Читать книгу Sun at Midnight - Rosie Thomas - Страница 12

Alice stood at the ship’s rail with her kitbags at her feet. She had spotted the station in the distance – it was nothing more than a pair of reddish specks marooned against a vast expanse of hostile emptiness. Then the clouds of snow and fog closed in again to obliterate even that much.

The breadth of the land’s desolation made her feel afraid, even though she had been longing for this moment ever since the ship had left Chile. She had been abjectly seasick for three days. The only glimpse she had caught of the Antarctic coast, when it finally appeared out of seas as high as mountains, had been through her cabin porthole. Yet now the moment had come to leave the little ship and the friendly Spanish crew, she was full of misgivings. She clamped her hands on the icy rail. The base looked so tiny and she knew just how remote it was. More than three days’ sailing to reach the southernmost tip of a distant continent again, then twenty-four hours of flying to reach home.

Two sailors lowered the flight of metal steps at the ship’s side. As the ship rolled, the platform at the bottom plunged under several feet of glassy water, then it rocked up again with spray cascading off it. One of the sailors drew a finger across his throat and winked at her. Weakly, Alice smiled back.

Over the drumming of the ship’s engines, she caught the higher-pitched note of another engine. At the same moment a nimbus of light formed in the white murk. The sailors ran down the heaving steps as confidently as if they had been a set of stairs in Benidorm. On the platform they unhitched ropes and waited. A black dinghy, pitched at a threatening angle, materialised behind the smear of light. A big man in orange waterproofs swept the tiller in an arc, the boat crested a wave and landed neatly at the foot of the steps.

One sailor made it fast to the steps, so that ship and Zodiac rolled in unison. Waves swept over the dinghy and the platform, and ice-clogged water cascaded everywhere. The other sailor ran nimbly up the steps again, grabbed Alice’s luggage and yelled ‘Vamos!’ at her. She let go of the railings.

The metal treads were steep and slippery. With Spanish instructions and the boatman’s terse commands both unintelligible through the din of engines and surf, she half scrambled and half slithered down to the platform. Water immediately submerged it. The man’s orange arm grabbed her and hoisted as the dinghy flew upwards like a fairground ride. On the downwards plunge Alice launched herself with a sob of panic on to the dinghy’s floor. Her bags tumbled in after her and some nets of more-or-less-fresh vegetables.

The ropes snaked away and the Zodiac roared free from the ship’s flank.

With his eyes on the white wave caps, the boatman kicked a red life-vest towards where Alice was cowering amongst the bags of onions and peppers. The water’s cold sucked all the breath out of her. ‘Put that on,’ he shouted without taking his eyes off the sea.

She struggled to get her arms through the holes and fasten the clasps across her chest. A rogue wave broke amidships and icy spray stung her face. Even though she was wearing weatherproofs she felt she was soaked to the skin. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably.

Behind her there were two long blasts on the ship’s hooter. Up on the bridge the captain and the mate were wishing the English scientist bon voyage.

The dinghy man loomed above her with his feet braced, one hand on the tiller, the other clasping a radio. He shouted again and Alice thought she caught the words five minutes. She huddled on the floor of the dinghy and prayed that they would either be ashore or dead within that time. She didn’t even care which, so long as it was fast.

The Zodiac and the waves raced each other to the shore. She had never been so far from home or felt the effects of distance so acutely. Nor had she ever been so apprehensive of what lay ahead of her.

It had happened with bewildering speed. It was barely a month since she had arrived at Lewis Sullavan’s London headquarters to be interviewed by Dr Richard Shoesmith.

The walls of the Sullavanco foyer were hung with representations of Sullavan newspaper front pages cast in bronze and television screens showed Sullavan TV programmes from around the world. There were three receptionists with identical smiles behind a long curved reception desk made of polished wood.

‘The Polar Office? You’ll find it on the fifth floor, if you’ll take the lift behind you.’

The lift was one of the kind that slides up a glass tube mounted on the outside of the building and which always tended to give her vertigo. The carpet of the fifth-floor corridor seemed to rise up to meet her as she stepped out and she steadied herself with one hand against the inner wall.

The Polar Office receptionist sat behind another sleek expanse of curved wood. There was an arrangement of hot-orange flowers at one end of it that made Alice think of Margaret.

‘Dr Shoesmith shouldn’t keep you too long,’ the receptionist said.

A secretary brought Alice a cup of coffee while she waited. This was all so mutedly but distinctly high-rent that it made her smile. It couldn’t have been further from the dowdy clutter of the Department of Geology, or any other academic institution she had ever known. If the Polar Office was anything to go by, Kandahar Station would have an indoor swimming pool and a resident manicurist.

