Sun at Midnight

‘I love Antarctica with all my heart. I’ve always loved it, first the idea and then the reality. It’s the only place, the only thing I have ever known that is always more beautiful than its admirers can convey, more seductive and more dangerous than its reputation allows. You can never forget it, and it never releases its hold on you. I hope that it will come to be just as important to you.’

‘I hope so too,’ Alice said. And then she smiled. It was her wide, infrequent and startlingly brilliant smile. ‘Thank you.’

Richard coughed and turned his attention to a separate set of papers on his tidy desk. ‘However, there are a number of things you will need to do before you can definitely join us. Medical and dental check-ups, and so forth. Beverley Winston will arrange for you to be kitted out with polar gear. Everything is supplied, with the Sullavan Company logo as well as the EU flag. You will also have to do some basic survival training. The British Antarctic Survey people have kindly agreed to provide that for our UK members, in the spirit of European unity and cooperation.’ He smiled drily.

‘At such short notice you may not have the opportunity to meet the other members of the expedition together, or even individually, before we all reach Kandahar. We’re a farflung group, geographically speaking. Which is part of the idea, of course – not to gather a little coterie of chums who were all at Cambridge together.’

Richard Shoesmith didn’t belong to any such coterie, Alice understood. Nor did Lewis Sullavan.

‘We shall be a full-season core of just ten people in all. Six scientists, including yourself, and four support staff.’

She read the list of names that he passed across the desk to her.

Eight people she didn’t yet know, with whom she would spend five months in a hut perched on the white margin at the distant end of the earth. Outside, in London, toy boats were plying their way up and down the river, and taxis were being hailed to take businessmen to lunch.

‘Six nationalities,’ Richard said. ‘Seven, if you count Welsh. This is not a huge Antarctic research station like McMurdo or even Rothera. We shall be pioneers on an old base and we’ll set out with no rules except safety regulations. We are there to help one another and to cooperate in everything from science to international understanding to cleaning the base kitchen. If there is a job that needs to be done, any job whatsoever, you will be expected to help out with it.’

A slow flush darkened Richard’s already ruddy cheeks. He was moved by the thought of this, of their tightly knit and multinational group working together outside the common conventions, and Alice found that she was touched in response.

‘You know your polar history? Of course you do. You know that Amundsen’s bid for the Pole was for Norway’s sake. It was a matter of national ambition and pride. Whereas Scott wanted the Pole, of course, but the real reason for his expeditions, the ideal that he and his team all fought and risked their lives for, was scientific exploration and discovery. We shall also be there for science’s sake.’

She understood that Richard Shoesmith was a scientist through and through. He would be a meticulous, painstaking investigator but he almost certainly wouldn’t write poetry passionate enough to inspire two generations, as his gentleman-botanist grandfather had done. Alice’s sympathy and liking for him grew.

‘Yes,’ she said.

The meeting was drawing to a close. They talked for a few more minutes about the practicalities of preparation and travel, then Alice stood up and Richard walked with her to the door. They were shaking hands when he said, ‘Are you free for lunch?’

It was twenty minutes past twelve and she had arranged to meet Becky at one o’clock in a bar in Clerkenwell. ‘I’m sorry. I’m on my way to see a friend.’

He didn’t have to ask her to lunch, it wasn’t a part of the vetting process. He was asking because he wanted to. They recognised each other. She smiled at him again.

‘Of course. Well, then, good luck with your medicals and so forth. We’ll speak.’

‘Yes. Thank you for asking me to join the expedition. I’m looking forward to it.’

As their eyes met for the last time they acknowledged this for a comical understatement.

Alice sailed down in the bubble lift, crossed the grandiose foyer and walked out into the cloudy morning. There was the smell of river and the dampness of autumn in the air. The faces of people walking towards her had acquired extra definition, she could read the words on the sides of buses crawling over Blackfriars Bridge. All her senses were heightened and sharpened with the intensity of anticipation. She had been insulated by her own circumspection, but now she was going into the unknown.

