Sun at Midnight

The two old people tried to persuade Alice to stay for lunch. Margaret even said she thought there was some cold ham somewhere, by way of an extra inducement.

‘No, I’ve really got to go because we’re having all these people round this evening, and I’ve still got to make the food and buy wine,’ Alice said.

‘Can’t Peter do something?’

It wasn’t that Trevor and Margaret disliked Peter, more that they didn’t understand how he lived a life with no particular plans, not even a proper routine. They thought that his habits and the hours he kept were incompatible with a productive existence. The few pieces of his work that they had seen left even Margaret with nothing to say. They believed that art lived on gallery or drawingroom walls and didn’t incorporate the contents of builders’ skips.

For his part Peter was always polite to them, but the politeness had a resistance to it that was almost ruder than if he had dispensed with it and just been himself.

‘It’s easier if I do it. He’ll be in charge of the barbecuing. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive you to the airport on Tuesday?’

‘Your father’s arranged a car to pick us up.’

‘Is there anything else I can do? Shopping? Packing?’

‘I’ve travelled to a few places in my life, Alice. I can manage a ten-day package trip to Madeira.’

‘I know you have, I know you can. So. Have a lovely time. Just sit in the sun. I’ll call you before you go.’

Alice hugged her mother as she left. In her arms, Margaret felt as light and dry as a leaf. Alice had been aware of the change for the past year or two, but it was still uncomfortable to recognise that the woman who had been such an embodiment of strength for her whole life was growing weaker.

‘Think about Kandahar,’ Margaret called after her, as a parting challenge. She believed in having the last word.

Trevor came out to the car to say goodbye. ‘I’d go, you know, if I were in your shoes,’ he said, startling her so that she paused, halfway into the driver’s seat.

‘But you never did go.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t. Maybe I should have done, but that sort of thing was Margaret’s role. She was the adventurer, so I was the stay-at-home. I loved her far too much to risk offering any competition, and then you were born and I didn’t want to miss a single day of your life. But if I were you, now, today, that would be quite different.’

Not for the first time, Alice reflected on her father’s unselfishness. He possessed enough for two. For three, if she counted herself into the equation. She had no children, no husband, yet, no evident ties – except for Pete, although he was enough to keep her firmly anchored. At least I’ve come far enough to recognise that I am selfish, she thought. Trevor was beaming at her. The breeze fluffed up the white feathers of his hair.

‘Then you wouldn’t have been you. You wouldn’t be you now. I don’t want you to be any different from the way you are,’ Alice told him.

He nodded. ‘I don’t think you need have any anxiety on that score. No new tricks for an old dog, you know.’

‘Good.’ She kissed his cheek. As always, Trevor convinced her that the world was a secure place.

‘Have a lovely holiday. Look after Mum.’

‘You know I’ll do that.’

He stood back to watch her go, his hands in the pockets of his shapeless trousers and his hair like thistledown in the sunlight.

It was 5.30 and Alice was lying in a hot bath when Peter appeared in the bathroom doorway. She saw his reflection first in the steamy mirror, then turned her head to smile at him. He was carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

‘I think I’ll join you.’ He grinned.

Pete unbuttoned his shirt, unbuckled his belt and pulled off his jeans. He had olive skin and a flat stomach. Alice watched him, noticing the play of muscles in his arms and back. He looked clean, even his hands and fingernails were clean, unlike the way they usually were when he came back from a day in the studio.

‘Were you working?’

He was naked now, but not in the least vulnerable. He stepped into the water, so that Alice had to sit up to make room for him. Heavily scented water slopped over the edge of the bath as he sank backwards.

‘Yeah.’

She didn’t say anything and after a beat of silence he added, ‘I had a mass of paperwork. Invoices, bills, all kinds of shit. I hate doing all that.’

‘I know you do. Pete?’

She was going to say, I had a moment this afternoon when I thought is this all? She had intended to ask him if he was happy, if what they had between them was good. If it was enough. But this, she knew, was what Pete would dismiss as a quintessential woman’s question.

