but she let Alice guide her gently to the sofa. They sat down once Alice had pushed the cat aside.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’ll be down as soon as he realises you’re here. I want a word first.’

‘Is something wrong? Have you seen Dr Davey?’

‘Don’t fuss, Alice. I’m perfectly fine.’ Margaret’s feet in elastic-sided shoes were placed flat on the floor, exactly together, toes pointing forward. She sat upright, hands folded.

Her mother wanted to be invulnerable, to remain as allcapable and all-knowing as she had always managed to be. Alice understood that perfectly. She knew that she despised her own increasing physical frailty, as if it were some moral weakness. In fact, there was nothing weak about Margaret and there never had been. She had been one of the first women scientists to penetrate the male domain of Antarctic research; she had filmed her seals beneath the ice of the polar sea and she had never shrunk from anything just because she was a woman, or a wife, or a mother. Her great energy and singlemindedness tended rather to make everyone around her feel weak by comparison. Recognition of this was one of the strongest of the many bonds between Alice and her father.

‘No, this is about you,’ Margaret announced.

Alice tried not to sigh. ‘Go on. I’m listening,’ she said.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Margaret glanced over the top of her bifocals towards the kitchen, as if this were some hitherto-unexplored wilderness region. It wasn’t that it daunted her, more that it didn’t offer interesting opportunities. Her lack of culinary ability was legendary.

‘Later. I’ll make it.’

‘All right. Now. Where were we? Yes. Listen to me. I’ve got a tip-top invitation for you.’

Margaret clapped her hands, then paused for dramatic effect while Alice wondered what awards dinner or institution’s prize-giving her mother had been asked to preside over, and at which she would be offered as a disappointing last-minute substitute. Being Margaret Mather’s daughter didn’t mean that she could make an audience eat out of her hand the way her mother did.

‘You have been invited to go to Kandahar Station,’ she announced grandly.

Alice had never heard of it, so couldn’t express either enthusiasm or reluctance. ‘What?’

‘Lewis Sullavan has personally asked you.’

‘Lewis Sullavan doesn’t know me from a hole in the fence.’

But Alice knew who he was. His media empire had been founded in the 1960s with a stake in one of the early commercial television companies. It had grown, hydra-headed, since then and now included newspapers and magazines in the UK and Europe, a Hollywood film company and interests in television companies across the world.

‘And if he doesn’t know me, why would he invite me out of the blue to go to some station I’ve never heard of?’

Margaret didn’t even blink. Age had rimmed her eyes with red and faded her dark eyelashes to the colour of dry sand, but her gaze was as sharp as it had ever been.

Alice quietly answered the question for herself. ‘Because of you.’ For as long as she could remember she had been notable because of her mother’s achievements rather than her own.

It made her feel mean and small to be resentful of this, and as an adult she was learning to accept what she couldn’t change, but she used to wish that she could be just Alice Peel, making her own way via her own mistakes and minor triumphs. Instead, she was always living in the half-light of reflected glory. The house she lived in had been purchased with her mother’s financial assistance and she even had a suspicion, lying just the other side of rationality, that her lectureship at the University was hers as much because of who she was as what she could do.

Even her choice of subject had been influenced by her mother. Alice might have wished to become a biologist herself, but there was no question that she could, or would, ever compete with what Margaret had done. Instead, she had chosen geology, her father’s speciality. In her teens they had taken camping trips alone together, looking at rocks. These times, when she had had the undivided attention of one of her parents, were amongst the happiest of Alice’s life.

Now, sitting beside her mother on the cat-scented sofa, she took Margaret’s dry hands between hers, noting the tiny flicker of resistance that came before submission. Margaret had never been physically demonstrative. In her view excessive hugging and kissing were for film actors, not real people.

‘Go on. Tell me. How do you know this media mogul and what is Kandahar Station?’

‘I met him many years ago when I was making my first series for the television.’ It was always the television, in Margaret’s old-fashioned way.

‘I didn’t know that.’

Margaret’s brief nod seemed to acknowledge that there were many episodes in her life that the passage of years and the accumulation of success had left half submerged. ‘It’s a very long time ago.’

She sounded tired, Alice realised with a stab of anxiety. It was a good thing that Trevor had been able to persuade her to take a ten-day break in Madeira.