Becky was waiting. Her legs were hooked round a bar stool made of tortured metal, there was a drink on the table beside her and her head was bent over the Evening Standard. Wings of smooth hair swung forward to curtain her face and then she looked up and saw Alice. ‘How did it go? No, I can see. You’re the polar queen. You’re really going? My God, Al, you are. C’mon, let’s drink to it.’

Alice laughed. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. ‘I’m going,’ she said faintly. ‘I hardly know how it’s happened, but I am.’

‘How long?’

‘Five months. The summer field season. I’ll be leaving at the end of October and I’ll be back in March.’

A drink materialised beside her. A long glass, ice, jaunty coloured straw. She took a long suck and almost choked with the intensity of the taste. Alcohol immediately fumed in her head.

Becky was wearing a khaki combat top with pockets and buttons and epaulettes, but the fabric was contradictory slippery satin. The way the light fell on it and reflected different sumptuous colours caught Alice’s eye. Pete used to talk about colour, she remembered, as if it were food or sex.

Look at this carmine, look at this crocus-yellow. Don’t you want to eat it? Don’t you want to lick it?

‘Alice? Are you okay?’

‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just getting used to the idea.’

‘So let’s talk about it. Tell me all.’ Becky’s appetite for other people’s lives was as keen as for her own.

Alice told her about Richard Shoesmith, and the list of names, and the sharing of work, and the tasks she would have to accomplish before she could leave. All the time she was reminding herself that she was cutting loose from everything she knew and heading for a place on which she had always, from her earliest memories, deliberately turned her back.

Is this how it happens, she wondered, in other people’s lives? The moving on and the changing and the randomness that never seemed to affect her, only the people she knew? And then a series of events and coincidences link together and what was impossible at one moment becomes inevitable in the next?

‘What about the house?’ Becky was asking.

‘Oh, I’ll let it for this academic year,’ Alice improvised. ‘Maybe I’ll travel for a couple of months on the way back. It would be a shame not to, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been to South America.’

Becky was looking at her. ‘What about Pete?’

‘There’s nothing much to tell. He moved out.’

‘Is that it?’

While Margaret was still dangerously ill, Alice stayed at the house on Boar’s Hill. Pete telephoned again and again, and when she wouldn’t speak to him he turned up unannounced at her office one afternoon. She looked up from her desk to see him in the doorway – or a more than usually unshaven, crumpled, wild-haired version of him. He was carrying a bunch of florists’ roses, dark-red.

‘Pete, don’t do this.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘You won’t see me, you won’t talk to me. You won’t let me explain what happened.’

‘I don’t think what I saw needs any explaining, does it?’

He looked around, then thrust the flowers in the jug she used for watering her pot plants. He slumped down on the only spare chair and put his head in his hands. His hair stuck up in spikes, as if he had been running his fingers through it in steady desperation. Of course Pete would turn rejection in love into a piece of performance art. He wouldn’t be shaving, on principle, or eating or sleeping.

‘I can’t sleep. I’ve lost my appetite. Alice, it isn’t funny. Why are you so fucking empirical about everything? I love you and I miss you, that’s all that matters. I want you to come home.’

‘Pete. I came to your studio and found you engaged in oral sex with one of your students. The same one I saw you on the river with, and the one you were kissing at our party. On the other hand Harry saw you in a pub in Bicester, kissing someone entirely different…’

‘What? I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near bloody Bicester in ten years.’

‘…I am empirical, if you mean that I base my reaction to you on the results of observation. How else am I supposed to respond to the evidence? “Oh, look, there’s Peter with Georgia. What he’s doing actually proves how much he loves me.”’

‘I can’t bear it when you’re sarcastic. It doesn’t suit you.’

‘It doesn’t really matter any more what you can and can’t bear about me.’

‘Alice please.’ He got up again and came to her. He put his arms round her and tried to draw her against him. He cupped the back of her head in his hand and rubbed her hair. It would have been very easy, knowing and missing the warmth and the smell of him as she did, to give way and bury her face in his shoulder and pretend that she believed him. But a pretence was what it would have been, and Alice preferred meagre facts to the most colourful and persuasive elaborations on the truth.

