Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  There was no talking as they tracked slowly back to Kandahar. Richard led the way, staring straight ahead of him as he marched on. They each felt the blackness of Antarctic winter rushing up behind them, and the grip of the ice threatening to seize and hold them fast. Alice scrambled alongside Phil. Occasionally he put his hand out to help her up over some curled and particularly slippery lip of ice.

  ‘Will we be able to get out?’ she asked him. A slow pulse of anxiety was beginning to beat in her. She felt it like a cramp tightening her stomach wall, a premonition of the first contraction that would inevitably come. She had begun to think of pregnancy and the delivery as only a prelude to a much bigger event, whereas even at the last field camp it was the birth itself and the days leading up to it that had filled her mind. She had told herself in the early weeks that motherhood would come to her when it happened; now she was much more strongly aware that there would be a baby, another person, her child. It wriggled and prodded inside her, less balletic but more insistent as the available space decreased. It seemed to be growing almost visibly as the days succeeded each other.

  Phil said thoughtfully, ‘I should think so. Mind you, it wouldn’t be the first time that a summer team had had to overwinter because they got trapped. You know that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’d be a nuisance, but on the other hand it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Six months or so on short rations, that’s all.’

  ‘I’d prefer to go home,’ Alice murmured. She made an effort to control her feelings, but a flutter of panic threatened to overtake her. They couldn’t, must not, be caught here for a whole winter.

  He shot a glance at her, not that it was possible to see anyone’s face under the goggles and layers of hoods and balaclavas. ‘Feeling trapped?’

  ‘No. Well, yes. Just, you know, the idea of a winter here.’

  ‘No bills, no car insurance, no parking meters. No ring tones, no queues, no muggers, no cold callers trying to sell you a new kitchen?’

  This was the familiar litany that they often gleefully recited to each other. But Alice didn’t add anything because she was thinking about medical advice, reassurance, Jo and Becky and her parents: all the things she needed in the next six months much more than she didn’t need mobile phones or traffic wardens.

  ‘No fuel, no food. Or not much.’ There were emergency supplies, but it wasn’t the discomfort she was concerned about.

  Phil shrugged. ‘Yeah, well. Don’t worry. We’ll be out of here somehow. Wouldn’t look good for Sullavan otherwise, would it? He needs good news after the Thai business. You’ve just got third-quarter blues.’

  ‘What’s that?’ She was panting a little in her efforts to keep up as they clambered over the rough ice.

  ‘It’s a recognised symptom. Third month of a four-month stay, or whatever it is. You feel as though you’ve been here a long time, you’ve learned all the ropes, but it’s still too soon to start counting the days to going home. So you get depressed. I’ve read the studies, Mood and Performance in Isolated Confined Environments, all that. Then when it does come to home time you get final-reaction syndrome, outbreaks of immature and emotional behaviour. Which translates mainly as wild partying, immoderate drinking and bouts of irresponsible sex. You heard it here first. So can I count you in?’

  ‘We’ll see, Phil. I make no promises.’ The defensive bantering had become automatic.

  That’s all right, then, Alice thought. Just third-quarter blues. Nothing to do with being an indeterminate number of months pregnant and fearing having to give birth down here. Oh, God. The possibility had been in her mind since the bay had frozen, but this was the first time she had fully articulated it to herself.

  Back in the hut, Richard called a meeting.

  He looked around at all of them, his eyes slightly glassy. Since coming back from the last field trip he had withdrawn further into himself. He didn’t make the same efforts to preside sociably over meals, often sitting in silence over his food, but he chivvied them ever more aggressively to get their work done.

  He clapped his hands together now, too loudly for the quiet room. His handsome face looked stiff, making his smile appear fixed. ‘Well, now. We’ve got less than one month left. We need some results to show for our first season. We need to publish, get ourselves talked about.’

  Eight pairs of eyes were on him.