‘Yeah?’ He locked his legs round her. Bubbles of foam popped close to their ears. Pete gave her a misted glass of champagne, clinked his own against it and drank. He licked a silver rim of froth off his top lip.

‘I’ve been asked to spend a season in Antarctica.’

‘And?’

And what? she wondered. What if I said, ‘I’m going, and I won’t be back for six months?’ Instead she murmured, ‘Well, I said no, of course.’

Pete nodded. That was what he would expect. He was used to her, to her precise ways, to the regularity of their life together that provided a framework for his erratic behaviour. When they were first together he used to steal pages of her work and frown over the stratigraphical analyses of rock structures. He would turn the equations that represented deformations upside down, playing up his bafflement. Alice used to try to explain to him that these equations were like pictures, abstract illustrations of dynamic relationships that to her were far more vivid than words or photographs. They were the same to her as his sculptures were to him: a shorthand expression of a solid state and at the same time an airy thumbnail sketch of sublime reality. They rendered down the universe, or they tried to.

Alice suddenly smiled. She was thinking in artists’ language.

Pete sat up, sending another wave slopping over the side of the bath. He took her face in his hands and drew her closer so their mouths touched. Her champagne glass tipped sideways and she spilled some in the water.

‘You know, Al. You’re incredibly beautiful when you smile like that.’

She closed her eyes as he kissed her. But not before she had seen a twist at the corner of his mouth and a flash in his black eyes that she couldn’t read.

Pete was the one who ended the kiss. He drank the rest of his champagne at a gulp and stood up, brandishing his glass. Water and bubbles slicked the black hairs on his legs into sleek lines.

‘We’re going to have a great party,’ he said. He didn’t ask any more about Antarctica. Alice had said that of course she wasn’t going, so there was no need to pursue it.

It was a good party.

Pete flipped sausages and chicken pieces on and off the barbecue in the back garden. There were candles in little coloured glass vases hanging in the branches of the tree and the night air was so still that the flames burned without a tremor. People brought their paper plates of food and glasses of wine outside to sit in the moth-filled darkness, and music drifted out of the windows over their heads. In between last-minute preparations Alice had found ten minutes to pull on a black frock that showed her cleavage and new stiletto-heeled sandals that made her feel tall but also slightly at risk of toppling forward over her own toes.

‘Nice dress,’ Mark the sculptor said, with his eyes on her front. Alice laughed and put her arm through his to steer him into the middle of the next group. The house and garden overflowed with different people, painters and writers and lecturers and scientists as well as the old friends Alice had grown up with. Oxford had been her home for most of her life and she loved this bringing together and shaking up of different elements from within it. She moved through the crowd, laughing and talking, catching Pete’s eye once in a while, checking that he thought it was going well too. They were good at this, making a celebration together. Recognising that the party was now moving under its own impetus, she gave herself up to the pleasure of it.

Alice’s oldest friend Jo was there and her husband Harry. They had brought their three-month-old twins and put them in their car-seat cradles to sleep in Alice and Pete’s bedroom.

‘Al, I am so knackered,’ Jo muttered. She had black rings under her eyes and her flat hair clung to her cheeks. ‘They never sleep at the same time. I never get more than an hour. What am I going to do?’

‘They’ll start sleeping better soon.’ Alice took her friend’s hands and rubbed them between her own.

‘When?’ Jo wailed. ‘I want my life back. I want to be myself again.’

‘You will be yourself. It’s only time.’

Becky arrived late. Her current man was a psychologist, an unnervingly handsome Indian who didn’t say very much. As always, Becky talked enough for both of them.

‘I’m sorry, Al, have we missed everything? The traffic from London, you wouldn’t believe, Vijay said we should just move to Oxford. Shall I come back, wouldn’t that be a gas? Jo! Come here, baby-mother, give me a hug. Mmm, look at you. God, your boobs are so fabulous.’

Alice and Becky and Jo had been friends since the fourth form. Jo had once said, ‘I’m the good girl, Alice is the clever girl and Becky is the star in the firmament.’

