Sun at Midnight

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.

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.

‘Well, then. I’m glad you’re so contented,’ Trevor said easily.

As she lifted her head Alice heard a sigh and then a click, as if there had been a second’s interruption of time. She looked along the path towards the goldenrod, seeing it as if she had never looked at it before, all broken up into waves of different depths of colour, and hearing the lawnmower’s buzz separated into a series of vibrating notes that sprayed through the air like drops of molten metal.

Is this what happiness means? she wondered. Just this?

The thought sounded a single hollow note within her head.

Then the world remembered its path and moved forward again. There were just ragged yellow flowers that were not much more than weeds and the sound of a neighbour working in his garden on a sunny Saturday morning.

‘What about Mum?’ Alice asked. ‘Will you get her to have a rest on this holiday?’

Trevor hunched his shoulders, spread his hands slightly. They had been exchanging this gesture for many years, the two of them. They left the shade of the sycamore tree and walked back up the slope of grass to the kitchen door. Dandelion clocks released small seed parachutes as their feet brushed past. Margaret had turned the music up again. The orange lilies had been put in a green enamel jug and placed beside her computer.

The two old people tried to persuade Alice to stay for lunch. Margaret even said she thought there was some cold ham somewhere, by way of an extra inducement.

‘No, I’ve really got to go because we’re having all these people round this evening, and I’ve still got to make the food and buy wine,’ Alice said.

‘Can’t Peter do something?’

It wasn’t that Trevor and Margaret disliked Peter, more that they didn’t understand how he lived a life with no particular plans, not even a proper routine. They thought that his habits and the hours he kept were incompatible with a productive existence. The few pieces of his work that they had seen left even Margaret with nothing to say. They believed that art lived on gallery or drawingroom walls and didn’t incorporate the contents of builders’ skips.

For his part Peter was always polite to them, but the politeness had a resistance to it that was almost ruder than if he had dispensed with it and just been himself.

‘It’s easier if I do it. He’ll be in charge of the barbecuing. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive you to the airport on Tuesday?’

‘Your father’s arranged a car to pick us up.’

‘Is there anything else I can do? Shopping? Packing?’

‘I’ve travelled to a few places in my life, Alice. I can manage a ten-day package trip to Madeira.’

‘I know you have, I know you can. So. Have a lovely time. Just sit in the sun. I’ll call you before you go.’

Alice hugged her mother as she left. In her arms, Margaret felt as light and dry as a leaf. Alice had been aware of the change for the past year or two, but it was still uncomfortable to recognise that the woman who had been such an embodiment of strength for her whole life was growing weaker.

‘Think about Kandahar,’ Margaret called after her, as a parting challenge. She believed in having the last word.

Trevor came out to the car to say goodbye. ‘I’d go, you know, if I were in your shoes,’ he said, startling her so that she paused, halfway into the driver’s seat.

‘But you never did go.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t. Maybe I should have done, but that sort of thing was Margaret’s role. She was the adventurer, so I was the stay-at-home. I loved her far too much to risk offering any competition, and then you were born and I didn’t want to miss a single day of your life. But if I were you, now, today, that would be quite different.’

Not for the first time, Alice reflected on her father’s unselfishness. He possessed enough for two. For three, if she counted herself into the equation. She had no children, no husband, yet, no evident ties – except for Pete, although he was enough to keep her firmly anchored. At least I’ve come far enough to recognise that I am selfish, she thought. Trevor was beaming at her. The breeze fluffed up the white feathers of his hair.

‘Then you wouldn’t have been you. You wouldn’t be you now. I don’t want you to be any different from the way you are,’ Alice told him.

He nodded. ‘I don’t think you need have any anxiety on that score. No new tricks for an old dog, you know.’

‘Good.’ She kissed his cheek. As always, Trevor convinced her that the world was a secure place.

‘Have a lovely holiday. Look after Mum.’

‘You know I’ll do that.’

He stood back to watch her go, his hands in the pockets of his shapeless trousers and his hair like thistledown in the sunlight.

It was 5.30 and Alice was lying in a hot bath when Peter appeared in the bathroom doorway. She saw his reflection first in the steamy mirror, then turned her head to smile at him. He was carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

‘I think I’ll join you.’ He grinned.

Pete unbuttoned his shirt, unbuckled his belt and pulled off his jeans. He had olive skin and a flat stomach. Alice watched him, noticing the play of muscles in his arms and back. He looked clean, even his hands and fingernails were clean, unlike the way they usually were when he came back from a day in the studio.

‘Were you working?’

He was naked now, but not in the least vulnerable. He stepped into the water, so that Alice had to sit up to make room for him. Heavily scented water slopped over the edge of the bath as he sank backwards.