Margaret withdrew her hands and smoothed her trousers over her knees. The jersey fabric was baggy and whiskered with cat hair. When she was younger, Alice remembered, her mother had had an ambivalent attitude to clothes. She had loved style and making a statement, but had been hampered by the suspicion that this didn’t go with serious science. So she had adopted a look that was all her own, in which plain suits and conservative dresses were enlivened with wicked shoes, or ethnic necklaces, or a wide-brimmed hat looped with scarves. These days, however, she dressed mostly for comfort.

‘Kandahar Station is Lewis’s current toy,’ she continued and her briskness came back again. ‘It’s a new research base. Largely funded at present by Sullavan himself, but with some EU support. As you know, he’s passionately pro-Europe. The intention is that Kandahar will ultimately offer facilities for European scientists and joint European research initiatives across all the relevant disciplines.’

This sounded like a speech. And if Margaret had rehearsed it, then what she was going to say must be important.

‘And where is it?’ Alice asked, although she knew the answer to this question too.

‘Antarctica.’

Of course.

Alice had grown up with the waterfall sound of the word. The pictures of it were as familiar as the view from this window. Some of them still adorned the walls and mantel here in Margaret’s room. In the most famous one of all, the younger Margaret crouched beside a hole in the ice shelf, dressed in the corpulent rubber folds of a diver’s drysuit. She had pulled off her rubber hood and the wind blew her hair away from her head like a silvery halo. A seal’s head poked up out of the ice hole and it looked as if they were amiably chatting together.

In another a stiffly posed group of bearded men stood in the snow outside a low-built wooden hut. Margaret’s figure at the end of the line looked tiny, like an afterthought, but her head was held erect and her chin jutted firmly forward.

Margaret was in her forties before her only child was born and most of her polar adventures were already behind her, but to the small Alice, hearing the stories, her mother’s doings and those of Scott and Shackleton and the others had run together into a continuous and present mythology of snow and terrible cold and heroic bravery. She curled up under her warm blankets and shivered, full of admiration and awe, as well as pride that her own mother somehow belonged to this bearded company. At the same time she made a childish resolution that she would never venture to such a place herself and her decision seemed to be endorsed by the fact that her father had never been there either.

More than twenty-five years later, Alice saw no reason to change her mind. ‘No,’ she said now, smiling as she did so but without letting a tremor of uncertainty colour her voice.

‘Alice, it’s an honour. Sir Lewis wants to name the laboratory block Margaret Mather House. What do you think of that?’

‘It is an honour,’ Alice gently agreed. ‘Do you think it would be too much for you to go yourself? To see the ice again?’

Margaret’s face flooded with longing but she shook her head. ‘I would go if…if I didn’t have damned arthritis and if I wasn’t going to be a nuisance and a liability.’

Anyone planning to travel south would have to undergo medical and fitness examinations. Margaret knew she wouldn’t pass any tests. And it would be Margaret’s idea of misery, of course, to feel that she might be a burden.

‘So. I want you to go instead. In my place. Lewis has asked for you.’

The imperiousness of her demand grated on Alice. ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ she answered as calmly as she could. Antarctica was her mother’s love, not hers. The idea of the southern continent lay in her mind like a vast, cold dead end at the bottom of the world. She didn’t want its icy walls to close around her.

Margaret lifted one hand. ‘Hear me out. It’s not just a PR excursion, Alice. You are being offered a place on the base for the entire summer season. Just think. For a geologist to be given the chance to go to Antarctica? You can pursue your own research project. Write your own ticket. You will have funding, you can use Sullavan’s infrastructure. It’s a great chance, a career opportunity you shouldn’t turn your back on. You’ve even got the time this year to do it.’

That much was true. After five years of teaching undergraduates, Alice had a six-month break coming up in which to pursue her own research. She planned to do some field work in western Turkey, making a broad analysis of sedimentary rock structures in a system of active faults. Travel to Turkey was easy enough to allow her to come back to Oxford, and Peter, as often as possible.

The familiar waves of Margaret’s enthusiasm and determination pounded against Alice. She felt as if she were some eroding shoreline that had been withstanding this onslaught for a lifetime. She scrabbled against the undertow, trying to keep her balance and hold firm against the current. ‘I’m flattered. And I can see that it would be a nice media hook for Sullavan.’

That was what it was about, of course. Some television footage, newspaper and magazine articles about the scientist daughter following in the scientist mother’s footsteps, pictures of the base, a good excuse to bring out all the archive photographs from Margaret’s heyday. It would be another publicity angle by which to promote a very rich man’s latest way of diverting himself. Alice didn’t admire what she had heard about Lewis Sullavan.

