Rosie Thomas - Sun at Midnight

Now, sitting beside her mother on the cat-scented sofa, she took Margaret’s dry hands between hers, noting the tiny flicker of resistance that came before submission. Margaret had never been physically demonstrative. In her view excessive hugging and kissing were for film actors, not real people.

‘Go on. Tell me. How do you know this media mogul and what is Kandahar Station?’

‘I met him many years ago when I was making my first series for the television.’ It was always the television, in Margaret’s old-fashioned way.

‘I didn’t know that.’

Margaret’s brief nod seemed to acknowledge that there were many episodes in her life that the passage of years and the accumulation of success had left half submerged. ‘It’s a very long time ago.’

She sounded tired , Alice realised with a stab of anxiety. It was a good thing that Trevor had been able to persuade her to take a ten-day break in Madeira.

Margaret withdrew her hands and smoothed her trousers over her knees. The jersey fabric was baggy and whiskered with cat hair. When she was younger, Alice remembered, her mother had had an ambivalent attitude to clothes. She had loved style and making a statement, but had been hampered by the suspicion that this didn’t go with serious science. So she had adopted a look that was all her own, in which plain suits and conservative dresses were enlivened with wicked shoes, or ethnic necklaces, or a wide-brimmed hat looped with scarves. These days, however, she dressed mostly for comfort.

‘Kandahar Station is Lewis’s current toy,’ she continued and her briskness came back again. ‘It’s a new research base. Largely funded at present by Sullavan himself, but with some EU support. As you know, he’s passionately pro-Europe. The intention is that Kandahar will ultimately offer facilities for European scientists and joint European research initiatives across all the relevant disciplines.’

This sounded like a speech. And if Margaret had rehearsed it, then what she was going to say must be important.

‘And where is it?’ Alice asked, although she knew the answer to this question too.

‘Antarctica.’

Of course.

Alice had grown up with the waterfall sound of the word. The pictures of it were as familiar as the view from this window. Some of them still adorned the walls and mantel here in Margaret’s room. In the most famous one of all, the younger Margaret crouched beside a hole in the ice shelf, dressed in the corpulent rubber folds of a diver’s drysuit. She had pulled off her rubber hood and the wind blew her hair away from her head like a silvery halo. A seal’s head poked up out of the ice hole and it looked as if they were amiably chatting together.

In another a stiffly posed group of bearded men stood in the snow outside a low-built wooden hut. Margaret’s figure at the end of the line looked tiny, like an afterthought, but her head was held erect and her chin jutted firmly forward.

Margaret was in her forties before her only child was born and most of her polar adventures were already behind her, but to the small Alice, hearing the stories, her mother’s doings and those of Scott and Shackleton and the others had run together into a continuous and present mythology of snow and terrible cold and heroic bravery. She curled up under her warm blankets and shivered, full of admiration and awe, as well as pride that her own mother somehow belonged to this bearded company. At the same time she made a childish resolution that she would never venture to such a place herself and her decision seemed to be endorsed by the fact that her father had never been there either.

More than twenty-five years later, Alice saw no reason to change her mind. ‘No,’ she said now, smiling as she did so but without letting a tremor of uncertainty colour her voice.

‘Alice, it’s an honour. Sir Lewis wants to name the laboratory block Margaret Mather House. What do you think of that?’

‘It is an honour,’ Alice gently agreed. ‘Do you think it would be too much for you to go yourself? To see the ice again?’

Margaret’s face flooded with longing but she shook her head. ‘I would go if…if I didn’t have damned arthritis and if I wasn’t going to be a nuisance and a liability.’

Anyone planning to travel south would have to undergo medical and fitness examinations. Margaret knew she wouldn’t pass any tests. And it would be Margaret’s idea of misery, of course, to feel that she might be a burden.

‘So. I want you to go instead. In my place. Lewis has asked for you.’

The imperiousness of her demand grated on Alice. ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ she answered as calmly as she could. Antarctica was her mother’s love, not hers. The idea of the southern continent lay in her mind like a vast, cold dead end at the bottom of the world. She didn’t want its icy walls to close around her.

Margaret lifted one hand. ‘Hear me out. It’s not just a PR excursion, Alice. You are being offered a place on the base for the entire summer season. Just think. For a geologist to be given the chance to go to Antarctica? You can pursue your own research project. Write your own ticket. You will have funding, you can use Sullavan’s infrastructure. It’s a great chance, a career opportunity you shouldn’t turn your back on. You’ve even got the time this year to do it.’

That much was true. After five years of teaching undergraduates, Alice had a six-month break coming up in which to pursue her own research. She planned to do some field work in western Turkey, making a broad analysis of sedimentary rock structures in a system of active faults. Travel to Turkey was easy enough to allow her to come back to Oxford, and Peter, as often as possible.

The familiar waves of Margaret’s enthusiasm and determination pounded against Alice. She felt as if she were some eroding shoreline that had been withstanding this onslaught for a lifetime. She scrabbled against the undertow, trying to keep her balance and hold firm against the current. ‘I’m flattered. And I can see that it would be a nice media hook for Sullavan.’

That was what it was about, of course. Some television footage, newspaper and magazine articles about the scientist daughter following in the scientist mother’s footsteps, pictures of the base, a good excuse to bring out all the archive photographs from Margaret’s heyday. It would be another publicity angle by which to promote a very rich man’s latest way of diverting himself. Alice didn’t admire what she had heard about Lewis Sullavan.

‘But I have made my plans for the next six months, you know.’

There was the sound of creaking floorboards again.

‘And now here’s your father,’ Margaret announced superfluously.

Trevor Peel was a small, pink-faced, egg-shaped man. He eased himself round the door, aiming to create the minimum of disturbance by his entrance. A fringe of feathery white hair clung to his otherwise perfectly bald head. From behind the shield of his gold-rimmed glasses he was trying to secondguess the temperature between his wife and daughter. ‘Mm, aha. I’ve been putting some things in a suitcase. Better now than at the last minute. So what do you think?’ he said to Alice. He knew about Margaret’s invitation and also Alice’s likely response to the idea of travelling in her place.

Alice loved her father dearly. His mildness was deceptive. He had a sharp mind, but it was coupled with a tolerant disposition. He had lacked the ambition rather than the intellect to reach the front rank himself as a scientist and he had always been aware of this deficiency. He had devoted himself to encouraging his formidable wife instead and in this they had been an ideal match. All through Alice’s childhood, Margaret had often been away but Trevor was invariably there. They had formed a sympathetic company of two, moving quietly in Margaret’s wake. Trevor had been retired for ten years now. He occupied himself with reading, crosswords, gardening and Margaret’s needs.