Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  Alice saw, suddenly, how much Richard longed for peace.

  The demands of being expedition leader and the expectations of Lewis Sullavan were weighing more heavily on him than she had guessed. What Richard really wanted was to immerse himself in science, to be left alone with his fossils, and yet some contrary impulse had driven him to take over the leadership role. A sense of obligation to family expectations and history, she thought. Just like me.

  Richard wasn’t good at defusing the prickles of tension back at Kandahar. He was awkward about giving orders. He couldn’t deal with Rooker’s overt aggression or unspoken scorn, and all his speeches about community and teamwork left his little group separately bemused rather than united. Alice knew all this, because she felt a version of it herself. Science was seductive because of its orderliness, its silent pathways through the maze along which you followed the patient thread of conjecture. You didn’t have to go out and sell yourself in order to sell other things, as Becky did, or even blunder through the minefield of motherhood, as Jo was learning to do. You collected rocks or fossils and took them back to the laboratory for analysis, and your web of data thickened into knowledge and thence understanding of the world’s dynamic process.

  The light in the tent was fading, and the wind banged and rattled at its thin skin. Another pot of snow was melting on the Primus for hot drinks.

  ‘I understand,’ Alice said quietly.

  He nodded, leaning back against her bedding with his chin sunk on his chest. Suddenly, she was reminded of a photograph she had seen reproduced in half a dozen books of polar history. It showed the interior of Scott’s hut at Cape Evans with Scott himself presiding at the head of the mess table. It was Christmas on the ice and halfway down the row of bearded faces was Gregory Shoesmith’s. Richard bore a marked physical resemblance, tonight, to his famous grandfather. And Alice could sense how deeply, for the whole of his life, Richard had wanted to be like him as well as look like him.

  ‘I’ll be field assistant. I think I can just about remember what Phil taught me.’

  Richard sat up, visibly struggling out of his melancholy. ‘You’re far too good a geologist for that. I need your expert sedimentologist’s eye. But don’t worry, we’ll be quite safe, the two of us.’

  Alice tried not to acknowledge even to her inner self that she was not reassured. She dismissed with equal speed the thought that if Phil or even Rooker had said the same thing it would have been quite different. Instead, she looked at Richard’s attractive but closed-in English face. His cheeks above the margins of his beard were reddened by the wind and his lips were slightly chapped. She realised that she wanted to put her hand to his cheek. She didn’t even know if he was married, she remembered.

  She cleared her throat and he watched her as she leaned forward to burrow amongst the food boxes. ‘Would you like coffee? Or herbal tea?’

  When she had made the drinks, Richard thanked her gravely for a delicious dinner, just as if they were in Sussex or Gloucestershire. But then he added, ‘And for your understanding. Goodnight, Alice.’

  She curled up in her sleeping bag, drinking tea and thinking. They had a week’s work to do out here, the two of them. That was the thing to focus on, not a momentary desire to touch someone because of the furrow between his eyebrows and the anxiety in his heart.

  As soon as she put her empty cup aside and closed her eyes, Antarctic sleep came to claim her, as thick and soft and featureless as a blanket of fresh snow.

  The days in field camp at Wheeler’s Bluff quickly fell into a rhythm.

  They were very busy but they were also peaceful, as Richard had predicted.

  The weather was good. The wind dropped to a gentle southerly breeze and the sun shone. The temperature rose above freezing in the middle of the day and it was surprisingly pleasant to be outside, moving about in the shelter of the rock ridge.

  Alice was caught up in her close-quarters study of the rocks that were held in a matrix of finer-grained silts and muds. Veins of quartz flowed around her, and rivers of boulders and pebbles. Her head was full of her work and the hours flew as she measured and drew in her notebook. She loved the sense that she was deciphering a single page in the earth’s history book. Wheeler’s Bluff was interesting to them both because the rocks encompassed the transition between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, and the sedimentary layers were particularly rich in molluscan fossils. Richard had studied the extinction of mollusc species in other parts of the world, and he intended to establish the dates of extinction here and relate them to his earlier studies.

