Читать книгу Sun at Midnight - Rosie Thomas - Страница 10

‘Your mother’s not very well,’ Trevor said.

Alice was sitting at her desk in the Department of Geology. She had been trying to concentrate on her work but her eyes kept sliding to the square of sky visible from her window. Now as she pressed the phone to her ear the maps she had been studying lost their definition and ran together in a grey blur. ‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘She’s picked up a chest infection. The hotel doctor’s a bit worried about her.’

‘Can I talk to her?’

‘She’s asleep at the moment.’

‘How long has she been ill?’

‘A couple of days.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Trevor sighed. ‘You know what she’s like.’

Small, fierce, unfaltering, impatient with weakness. As stubborn as a rock formation. Yes, Alice knew what her mother was like.

‘Are you going to bring her home? Shall I come out there?’

‘There’s no need for that. Rest and antibiotics is what she needs.’

‘Are you sure? I’ll call you later and see how she is. Give her a kiss from me when she wakes up.’

After Trevor had rung off Alice tried to turn back to her work, but anxiety nudged at her and in the end she gave up. It was almost lunchtime. Jo’s house was nearby and Jo would have constructive advice to offer. But it was Pete she wanted to talk to. She would call in at his studio and tell him about Margaret. They could have a sandwich and a cup of coffee together. Alice left her desk at once and rode her bicycle through the traffic.

The studio was in an old warehouse at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mark’s side was closed up, but the heavy door to Pete’s hung narrowly ajar, sagging slightly on its hinges. Alice padlocked her bike to a street sign advising that there was no parking. A smart new Mini was parked right alongside.

She edged round the door and slipped into the studio. It was dim inside after the bright daylight. Pete wasn’t working, then. The blinds at the big windows were all drawn. The concrete-floored space smelled of dust and resin, and something familiar scraped at her subconscious in the split second before she identified it and the association. It was music, the same song that had been playing in the punt on the afternoon when Pete jumped into the water.

His latest work in progress loomed above Alice’s head. It was a bird’s nest of twisted metal and within the lattice cage some of his found objects were suspended on thin wires – a buckled bicycle wheel, a polystyrene wig block like a blanched head that revolved very slowly as the studio air stirred. The hair at the nape of Alice’s neck prickled as she looked around for the source of the music. Peter’s welding torch lay on the ground, with the black welding mask that made him look like Darth Vader discarded beside it. She took three quick steps to the inner door, past more accumulated debris.

The door led into a boxed-off cubicle with a metalworker’s bench at which Pete did his smaller-scale work. There was a grey filing cabinet, a kettle and a clutch of mugs stained with rings of tannin. The CD player was balanced on the broken typist’s chair from the skip outside the Parks. A girl’s handbag, an expensive-looking fringed suede affair, spilled its contents on the floor. The girl herself was perched on the edge of the cluttered bench, steadying herself with her hands. Her denim legs stretched out on either side of Pete’s head.

Pete hadn’t heard Alice come in. Just above and to the side of his right ear Alice could see the butterfly tattoo.

The girl looked straight into Alice’s eyes as the song finished.

‘Oh, shit,’ the girl said.

Alice didn’t move. There was a scramble of movements from the other two as Peter leaped to his feet and the girl pulled up and zipped her jeans. She bent down sideways and picked up her bag, briefly holding it in front of her chest as if it were a piece of body armour.

Peter shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. For the moment he was silenced.

It was the girl who spoke first. ‘Look, what can I say?’

She had one of those low, drawling voices. Alice knew that it must be her car parked outside, probably a twentyfirst present from Daddy. Pete liked girls who weren’t going to rely on him for support. She belonged in that category herself. The thought struck a shiver of bewildered amusement through her and when he glimpsed it in her face Pete winced and said in a thick voice, ‘Al, you know, it isn’t…’

‘It isn’t what I think? Is that what you’re going to say?’

He held up his hand. ‘Georgia, you’d better go.’

With a part of her mind Alice was noticing how pretty she was and how young she looked. In contrast to this glowing girl she felt old and dull. She was also surprised by Georgia’s self-possession. She had hitched her bag over her shoulder and now she was looking coolly around the little room to see if she had dropped anything else. She leaned across and pressed a button to eject the disc from the player. When she had tucked it inside her bag she stood facing Pete with her back to Alice. Alice gazed at the graceful lines of her neck and narrow shoulders.

