by Rosie Thomas
‘And now that our guests have gone, we can all get back to work. Rook?’
‘Right,’ Rooker agreed.
Looking around the table when they gathered for lunch, Alice noticed that the change that had begun before Lewis Sullavan’s arrival appeared complete. The intrusion of people who didn’t belong to the group or understand the subtle mechanics of it had forged a team spirit. Everyone was talking and smiling, united by their relief at the departure of the visitors.
Laure was herself again, joking with Jochen over the division of the food. Richard discussed the next month’s work schedule that would keep the scientists and support staff fully occupied. No one mentioned Beverley but there was an unspoken collective expectation that in the end, in time, the havoc that her availability and her choice of Rooker had caused would become one of the jokes on the base. Alice watched him covertly, and she also saw that the men checked from time to time to see how he was reacting or what he might be thinking. The episode had improved his standing, but he gave no sign of being aware of this. He was impassive, as always.
It was nine days before Christmas.
That was the beginning of the best time at Kandahar.
The weather was extraordinary. ‘There is no such thing as ordinary weather down here,’ Arturo always said and the experienced Antarctic hands agreed with him, but even so the present spell was unusual. The skies were almost always clear, the sunshine only veiled from time to time by thin high cloud like a layer of tattered lace. Dozens of rainbows arched delicate filaments against the blue backdrop and rays of pale-green and apricot and rose-pink fanned upwards from the horizon, so that it looked as if immense stage footlights played on the sky from somewhere beyond the blocks and crumpled ice tenements of the glacier across the bay. Often, when the sun was high, beams of coloured light struck from each quarter like outstretched arms. At the end of each arm another sun was suspended in a nimbus of soft hazy colour and in turn more rays struck from each of the new suns, until it looked as if the firmament had been invaded and conquered by a new population of suns which obeyed none of the old laws of the mundane universe.
Alice knew that these suns were parahelia, sun dogs caused by ice crystals falling with their bases level to the horizon and bending the light through their tiny prisms, but knowing the physical explanation for the phenomenon did nothing to decrease her wonder at the sight of them.
At night, which was night by the clock although no darkness came, the sky to the south of them burned with richer colours, complex meshed layers of viridian and indigo and scarlet, while the sun hung like a copper ball at the centre of the skein and the glaciers and ice cliffs were splashed with orange and gold and saffron-yellow. Alice went regularly along the water’s edge to the secluded bay where the flight of natural stone steps climbed to the clifftop. She sat on the top step with her parka hood pushed back, even though the cold was intense, so as not to miss even an eye’s blink of the light show. She believed that the baby was somehow absorbing the light and colours as it unfurled within her.
She felt as well as she had ever done in her life and reasoned that, if she was well, the baby couldn’t be otherwise. She ate heartily, and although the work she was doing was hard and often physical she didn’t find it too much for her. She climbed rocks in the course of her mapping and sampling, and pulled sledges and spent long days out in the sunshine. Her face was deeply tanned, like all the others’, with white blinkers over their eyes where the skin was shielded by glacier goggles.
The boxes of bagged and labelled rock samples slowly filled up. There were other valuable fossil discoveries, but nothing that intrigued Richard as much as the Wheeler’s Bluff gastropod. While they worked in the lab hut together he talked about the paper he would write on it and how it would break major new ground in his field.
At night, Alice slept as she had never done before. It was like falling and flying into a huge cloud of feathers. She gave herself up eagerly to the soft oblivion, and woke every morning to the view from the bunk-room window of the giant berg stranded in the bay, and the silver and cobalt ripples of water fanning around it. Sometimes she dreamed – tiny, detailed vignettes from her childhood, or reassuring and mundane reworkings of the day that had just gone.