Now Jo said, ‘I’ve just got to go up and check on them again. I don’t know where Harry is.’ She looked as if she was going to cry.

Becky and Alice glanced at each other.

‘Harry’s in the garden with Pete. I’ll go up and make sure they’re still fast asleep, you sit here and talk to Beck,’ Alice told her.

She gave them both a glass of wine and went quietly up the stairs. The dancing had started and loud music came up through the floorboards but it didn’t seem to bother Jo’s babies. They slept in their padded plastic cradles. One of them held his fist against his cheek, the thumb not quite connecting with his mouth. Alice stooped down to look closer and found that she wanted to touch the tip of her finger to his rosy skin. She stopped herself in case he woke up, but she crouched there for a long minute, watching and listening. Downstairs, someone turned the music up even further. The party was changing up a gear.

She stood up again, almost reluctantly, and walked to the door. It was ajar and from the semi-darkness of the bedroom she could see down to the half-landing where a pretty arched window looked over the garden. Pete was standing in the angle of the stairs, just out of sight of anyone who might be in the hallway. His hand slid slowly down the back of a girl who was pressed up against him, came to rest on her bottom. She was wearing a cropped pink top that exposed a broad expanse of skin above lowslung trousers.

Alice stood completely still. He bent his head and kissed her, then whispered something in her ear. She angled herself closer still, the movement eloquent of intimacy and familiarity. The two of them knew one another’s bodies.

A second later the girl ducked away from him. She used her thumbs to flick her long hair back behind her ears and smiled at him from beneath her eyelashes before she skipped down the stairs. Pete leaned against the wall for a second, staring down into the garden. If he had looked the other way, up the stairs, he would have met Alice’s eyes. But he didn’t. He rose up on to the balls of his feet, as if balancing on the brink of something delightful, then followed the girl.

It was just a kiss at a party.

She told herself that it meant nothing, it was what parties were for. She would go downstairs herself and kiss Mark, or preferably Vijay.

But everything about the tiny encounter told her that it wasn’t nothing; it was much more than just a kiss at a party.

Becky and Jo both stared at her as she came back.

‘Hey,’ Becky said softly.

‘Are they all right?’ Jo was already heaving herself to her feet.

‘They’re fine. I just saw Pete kissing some girl on the stairs.’

Now it was Becky and Jo who looked at each other.

‘Which girl?’

Alice glanced around the crowded room. Faces nodded and mouthed through the smoke and music. A tide of dirty plates and ashtrays lapped against the walls.

‘That one.’ She was standing by the mantelpiece. Midway between the prominent crest of her hip bone and her neat bellybutton there was a butterfly tattoo.

‘Never seen her before,’ Becky said.

‘She’s one of Pete’s students.’

‘And where is he?’ Jo asked in a let-me-at-him way.

Alice forced a smile. ‘He’d better keep out of my sight for an hour.’

She drank some more wine and tried to reconnect to her earlier enjoyment. She kept talking and laughing, then she danced with Mark and with Harry. She saw Pete moving through the skeins of people, even caught his eye as she had done at the start of the evening, but it was only a brief connection. She wanted to dance with him, but they were never in the right place together.

At 1 a.m. Jo and Harry went home, carrying a baby seat apiece down the stairs. Becky and Vijay left at two.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Becky said, concern showing in her eyes.

‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’

The hard-core guests stayed until it was light. She would have liked to be drunk herself, but all she felt was cold. Pete had spent the last hour playing his guitar and singing with the remaining handful of people. Now he was sitting on the sofa, picking out chords and humming with his head down. There was a glass of whisky at his feet.

Alice stood in front of him and he raised his head to look at her. His eyes weren’t quite focusing. The room seemed to press in around the two of them, full of the weight of their combined belongings and the evening’s events.

Pete strummed a chord and sang, ‘Just the two of us, just you and…me.’

‘Pete, come to bed.’

The bedroom was disorientatingly light. Alice took off the black dress and hung it up in her cupboard, Pete stripped off his clothes and left them in a heap. They lay down and Pete gave a long sigh, then turned and lay against her, one arm heavy over her hips.

