by Rosie Thomas
In spite of the cold and ceaseless wind, Alice felt safe with Rook’s dark bulk close at hand. She was less conscious of the vast hostile distance from camp to base than she had been on the last trip. The work itself was unceasing but it had become familiar. Field life was a monotonous alternation of geology, performed under harsher conditions than anywhere else but still a practised routine, and short tent hours where they cooked uncomfortable meals, tried to keep dry in spite of the showers of ice and to warm up their bones after a day outside. Alice got used all over again to never taking off any clothing except the outer windproofs. She was glad of her baggy fleece layers because no one could have any idea of her shape underneath them, or any interest in speculating about it. The baby swam and turned somersaults inside her. Sometimes it prodded so hard that she had to cover up an exclamation of surprise. She shook out her fleecy camouflage like Margaret’s cat puffing out its fur at the sight of Roger Armstrong’s Labrador, then smiled at this tiny memory of home. The two bearded men gazed at her over their tin plates of food. They had been eating in silence, the clink of spoons rubbed out by the shriek of the wind. Rook grinned back, but Richard’s glance flicked from one to the other as if he believed they were sharing a joke against him.
Their work might have been the same, but the atmosphere was not.
Richard and Rooker were working and living in close proximity, and sleeping in the same small tent. It was evident from every remark and every gesture that they loathed each other.
Richard’s anxiety was making him impatient and autocratic. Every minute that wasn’t spent out on the rocks was wasted for him, so he ordered early morning starts and called a halt later and later in the day. Rooker did what he was told, but in a silence that was more scathing than words. Alice tried to smooth over the hostility by being cheerful, but she was hampered by the knowledge that she was the cause of at least some of the trouble.
The intimacy that she had shared with Richard at the last camp was gone and when she thought back she couldn’t even recapture the quality of it.
I was a fool, she thought. I shouldn’t have let even that much happen.
She hadn’t understood, then, that the longing for intimacy, for the touch of another’s skin, was a reaction to the harshness of the ice. It affected them all, Laure and Valentin and Richard and Jochen and herself, and Beverley Winston too. It was the human instinct, in this overwhelming place, to draw close round the saving spark of sexual warmth, like hands cupping a match.
Rooker didn’t seem to feel it. But then Alice often looked up and caught him watching her. Richard noticed it too and his frown deepened.
There was the twice-daily radio link with Niki at Kandahar. Richard crouched over the radio transceiver in his tent, exchanging details of the current weather conditions and noting the forecast. Then he asked searching questions about what everyone had done and whether they had kept to the work schedules. One evening Russell reported that Jochen had stomach pains and had spent the day resting in his bunk.
‘Really? I hope he’ll be fit tomorrow. His study’s not progressing that quickly as it is. Over.’
‘I’ve no idea about that,’ Russ’s voice crackled back. ‘He’s the doctor and I’m base manager, and between us we judged that he’s not well enough to work. Over.’
‘Of course. Yes. Well, give me another update in the morning.’
‘He’s losing it,’ Rooker said later to Alice.
After they had eaten their evening meal, Richard had taken to getting straight into his sleeping bag to write notes or read by the light of his head torch. The noise of the wind was such that a conversation a couple of metres away was as inaudible as if the distance were fifty miles. In the other tent Rooker was helping Alice to wipe plates and rinse cooking pots.
‘Losing what?’
‘Sense of proportion. Control. He’s going to get worse before we get off the ice.’
Alice started to contradict him and then gave up the attempt. Richard’s diligence was sliding into obsessiveness. He would announce an 8 a.m. start and then brusquely order them to hurry up if they weren’t ready to leave camp at 7.45. He would begin a search of one section of rock, only to notice that another site a hundred metres away looked more promising and insist that they shifted to that. Alice did her best to be patient with his erratic decisions and to deflect his impatience by being ready earlier and quicker to do whatever he asked. But Rook grew increasingly mutinous.
‘We only just got up here,’ he snapped when Richard decided that he wanted to move on from one inaccessible rock outcrop to another even more difficult spot.
‘Your job is field assistant. I decide where we work and you’ll get us there,’ Richard shouted back.
‘Not if I judge that it’s dangerous.’
‘You advise, Rooker. You don’t give the orders.’
‘Ah, fuck you,’ Rook muttered in exasperation. But he set up the abseil that lowered the three of them safely back down to the glacier. Richard never took his eyes off the undulations of the Bluff as they travelled on again, and he leaned forward into the searing wind as if by sheer willpower he could make them move faster and force the rocks to yield up their fossilised secrets.
As he became less reasonable, Richard’s physical resemblance to his grandfather increased. He was too impatient to eat properly because stopping for food meant that no work was being done. His cheeks were hollow under the rough spikes of his beard and his eyes sunk into their orbits. When she looked at him Alice kept seeing the pictures of Gregory Shoesmith.
‘Don’t judge him too harshly,’ she said to Rook.