Dr Richard Shoesmith did keep her waiting – a full twenty minutes. When he finally emerged from his inner office Alice saw a compact man perhaps ten years older than herself. He was noticeably good-looking, but there were pale vertical furrows etched between his eyebrows that stood out against his weather-beaten skin. When they shook, his hand enveloped hers. He looked fit and slightly out of place in the plush Sullavan offices.

‘I’m sorry, Dr Peel. I was talking to the French. They maintain a full research programme of their own down south, as you know. There are Antarctic politics, as there are politics everywhere else in the world.’

‘Yes.’ Alice smiled.

They sat down, Shoesmith behind his desk, and Alice to one side and in a slightly lower chair.

‘You have no previous Antarctic experience,’ he began.

‘None,’ she said steadily.

He looked through a neat sheaf of documents. She could see that there were offprints of some her published research papers, a copy of the full academic CV she had submitted at the request of Beverley Winston, Lewis Sullavan’s assistant. There was also an excellent reference provided by Professor Devine.

‘Hmm. Doctoral studies, carbonate sedimentary rocks, western Turkey. Lecturer in sedimentology, University of Oxford…proposed area of study…mapping, stratigraphic survey and dating of sedimentary rock formations in the vicinity of…Yes.’ Richard looked up abruptly and his eyes held Alice’s. His gaze was unblinking. ‘Lewis is very eager to have you join the expedition.’

Cautiously, Alice nodded.

‘Perhaps you could give me your own reasons.’

She looked straight back at him. She would have to be honest. ‘The enthusiast was originally my mother. She was, is…’

‘Yes, I know who your mother is.’

Of course he did.

There was a small silence. Shoesmith was still waiting. Alice added softly, ‘I have thought about it a great deal since the suggestion was first made.’

The truth was that an entirely unexpected desire had taken hold of her.

It wasn’t to do with geological research, although her academic appetite for the new realm of Antarctic rock was beginning to grow. It wasn’t even for Margaret’s sake, although of course that was a part of it. It was much more that she wanted to push out from the secure corner of her own life, the place that her crumbled illusions about Peter had left dusty and unpopulated, and to turn disappointment into discovery.

All her knowledge of the south was second-hand, straitjacketed by book covers or seen through the tunnel of a camera lens. There was none of her own history in it, although its history surrounded her. She had been keeping her mind closed to it for years, until Margaret and Lewis Sullavan together had opened a door. And now the very remoteness and the blank page that it would offer had begun to draw her, as forcibly as they had once repelled.

She began to dream of Antarctica, vivid dreams painted in ice colours and scoured with blizzards. She woke up from these dreams relieved to find herself in her own bed and yet impatient with the confines of ordinary life.

Beyond the shaded windows of the Polar Office lay the olive-green river, threaded by tourist boats and police launches, and the dome of St Paul’s and the busy bridges, the complicated and familiar web of London. Alice thought of the roads leading away from the centre, skeins of motorways passing the airports, the route that would take her back to Oxford, to the quiet house in Jericho where Pete no longer lived, and all the other avenues and niches of a populated world. Was going to Antarctica just running away from the overfamiliar, from the present disappointment of reality?

No one who went to the ice ever came back unchanged: Alice had heard that often enough, even from Margaret, the arch-unsentimentalist. Probably everyone who found themselves drawn south was on the run from someone, or something, and that included Richard Shoesmith. But she was running towards it too, faster and faster every day. The sound of her own footsteps pounded a drumbeat rhythm in her head.

She was ready to be changed.

Richard Shoesmith was waiting for her answer.

Alice felt her legs shaking and the palms of her hands grew damp. She crossed her ankles in the opposite direction and let her hands lie composedly in her lap, but even so she was sure he read the unscientific glitter in her eyes. She didn’t think Shoesmith missed much. ‘I want to see it for myself,’ she said.

‘Go on, please.’

Knowing that this was not the time to mention dreams of ice, or of running anywhere, she talked about European scientific co-operation, Antarctic geopolitics and the unrivalled opportunity to undertake valuable research. The words were measured, but eagerness coloured them and her voice shivered just audibly with absolute longing.

Richard Shoesmith took all of this in. His expression didn’t change as he listened to her, but some of the rigidity seemed to melt out of him.

‘It is a chance that any geologist would jump at, Dr Peel. A complete field season, automatic full funding, the opportunity to make your mark as part of a team at a brand-new station.’

‘Yes. I do appreciate that.’

