Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  Richard acknowledged the information with a mechanical nod. The rest of them looked at each other, mutely reflecting on the extra degree of their isolation. They depended now on the possible arrival of their own ship, ice permitting, or on the air support of the Chileans at Santa Ana.

  ‘Antarctic heroes, eh?’ Phil tried to rouse them, but no one responded.

  As soon as the Ukrainian ship was gone the weather deteriorated. There was still daylight because the sun climbed above the horizon for a few hours each day, but the sky was either dark with cloud or obscured by blizzards. The snow was so thick that there might just as well have been no light, because there was no visibility. Alice completely understood the old description of a serious blizzard as ‘white darkness’.

  The frozen bay lost its crests of ice and became a pearly blank plain with no beginning or end. Only the shawled berg stood out, intermittently visible during the ragged gaps in the weather as a reminder of the landscape’s vanished scale. The penguins deserted the Kandahar rocks and began their exodus towards the distant sea margin. Without the little birds’ constant bustle, or the glimpses of seals basking on the ice or whales blowing in the deeper water, the sense of isolation deepened further. The wildlife and the sun were retreating, leaving the human interlopers to the mercy of winter.

  The baby moved around much less now. The walls of her womb were tightening around it, restricting its blind ballet. When Laure was out of the bunk room, Alice slid her hands over the mound of her stomach, feeling the pressure of a tiny heel or fist answering her touch.

  Are you there? Can you hear me, baby?

  She tried to make the monologue soothing and reassuring.

  We’re going to be fine, you and me. Wait and see. Wait quietly there until we’re home.

  Once, Laure opened the bunk-room door, startling her. Alice hunched her back and pulled more clothes round her body.

  ‘What were you saying?’ Laure asked, eyeing her doubtfully.

  ‘Nothing,’ Alice answered. She realised that she had been talking out loud. Now her room-mate thought that she rambled on to herself. It didn’t matter. They were all retreating into eccentricity in their different ways, as the light dwindled. As the food supplies began to run low, meals became fragmentary, eaten at different times, and they passed by each other silently in the narrow confines of the hut.

  One night, Alice was reading in her bunk by the light of her head torch. The little beam concentrated on the page gave her the illusion of cosiness, as if she were curled up with a book in her childhood bedroom at Boar’s Hill. Then an awareness that something was not quite as usual intruded into her consciousness. She lay still for a moment, trying to fix on what it might be before she lifted her head off the pillow. When she did so, an icy draught of air bit at her bed-warmed neck. She could feel it on her face now, too. The room was unusually cold. She sat up and the torchlight showed her Laure rolled up and fast asleep in the opposite bunk. Laure slept more and more these days, retreating for twelve and fourteen hours at a time.

  Alice pulled the covers up round her shoulders and tried to concentrate on her book again, but it was no use. She was shivering now. She swung her legs out of bed and padded in her thick socks to touch the electric wall heater. The panels were cold, with only a faint suggestion of warmth lingering in the lowest rib. She clicked on the main light switch, intending to check the controls in case the heater had been turned off by mistake. Nothing happened. She listened and realised that it was the absence of the generator’s constant low murmur that had first caught her attention. There was no electrical power because the generator was off.

  Quickly, she dragged on some more layers of clothes. She opened the bunk-room door and closed it behind her with a soft click.

  Someone was moving around in the hut. The walls were flickering with a soft, unfamiliar light.

  ‘Hello?’ Alice said. She twisted the casing of her torch to widen the beam.

  There were lit candles all around the room, on the shelves and windowsills, on the computer table and even on the monitor. Some of the candles tipped at an angle, already drooling wax.

  A dark figure turned and his huge shadow reared up the wall. She knew who it was.

  ‘Richard?’

  Instinctively she switched off her torch so as not to dazzle him, then wished that she had not. Candlelight threw his features into exaggerated relief. His beard was black and she couldn’t see his eyes, only the dark sockets.

  ‘Richard, what are you doing?’

  It was one o’clock in the morning. Everyone else on the base must be asleep.

