Sun at Midnight

A different nurse performed the observations, which meant that the night staff had now come on. Alice was just deciding she would insist that Trevor ate some food when Margaret opened her eyes. They focused, in an instant of confusion, then flooded with mute terror. Her free hand came up and clawed at the mask. She dragged it off her face and hoarsely whispered, ‘I’ll suffocate.’ Her Yorkshire vowels were exaggerated: soooffocaaate.

Alice jerked to her feet. ‘No, no, you won’t. It’s helping you to breathe,’ she soothed.

‘Mag? Maggie, darling, you’re all right,’ Trevor murmured.

Her silvery-haloed head rolled on the pillow.

‘Are you there?’ Margaret demanded.

‘Yes,’ they said. Her head turned to Trevor and then the other way, until her eyes connected with Alice’s. Alice had never seen her mother afraid before, but her face was livid with it now. There were beads of sweat on her forehead. She breathed noisily with her mouth open and Alice tried to put the mask back, but Margaret impatiently knocked it away.

‘I want you to do something for me.’ She said it to Alice. Even now she managed a degree of imperiousness but it sounded a cracked note, the tremulous insistence of a frightened child.

‘Of course I will.’

‘I want…’ Margaret took a breath. ‘I want you to go south. To Lewis Sullavan’s station.’

‘I can’t go anywhere, not when you are ill.’

Margaret’s hand twitched on the covers. ‘This isn’t it. Not by a long chalk it isn’t. I’ll be getting over this. But I want you to go, while you can, while you’ve got the chance. For…me. Do it for me.’

Alice understood what she meant, with the clear precision born in the most intense moment of an intense drama. She knew that she would remember this instant and her exact comprehension of her mother’s wishes. There would be no denying or forgetting what was intended.

Margaret was looking at the spectre of her own mortality. She wouldn’t die here, not yet, her will was too strong for that. But she knew, finally and empirically, that her strength was not infinite. And her intention was that her life would be carried forward for her, out on the ice where she had lived it most intensely, by her only child.

Somewhere beyond their glass box a telephone was insistently ringing. Footsteps passed, metal harshly scraped – the sounds they had been hearing for hours. Alice looked at Trevor and saw the mute imprecation in his face. Trevor had never, throughout her life, demanded a single thing of her. All he had done was to love the two of them, his two women. The telephone stopped ringing, then started up again.

‘Of course I’ll go,’ Alice said softly.

The fear in Margaret’s eyes faded, replaced for a moment by a clear sapphire glimmer of triumph. It was Trevor who smudged away tears with the back of his hand.

‘You’ll find details. E-mail, in my e-mail in-box,’ Margaret said.

‘Don’t worry about that now.’

Gently Trevor lifted the plastic mask and fitted it over his wife’s mouth. She nodded her acquiescence and her eyes closed again.

At 10 p.m., when Trevor began to doze with his head on the covers next to Margaret’s hand, a different doctor came to explain regretfully that there would be no place available on the ward before the morning. Margaret herself was now asleep, so Alice drove her father home to Boar’s Hill. She heated up some soup and once they had eaten and she was sure that he had gone to bed, she made up a bed for herself in her old room. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up, as she had done as a child, and looked across at the old books on the white-painted shelves. There was Shackleton’s South, and Fuchs and Hillary’s The Crossing of Antarctica, both of them presents, on different birthdays, from Margaret. She had written Alice’s name and the date on the flyleaf of each. It was as if Alice could see straight through the stiff board covers now, into an Antarctic landscape where the reality of Margaret’s films and the explorers’ stories overlapped with a fantastical realm of ice turrets and rippled snow deserts and blue-lipped crevasses. Tattered veils of snow were chased by the wind and the howling of it rose inside her head, reaching a crescendo in an unearthly shriek that drowned out her mother’s voice and the chirring of the penguins.

And now Antarctica lay in wait for her, with its frozen jaws gaping wide open.

Alice sat upright. Sleep was out of the question. She pulled on her clothes again, shivering in the unheated bedroom, and went downstairs. Margaret’s chair at the gate-legged table in the bay window overlooked a dark void where the garden lay. Alice made herself a mug of tea and sat down at her mother’s computer screen.