‘When will I see you again?’

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not for a bit.’

‘I see. Well, then, I’ll call you.’ She turned away and glanced at Alice. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. It wasn’t intended to be like this. But all’s fair, as the saying goes.’

Then she left.

What does one say now? Alice wondered. Pete was waiting, ready to take his cue from her. He looked like a schoolboy anticipating a scolding, half truculent and half defiant. She wanted to tell him that he was an adult, a grown man. He couldn’t get away with being a naughty boy for ever.

‘I came over because my mother’s not well. I’m worried about her. I was thinking we could have lunch. Just a sandwich or something.’

Her words fell into the space between them. Pete’s expression changed to one of relief, reprieve.

‘Of course we can. Come on. Where would you like to go?’

‘What? No. I don’t want to go anywhere. That was before I saw…what I just saw.’

He rushed in: ‘Al, believe me, it’s one of those dumb things, it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It’s just a dick thing?’

His face flushed. ‘No. Well, if you want to call it that, yes. I suppose.’

‘How many?’

‘How many times? For God’s sake. She’s just a student.’

‘I meant how many other women.’

‘Alice, please. What do you think I am? I’m with you, I love you.’

She stared at him. She wanted to have him put his arms round her and hear him saying that this was all a mistake – not in the guilty, formulaic way that he was saying it now, but in a way that meant she could believe him. And at the same time she knew that this was utterly unrealistic because she would never be able to believe what he told her, never again, no matter what he said. He had lied to her and he was lying to her now.

When he had finished protesting she listened carefully. She thought she could hear a tiny, feathery whisper. It was the sound of her illusions, softly collapsing.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

He thumped his clenched fist on the bench. It was a theatrical gesture. ‘Listen, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. It was a mistake and I was regretting it even before you walked in. But it happens.’ The way an avalanche happens, or a thunderstorm, presumably. A natural cataclysm that was beyond his control.

Alice said carefully, ‘You didn’t look as though you were regretting it. I’m going back to work now. We’ll have to talk about what’s going to happen, about how to…’ She was going to say put an end to everything, but she couldn’t find a word that fitted. ‘But I don’t want to do it today. If you can’t find a place to stay tonight, I’ll go to Jo’s.’

She was dry-eyed and her voice sounded level, but she didn’t feel in control. Her stomach churned with nausea and the palms of her hands were wet. Then she turned round and walked out through the studio. The polystyrene head was still gently turning on its thread of wire. She had never understood Peter’s art, she thought. She had longed to, had dragged her mind and her senses to contemplation of it over and over again, but she had never been able to make sense of it. She was like Trevor and Margaret, really: just a literal-minded scientist.

Unable to think clearly, she cycled back to her office, combed her hair and drank a glass of water. Then she sat through a long discussion with five of her colleagues about grant allocations for the coming year. She took the minutes, concentrating on noting everyone’s different points with meticulous accuracy. Once or twice, though, when someone spoke to her, she found herself staring at them and struggling to inject meaning into the babble of their words.

‘Are you all right, Alice?’ Professor Devine asked as the meeting broke up. David Devine was the head of her department and an old friend of both of her parents.

She smiled straight at him. ‘Yes, thanks, I’m fine.’ In fact, she felt sick.

From her office, she called Jo. ‘Are you in? Can I drop in after work?’

‘Of course I’m in. I’m always in. The babies are having a bit of a crap day, though.’

‘I’ll give you a hand.’

Jo and Harry lived in Headington. Alice cycled slowly up the hill, buffeted by the tailwind from passing buses, her legs feeling like bags of wet sand. She rang Jo’s doorbell and leaned against the wall of the porch while she waited for her to come to the door. How many times had she stood here?

Jo opened the door with one of the babies held against her shoulder. She cupped the back of his head with one hand and kept him in place with her chin and forearm. There was a bottle of formula in her free hand. Alice kissed her, smelling baby sick and talcum powder.

‘Come through,’ Jo said. She edged past the double babycarrier that blocked the hall and led the way to the kitchen. The second twin was in a Moses basket on the table. He was awake, his black-eyed stare fixed on the shadows moving on the ceiling above him. ‘Cup of tea? Wine?’