  ‘We have to economise on fuel, you know.’

  On the table was a big box, a gross of candles. He took another and clicked Niki’s cigarette lighter to it. A little teardrop of flame flared and steadied. Richard cupped a hand round it. His face was all raw bones and black hollows. The hair prickled at the nape of Alice’s neck.

  ‘Why is the generator not running?’

  ‘I told you.’ He was tetchy, not wanting to be distracted from his task. He put the new candle on a shelf close to the picture of Lewis Sullavan that Phil had pocked with darts.

  Alice heard another footstep behind her and whirled round. She almost collided with Valentin.

  ‘Val,’ she breathed in relief. ‘The generator.’

  He dodged round her. He was frowning. ‘It has broken down? We must fix. The freezer will be off. I have to preserve my ice core samples.’ Valentin’s first thought was for his glaciology study. The freezer in Margaret Mather House was full of the neat sections he had drilled out of the heart of the glacier. Alice remembered that Laure’s penguin blood samples were stored there too.

  ‘I switched off the generator to save fuel,’ Richard murmured abstractedly. The lighter clicked again as he lit another candle.

  The other men had woken up now and they came out of the bunk rooms. Their shadows swept over the walls as the candle flames shivered. The room was crowded with giant spectres.

  Somebody shouted, ‘Shoesmith, what in Christ’s name d’you think you’re doing?’ Rooker was large, angry and reassuringly three-dimensional. He was already scrambling into his boots and weatherproofs. He and Phil headed outside, followed by Valentin. The blast of cold air made them all shiver.

  Russell tried unthinkingly to switch on the electric kettle, then filled a pan with water and lit the gas under it instead. Niki thumbed a cigarette from his pack and took the lighter out of Richard’s hand. Arturo held Richard by the arm and guided him to a chair. He gave no sign of a protest. He put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands.

  No one looked at anyone else. Seconds crumbled away, the silence only broken by the wind and the hissing gas. After a few minutes they heard a stuttering roar that settled into a steady chugging as the generator fired up again. The lights blinked on and the candle flames paled. Alice went quietly round the room and blew them out one by one. The puddles of hot wax hardened instantly in the freezing air.

  Richard lifted his head. ‘I do apologise,’ he said quietly. ‘That was an overreaction. But it is important, you know, if we can’t leave here. We must conserve fuel. An airdrop might not be possible for weeks.’

  Alice stood at the end of the table and gazed at the dense blackness framed by the window. Blood pulsed noisily in her head and her scalp tightened as the realisation finally and properly dawned on her.

  We may well be stranded here for the polar winter.

  The Ukrainian ship had gone; miles of sea ice would separate them from Polar Star when it finally did arrive. Helicopters didn’t take off in weather conditions like these. It wasn’t that they might die or even go really hungry, because they had walls and a roof to shelter them, and fixed-wing flights from Santa Ana would drop fuel and food supplies on the ice even though they could not land. A few months of isolation would be a grand inconvenience for the other expedition members, but it would mean something entirely different for her.

  Alice ran h
er tongue over her cracked lips and kept her head turned towards the window in case anyone should glimpse her face. Ripples of panic began to wash through her.

  Russell was putting mugs of tea on the table. Valentin came banging back from the lab hut. ‘No defrosting yet, lucky to say.’ He drank a gulp of hot tea and scowled.

  Rooker and Phil returned, stamping their feet and shaking snow off their protective clothes.

  Richard repeated his apology. ‘I should not have closed down the generator.’

  ‘Does that really need saying?’ Rooker snarled.

  ‘Shut up, Rook.’ It was Russell, startling them all with the crack in his usual mildness.

  ‘Tomorrow, as a group, we will make contingency plans for rationing fuel and food,’ Richard said.