  He worked with quiet absorption, moving up and down the rock band, tapping with his geological hammer to extract another promising specimen. The metallic ringing sound carried a long way in the silence. Whenever Alice looked up, to rest or just to enjoy the sun on her head and the breeze on her face, she would see him with his head down, intently scribbling in his notebook or blowing the rock dust off a sample with a sharp puff of breath. When he removed a specimen he took a GPS reading to establish its exact location and sealed it in a marked sample bag.

  His industry spurred her on. She clambered over the outcrops, running her hands over the chunks and blocks of rock, chipping at shards with her hammer and picking with her fingertips at the remains of flora and fauna that had been embedded there for millions of years. She chose places where she could climb easily to make her painstaking measurements of the thick sections and she wedged herself into cracks and perched on ledges to draw detailed stratigraphical sections in her notebook. She collected thin sections from the crucial boundary margin, and labelled her samples with the index of the profile and an individual sample number. Back on the base she would analyse the rock fragments for mineral composition, then make a more precise analysis with all the facilities of her lab in Oxford.

  When one or the other of them judged that the day was half over they would scramble down from where they had been working to the skidoo parked at the base of the rock band. They didn’t usually travel more than ten or fifteen minutes from the camp, but their time and the fuel seemed too precious to waste in going back there in the middle of the day. They brought a rudimentary picnic instead, and the first one to down tools laid out the food on the seat of the skidoo and opened the flask of hot coffee. It was a good time to sit and look at the view.

  On some days the ice sheet was a diamond-hard expanse of silver and blue, on others billows of snow swelled up in the wind and swept towards them, hiding the sun or dimming it to a disc of dull tin. They talked quietly about the location of the next section, the identification of Richard’s molluscs, their intentions for the following day. Once they had devoured everything they went straight back to work for another four or five hours. The outline of the days was featureless, but they were crowded with incident.

  One afternoon they scaled the rock face to reach the top of the Bluff. They put on climbing harnesses and roped up, and Richard led up a hundred feet of puckered and weathered rock. Alice followed, carefully placing her hands and feet, half intrigued by the rock’s composition and half terrified by the height and her exposure. As she scrambled over the top, Richard gave her his hand and pulled her up.

  She was elated, and breathing hard with relief.

  ‘Well done.’ He smiled, with his face close to hers. ‘And just look.’

  She turned and gasped. The puckered and pleated whiteness stretched away into infinity, textured with every shadow of blue and grey. Far in the distance, like mountains glimpsed in a dream, she thought she could see immense sharp silver peaks fretting the sky. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen and the most desolate. Every day Antarctica seemed to offer a fresh set of superlatives and a continual reminder of how far she had travelled from the ordinary world. Out here, on the ridged back of a mountain that was like a monster rising out of a frozen sea, it was as if she and Richard Shoesmith were the only two people in the universe.

  That night, Richard heated up freeze-dried beef and dumplings wh
ile Alice made the nightly radio connection with Kandahar. She gave the weather report to Niki, temperature and wind speed and direction and cloud cover, and noted the forecast.

  ‘And what’s going on back there?’ she asked at the end, and through the static heard his fat chuckle that always sounded at odds with his skeletal physique.

  ‘So. You are missing civilisation, I think? Or missing me, maybe?’

  ‘Of course I miss you, Nik. I miss everyone.’

  Niki told her that Valentin had been out on the glacier with his drilling equipment, taking core samples of the ice, and Phil had been assisting him. Arturo was busy with his wind profiling and Laure, with Jochen’s assistance, had netted and microchipped almost a hundred penguins.

  ‘And Rook is building a beautiful hut for the skidoos. So you see, life on base is much as it always is.’

  ‘Good. Roger, Niki. Same schedule tomorrow.’

  ‘Goodnight, Wheeler’s Bluff. Over and out.’