‘I’d love some tea, please,’ Alice said. She didn’t think she could keep a glass of wine down although she would have welcomed the bluntening effect of alcohol. ‘Can I hold him?’

Jo handed the baby over at once. He frowned and squinted up at Alice, who knew that she handled him with that stiff, alarmed concentration of the utterly unpractised. He responded by going stiff himself and puckering his face up, ready to start crying.

‘Here, plug this in,’ Jo said, handing over the bottle of formula. Alice poked the rubber teat into the baby’s mouth and he began to suck. She eased herself into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, the Moses basket and a packet of Pampers and a pile of baby clothes at her elbow. Through the open doors into the garden she could see leaves and the ragged, dirty-pink globes of mophead hydrangeas. Getting into his stride, the baby snuffled and sucked more vigorously.

‘How are you?’ Alice asked and Jo half turned from the sink. She looked, as she so often did nowadays, on the verge of tears.

‘I’ve had to start bottle-feeding in the last couple of days. I just can’t go on feeding them both myself. This way, they sleep a bit longer between feeds and I can sometimes get as much as two hours myself.’

‘That’s much better, isn’t it?’

Jo nodded, but without seeming convinced. She wanted to be a good mother, as well as a good girl, and that meant breastfeeding. Alice knew this without Jo having to say as much.

‘Look at me, Ali,’ Jo said quietly.

‘I am looking.’

She was wearing a shapeless shirt under which her breasts swam like porpoises. Her skirt hem hung unevenly and revealed pale calves and unshaven shins, and her pretty face was drawn. Alice thought she looked older but there was also a new solemnity about her, an extra elemental dimension that added greatly to her appeal. Even in her weariness she was sexier than she had ever been before her pregnancy.

‘Sometimes I think that no one ever looks at me now, even Harry. I’m an invisible appendage. I have no function except as a machine for feeding and wiping and tending Leo and Charlie. I’m just a mother. I want to be myself, but I can’t even remember what I was like before this happened.’

‘You are yourself. Only more so. This time will pass.’

Alice wanted to put an arm round her friend, but she was pinned down by the baby she was nursing. And this was only one of them, for a few minutes. When she looked out into the garden again she saw how narrow the view really was. Jo had told her how long it took to get both babies ready to leave the house, even for a walk to the shops. What must it be like, to think that the world had shrunk from its infinite breadth to the four walls of a house and a square of suburban garden?

‘It’s only twelve weeks since they were born. They’ll grow up and start running around.’ With the present helpless morsel of humanity in her arms, Alice realised how very far in the future this must seem.

Jo sighed. ‘I know, of course they will. It is getting better, too. Remember at the beginning when some days I didn’t even find time to get dressed? I’m sorry, Al. I don’t mean to complain. I’m just sounding off because I’ve been here on my own all day. I wanted them so much and I do love them. I didn’t even know what loving meant before I had them.’

She put a teapot and two mugs on the table.

‘Which one is this?’ Alice asked sheepishly.

Jo laughed. ‘Leo.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ll learn to tell them apart.’

‘Don’t worry. Even Harry gets it wrong half the time. D’you want some toast or a biscuit or something? ’Fraid I haven’t made a Victoria sponge.’

Alice shook her head quickly.

Jo eyed her, then sat down next to her at the table. ‘What’s up?’

‘It’s Pete.’

‘Go on.’

Alice told her. While she was talking Leo’s eyelids fluttered and then closed. His gums loosened on the bottle teat and a shiny whitish bubble swelled at the corner of his mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said at the end. ‘And I’m sorry for going on and on about my problems without giving you a chance.’

‘You didn’t. You never do that.’

There was a moment of quiet in the kitchen. Both babies were asleep, and the oasis of calm silence was more notable and the more precious because it would last only a few minutes. Jo’s face went smooth and luminous as she stared peacefully into the garden. Alice’s sympathy for her twitched into sudden envy and she bit her lip at the realisation.

She said, ‘The thing is, I’m not sure that Georgia is the only one. Now I’ve seen this much, all kinds of other details seem to be falling into place. Pete’s so evasive and maybe I’ve been convincing myself that it’s just because he’s an artist, needs space, can’t be tied down. When he doesn’t come home in the evenings, when he goes off to Falmouth or London or Dieppe for days at a time, I just get on with my work and feel pleased about how…how separately productive and mutually in accord we are. In fact, he’s probably got half a dozen women on the go, hasn’t he?’