  Without his usual beaming grin, Valentin said, ‘I am not one of your graduate students. I work my own rate, and I do not discuss my findings and certainly do not publish until I am ready.’

  Arturo nodded sulky agreement.

  Richard inclined his head towards Alice, waiting for her comment.

  ‘I think everyone is doing their best,’ she ventured and he flinched. Rooker tilted his chair and raised one black eyebrow.

  Richard collected himself and went on, ‘We will be leaving here on 15 March, on schedule. I guarantee you that. In the meantime I ask you to give Kandahar your best effort.’

  Russell and Phil exchanged sceptical glances. How could Richard guarantee a departure date? He was drifting away from logic into the realm of wishful thinking.

  If anyone was depressed, Alice decided, it was the expedition leader. His polar expedition had not delivered any antidote to his self-doubt, or even any properly notable scientific discoveries. It was not exactly her field, but she was beginning to wonder if the gastropod was as important as he wanted it to be.

  Without Jochen, the established structure of the group had changed. The hut was emptier and also oddly quiet, as if their number had diminished by more than one person. The big, noisy doctor hadn’t been their scapegoat, exactly, but he had been thick-skinned enough to take some disapprobation without apparently suffering from it. Jochen could always be relied upon tediously to state the obvious or to crow about what the others were usually tactful enough to leave unsaid. If the room was overcrowded it was because of Jochen’s sheer bulk and if there wasn’t quite enough food to go round it was because of his excessive appetite. Now that he was gone, and was recovering in Santiago from his appendectomy, the ebbing and flowing tides of irritation were less predictable.

  Russell and Valentin were experienced enough to be automatically loyal to Richard as the leader, and Alice had her own reasons, but the others hardly disguised their resentful dislike of him. Niki’s Baltic melancholy cast a lengthening shadow, whereas Phil’s constant flippancy grated in a different way. Rooker’s sardonic silences were unnerving, and without Jochen to pay her attention Laure was becoming increasingly subdued. In the bunk room she talked more and more wistfully to Alice about Paul, and whether or not he would be waiting for her when she got back to Paris.

  ‘I want to see him too much, I know you will say, Aleece, because your advice is always good. But this place, it is getting me down. Richard is not the leader, he is like a different person, without direction and with too many instructions to give.’

  ‘A month goes quickly,’ Alice murmured. ‘We’ll soon be home.’

  Alice attracted her own share of disapproval. Pregnancy was beginning to make her physically clumsy and also forgetful. She forgot to write her name and destination on the board when she went out, and Rooker scolded her for her carelessness. When she tried to hide her lapses by making herself as inconspicuous as possible, she realised that everyone else thought she was just being lazy.

  She had lost much of her appetite, but to provide an explanation for her increasing girth she tried to make it look as if she ate a lot. She loaded up her plate at every meal, then slipped the food back or scraped it away when no one was looking.

  Arturo pursed his lips. ‘Without Jochen, I thought all of us might eat too much food. But Alice is kind, she takes care of it all.’

  Alice went red. This was exactly the observation she had hoped someone might make but she still wanted to escape from the table and hide in her bunk. She forced a smile instead. ‘I’m always hungry at Kandahar. I’m getting as fat as a pig.’


  Arturo smirked, delicately agreeing with her.

  ‘The climate suits her. A bit of extra flesh suits her too. I like a woman I can get hold of,’ Valentin countered.

  When she looked in her tiny mirror Alice saw that her face had filled out. She even had the beginnings of a double chin.

  Another dinner was eaten and cleared away, another day was greedily enveloped by the Antarctic night. The time passed slowly. Bad weather meant that outdoor work became more difficult. Inside the hut they waited, trying to contain their irritation with each other and their confined world.

  Jochen was not going to be replaced. Richard discussed the possibilities with the Polar Office and with Beverley, and even spoke via satphone to Lewis. It seemed that it was not worth the expense of sending another medic all the way down to Kandahar for what would now be a stay of just over three weeks.

