Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  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.

  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.’