‘I want you to move out. I am going to stay at my parents’ house until you do. You’ve got time to find somewhere else, but that’s what I want you to do.’

His face changed.

Under the veneer of his remorse there had been confidence, because he had assumed that he would be able to win her round. Realising this made her feel still more dismal. If he thought that, it was obvious that Pete had never really known her properly. They had shared a bed and made a home and a life together, and still she might as well have been a stranger, or Georgia, or the woman in the pub. It made her want to cry, but she couldn’t bear to give way to that impulse either. She looked steadily back at him, dry-eyed.

‘I see,’ he said at last.

To do him credit, he didn’t argue any more then. And he packed his belongings and moved out of the house within two days. He left a note for her on the kitchen table, weighted at one corner by the teapot still half-full of cold tea. The note said that he loved her even if he had a strange way of showing it and that as far as he was concerned this wasn’t the end of things between them. Alice crumpled the single sheet of paper into a ball and threw it into the kitchen bin.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she told Becky.

‘I’m sorry, darling. He made you happy, you know. You were happy all this year. You laughed all the time and you didn’t take your responsibilities as seriously as you usually do. Pete made you just a little bit frivolous.’

‘I do know that.’

They had ordered some food and now it was put in front of them. Thinking she was ravenous, Alice had ordered seared tuna and glass noodles. Now she noticed that there were sesame seeds in the dressing and they looked like tiny myriapods. If she examined them more closely she imagined that she would see the filaments of their legs. Very deliberately she sliced a corner of fish, wound it in a web of noodle and placed it in her mouth. The food had a strange metallic taste.

‘Alice, are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, of course I am.’ She smiled at Becky. ‘I’ve learned to be frivolous. I’ve got it completely sorted. I don’t need Pete and his antics. I’m just dropping everything and swanning off to Antarctica for months, aren’t I?’

‘That doesn’t sound particularly carefree and impetuous to me. It sounds very uncomfortable and rather dangerous.’

‘But I get to look at 400-million-year-old sedimentary rocks that hardly anyone’s ever seen before. I’ll wear a butch survival suit and learn how to drive a skidoo and how to rescue myself from a crevasse, and on really good days I’ll get a turn at cleaning the base kitchen. Dr Shoesmith promised me that.’ Her gaiety was convincing to herself, at least.

‘Oh, God.’ Becky grimaced.

Through the open fronts of her Christian Louboutin sandals, her toenails were clearly visible. They were painted a softly luminous shell-pink and each nail was delicately rimmed in white. Her legs were smooth and tanned, and her fingernails were manicured too. There were small diamond studs in her ears and everything about her said clean. They looked at each other and laughed.

Alice realised that she had finished her drink and had even drunk most of the melted ice.

‘Shall we have another couple of these?’

‘I’ve got to work this afternoon, unfortunately. But what the hell. I’ll have a glass of wine,’ Becky said. ‘You will come back safely from down there, won’t you?’

‘I will,’ Alice promised.

No one ever comes back unchanged, she remembered.

‘How does Jo seem?’ Becky asked.

They drank their wine and Becky finished her food. They talked about Jo and the babies and whether Vijay was exactly or only approximately the man Becky was looking for. None of this was any different from the dozen lunches that Becky and she had shared this year alone, but Alice felt as if she had moved a little distance apart. There was a voice in her ear, a waterfall of syllables. Antarctica.

From the upright chair beside her bed, Margaret saw Alice walk down the ward towards her. She didn’t want Alice to know how anxiously she had been looking out for her so she allowed herself only the quickest glance before composedly folding the newspaper in her lap. But she could see even in a second that there was more colour about her, her face had opened like a flower in the sun. The news must be good.

A flood of memories rose up and washed away the stuffy ward. Almost exactly forty years ago she had felt like Alice looked now: poised on the brink of the central years of her life with the whole breadth of Antarctica waiting for her. Even now, with pain twisting her joints so cruelly that she could hardly stand, she could remember what it was like to lie in a field tent with the wind banging and raging at the walls, or to stare down into the greedy blue throat of a crevasse where a snow bridge threatened to collapse in the late-season sun. Antarctica was a painful, perfect place. There was the astringent flavour of envy in Margaret’s mouth and she reminded herself that it was absurd to feel envy at her age. Alice would go back there instead of her. Through Alice she would live in Antarctica one more time.