  Richard repeated, ‘15 March’. Snow was driving against the dark windows. ‘What do we need a doctor for between now and then? We can hardly get out of the hut door.’

  When she did venture outside into the short-lived twilight, Alice stood on the sea ice and stared up at the hut. The lights made it look like a luminous golden shell, perched so precariously on the rocks that the smallest puff of wind might lift it and carry it away. Their existence here was so fragile. It was hubris, she thought, to imagine that they or anyone else could outwit the forces of Antarctica. They crouched here in their tiny wooden hut, scratching away at the rocks and ice, and making their small observations, and all it took to overthrow their elaborate plans was a few extra degrees of cold. The sea froze and they were potentially trapped.

  Dusk lasted only a few minutes. Darkness fell like a curtain and the sky was thick with theatrically bright stars. The cold knifed through her parka, but it was not just the wind that made Alice shiver. No one had said yet that they might well have to overwinter at Kandahar, but the possibility drained most of the flavour from the endless conversations about what they were most looking forward to on returning to the world.

  Arturo would lift his eyes to heaven. ‘A double espresso, a barber shave, a concert.’

  ‘A shag,’ would be Phil’s typical retaliation.

  The claustrophobia of the hut and the predictability of her companions tempted Alice to linger outside, but the cold was too intense. She climbed the rock steps back to the hut, past motionless ranks of Adélie penguins. They stood patiently, their sleek feathers now a tattered greying mess. During the annual moult the birds waited on the rocks, unable to swim or, therefore, to feed. This year the early freeze meant that the water margin had receded into the invisible distance. Once their moult was completed and before they could break their fast, the penguins would have to march upright or slither on their bellies all the way to the open sea.

  The rising wind blew discarded feathers, making them whirl up into the air like tiny blizzards.

  A weighty silence filled the hut. Richard was wearing headphones and scribbling in his notebook; Phil was at the computer. It was Rooker’s duty day and he was washing up. Alice picked up the drying-up cloth.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he advised.

  She ignored him. She polished a plate carefully on both sides and put it down, then did the same with the next one. The exaggerated normality of the business only emphasised the fact that her mouth was dry and her heart was fluttering with anxiety.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked casually.

  When he looked round his enigmatic gaze travelled all the way over her, from head to foot. The stretched skin on her stomach itched unbearably and it took all her willpower to resist the urge to scratch it. He knows, she thought. He’s guessed. It didn’t surprise her, not really. She had a feeling that Rooker saw much more than any of the others.

  Then his eyes twitched away again. Relief flooded through her, weakening her knees. Of course he hadn’t guessed.

  ‘Losing your nerve?’ He was half smiling.

  ‘Um. I’d just…like to know.’

  ‘We’ll get away. If I have anything to do with it,’ he said.

  Alice went on drying plates. The air in the hut whispered with tension. It was like static electricity, stored in the door handles and metal surfaces, waiting to discharge itself at the lightest touch.

  She wrote to Becky and Jo. She had decided that she should lessen the impact of the news when the time finally came to break it, so she told them first that she had changed her mind about travelling in South America and was planning to come straight home.

  …Once we do get out of here. The bay has iced over very early so there’s some doubt at the moment about exactly when that might be…

  Becky responded at once. She had been sitting at her desk in London when Alice’s mail appeared in her in-box.

  Darling, the best news! Dying to see you. South America’s always going to be there – quite understand you wanting to get straight back to civilisation. When are you getting here? V taking me for a quick w/e to New York some time in March but DON’T want to miss the big return. Let me know asap!

  Jo’s reply came two days later.

  Al, so sorry for delay, everything seems to take twice as long to get done these days. Are you sure about coming straight back?? Are you just a bit homesick and fed up with being on the base? If I were you I’d take the op to go everywhere while you’ve got the chance: I’m really ENVIOUS. Isn’t the house let until Sept? Are you sure you’re okay? Tell all, please.

