Rosie Thomas - Sun at Midnight

By ‘the others’ she meant scientists working in her field, marine mammal biology.

In the 1960s Margaret had made a series of television films about whales and seals in the seas surrounding Antarctica. She spent many months of the year living down on the ice, even doing most of her own underwater camerawork. She wrote the films’ drily lyrical commentaries too, and narrated them in her strong Yorkshire accent. The series made her and her voice famous.

She was never short of energy. Even after she had become a celebrity she continued her research and maintained her reputation as a serious scientist. Her meticulous work on the breeding patterns of Weddell seals pioneered a subsequent generation of Antarctic studies.

This morning, Margaret was replying to a personal message from Lewis Sullavan.

There had been a succession of increasingly insistent communications from his staff and now there was one from the great man himself. She sat for a moment with her fingers resting beside the keyboard. She looked out into the garden without seeing the heavy trees that leaned over into the lane, then shook herself and began.

‘My dear friend, I really cannot accept your kind invitation,’ she recited as she picked out the words. ‘Much as I would like to. The fact is that I am now 77 years of age and I have severe arthritis. However, there remains the alternative proposal.’

The cat yawned and stood up to claw the sofa cushions. Margaret heard Trevor’s footsteps crossing the upstairs landing from the bathroom to his study. The floorboards creaked as they always did.

‘My daughter is very interested in the idea,’ Margaret typed and whistled through her teeth as she sat back to review what she had written.

‘We’ll see, eh?’ she said, addressing the last remark to the cat.

She heard a car and quickly looked up. Alice’s car rounded the overgrown circular flowerbed that blocked the space between the house and the gate to the road, and drew up outside the front door.

‘Soon enough,’ Margaret added. She saved her unfinished message to Lewis Sullavan and was hobbling away from a blank screen by the time Alice came in.

‘Ah, there you are at last,’ Margaret said briskly.

Alice had brought a bunch of bright orange lilies with chocolate-speckled throats, her mother’s favourite flowers. She wrapped her arms round Margaret, hugging her close. She saw that the room looked as it always did; it was her mother who seemed smaller, as if the disorder might finally be on the point of overwhelming her.

‘Hello, Mum. Here I am.’

After a brief embrace Margaret leaned away, apparently for a better view of her daughter.

Alice’s hair was thick and slightly wavy, the same texture and silvery blonde colour as Margaret’s had also once been. Margaret’s was white now, and she wore it bluntly chopped round her face They were both slightly built, but Alice seemed to grow taller as Margaret’s painful stoop increased. Margaret said that her daughter was much more contemplative and serious-minded than she had ever been, but Trevor insisted that she was so like her mother at the same age that they could have passed for twins. Neither woman believed him.

‘Mum, the music’s very loud. Can I turn it down a bit?’

‘Is it? All right.’

Margaret motioned to the CD player and watched with a touch of envy as Alice swung with an unthinking fluid movement and muted the sound.

‘How do you feel?’ Alice asked.

‘I’m grand,’ she answered, although the pain was bad today. ‘And we’re away on holiday in three days, even though we don’t do so much here that needs taking a holiday from .’

‘Come on, you’re just going to stay in a nice hotel in Madeira and enjoy being waited on for once. Why don’t you sit down?’

Margaret gave an impatient shrug but she let Alice guide her gently to the sofa. They sat down once Alice had pushed the cat aside.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’ll be down as soon as he realises you’re here. I want a word first.’

‘Is something wrong? Have you seen Dr Davey?’

‘Don’t fuss, Alice. I’m perfectly fine.’ Margaret’s feet in elastic-sided shoes were placed flat on the floor, exactly together, toes pointing forward. She sat upright, hands folded.

Her mother wanted to be invulnerable, to remain as allcapable and all-knowing as she had always managed to be. Alice understood that perfectly. She knew that she despised her own increasing physical frailty, as if it were some moral weakness. In fact, there was nothing weak about Margaret and there never had been. She had been one of the first women scientists to penetrate the male domain of Antarctic research; she had filmed her seals beneath the ice of the polar sea and she had never shrunk from anything just because she was a woman, or a wife, or a mother. Her great energy and singlemindedness tended rather to make everyone around her feel weak by comparison. Recognition of this was one of the strongest of the many bonds between Alice and her father.

‘No, this is about you,’ Margaret announced.

Alice tried not to sigh. ‘Go on. I’m listening,’ she said.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Margaret glanced over the top of her bifocals towards the kitchen, as if this were some hitherto-unexplored wilderness region. It wasn’t that it daunted her, more that it didn’t offer interesting opportunities. Her lack of culinary ability was legendary.

‘Later. I’ll make it.’

‘All right. Now. Where were we? Yes. Listen to me. I’ve got a tip-top invitation for you.’

Margaret clapped her hands, then paused for dramatic effect while Alice wondered what awards dinner or institution’s prize-giving her mother had been asked to preside over, and at which she would be offered as a disappointing last-minute substitute. Being Margaret Mather’s daughter didn’t mean that she could make an audience eat out of her hand the way her mother did.

‘You have been invited to go to Kandahar Station,’ she announced grandly.

Alice had never heard of it, so couldn’t express either enthusiasm or reluctance. ‘What?’

‘Lewis Sullavan has personally asked you.’

‘Lewis Sullavan doesn’t know me from a hole in the fence.’

But Alice knew who he was. His media empire had been founded in the 1960s with a stake in one of the early commercial television companies. It had grown, hydra-headed, since then and now included newspapers and magazines in the UK and Europe, a Hollywood film company and interests in television companies across the world.

‘And if he doesn’t know me, why would he invite me out of the blue to go to some station I’ve never heard of?’

Margaret didn’t even blink. Age had rimmed her eyes with red and faded her dark eyelashes to the colour of dry sand, but her gaze was as sharp as it had ever been.

Alice quietly answered the question for herself. ‘Because of you.’ For as long as she could remember she had been notable because of her mother’s achievements rather than her own.

It made her feel mean and small to be resentful of this, and as an adult she was learning to accept what she couldn’t change, but she used to wish that she could be just Alice Peel, making her own way via her own mistakes and minor triumphs. Instead, she was always living in the half-light of reflected glory. The house she lived in had been purchased with her mother’s financial assistance and she even had a suspicion, lying just the other side of rationality, that her lectureship at the University was hers as much because of who she was as what she could do.

Even her choice of subject had been influenced by her mother. Alice might have wished to become a biologist herself, but there was no question that she could, or would, ever compete with what Margaret had done. Instead, she had chosen geology, her father’s speciality. In her teens they had taken camping trips alone together, looking at rocks. These times, when she had had the undivided attention of one of her parents, were amongst the happiest of Alice’s life.