by Rosie Thomas
The hut was quiet. In their room, Laure was asleep. Alice took out the Polaroid of himself and Desiderata that Pete had sent her and examined it in the light of her head torch. She felt a complicated mixture of affection and warmth towards him, even though it was diluted by absence and distance and disappointment. Loneliness and regret wrapped round her as she reflected that they wouldn’t be bringing up their child together. She thought of the holidays and Christmases and school prize-givings and milestones they might all have shared. That togetherness couldn’t happen, she was certain of that, but alone in the chilly darkness she still yearned for it.
She couldn’t go to bed yet. She needed to talk to someone, not about Peter or home and certainly not about the baby secretly unfurling inside her, but just to have the affirmation of human company. She put the photograph away and went to find Rooker.
Russell had taken her place at the computer and Phil was idly throwing darts at a picture of Lewis Sullavan that someone had pinned to the wall. There were dirty cups on the table and the CD of Van Morrison’s Greatest Hits had been played so many times that no one heard it any more, it was just white noise. She put on her parka and ran the few steps across to Margaret Mather House. She found Rooker in the empty radio room. He was reading, rocking gently in Niki’s chair. The little cubicle smelled of dust and heated metal, and in the background was the fluid, insistent pipping of Morse.
He looked up. ‘Hi. Has something happened?’
‘No. Do you have anything to drink?’
‘Sure. Scotch or bourbon?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Scotch, then.’
He poured whisky from a flask into a cup and gave it to her. Alice sat down in the only other seat, a rickety typist’s chair with brown rexine seat pads that looked as if it belonged in one of Pete’s sculptures. With a certain effort she hooked her feet up on the bench and took a mouthful of whisky.
‘Go on,’ Rooker said after a minute.
‘What?’ Then she smiled. It was cosy in here, hemmed in by the winking dials and glowing lights of the radio equipment, and the clutter of logbooks and Niki’s chessmen. ‘I haven’t come to say anything. You tell me something,’ she added recklessly.
Rooker put down his book. It was a thriller he had borrowed from Phil and it wasn’t very good. It occurred to him, startlingly, that talking to Dr Alice Peel – telling her something, even – was a much more appealing option than reading any more of it.
He started to speak but his voice dried up and he cleared his throat before taking a drink. ‘Where shall I start?’ The words came out without premeditation.
‘What about…when you were growing up. In New Zealand, before you went to live with Uncle Henry Jerrold?’
He was utterly amazed that she remembered all this. He had almost forgotten that he had mentioned it, in the tent out at Wheeler’s Bluff.
He began to tell her about the first thing that came into his head, his friend Gabby Macfarlane.
Gabby’s home was a couple of miles outside town. His dad was a farmer and his mother was a small woman with a pursed mouth who wore a nylon scarf over her hair to do the housework, and who stuck the head of her dusting mop out of the open windows and twirled it to send the cobwebs spiralling away in the sharp wind. At Gabby’s there were glasses of milk to drink and apples from a bowl on the kitchen sideboard. You weren’t allowed to come inside with your boots on; you had to take them off and walk around in your socks. Mrs Macfarlane looked at Jimmy’s black toenails sticking out of the ends of his and pursed her mouth even tighter.
It was a very clean and orderly house, Gabby’s, but it didn’t feel all that comfortable. Mr Macfarlane was a square, blocky man with a red face like a slab of meat. When he came in, Mrs Macfarlane and the children would go quiet. Once, Jimmy saw Gabby pull his father’s shotgun out of the cupboard beside the back door and take aim with it across the yard towards the orchard, thinking that his father was down at the barn. But he came out of the scullery and saw the boys with the gun. Gabby flung it down and tried to escape out of the door but he was too late. His father hoisted him by the neck and his socked feet dangled in the air. He hit Gabby in the face twice with the back of his hand, blows that made his head crack and jerk sideways as if his neck would snap, but Gabby never uttered a sound. He slipped back to the floor and staggered against the open door. Mr Macfarlane put his gun back in the cupboard and walked away.