  In fact, Alice thought, she wasn’t missing life on base at all. She had never felt as alive and yet as peaceful as she did out here. Field life was just as simple and satisfying as Richard had predicted. There was work, there was food, there was sleep and there was human company. The two of them fitted together neatly and unquestioningly, linked by their work and the pared-down rituals of the day. She forgot that she had ever felt afraid of being out here.

  From the other tent, where Richard was dishing up the evening meal, came the sound of a spoon banging a tin plate. Alice zipped up Richard’s tent against the wind and scuttled the four steps to her own.

  They had fallen into the habit, after they had eaten, of talking for an hour before bed. When the sun dipped behind the Bluff it grew dim in the tent, so Alice lit her tilley lamp and stood it on the pot box. She thought of how their tiny camp must look from across the great distances of the ice sheet: two fragile golden triangles glowing in the pearly emptiness.

  She was talking about her father. He was often in her mind out here.

  ‘I remember his work,’ Richard said, although Trevor’s field of structural geology had relatively little bearing on palaeontology. She was pleased with this, that it should be Trevor’s achievements that were noted, for once, rather than Margaret’s.

  She told him, ‘We used to go to Zermatt every summer, just the two of us. My mother would be on lecture tours, or making a film, or catching up on her students’ work. Trevor would collect rocks and show me granite and dolerite and quartz and felspar. Once he scraped a rock chip on the metal shaft of his hammer and it made a chalky mark. “That shows us it is calcareous,” he said. I can hear him saying it. He taught me to rock-climb too.’ She laughed. ‘Although you wouldn’t think it.’

  ‘You did well today,’ he said and meant it.

  ‘He loved the mountains. So do I.’

  She remembered the sunsets. The sun sliding down the sky and the way the snow peaks flushed pink and apricot. The Matterhorn made a hooked dark cut-out of itself against the luminous light. The sight of it always made her shiver, when everyone else exclaimed about its magnificence.

  One evening Trevor had taken her on a walk, up zigzagging paths that led between the old stone and wood houses, to the church overlooking the old town. There were wildflowers, campion and cow-parsley and buttercups, in the long grass that brushed her bare legs as they climbed. The little white church had a squat tower, and a shingled roof and spire. There was a small graveyard surrounding it and as Trevor led her around she was surprised to see from the inscriptions how many of the dead were English.

  ‘But they are young,’ she had said. She was affronted by the idea that death might claim anyone but ancient people. Yet these were men and women who had died in the prime of their lives, in rock falls and avalanches and glacier accidents. These mountains, so ethereally lovely in the evening sun, were clearly dangerous.

  Inside the church, by the slanting light from high windows, they read the stone tablets on the walls: ‘Died in a fall on the Matterhorn, aged twenty-eight years, Member of the Alpine Club’; ‘Aged twenty-two. Erected by his friends of the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club, in Affectionate Memory’.

  A troubling thought stirred in Alice as she gazed at the memorials. ‘You were at Cambridge University and you belong to the Alpine Club. I know that. I’ve seen the letters in your study.’

  Trevor took her hand. In those days his fine hair was still sandy-blond and it covered most of his head. ‘You are right.’

  ‘You go climbing. I know you do. There are photographs of you. But I don’t want you to die.’

  The cry came unthought, straight out of some dark place in her soul, and she was surprised and almost embarrassed to hear it.

  ‘I won’t die,’ Trevor said mildly. He didn’t let go of her hand as they walked out into the brightness again. ‘I used to climb mountains when I was young, long, long before you were born. But after we had you, Alice, I stopped doing it because I thought it was important for me to be here. In case you need me.’

  ‘I do need you. Every day, every minute.’

  This was not a usual conversation for them to be having, but she knew it was important.

  ‘And so here I am and I always will be. I don’t need to climb mountains any more. I’ve got you and Margaret.’