Do it, she exhorted herself. You made a promise. Do this much at least, before tomorrow throws any complications in the way.

Alice clicked new message and began to type.

If it was appropriate, and if her understanding of the present situation was correct, following her mother’s serious illness she would be honoured to be considered in her place for membership of the forthcoming European joint expedition to Antarctica.

She attached a list of her scientific qualifications. At the end, against Previous Antarctic Experience, she typed none.

The tea had gone cold but she took a gulp of it anyway. She reread her short message and changed a couple of words, then checked that the address in the box was correct. She typed her own correspondence address and quickly pressed send. The out-box was briefly highlighted before the communication went to an unknown recipient named Beverley Winston, assistant to Lewis Sullavan.

There was nothing else to be done tonight. Alice poured her unfinished tea down the kitchen sink and went back to bed. She lay still under the familiar weight of the covers. She thought of her own bed in the house in Jericho and wondered where Pete was tonight. Only a little time ago they had woken up in the same bed with nothing more than a kiss glimpsed at a party to separate them.

Now there was the prospect of half a world.

The acceleration of change seemed to open a pit beneath her. Opening her eyes again to counter another bout of nausea, Alice examined the contours of her room. She had lived a remarkably sheltered life. As she saw it now, she had made an almost stately progression from childhood to today. In Margaret’s shadow and under her father’s benign protection she had done what was expected of her and what she expected of herself. No more, nothing more than just what was expected.

And now, without Pete and with her mother’s shadow shortened, there was this.

Suddenly, beneath her ribcage, Alice Peel felt a sharp stab of anticipation that shocked her with its ecstatic greed.

CHAPTER FIVE

With the steady approach of summer the pack ice in the scoop of bay was slowly, grudgingly, breaking up. This morning the ice was a dirty ivory colour, glinting here and there like polished bone. The expanding streaks of water were black and pewter grey under a matching sky, and a thin veil of ice fog hung over the cliffs that formed the opposite wall of the bay. Idle flakes of snow spun in the still air, floating upwards as well as down.

Rooker replaced the engine casing of the skidoo and twisted the ignition key. The machine obligingly coughed and roared, and Valentin Petkov, the glaciologist, glanced back from where he was placing bamboo wands and marker flags out on the ice and gave a thumbs-up. The field assistant, Philip Idwal Jones, was nearby, coiling a rope. He finished it with a loop, slung it over his shoulder and trudged back through the snow.

‘Hey. Rook.’ The shout carried clearly in the silence. ‘Time for a brew?’

Rooker pulled back the cuff of his glove to check his watch. It was midday and they had been out since 8 a.m. Petkov was keen to set up his markers and take the first set of readings. This part of his study, as Rooker understood it, was to do with comparing the speed of travel of the margins of the ice with the centre. If you could call it speed, he reflected, at the rate of millimetres per year.

Philip reached the skidoo, dropped his rope and took off his fleece cap to scratch at his spikes of black hair. He had a patchy black beard to match. Phil was only twenty-six but he had been travelling and climbing since he was seventeen. This was his third Antarctic season. As a mountain guide it was his job to assist the scientists in their fieldwork and at the same time to make sure they didn’t fall down a crevasse or off a cliff.

‘Piece of cake, I don’t think,’ he had confided to Rooker. ‘That French bird thinks she knows it all, du’n’t she?’

Rooker liked him.

‘Ta,’ Phil said now when Rooker passed him a thermos of coffee. ‘Phew. Warm, innit?’

It was, compared with a week ago, when they had first arrived. Daytime temperatures then had hovered around –23°C, with a heavy wind chill. Today it was a mild and summery –5°C.

‘D’you think Valerie’s going to take a break?’ Phil wondered, looking over at Petkov who was still zigzagging across the glacier. Phil maintained that Valentin wasn’t a name at all, just a card you sent to your girlfriend if you remembered and could be bothered, and insisted instead on Val, which he then back-formed to Valerie. No one could be less effeminate than Valentin. He had a rich bass voice and a barrel chest, and a fondness for whisky and jokes whose punchlines didn’t always survive the shift from Bulgarian into English. There were six different first languages at Kandahar Station, but English was the common tongue.

