Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  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.

  It was time to go home. Alice had an armful of goodluck presents, several of which were toy polar bears even though the nearest real polar bears to Antarctica lived in the Arctic.

  Becky kissed her, cupping her face briefly in both hands. ‘Come back soon, Ice Queen, d’you hear?’

  Now that the moment was here, it seemed like for ever in prospect. Alice smiled as confidently as she could. ‘It’s six months or seven months at the very most. I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone away.’

  Jo and Harry stood in the hallway with light spilling out into the darkness beyond the porch. Their house was full of the warmth and laughter of the evening. Alice felt that she was moving out of the web of friendship and familiarity.

  Jo kissed her too.

  ‘Have a wonderful, thrilling time.’ She was envious, Alice could hear it. Jo would like to be going but she was tied to this house by her babies and Harry. Would I change places? she wondered. Yes, she thought, with the sad picture in her head of her own house empty but for the last boxes stacked in the hallway, and yet with Pete at her shoulder as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

  And then, No, I would not.

  ‘Good luck, Al.’ Jo and Becky and Harry and Vijay gathered in the doorway to wave goodbye. Alice looked back at the tableau they made and framed it in her mind.

  ‘I’ll see you home,’ Pete murmured.

  ‘Pete’s going to see me home,’ she called and they all nodded, waving and understanding perfectly.

  They went in Alice’s car, with Alice driving, but he did jump out at the other end to open the car door for her. He followed her up the familiar path, took her key out of her hand and unlocked the front door as well. They half turned to each other, hesitating, then Pete tipped her face up to his. ‘I wish you’d let me say I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can say it.’ Her voice was raw in her throat.

  ‘I wish you’d let me show you I’m sorry.’

  Alice lifted her hand. It started as a warding-off gesture but her fingers seemed to melt. They rippled over the vee of her top which felt too tight, as if it only just contained her breasts, and fluttered over her belly. Her skin seemed to have developed a million new nerve endings.

  Why not? she thought.

  Why not just once more, after so many other times?

  ‘To say goodbye?’ she murmured.

  There was a flash of triumph in his eyes, quickly extinguished. But you are wrong, the triumph’s really mine, she thought.

  ‘If that’s what you truly want to say,’ he answered.
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br />   He followed her into the house and closed the door behind them.

  The shelves in the bedroom, the top of the chest of drawers, the bedside tables were all bare. Alice’s kitbags with the flag and logo stood packed against one wall.

  Pete slid his hands over her, cupping her breasts, drawing her hips against him. ‘You’re different. You’re lovelier,’ he breathed.

  Am I? I am not sure that I even recognise myself, she thought.

  But her body remembered the familiar rhythms well enough and improved on them. Their lovemaking had always been affectionate, well-practised, almost invariably satisfactory, but tonight it went much further than that. In the absence of intimacy and trust, they were naked and greedy.

  Afterwards, Pete lay with his head against her heart, listening to its beat. Her hand lightly cupped the curve of his skull. She could feel his limbs growing heavy as he drifted towards sleep.

  I have just taken what I wanted, she thought, without weighing up whether it would hurt him or not.

  The notion of revenge had never crossed her mind and this didn’t feel like it, but there was a symmetry here.

  Alice closed her eyes and thought of the long journey ahead and the ice waiting for her at the end of it.

  In the morning Pete sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and watching her as she made toast from the end of a loaf. She emptied the crumbs out of the bread bin and wiped the inside with a wadded paper towel. She would spend tonight, her last in Oxford, at Boar’s Hill with Margaret and Trevor.

  ‘Have you finished with your plate?’

  He looked at her and she steadily returned his gaze.

  ‘Are you going so far away because of me?’ he asked.

  She smiled. ‘No, Pete. I’m going because of me. And partly because of Margaret.’

  Peter sighed. He stood up and looked around the kitchen. ‘I made a good job of those shelves.’

  They had come in a flat pack from Ikea. He had assembled them and fixed them to the wall.

  Alice suddenly laughed. She felt the upward swing of happiness. Everything was going to be all right. ‘You did,’ she said softly.

  ‘I’d better get to the studio, I suppose. I’m still working on Desiderata, you know.’

  The sculpture with the polystyrene head.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘There’s something mutinous about it.’

  ‘I see.’

  It was Pete’s turn to laugh. His eyes crinkled and the inside of his mouth was red. ‘My lovely Alice. What you see is figures and graphs.’

  ‘So I haven’t changed all that much.’

  He turned serious again. ‘I think maybe you have. Desiderata will be finished by the time you come home. I’d like to show it to you. We can talk about it.’

  ‘If I can find the right language.’

  He nodded, not really understanding her reservation. She saw him to the front door and he kissed her goodbye, gently, on the mouth.

  ‘We’re still friends, Alice, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, we are,’ she reassured him.

  Margaret had spent a lot of her time in bed since coming home from hospital, but tonight she was up and dressed in a trouser suit with a flowing emerald-green scarf tied round her hair. Working together, she and Trevor had even assembled a meal of boiled ham and beetroot. Trevor lit the candles in the seldom-used dining room and Alice carried through a tray of food laid out on the best china. It was a celebration evening.

  Trevor raised his glass of wine to propose a toast. The candlelight made his bald head glisten. ‘Here’s to my two Antarctic heroines. I am so proud of you both.’