‘But I have made my plans for the next six months, you know.’

There was the sound of creaking floorboards again.

‘And now here’s your father,’ Margaret announced superfluously.

Trevor Peel was a small, pink-faced, egg-shaped man. He eased himself round the door, aiming to create the minimum of disturbance by his entrance. A fringe of feathery white hair clung to his otherwise perfectly bald head. From behind the shield of his gold-rimmed glasses he was trying to secondguess the temperature between his wife and daughter. ‘Mm, aha. I’ve been putting some things in a suitcase. Better now than at the last minute. So what do you think?’ he said to Alice. He knew about Margaret’s invitation and also Alice’s likely response to the idea of travelling in her place.

Alice loved her father dearly. His mildness was deceptive. He had a sharp mind, but it was coupled with a tolerant disposition. He had lacked the ambition rather than the intellect to reach the front rank himself as a scientist and he had always been aware of this deficiency. He had devoted himself to encouraging his formidable wife instead and in this they had been an ideal match. All through Alice’s childhood, Margaret had often been away but Trevor was invariably there. They had formed a sympathetic company of two, moving quietly in Margaret’s wake. Trevor had been retired for ten years now. He occupied himself with reading, crosswords, gardening and Margaret’s needs.

Alice’s eyes met his. There was no need to speak. Over the years they had developed a silent language of their own. Today’s communication was keep your head down.

‘I don’t understand her,’ Margaret announced. ‘I would have thought she would jump at an offer like this.’

‘Ah,’ Trevor said.

Everyone understood that Margaret had known that Alice wouldn’t do anything of the kind, but had assumed that she would be able to override her opposition.

‘You’ve got a few days to think it over, Alice. I’ll let Lewis know you’re considering it very seriously. No one could expect you to make a decision on the spot. Although I would have done. We can discuss it properly when we come back from this holiday.’ She spoke the word as if it were Gulag or torture chamber.

The glance that passed between Trevor and Alice said better try and nip this in the bud.

Alice drew in a breath. ‘Mummy, I don’t want to go to Antarctica. I’m sorry to spoil a nice story and turn my back on history at the same time, but I’m not going. It doesn’t fit in with my plans.’

This didn’t come out right. She intended to be cheerfully firm but she ended up sounding feeble as well as petulant, as she too often did when she was forced into open conflict with her mother.

‘Just give me your reasons why not,’ Margaret said. So she could then set out to demolish them.

Alice reflected that there were many reasons, but they could all be placed under the same heading. ‘Because I am happy where I am,’ she said gently.

She thought about sitting in the sun yesterday afternoon, eating scones and listening to Peter and Mark. She remembered the cool bedroom light and the heat of Peter’s mouth on her skin. Tonight their house would be full of friends and music. She knew where she would be and what she would be doing, next week and the week after that. Order and certainty were important to her. She didn’t like question without answer, thesis without proof. She liked her work, even loved it, but she didn’t want to make it her entire reason for living. Antarctica was an unknown and Alice preferred the known world.

Margaret’s eyebrows drew together. She put her head on one side, in the way she did when she was considering a problem. ‘I don’t see what happiness has to do with anything,’ she said at length.

No, Alice thought.

Her mother understood achievement, as in doing your best and then improving on that. She had no fear and no self-doubt. She didn’t care much about her own comforts and not at all when she had a goal in mind. Happiness would come a long way down her list of considerations. This was what Alice believed, although she realised with a small jolt that the two of them had never talked about it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

Trevor patted his tweed pockets, searching for his cigarettes. He only smoked outside the house, by Margaret’s decree, and this was his unconscious signalling that he wanted to get out of the room.

‘I’ll make some coffee.’

‘Is it too early for a sherry?’

Trevor and Alice spoke brightly, simultaneously. With difficulty Margaret stood up and walked slowly back to her table. She sat upright at her keyboard, hitching her loose cardigan round her.

I have disappointed her, Alice thought. It was not a new realisation. She went quickly and stood behind the chair, cupping her mother’s shoulders in her warm hands.

‘I will have a cup of coffee, thank you,’ Margaret said.

Later, Alice walked in the garden with Trevor.

