Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘It isn’t bad.’

  ‘It doesn’t look good to me.’

  The children were silhouetted against the glittering water. Jackson and Corinna were walking in the wet sand, and the baby was trying to stretch his legs to match his brother’s footprints. Rooker closed his eyes on a sudden clutch of pain and greenish suns swam and merged behind his eyelids. He heard Frankie pop the ring on a can of beer for herself and take a long swallow.

  ‘What happened to you, down at the South Pole?’

  Automatically he corrected her, ‘We weren’t anywhere near the Pole.’ Then he added, ‘A woman had a baby down there, can you imagine that? I delivered it.’

  He was surprised. Once the first words were out, he felt a dam ready to break behind his tongue. There was a huge weight of water, words, history, waiting to pour out of him.

  ‘Go on,’ Frankie said softly.

  He told her what had happened. He tried to explain about the innocence and how amazed he had been to hold it in his hands. Meg’s birth had made him feel used up and polluted, with the dirt of a lifetime ingrained in the pores of his skin and the furls of his brain. It was too late to clean up. All he could do was keep away from them. Stay away from them.

  ‘Rooker, you aren’t seeing straight. You’ve lived tough, but you’re no worse than most people who’ve been in this world four decades or more. What’s so bad in the past that you think you’re going to pollute a newborn just by being near to her?’

  He wouldn’t tell Frankie what. There was only one person he might have told – he had already blurted out the words, so he could have filled in the details – but she was nowhere near this sunny-day picture of a lake shore. He held up his hands instead, cupping them round empty air. ‘She was so tiny. Folded, crimson, wet. And yet as soon as she took a breath she was a complete being. It was as though I had never seen anything in my life before, never opened my eyes on anything that mattered. And after I had seen it nothing really mattered except the two of them. Look at me. In the long term, how much better will it be for Alice and Meg if I’m not there? I can give up anything in the world for them, easily. Even the chance of being with them.’

  They were both watching the two bigger children as they ran into the shallow water, sending up glittering cages of spray. Sammy hesitated, wobbling as the wavelets ran around his ankles.

  ‘But children don’t judge you, or ask for your history. They take you as you are. Mine do, don’t they, and you let them? Tell me how you know that you are doing the right thing by giving these people up, if that’s what drifting around the world like this means. Did you ask the mother – Alice – if she wanted you to be quite so nobly considerate? Or are you just being selfish and listening to your own inside voice?’

  Jackson waded deeper, holding up his skinny arms like chicken wings to keep them out of the cold water for as long as possible, and Corinna shivered on his heels so as not to be left behind or outdone.

  It was more than two years since he had last seen Frankie, but even so he counted her as his closest friend. He had come up here to find her, hadn’t he, in the end? He had told her some of the truth; he should listen to her now. He guessed that if he didn’t there was nothing left for him to do and nowhere else to turn.

  ‘No, I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘Jesus, Frankie. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘I think it does matter. Maybe it matters more than anything. Do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Frankie tipped her head back to drain her beer. Then she stood up and walked almost to the water’s edge where she scraped up a mound of gritty sand around the can. She stooped to collect a handful of pebbles, then came back to give half of them to Rooker. They took it in turns to aim at the can. Four out of five of Rook’s pebbles pinged, and all five of Frankie’s.

  ‘Does she love you?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘She’s English.’

  Frankie laughed. ‘So are you.’

  ‘Not in quite the same way, Frank. I’m just passport-English, she’s Oxford and educated and classy, and she doesn’t say much, but when she does believe me it counts. The answer to your question is I would have to find that out.’

  Frankie let her long arms hang over the arms of the chair. She had a tattoo on her right bicep, a rose with an exaggeratedly thorny stem.

  ‘Then find out.’

  ‘I might discover she’s gone back to Meg’s father. I might screw things up for her in a hundred different ways. Or she might see things differently, now we’re not on the ice any longer.’

  ‘Is that how little you think of her?’

  Shamed, Rook murmured, ‘No.’

  Frankie picked out another fistful of pebbles, this time keeping them all for herself. She sat up very straight and aimed a savage volley at the beer can. She didn’t trust herself to look at him.

  Jackson and Corinna were trying to coax Sammy into the water. They each took one of his hands and swung him between them so his feet churned the surface while he yelled with the pleasure of fear.

  Frankie snapped, ‘Go to England, Rook. You think you’re strong but you’re not; you’ve got more cracks in you than grandaddy’s whip. You never will be really strong either, not until you’ve had the courage to make yourself vulnerable, and if you don’t do it soon you’ll be so stiffened up that you’ll never be able to. Fuck. Listen to me, you asshole.’

  She shouted these last words, making him jump. She leaped to her feet and pushed him so hard that his flimsy chair overbalanced and sent him sprawling in the sand. Corinna let go of Sam’s hand and he clawed briefly at his brother, then slid into the water. Frankie was already sprinting across the strip of sand as Rooker sat up. She ploughed straight into the water and swept Sammy into her arms, and the other two children clung to her as she waded out again. They lurched back together, a misshapen eight-legged creature that spattered the sand with drips. Frankie’s long skirt clung to her legs.

