Rosie Thomas - Sun at Midnight

Alice’s eyes met his. There was no need to speak. Over the years they had developed a silent language of their own. Today’s communication was keep your head down .

‘I don’t understand her,’ Margaret announced. ‘I would have thought she would jump at an offer like this.’

‘Ah,’ Trevor said.

Everyone understood that Margaret had known that Alice wouldn’t do anything of the kind, but had assumed that she would be able to override her opposition.

‘You’ve got a few days to think it over, Alice. I’ll let Lewis know you’re considering it very seriously. No one could expect you to make a decision on the spot. Although I would have done. We can discuss it properly when we come back from this holiday.’ She spoke the word as if it were Gulag or torture chamber .

The glance that passed between Trevor and Alice said better try and nip this in the bud .

Alice drew in a breath. ‘Mummy, I don’t want to go to Antarctica. I’m sorry to spoil a nice story and turn my back on history at the same time, but I’m not going. It doesn’t fit in with my plans.’

This didn’t come out right. She intended to be cheerfully firm but she ended up sounding feeble as well as petulant, as she too often did when she was forced into open conflict with her mother.

‘Just give me your reasons why not,’ Margaret said. So she could then set out to demolish them.

Alice reflected that there were many reasons, but they could all be placed under the same heading. ‘Because I am happy where I am,’ she said gently.

She thought about sitting in the sun yesterday afternoon, eating scones and listening to Peter and Mark. She remembered the cool bedroom light and the heat of Peter’s mouth on her skin. Tonight their house would be full of friends and music. She knew where she would be and what she would be doing, next week and the week after that. Order and certainty were important to her. She didn’t like question without answer, thesis without proof. She liked her work, even loved it, but she didn’t want to make it her entire reason for living. Antarctica was an unknown and Alice preferred the known world.

Margaret’s eyebrows drew together. She put her head on one side, in the way she did when she was considering a problem. ‘I don’t see what happiness has to do with anything,’ she said at length.

No, Alice thought.

Her mother understood achievement, as in doing your best and then improving on that. She had no fear and no self-doubt. She didn’t care much about her own comforts and not at all when she had a goal in mind. Happiness would come a long way down her list of considerations. This was what Alice believed, although she realised with a small jolt that the two of them had never talked about it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

Trevor patted his tweed pockets, searching for his cigarettes. He only smoked outside the house, by Margaret’s decree, and this was his unconscious signalling that he wanted to get out of the room.

‘I’ll make some coffee.’

‘Is it too early for a sherry?’

Trevor and Alice spoke brightly, simultaneously. With difficulty Margaret stood up and walked slowly back to her table. She sat upright at her keyboard, hitching her loose cardigan round her.

I have disappointed her, Alice thought. It was not a new realisation. She went quickly and stood behind the chair, cupping her mother’s shoulders in her warm hands.

‘I will have a cup of coffee, thank you,’ Margaret said.

Later, Alice walked in the garden with Trevor.

They descended a set of mossy steps and reached the fence that separated their land from the neighbour’s plot. There was a sycamore tree in the angle of the fence, casting too much shade so nothing would grow beneath it. The bare earth was dry and scented with cat. They leaned against the tree’s rough bark to smoke, looking up the garden at the cream-washed stucco of the house. It was too big for two elderly people and it had acquired a neglected aspect. Paint was peeling off the window frames and there was a long streak of damp in the render beneath a broken gutter.

Trevor drew a line in the dust with the toe of his shoe. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked tentatively.

Alice had been remembering how big this garden used to seem when she had conquered the shrubbery and built dens in the hedges. As big as a whole country, and the swampy pond with its frog population had been a wide sea.

‘Sure?’ she repeated.

‘About not going south.’

‘Yes, I am. Realistically, what would my study be?’

It was much easier to talk to Trevor like this, not just because he was interested in the scope of her sedimentological rock investigations but because he listened to what she said, whether it was related to science or not.

‘You won’t need to apply for funding, as I understand it. You just go, look at something that interests you and Sullavan picks up the tab. That doesn’t happen every day, does it?’

Almost all research projects involved time spent in the field, studying rock formations and collecting samples for lab analysis. Expeditions to remote places were expensive to set up and needed complex support. Proposals had to be carefully directed and worded to attract approval and sufficient financial support from the funding bodies, and this was often the hardest part of the process. Alice was still waiting to hear whether she would be awarded a grant for her next six months’ research.

‘What is the deal?’

She hadn’t given Margaret the opportunity to explain even this much herself, so her mother wasn’t the only one guilty of not listening. Sometimes, she thought, we bring out the worst in each other. We work against one another’s grain, setting up ridges and splinters.

Trevor threw his cigarette end into the hedge. ‘It’s a maverick set-up, as you would expect with anything connected to Sullavan. Kandahar is down at the base of the Antarctic peninsula. It was built in the 1950s for the British Antarctic Survey, who closed it down in the late 1990s as surplus to requirements. The bay gets iced up in winter and it’s difficult to supply as a year-round station. They were on the point of dismantling the buildings and clearing the site when Sullavan stepped in and offered to buy it as the base for his pet project: United Europe in Antarctica. It was much cheaper for BAS to sell the place standing than pay for clearance, so Sullavan got quite a bargain. Now he’s got to get some decent science underway; it probably doesn’t matter too much exactly what so long as it has popular appeal and preferably a few familiar names connected with it. Which is where Margaret comes in.’

And by extension her daughter, neither of them went on to add.

‘I see.’

‘Not tempted?’

A lawnmower was whining monotonously somewhere in the middle distance. The gardener was probably Roger Armstrong, a mathematician whose garden on the other side of the lane was tended with millimetric precision, in striking contrast to the Peels’. Trevor liked to wander between his hedges and stand rocking on the balls of his feet while he peered into his tangled flowerbeds. He believed that a garden should be a place to stroll or sit and think, a sanctuary, not a job of work. Today, as if to prove him right, it looked beautiful in its dishevelment. Clumps of goldenrod glowed in the sun and even the mildew on the asters took on a silvery glamour. Thanks to Roger Armstrong’s efforts the air was full of the lush scent of late-season grass.

‘Not in the least.’ Alice smiled. It was easy to sound entirely certain.

Her father put an arm round her and hugged her. His smell, as always, was a compound of cigarettes and wool and something of himself, perfectly clean but also animal like a horse or a dog. She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.