  This idea made Alice feel happy, as if there were a bird flying in her chest. Her father had given up something for her, something she sensed was important to him, because she herself was even more important.

  From that moment in the graveyard at Zermatt a bond of trust grew.

  Trevor loved her and had made a sacrifice for her. He considered his own safety and took steps to preserve it for her sake. He would always be here; she knew that because he had told her so. Margaret was unpredictable and often absent but Trevor was her rock. Geology and her father’s dependability knitted together in her mind, twin solid pillars that had stayed with her all her life.

  ‘But I’ll tell you what,’ Trevor had added. ‘I think we should go out and do some climbing together. You and me. Then you’ll understand that if you are careful, and if you never forget that it is often harder to turn back than go forward, climbing isn’t as dangerous as many other things in this world. Would you like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alice said doubtfully.

  The next day they went to a shop in the main street and a man with a seamed face and two fingers missing from his right hand fitted a small harness round Alice’s chest and hips. She was surprised by how deft the remaining fingers were as he did up the buckles.

  ‘Why was his hand like that?’ she asked Trevor as they walked away with a rope, and Alice’s harness and a small pair of climbing shoes.

  ‘His hands got very cold and the fingers died and had to be removed. It’s called frostbite,’ Trevor said.

  She looked up at the snows that cloaked the high mountains, even now, when it was so warm down here amongst the shops and cafés. ‘Will we get it?’

  ‘No,’ Trevor said.

  She watched her father climb a slab of rock. He moved so smoothly that he looked almost as if he were dancing.

  When he reached a ledge he stopped and after a moment the rope drew tight between them. ‘Now you,’ he called from fifteen feet above her head. Reluctantly, she put her hands on the warm granite. The rope and the harness tightened still further and at once she understood that she might slip, but she could not fall. Trevor held her safe. She climbed up to the place beside him and watched as he clipped and knotted the rope to make her fast. It wasn’t the rope and the slings she put her trust in but her father.

  ‘He never did let me fall,’ Alice told Richard. ‘What was your father like?’

  ‘He was a serving army officer.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘Did you see much of him?’

  ‘No. I went to boarding school; holidays were mostly with my mother’s parents in Suffolk because my father and mother were always overseas.’

  ‘That m
ust have been hard.’

  ‘What? No, not really. Most of us children at school were in the same boat. At least I had the name. People – boys – were impressed, as if it made me someone. I knew it didn’t, though.’

  She could imagine the housemaster reading aloud from South or The Worst Journey, and Richard in the row of small boys with upturned faces, worrying that he might never match up to his father, let alone his famous grandfather.

  ‘And now here you are,’ she said, letting her thoughts run on.

  ‘Here we both are, in fact.’

  Alice studied his wind-reddened face again. Richard’s eyes met hers. ‘Did you know your grandfather?’

  ‘I don’t have many memories of him. I was only eight when he died. There was his house near Cambridge, my father and mother took me there just a few times. I remember brown-panelled rooms and a clock ticking, and a certainty that I mustn’t speak too loudly or knock anything over. My grandmother tiptoed and the rest of us followed suit. There were photographs everywhere: Grandfather receiving his polar medal from the King, Grandfather with Scott’s widow. There was one that terrified me. It stood on a table in front of the french windows, and when the light outside was bright enough the glass reflected and you couldn’t see the picture itself. I was always glad of a sunny day at Grandfather’s. The picture was taken by Ponting, who was the expedition’s photographer – you know that, of course, I’m sorry – and it was of a killer whale. The creature’s blunt head was rearing up out of a narrow crack between the ice floes and its mouth was wide open, a huge trap lined with terrible teeth. You could see the thing’s tiny eyes, and if I closed mine to shut it out I was right in the water and the jaws were closing round me. It used to give me nightmares. I’d wake up screaming and I couldn’t tell my mother why.’ Richard collected himself. ‘It’s strange, the things that frighten children.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s strange. It gives me a shiver just to hear you describe it.’