Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Good.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’m here. Wait for the next one, then push.’

  She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Here it comes.’ Her jaw clenched and her eyes squeezed shut. Through his hands Rook felt the clench of muscles as the baby’s head was born. He cupped his hand to support and protect it, gazing down in wonder at the tiny features. He had nothing within reach with which to wipe the blood and mucus from its nasal passages, so he gently did it with the tips of his fingers.

  Here was a new person, a whole new life beginning in this instant.

  He had never known anything so natural and simple, and yet so momentous. His heart was swelling and he had to stare even harder to keep his tears from blinding him.

  ‘Is it there?’ Alice whispered.

  ‘I can see its face.’

  ‘Again,’ she panted, then gave a long wail of triumphant effort.

  Gently, with his left hand, Rooker eased out the slippery hunched shoulders and the folded limbs. The baby lay in his two palms, wet with blood and amniotic fluid. She opened her deep, dark eyes and gave a tiny ragged cry.

  ‘It’s a girl.’

  ‘Margaret,’ Alice said.

  They were both weeping.

  ‘NZ two-zero, can you hear me?’ the insistent voice went on. ‘Come in, please.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rooker croaked. He lifted the tiny creature and laid her on Alice’s belly.

  Alice cupped her hands round her child’s head and bottom, and cradled her close to her body’s warmth, and he stripped off his parka and fleece jacket and tucked it over them. Alice was laughing as well as crying. ‘Meg,’ she was murmuring.

  Beyond the windscreen of the Squirrel the mist rose like steam as the sun strengthened. The ice all around their small saucer and as far as he could see was chopped into frozen waves and crazily welded floes. But there was no time for more than the briefest glance to get his bearings. Rook looked for the helicopter’s emergency survival kit and found it stored against the fuselage behind the rear seats. He broke the seal, tore off the lid and saw what he was looking for. He shook out the silvery folds of an insulated bivouac shelter and wrapped that over and round the baby as well. ‘The baby’s born,’ he said into the headset.

  ‘Are they both all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ It felt like the most significant word he had ever uttered. ‘What do I do now?’

  He listened as the doctor advised him how to deliver the placenta and did exactly as he was told.

  ‘Don’t try to cut the cord,’ the voice ordered. So he wrapped the baby and the cord and the afterbirth in a warm bloody muddle against Alice’s body, and wound them in clothes and the folds of the shelter.

  ‘Now you fly them out to us,’ the doctor said. ‘Good luck.’

  Rooker quickly leaned over Alice and looked into her eyes. ‘You did well. Are you ready now?’

  ‘I’m ready.’ Her face was soft and beautiful, and full of trust.

  ‘Good. Let’s go.’

  Anxiety about what he had to do next was rising in his mouth like bile. He swung across into the pilot’s seat and opened the door to clamber down on to the pack. He couldn’t even try to lift off again without checking to see how much ice had formed on the Squirrel. And what he saw next made his throat close and his hands shake. There was a dark, serpentine thread winding through the ivory and grey monotony of the pack ice. It was a polynya, a little crack through which water came welling up. The weight of the Squirrel had depressed the flat floe and the sea water had flooded up over the skids. And now it had frozen over them in a thin, glassy layer of pure menace.

  Mist drifted gently over the world of ice like a legion of ghosts.

  He climbed back into the pilot’s seat, shivering without his outer clothes. He started up the engines and uttered a soundless, wordless prayer. All he could do was use the engine power to break the seal of ice and pray to God that both skids came free at the same time. If one came loose before the other and the machine tilted by more than fifteen degrees, the blades would strike the ice and send them all cartwheeling into oblivion.

  Rook pulled on the headset once again. Alice lay wrapped in her silver cocoon behind him.

  ‘Preparing for take-off, Polar Star,’ he said through clenched teeth.

  Here we go.

