Rosie Thomas - Sun at Midnight

‘Well, then. I’m glad you’re so contented,’ Trevor said easily.

As she lifted her head Alice heard a sigh and then a click , as if there had been a second’s interruption of time. She looked along the path towards the goldenrod, seeing it as if she had never looked at it before, all broken up into waves of different depths of colour, and hearing the lawnmower’s buzz separated into a series of vibrating notes that sprayed through the air like drops of molten metal.

Is this what happiness means? she wondered. Just this?

The thought sounded a single hollow note within her head.

Then the world remembered its path and moved forward again. There were just ragged yellow flowers that were not much more than weeds and the sound of a neighbour working in his garden on a sunny Saturday morning.

‘What about Mum?’ Alice asked. ‘Will you get her to have a rest on this holiday?’

Trevor hunched his shoulders, spread his hands slightly. They had been exchanging this gesture for many years, the two of them. They left the shade of the sycamore tree and walked back up the slope of grass to the kitchen door. Dandelion clocks released small seed parachutes as their feet brushed past. Margaret had turned the music up again. The orange lilies had been put in a green enamel jug and placed beside her computer.

The two old people tried to persuade Alice to stay for lunch. Margaret even said she thought there was some cold ham somewhere, by way of an extra inducement.

‘No, I’ve really got to go because we’re having all these people round this evening, and I’ve still got to make the food and buy wine,’ Alice said.

‘Can’t Peter do something?’

It wasn’t that Trevor and Margaret disliked Peter, more that they didn’t understand how he lived a life with no particular plans, not even a proper routine. They thought that his habits and the hours he kept were incompatible with a productive existence. The few pieces of his work that they had seen left even Margaret with nothing to say. They believed that art lived on gallery or drawingroom walls and didn’t incorporate the contents of builders’ skips.

For his part Peter was always polite to them, but the politeness had a resistance to it that was almost ruder than if he had dispensed with it and just been himself.

‘It’s easier if I do it. He’ll be in charge of the barbecuing. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive you to the airport on Tuesday?’

‘Your father’s arranged a car to pick us up.’

‘Is there anything else I can do? Shopping? Packing?’

‘I’ve travelled to a few places in my life, Alice. I can manage a ten-day package trip to Madeira.’

‘I know you have, I know you can. So. Have a lovely time. Just sit in the sun. I’ll call you before you go.’

Alice hugged her mother as she left. In her arms, Margaret felt as light and dry as a leaf. Alice had been aware of the change for the past year or two, but it was still uncomfortable to recognise that the woman who had been such an embodiment of strength for her whole life was growing weaker.

‘Think about Kandahar,’ Margaret called after her, as a parting challenge. She believed in having the last word.

Trevor came out to the car to say goodbye. ‘I’d go, you know, if I were in your shoes,’ he said, startling her so that she paused, halfway into the driver’s seat.

‘But you never did go.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t. Maybe I should have done, but that sort of thing was Margaret’s role. She was the adventurer, so I was the stay-at-home. I loved her far too much to risk offering any competition, and then you were born and I didn’t want to miss a single day of your life. But if I were you, now, today, that would be quite different.’

Not for the first time, Alice reflected on her father’s unselfishness. He possessed enough for two. For three, if she counted herself into the equation. She had no children, no husband, yet, no evident ties – except for Pete, although he was enough to keep her firmly anchored. At least I’ve come far enough to recognise that I am selfish, she thought. Trevor was beaming at her. The breeze fluffed up the white feathers of his hair.

‘Then you wouldn’t have been you. You wouldn’t be you now. I don’t want you to be any different from the way you are,’ Alice told him.

He nodded. ‘I don’t think you need have any anxiety on that score. No new tricks for an old dog, you know.’

‘Good.’ She kissed his cheek. As always, Trevor convinced her that the world was a secure place.

‘Have a lovely holiday. Look after Mum.’

‘You know I’ll do that.’

He stood back to watch her go, his hands in the pockets of his shapeless trousers and his hair like thistledown in the sunlight.

It was 5.30 and Alice was lying in a hot bath when Peter appeared in the bathroom doorway. She saw his reflection first in the steamy mirror, then turned her head to smile at him. He was carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

‘I think I’ll join you.’ He grinned.

Pete unbuttoned his shirt, unbuckled his belt and pulled off his jeans. He had olive skin and a flat stomach. Alice watched him, noticing the play of muscles in his arms and back. He looked clean, even his hands and fingernails were clean, unlike the way they usually were when he came back from a day in the studio.

‘Were you working?’

He was naked now, but not in the least vulnerable. He stepped into the water, so that Alice had to sit up to make room for him. Heavily scented water slopped over the edge of the bath as he sank backwards.

‘Yeah.’

She didn’t say anything and after a beat of silence he added, ‘I had a mass of paperwork. Invoices, bills, all kinds of shit. I hate doing all that.’

‘I know you do. Pete?’

She was going to say, I had a moment this afternoon when I thought is this all ? She had intended to ask him if he was happy, if what they had between them was good. If it was enough . But this, she knew, was what Pete would dismiss as a quintessential woman’s question.

‘Yeah?’ He locked his legs round her. Bubbles of foam popped close to their ears. Pete gave her a misted glass of champagne, clinked his own against it and drank. He licked a silver rim of froth off his top lip.

‘I’ve been asked to spend a season in Antarctica.’

‘And?’

And what? she wondered. What if I said, ‘I’m going, and I won’t be back for six months?’ Instead she murmured, ‘Well, I said no, of course.’

Pete nodded. That was what he would expect. He was used to her, to her precise ways, to the regularity of their life together that provided a framework for his erratic behaviour. When they were first together he used to steal pages of her work and frown over the stratigraphical analyses of rock structures. He would turn the equations that represented deformations upside down, playing up his bafflement. Alice used to try to explain to him that these equations were like pictures, abstract illustrations of dynamic relationships that to her were far more vivid than words or photographs. They were the same to her as his sculptures were to him: a shorthand expression of a solid state and at the same time an airy thumbnail sketch of sublime reality. They rendered down the universe, or they tried to.

Alice suddenly smiled. She was thinking in artists’ language.

Pete sat up, sending another wave slopping over the side of the bath. He took her face in his hands and drew her closer so their mouths touched. Her champagne glass tipped sideways and she spilled some in the water.

‘You know, Al. You’re incredibly beautiful when you smile like that.’

She closed her eyes as he kissed her. But not before she had seen a twist at the corner of his mouth and a flash in his black eyes that she couldn’t read.