‘Dead common,’ Phil had inevitably quipped in his thick Welsh accent.

He beckoned to Valentin by waving a mug in a wide arc. It was hard to judge distances across the bland, grey-white face of the glacier. Only over to their left, where it suddenly tipped downhill and spilled towards the ice and the sea, splitting into a chaotic mass of seracs and twisted crevasses on the way, did its scale become more legible.

Phil sighed when the scientist cheerily waved back, either not understanding or not wanting to stop work.

‘Daft Bulgar. I’ll have to take it over there. Give us one of those butties, mate.’ He took the thermos and a wrapped sandwich, and headed off across the snow again.

The skidoo had been tending to stall on the way out from the base. Rooker had found and cleared a blockage in the fuel line. He sat on the machine now, leaning back against the handlebars with his feet up on the seat. When he had looked into the radio room this morning, Niki had told him that the warm and windless weather heralded a storm. Nikolai Pocius was the radio operator, a gaunt Lithuanian communications genius who had spent ten years in the Russian army. Niki was probably right, but it was hard to believe it in this moment of perfect stillness. When he closed his eyes, apart from the faint breath of cold on his face, Rooker thought he could be in a vacuum. The depth of silence was crystalline and absolute, without the smallest possibility – a certainty anywhere else in the world – that it would be shattered in the next second by a jet passing overhead or a burst of distorted music or the whine of traffic.

Apart from the nine people currently occupying the two huts on a small bluff that made up Kandahar Station, the nearest human habitation was at Santa Ana, a Chilean base that lay 120 miles further up the peninsula. The Chileans maintained a snow ski-way for fixed-wing aircraft, and the Kandahar personnel had flown in there and then been transferred by helicopter to Kandahar. In partnership with the Chileans, Lewis Sullavan had leased for the summer season a pair of New Zealand-owned Squirrel helicopters with two Kiwi pilots and a mechanic. The machines and their crews would be based up at Santa Ana, but they would be available to transport Kandahar scientists out to field locations too remote to be reached by skidoo and sledge. Rooker envied the pilots. He would have liked to fly over the wilderness of glaciers, watching and trying to secondguess the extreme weather, but there was no chance of that. His fixed-wing licence was out of date and he had only flown a helicopter a handful of times.

The silence expanded and thickened around him. He could feel it almost as a physical mass pressing inwards against his eardrums. In the ten days since they had arrived here, the peace had soothed him. He escaped outside as often as he could.

The hut was crowded. He found it difficult to live at such close quarters with the disparate group that Shoesmith had assembled here. Dr Richard Shoesmith was the expedition leader. Rooker had taken an instinctive and immediate dislike to him, but the rest of them were mostly all right. It was the mass function that he recoiled from. People were always talking, trying to make themselves heard above the hum of the other voices. They wanted to make their mark, all of them. Even the jokes were often about scoring points off someone else, or about forming miniature alliances. Sometimes the spectacle touched him, at other times he laughed with everyone else, but he found it impossible to join in properly. The layers that protected him had thickened to the point of impermeability.

Since he had left Edith behind he had grown accustomed to being alone. Before that even, a long time before that, he had stopped looking for company, except for sex or for someone to drink with. He drank on base, of course, although Shoesmith didn’t allow private supplies of alcohol. There was always drinking company, as there was everywhere else in the world. Neither Phil nor Valentin took any notice of the prohibition either. But Rooker didn’t want to know about their lives outside Kandahar, or to know what they dreamed of or hoped for. They didn’t ask him about his life and that suited him perfectly.

Outside, alone, he felt comfortable. The play of light constantly amazed him. The quality of it could change ten times in an hour, going from milky translucence to blade-sharp clarity to a thick yellow glow. He would sit on a rock with his hands hanging loose between his knees, almost oblivious to the cold, just watching.