‘Who was she?’ Alice asked.

‘Who was who?’

‘The girl with the tattoo.’

‘Tattoo? I dunno. All girls have tattoos. ’Cept you.’ He laughed into her hair and she shivered with the first wave of longing for intimacy that was already gone.

‘She was with you yesterday. In the punt.’

‘Punt? Oh, yeah, her. Georgia.’

Alice lay on her back, watching the ceiling. If he says anything else, she thought, it will be all right. If I have to ask him what he was doing with her it won’t be. The seconds passed. Out of the furthest corner of her eye she was aware of the digital clock on the bedside table. The green numerals changed, 23, 24. Then she realised from Pete’s slow breathing that he had fallen asleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Your mother’s not very well,’ Trevor said.

Alice was sitting at her desk in the Department of Geology. She had been trying to concentrate on her work but her eyes kept sliding to the square of sky visible from her window. Now as she pressed the phone to her ear the maps she had been studying lost their definition and ran together in a grey blur. ‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘She’s picked up a chest infection. The hotel doctor’s a bit worried about her.’

‘Can I talk to her?’

‘She’s asleep at the moment.’

‘How long has she been ill?’

‘A couple of days.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Trevor sighed. ‘You know what she’s like.’

Small, fierce, unfaltering, impatient with weakness. As stubborn as a rock formation. Yes, Alice knew what her mother was like.

‘Are you going to bring her home? Shall I come out there?’

‘There’s no need for that. Rest and antibiotics is what she needs.’

‘Are you sure? I’ll call you later and see how she is. Give her a kiss from me when she wakes up.’

After Trevor had rung off Alice tried to turn back to her work, but anxiety nudged at her and in the end she gave up. It was almost lunchtime. Jo’s house was nearby and Jo would have constructive advice to offer. But it was Pete she wanted to talk to. She would call in at his studio and tell him about Margaret. They could have a sandwich and a cup of coffee together. Alice left her desk at once and rode her bicycle through the traffic.

The studio was in an old warehouse at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mark’s side was closed up, but the heavy door to Pete’s hung narrowly ajar, sagging slightly on its hinges. Alice padlocked her bike to a street sign advising that there was no parking. A smart new Mini was parked right alongside.

She edged round the door and slipped into the studio. It was dim inside after the bright daylight. Pete wasn’t working, then. The blinds at the big windows were all drawn. The concrete-floored space smelled of dust and resin, and something familiar scraped at her subconscious in the split second before she identified it and the association. It was music, the same song that had been playing in the punt on the afternoon when Pete jumped into the water.

His latest work in progress loomed above Alice’s head. It was a bird’s nest of twisted metal and within the lattice cage some of his found objects were suspended on thin wires – a buckled bicycle wheel, a polystyrene wig block like a blanched head that revolved very slowly as the studio air stirred. The hair at the nape of Alice’s neck prickled as she looked around for the source of the music. Peter’s welding torch lay on the ground, with the black welding mask that made him look like Darth Vader discarded beside it. She took three quick steps to the inner door, past more accumulated debris.

The door led into a boxed-off cubicle with a metalworker’s bench at which Pete did his smaller-scale work. There was a grey filing cabinet, a kettle and a clutch of mugs stained with rings of tannin. The CD player was balanced on the broken typist’s chair from the skip outside the Parks. A girl’s handbag, an expensive-looking fringed suede affair, spilled its contents on the floor. The girl herself was perched on the edge of the cluttered bench, steadying herself with her hands. Her denim legs stretched out on either side of Pete’s head.

Pete hadn’t heard Alice come in. Just above and to the side of his right ear Alice could see the butterfly tattoo.

The girl looked straight into Alice’s eyes as the song finished.

‘Oh, shit,’ the girl said.

Alice didn’t move. There was a scramble of movements from the other two as Peter leaped to his feet and the girl pulled up and zipped her jeans. She bent down sideways and picked up her bag, briefly holding it in front of her chest as if it were a piece of body armour.

Peter shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. For the moment he was silenced.

It was the girl who spoke first. ‘Look, what can I say?’