‘There you are. What an age you’ve been, when I’m dying to hear all about it. Sit down. No, wait. Could you get that girl to bring us a cup of tea, d’you think?’

Alice kissed the top of Margaret’s head where the shiny pink of her scalp showed through the strands of thinning hair. ‘Do you want tea, before I tell you?’

‘Don’t be so damned annoying. Put me out of my misery.’

‘Yes. I’m going. All right?’

Margaret’s face sagged briefly with relief and the crosshatching of tiny lines deepened beneath her eyes. ‘Good,’ she said firmly and took possession of her face once more.

Alice sat down and Margaret listened intently as she described her hour with Richard Shoesmith.

‘I met his grandfather, you know,’ Margaret said.

Gregory Shoesmith had been an old man, sitting with a plaid rug over his knees and a stick leaning against his chair – just like me, now. Where do time and strength slip away to? – but he had taken her hand between his two and leaned forward so their faces almost touched. He said, ‘We have been privileged, you and I. We have seen places that we will never forget.’ He had known war and too many deaths, and he had lived a long life, but it was the ice that filled his mind. Even in old age he was a powerful man.

Alice didn’t look surprised. ‘You met everyone.’

Margaret was listening, her head nodded at every point that Alice made, but she was caught up in the teeming mass of her memories. They swirled around her, thicker and faster, like a blizzard. Alice would inherit the memories. They would be different in their precise content but they would be made of the same material. It was like handing on your own genes, mother to daughter. Antarctica was what made me, Margaret thought. It will be the making of my child too, and she needs that. Alice has always been reticent, and now she will come into bloom.

Margaret had no fears for her, any more than she had ever had for herself.

It had started to rain, and thick runnels slid down the windows. It was making her eyes swim. To clear her vision she looked down at her hands, resting on the blue cellular blanket that covered her knees. It always surprised her to realise that these veined and knotted appendages, with their swollen knuckles and brown blotches, were her own hands that had once been so strong and dexterous. The pain in her joints and in her chest sometimes seemed to belong to someone else too, to some old person who was leaning on her and whose weight she could thrust aside and step lightly away from.

Alice was talking about medical assessment.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Margaret said. Alice was so young, she moved so unthinkingly and confidently. ‘You’re just like me. As I used to be. Strong as a horse.’

‘And less skittish.’ Alice smiled. ‘Than a horse, I mean.’

Margaret was tired now. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes, and think about what she had done and what Alice would do.

Alice saw it and she stood up, pretending to look at her watch. ‘I’ll come in tomorrow.’

‘Do that. There’s a lot you’ll need to know.’

They kissed each other quickly.

‘I’m glad, Mum. I’m glad to be going.’

‘That’s good,’ Margaret answered. She was thinking, I may be old but I’m not daft. I know what it takes to do well down there and you have it, my Alice. You’re more like me than you want to admit.

Three hectic weeks had followed. Alice fitted in all the things she had to do, but only just. She went to see Dr Davey, who had been the family doctor ever since she was born.

‘You’ve never had a day’s illness in your life, my dear. I don’t need to run a battery of expensive tests to know you are in perfect health.’

He ticked a long list of questions, scribbled a paragraph at the end and signed the medical declaration. Alice countersigned it and sent it off to Beverley Winston.

She visited her dentist and had all her fillings checked. She went up to London and at a Sullavan-owned warehouse near the North Circular Road she was issued with her polar kit by a man with a heavy cold, who told her that he had spent six winter seasons down on the ice. There was a bewildering pile of fleece and Gore-tex inner and outer garments, all marked with the EU flag and Sullavanco logo, just as Richard had described. The massive red outer jacket, with matching windpants, had a big white rectangle on the back with the words ‘1st EU Antarctic Expedition’ stitched on it. On the front there was a Velcro sticker that read simply ‘Peel’. There was a pair of boots with insulated liners. And there was a balaclava helmet that covered her head except for a narrow eye slit. It was hot in the warehouse, and just trying all these items on made sweat run down and pool in the small of her back.