Apart from when his father was around, Gabby was an inspired wrongdoer. Jimmy and he had recognised each other almost at first glance, and they fell into a life of crime. They stole sweets and toys from the shops in town, and sometimes things they didn’t need or even want like tins of paint or nail brushes. Just because they were there and because they could. It was Gabby who decided in the end that this was stupid and they should plan their heists, and it was Jimmy who introduced him to the word.
‘Heistmeisters, that’s what we are,’ Jimmy said.
‘Yeah, that’s what,’ Gabby agreed without much interest.
So they graduated to records, targeting desirable singles in shiny sleeves from the Main Street Record Barn. They took these home to play at Jimmy’s house, and his mother would either try to dance with Gabby or she would waltz on her own, singing along with the words and laughing. ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, that was one of their trophies. She loved Elvis Presley. She never once asked where they’d got the records from.
Gabby and he liked setting fires. A match tossed on rags soaked in petrol from the can that Mr Macfarlane kept in the tractor shed made a whump and a wall of pure flame out of a pile of rubbish or even a deserted garden shed.
Gabby had three older sisters. One day he and Jimmy squirmed on their stomachs through the toetoe grass to a place where the two bigger ones were sunbathing in their knickers. Jimmy gazed through the screen of grass stalks at Joyce’s pale splayed legs and the way the bones of her hips poked up to make a kind of cradle of the flesh that spanned them. He thought how much he would like to rest his head in that cradle and then felt embarrassed to connect this hot unwieldy tenderness with Joyce Macfarlane, who had frizzy colourless hair and pink-framed spectacles.
That day, the same day, was the first time he went home and found Lester there.
‘Jimmy,’ she said to him, waving her glass and slopping some of the contents down the front of her silky blouse, ‘this is my friend Lester Furneaux and he’s a designer.’
He might well have been, but Jimmy never saw him design a thing in the whole of the year that followed.
‘This is my son. Say hello, Jimmy,’ she ordered.
He did as he was told, reluctantly poking out the word with his tongue. The man looked coldly back at him and they both knew that they were rivals for her affection and attention.
Lester. There had been years when he had been able to stop every avenue of thought leading back to him, so why did he have to intrude now?
‘What happened to Gabby Macfarlane?’ Alice Peel asked.
In the light cast by the small desk lamp her face was luminous. She wasn’t prying, she was just interested in his storytelling. He could see the faint down on her rounded cheek, the flat rose-pink cushion of her earlobe and a tendril of hair spun out by the lamplight into tiny metallic filaments. The memory of Joyce Macfarlane came back to him, and he felt the same unworded tenderness that was distinct from and much less resistible than lust. He was going to lift his hand and put it over hers, without making any calculation about what might happen next.
The radio gave out a loud burst of scrambled noise that made them both jump.
Instead of touching Alice’s hand, Rook picked up Niki’s headphones and pulled them over his head. The static shriek resolved itself into a human voice as he hastily adjusted the frequency.
‘Vernadsky, Vernadsky, I read you. This is Kandahar. Over.’
Vernadsky was a Ukrainian station on the peninsula. Niki regularly played radio chess with his opposite number, and Phil and Russell were engaged in an honesty-
darts tournament against the field assistants. ‘Bloody amazing darts players, these Russkies, I can tell you,’ Phil had said drily.
Tonight, though, there was no chess move or claim of a double top. Rooker listened intently to the torrent of Russian-English, then lifted the headset from one ear. ‘Go and get Niki. Our leader will want to hear this as well.’
Alice knocked on the doors of the bunk rooms and woke the two men. They spilled blearily into their windproofs and she followed them back to the radio room.
Niki took his seat and the rest of them waited behind him. Richard frowned at the gabble of Russian.
‘Ship? There’s no ship. What are they talking about?’
But there was a ship.
When Niki flipped a switch and quiet flooded into the room, Richard was already shaking his head. He leaned over and took the handset from Niki, stretching the black snake of flex. Rooker was watching every move.
