Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Yet your mother went diving amongst them.’

  ‘The thought of Antarctica scared me too. I liked the stories, I just never wanted to come here myself.’

  ‘And yet?’

  Alice didn’t feel caught out, as she might have done before they had come to Wheeler’s Bluff. Richard and she were confiding in each other now. ‘My mother wanted me to come because she couldn’t travel herself. I agreed because of her, but I feel differently now.’

  Richard was smiling. ‘Better, or worse?’

  Alice lifted her hand and made a wide gesture that took in the tent’s shelter, the height of the Bluff in one direction and the frozen desert in the other. ‘I imagined what it would be like, but this is beyond imagination. I wouldn’t have missed it, this, here and now, for anything else in the world.’

  She felt it passionately but the words’ comparative poverty made her blush. She could feel the colour creeping up her face.

  ‘I’m happy to hear that,’ Richard said.

  His voice and the look in his eyes told her: he’s going to kiss me. He had leaned closer to her in the cramped space and their mouths were only inches apart.

  Do I want him to? Alice asked herself. The answer was yes. The wind and the silence that always lay beneath it drummed in her ears.

  But he didn’t kiss her.

  Their cheeks almost brushed. Richard picked up his tin mug and drained the last of his cold tea. Alice hooked her arms round her knees, feeling like the awkward girl at a party.

  You are a scientist out in the field with a colleague, she reminded herself. And at the same time she thought of Becky, who wouldn’t have waited for Richard or anyone else to take the initiative.

  ‘What’s funny?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Nothing, really. Um, do you have children yourself?’

  ‘No. I was married but I’ve been divorced for two years. Helena was never happy with the amount of time I have to spend away from home. In the end she found herself a marketing consultant who comes back for dinner every night.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She could almost feel the layers of diffidence and loneliness in him, like her own sedimentary rocks, except that Richard’s layers were the accretions of British upper-middle-class reserve, and stiff-upper-lipness and fear of showing your feelings.

  ‘I’ve got the advantage over you. I know from your CV that you’re single and childless.’

  His words set up a shiver at the base of Alice’s spine. She didn’t know why and the lack of a reason was like the whirling blank spot at the centre of her field of vision that heralded a migraine. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who was that in the photograph?’

  For Richard, this was a seriously personal question. She had to think for a second. Of course, he had caught a glimpse of the Polaroid. ‘That’s Pete. My ex-boyfriend. He’s an artist.’

  Obviously Richard didn’t know any artists. For an instant he looked as baffled as if she had said trapeze artist or fortune teller – but then, neither of these sounded as outlandish as fossil hunter.

  ‘Is he a good one?’

  Alice hesitated. ‘I can’t tell.’

  ‘That’s it exactly. I can never tell. One of the reasons why I’m a scientist, I suppose.’

  ‘Not all that good. Probably. Does that sound disloyal?’

  It was getting cold in the tent without the Primus burning. Alice was beginning to think of the warm layers of her sleeping bag. Tomorrow, if the weather held, they planned to move ten kilometres further east along the Bluff and set up a new campsite. It promised to be a long day.

  ‘I don’t think you would ever be disloyal, Alice.’

  He touched her wrist then, with just the tip of his forefinger. In their profound isolation, where there would have been no one to see or care if they had cavorted naked and rampant in the snow, it managed to be the most intimate gesture she had ever known.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ Richard asked.

  ‘No,’ Alice said. They didn’t look at each other.

  There didn’t seem to be anything to add, for tonight.

  Richard began to gather up his windproofs. His insulated boots lay beside the door and he pulled them on, careful not to turn round and accidentally trample on her belongings. Finally he unzipped the flap and thin flakes of snow gusted around him. She watched him crawl out backwards, like a rabbit disappearing the wrong way down a hole. They agreed, before he withdrew his head, on a 6 a.m. start.