She started on a laugh to distance herself from this possibility and then a flicker in Jo’s eyes made the laughter stick in her throat.

‘What do you know? Jo, please tell me.’

Jo hesitated. ‘Harry saw him one night. In a pub near Bicester.’

‘Everyone goes to the pub, Jo. Quite a lot of Pete’s working life seems to take place in them, in fact. What does he call it? Necessary inspiration?’

But when Jo said nothing Alice felt the last of her defences crumbling. Was I happy? she wondered. Or was I just determined to be? ‘Go on,’ she said miserably.

‘Pete didn’t see him, because he had his tongue down some woman’s throat at the time. That’s how Harry put it. He said they didn’t look as if they were going to get as far as the car park before they…well. I’m sorry, Al. I’m so tactless. I’ve forgotten how to talk to real people, haven’t I?’

‘Was it Georgia?’

‘It didn’t sound like her.’

‘No. I see.’

In the Moses basket Charlie stirred and gave an experimental whimper. Jo said, ‘It’s coming up to his lively time. He’ll be awake now until about ten. I thought you sort of knew about Pete and that was the way you chose to handle it. Knowing and not knowing.’

‘Perhaps,’ Alice murmured. Humiliation made her want to bend double, as if she had a stomach-ache.

‘You deserve better,’ Jo observed, lifting Charlie out of his basket as full-scale crying got under way. She rocked him gently, shushing him softly.

‘Perhaps,’ Alice said again.

‘Do you love him?’

Yes, she loved him. Or was it actually the idea of him that she loved, the concept of Pete? Not just the illusory domesticity that they had enjoyed, but the very way his disarray and lack of precision had made an anarchic foil for her own selfimposed orderliness?

Perhaps that was it. His work, his pieces of sculpture, were only just on the right side of giant rubbish heaps. (Of course they are, he would say. It is all a metaphor for our world. Arbitrary arrangements scraped together in a disintegrating society, drowning in its own discarded refuse. Or something like that. She never had quite mastered the language.) Whereas she had grown up with Trevor, sitting on a sun-warmed stone and watching her father frowning and scribbling stratigraphic measurements in his notebook. She had loved the names of the rocks. Gabbro and dolerite and basalt. The earth’s apparent solidity and her father’s dependability had somehow fused into a reassuring constant. It was only much later, as a geology student herself, that she began to appreciate the immense scale of the earth’s restlessness. And now, in her mid-thirties, as the balance of power between them shifted and her parents grew frailer, and as Pete’s shape shifted, her notions of what was solid and dependable were all being overturned.

‘I don’t know,’ she told Jo now. The realisation that she truly didn’t know shocked her.

‘What will you do? Tell him to behave or else?’

‘It’s a bit late for that. I was going to ask if I could stay here until he’s moved out?’

They were both holding a baby. The sun had moved off the garden and the light was fading.

Jo said immediately, ‘Of course you can.’

Alice made pasta for dinner while Jo bathed the babies and fed them again. Harry came home, his face creased from the day, and they juggled the wakeful twins between the three of them while they ate. Pete rang Alice’s mobile every half-hour, but she didn’t take the calls. He rang Jo and Harry’s number too, and Harry did pick up the phone.

‘Yeah, she’s here. But I’d leave it for a while, mate, if I were you.’

The calls stopped after that. Before she went to bed Alice spoke to her father in the hotel in Madeira. ‘Is she feeling any better?’

‘The doctor called in again. He’s been very good. We think she might be better off at home, you know, so we’re going to take a flight tomorrow. All being well, that is.’

‘Can you put her on?’

Alice put the flat of her hand against the wall of Jo’s spare bedroom, wanting to feel its solidity.

‘It’s very annoying,’ Margaret said into the phone. The words were hers but her voice was almost unrecognisable, falling between a whisper and a sigh.

‘You’ll be fine. Once you’re home. A couple of days and you’ll be yourself again.’

‘Will I?’ She asked the question as though she were a child.

‘Yes,’ Alice said with a tremor in her voice.

In their bedroom, Jo and Harry undressed for bed. One baby was asleep, the other cried every time Jo put him down. They would alternate this routine throughout the night. If he had to work the next day Harry usually slept in the spare room, but tonight Alice was in it. Jo walked up and down, rhythmically rocking the baby against her, willing him to fall asleep.