He picked up a smooth ovoid rock from his desktop and meditatively turned it in his fingers. Embedded in the dark siltstone Alice could see the pale, distinct bullet shape of a Jurassic belemnite. ‘Because of the nature of our present funding, in the selection of personnel for this expedition there is an inevitable element of, how shall I put it, who you are and whom you know?’

He was looking down at the fossil, not at her.

Alice smiled before she said delicately, ‘I think we both understand that.’

Because she knew about Richard Shoesmith, just as he knew about her and her mother’s reputation.

Shoesmith was a famous name, but not by reason of Richard’s own achievements. He was a palaeontologist. He had completed his PhD at Cardiff, had done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, held a research post at Warwick and was currently Reader in Palaeontology there. She had pulled out some of his papers and read them attentively. He had done some new work on evolution and extinction of certain cephalopods and gastropods at the end of the Cretaceous, but he didn’t have a big reputation in his field.

His grandfather, however, was Gregory Shoesmith.

As a twenty-two-year-old alpinist, poet and gentleman botanist, Gregory had been one of the youngest members of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. As an explorer he had acquitted himself with quiet bravery and dignity, and Mount Shoesmith, the majestic peak overlooking the Beardmore Glacier, was named after him. But it was for his poem, ‘Remember This, When I Am Best Forgotten’, that he was famous. For every schoolchild of the last century it was the epitaph for the heroic age of polar exploration.

Gregory came home from the ice with what was left of Scott’s expedition and had almost immediately enlisted. He survived the entire war and was awarded the VC. He was widowed while he was still a young man, then married again in his forties. His second wife had three children and the youngest of these, a career soldier, was Richard Shoesmith’s father. As the child of a services family Richard had seen his father’s postings all over the world, but mostly he had grown up in English boarding schools.

This much Alice knew as fact. She also knew by intuition that she and Richard Shoesmith suffered in common the sun and shadow effect of their family reputations. For Lewis Sullavan it made perfect sense to have Gregory Shoesmith’s grandson leading his first expedition, just as it would to have Margaret Mather’s daughter amongst the scientists. Who you are, as Richard put it, provided them both with enviable opportunities. And the two of them had always to live without the certainty that what they did achieve was on their own merits.

Richard put down the belemnite stone but his fingers still rested on it, as if for reassurance. He considered for a moment, then seemed to reach a decision. ‘Are you free to travel south at this short notice? Most of the members will be at Kandahar by the middle of October.’

A little more than two weeks’ time.

Alice thought quickly. ‘My mother has been very ill recently, but she’s recovering. She would be there herself if it were possible and because it isn’t she very much wants me to go in her place. Apart from my parents, I don’t have any other ties. I could be at Kandahar in a month’s time, if that would be acceptable.’

A silence fell. With his head turned to the city view of towers and cranes, and his fingers minutely caressing the stone, Richard was thinking. On the wall behind him was a framed aerial photograph of a slice of Antarctic coastline. It was a black-and-white image in which the sea was inky black and the mainland mountain peaks stood out in stark whiteness, ribbed with shadows almost as black and deep as the waters. In the fretted indentations of U-shaped bays, ice showed up in milky swirls as diaphanous as torn muslin. At such a distance the treacherous glaciers looked as innocuous as wrinkled skin on some great cooling and congealing milk pudding. Somewhere, on that peninsular margin between black water and white ice, lay Kandahar Station.

‘As I told you, Lewis is strongly in favour of your joining us. And I would be happy to accede to that.’

She thought that this cool assurance was the last word, but then he surprised her.

‘I love Antarctica with all my heart. I’ve always loved it, first the idea and then the reality. It’s the only place, the only thing I have ever known that is always more beautiful than its admirers can convey, more seductive and more dangerous than its reputation allows. You can never forget it, and it never releases its hold on you. I hope that it will come to be just as important to you.’

‘I hope so too,’ Alice said. And then she smiled. It was her wide, infrequent and startlingly brilliant smile. ‘Thank you.’

Richard coughed and turned his attention to a separate set of papers on his tidy desk. ‘However, there are a number of things you will need to do before you can definitely join us. Medical and dental check-ups, and so forth. Beverley Winston will arrange for you to be kitted out with polar gear. Everything is supplied, with the Sullavan Company logo as well as the EU flag. You will also have to do some basic survival training. The British Antarctic Survey people have kindly agreed to provide that for our UK members, in the spirit of European unity and cooperation.’ He smiled drily.

‘At such short notice you may not have the opportunity to meet the other members of the expedition together, or even individually, before we all reach Kandahar. We’re a farflung group, geographically speaking. Which is part of the idea, of course – not to gather a little coterie of chums who were all at Cambridge together.’