  He raised the collective lever and the machine trembled and tried to lift off. At once it began to list to the left and he hastily lowered the lever again. The right skid was now free but the left was still solid. The only option left to him was to try again with less power but more yaw. He swallowed hard and gave the left pedal almost full deflection as the engine screamed and the machine juddered and vibrated. Alice said something in a voice sharp with alarm. Suddenly the trapped skid tore free of the ice, and the machine soared into the air and spun through 180 degrees to face in the direction they had come. It lurched and tilted crazily as Rooker fought the yaw pedals to regain control, but now they were airborne.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Alice screamed.

  It was another five seconds before he could answer her. He gripped the stick and they rose steadily through the wreaths of mist.

  When he did speak his voice was almost steady. ‘Nothing to worry about. Not the easiest take-off.’

  He flew onwards. Then suddenly there was grey water in the distance, flecked with ice like foam, and dead ahead through the screen he saw the paler grey superstructure and red funnels of the Polar Star. There was a black smudge down on the ice margin, surrounded by half a dozen tiny orange specks.

  ‘Look,’ he said and pointed.

  He set the Squirrel down for the second time, a safe distance from the open water. The sailors were already running towards them across the waves of ice. Two of them were carrying the poles of a stretcher. They reached the helicopter and there was a babble of Spanish voices giving orders. Big gloved hands lifted Alice and the baby in their silver blanket, and laid them gently on the unfurled canvas of the stretcher.

  ‘Rook,’ she called, twisting her head to see him.

  He rested his hand on her head as the phalanx hurried over the ice. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Come back quickly.’

  He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘You’ll be safe now.’

  Another sailor was standing in the stern of the Zodiac. The big outboard motor was already revving and churning the iron-grey water of a lead in the ice. They reached the black rubber side of the dinghy. Sailors in float suits stepped and balanced all round them as they prepared to lift the stretcher. Alice fought to free one arm and caught Rooker’s wrist. She pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed it.

  A wave of terrible emotion flooded over him.

  He remembered the moment of purity and innocence amidst the panic as the baby was born. He wanted to sink down next to her stretcher and pull her into his arms, and tell her the truth and never have to run or hide or fight ever again. He wanted to hold her and the baby, and keep them safe from whatever the world could do. Most of all he wanted to tell her the truth.

  He stood stock-still, ignoring the precarious ice and the jostling sailors and their imprecations, not even noticing the cold any more. There were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks.

  ‘You will come as soon as you can? Rook? Answer me.’

  He took a deep, burning, painful breath. ‘Alice. I can’t follow you. It isn’t right. I am not right.’

  Sailors’ arms and legs kept getting in the way, blocking their sight.

  ‘You must.’

  He lowered his voice. ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done. A man died because of me. I am a murderer.’

  There wasn’t even a beat. ‘I don’t care,’ she screamed. ‘I don’t care what or who you are. I love you.’

  But it was too late. They prised her hands away from him and folded her into her coverings. Rook stepped back and watched the sailors lifting her stretcher and placing it in the bottom of the Zodiac. She was sobbing and trying to sit up, clutching Meg, and there were huge boots
clumping around her as the men clawed their way off the ice and perched themselves on the pontoon, until only one remained on the ice.

  He put his arm across Rooker’s shoulders. ‘Adiós,’ he said, not unkindly, and pushed him back towards the helicopter. Then without another glance he leaped to join his companions. The boatman immediately opened the throttle and the Zodiac nosed away through the ice-thick water. Rooker couldn’t see anything of her, but he didn’t take his eyes off the dinghy until it reached the ship’s side. The seamen clambered up the metal stairway, a line of fat orange matchstick men, but the dinghy itself and the boatman and their cargo were winched straight up on to the deck of Polar Star. Only then did Rooker finally, slowly, turn away.

  He strapped himself into the pilot’s seat and pulled on the headset. With absolute brutality he made himself think of nothing but what must be done to make a safe return to Kandahar. Batteries, fuel pump. Start up both engines. The Squirrel’s blades spun again. ‘NZ two-zero, airborne,’ he muttered.

  The voice of Polar Star’s radio operator came right back at him. ‘Good luck,’ he repeated.