She piled two of their three cooking pots next to the stove and lit the flame under the third to boil water for tea. Rooker poured whisky from a flask and handed her the tin mug. She took a long gulp of the spirits. It was warm enough in her tent now with the gas burning and Rooker’s body generating heat, but during the short clamorous hours of the night she felt too small and insignificant to fill the icy space. She was always on the edge of a shiver, and whenever she hunched up to conserve warmth inside her sleeping bag a fine powdering of ice crystals fell from the nylon tent inner and drifted over her. When she shone her torch she saw the faint twinkle, like dim stars at the edge of a chilly firmament. Her own personal diamond dust.
She thought back to the last field trip when she and Richard had been living and sleeping side by side. It seemed a long time ago. She was afraid now, not exactly of Richard himself but of what might happen to him, and as her anxiety had grown her reliance on Rooker steadily increased. Rooker’s saving presence out here was like a rope leading out of a crevasse. The rope was within her reach. She could grasp it if she felt that she might fall.
He reclined opposite her, drinking whisky straight from the flask. Alice wore her fleece hood but he was bareheaded, as if minus twenty degrees was a mild summer’s night. Away from the base his hair was growing in a thick thatch. His beard was darker.
‘Why does he care about that jackass Sullavan or the European Union?’ he mused. ‘Do the job, yeah, if you must. But not like that.’ His head jerked towards the other tent.
‘It’s partly because he wants to deliver what Lewis Sullavan expects of him and to make a significant scientific contribution that will justify the existence of Kandahar as an EU base – to enable all of us to contribute – but I think those are only relatively superficial reasons.’ Alice tried to choose her words carefully but she guessed that to Rook she just sounded pompous. ‘He is so driven because of who he is.’
Rook gave a derisive laugh. ‘We all act the way we do because of who we are. That’s no justification.’
This was the first even remotely personal remark she had ever heard him volunteer. She stared at him in surprise.
‘I don’t know about you. I do know that Richard wants more than anything to live up to his grandfather’s name.’ She felt disloyal, talking in this way about him.
Rook appeared to read her mind. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t
repeat our conversation. But we are out here, the three of us. We have a degree of responsibility for one another.’
‘I know that.’
‘Shoesmith won’t live up to his grandfather’s name because he can’t and his trouble is that he knows it.’
Alice stirred one of their teabags in the pan of boiling water, waited for the brew to turn dark brown, the way Rooker liked it, then tipped it into two tin mugs. Without asking her whether she wanted it or not he added a generous slug of whisky to each of them. In any case, Alice was glad of anything that helped to keep the ache of cold at bay even temporarily. Rook drank his and added, ‘He isn’t a hero. It’s not his fault. He’s a neat-minded, anxious man who’s afraid to be ordinary just because his name isn’t Jones or Brown.’
‘You may be right,’ Alice agreed.
‘I am right. And in a place like this our ordinary leader’s longing to be extraordinary makes him dangerous.’
A small icy fingertip, colder than the wind that worried at the tent, touched the nape of Alice’s neck. ‘He’s not a fool,’ she said sharply.
‘Oh, no. It would be much simpler if he were. The trouble is that he knows exactly what he is and how far he’s got to go to be anything else.’
She drank her tea, registering the strong whisky taste with deliberate attention. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.
Rooker was bored with Shoesmith as a topic of conversation. ‘And what are you afraid of, Alice?’
He was taunting her, she thought. She considered the question seriously, because a straight answer wouldn’t be what he was expecting. ‘I used to be afraid of disappointing my mother. Rather similar to Richard, you see, which may be why I feel more forgiving of him than you do. I was so afraid that I deliberately withdrew from her and turned my back on what she valued so that there would be a lesser risk of exposure. But coming down here has changed that. For me and for her, it was the right thing to do.’
Her eyes met Rooker’s now and she found that she was smiling. Her ears and neck were suddenly warm inside the fleece hood.
‘I see,’ he said.
‘And you?’ she countered.
He gave the same derisive laugh. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s important enough.’
She waited, but he didn’t elaborate. ‘Go on?’
His eyes moved over her face. The image of hands cupped round a match flame came back into Alice’s mind. Even Rooker, out here in the wilderness where the winds tumbled down from the plateau, might feel the need for intimacy. But he only raised one eyebrow and yawned. The conversation was finished and the shutters came down over his face.
‘What time tomorrow, did he say?’
‘Half seven.’
‘Well, then, time to sleep. Are you warm enough in here?’
What would you do about it if I said no? Alice smiled again. ‘It’s not too bad.’
‘Sweet dreams,’ Rook said.
In the morning’s radio link Russell reported that Jochen was worse. The doctor’s self-diagnosis was appendicitis.
Richard pinched the bridge of his nose. Alice and Rooker looked at each other and listened in silence.
‘You’d better advise Santa Ana,’ Richard responded.
‘Niki called in this a.m. The helo is standing by but the forecast’s for winds gusting up to fifty knots.’
‘Thank you, Kandahar. Keep me posted.’
After he had signed off Richard turned on them. ‘Come on. Let’s get moving.’ His mouth looked pinched.
It was a long, bleak day. A capricious wind stirred up twisters of snow that enveloped and momentarily blinded them. Alice worked doggedly in Richard’s wake, examining and chipping at the sedimentary layers and logging the sections whenever the visibility improved enough to allow her to do so. The sight of Rook’s bear-like bulk trudging ahead of her was the counterbalance to Richard’s increasingly frenzied darting.