She began to be friends with Laure. One morning Laure brought her a mug of tea in bed and after that they took it in turns, so that the other could lie there a little longer and watch the kaleidoscopic water. Alice was relieved that she didn’t feel sick – she hadn’t felt even remotely ill since the ship’s crossing, and before that in the hectic days of Margaret’s time in hospital and her rushed preparation for the expedition – but she was grateful for a few extra minutes to emerge from the heavy oblivion of sleep. They talked a little, in the bunk room, when they were changing after work or getting ready to go out again.
‘I think I was being stupid.’ Laure sighed as she brushed her hair. Her neat bob was growing out in a series of frayed kinks round her neck.
‘What about?’
‘Ah, about Monsieur Rooker.’
‘Why?’
‘I was dreaming of love.’
‘I don’t think he’s the right character to fit into that particular dream.’
‘No. It’s so easy to make these mistakes. I have been doing it since, ha, since I was a teenager. This boy, you know, everyone knows he is a bad sort but I can make the difference, I can make him be a good sort. Then – hm – he’s doing whatever it is with some other girl, your good friend more than likely, and you are crying in your bedroom for one week.’
Alice laughed. Laure’s eyes danced as she deprecated herself.
‘I know. It’s a pattern. Falling for the same but different Mr Wrong over and over again.’
‘I am like this now, with my boyfriend in France. I think, one of these days I can make him put more value to me than his mother. But we have been together for four years and still maman is the first in his life. If she says come, Paul is running. So I am away for my Antarctic season, maybe then Paul will miss me. Not that I am not here for penguin work too, of course,’ she added hastily. She sighed and put her hairbrush away in her Chanel bag. ‘But I cannot see any great signs of how much I am missed.’
‘Maybe it will be different when you get home,’ Alice said, without too much conviction.
‘And maybe I will look for someone else altogether. But he is very handsome, though, and so sexy, don’t you think? A bit of a dish?’
Alice laughed again. ‘Rook, you mean? Yes, he’s a bit of a dish all right. But not one I want to eat off, thanks all the same.’
‘You are right and again I am crying in my bedroom. I think maybe you are always right, Aleece. You are very sensible.’
‘Not really,’ she said.
Briefly, she thought how luxurious it would be to confide in Laure.
For one thing, it was becoming difficult to manoeuvre herself while dressing and undressing to hide the distinct bulge of her stomach. By her calculations Alice reckoned that she must be not quite twelve weeks gone. She went through it in her mind, over and over again. There had been the heavy, abnormally heavy and cramping, bleeding around the first week of October when Margaret had been so ill and she had been too busy to pay any attention. After that, nothing. And then the last night with Pete before she left to travel south. That was right, it all made sense. Even in her relative ignorance Alice knew that you counted in weeks from the first day of your last period. She wouldn’t have expected anything to show yet, but then everyone’s body was different. She had been thin before and so perhaps the changes were more noticeable.
But telling Laure was out of the question. Alice didn’t want to be banished from the present beauty of Antarctica, but the main reason she didn’t say anything was that it would be unfair to ask another person to keep her secret. If something went wrong – it wouldn’t, in her bones she knew it wouldn’t – but if it did, she alone must be responsible. So she dreamily hugged the baby to herself, not quite believin
g in or even understanding the magnitude of what was unfolding.
For the first time in her life, she reflected, she was doing what she wanted to do. Not because she should, or because it was expected of her by her parents or her teachers or the University or her students or even Pete, but because of herself. She wanted to finish what she had come here to do, in this magical place, then she wanted to go home and plan for her child.
She could do it, she knew that. And she would have to do it alone, as a parent, when the time came, so she might as well get used to being alone now.
With Laure she went on talking about their work and life at Kandahar, and making wry jokes about men and boyfriends. She tried not to say too much about her own intentions for the future, so that when the time came Laure wouldn’t feel that she had been hoodwinked.
‘You are good at listening,’ Laure told her.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Alice answered, feeling guilty.
Christmas came.