McMurdo, the American base on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, had been nothing like this. In the summer season McMurdo could house over a thousand people. It had bars and buses and a constant round of parties, and he looked back on it now as just a more boring and much harsher version of Ushuaia. It had been too populous and insulated for him to feel the powerful presence of the ice, and because he had been working as a shuttle-bus driver he had had few reasons ever to go beyond the base and the airfield. Unless it was over to drink with the Kiwis on Scott Base a couple of miles away. But it was lucky that he had worked that meaningless long-ago season, because it was the magic phrase ‘previous experience’ that had secured him this job. He had been taken on by Sullavan and Richard Shoesmith to manage transport, and to act as base mechanic and maintenance man.

That was easy enough. Rooker was good with machinery. He had almost five months ahead of him now, and all he had to do was drive the Zodiac, fix skidoos, and keep the water and the generators running. He felt, at long last, that he had travelled far enough. No one would try to reach him or come pushing up against him here, nudging him for reasons or responses. At McMurdo, planes were constantly landing or taking off. There was always the lure of other destinations. But here, unless a helicopter came in from Santa Ana or a ship arrived in the bay, no one could arrive or leave. Including himself.

He could keep a certain distance from the eight other people. He had a corner that he could curtain off in one of the men’s four-bunk pit rooms, and outside there was always the mercurial light and the silence that was only ever shattered by the wind.

No, he suddenly remembered, it would soon be nine, not eight.

Nine people, because there was another scientist arriving today.

Shoesmith had made one of his ponderous announcements over breakfast: ‘As most of you already know, Dr Alice Peel, from Oxford, will be arriving later today. Please do everything you can to make her welcome.’

Jochen van Meer, the station’s medical doctor, had raised his thick blond eyebrows and grinned across the table at the other men. ‘It will be a pleasure.’

Eight, nine, Rooker thought. It made no difference.

A shadow flicked over his closed eyelids and he sat up to see what it was. A big brown skua gull had landed a yard away, and now it cocked its head and gazed at him. The skuas ringed the rocks outside the door of the base, scavenging for scraps of food, and they quickly learned to follow the sledges further afield. He rummaged in the zipped pocket of his parka, found a lint-coated square of chocolate and threw it to the bird. There was a snap and the fragment disappeared into the hooked beak.

The radio crackled in his inner pocket. Shoesmith’s voice broke out of the buzz of static. ‘Base, this is Kandahar Base, Base to Rooker. Over.’

‘Copy you,’ Rooker replied.

Everything about Shoesmith, including his radio manner, was irritating.

As soon as they met, at the hotel in Punta Arenas before the flight south, Rooker knew that Shoesmith had the English public schoolboy’s conviction that what he did was right because it was always done that way. He had confidence, it seemed to Rooker, but it wasn’t rooted in competence or insight.

The trouble was that his voice, his manner, even his pink, handsome face, reminded Rooker of Henry Jerrold of Northumberland, England, whom he wanted to forget for ever.

Rooker listened to the leader’s instructions. While the glaciology team was working, Richard wanted him to come back to base with the skidoo and ferry the French biologist to one of her penguin colonies. After that, the supply ship was due. Rooker was to take the Zodiac out through the loose ice to meet the new arrival and bring her ashore.

‘Roger,’ he said.

He fired up the skidoo and the skua launched itself away in a long, confident glide. Rook nosed his way back along their outward ski tracks until he reached the point closest to the others, then dismounted and plodded across to tell them where he was going. His boots sank almost to the ankles in the soft snow cloaking the ice.

‘You are not leaving us out here the whole night with no more than one sandwich?’ Valentin laughed.

‘Don’t you fret, Val, we can walk home, no problem. It’s Rook who’ll have to worry when we do get in,’ Phil threatened.

He left them to their flagging, uncoupled the sledge and raced the skidoo back to base. The outward journey had been slow because he and Phil had stopped to test the snow ahead with a long probe wherever there was a shadow or a dip. Too many dogs and sledges and even men had vanished from history into the bowels of the ice for it to be worth taking any risks. But now he drove at full speed, bouncing along with the cold stinging his cheeks and the front skis skimming in the safe tramlines of their exploratory journey. The trail stretched ahead, a thin smudge winding into the blank distance. Exhilaration curved his mouth into a wide grin.