‘Yeah.’

She didn’t say anything and after a beat of silence he added, ‘I had a mass of paperwork. Invoices, bills, all kinds of shit. I hate doing all that.’

‘I know you do. Pete?’

She was going to say, I had a moment this afternoon when I thought is this all? She had intended to ask him if he was happy, if what they had between them was good. If it was enough. But this, she knew, was what Pete would dismiss as a quintessential woman’s question.

‘Yeah?’ He locked his legs round her. Bubbles of foam popped close to their ears. Pete gave her a misted glass of champagne, clinked his own against it and drank. He licked a silver rim of froth off his top lip.

‘I’ve been asked to spend a season in Antarctica.’

‘And?’

And what? she wondered. What if I said, ‘I’m going, and I won’t be back for six months?’ Instead she murmured, ‘Well, I said no, of course.’

Pete nodded. That was what he would expect. He was used to her, to her precise ways, to the regularity of their life together that provided a framework for his erratic behaviour. When they were first together he used to steal pages of her work and frown over the stratigraphical analyses of rock structures. He would turn the equations that represented deformations upside down, playing up his bafflement. Alice used to try to explain to him that these equations were like pictures, abstract illustrations of dynamic relationships that to her were far more vivid than words or photographs. They were the same to her as his sculptures were to him: a shorthand expression of a solid state and at the same time an airy thumbnail sketch of sublime reality. They rendered down the universe, or they tried to.

Alice suddenly smiled. She was thinking in artists’ language.

Pete sat up, sending another wave slopping over the side of the bath. He took her face in his hands and drew her closer so their mouths touched. Her champagne glass tipped sideways and she spilled some in the water.

‘You know, Al. You’re incredibly beautiful when you smile like that.’

She closed her eyes as he kissed her. But not before she had seen a twist at the corner of his mouth and a flash in his black eyes that she couldn’t read.

Pete was the one who ended the kiss. He drank the rest of his champagne at a gulp and stood up, brandishing his glass. Water and bubbles slicked the black hairs on his legs into sleek lines.

‘We’re going to have a great party,’ he said. He didn’t ask any more about Antarctica. Alice had said that of course she wasn’t going, so there was no need to pursue it.

It was a good party.

Pete flipped sausages and chicken pieces on and off the barbecue in the back garden. There were candles in little coloured glass vases hanging in the branches of the tree and the night air was so still that the flames burned without a tremor. People brought their paper plates of food and glasses of wine outside to sit in the moth-filled darkness, and music drifted out of the windows over their heads. In between last-minute preparations Alice had found ten minutes to pull on a black frock that showed her cleavage and new stiletto-heeled sandals that made her feel tall but also slightly at risk of toppling forward over her own toes.

‘Nice dress,’ Mark the sculptor said, with his eyes on her front. Alice laughed and put her arm through his to steer him into the middle of the next group. The house and garden overflowed with different people, painters and writers and lecturers and scientists as well as the old friends Alice had grown up with. Oxford had been her home for most of her life and she loved this bringing together and shaking up of different elements from within it. She moved through the crowd, laughing and talking, catching Pete’s eye once in a while, checking that he thought it was going well too. They were good at this, making a celebration together. Recognising that the party was now moving under its own impetus, she gave herself up to the pleasure of it.

Alice’s oldest friend Jo was there and her husband Harry. They had brought their three-month-old twins and put them in their car-seat cradles to sleep in Alice and Pete’s bedroom.

‘Al, I am so knackered,’ Jo muttered. She had black rings under her eyes and her flat hair clung to her cheeks. ‘They never sleep at the same time. I never get more than an hour. What am I going to do?’

‘They’ll start sleeping better soon.’ Alice took her friend’s hands and rubbed them between her own.

‘When?’ Jo wailed. ‘I want my life back. I want to be myself again.’

‘You will be yourself. It’s only time.’

Becky arrived late. Her current man was a psychologist, an unnervingly handsome Indian who didn’t say very much. As always, Becky talked enough for both of them.

‘I’m sorry, Al, have we missed everything? The traffic from London, you wouldn’t believe, Vijay said we should just move to Oxford. Shall I come back, wouldn’t that be a gas? Jo! Come here, baby-mother, give me a hug. Mmm, look at you. God, your boobs are so fabulous.’

Alice and Becky and Jo had been friends since the fourth form. Jo had once said, ‘I’m the good girl, Alice is the clever girl and Becky is the star in the firmament.’

Now Jo said, ‘I’ve just got to go up and check on them again. I don’t know where Harry is.’ She looked as if she was going to cry.

Becky and Alice glanced at each other.