‘Vernadsky, Vernadsky, this is Dr Shoesmith. Thanks for the kind offer. Much appreciated. But we’ll stay on base until our scheduled departure day. Over.’
The radio operator’s voice sounded startled in response. ‘Weather conditions, Kandahar, and the latest forecast, indicate increasing difficulty…’
‘Thanks again, Vernadsky. We have information. Out.’
Rook’s hand shot out and grabbed Richard by the wrist. He dropped the handset and it plunged off the edge of the desk. They all winced at another burst of high-volume static.
‘Call up again,’ Rooker ordered.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard.’ He stooped for the handset, picked it up and thrust it back into Richard’s hand. ‘You’re the expedition leader. The Ukrainians are making room on their relief ship to take all your personnel to safety, leaving in two days’ time. It’s still a manageable trek out over the ice. Make the right decision.’
Richard was white to the lips. ‘I have already made my decision. We stay here another nineteen days, until our scheduled departure. There’s work to be done. We couldn’t be ready to leave in forty-eight hours’ time, in any case.’
‘We could be ready in four if necessary. If it were a matter of life and death.’
Silence bled through the room. Niki’s bony fingers lightly rested on the dials, waiting.
‘It isn’t. It’s a matter of duty,’ Richard said softly. ‘And you’ll do yours, Rooker, along with everyone else.’
‘You are a fool,’ Rook snapped.
‘I’m the expedition leader,’ he repeated.
Rooker got up and walked away. He left the door of the radio room swinging open and a shaft of chill air struck in.
Niki sat with his head down. Alice met Richard’s eyes. There was a new narrowness that made him look cunning, even a little unbalanced.
‘Why don’t we leave with the Ukrainians, while we can?’ she asked.
His lips tightened. ‘I’d have thought you’d understand why not. You’re not a time waster. It’s what we have to do, Alice. It’s our job to stay here, to deliver what Lewis expects, to finish our work, to close down the base properly when the time comes and not to run away at the first sign of difficulty like rats off a sinking ship.’
She held his gaze. ‘It’s an accident of the weather. You’re not Captain Scott or Ernest Shackleton, or Mawson or Amundsen. You’re not your grandfather, but that’s because you don’t have to be, not because you haven’t got it in you. The pioneer days have long gone. We’re just a party of scientists, with our bags of rock and tubes of penguins’ blood, holed up in our lab on what was the seashore and is now ice. We could go home in two days’ time, and do our analyses and write up our results. The business of science will either be infinitessimally advanced or it won’t, but we’ll have done all that anyone expects of us. Who’s expecting so much anyway? Lewis?’
Richard slowly shook his head, staring at her as if he barely understood what she was saying. ‘Who? Ourselves, of course. Oneself. Are you afraid of staying here, Alice?’
‘No.’
It was a lie. As she stood there her stomach jutted out like the prow of a ship. In the corner of her mind she knew that she must be further along than she had calculated. She must have already been pregnant when she had spent her last night in Oxford with Pete. How many months? Two? Three, even?
She was thinking that she didn’t care about duty or honour or science. She cared about life.
The life she was carrying inside her. She was afraid to put it in further jeopardy. ‘I would like to leave on the Ukrainian ship.’
He brushed the words aside. ‘We will all leave together as planned on the Polar Star. We’ll negotiate the ice by skidoo or be lifted out by helicopter, which contingency we have planned and paid for. It’s a matter of routine.’ He smiled at her without humour.
Niki carefully took off his headset and placed it on the hook above the bench.
Alice nodded. ‘I see.’ She hauled her parka round her shoulders and walked the bitterly cold steps back to the hut. The room was littered but empty. The only sound was the wind and in the distance, like a heartbeat, the steady pulse of the generator.
In the morning Rooker insisted that everyone convene round the mess table.
A low sun, tangerine-coloured, glowed through the snowcrusted windows and revealed indoor air thick with bluish smoke coils from the breakfast frying and Niki’s cigarettes. There was a smell of old food and dirty clothes. Richard sat silently in his usual place at the head of the table, his hands pressed close together.
