Sun at Midnight

CHAPTER SIX

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.