Work at Kandahar didn’t follow the set pattern of weekdays and weekends. While the weather was good everyone went out and did as much as they could without taking a rest day, knowing that there might be a long stretch of enforced down time with the next spell of bad weather. The sunshine following Lewis Sullavan’s departure meant that the whole team worked for nine days straight. When Richard announced that, whatever the weather, Christmas Day and Boxing Day would be official rest days, there was a cheer around the table.
Richard had another suggestion, too.
Everyone had brought presents and cards from home to open on Christmas morning, but Richard said there should be an exchange of gifts amongst the team members too. They should each put one present into a sack, and take out a different one.
Laure’s forehead creased. ‘But, what to give?’
‘You can make something, from whatever you can find on or around the base. Or you can give one of your own possessions, maybe something you value or which has significance for you. You can choose, you can use your imagination. Of course, you don’t know who is going to receive your present.’
Alice said, ‘That’s a very nice idea.’
‘It’s not original,’ Richard answered, but he was deeply pleased by her approval.
On Christmas morning everyone slept for an extra hour. Alice and Laure opened their eyes on a silver and gunmetal sea, and saw that the berg had faded to pearly grey, like slippery satin. The spell of fine weather was ending. Someone was playing a loud recording of Christmas carols on the living area CD player.
The kitchen was low on bottled gas and cooking had been severely curtailed for the past week, but today there would be no restrictions. Russell had defrosted a turkey and Alice had improvised a stuffing for it using dried apricots, tinned chestnuts and dried herbs. Kandahar cooking now involved a lot of improvisation as supplies ran low before the New Year resupply, but Alice enjoyed the challenge of opening the store cupboard and trying to devise custard or pasta sauce or chocolate cake from its contents. For their Christmas dinner there was also plum pudding and rum butter that had come down with the original supplies, and Russell had made mince pies. Richard relaxed the no-alcohol rule for the day.
‘Bon Noël, Aleece,’ Laure said. They hugged each other.
The living area was decorated with tinsel and candles, and a big picture of a decorated Christmas tree was pinned to the bulletin board. The day’s eating began with a convivial breakfast of scrambled eggs and fish, which Valentin and Niki had caught in the bay and smoked in a homemade smoke box. Russell produced two bottles of champagne and made Buck’s Fizz with concentrated orange juice. Led by Richard they shook hands and wished each other Happy Christmas, then drank a toast to families and friends. Rooker drained his in one gulp, Alice noticed, but he didn’t join in the chorus of the toast. He looked more withdrawn today than usual, if that was possible. His black eyes were hooded as he regarded the rest of them.
After breakfast there was the exchange of team presents. The only sack Russell had been able to find was a black bin bag, but Alice and Laure had cut out paper snowflakes and stuck them all over it. It made them laugh, to be manufacturing fake snowflakes when they were surrounded by an abundance of real ones.
After much thought, Alice had chosen to make someone a present of her treasured copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with reproductions of the Doré illustrations from 1875. In one of them a frozen ghost ship glides on black water between towering cliffs of ice. Overhead, a solar arc spans the sky, just as strange suns had disturbed the skies in the last nine days. The thin volume had been a school prize, and her name and the date and the words ‘For Excellence in Mathematics’ were inscribed on a bookplate inside the front board. She had always loved the poem, and now that she had seen them for herself she thought more than ever that Coleridge’s description of the realms of ice was the most chilling she had ever read.
The verses ran in her head as she wrapped the book.
When her turn came to draw a present Alice reached into the black mouth of the bag and took out the first item that her fingers touched. With everyone’s eyes on her she unwrapped some crumpled paper and looked down at the gift in her hands.
It was a piece of driftwood, rubbed bone-smooth by the waves and curved in a shape that fitted in her two palms. The outlines already suggested the finish, but the wood had been carved with a few extra deep, deft lines that made it into a sleeping, swaddled baby. The piece was beautiful for its simplicity. Alice knew that Rook had done it. She had seen him carving before, his head bent in preoccupation over the wood and the blade of his penknife almost swallowed up in his big hands.