‘She’s very precise. Not detached, or unsentimental, not exactly. But she doesn’t waver, or change her mind. If she’s decided it’s all over with Pete then it’s over.’

Harry took off his socks, balled them up and aimed them towards the laundry basket. ‘Yes? Probably for the best, then.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know, though. She seemed happy with Pete. He countered that precision in her. Made her more spontaneous.’

Harry lay down and closed his eyes. ‘Are you going to get into bed?’

Jo smiled, sat down on the edge of the bed and swivelled so that her back rested against the headboard, trying at the same time not to interrupt the rocking. She wanted to talk to Harry now, piecing together the day’s events and impressions. Just for ten minutes, before she entered the hushed tunnel of another night when every living thing seemed to sleep except for herself and one or both of the babies.

‘Al’s my best friend. But sometimes I think I don’t know her at all. I mean, I’ve never even glimpsed it, but beneath all that cool logic there might be a wild heart beating. Don’t you think?’

There was no answer. When she looked at him she saw that Harry had plunged into sleep.

Alice went home for a change of clothes. Pete had been there, she could tell from the crumbs on the counter and a single plate and knife in the sink, but there was no other sign. There was no note and she thought that most of his belongings were still in their accustomed places. She registered this much, then dismissed the thought. The latest telephone conversation with Trevor had left a hard knot of anxiety in her chest. Margaret had had a bad night and was suffering breathing difficulties. There was some doubt about whether she would be able to fly home at all, although she was still insisting that this was what she wanted. Alice said to her father that she would meet them at the airport but Trevor told her that he had arranged a private ambulance. Margaret would be driven straight from the airport to hospital.

‘We’re probably being overcautious. But there’s no harm in that, is there?’ he said.

‘No. Of course not. I’m sure,’ Alice answered. They had somehow entered a conspiracy of matter-of-factness, in which they both pretended that this was a routine way of ending a holiday.

The flight left, with Margaret and Trevor on board. It was too early yet for Alice to think of going to the hospital to meet them. She washed Pete’s plate and knife and put them away, then walked through the house. It felt slightly unfamiliar, as if she had been away from it for much longer than one night. The arrangements of crockery in cupboards and books on shelves seemed irrelevant, as if already viewed through the distancing membrane of history.

After an hour she couldn’t bear the house’s silence any longer. She locked the front door and went to the Department. A few minutes after she arrived Professor Devine put his head into her office with a question about the minutes of the budgeting meeting. She told him about Margaret and he took off his glasses and replaced them again, a sign of dismay that she knew was habitual without ever having been aware of it before. Everything around her had a lurid clarity that balanced on the edge of nausea.

‘If there is anything Helen and I can do, anything at all,’ the Professor mumbled.

She isn’t dead, Alice thought, while she was gravely accepting his statements of concern. She isn’t going to die.

Eventually, after a long time, Trevor called again. They were in the ambulance. Margaret had taken a turn for the worse on the flight. He didn’t any longer try to suggest that there was nothing to worry about. Their conspiracy now was about getting Margaret to hospital with all speed.

‘I’ll see you there,’ Alice said. She left her office and drove to the hospital, and found a seat in the A&E waiting area. People flurried past her or sat and gazed into space. An ambulance with its blue light lazily flashing arrived under the canopy. The steps at the rear were unfolded but it was a young woman carrying a baby who was helped down and hurried through the doors. Another half-hour dragged by before a long white car with blacked-out windows drew up. A stretcher was rolled out of the back and lifted on to a trolley. Alice glimpsed her mother’s white hair on a blue pillow. She left her seat and ran in pursuit.

Margaret’s eyes seemed twice their normal size. Her face was a parchment triangle that looked too small to contain them and there were purple marks like fresh bruises showing through the skin. She was breathing in fast, shallow gasps. Her hand moved just perceptibly under the red blanket that covered her, and Alice slid her own underneath and took hold of her cold fingers.

‘It’s all right,’ she said gently and the memory came back to her of Trevor using exactly the same intonation when she woke up from some childish nightmare. ‘It’s all right now.’

Margaret’s eyes remained fixed imploringly on hers.

