Sandra Field - The Sun At Midnight

For a moment she thought Jud hadn’t heard her; he was gazing across the valley, and in profile looked more like the boy she had grown up with than the stranger he had become. Then he said, so quietly that she had to strain for the words, ‘Perhaps because there’s room to breathe.’

In swift compassion she said, ‘How did you ever survive being in prison, Jud? Five days in a classroom used to be more than you could take.’

‘I went so deep inside myself that nothing and no one could touch me. I’d have gone mad otherwise.’

He had spoken without emphasis, in a way that was completely convincing. She remembered the slow seep of blood through his blue shirt all those years ago and the stoicism with which he had borne her awkward ministrations, and wanted to weep. It was on the tip of her tongue to cry, ‘Why did you do it?’, for this was the one question whose answer had always evaded her. But she quelled her words before they could be spoken. He had called for a truce, and she had said she did not trust him. It was not for her to ask that question.

Her voice credibly calm, she said, ‘Then this is the right place for you to be.’

He glanced over at her and almost conversationally said, ‘You know, you’ve grown into a very beautiful woman, Kit.’

Her jaw dropped. ‘Who, me?’

A rare smile lit up his face. ‘No one else here.’

Ivor had never told her she was beautiful. Ivor had favoured exquisitely groomed blondes, and if they were rich, all the better. ‘I’ve got freckles.’

He poured boiling water out of the pot on the little gas stove into two mugs containing instant coffee, and passed her one. ‘Is that a crime?’

‘Women in Vogue don’t wear fleece pyjamas and don’t have freckles.’

‘But the women in—’ He broke off. ‘Good lord, where’s my camera?’

As he grabbed for his pack, she looked over her shoulder. A big dark-winged bird was flying straight for them. ‘It’s a jaeger,’ she said with a grin. ‘A parasitic jaeger. Stercorarius parasiticus , to give it its—duck your head!’

But Jud was standing up to adjust his lens, and as the bird swooped overhead, his shutter clicked busily. For a moment the jaeger hung in the air, perfectly poised, its tail fanned and its streamers gracefully punctuating the sky. Then it dived again, and with a burble of laughter Kathrin watched its passage stir the parting in Jud’s hair.

The jaeger passed over them twice more before flying off in the direction of the sea. Jud lowered his camera. ‘I’m sure I got at least one good shot there,’ he said, ‘and maybe two. It must have had a four-foot wing span.’

‘Forty-two inches,’ Kathrin said obligingly, laughter lingering on her face. ‘It’s a good thing we ate all the stew—they’re not called pirate-birds for nothing.’

‘To hell with the stew—I thought it was after my scalp.’

‘It did give you a new hairdo,’ she chuckled, and reached up with one hand to smooth his hair back in place. But Jud was taller than she remembered, so that she had to stand on tiptoe; and his hair, for all its thickness, was silky to the touch. She had somehow expected it to be coarse and springy. Taken aback, she realised with a frisson along her spine that what she really wanted to do was stroke it as she might have stroked the smooth pelt of a wolf, in wonderment and pleasure. Of their own accord her eyes flew to his face.

He was standing very still, the camera dangling from one hand. Yet it was far from the stillness of repose: he blazed with an energy that gathered Kathrin into its orbit as naturally as the act of breathing. Her hand drifted from his hair to his face, her fingertips tracing the ridge of his brow and the jut of his cheekbone, all the while achingly aware of how warm his skin was. Then she touched the corner of his mouth and heard the sharp inhalation of his breath.

Only a tiny sound, but it broke the spell. Her hand dropped to her side and she said incoherently, ‘Jud, I’m sorry—I don’t know what came over me to act like that, I—I must have been out of my mind...I’ve never behaved like that with you before, never. I promise it won’t happen again, truly.’

She backed away from him, her dark eyes filled with panic, and because she was not looking where she was going she stumbled on a hummock of grass. Jud grabbed for her arm. Through the layers of her jacket and her two sweaters she was aware in every nerve of her body of the strength of his grip, and of the current of energy that seemed to surge from his body to hers. A man’s energy. Called up because she was a woman...

Frightened out of her wits, Kathrin pulled free. ‘We’ve got to go. Please let go, Jud!’

He did so instantly. But her blood was still beating in her ears, destroying the tundra’s silence and with it her peace of mind. Striving for the ordinary, she said inanely, ‘We didn’t finish our coffee.’

‘I’ll make more when we reach the muskoxen,’ Jud said with a casualness that did not ring true.

He was as shaken by what had just happened as she was, Kathrin thought in disbelief. Yet what exactly had happened? She was not sure that she knew. She was less sure that she wanted to know. Certainly there was no way she could have put the strange intensity of the last few minutes into words.

Jud knelt to replace his lens cap on the camera. Glancing up at her, his voice almost normal, he said, ‘Before that jaeger arrived, we were talking about women and beauty, weren’t we? I know one thing—I’ve never seen a woman in Vogue as beautiful as you, Kit. Because there’s intelligence and character in your face. Character you’ve earned over the last few years, I suspect...were they difficult years?’

How could she talk about the past—especially to Jud—when the present was filling her with such confusion? ‘This conversation doesn’t qualify as a truce. Anyway, what I did in those years is really none of your business.’

With a violence that startled her Jud said, ‘Do you know what keeps knocking me off balance? One moment we’re back where we always were, having fun in the outdoors, laughing because a bird’s just dive-bombed us...then sud-denly I’m aware that you’re a woman. Not a girl. A woman. A beautiful woman.’

With uncanny accuracy he had mirrored her own perception, that the two of them were on a seesaw that kept tilting between the past and the present. But she didn’t want to be alone on the tundra with a man who saw her as a beautiful woman; a man whose hair was soft to the touch. ‘We were like brother and sister,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t want that to change, and there’s no reason why it should. And now we’d better get going...I need to get some sleep at some point tonight.’

‘You want things simple and tidy, don’t you?’ he said ferociously. ‘Jud was once like a brother to me so he’ll always be a brother to me. Life’s not like that; surely you’ve learned that much?’

Kathrin dumped her cold coffee on the ground and shook the last droplets from the mug. ‘We’re here to look for muskoxen. Not the meaning of life.’

‘If we’re alone out here for four days, we’re going to find more than muskoxen,’ Jud said grimly, and bent to dismantle the little stove.

A few minutes later they set off, Kathrin in the lead, Jud behind her. But as she trudged through the bleached grass, she knew Jud would follow her lead only as long as he wanted to—and no longer.

* * *

The muskoxen were in the next valley, grazing in the meadow beyond an outcrop of rocks. ‘There they are!’ Kathrin exclaimed, as excited as if she’d met old friends. ‘It’s the same herd. I call the bull Bossy and the cow that doesn’t have a calf is Daisy. You can tell the other two cows apart by the degree of shedding—Clara’s only just started, and Sara’s well along. Their calves must have been born within a couple of days of each other, I can’t tell them apart.’