Blood rushed into her face as she looked up.
He must know. Who knew, who else?
Then her eyes met his hooded glare. Of course he didn’t know. How could he have determined that she would pick this gift? It was a coincidence, no more than that. She took a breath to compose herself. ‘Thank you. It’s beautiful,’ she said quietly. Some of the darkness melted out of his face.
Jochen was the recipient of her Coleridge. He looked puzzled by it. Valentin had put in a bottle of his special Bulgarian rakia, which was drawn by Phil.
‘Ta, Valerie,’ he said with evident pleasure.
Richard’s present was a handsome old brass-bound compass, which went to Niki, but it was Arturo’s contribution that drew the most admiration. He had collected a varied pile of beach stones, black basalt and ribby quartz and greenish olivine, rounded shapes that nestled smoothly in the hand, each one with a hole rubbed right through it by the agitation of the sea. He had taken a length of smooth white cord from the stores and had linked the stones with macramé knots beween each one to make a heavy chain, too massive for a necklace, like a stone snake.
Laure gave a surprised wince when she felt the weight of the package, then her face flowered into a smile when she tore off the paper. She arranged the stones and the cord coiled sweetly between them. ‘Oh, it is a sculpture,’ she cried. ‘I love this.’
Arturo basked in the praise.
Afterwards, everyone went outside. The sky was purled with cloud now and they missed the sun that they had begun almost to take for granted. There was an assortment of old skis in the store, left behind by the British. Phil and Rooker got the skidoos out of the shelter and fixed tow ropes, and everyone took it in turns to be pulled up the longest slope behind the hut and to ski down again. Alice wondered if it was reckless of her, but she reckoned that if she could be pregnant and rock-climb then she could ski too, and anyway the exhilaration of swooping down from the lip of the glacier almost to the back of the hut was too pleasurable to miss.
Rooker didn’t ski; he drove the skidoo uphill over and over again with whooping skiers hanging on to the back.
‘I never learned,’ he snapped when Alice asked him why. She realised now that it was always Phil who went off on the cross-country skis to teams in the field when both skidoos were in use.
‘You have to try.’ She laughed. �
�Go on. I’ll be your instructor. Bend ze knees, remember.’
He studied her face for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said.
He borrowed Phil’s skis and boots, cramming his feet into the boots with a grimace. Alice walked a little way up the slope with him, took his hands and gently towed him as he ploughed downhill. They did it several times, ascending higher each time. For a man of his size he generally moved with economy and agility, and it was strange to see him looking awkward. At first he responded to her praise and encouragement with the usual shrug, then he gave a slight smile followed by a sharp glance to see if she really meant it. He learned quickly, with a kind of wolfish concentration.
After another half-hour she drove the skidoo to the top of the slope with Rook wobbling on the tow rope. ‘Slowly.’ She pointed to the shallowest angle of descent. ‘I’ll drive alongside.’
He launched himself away immediately. His shoulders were rigid with determination.
‘Relax. Bend your knees. Keep your hands low,’ she shouted after him. But he knew what to do. He would turn out to be a natural.
He was gathering speed and she accelerated after him. She told him to lean all his weight on one leg, then on the other. A series of lurching turns developed.
‘Hey!’ he yelled in unaccustomed delight.
Laure came swooping by in an elegant arc, a plume of snow feathering up from her ski tails. She was an excellent skier. Rooker lost his concentration and plunged forward, crossed his ski tips and somersaulted down the slope to end up in a heap.
Alice shot forward to reach him. ‘Are you all right?’
He was lying in the snow, a tangle of long limbs and skis and poles. She felt a beat of concern and then she saw that he was laughing. He let his head fall back in a snowdrift and laughed up at the sky. She had never seen him look this way before, never even heard him laugh with all his heart. The blankness had all broken up and he was alive with momentary happiness.