Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘What’s funny?’ Mark asked her. Alice hadn’t realised that she was smiling.

  ‘Nothing, really. I’m just listening.’

  ‘But what do you think?’

  Sunlight lay across the table. The tea in her cup reflected a glittering bronze disc. Pete sprawled back in his chair, lanky and at ease, grinning at her. Their life together was made up of a series of small encounters like this one. They met friends, had tea or dinner or went to the pub together. They went to parties and gave their own – were giving one the very next evening, in fact. Peter was gregarious and liked nothing better than to gather a crowd of people around him. It meant that she didn’t see a lot of him on his own, but she didn’t mind that. She had what she wanted in life.

  She smiled more broadly now. ‘I think I’d like another scone before Pete devours the lot.’

  She didn’t want to be drawn into the endless discussions about art. Peter never listened to anyone else anyway. He stopped with half a scone almost into his mouth and returned it to his plate. Scooping some extra jam on top, he transferred it to Alice’s plate.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What do you do? Are you an artist?’ Mark persisted.

  ‘A scientist. A sedimentary geologist.’

  ‘My God,’ he said.

  ‘He’s one theory. Not many geologists subscribe to it, though.’

  They all laughed. Alice bit into the jam-laden scone, enjoying her appetite and the lazy bickering of the two men, and the prospect of going home with Peter to their house and the quiet late-summer twilight in their tiny garden.

  When the scones had been eaten and the teapot refilled and emptied twice, they stood up. As they said goodbye, Peter invited Mark to tomorrow’s party. Finally Peter shouldered his chair-remnant, and he and Alice headed for home. The route was so familiar to both of them that they could have walked it blindfolded. They crossed St Giles and walked down Beaumont Street. The end-of-the-day traffic was heavy, but when they turned into Jericho everything was quiet again. The little red-brick houses with their Gothic touches had been built in the nineteenth century for clerks and the more senior college servants, but lately they had become sought after and very expensive.

  Alice couldn’t have afforded to buy one, not on an academic’s salary, and of course Peter wasn’t able to contribute anything, but her mother had helped her with the down payment.

  This sequence of recollections didn’t quite play itself out in full as she opened the low gate, but it coloured the fabric of her thoughts. Sometimes it seemed to Alice that her mother’s life was always the vivid, engrossing, three-dimensional backdrop against which her own activities were executed on a much dimmer and smaller scale.

  Peter hoisted the wrecked chair straight over the wall, snapping one of the rose branches that she was training over a rope swag. It landed foot uppermost, the wheeled claw sluggishly rotating.

  ‘Will it be safe there?’ she asked as he followed her up the short tiled path to the front door.

  He took her question entirely at face value. ‘Should be. I’ll take it over to the studio first thing.’

  It was cool inside the house. From where she stood in the hallway, as Pete’s mouth brushed against the nape of her neck, Alice could see straight through the kitchen doors into the garden. There was a blue-painted bench and a little rustic table, and a crab-apple tree for shade.

  Pete’s hands slid up and cupped her breasts. ‘Mmm?’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go to bed.’

  Their bedroom would be cool too, behind white blinds.

  With clasped hands they trod up the stairs.

  A minute later they were stretched out on the white-covered bed. Alice tipped her head back, her eyes closed, and Pete’s hand secured her wrists above her head so she couldn’t break free. On the bedside table the phone cheeped. Pete swore, but neither of them made a move towards it. After a dozen rings, the answering machine picked up.

  ‘Alice, are you there?’

  There was a pause and then an audible tut-tutting of annoyance. ‘Well, wherever can you be, at this time of day? I need to speak to you. Give me a ring straight back, won’t you?’ The voice was brisk, busy as always.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Pete murmured. He gathered Alice up and rolled adroitly so that she ended up on top. He never voiced any criticism of Alice’s mother, the formidable Margaret Mather, but there was not much love lost. Alice didn’t pursue this line of thought either. Now was not the time to be thinking about Margaret. Now was not the time to be thinking of anything but this.

  Afterwards they lay with their legs interlocked, listening to the small sounds of the street through the open window. Pete hummed a little, an unborn sequence of notes reverberating deep in his chest. Alice smiled, her cheek against his shoulder sticky with their mingled sweat.

  She would call in and see her parents in the morning.

  Margaret Mather sat at the gate-legged table in the large bay window of the house on Boar’s Hill. Books and papers and correspondence leaned in haphazard piles on either side of her computer monitor and keyboard. She had never been tidy, or even faintly house-proud, and the table was littered with half-full teacups and dirty plates as well as her sheaves of work. The rest of the room was cluttered and dusty, and the Persian rugs were matted with cat hair. The cat itself, a fat white creature with a penetrating smell, lay on the sofa and licked its rear parts.

  Margaret’s husband Trevor worked or read in his small upstairs study with a view of the sloping garden. His room was bare by comparison and together with Alice’s old bedroom it represented the only ordered area in the entire house. Although Alice had long ago left home, her room remained exactly as it had always been. Her teenage books filled the shelves and there were framed school and netball team photographs on the walls. It wasn’t that Margaret had preserved it as any kind of shrine to her daughter’s childhood, rather that she had never got around to doing anything else with it. In the same way, a hopbine gathered on a country holiday twelve years earlier was still rakishly pinned to the beam in the kitchen, and was now a dust-and-grease fossil of its former self.

  Margaret was listening to music and working through the morning’s e-mails. She peered at the screen through her bifocals, reading interesting titbits aloud to herself and muttering the responses as she prodded them out of her keyboard. She was in her seventies, but she took to new technology with enthusiasm. E-mail made her complicated correspondences with friends and with fellow scientists all over the world much easier. She loved to explain to anyone who would listen that, for example, she could now chat on a daily basis with her old friend Harvey Golding who was based in San Diego and whom she hadn’t seen in the flesh for more than twelve years.

  ‘And I can keep abreast. See what the others are up to. It’s all there on the net, you know. Much easier nowadays.’

  By ‘the others’ she meant scientists working in her field, marine mammal biology.

  In the 1960s Margaret had made a series of television films about whales and seals in the seas surrounding Antarctica. She spent many months of the year living down on the ice, even doing most of her own underwater camerawork. She wrote the films’ drily lyrical commentaries too, and narrated them in her strong Yorkshire accent. The series made her and her voice famous.

  She was never short of energy. Even after she had become a celebrity she continued her research and maintained her reputation as a serious scientist. Her meticulous work on the breeding patterns of Weddell seals pioneered a subsequent generation of Antarctic studies.

  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 in
vitation,’ 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.