They reached camp again only just in time for the evening’s radio link. ‘Kandahar, do you read me? Over,’ Richard shouted into the transceiver.
‘Wheeler’s Bluff, Wheeler’s Bluff, this is Kandahar,’ Niki’s voice patiently responded.
The news was that the helicopter had managed a landing in a window of calmer weather at 4.30 p.m. and had immediately flown Jochen back up to Santa Ana where a fixed-wing flight would take him onwards to Punta Arenas, to hospital and a probable appendectomy.
‘Right, Kandahar,’ Richard answered. ‘Thank you for that.’
‘Now we have no doctor on the base,’ he muttered once he had signed off.
‘But Jochen will be all right,’ Rooker observed.
Richard brushed the concern aside. ‘Yes, yes. I’m sure. The problem I’m facing now is whether to bring down another medic for the last month of the season. It’s a very costly option. I’ll have to consult the Polar Office. I wonder if Niki can patch me through to London from out here?’
This turned out not to be possible. Richard had to decide between heading back early to Kandahar, where most of his team were caught without medical cover and with only one safety officer, or staying on at the Bluff to pursue his fossils.
‘If we can only uncover one or two more Gastropoda. Just one specimen would do,’ he kept repeating to Alice. Rooker silently prepared the food for the evening meal. Alice tried to persuade Richard that Russell could deal with the Polar Office in London.
‘Maybe, but I should be at Kandahar to talk it over with them. I’m the only one who can make the decision.’
It was true that Richard didn’t know how to delegate. Rooker was stooping over the frying pan with his back turned but Alice knew that his eyebrows would be drawn up into sarcastic peaks.
‘What’s the forecast?’ Rook drawled.
Richard had written it down, but had been too preoccupied to take it in. He looked at the left-hand page of the camp log where the twice-daily forecasts were recorded – ‘2 February. Wheeler’s Bluff: cloud cover variable, winds strengthening, twenty to thirty knots.’
It was not much of a variation on the preceding days, slightly better if anything.
Rook shrugged and tipped hot rice into the three tin plates. The rising steam was instantly damped by the tent’s clammy cold air. They ate the food without interest, hunger and tiredness fighting their usual battle.
Alice suggested, ‘Let’s do another day’s work, wait for Niki to give us the response from the Polar Office tomorrow evening, then decide. There’s nothing to be done now, it’s midnight in London.’
Richard nodded, repeating the plan as if he had come up with it himself. ‘And that means a prompt start in the morning, please.’ He spoke brusquely to Rooker, as if he had been late every morning of the trip.
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Rook lifted one hand to his temple in a lazy salute.
Richard frowned but he let it pass. Five minutes later, after repeating that another Gastropoda find was all that really mattered, he said goodnight and withdrew to the other tent.
‘It’s only an ancient bloody dead snail,’ Rooker sighed.
Alice was tired. She wanted to complete the fieldwork, but the thought of a hot shower followed by a warm bed at Kandahar was deeply alluring. She was pricked by anxiety to think that there was no doctor on hand, even if that doctor was Jochen, but on the other hand the speed with which he had been evacuated was reassuring. ‘No. To him, it’s much more than that. But you’re not a scientist.’
Rook only laughed. ‘That’s for sure.’
The next evening Niki passed on a message from Beverley Winston. Lewis was in Ecuador and could not immediately be contacted.
‘Meanwhile we sit here on the ice and wait for a word,’ Richard fumed.
‘You wanted extra time to pick around the rocks,’ Rooker pointed out.
It was, in any case, only another four days before they were scheduled to return.
The forecast was more or less unchanged but they woke up to a viciously howling wind and a blinding wall of blown snow. From the mouth o
f Alice’s tent the other tent was barely visible and the snow igloo that sheltered the latrine barrel was completely obscured.
‘No leaving camp today,’ Rooker announced.
Richard put his dish of porridge aside, having barely touched it. ‘We’ll give it an hour, then see.’
‘No,’ Rook said.
They waited in Alice’s tent. Rooker and Alice tried to read but Richard rocked up and down, opening the flaps to look outside and constantly checking his watch. After two hours he said, ‘Right. It’s clearing. Let’s move.’
‘It isn’t doing anything of the kind. I’m safety officer here. No one leaves camp.’
‘We’re going to work. It’s six hundred yards to the nearest section of the Bluff. We’ll head there.’
‘No.’
‘Alice?’
After nine days of avoiding eye contact, Richard looked straight into her eyes. Choose, he silently challenged her.
She crawled to the tent door and stared out. It did seem that the wind was relenting. Through the whirl of driven snow she could just make out the outline of the igloo, ten yards away. Richard was asking for her loyalty. Rooker was stubborn. This confrontation was about their mutual detertation as much as it was about work or safety. Alice didn’t want to be a pawn in their play. She would make her own decision.
She did think that the weather was improving and almost anything would be better than a whole day confined to the tents in this atmosphere of rancid dislike. She picked up her parka from her pile of damp, filthy belongings and began to pull it on.