  Alice brushed her teeth with the last of the water and spat out in her tin mug. She undressed to the two layers of thermals that she slept in and crawled into her sleeping bag. Left alone, she did miss Pete. Or not Pete himself but the warmth and reassurance of another familiar body. She turned on to her side and tried to imagine the pressure of his chest against her spine, the way his knees fitted into the crook of hers, the moisture of his breath against the nape of her neck. Within seconds the body she was imagining was not Pete’s but Richard Shoesmith’s.

  At once she turned over and lay flat on her back. The tilley lamp was still burning so she reached an arm out of her cocoon to extinguish it. Sleep had begun to flutter like moths’ wings at the margins of her consciousness, but now in the tent’s twilight it flew away out of her reach. Her eyes widened and her thoughts quickened.

  She was cold, even in her layers of insulation, and the chill reminded her of the shiver that had touched her earlier.

  What had he said?

  There was the nauseating blank spot again, in the middle of her mind’s eye, while her thoughts spun faster and faster.

  I know from your CV. Was that it? Yes. You are single and childless.

  The spot contracted to a single blinding point of light. Alice felt a pain like hot wire in her elbows, across her shins, round her ribs. She stopped breathing and stared up at the yellow planes of the tent’s inner skin. The wind’s drumming seemed to grow louder until it took on the rhythm of her racing heart.

  Very slowly she flexed her fingers. She lifted her hands from her sides and laid them over her stomach.

  How long? Oh God, how long, and why had she only just thought about it?

  She forced herself to reckon up. Not regular, no. She never had been. The Pill hadn’t suited her and she had had a coil fitted after she met Pete. Dr Davey had done it for her.

  Think.

  So much else to fill her mind in the last weeks.

  It was now – what? – the end of the third week in November. Her last period had been at the beginning of October, when Margaret was ill and there had been the flurry of decisions to make about Kandahar.

  That was it. She remembered now, she had bled more heavily than usual and felt tired and cramped, but she had taken some painkillers and paid no more attention. Since then, nothing. Alice’s scalp tightened. She had to remember to breathe. Nothing, that is, except the night of the farewell party at Jo’s house. Going home with Pete, opening the door of the house they had shared. The bare shelves and empty drawers, the bulky shapes of her polar kitbags on the bedroom floor.

  There had been a barefaced passion, where once there had been intimacy. She did remember that, quite clearly.

  Her period was now more than three weeks late. Therefore, counting from the date of her last period (it was like insisting on a correct punctuation mark, this accuracy, in a torrent of feverish babble), she could be about seven weeks pregnant.

  She writhed on the air mattress, twisting as if she were delirious.

  This was not possible. She had taken responsible precautions. It was a mistake and the real reason for the absence of her period would become plain if only she could think clearly enough.

  Instead, she remembered something else.

  Becky and Jo had been waiting for her in a café. Jo had a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of her, Becky an untouched glass of water. They were all eighteen and it was a hot July day at the end of their last week at school.

  Alice slid into the seat facing them. The red plastic covering was hot ag
ainst her bare legs.

  ‘Well?’

  Becky slowly shook her head. ‘The only really likely explanation for a missed period in a healthy, sexually active young woman is pregnancy.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I rang a family planning clinic. Gave them your name, actually.’

  Even in a crisis Becky tried to joke. Then she held up a Boots bag. ‘This is the test. I’m going to do it tomorrow.’

  In the end Becky had had an abortion and had gone up to Cambridge that same autumn as if nothing had happened. Only Jo and Alice knew how much the ordeal had affected her. And the exact words she had muttered on that hot afternoon came back to Alice now.

  The only likely explanation. She was young enough and certainly healthy, and she had been sexually active.

  Wait, she thought. Don’t jump to conclusions. There could be all sorts of reasons: cold, exertion, anxiety. But as she ran her hands over her body she knew, with a woman’s certainty that she would have denied only an hour ago, that she was pregnant. Her breasts were fuller, and her thighs and hips had acquired a new solidity, as if under skin and dense layers of muscle the blood itself was richer and circulated with more purpose. Her fingers met over her abdomen. There was a dome where once there had been a hollow. Already? Was that possible?