She had one of those low, drawling voices. Alice knew that it must be her car parked outside, probably a twentyfirst present from Daddy. Pete liked girls who weren’t going to rely on him for support. She belonged in that category herself. The thought struck a shiver of bewildered amusement through her and when he glimpsed it in her face Pete winced and said in a thick voice, ‘Al, you know, it isn’t…’

‘It isn’t what I think? Is that what you’re going to say?’

He held up his hand. ‘Georgia, you’d better go.’

With a part of her mind Alice was noticing how pretty she was and how young she looked. In contrast to this glowing girl she felt old and dull. She was also surprised by Georgia’s self-possession. She had hitched her bag over her shoulder and now she was looking coolly around the little room to see if she had dropped anything else. She leaned across and pressed a button to eject the disc from the player. When she had tucked it inside her bag she stood facing Pete with her back to Alice. Alice gazed at the graceful lines of her neck and narrow shoulders.

‘When will I see you again?’

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not for a bit.’

‘I see. Well, then, I’ll call you.’ She turned away and glanced at Alice. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. It wasn’t intended to be like this. But all’s fair, as the saying goes.’

Then she left.

What does one say now? Alice wondered. Pete was waiting, ready to take his cue from her. He looked like a schoolboy anticipating a scolding, half truculent and half defiant. She wanted to tell him that he was an adult, a grown man. He couldn’t get away with being a naughty boy for ever.

‘I came over because my mother’s not well. I’m worried about her. I was thinking we could have lunch. Just a sandwich or something.’

Her words fell into the space between them. Pete’s expression changed to one of relief, reprieve.

‘Of course we can. Come on. Where would you like to go?’

‘What? No. I don’t want to go anywhere. That was before I saw…what I just saw.’

He rushed in: ‘Al, believe me, it’s one of those dumb things, it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It’s just a dick thing?’

His face flushed. ‘No. Well, if you want to call it that, yes. I suppose.’

‘How many?’

‘How many times? For God’s sake. She’s just a student.’

‘I meant how many other women.’

‘Alice, please. What do you think I am? I’m with you, I love you.’

She stared at him. She wanted to have him put his arms round her and hear him saying that this was all a mistake – not in the guilty, formulaic way that he was saying it now, but in a way that meant she could believe him. And at the same time she knew that this was utterly unrealistic because she would never be able to believe what he told her, never again, no matter what he said. He had lied to her and he was lying to her now.

When he had finished protesting she listened carefully. She thought she could hear a tiny, feathery whisper. It was the sound of her illusions, softly collapsing.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

He thumped his clenched fist on the bench. It was a theatrical gesture. ‘Listen, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. It was a mistake and I was regretting it even before you walked in. But it happens.’ The way an avalanche happens, or a thunderstorm, presumably. A natural cataclysm that was beyond his control.

Alice said carefully, ‘You didn’t look as though you were regretting it. I’m going back to work now. We’ll have to talk about what’s going to happen, about how to…’ She was going to say put an end to everything, but she couldn’t find a word that fitted. ‘But I don’t want to do it today. If you can’t find a place to stay tonight, I’ll go to Jo’s.’

She was dry-eyed and her voice sounded level, but she didn’t feel in control. Her stomach churned with nausea and the palms of her hands were wet. Then she turned round and walked out through the studio. The polystyrene head was still gently turning on its thread of wire. She had never understood Peter’s art, she thought. She had longed to, had dragged her mind and her senses to contemplation of it over and over again, but she had never been able to make sense of it. She was like Trevor and Margaret, really: just a literal-minded scientist.

Unable to think clearly, she cycled back to her office, combed her hair and drank a glass of water. Then she sat through a long discussion with five of her colleagues about grant allocations for the coming year. She took the minutes, concentrating on noting everyone’s different points with meticulous accuracy. Once or twice, though, when someone spoke to her, she found herself staring at them and struggling to inject meaning into the babble of their words.

‘Are you all right, Alice?’ Professor Devine asked as the meeting broke up. David Devine was the head of her department and an old friend of both of her parents.