They descended a set of mossy steps and reached the fence that separated their land from the neighbour’s plot. There was a sycamore tree in the angle of the fence, casting too much shade so nothing would grow beneath it. The bare earth was dry and scented with cat. They leaned against the tree’s rough bark to smoke, looking up the garden at the cream-washed stucco of the house. It was too big for two elderly people and it had acquired a neglected aspect. Paint was peeling off the window frames and there was a long streak of damp in the render beneath a broken gutter.

Trevor drew a line in the dust with the toe of his shoe. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked tentatively.

Alice had been remembering how big this garden used to seem when she had conquered the shrubbery and built dens in the hedges. As big as a whole country, and the swampy pond with its frog population had been a wide sea.

‘Sure?’ she repeated.

‘About not going south.’

‘Yes, I am. Realistically, what would my study be?’

It was much easier to talk to Trevor like this, not just because he was interested in the scope of her sedimentological rock investigations but because he listened to what she said, whether it was related to science or not.

‘You won’t need to apply for funding, as I understand it. You just go, look at something that interests you and Sullavan picks up the tab. That doesn’t happen every day, does it?’

Almost all research projects involved time spent in the field, studying rock formations and collecting samples for lab analysis. Expeditions to remote places were expensive to set up and needed complex support. Proposals had to be carefully directed and worded to attract approval and sufficient financial support from the funding bodies, and this was often the hardest part of the process. Alice was still waiting to hear whether she would be awarded a grant for her next six months’ research.

‘What is the deal?’

She hadn’t given Margaret the opportunity to explain even this much herself, so her mother wasn’t the only one guilty of not listening. Sometimes, she thought, we bring out the worst in each other. We work against one another’s grain, setting up ridges and splinters.

Trevor threw his cigarette end into the hedge. ‘It’s a maverick set-up, as you would expect with anything connected to Sullavan. Kandahar is down at the base of the Antarctic peninsula. It was built in the 1950s for the British Antarctic Survey, who closed it down in the late 1990s as surplus to requirements. The bay gets iced up in winter and it’s difficult to supply as a year-round station. They were on the point of dismantling the buildings and clearing the site when Sullavan stepped in and offered to buy it as the base for his pet project: United Europe in Antarctica. It was much cheaper for BAS to sell the place standing than pay for clearance, so Sullavan got quite a bargain. Now he’s got to get some decent science underway; it probably doesn’t matter too much exactly what so long as it has popular appeal and preferably a few familiar names connected with it. Which is where Margaret comes in.’

And by extension her daughter, neither of them went on to add.

‘I see.’

‘Not tempted?’

A lawnmower was whining monotonously somewhere in the middle distance. The gardener was probably Roger Armstrong, a mathematician whose garden on the other side of the lane was tended with millimetric precision, in striking contrast to the Peels’. Trevor liked to wander between his hedges and stand rocking on the balls of his feet while he peered into his tangled flowerbeds. He believed that a garden should be a place to stroll or sit and think, a sanctuary, not a job of work. Today, as if to prove him right, it looked beautiful in its dishevelment. Clumps of goldenrod glowed in the sun and even the mildew on the asters took on a silvery glamour. Thanks to Roger Armstrong’s efforts the air was full of the lush scent of late-season grass.

‘Not in the least.’ Alice smiled. It was easy to sound entirely certain.

Her father put an arm round her and hugged her. His smell, as always, was a compound of cigarettes and wool and something of himself, perfectly clean but also animal like a horse or a dog. She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.

‘Well, then. I’m glad you’re so contented,’ Trevor said easily.

As she lifted her head Alice heard a sigh and then a click, as if there had been a second’s interruption of time. She looked along the path towards the goldenrod, seeing it as if she had never looked at it before, all broken up into waves of different depths of colour, and hearing the lawnmower’s buzz separated into a series of vibrating notes that sprayed through the air like drops of molten metal.

Is this what happiness means? she wondered. Just this?

The thought sounded a single hollow note within her head.

Then the world remembered its path and moved forward again. There were just ragged yellow flowers that were not much more than weeds and the sound of a neighbour working in his garden on a sunny Saturday morning.

‘What about Mum?’ Alice asked. ‘Will you get her to have a rest on this holiday?’

Trevor hunched his shoulders, spread his hands slightly. They had been exchanging this gesture for many years, the two of them. They left the shade of the sycamore tree and walked back up the slope of grass to the kitchen door. Dandelion clocks released small seed parachutes as their feet brushed past. Margaret had turned the music up again. The orange lilies had been put in a green enamel jug and placed beside her computer.