  Corinna was blue-lipped and her teeth were chattering. Rooker wrapped a towel round her and rubbed her dry. ‘Corinna Corinna,’ he sang as he did it.

  ‘I hate that tune. Everyone always sings it when I’m around. It sucks.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  She shrugged and he saw the way her skin slid so smoothly over the planes of her shoulder blades. A kind of pain that was now knotted with anticipation suddenly gathered in him again.

  ‘Because.’ Corinna put her head on one side and he saw her mother in her once more. He couldn’t detect much of Ross.

  ‘Rook, c’n we go in a boat now? You said,’ Jackson called out from inside his towel.

  ‘Sure. You coming, Frankie?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head, still not looking at him. ‘Sammy and I’ll stay here. Eh, Sam? You and me?’

  They stayed late at the shore and it was already dark as they made their way home. All three children were asleep in the back and Frankie stared into the oncoming lights as Rook drove. She had been quiet all afternoon and he had left her to herself. There was enough talk from the kids.

  But now she put her hand on his arm. ‘Rooker?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you going?’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you scared to? You could phone first or mail her or something.’

  ‘Yes, I’m scared. And if I’m going to see her I’d rather it was face to face to start with. It’s easier to see the truth that way.’

  There was a silence.

  After a while Frankie said, ‘Edith called me last week.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘To find out where you were.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘That I had no more idea than she did. It was true, then.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rooker said.

&nb
sp; Two days later he was still at Frankie’s place. A weight of uncertainty and indecision pressed on him, and he tried to work it off by painting the yard fences and taking down the storm shutters to replace the old frames.

  He watched the patients coming and going from Frankie’s husband’s chiropractic clinic adjoining the house, and in the evenings he shared a beer with Ross while he talked about the Iraq war. On the third evening he helped Frankie to carry in the grocery bags after she came back from the store.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  She took the rolled-up baton of a magazine out of one of the bags and pitched it at him. The glossy pages flipped in a coloured blur. Rook bent slowly and picked it up, and it fell open at a big picture. He stared down into Alice’s face. She was holding Meg on her lap and a fierce-looking old woman stood very straight beside them.

  ‘That’s her, isn’t it?’

  Rook felt a hammering inside him. ‘Yes.’ He couldn’t read the text. The words jumped around in front of his eyes.

  ‘So, are you going to England?’

  All he could see was Alice’s face, he could hear nothing but her voice in his ears. ‘No,’ he said wretchedly. ‘How can I?’

  Ross went out that evening to a football game. Once the children were in bed, Frankie and Rooker sat on the sofa together in front of the television. She curled up with her feet tucked under the folds of her skirt, her head resting on his chest. Rooker lightly stroked her hair, disentangling loose strands from her long earring and tucking them behind her ear. A glint of light on her cheek caught his eye and he saw that she was crying.

  ‘Frank?’ He drew her upright and cupped her face in his hands. She sniffed and tried to smile. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I want…’ she began. ‘Well, shit, it doesn’t matter what I want. I want you to be happy. Go to England, find your Alice. Why can’t you? Why are you so…so rigid? It’s as if you’ve made up your mind not to be happy. If she loves you, what right do you have to make her miserable?’

  Frankie’s wet face was flushed. He looked into her eyes. Was that true? he wondered. Had he decided on the day that Lester died that happiness was not for him?

  ‘You saw the picture. Her mother, her child. A whole life that I don’t know, don’t belong to. How can I walk into that?’

  She stared at him. ‘How? By putting one foot in front of the other.’

  Rooker let his head sink forward until their foreheads and noses touched. Frankie’s hot tears ran over his thumbs.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

  He nodded slowly. Their faces were pressed together, his eyes were closed now. The dam holding back the buried words was close to breaking. Tears forced themselves between his eyelids and he clenched his teeth to hold everything in place. He loved Frankie too. Like a sister.

  ‘Go to England,’ she begged him. ‘Do it for me.’

  That she should be so generous, so full of concern for him and not herself, made him cry properly. He kissed her forehead and she clung to him. It was a moment before he could speak.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he promised her at last.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Jo protested.

  ‘Or else I’m totally sane.’

  ‘What about Meg?’

  ‘All Meg needs is me. And I will be there with her.’

  Alice spoke with confidence. In the months since she had brought her home Meg had grown. She was still small compared with full-term babies of her age, but she was healthy and making good progress. Travelling with her now would be nothing like flying from Santiago to Patagonia in the first precarious week of her life.

  They were in the house in Jericho and Jo was helping Alice to clear cupboards ready for it to be let yet again.

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I don’t know how long I’ll be there. I can rent a house like this one, can’t I?’

  ‘What about the Department? Your research, your students? They used to mean everything to you and now it’s as if nothing except Rooker means anything at all. You’re uprooting your baby, carting her off to the middle of nowhere…’

  ‘It’s New Zealand,’ Alice said mildly, ‘to begin with. Not Outer Mongolia. Of course what I’m leaving here is still important to me. But I have to do my best to find him; if I sit and do nothing my life here will be diminished by more than I’m prepared to accept.’