Medical staff crowded into the cubicle. Alice and Trevor retreated together to a short row of chairs. They could see feet and ankles and rubber wheels and metal protruberances beneath the curtain hems of the cubicles facing them. Trevor’s cardigan was buttoned up wrongly, with one button spare at the chest vee and another unmatched over the small swell of his stomach. His white hair stood out round his head and Alice wanted to smooth the wrinkles of freckled skin where it suddenly seemed too loose for his skull.

‘The flight,’ he murmured. ‘I thought…’ His eyes travelled to where Margaret was lying. He had thought that she was going to die. Having seen her mother, the fear didn’t seem irrational to Alice.

‘The doctor will tell us everything.’ It was important to get information and to act on it. She took his hand and found that it was trembling.

She sat still, holding her father’s dry hand and waiting. The hospital setting was completely unfamiliar to her. She had hardly ever been inside one before today. None of them was ever ill. A sheltered life, she thought, aware of it sliding into the past tense. She pressed the soles of her shoes to the mottled grey floor, wondering how it remained motionless when everything was shifting.

At last a doctor came to find them.

‘Mrs Peel almost certainly has a form of pneumonia,’ she said. ‘We are X-raying her now and we’ll do some blood tests.’

Under her married name Margaret sounded like a stranger, Alice thought. She was always Margaret Mather, yes, the Margaret Mather…

‘Can I go to her?’ Trevor asked. There was suddenly a pleading note in his voice. Anxiety scraped away his reserve. It occurred to Alice that she had never been properly aware before of how deeply he loved Margaret. She felt like an eavesdropper outside the walls of her parents’ marriage.

‘We’ll stabilise her first. It’s a matter of making her comfortable.’

They went back to the row of seats and waited. Alice let her father sit quietly. A teenaged girl with her leg propped in front of her was pushed past in a wheelchair. She was wearing school uniform, the navy-blue and cerise of Alice’s old school.

Once, Alice remembered, when she was eleven or twelve, Margaret had come to talk to the school to show one of her celebrated films. She stood up on the stage in the hall beside the rectangle of white screen unrolled in readiness by Mr Gregory, the biology teacher. Her neat navy-blue suit was unremarkable, but she wore it with a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes. The sunlight flooding in from the big window behind her made her hair glint like silver mesh.

‘I am going to take you all on a journey,’ she said. ‘To one of the most remarkable places in the world.’

The blinds were drawn and the lights dimmed.

The film’s images were already familiar to Alice. There were the rookeries of Adélie penguins on rocky headlands of the Antarctic peninsula. Thousands of birds seethed on a narrow rock margin between mirror-silver sea and steep walls of ice and snow. The intense chirring sound made by the birds swelled and filled the hall.

Margaret and her assistant moved through the dense colony, counting the eggs and the chicks. The chicks were newly hatched and the schoolgirl audience gave a collective aaah at the first close-up of a beaky ball of silver-grey down. Margaret stopped the film and continued her crisp commentary.

‘The Adélie breeding season is short. Females lay two eggs apiece but only about sixty per cent of Pygoscelis adeliae chicks reach the crèche stage at the age of three weeks.’

The film started up again and the blunt arc of a brown Antarctic skua swept out of the whitish sky and dived on a chick at the edge of the colony. The morsel of fluff was swallowed whole, head first. For a fraction of a second the tiny feet were visible in the slit of the skua’s bill. The sentimental tendency of the audience dissipated after that.

There were shots of penguins flipping out of the sea between the ribbed flanks of icebergs, like dozens of tiny missiles, intercut with footage of the birds cruising underwater through the spinning maze of krill. Alice knew that Margaret hadn’t used an underwater cameraman; she had dived down into the ice-bound sea to film all this herself. She wanted to nudge her neighbour and tell her so.

‘Adult birds fish for krill, Euphausia crystallorophias in the main, in the rich waters around the continental edge.’

Margaret paid her audience the compliment of never talking down to them and she also had the knack of making them feel that she was sharing the complete experience. Her film included personal footage that was never shown on television. In one sequence she was cooking on a small stove outside her little orange pyramid tent. Her red protective suit and the tent made a dab of colour in an immense blank sweep of white and cobalt blue. In one close-up she looked over her shoulder and laughed straight up at the cameraman. Strands of her pale hair blew across her cheek and stuck there, seeded with ice. Alice drew her knees up against her chest and shivered, as if she were out in the ice herself.