Richard Shoesmith didn’t belong to any such coterie, Alice understood. Nor did Lewis Sullavan.

‘We shall be a full-season core of just ten people in all. Six scientists, including yourself, and four support staff.’

She read the list of names that he passed across the desk to her.

Eight people she didn’t yet know, with whom she would spend five months in a hut perched on the white margin at the distant end of the earth. Outside, in London, toy boats were plying their way up and down the river, and taxis were being hailed to take businessmen to lunch.

‘Six nationalities,’ Richard said. ‘Seven, if you count Welsh. This is not a huge Antarctic research station like McMurdo or even Rothera. We shall be pioneers on an old base and we’ll set out with no rules except safety regulations. We are there to help one another and to cooperate in everything from science to international understanding to cleaning the base kitchen. If there is a job that needs to be done, any job whatsoever, you will be expected to help out with it.’

A slow flush darkened Richard’s already ruddy cheeks. He was moved by the thought of this, of their tightly knit and multinational group working together outside the common conventions, and Alice found that she was touched in response.

‘You know your polar history? Of course you do. You know that Amundsen’s bid for the Pole was for Norway’s sake. It was a matter of national ambition and pride. Whereas Scott wanted the Pole, of course, but the real reason for his expeditions, the ideal that he and his team all fought and risked their lives for, was scientific exploration and discovery. We shall also be there for science’s sake.’

She understood that Richard Shoesmith was a scientist through and through. He would be a meticulous, painstaking investigator but he almost certainly wouldn’t write poetry passionate enough to inspire two generations, as his gentleman-botanist grandfather had done. Alice’s sympathy and liking for him grew.

‘Yes,’ she said.

The meeting was drawing to a close. They talked for a few more minutes about the practicalities of preparation and travel, then Alice stood up and Richard walked with her to the door. They were shaking hands when he said, ‘Are you free for lunch?’

It was twenty minutes past twelve and she had arranged to meet Becky at one o’clock in a bar in Clerkenwell. ‘I’m sorry. I’m on my way to see a friend.’

He didn’t have to ask her to lunch, it wasn’t a part of the vetting process. He was asking because he wanted to. They recognised each other. She smiled at him again.

‘Of course. Well, then, good luck with your medicals and so forth. We’ll speak.’

‘Yes. Thank you for asking me to join the expedition. I’m looking forward to it.’

As their eyes met for the last time they acknowledged this for a comical understatement.

Alice sailed down in the bubble lift, crossed the grandiose foyer and walked out into the cloudy morning. There was the smell of river and the dampness of autumn in the air. The faces of people walking towards her had acquired extra definition, she could read the words on the sides of buses crawling over Blackfriars Bridge. All her senses were heightened and sharpened with the intensity of anticipation. She had been insulated by her own circumspection, but now she was going into the unknown.

Becky was waiting. Her legs were hooked round a bar stool made of tortured metal, there was a drink on the table beside her and her head was bent over the Evening Standard. Wings of smooth hair swung forward to curtain her face and then she looked up and saw Alice. ‘How did it go? No, I can see. You’re the polar queen. You’re really going? My God, Al, you are. C’mon, let’s drink to it.’

Alice laughed. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. ‘I’m going,’ she said faintly. ‘I hardly know how it’s happened, but I am.’

‘How long?’

‘Five months. The summer field season. I’ll be leaving at the end of October and I’ll be back in March.’

A drink materialised beside her. A long glass, ice, jaunty coloured straw. She took a long suck and almost choked with the intensity of the taste. Alcohol immediately fumed in her head.

Becky was wearing a khaki combat top with pockets and buttons and epaulettes, but the fabric was contradictory slippery satin. The way the light fell on it and reflected different sumptuous colours caught Alice’s eye. Pete used to talk about colour, she remembered, as if it were food or sex.

Look at this carmine, look at this crocus-yellow. Don’t you want to eat it? Don’t you want to lick it?

‘Alice? Are you okay?’

‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just getting used to the idea.’

‘So let’s talk about it. Tell me all.’ Becky’s appetite for other people’s lives was as keen as for her own.

Alice told her about Richard Shoesmith, and the list of names, and the sharing of work, and the tasks she would have to accomplish before she could leave. All the time she was reminding herself that she was cutting loose from everything she knew and heading for a place on which she had always, from her earliest memories, deliberately turned her back.

Is this how it happens, she wondered, in other people’s lives? The moving on and the changing and the randomness that never seemed to affect her, only the people she knew? And then a series of events and coincidences link together and what was impossible at one moment becomes inevitable in the next?

‘What about the house?’ Becky was asking.