The base was six miles away. As he came over the last rise Rooker saw it lying ahead of him in a sheltered bay, two tiny carmine-red dots against a sweep of snow with the pack ice and a tongue of inky water as a backdrop. Escarpments of exposed rock rose on either side, and behind the base the sloping snowfield was crowned with a towering rock outcrop that marked the margin of the glacier. At the closed end of the bay another tongue of the glacier tumbled in vicious blocks and gashes down to sea level.

He made a wide circuit round the jumbled mass of rock and roared down the slope towards the huts. He could see a little red-jacketed figure crossing the isthmus of snow between the living quarters and the lab hut.

Rooker swept the skidoo in a circle and left it under a makeshift shelter at the rear of the huts. One of his extra assignments was to build a proper housing, using the wooden frame materials left by the supply ship at the beginning of the season. The sky had darkened to solid slate-grey and he noticed that the wind was rising now. Tiny eddies of snow chased around his feet.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Shoesmith said superfluously. He was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table in the middle of the living area with a mass of papers spread out in front of him. The only other work area at Kandahar was at the narrow benches in the chilly lab and most people preferred to do their less demanding work in the warmth of the communal area.

At the far end of the room, where a pair of windows looked out on the snow hill, the base manager, Russell Amory, and Niki were crowded in the kitchen. Niki was peeling potatoes in a metal bowl and Russ was making bread. Rooker thought that one of the best features of life at Kandahar was Russ Amory’s bread.

The two men looked like one another’s opposites. Niki was immensely tall and cadaverously thin. He had long, unkempt hair and a wispy beard that didn’t hide his hollow cheeks, and when he laughed his honking laugh the tight skin and thin lips pulled away from bad teeth that looked as if one more headshake would jerk them loose from the gums. Russell was short and suntanned and completely bald except for a band of fuzz above his ears. Today a white apron was stretched round his middle, emphasising his broad belly.

Russ and Nikolai didn’t pause in their peeling and kneading. Niki twitched his wrist and sent a long coil of potato peel spiralling down into the bowl.

‘Where is Laure? Is she ready?’ Rooker asked from the doorway. He didn’t want to spend time getting out of his boots and outer clothes if he was going straight outside again, and Russ never appreciated people trampling snow and grit over the linoleum floors.

As if to answer him the Frenchwoman, Laure Heber, emerged from the door of the women’s pit room. She had a full backpack in one hand and a pair of insulated boots in the other. The other three men all looked up.

‘Merci, Jeem,’ she smiled. ‘Tout prêt.’

Laure’s shiny dark hair was cut in a tidy bob. She wore pearl studs in her ears and even her fleece tops were flatteringly shaped to show off her long neck. Compared with the eight men on the base she was a miracle of personal grooming. She didn’t talk very much, but her tendency to raise one eyebrow whenever anyone else was speaking gave her an air of detachment and scepticism. There was a rota for everyone to take a day’s responsibility for cooking meals and cleaning the living areas, and on Laure’s day she had served boeuf bourguignonne garnished with chopped herbs and a tarte tatin. The men had wolfed it all down. Jochen van Meer had kissed his fingertips at her. The big Dutchman had also made a point of helping her with the washing-up afterwards while the others drew up their chairs to watch a DVD of The Matrix.

Now she took her windpants and red parka off the hook by the door tagged ‘Heber’ and began pulling them on. She said to Rooker, ‘Jochen is coming to the rookery as well. He will help with netting the birds. You can take two of us?’

‘Sure,’ Rooker answered. Laure was tiny. It would mean squeezing up a bit, but he didn’t think Jochen would mind that.

On cue, van Meer popped out of the opposite bunk-room door. The living area at Kandahar was very small. Someone was always crossing purposefully from bunk room to bathroom or from kitchen to front door. It was like one of those stage farces, Rook thought, but without the comedy.

Beside the front door was a whiteboard, with a list of surnames and a box beside each name. A tick in the box indicated that you were safely on the base. If you were going beyond the immediate environs you wrote down your destination and estimated time of return. It was Phil’s job, and also Rook’s as deputy safety officer, to monitor the status of the board. He ran his eye over it now, thumbed out the line that declared he was assisting on the Spaatz Glacier, scribbled ‘transport SW rookery’ instead and added his initials. He would be back, he estimated, within the hour.