  They came to a set of china. ‘Pack or leave?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Leave. People might as well use it, mightn’t they?’

  Enough foreign academics visited Oxford to make letting a house easy. The chairs, pictures, china that furnished hers were just things, now. She had no anxieties about leaving them. There were infinitely more important assets that couldn’t be stored in cupboards.

  ‘Jo? When I left for the south, I thought you were jealous of my freedom.’

  Jo stood upright. She brushed back her hair, ready to make a serious statement, the way she had been doing since they were fourteen years old. ‘I was, of course. Our situations were completely different then and what you were doing showed up my dissatisfaction with mine. But now we are in the same place.’

  ‘Not really. You have Harry, a family, you’ve made a set of commitments and it isn’t a capitulation to be here. It’s a promise.’

  ‘You could have Pete. You could be a family.’

  Alice closed a cupboard door with a small, decisive click. ‘That isn’t what I want,’ she said.

  Margaret was much more difficult to deal with.

  ‘New Zealand? For how long?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘You can’t, Alice, and that’s flat. Not running after some safety officer who…’

  ‘Would it be different if he were a scientist?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Not at all.’ Although Alice didn’t think that was quite the truth. ‘You’ve got a child now, you have responsibilities.’

  Didn’t you? Alice wanted to ask. But that would not have been fair. As a child she had had Trevor, they both had. Always: Trevor had always been the given in Margaret’s life as well as in her own. He sat on the sofa now, with the cat beside him. He was rubbing the worn corduroy of his trouser legs, massaging warmth into his thin legs even though it was a balmy, still evening. It was Trevor’s constancy that had enabled Margaret’s unpredictability and without him she would have been half the person. Marriages were infinitely complex, Alice thought. Aspects of her parents’ could still take her by surprise. She saw their partnership now as if it were a rock specimen, revolving on a display plinth, presenting her with new facets as it rotated.

  ‘I’m not abandoning her,’ she said quietly. ‘Where I go, she goes.’

  ‘What will you do about money?’ Margaret asked. She was always frugal. Money was for saving, not spending.

  Alice had resigned her teaching and research post. ‘I’ve got the rent from the house. Some savings. I’ll have to be careful, that’s all.’

  Trevor looked straight at her. ‘I’ve got a bit put by. You can have that.’

  Margaret cried, ‘No. She can’t. That’s not the way to handle this.’

  But Trevor held up his hand. He said in a tone that Alice had never heard him use before, ‘Be quiet, Margaret.’

  Margaret shrank. Tears came into her eyes. ‘I’m not that well, Alice. You know I’m not. When am I ever going to see Meg?’

  Alice put her arms round her mother’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head where the strands of thin hair parted to reveal pink scalp. ‘Often,’ she comforted her. ‘I’ll make sure of it.’

  Pete tried cajoling, then anger and outrage, and finally threats. ‘You can’t take her without my consent. I won’t let you do it.’

  Alice took his two hands and turned them over in hers, looking at the nailbeds with purple hammer bruises and cuticles rimmed with plaster dust. ‘Don’t do this to us,’ she begged at last. ‘Not when we could stay friends.�
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  They were in the Jericho house where the last few boxes of Alice’s clothes and books were waiting to be taken back to store. He broke away from her and leaned his forehead against the wall, beating at the paintwork with his clenched fist. ‘This is our home,’ he groaned.

  ‘It was. Everything changes, Pete. You can’t fix life like…like a sample catalogued in a drawer. All you can do is move with it.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ he mumbled, and there was real pain in his voice. ‘She’s my daughter.’

  ‘Pete, she will always be your daughter. For the rest of your life and hers.’

  He lifted his head. ‘Yes.’ He sighed then. ‘Make sure you bring her back to me.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  Becky said, ‘I think you are doing the right thing. I don’t want you to go, but that’s for selfish reasons.’

  ‘It is the right thing,’ Alice agreed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ‘I would like Alice Peel’s address, please.’

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t give out expedition members’ personal details, Mr Rooker. The Polar Office will forward any communications, of course.’

  He was standing in a mid-town phone booth, his bag at his feet, waiting to pick up the express bus for JFK. A hooting stream of yellow cabs and buses and cars poured past him, cruelly glittering in the low sunshine. Rooker frowned into the glare. He still wasn’t sure whether or not to go to England. Prickles of indecision ran down his spine like beads of sweat. In spite of his promise to Frankie it would be easy – too easy – to find a way not to do it.

  ‘Could I speak to Beverley Winston?’

  ‘Just a moment, please.’

  The line went dead and he thought the transatlantic connection had failed, but at last the woman’s voice came back. ‘You could try her on this number.’

  Rooker crooked the receiver to his ear and scribbled the digits on the reverse of his air ticket folder. He pressed the disconnect button and rapidly dialled again.