  Alice saw the ship’s mast and funnels looming crazily over her, and there were faces and the backs of heads, then the cream-painted walls and booming stairways of the interior. Meg’s tiny wet body lay in a sticky morass on her belly but she was alive, stirring, and her cry was a bleat that sounded louder in her mother’s head than all the shouting in Spanish and the racing footsteps and banging of heavy steel doors.

  An indoor draught of hot air hit Alice full in the face. It stank of oil and paint and food and disinfectant, so much stronger than anything she had smelled in months that she almost retched. Another door opened ahead of her and she was borne into a clean, quiet white space. Spanish voices told her to be ready and then she was lifted on to a bed. A man’s face came into view. He looked odd until she realised that it was only because he was soap-pink, and plump, and clean-shaven.

  ‘You have given us quite a big surprise,’ the doctor said.

  When the cord was tied and cut, and Alice had been stitched, and Meg had been examined and warmed on a heated pad, and wrapped in linen cloths and warm towels, the doctor gave her back to Alice to hold. She was entirely swaddled except for her small, composed face. For what seemed a very long time, suspended between awe and amazement, Alice studied her stipple of black eyelashes and the scoop of flesh that formed her nose and the precise bud of her mouth. A jerky tape of the helicopter and Rook’s stricken face played inside her head, and shock and relief made the breath catch in her throat as she held the white bundle close.

  ‘I think all right, both of you, to put you on the aeroplane,’ the doctor pronounced at last.

  Alice lifted her head to stare at him. Pieces of the world, little fragments of awareness, were sliding back into place. She realised that she could hear the throb of the ship’s engines. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To Santa Ana,’ the doctor said, staring a little. ‘And then, I think they make you a flight to Santiago. We have no facility on the ship…’

  She looked around her with a sudden falling-away sensation. ‘Santiago? Wait. The pilot…the helicopter pilot. Where is he? I have to speak to him. I thought the ship would wait for the other people to come aboard from Kandahar…’

  The doctor shook his head.

  Alice grabbed at his wrist. ‘Why not?’

  Her vehemence made him demur, ‘I am only the medical man. I will find someone to tell you.’

  The ship’s first officer knocked and came in. He wore a white shirt with epaulettes, the buttons straining over his generous paunch. He told Alice that the helicopter had landed again at Kandahar.

  ‘Thank you,’ she managed to whisper, over the disablement of relief.

  The man twinkled at her. ‘You are VIP, I think.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We have already urgent radio instructions from the big man, we are straight to Santa Ana and a special plane for you and the baby, all the way to hospital in Santiago.’

  The big man.

  Alice struggled to tease some sense out of the tide of bewilderment. It must be Lewis Sullavan. ‘And the others?’

  The officer almost shrugged. ‘Another ship. Maybe one, two days. But by then you will be in a safe place. By order.’ He patted her hand and turned down a corner of the wrappings in order to gaze benignly at Meg’s sleeping face.

  Alice let her head rest against the pillows. She stared unseeingly at the metal cupboards that lined the walls of the ship’s clinic, the stainless-steel sinks and the square of colourless Antarctic sky beyond the square porthole.

  ‘Please will you thank everyone for me? The sailors on the Zodiac and the radio operator and the captain. Everyone,’ she repeated.

  The officer patted her hand again. ‘It is not every day,’ he murmured.

  When he had gone and the doctor was at his desk in the corner writing notes, Alice shut her eyes. The tape instantly started playing its jerky scenes again and she knew that she would be living with them for a long time yet.

  She could hear his voice too, a desperate low exclamation, I am a murderer.

  She had answered, I don’t care what or who you are. I love you.

  That was the simple truth.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Midway through the flight from Madrid to Heathrow the Sullavanco PR woman turned to Alice. ‘There may be some press at the airport. You don’t have to say anything, of course. But there will be photographers. Just so you’re ready, okay?’

  ‘I see,’ Alice replied.

  The PR woman, who introduced herself as Lisa, had met them off the plane from Santiago and escorted them to the London flight. She offered to carry Meg to the departure gate, but Alice declined.