  Neither of her friends had picked up on the significance of the sea freeze. There was no reason why they should – they were a long way away, in a temperate climate. They would imagine that a ship could smash the ice, or that a plane could descend from somewhere and lift them all away, and she hadn’t tried to tell them otherwise – not yet.

  Apart from that the difference in the responses made her smile, although it was a smile with an edge to it. Becky’s pleasure in her freedom contrasted so sharply with Jo’s wistful acknowledgement that her travelling days were over. Alice told herself that it was too late to make comparisons between her friends’ lives, or to indulge herself with regrets. She was going home – if Rooker was correct and she wanted very much, needed, to believe him – to a life that would be completely different from her previous one. All being well, she would have a child to take care of. All being well. First, to escape the ice and make her way back to Oxford.

  On the same day as Jo’s, some messages came from Peter. Typically, she hadn’t heard from him since Christmas and now here was a flurry of three at once. They were all imploring.

  Are you going to be angry with me for ever? I don’t know what I can say or do to make it up, Al, but the truth is that I love you. I don’t know why I didn’t recognise this before: it’s like it was just too monolithic for me to see it properly. I miss you. I’m waiting for you to come home so that I can tell you in person. Will you let me?

  Please answer this.

  xxx always P

  Alice stared at the screen. At least there was no longer any risk of Jochen looming over her shoulder pretending to check if she was surfing the porn sites.

  It was Pete’s child she was carrying; did he have a right to know what she was doing and the risks she was running?

  Considering what had happened – Georgia and the woman in the pub and no doubt others – she didn’t think he did. After the accident of conception, the baby was hers. When she got home she would tell Pete what was happening and if he wanted it they would negotiate for him to have some share in its future, although it wasn’t clear to her yet what that role might be.

  Her fingers rested on the keyboard while she reflected on what to tell him now. She looked down briefly at her bruised, chapped knuckles and the broken nails. It was like seeing someone else’s hands grafted on to her own wrists, but when she came to think about it the arms didn’t feel like her own either, nor did the rest of her heavy, pregnant body. The other Alice, the familiar one who had been a scientist and Peter’s girlfriend and part of a tri
o with Jo and Becky, had gone and someone who would be a mother had crept into her skin in her place.

  The floor, scuffed tiles gritty with dirt, suddenly seemed to drop away from under her feet.

  Disorientation made her shiver. Home was far away and getting there was a series of obstacles. Nothing was ordinary any longer, none of the coarse or slippery textures of normality revealed themselves.

  The only thing that was still real was Antarctica itself, that giant white mouth. She sensed it, outside the pathetic barrier of the hut walls, opening up to swallow her. She understood why the old explorers had found it so difficult to extricate themselves and why Margaret had never really escaped its thrall. Its raw power was such that it made the world beyond seem pale and slight.

  She frowned now, trying to make herself focus on what she would say to Peter. It would be easy enough to spell out the words to tell him that she would come back and they could be together. The baby would have a father; she wouldn’t have to face the decisions that lay ahead on her own.

  But it would not be right, and she was as sure of that as she was sure of the ice outside the hut. To try to make it so would be like falsifying research results to prove a thesis. The solution might briefly hold, but it could not endure.

  Dear Pete, I was very glad to hear from you. I’m not angry, and I miss you too [all this was the truth].

  I’ll be back in Oxford in about a month’s time, earlier than I originally planned, and I’d like to see you then, of course. I do know you love me and I love you too, in a way, but it’s not enough on either side, nor in the right way, for me to say what I think you want to hear. I’m sorry if this hurts you, and I honestly wish it were different [how much easier the future would be, if only].

  I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be back because of the weather conditions here. But I will call you as soon as I am.

  Much love, Al

  She read and reread this, wondering how to expand on it, but she couldn’t think of anything else that wouldn’t sound mysterious or offer him grounds for false hope. In the end she pressed the send button and the bleak message went on its way to Peter just as it was.