‘Oh, I’ll let it for this academic year,’ Alice improvised. ‘Maybe I’ll travel for a couple of months on the way back. It would be a shame not to, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been to South America.’

Becky was looking at her. ‘What about Pete?’

‘There’s nothing much to tell. He moved out.’

‘Is that it?’

While Margaret was still dangerously ill, Alice stayed at the house on Boar’s Hill. Pete telephoned again and again, and when she wouldn’t speak to him he turned up unannounced at her office one afternoon. She looked up from her desk to see him in the doorway – or a more than usually unshaven, crumpled, wild-haired version of him. He was carrying a bunch of florists’ roses, dark-red.

‘Pete, don’t do this.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘You won’t see me, you won’t talk to me. You won’t let me explain what happened.’

‘I don’t think what I saw needs any explaining, does it?’

He looked around, then thrust the flowers in the jug she used for watering her pot plants. He slumped down on the only spare chair and put his head in his hands. His hair stuck up in spikes, as if he had been running his fingers through it in steady desperation. Of course Pete would turn rejection in love into a piece of performance art. He wouldn’t be shaving, on principle, or eating or sleeping.

‘I can’t sleep. I’ve lost my appetite. Alice, it isn’t funny. Why are you so fucking empirical about everything? I love you and I miss you, that’s all that matters. I want you to come home.’

‘Pete. I came to your studio and found you engaged in oral sex with one of your students. The same one I saw you on the river with, and the one you were kissing at our party. On the other hand Harry saw you in a pub in Bicester, kissing someone entirely different…’

‘What? I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near bloody Bicester in ten years.’

‘…I am empirical, if you mean that I base my reaction to you on the results of observation. How else am I supposed to respond to the evidence? “Oh, look, there’s Peter with Georgia. What he’s doing actually proves how much he loves me.”’

‘I can’t bear it when you’re sarcastic. It doesn’t suit you.’

‘It doesn’t really matter any more what you can and can’t bear about me.’

‘Alice please.’ He got up again and came to her. He put his arms round her and tried to draw her against him. He cupped the back of her head in his hand and rubbed her hair. It would have been very easy, knowing and missing the warmth and the smell of him as she did, to give way and bury her face in his shoulder and pretend that she believed him. But a pretence was what it would have been, and Alice preferred meagre facts to the most colourful and persuasive elaborations on the truth.

‘I want you to move out. I am going to stay at my parents’ house until you do. You’ve got time to find somewhere else, but that’s what I want you to do.’

His face changed.

Under the veneer of his remorse there had been confidence, because he had assumed that he would be able to win her round. Realising this made her feel still more dismal. If he thought that, it was obvious that Pete had never really known her properly. They had shared a bed and made a home and a life together, and still she might as well have been a stranger, or Georgia, or the woman in the pub. It made her want to cry, but she couldn’t bear to give way to that impulse either. She looked steadily back at him, dry-eyed.

‘I see,’ he said at last.

To do him credit, he didn’t argue any more then. And he packed his belongings and moved out of the house within two days. He left a note for her on the kitchen table, weighted at one corner by the teapot still half-full of cold tea. The note said that he loved her even if he had a strange way of showing it and that as far as he was concerned this wasn’t the end of things between them. Alice crumpled the single sheet of paper into a ball and threw it into the kitchen bin.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she told Becky.

‘I’m sorry, darling. He made you happy, you know. You were happy all this year. You laughed all the time and you didn’t take your responsibilities as seriously as you usually do. Pete made you just a little bit frivolous.’

‘I do know that.’

They had ordered some food and now it was put in front of them. Thinking she was ravenous, Alice had ordered seared tuna and glass noodles. Now she noticed that there were sesame seeds in the dressing and they looked like tiny myriapods. If she examined them more closely she imagined that she would see the filaments of their legs. Very deliberately she sliced a corner of fish, wound it in a web of noodle and placed it in her mouth. The food had a strange metallic taste.

‘Alice, are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, of course I am.’ She smiled at Becky. ‘I’ve learned to be frivolous. I’ve got it completely sorted. I don’t need Pete and his antics. I’m just dropping everything and swanning off to Antarctica for months, aren’t I?’

‘That doesn’t sound particularly carefree and impetuous to me. It sounds very uncomfortable and rather dangerous.’

‘But I get to look at 400-million-year-old sedimentary rocks that hardly anyone’s ever seen before. I’ll wear a butch survival suit and learn how to drive a skidoo and how to rescue myself from a crevasse, and on really good days I’ll get a turn at cleaning the base kitchen. Dr Shoesmith promised me that.’ Her gaiety was convincing to herself, at least.