‘You all know what this is about,’ Rook said calmly. ‘We can leave here on the Ukrainian ship. I think we should take a show of hands.’
A pulse twitched at the corner of Richard’s mouth. ‘I am the leader of this expedition,’ he said again. There was a crack in his voice and his knuckles were as white as bone. Alice felt so much sympathy that she could hardly look at him.
Rook ignored him. ‘Round the table, then. Russ?’
‘Stay till Polar Star comes.’ The base manager’s dry Kiwi voice was unemphatic. Russell’s loyalty to the expedition leader was unshaken.
‘Arturo?’
‘I am able to wind up my studies in time, I see no point in maybe spending a whole winter here. I go with Ukrainians.’
‘Laure?’
Laure looked exhausted and faintly tearful. ‘Me also.’
‘Niki?’
‘Ukrainians.’
‘Four of us in favour so far, so…’
‘Just wait a minute, mate.’ It was Phil who interrupted him. There was no sign of his usual chirpy grin. ‘It’s eighteen days to finish the job, right? I don’t like pulling out early. I’m for staying put until the fifteenth.’
‘That’s the considered view of our safety officer?’ Rooker’s voice grated with sarcasm.
‘Yeah, it is. Who are you to appoint yourself vote taker, anyway?’
Hostility reared between them and seeped round the rest of the table. Everyone was fidgeting now, not looking at anyone else.
‘Valentin?’
‘I stay. Same reasons as Phil. I think there is no need to hurry away.’
Four all. It was Alice’s turn and there was an uncomfortable silence.
‘I vote to go out on the Ukrainian ship,’ she said clearly.
Rooker leaned back in his chair. ‘That’s a majority,’ he said to Richard.
It was as if there were only the two of them in the room.
Very slowly, Richard got to his feet. He stood behind his chair, gripping the back. ‘I remain the leader of this expedition and what I say goes. Lewis Sullavan has provided the funding, I control our budget. Polar Star is paid for, an entirely unnecessary Ukrainian evacuation is not. I remind you also that this is a team. We stay here as a group, regardless of your divisive voting, Rooker, until the agreed date for our departure.’
There was a stubbornness in him that Alice couldn’t help but admire even now. But she was summoning up all her courage to tell them the truth,
to blurt out why the Ukrainian ship would have to come. It shamed her to think that she hadn’t even considered the cost implication.
Before she could open her mouth Rook sprang up and leaped across the room. They all saw what a big, coiled, dark, dangerous man he was. His hands went to Richard’s throat and he shook him as if he were a child’s doll. Russell and Valentin ran at him and tried to haul him off while Phil wrestled an outraged Arturo. Niki’s fists swung. Suddenly there was a mêlée of men and overturning chairs. Alice and Laure stared at each other. This was what all their highminded European collaboration and teamwork had come to – a brawl over the breakfast table.
The fight was over as quickly as it had begun. Rooker wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, with Russell and Valentin hanging on to his arms.
Richard spoke out of pinched lips. ‘You’re relieved of your duties, Rooker.’
Rooker laughed. He seemed genuinely amused.
Looking from one face to another, Alice found that her confession had died in her mouth. She couldn’t – could not – pipe up now and tell them that she was pregnant and needed to go home. That would be to place her concerns in direct opposition to Richard’s. That would oblige him to choose publicly between her requirements and his own overwhelming need.
She would rather almost anything than have to witness his choice.
No. She would have to stay put and pray that her luck would hold. Maybe Phil and Russ and the others would be proved right after all, and they would steam away north on Polar Star.
Richard stalked out of the hut. In silence, the rest of them turned away from each other.
There was a wary stillness on the base for the two days until the Vernadsky ship left. Mealtimes were silent, outdoor work was done as the weather permitted. Niki reported eventually that the Ukrainians had closed their station for the season and were aboard ship en route for Ushuaia.