  Alice sat down at the edge of the circle, keeping as far as possible out of the lamplight. Richard looked almost himself again, although his face was drawn. She glanced in turn at each of the other bleary, bearded faces. She had felt safe, all through the past months, in the company of these men. She hadn’t liked them all equally, or felt completely comfortable with some of them for the entire time, but she had trusted their decisions because their experience of everything in Antarctica was much greater than hers. Now the props were being removed, leaving each of them exposed. When it came down to it, she thought, when the collective strength was eroded by pressure of circumstances or failing leadership or just the expiry of mutual tolerance, then all you were left with was yourself.

  Perhaps, after all, she had been too dependent on other people for too much of her life. On Trevor and Margaret; her friends; Peter. She had set too much store by their beliefs and trusted too little in her own instincts. Except for coming to Antarctica in the first place, that is, and then deciding to stay on even though she was pregnant. She had done that by following her own instincts.

  A cough of self-mocking laughter almost broke out of her, but she managed to suppress it before any of the others turned to stare at her.

  Right or wrong, foolish or criminally insane, she had brought herself to this point and all that mattered from now on was survival for her child’s sake.

  She lifted her head and straightened her spine. There was no question but that they would survive, the two of them. For now, there was no point in doing anything more than she had already done. She would wait quietly, to see if the ship or the helicopters came in good time.

  You wait too, baby.

  Richard concluded, ‘Thank you for restoring the power tonight. Rooker, you’ve got your job back. Let’s try to work together, shall we?’

  Rook laughed again. ‘Thanks a lot.’ His levity was somehow shocking in the sombre atmosphere. Alice alone was glad of his shrugging carelessness. It meant – it must mean – that their plight wasn’t serious.

  They drifted back to their bunks, with the old refrain of the howling wind and the bass vibration of the generator to lull them to sleep. Laure had slept through the whole business.

  When the next all-too-brief break in the succession of blizzards came, Rooker and Phil took the skidoos across the sea ice to attempt to find the margin beyond which the water would be navigable. The rest of them waited in the huts, monitoring the threatening weather reports and listlessly arranging their belongings ready for packing. No one could believe that a day of departure would actually come, but the opposite was equally unimaginable.

  The brief daylight subsided rapidly into darkness, and Phil and Rooker were still not back. Niki reported that they were in radio contact, but return progress in darkness over the snow-blanketed ice was painfully slow. Alice was tortured by anxiety. She reached a point when the only way to contain herself was by pacing slowly from the kitchen to the window overlooking the bay and back again.

  Arturo jerked his head at her. ‘What is the matter with you? Can you not sit still for one moment?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured and slumped into a chair, but five minutes later she was on her feet again and staring through the snow-laced glass.

  A smear of torchlight was visible in the distance, swaying in the blackness. ‘They’re back,’ she cried.

  The two men were exhausted. They stood blinking in the hut lights, clods of ice and driven snow thickening their beards. Phil’s hands were so numb that he couldn’t pull off his fur-lined gauntlets. When Russ did it for him they saw that his fingers were frozen into claws and the tips were blackening with frostbite. There were dead white patches on his cheeks too. Rooker sat down heavily and let Valentin unfasten and pull off his boots.

  ‘How far is it?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Let them get warm first,’ Russ said.

  Warm drinks and food were produced. Neither of them could eat much, but they drank mug after mug of sweet tea.

  It was nine miles over the ice to the closest point where they judged the ship might be able to follow leads inwards through the pack ice. These were conditions almost unheardof for the early part of March. The frozen ice was extending fast. By the time the ship did arrive, navigable water might easily be twelve or fifteen miles distant.

  ‘A day’s travel,’ Richard judged.

  Phil said nothing. After a moment Rook told them, ‘It doesn’t sound far by skidoo. But it’s uneven going all the way. With nine people and loaded sledges, I’d say more than a day.’

  ‘So if we get a clear weather spell we’ll do it by helicopter shuttle. It’s only in the worst case that we’ll have to go out over the ice. I’ll talk to Santa Ana and I’ll ask the Polar Office if they can get the ship in earlier.’

  Phil and Rooker looked at each other. With her heightened awareness Alice saw the flicker of resigned disbelief that passed between them, but she didn’t think any of the others did.