‘Good lug,’ the man with the cold said as she tottered away with her new wardrobe.

She went up to Cambridge for a three-day induction course run by the British Antarctic Survey for their own departing personnel, where she was the object of curiosity and envy.

‘I hear you people have got unlimited funding,’ a sandyhaired climatologist remarked enviously. ‘While we have to sign for every specimen bag and camp meal.’

A man wearing a jacket and tie laughed over his pint of beer. ‘Sullavan will need to spend a few of his millions putting Kandahar straight. How long is it since we pulled out of there?’

‘He wouldn’t even notice it, whatever it costs him. There’ll be en suite bathrooms and waiter service. Bit different from what we can expect, eh, Jack?’

The BAS men roared with laughter and Alice smiled politely.

They all went to lectures about the dangers of frostbite, and glacier travel, and ecological disposal of waste matter. There were practical sessions about mountaineering and survival. Trevor had taught Alice the basics of rock climbing on their Alpine holidays together. The instructor didn’t patronise her quite so much when he realised that she knew how to put on a climbing harness and could tie a figure of eight knot in a rope.

The preparations absorbed her attention on one level; on another she observed her own dashings around as if she had become a stranger. Even her body felt slightly unfamiliar. She had lost her appetite, and if she sat down to collect her thoughts between work and meetings and lists she found herself on the brink of falling asleep. This she put down to being too busy, to delayed anxiety about Margaret and perhaps a reaction to Peter’s absence. He often slipped into her thoughts, but she wouldn’t see him and she didn’t even know where he was living.

The last week came. The plane tickets for her complicated journey south were sent down from the Polar Office and she propped the folder on the small mantelpiece in her bedroom. She packed and repacked her books and clothes in the big orange kitbags supplied for the purpose. The house was tidy and empty – everything she didn’t need for Antarctica had been put into store, and the tenants would move in the day after her departure. It was odd to look from the bare rooms to the October sky beyond the windows, and to think of being away for a whole winter. When she came back the trees would be putting out new leaves. She watched the dazed new students flooding the streets and reflected that they would be confident old hands by the time she returned.

Two days before she left, Jo and Becky gave a goodbye party for her at Jo’s house.

‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ Alice asked her in concern.

‘It’s getting much better. Charlie only woke up once and Leo twice last night. There were two whole hours when all three of us were asleep.’

It was a good party, but different.

Alice wore the long johns and balaclava and huge insulated boots, until she got too hot in the crush and discarded them behind Jo’s sofa. She was pulling a fleece vest over her head and briefly revealing her black lace best bra, which had shrunk in the wash and exposed an unusual depth of cleavage, when she looked up and saw Pete. His eyes travelled over her. He had shaved and, apart from a mournful expression, looked just as he always did.

‘Did Jo…?’ Alice began, thinking that she would have preferred to know that he was coming.

He shook his head. ‘Nope. I wasn’t invited, but I came anyway and Harry didn’t turn me away from the door. You look wonderful. You must be excited.’

‘Oh, Pete.’

He held out his arms and she hesitated, then let them enclose her.

‘Dance?’ he asked.

She nodded and they swung across Harry’s sanded and sealed floorboards. They had always moved well together, she thought.

At the end of the evening, when most of the guests had hugged Alice and said goodbye and told her that she must take care to come home safely, Pete was still there. He hadn’t drunk very much, he had talked to everyone and bursts of laughter continually erupted around him. When he wanted to he could always make himself the centre of a gathering. Even though she hadn’t intended it, Alice kept track of where he was in the room and listened for his voice through the hubbub of music. The past had been swallowed up, the future was unreadable, and the present was nothing but this instant’s narrowest margin between sense and desire. She had the feeling that her good sense, always her strongest asset, was inexplicably deserting her.