‘Oh, God.’ Becky grimaced.

Through the open fronts of her Christian Louboutin sandals, her toenails were clearly visible. They were painted a softly luminous shell-pink and each nail was delicately rimmed in white. Her legs were smooth and tanned, and her fingernails were manicured too. There were small diamond studs in her ears and everything about her said clean. They looked at each other and laughed.

Alice realised that she had finished her drink and had even drunk most of the melted ice.

‘Shall we have another couple of these?’

‘I’ve got to work this afternoon, unfortunately. But what the hell. I’ll have a glass of wine,’ Becky said. ‘You will come back safely from down there, won’t you?’

‘I will,’ Alice promised.

No one ever comes back unchanged, she remembered.

‘How does Jo seem?’ Becky asked.

They drank their wine and Becky finished her food. They talked about Jo and the babies and whether Vijay was exactly or only approximately the man Becky was looking for. None of this was any different from the dozen lunches that Becky and she had shared this year alone, but Alice felt as if she had moved a little distance apart. There was a voice in her ear, a waterfall of syllables. Antarctica.

From the upright chair beside her bed, Margaret saw Alice walk down the ward towards her. She didn’t want Alice to know how anxiously she had been looking out for her so she allowed herself only the quickest glance before composedly folding the newspaper in her lap. But she could see even in a second that there was more colour about her, her face had opened like a flower in the sun. The news must be good.

A flood of memories rose up and washed away the stuffy ward. Almost exactly forty years ago she had felt like Alice looked now: poised on the brink of the central years of her life with the whole breadth of Antarctica waiting for her. Even now, with pain twisting her joints so cruelly that she could hardly stand, she could remember what it was like to lie in a field tent with the wind banging and raging at the walls, or to stare down into the greedy blue throat of a crevasse where a snow bridge threatened to collapse in the late-season sun. Antarctica was a painful, perfect place. There was the astringent flavour of envy in Margaret’s mouth and she reminded herself that it was absurd to feel envy at her age. Alice would go back there instead of her. Through Alice she would live in Antarctica one more time.

‘There you are. What an age you’ve been, when I’m dying to hear all about it. Sit down. No, wait. Could you get that girl to bring us a cup of tea, d’you think?’

Alice kissed the top of Margaret’s head where the shiny pink of her scalp showed through the strands of thinning hair. ‘Do you want tea, before I tell you?’

‘Don’t be so damned annoying. Put me out of my misery.’

‘Yes. I’m going. All right?’

Margaret’s face sagged briefly with relief and the crosshatching of tiny lines deepened beneath her eyes. ‘Good,’ she said firmly and took possession of her face once more.

Alice sat down and Margaret listened intently as she described her hour with Richard Shoesmith.

‘I met his grandfather, you know,’ Margaret said.

Gregory Shoesmith had been an old man, sitting with a plaid rug over his knees and a stick leaning against his chair – just like me, now. Where do time and strength slip away to? – but he had taken her hand between his two and leaned forward so their faces almost touched. He said, ‘We have been privileged, you and I. We have seen places that we will never forget.’ He had known war and too many deaths, and he had lived a long life, but it was the ice that filled his mind. Even in old age he was a powerful man.

Alice didn’t look surprised. ‘You met everyone.’

Margaret was listening, her head nodded at every point that Alice made, but she was caught up in the teeming mass of her memories. They swirled around her, thicker and faster, like a blizzard. Alice would inherit the memories. They would be different in their precise content but they would be made of the same material. It was like handing on your own genes, mother to daughter. Antarctica was what made me, Margaret thought. It will be the making of my child too, and she needs that. Alice has always been reticent, and now she will come into bloom.

Margaret had no fears for her, any more than she had ever had for herself.

It had started to rain, and thick runnels slid down the windows. It was making her eyes swim. To clear her vision she looked down at her hands, resting on the blue cellular blanket that covered her knees. It always surprised her to realise that these veined and knotted appendages, with their swollen knuckles and brown blotches, were her own hands that had once been so strong and dexterous. The pain in her joints and in her chest sometimes seemed to belong to someone else too, to some old person who was leaning on her and whose weight she could thrust aside and step lightly away from.

Alice was talking about medical assessment.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Margaret said. Alice was so young, she moved so unthinkingly and confidently. ‘You’re just like me. As I used to be. Strong as a horse.’

‘And less skittish.’ Alice smiled. ‘Than a horse, I mean.’

Margaret was tired now. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes, and think about what she had done and what Alice would do.

Alice saw it and she stood up, pretending to look at her watch. ‘I’ll come in tomorrow.’