The applause at the end was loud. Mr Gregory came back up on to the stage and thanked Dr Mather for coming to talk to the school. Margaret stood beside him, even in her heels barely reaching up to his shoulder. She looked straight out into the audience and she appeared to be made of different materials and coloured more brightly than the biology teacher or the headmistress who was beaming on her other side. Alice realised now that that was the moment when she understood how sexy her mother was. Margaret was then in her fifties.

Margaret had another lecture to give after her talk to the school and she drove herself away straight afterwards in her green Alfa Romeo with the dented rear wing. Alice was surrounded by a group of girls.

‘Your mum’s rather amazing,’ Becky Gifford said. Becky’s own mother was a television actress, and Becky was the most sophisticated and confident girl in Alice’s year. She had never noticed Alice before.

‘She is a scientist,’ Alice answered, wanting to make clear that that was what was most important.

‘So are you going to be one as well?’

‘Yes,’ Alice told her.

It was probably true, Alice thought, that she owed her friendship with Becky to Margaret and that day.

A nurse came and stood in front of their chairs. ‘You can come and sit with her now,’ she told them. ‘Could you pop these on first? They do up at the back.’ She handed them a blue paper gown apiece. In silence, Alice and Trevor helped each other into the crackling shrouds and did up the ribbon ties at the nape of the neck.

Margaret had been moved to a different cubicle, a glassedin alcove to the side of the department. Beyond the glass partition three other trolley beds had also been drawn up. She was propped up on pillows with a clear plastic mask held to her face by an elastic loop. The mask looked too big for her, as if it might envelop the bones of her jaw and cheek. An intravenous tube was taped to her arm. Her eyes, wide with alarm, fixed on them as they approached.

‘Here we are,’ Trevor said. They moved one to either side of her. The bed immediately beyond the glass was occupied by a young Asian man, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed. ‘Here we are now,’ Trevor repeated.

Alice glanced around and saw a chair across the corridor. She carried it over and placed it for Trevor to sit down. He folded abruptly into it as if his legs were about to give way. He leaned to put his hand on Margaret’s arm and she turned her head to see him better.

After a while she drifted into sleep.

The time passed, minutes divided from minutes by the slow sweep of the second hand of the wall clock directly in Alice’s sightline. She brought her father a bottle of water from a vending machine, but he wouldn’t leave his place for long enough to eat anything.

A nurse came every half-hour to check Margaret’s pulse and temperature. The close-quarters bustle and clattering of the emergency department seemed to reach them through thick layers of close air. The young Asian man was wheeled away by a porter in green overalls and his place was immediately taken by an older man who looked around him in mournful bewilderment. The evening seeped away. Alice thought of the chains of car headlights outside on the bypass and of busy people on their way to somewhere familiar, at the end of an ordinary day.

A different nurse performed the observations, which meant that the night staff had now come on. Alice was just deciding she would insist that Trevor ate some food when Margaret opened her eyes. They focused, in an instant of confusion, then flooded with mute terror. Her free hand came up and clawed at the mask. She dragged it off her face and hoarsely whispered, ‘I’ll suffocate.’ Her Yorkshire vowels were exaggerated: soooffocaaate.

Alice jerked to her feet. ‘No, no, you won’t. It’s helping you to breathe,’ she soothed.

‘Mag? Maggie, darling, you’re all right,’ Trevor murmured.

Her silvery-haloed head rolled on the pillow.

‘Are you there?’ Margaret demanded.

‘Yes,’ they said. Her head turned to Trevor and then the other way, until her eyes connected with Alice’s. Alice had never seen her mother afraid before, but her face was livid with it now. There were beads of sweat on her forehead. She breathed noisily with her mouth open and Alice tried to put the mask back, but Margaret impatiently knocked it away.

‘I want you to do something for me.’ She said it to Alice. Even now she managed a degree of imperiousness but it sounded a cracked note, the tremulous insistence of a frightened child.

‘Of course I will.’

‘I want…’ Margaret took a breath. ‘I want you to go south. To Lewis Sullavan’s station.’

‘I can’t go anywhere, not when you are ill.’

Margaret’s hand twitched on the covers. ‘This isn’t it. Not by a long chalk it isn’t. I’ll be getting over this. But I want you to go, while you can, while you’ve got the chance. For…me. Do it for me.’