  To save fuel, the main generator was turned off every night at 10 p.m. (‘We’re not short of freezer capacity,’ Richard had said, jerking his chin at the white outdoors. The men had dug an ice cave behind the lab hut and consigned the lab freezer contents to it.) Everyone piled on extra layers of insulation and retired to their bunks to keep warm, but tonight Alice was too restless. She lit a couple of candles and paced the main room, wearing most of her clothes except her windproofs.

  A man’s shadow loomed over the wooden wall ahead of her. She turned with her heart leaping into her mouth and saw Rooker.

  ‘So you can’t sleep either,’ he said. He produced the inevitable bottle and poured scotch into two mugs.

  ‘Will you have enough whisky for the winter, if we get stuck?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is the last. Cheers.’

  She drank, then took a breath, with the spirit still scalding her throat. ‘Rook, I’ve got to get back to England.’

  ‘This is Antarctica, not Spain or somewhere. There’s no got to. You’ll get back if it’s possible and if it isn’t you’ll stay here until the ice breaks up.’

  ‘But…you said we’d get away, if you had anything to do with it.’

  The look he gave her was pitying. ‘You didn’t see what I saw today. Outside this bay, the sea has frozen in broken waves. Can you imagine that? Crests and troughs of ice, choppy, either bare and slippery or piled with loose, soft snow. Every ridge has to be negotiated, up and down for miles. It’s difficult and dangerous. And with nine people and heavy sledges?’

  ‘There are two helicopters at Santa Ana. They’ll come.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  Shockingly, she felt her face begin to crumple. Tears burned at the back of her eyes. Rooker saw and put his hands on her shoulders. Very gently, he drew her close to him. She wanted more than anything to rest her head against his shoulder and tell him what was wrong. Instead, she arched her back and resisted his comfort, afraid that he would notice the swollen bulk of her stomach.

  ‘What is it? Why does it matter so much?’

  She only shook her head.

  With his thumbs he stroked the tears away from under her eyes, surprising her with his gentleness. Then he took her face between his h
ands. ‘I’ve watched you. You’re strong and you’re brave as well. It’s only waiting. What do you fear?’

  She was ashamed to tell him her secret, with all its soft womanishness and the attendant implications of wilful miscalculation. She stepped away from him instead. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a different voice. ‘The uncertainty gets to us all in different ways, doesn’t it? I think I’ll go to bed. Thanks for the whisky.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said.

  Alice lay in her bunk and listened to the familiar din of the night wind. None of them knew for sure yet that 15 March wouldn’t see them on board the Polar Star.

  Beverley Winston and the Polar Office responded to Richard’s request that in view of the extreme weather conditions the relief ship might come to bring them out earlier than scheduled. Unfortunately, she noted, the ship’s programme was already determined and to change its itinerary would be very expensive. It would cost an estimated mimimum of $25,000 to reroute the Polar Star and in view of the fact that it would only make a few days’ difference to the planned date, Mr Sullavan judged that this would be an excessive expenditure.

  When he gave them this news, Richard’s face was creased with resignation.

  Russ let his disgust show. ‘A few days? Does he really not understand that a single day can make the difference down here?’

  ‘We should have accepted the invitation of the Ukrainians,’ Arturo complained.

  ‘Too fucking right,’ Phil groaned. He was angry with himself for having come down on the wrong side.

  ‘Lewis Sullavan’s an amateur. He wanted a polar station, but now he’s finding out that his toy’s too expensive.’ Rooker was scathing and no one tried to contradict him.

  The days passed, but every hour stretched out painfully.

  The last week came. The base was stripped down ready to be closed up and most of the equipment was packed, although it seemed impossible that they would actually be leaving.

  The weather reports were seized upon as soon as they arrived, but there was never an optimistic note. The helicopters had been on the ground at Santa Ana for more than two weeks, without flying a single excursion. The blizzards followed one upon the other with hardly a break between them, and fifty- and sixty-knot winds screamed down from the glacier.