  In the five days since they had flown out of Antarctica she had never let the baby out of her sight and most of the time she had held her in her arms. Meg slept and cried her small mewing cry, and Alice watched her and fed her, realising in bewilderment that she had hardly unwrapped the first layer of the package that she and Rook had delivered into the world. Sometimes, in the hazy midday sunshine of her room at the Clinica Providencia in Santiago, she felt confident that they would come to know each other in good time. At others, mostly in the lonely small hours when Meg was asleep and she lay staring at the small picture of the Virgin on the wall opposite her bed, she wondered in terror how she would ever find a mother’s instincts within herself after the way it had all begun.

  The ship had taken her to Santa Ana and as the second day of Meg’s life dawned they went ashore in the Zodiac again. This time she carried the baby wrapped in layers of ship’s blankets. She refused a stretcher, but most of the Chilean personnel came out anyway to help her walk the few metres up to the base. When she was ensconced in the living area one or two of them shyly asked if they could take photographs of her holding Meg. Alice nodded distractedly; all she could think of was how to contact Rooker back at Kandahar.

  ‘Please try to raise them for me,’ she begged Miguel, the radio operator. ‘Please? Now?’

  The Chilean leader was explaining that a Dash-7 chartered by Lewis Sullavan was on its way from Punta Arenas to collect her and would land at the permanent ski-way in about two hours’ time. Sullavan had sent a radio message, would she like to read it?

  Alice was amazed. Less than twenty-four hours had elapsed since Meg’s arrival, but from wherever he was in the world Lewis was already dealing with matters. Or his people were. All this would be for Margaret’s sake, she guessed, and long-ago memories.

  He sent his congratulations, adding that they were no less warm for being unexpected, and his best wishes for both Alice’s good health and the baby’s, following the dramatic circumstances of her arrival. (Lewis evidently knew all the details.) She was to allow him the privilege of making arrangements for them from now on. Professor Peel and Dr Mather were being informed of her whereabouts, and she would of course be able to speak to them from Santiago.
In the meantime, so that she could rest and recover, it would be simpler if she were to let Sullavanco do any talking that might be necessary.

  What talking? Alice wondered in surprise, before she put the message aside. She wasn’t thinking properly yet even about Trevor and Margaret. All that mattered were her daughter and the radio connection to Kandahar.

  The minutes crawled while she drank tea and waited. The Santa Ana people had improvised a cradle for Meg out of a cardboard carton lined with towels and in order not to seem ungrateful she laid the baby in it. Her sleeping face was a pucker of closed-up features with one fist pressed against her mouth. The men gathered round and peered at her, awkwardly smiling. Mike, the second helicopter pilot, Miguel and the leader were the only ones who spoke English.

  Miguel’s head came round the connecting door to the radio room. ‘If you like to talk…’

  Alice stumbled forward.

  Niki’s voice greeted her. ‘You are well, and lucky, I hear.’

  She gasped, ‘Nik…oh, Nik, are you all right, all of you?’

  ‘A little cold, a little hungry, but not so bad. Polar Star will come back or maybe another ship, but first we must have no mist in order to fly.’

  Alice tripped over the words in her anxiety. ‘That’s good, I mean, not good that you’re still there. I’m sorry I took the ship away and everything. Nik, please, I need to speak to Rooker. Is he there? Over.’

  ‘He is waiting here.’

  In her mind’s eye she saw the generator hut and the improvised table and the tilley lamp hanging from the hook overhead. And Rook’s face.

  ‘Alice. Can you hear me?’ His familiar voice sounded remote.

  ‘I’m here. Tell me. I know you landed, but the flight back, was it all right? Over.’

  ‘It was less eventful.’

  ‘Rook. Thank you for everything you did.’

  The words were so dry and colourless. She could only pray that he knew what lay behind them. She closed her eyes on a sudden rush of tears, then opened them again to see the blurred clutter of the Chilean radio room. Two hundred miles of ice already separated them, and soon the distance would stretch to thousands more.