Alice understood what she meant, with the clear precision born in the most intense moment of an intense drama. She knew that she would remember this instant and her exact comprehension of her mother’s wishes. There would be no denying or forgetting what was intended.

Margaret was looking at the spectre of her own mortality. She wouldn’t die here, not yet, her will was too strong for that. But she knew, finally and empirically, that her strength was not infinite. And her intention was that her life would be carried forward for her, out on the ice where she had lived it most intensely, by her only child.

Somewhere beyond their glass box a telephone was insistently ringing. Footsteps passed, metal harshly scraped – the sounds they had been hearing for hours. Alice looked at Trevor and saw the mute imprecation in his face. Trevor had never, throughout her life, demanded a single thing of her. All he had done was to love the two of them, his two women. The telephone stopped ringing, then started up again.

‘Of course I’ll go,’ Alice said softly.

The fear in Margaret’s eyes faded, replaced for a moment by a clear sapphire glimmer of triumph. It was Trevor who smudged away tears with the back of his hand.

‘You’ll find details. E-mail, in my e-mail in-box,’ Margaret said.

‘Don’t worry about that now.’

Gently Trevor lifted the plastic mask and fitted it over his wife’s mouth. She nodded her acquiescence and her eyes closed again.

At 10 p.m., when Trevor began to doze with his head on the covers next to Margaret’s hand, a different doctor came to explain regretfully that there would be no place available on the ward before the morning. Margaret herself was now asleep, so Alice drove her father home to Boar’s Hill. She heated up some soup and once they had eaten and she was sure that he had gone to bed, she made up a bed for herself in her old room. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up, as she had done as a child, and looked across at the old books on the white-painted shelves. There was Shackleton’s South, and Fuchs and Hillary’s The Crossing of Antarctica, both of them presents, on different birthdays, from Margaret. She had written Alice’s name and the date on the flyleaf of each. It was as if Alice could see straight through the stiff board covers now, into an Antarctic landscape where the reality of Margaret’s films and the explorers’ stories overlapped with a fantastical realm of ice turrets and rippled snow deserts and blue-lipped crevasses. Tattered veils of snow were chased by the wind and the howling of it rose inside her head, reaching a crescendo in an unearthly shriek that drowned out her mother’s voice and the chirring of the penguins.

And now Antarctica lay in wait for her, with its frozen jaws gaping wide open.

Alice sat upright. Sleep was out of the question. She pulled on her clothes again, shivering in the unheated bedroom, and went downstairs. Margaret’s chair at the gate-legged table in the bay window overlooked a dark void where the garden lay. Alice made herself a mug of tea and sat down at her mother’s computer screen.

Do it, she exhorted herself. You made a promise. Do this much at least, before tomorrow throws any complications in the way.

Alice clicked new message and began to type.

If it was appropriate, and if her understanding of the present situation was correct, following her mother’s serious illness she would be honoured to be considered in her place for membership of the forthcoming European joint expedition to Antarctica.

She attached a list of her scientific qualifications. At the end, against Previous Antarctic Experience, she typed none.

The tea had gone cold but she took a gulp of it anyway. She reread her short message and changed a couple of words, then checked that the address in the box was correct. She typed her own correspondence address and quickly pressed send. The out-box was briefly highlighted before the communication went to an unknown recipient named Beverley Winston, assistant to Lewis Sullavan.

There was nothing else to be done tonight. Alice poured her unfinished tea down the kitchen sink and went back to bed. She lay still under the familiar weight of the covers. She thought of her own bed in the house in Jericho and wondered where Pete was tonight. Only a little time ago they had woken up in the same bed with nothing more than a kiss glimpsed at a party to separate them.

Now there was the prospect of half a world.

The acceleration of change seemed to open a pit beneath her. Opening her eyes again to counter another bout of nausea, Alice examined the contours of her room. She had lived a remarkably sheltered life. As she saw it now, she had made an almost stately progression from childhood to today. In Margaret’s shadow and under her father’s benign protection she had done what was expected of her and what she expected of herself. No more, nothing more than just what was expected.

And now, without Pete and with her mother’s shadow shortened, there was this.

Suddenly, beneath her ribcage, Alice Peel felt a sharp stab of anticipation that shocked her with its ecstatic greed.