‘Harry’s in the garden with Pete. I’ll go up and make sure they’re still fast asleep, you sit here and talk to Beck,’ Alice told her.

She gave them both a glass of wine and went quietly up the stairs. The dancing had started and loud music came up through the floorboards but it didn’t seem to bother Jo’s babies. They slept in their padded plastic cradles. One of them held his fist against his cheek, the thumb not quite connecting with his mouth. Alice stooped down to look closer and found that she wanted to touch the tip of her finger to his rosy skin. She stopped herself in case he woke up, but she crouched there for a long minute, watching and listening. Downstairs, someone turned the music up even further. The party was changing up a gear.

She stood up again, almost reluctantly, and walked to the door. It was ajar and from the semi-darkness of the bedroom she could see down to the half-landing where a pretty arched window looked over the garden. Pete was standing in the angle of the stairs, just out of sight of anyone who might be in the hallway. His hand slid slowly down the back of a girl who was pressed up against him, came to rest on her bottom. She was wearing a cropped pink top that exposed a broad expanse of skin above lowslung trousers.

Alice stood completely still. He bent his head and kissed her, then whispered something in her ear. She angled herself closer still, the movement eloquent of intimacy and familiarity. The two of them knew one another’s bodies.

A second later the girl ducked away from him. She used her thumbs to flick her long hair back behind her ears and smiled at him from beneath her eyelashes before she skipped down the stairs. Pete leaned against the wall for a second, staring down into the garden. If he had looked the other way, up the stairs, he would have met Alice’s eyes. But he didn’t. He rose up on to the balls of his feet, as if balancing on the brink of something delightful, then followed the girl.

It was just a kiss at a party.

She told herself that it meant nothing, it was what parties were for. She would go downstairs herself and kiss Mark, or preferably Vijay.

But everything about the tiny encounter told her that it wasn’t nothing; it was much more than just a kiss at a party.

Becky and Jo both stared at her as she came back.

‘Hey,’ Becky said softly.

‘Are they all right?’ Jo was already heaving herself to her feet.

‘They’re fine. I just saw Pete kissing some girl on the stairs.’

Now it was Becky and Jo who looked at each other.

‘Which girl?’

Alice glanced around the crowded room. Faces nodded and mouthed through the smoke and music. A tide of dirty plates and ashtrays lapped against the walls.

‘That one.’ She was standing by the mantelpiece. Midway between the prominent crest of her hip bone and her neat bellybutton there was a butterfly tattoo.

‘Never seen her before,’ Becky said.

‘She’s one of Pete’s students.’

‘And where is he?’ Jo asked in a let-me-at-him way.

Alice forced a smile. ‘He’d better keep out of my sight for an hour.’

She drank some more wine and tried to reconnect to her earlier enjoyment. She kept talking and laughing, then she danced with Mark and with Harry. She saw Pete moving through the skeins of people, even caught his eye as she had done at the start of the evening, but it was only a brief connection. She wanted to dance with him, but they were never in the right place together.

At 1 a.m. Jo and Harry went home, carrying a baby seat apiece down the stairs. Becky and Vijay left at two.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Becky said, concern showing in her eyes.

‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’

The hard-core guests stayed until it was light. She would have liked to be drunk herself, but all she felt was cold. Pete had spent the last hour playing his guitar and singing with the remaining handful of people. Now he was sitting on the sofa, picking out chords and humming with his head down. There was a glass of whisky at his feet.

Alice stood in front of him and he raised his head to look at her. His eyes weren’t quite focusing. The room seemed to press in around the two of them, full of the weight of their combined belongings and the evening’s events.

Pete strummed a chord and sang, ‘Just the two of us, just you and…me.’

‘Pete, come to bed.’

The bedroom was disorientatingly light. Alice took off the black dress and hung it up in her cupboard, Pete stripped off his clothes and left them in a heap. They lay down and Pete gave a long sigh, then turned and lay against her, one arm heavy over her hips.

‘Who was she?’ Alice asked.

‘Who was who?’

‘The girl with the tattoo.’

‘Tattoo? I dunno. All girls have tattoos. ’Cept you.’ He laughed into her hair and she shivered with the first wave of longing for intimacy that was already gone.

‘She was with you yesterday. In the punt.’

‘Punt? Oh, yeah, her. Georgia.’

Alice lay on her back, watching the ceiling. If he says anything else, she thought, it will be all right. If I have to ask him what he was doing with her it won’t be. The seconds passed. Out of the furthest corner of her eye she was aware of the digital clock on the bedside table. The green numerals changed, 23, 24. Then she realised from Pete’s slow breathing that he had fallen asleep.