  Margaret clapped her hands. Looking as excited as a child, she made Alice tell her all the details of her final preparations. She listened eagerly, nodding approval about notebooks and labels, and the difficult choices of books and CDs. She ate very little, but she was more animated than they had seen her for weeks.

  ‘What do you know? You are not a polar hand like Alice and me,’ she teased Trevor when he chipped in.

  ‘Thank God for that. We can’t all go off to the bottom of the world, can we? I will just be glad to see Alice home again. As I always was when you came back to me, my darling.’

  Memories glimmered in Margaret’s eyes. She was thinking about those reunions, and what had preceded them. Watching her, Alice had a renewed sense of how difficult it must have been for her father, all those years ago. He hadn’t tried to follow his wife south, or to stop her doing what she was good at because it didn’t include him or reflect on him. He had simply stepped back and given her the space. How did the old saying go? If you want to keep someone, first you have to set them free? She wondered briefly if that was what she was doing with Pete and laughed inwardly. What she was doing with him was setting him free, full stop. Antarctica had come in his place.

  Tomorrow she would set off. The unimaginable vastness and the glamour of the ice left her breathless and thrilled with anticipation. She wondered if this was how her mother had felt too and when she looked through the candlelight into Margaret’s face she knew for certain that it was.

  There was a silver and cobalt-blue streak of mystery in Margaret, forged from what she had seen and done. Now, maybe, she would be able to know her better.

  Trevor sat quietly between the two of them, eating his food and drinking his wine.

  It was only when the meal was finished and Alice had cleared the table that they saw how tired Margaret was. Trevor blew out the candles and Alice helped Margaret slowly up the stairs. She sat her on the bed and took off her shoes and rolled down her socks for her. Her bare feet were cold and Alice rubbed them to bring back the circulation.

  ‘We used to do that in the field. Warm each other’s feet,’ Margaret remembered.

  ‘Who will warm mine? Richard Shoesmith?’

  Margaret giggled and Alice eased off her trousers and top for her. Her skin was so thin it was almost translucent, like tissue paper.

  ‘Where’s your nightie?’

  ‘Under the pillow. Darling, you’re not going south just because of your…because of Peter, are you?’

  Alice had played it down. She told Trevor and Margaret that she and Pete had just decided to go their separate ways.

  ‘No. I’m going because it seems like a good idea.’ They had an unspoken agreement up until now, the two of them, that they would treat Alice’s departure lightly. ‘It’s only five months. Whatever happens, it’s not very long and then I’ll be home again. Back to the Department and field studies in Turkey and Iceland.’

  Margaret held up her arms and as Alice slipped her nightdress over her head she said, almost to herself, ‘It’s not a matter of time. Antarctica makes a different dimension altogether. You’ll understand me, when you get there, and you’ll know there is no wiping it out. Always, for ever, you see everything in your life through its prism. Through a veil of diamond dust.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Clear air ice precipitation. Below –40° ice crystals form by spontaneous nucleation and are deposited usually in short bursts. Storms of glittering points of ice, falling out of a blue sky. It’s beautiful.’

  Margaret lay back against the pillows. Alice sat beside her and they held each other’s hands.

  ‘I will think of you, with diamond dust falling,’ Margaret added, with the deepest satisfaction in her voice. She didn’t warn her daughter to be careful or insist that she must come home safely. Alice knew that her mother was offering her what had been the best and biggest experience of her own life. It was a gesture that was at once expansive and profoundly selfish, and thus perfectly expressive of Margaret herself.

  She bent forward and kissed her mother on the forehead. Margaret’s eyes were already closed.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alice whispered. ‘I will think of you too, with diamond dust falling.’

  Trevor drove her to the airport for the evening flight to São Paolo, where she would connect with a flight to Santiago and thence to Pu
nta Arenas at the tip of Chile. At Punta Arenas she would embark on a Spanish supply ship for a three-day voyage across the huge seas of the Drake Passage, to the Antarctic peninsula and Kandahar Station. Richard and the other expedition members had preceded her two weeks earlier. As a late recruit, this awkward journey was the best that the Polar Office had been able to arrange for her.

  In the car they didn’t talk much until the signs for Heathrow were flashing towards them. Trevor had always been an alarmingly fast driver.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘I feel like an impostor. I’m not Mum, I’m not a pioneer or even an innovator. I’m scared that I’m going to turn up down there and someone will tap me on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, we were expecting Margaret Mather.” I’m afraid of letting her down.’ And myself, she could have added, although that never seemed to loom as large in the ranks of anxieties.

  Trevor took his hand off the wheel and patted her knee. He was overtaking a truck at the same time and Alice shrank in the passenger seat.

  ‘Never feel that,’ he ordered. ‘You can never be an impostor.’

  She smiled and he took hold of the wheel and righted the car again.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she temporised. She was leaving many things behind but she carried his love with her, a thread as fine and as strong as a spider’s silk.

  They checked in her baggage and drank airport coffee at one of the depressing Terminal Three bars. Trevor bought her a sheaf of newspapers and magazines, and the handles of the plastic bag dug into her fingers as they walked around, killing time. She thought she had never loved him as much as she did now.

  ‘What was it like, seeing her off all those years ago?’

  ‘I wanted to plead with her not to go. So I was glad when she disappeared, that I hadn’t given way to begging. Then I just waited for her to come back.’

  If you want to keep someone, you have to set them free.

  At the departure point, Trevor stood behind the barrier and watched while she queued up to have her passport checked. She turned back before slipping past the screen that would hide her from him.