Sandra Field - The Sun At Midnight

Red-throated loons were swimming in the lakes between her and the camp. They wailed a warning signal, a chorus so eerie and mournful that it never failed to raise the hairs on the back of Kathrin’s neck. Obediently she kept her distance from their nesting sites, the frigid wind that was blowing off the pack ice scourging her cheeks.

Offshore, the humped cliffs of Whale Island were black against the sky. Garry had promised he’d take her and Pam out there one day soon. There were ancient tent sites on the island, with the bones of bowhead whales slaughtered hundreds of years ago; and nesting on the cliffs were gyrfalcons, the rare white-feathered hunters of the far north.

Kathrin topped the final rise and then her boots were crunching in the loose stones on the airstrip. She marched along it between the two rows of oil drums that were its only markers. She was hungry. Surely Pam, who was the camp cook as well as Garry’s girlfriend, would have saved her some supper? Real food instead of freeze-dried rations, she thought dreamily...that, too, could be considered very close to heaven.

The building that was a combination kitchen, dining-room and library was painted a garish orange. Kathrin pushed open the porch door and slid her pack to the floor, leaning against the wall. From inside she could hear the murmur of voices and a burst of laughter. After leaving her boots on the mat alongside several other pairs, she stepped into the kitchen.

The heat from the coal stove enfolded her, bringing an added pink to her cheeks. She blinked a little, pulling off her jacket and her knitted cap, so that her hair fell in untidy wisps around her face. Sniffing the air, she said, ‘I sure hope you guys have left me something to eat.’

In his stilted English Karl said, ‘We have left much food.’

‘Not a thing,’ said Calvin. ‘You’re too fat.’

Pam gave a snort of laughter. She was too fond of her own cooking and hence rather plump, and openly envied Kathrin’s ability to eat well and stay slim. ‘It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to heat it up,’ she said. ‘I left a plate out for you.’

Karl was lanky and bespectacled, frighteningly clever and unfailingly serious; he was on a scientific exchange programme from Sweden. Calvin, short, stout, and cheerful, was a lover of pretty women and practical jokes, not necessarily in that order. To all who would listen, he professed himself madly in love with Kathrin’s dark eyes and chestnut hair; yet she would have shared a tent with him on the tundra and known herself to be entirely safe. She liked him very much. ‘I thought you were supposed to be collecting algal samples in the bog,’ she said sternly.

‘I got my socks wet,’ he replied. ‘How were the muskoxen?’

Kathrin dropped her jacket over the back of a chair and hauled her sweater over her head. More of her hair was tugged free of its braid, to lie in chestnut strands on the shoulders of her green shirt. ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘I followed the herd for nearly five days—I think I’ll go back out tomorrow.’ She caught sight of Garry standing by the stove, his bearded face flushed from the heat, and added, ‘After I have a sauna, right?’

‘It’ll be ready in half an hour,’ he rejoined. ‘And you might have company to go and see the muskoxen tomorrow—we have a visitor.’

As she raised her brows in inquiry, not best pleased at the thought of sharing her solitude, a voice spoke from behind her, a man’s voice. ‘Hello, Kit,’ it said.

Only one person in the world had ever called her Kit.

Swept back into the past with an immediacy that petrified her, Kathrin felt her eyes widen with shock and her muscles tense in rejection. Her whole body rigid, she clutched at the sweater she had draped on top of her jacket. She would wake up in a minute and find this had all been a dream. Or a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep.

Because it couldn’t be true. Jud couldn’t be here.

Not Jud.

Very slowly, aware at some distant level that Karl was looking puzzled and Calvin gaping at her, Kathrin turned her head. A man was sitting in the far corner of the room, his chair tipped back, his thumbs tucked in his belt. His eyes were fastened on her face. In front of him on the flowered plastic tablecloth was an empty coffee mug.

She recognised him immediately, and at the same time saw that he was unutterably altered from the man she had known so many years ago. She could not have smiled to have saved her soul, for the flesh seemed to have frozen to her face and she could feel herself being drawn into the cold blue pits of his eyes in a way that appalled her. No one else she had ever known had eyes of so intense and vivid a blue as Jud; yet right now they reminded her of nothing so much as the meltwater that collected in pools on glaciers, deep turquoise over hidden depths of ice. Struggling to find her voice, she croaked, ‘Jud...Jud Leighton.’

Pam banged a saucepan on the stove and said matter-of-factly, ‘Your supper’s ready, Kathrin.’

Rescue. With a huge effort Kathrin unlocked her gaze from her antagonist’s—for instantly she had known that was what he was—wondering in some dim recess of her brain if she were physically capable of walking across the room and taking the plate that Pam was holding out to her. It’s not Ivor sitting at the table, she thought dazedly, it’s Jud. Ivor was the brother she had been in love with, the one who should have roused this storm of emotion in her breast. Even though Jud had materialised without warning in a place thousands of miles from Thorndean, she would never have expected him to have upset her so strongly. So why was she standing here as stiff-limbed as a plastic doll?

Because Jud’s betrayal had been worse than Ivor’s.

Ten times worse.

This new knowledge slammed into Kathrin’s body with the force of a fist. She should have known it seven years ago, and had not. It had taken Jud’s sudden reappearance into her life to make it clear to her how deep was the wound he had inflicted. Deeper than Ivor’s more physical wounds. Deeper, too, than her exile from Thorndean, terrible though that had been. Numbly she became aware that Pam was now standing in front of her holding out the plate, her long-lashed grey eyes concerned. ‘Are you OK?’ Pam asked. ‘You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.’ She turned an unfriendly gaze on the man on the other side of the table. ‘Jud didn’t tell us he knew you.’

Not hurrying, Jud lowered the legs of his chair to the floor and leaned his arms on the table. ‘I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. There must be more than one Kathrin Selby in Canada.’

In an unexpected and invigorating rush, like flame seizing upon dry wood, Kathrin lost her temper. ‘More than one with red hair and brown eyes, who loves wild places and wild animals?’ she blazed. ‘Give me a break, Jud!’

‘You overestimate yourself,’ he mocked. ‘I didn’t bother asking for any details. When I heard your name, I just tucked myself in the corner and waited to see who would walk in the door.’

His voice might be as smooth as the exquisite silk scarf he had given her for her sixteenth birthday; but she still knew him well enough to realise that beneath a thin veneer of control he was furiously angry. He had no right to be angry, Kathrin thought blankly. None whatsoever. She was the one who had been wronged, not him.

As if a wound had been reopened, she was suddenly flooded by all the anguish of the seventeen-year-old girl whose world had collapsed around her one summer long ago. There had been no firm ground to stand on that summer, for everything that she had taken for granted had shown her another face, a demonic face, ugly and frightening beyond belief.

Frantically Kathrin fought to collect her wits. She might have been knocked off balance a few minutes ago; but she was not so disoriented as to challenge Jud’s anger in the camp kitchen in front of an audience as rapt as any play-wright could have wished. With a fresh spurt of fury she realised how easily Jud had gained the advantage over her, just by sitting out of sight of the door and waiting for her to walk into the room. All her shock and horror had been written on her face for him to read. Him, and everyone else in the kitchen.