‘Do that. There’s a lot you’ll need to know.’

They kissed each other quickly.

‘I’m glad, Mum. I’m glad to be going.’

‘That’s good,’ Margaret answered. She was thinking, I may be old but I’m not daft. I know what it takes to do well down there and you have it, my Alice. You’re more like me than you want to admit.

Three hectic weeks had followed. Alice fitted in all the things she had to do, but only just. She went to see Dr Davey, who had been the family doctor ever since she was born.

‘You’ve never had a day’s illness in your life, my dear. I don’t need to run a battery of expensive tests to know you are in perfect health.’

He ticked a long list of questions, scribbled a paragraph at the end and signed the medical declaration. Alice countersigned it and sent it off to Beverley Winston.

She visited her dentist and had all her fillings checked. She went up to London and at a Sullavan-owned warehouse near the North Circular Road she was issued with her polar kit by a man with a heavy cold, who told her that he had spent six winter seasons down on the ice. There was a bewildering pile of fleece and Gore-tex inner and outer garments, all marked with the EU flag and Sullavanco logo, just as Richard had described. The massive red outer jacket, with matching windpants, had a big white rectangle on the back with the words ‘1st EU Antarctic Expedition’ stitched on it. On the front there was a Velcro sticker that read simply ‘Peel’. There was a pair of boots with insulated liners. And there was a balaclava helmet that covered her head except for a narrow eye slit. It was hot in the warehouse, and just trying all these items on made sweat run down and pool in the small of her back.

‘Good lug,’ the man with the cold said as she tottered away with her new wardrobe.

She went up to Cambridge for a three-day induction course run by the British Antarctic Survey for their own departing personnel, where she was the object of curiosity and envy.

‘I hear you people have got unlimited funding,’ a sandyhaired climatologist remarked enviously. ‘While we have to sign for every specimen bag and camp meal.’

A man wearing a jacket and tie laughed over his pint of beer. ‘Sullavan will need to spend a few of his millions putting Kandahar straight. How long is it since we pulled out of there?’

‘He wouldn’t even notice it, whatever it costs him. There’ll be en suite bathrooms and waiter service. Bit different from what we can expect, eh, Jack?’

The BAS men roared with laughter and Alice smiled politely.

They all went to lectures about the dangers of frostbite, and glacier travel, and ecological disposal of waste matter. There were practical sessions about mountaineering and survival. Trevor had taught Alice the basics of rock climbing on their Alpine holidays together. The instructor didn’t patronise her quite so much when he realised that she knew how to put on a climbing harness and could tie a figure of eight knot in a rope.

The preparations absorbed her attention on one level; on another she observed her own dashings around as if she had become a stranger. Even her body felt slightly unfamiliar. She had lost her appetite, and if she sat down to collect her thoughts between work and meetings and lists she found herself on the brink of falling asleep. This she put down to being too busy, to delayed anxiety about Margaret and perhaps a reaction to Peter’s absence. He often slipped into her thoughts, but she wouldn’t see him and she didn’t even know where he was living.

The last week came. The plane tickets for her complicated journey south were sent down from the Polar Office and she propped the folder on the small mantelpiece in her bedroom. She packed and repacked her books and clothes in the big orange kitbags supplied for the purpose. The house was tidy and empty – everything she didn’t need for Antarctica had been put into store, and the tenants would move in the day after her departure. It was odd to look from the bare rooms to the October sky beyond the windows, and to think of being away for a whole winter. When she came back the trees would be putting out new leaves. She watched the dazed new students flooding the streets and reflected that they would be confident old hands by the time she returned.

Two days before she left, Jo and Becky gave a goodbye party for her at Jo’s house.

‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ Alice asked her in concern.

‘It’s getting much better. Charlie only woke up once and Leo twice last night. There were two whole hours when all three of us were asleep.’

It was a good party, but different.

Alice wore the long johns and balaclava and huge insulated boots, until she got too hot in the crush and discarded them behind Jo’s sofa. She was pulling a fleece vest over her head and briefly revealing her black lace best bra, which had shrunk in the wash and exposed an unusual depth of cleavage, when she looked up and saw Pete. His eyes travelled over her. He had shaved and, apart from a mournful expression, looked just as he always did.

‘Did Jo…?’ Alice began, thinking that she would have preferred to know that he was coming.

He shook his head. ‘Nope. I wasn’t invited, but I came anyway and Harry didn’t turn me away from the door. You look wonderful. You must be excited.’

‘Oh, Pete.’

He held out his arms and she hesitated, then let them enclose her.

‘Dance?’ he asked.

She nodded and they swung across Harry’s sanded and sealed floorboards. They had always moved well together, she thought.