  A flood tide of dismay swept through her as she realised that she had no idea.

  She lay on her back and tried to think rationally. But all that came was panicky non sequiturs, flutters of astonishment and spasms of terror that squeezed her heart. It was as if all her years of training as a scientist melted away in an hour. She had been a meticulous layer of plans, always prepared with facts and data, and now there was an inner chamber of herself that was susceptible to none of her scientific armoury and yet would change everything in her world.

  The hours passed. She lifted her wrist once in a while to see the luminous dial of her watch. Sleep was unthinkable.

  At ten minutes to six she heard Richard moving around in his tent. The wind had dropped during the night, but it had started to snow. She had listened absently and unreflectingly to the slithering kiss of it on the tent’s panels. The nylon sagged slightly above her head with the accumulating weight.

  At six o’clock, wearily shaking herself, Alice crawled out of her sleeping bag. She dressed in her layers of clothes, managing the zips and toggles even though her fingers trembled, and crawled outside to fill a pan with snow for tea. The world that met her eyes was drained of all colour and definition. The Bluff and the ice sheet were invisible behind veils of spiralling snow. Snow had drifted against the sides of the tents and over the skidoo. A reddish shape lumbered a few feet away from her. It was Richard in his windproofs, already dismantling the radio antennae in preparation for moving camp.

  ‘A thick day,’ he called. ‘But I think we can travel.’

  Alice licked her dry lips. ‘Right.’

  She melted snow, then stirred oats and dried milk powder into the hot water to make their breakfast porridge. While they were eating she listened to Richard outlining the day’s objectives. She nodded and spooned up the food, thinking of it as fuel. Do what was expected of her, that was all she could hope for today. When there was time to think properly, when the shock had subsided, she would decide what to do.

  They loaded the sledge with mounds of gear and the heavy boxes of rock samples. The final task was to take down the tents. Alice slid the telescopic poles out of hers first, leaving the fabric securely pegged until the last, when she was ready to bundle it up and stow it. Richard sealed up the bag of their frozen waste and hoisted the lidded barrel that contained it on to the back of the sledge. Everything, even this, was classified as ‘retro’ – to be flown back to Kandahar and, in the end, shipped out of Antarctica.

  Richard took a compass bearing. The Bluff was intermittently visible through the white veil, but not reliably enough to navigate by. They started to move forwards. Alice drove the skidoo, Richard plodded a little ahead through the fresh snow with a long glacier probe in his hand. He stared into the blankness, trying to see a dip or hollow that might betray a big crevasse. The skidoo tracks rode up and down over the rigid waves of sastrugi. Alice concentrated as hard as she could, her eyes fixed on Richard, keeping the machine moving forward at the same slow pace.

  After an hour they changed places and after another hour they changed back again.

  It was the longest journey Alice had ever known. After four hours they stopped briefly to eat chocolate and drink from the Thermos.

  ‘How much further?’ Alice asked, trying to sound as if she were enquiring out of mere curiosity.

  ‘I reckon we’re halfway. Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Cold and exhaustion gnawed at her when she drove the skidoo. When she trudged through the deepening snow her eyes ached and stung from staring at the white void and her leg muscles screamed with the effort of keeping going, but at least she was reasonably warm. At last, when she had begun to think that the walk would never end and life would for ever be a matter of putting one foot in front of the other or bumping over vicious ridges with cold racking her bones, Richard stopped. He stood with his back to the snow, extracted his GPS handset from an inner recess in his parka and took a reading. Then, to Alice’s joy, he jerked her the thumbs-up signal.

  It was windier here than at their first camp. The Bluff was lower at this point and wind howled over the top of it, scouring up loose snow and flinging it into their eyes and mouths. They tried to work quickly, unloading boxes and preparing to set up the tents. By this time Alice was blundering with tiredness. She unpacked her tent and spread it out on the snow, turning aside for a second to pick up the poles. A strong gust of wind licked over the invisible Bluff and roared over the ice. It snatched at one corner of her tent, then sucked it into the air with a flap like a giant bird’s wing. She had forgotten Phil’s First Rule. Never leave your tent unpegged, even for a second.

  Her hand, holding the now useless peg hammer, fell to her side. The orange wing soared into the air beyond her reach and was whirled away into infinity.

  She turned to Richard. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘We’ll share.’ He pegged his all the way round before sliding in the poles.

  They went through all the morning’s activities, in reverse.

  At last they were crouching within the shelter of the remaining tent. Alice stirred a pan of chilli and beans while Richard made the scheduled radio contact with Niki.

  ‘Kandahar, Kandahar, this is Wheeler’s Bluff. How copy?’

  ‘Hello, Wheeler’s Bluff,’ Niki’s voice came back like a warm handshake. ‘How are you this fine evening?’

  Niki gave them the weather forecast. ‘Put on your warm clothes out there.’

  ‘Okay, Kandahar. Thanks for that.’

  Alice squatted on her mattress. With both their sleep kits laid out there was no room to move around.

  ‘Good job we travelled today. We may have to sit out a couple of stormy days,’ Richard said cheerfully.

  ‘And I let my tent blow away.’

  She was wedged between two insolubles, the immediate one of tents and weather and isolation and the other, distant but so enormous that it overshadowed all the familiar scenery of her life. Her hand was shaking and the tin spoon rattled as she stirred the pot of food.

  ‘Worse things could have happened,’ Richard said. She wondered if he meant it or if he was repeating what his grandfather would have said, then felt ashamed at the thought.

  They ate, sitting side by side with the stove still burning to keep the tent warm. Hours of cold and exertion meant that they were both hungry, although Alice was surprised by her appetite. Keep going, for now. That was all she could do. Maybe I’m wrong, she kept thinking. But she knew she was not wrong.

  The stove and the light of the tilley lamp and the food they were sharing made the tent an intimate place. But after they had eaten and wiped the plates a
nd drunk some tea, there was no attempt to have their usual hour’s talk. There would be no saying goodnight to close the conversation safely, because they would be lying here side by side.

  Alice took off a couple of layers of clothes and squirmed into her sleeping bag. She closed her eyes, lying as still as she could and resisting the impulse to lace her fingers over her stomach. Richard moved around for a few minutes, then he lay down next to her and turned out the lamp.

  In their little bubble of shelter against the snow, Alice wondered how it would be if she raised her voice over the wind and said, I think I am pregnant. But even the thought made her hot with dismay. It would be to admit that without any warning her life had slipped out of her control – here, of all places, where control was the only way to survive against the elements. No. She would have to work out her own strategy and act on it.

  A foot away from her, Richard was thinking too. When the pressure of anxiety forced her eyes open, she saw that he was watching her in the yellow light. He lifted one hand and touched her hair. Then his fingers moved across her cheek and rested on her mouth.

  Last night – only last night? – she would have welcomed the caress. But now, with her body still defensive with shock, she flinched. She didn’t mean to, she should have caught his hand and held it, warmly, yet to stop him going any further. But it was too late.

  He withdrew his hand as if she had bitten it and turned on to his back. ‘I’m sorry. That was completely inappropriate.’ He sounded as stiff as a Victorian uncle. As if Gregory Shoesmith had ventured too far with a fellow officer’s sister at a tennis party.

  ‘No, it’s me. I mean…’ Her voice trailed away, was swallowed by the wind. She couldn’t tell him, it’s not that I don’t want you to, didn’t want you to, only this is happening and I don’t know anything any more…

  ‘I understand. One has to be very careful. Out here. It’s very easy to cross boundaries that then can’t be, you know, put up again. If necessary.’

  She did understand what he was saying, in his chokedoff way. In this place raw feelings swelled much closer to the surface. She could read Richard’s face and the pucker of emotions that rippled under the skin. He could see her, and so could Valentin and Laure and Russell and the others. There was nowhere to hide: the light was too bright and clear, and the days were too long.