At the end of the evening, when most of the guests had hugged Alice and said goodbye and told her that she must take care to come home safely, Pete was still there. He hadn’t drunk very much, he had talked to everyone and bursts of laughter continually erupted around him. When he wanted to he could always make himself the centre of a gathering. Even though she hadn’t intended it, Alice kept track of where he was in the room and listened for his voice through the hubbub of music. The past had been swallowed up, the future was unreadable, and the present was nothing but this instant’s narrowest margin between sense and desire. She had the feeling that her good sense, always her strongest asset, was inexplicably deserting her.

It was time to go home. Alice had an armful of goodluck presents, several of which were toy polar bears even though the nearest real polar bears to Antarctica lived in the Arctic.

Becky kissed her, cupping her face briefly in both hands. ‘Come back soon, Ice Queen, d’you hear?’

Now that the moment was here, it seemed like for ever in prospect. Alice smiled as confidently as she could. ‘It’s six months or seven months at the very most. I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone away.’

Jo and Harry stood in the hallway with light spilling out into the darkness beyond the porch. Their house was full of the warmth and laughter of the evening. Alice felt that she was moving out of the web of friendship and familiarity.

Jo kissed her too.

‘Have a wonderful, thrilling time.’ She was envious, Alice could hear it. Jo would like to be going but she was tied to this house by her babies and Harry. Would I change places? she wondered. Yes, she thought, with the sad picture in her head of her own house empty but for the last boxes stacked in the hallway, and yet with Pete at her shoulder as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

And then, No, I would not.

‘Good luck, Al.’ Jo and Becky and Harry and Vijay gathered in the doorway to wave goodbye. Alice looked back at the tableau they made and framed it in her mind.

‘I’ll see you home,’ Pete murmured.

‘Pete’s going to see me home,’ she called and they all nodded, waving and understanding perfectly.

They went in Alice’s car, with Alice driving, but he did jump out at the other end to open the car door for her. He followed her up the familiar path, took her key out of her hand and unlocked the front door as well. They half turned to each other, hesitating, then Pete tipped her face up to his. ‘I wish you’d let me say I’m sorry.’

‘You can say it.’ Her voice was raw in her throat.

‘I wish you’d let me show you I’m sorry.’

Alice lifted her hand. It started as a warding-off gesture but her fingers seemed to melt. They rippled over the vee of her top which felt too tight, as if it only just contained her breasts, and fluttered over her belly. Her skin seemed to have developed a million new nerve endings.

Why not? she thought.

Why not just once more, after so many other times?

‘To say goodbye?’ she murmured.

There was a flash of triumph in his eyes, quickly extinguished. But you are wrong, the triumph’s really mine, she thought.

‘If that’s what you truly want to say,’ he answered.

He followed her into the house and closed the door behind them.

The shelves in the bedroom, the top of the chest of drawers, the bedside tables were all bare. Alice’s kitbags with the flag and logo stood packed against one wall.

Pete slid his hands over her, cupping her breasts, drawing her hips against him. ‘You’re different. You’re lovelier,’ he breathed.

Am I? I am not sure that I even recognise myself, she thought.

But her body remembered the familiar rhythms well enough and improved on them. Their lovemaking had always been affectionate, well-practised, almost invariably satisfactory, but tonight it went much further than that. In the absence of intimacy and trust, they were naked and greedy.

Afterwards, Pete lay with his head against her heart, listening to its beat. Her hand lightly cupped the curve of his skull. She could feel his limbs growing heavy as he drifted towards sleep.

I have just taken what I wanted, she thought, without weighing up whether it would hurt him or not.

The notion of revenge had never crossed her mind and this didn’t feel like it, but there was a symmetry here.

Alice closed her eyes and thought of the long journey ahead and the ice waiting for her at the end of it.

In the morning Pete sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and watching her as she made toast from the end of a loaf. She emptied the crumbs out of the bread bin and wiped the inside with a wadded paper towel. She would spend tonight, her last in Oxford, at Boar’s Hill with Margaret and Trevor.

‘Have you finished with your plate?’

He looked at her and she steadily returned his gaze.

‘Are you going so far away because of me?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘No, Pete. I’m going because of me. And partly because of Margaret.’

Peter sighed. He stood up and looked around the kitchen. ‘I made a good job of those shelves.’

They had come in a flat pack from Ikea. He had assembled them and fixed them to the wall.

Alice suddenly laughed. She felt the upward swing of happiness. Everything was going to be all right. ‘You did,’ she said softly.

‘I’d better get to the studio, I suppose. I’m still working on Desiderata