‘Isn’t Alice enough?’
Laure had her dark head turned towards Rooker and appeared not to be listening. ‘And Laure, of course?’ Richard added.
‘I count only two girls. And there are eight of us,’ Jochen complained.
‘We’re scientists. We’re here to work, remember,’ Richard said calmly. It was a reprimand but he did it gently, so that his words floated over the rest of the talk. Jochen only grinned.
Niki said that the weather forecast for the next forty-eight hours was looking much better. As a climatologist, Arturo usually regarded day-to-day meteorological predictions as beneath him but now he nodded in agreement. ‘It will be weather for sunbathing.’
‘Or for field training.’ Phil winked at Alice. Before she could set off inland with Richard, Alice would have to practise safety and survival techniques, and it was Philip’s job to instruct her. She leaned back in her seat and smiled at him. The cheerful little Welshman seemed even more jovial than usual tonight.
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said.
The room and the faces around the table were becoming familiar. This evening, the hands of the wall clock were actually jumping instead of creeping. She began to think that she might after all fit in here and even make a useful contribution. Outside, the wind blew with less fury. Tomorrow, Alice thought, with just a bit of luck, she would be able to step all the way outside the door.
After she had cleared away the dinner dishes and put the coffee pot on the table, Phil went to his room and reappeared with a guitar. He tipped back in his chair, strummed a couple of chords and then began to sing. He had a big, strong baritone voice, trained in a Welsh choir, that filled the hut and rode over the nagging wind. Within a minute everyone was singing with him.
Rooker had a good voice too. Looking nowhere, with his black eyebrows drawn together, he sang ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’, then ‘Yesterday’ as a duet with Laure. Everyone clapped that one and Laure laughed, forgetting to be poised for once and turning pink with pleasure. She let her head fall, just for a second, against Rooker’s shoulder. Phil and Rooker went on singing, louder, absorbed in the music.
‘
Laure, s’il vous plaît
?’ Jochen said. He stood up, beckoning her to dance. She looked as if she would much rather stay put but she didn’t refuse. Valentin and Russ pushed aside some chairs to make room for them. Laure danced as if she were on MTV, Jochen waved his arms and hopped from foot to foot.
Richard took Alice’s hand. ‘Would you like to?’ he asked.
‘Yes, please.’
He was stiff at first, but then he loosened up. His hand shifted tentatively over her ribcage before settling in the small of her back. As they swung round, Alice saw him glance around the room, covertly gauging the mood.
Understanding and a sudden affection sprang up in her.
Richard was shy and he was also anxious because the success of Lewis Sullavan’s venture depended mainly on him. It was no wonder that he sometimes seemed ill at ease. But now his face had softened. He was pleased with the warmth that had sparked around the table tonight, and with the singing and dancing. They would settle down together, all of them, in this ice world.
‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’ Alice said, with her mouth to his ear as they moved closer.
‘I’m not much of a dancer,’ he protested, misunderstanding her.
A whisky bottle materialised on the table behind him. Valentin was busy filling glasses. Alice had guessed that Rooker and Phil and the others were drinking in their bunk room to pass the time, and it was obvious that they were several drinks ahead tonight. A sudden burst of laughter and the sight of Niki draping a spindly arm round Valentin’s shoulders confirmed it.
Richard had seen the bottle too. Now he would have to choose whether to make a heavy-handed objection, or to let tonight be an exception to his rule. It crossed her mind, with the music and the dancing, that she would quite like a drink herself. As if he read her mind, Valentin picked up a glass and waved it at her.
Richard hesitated, missing a beat and looking down into her face as if for reassurance. Then his mouth lifted at one corner and he gave a small, self-mocking, acquiescent shrug. It was such a tiny movement that Alice, in his arms, felt it rather than seeing it. They found themselves laughing, the warm laughter of people who have begun to appreciate one another.
Phil played a final loud chord and put his guitar aside to take a gulp of whisky. Richard bowed and led Alice back
to her seat. Rooker was lounging at the other end of the table, his expression as unreadable as always.
Richard leaned across and picked up an empty glass, nodded to the whisky bottle. ‘May I?’ he asked pleasantly.
‘Sure thing.’ Jochen poured him a measure. Alice accepted the glass that Valentin passed to her across the oilcloth and saw that Laure had one in front of her too.
Richard lifted his drink. He considered for a moment and the table waited. ‘Here’s to the complete team, and to Kandahar, and to cooperation.’
‘And to less bullshit,’ Rook drawled.
Laure bit her lip.
The wind had dropped completely. After the days and nights of clamour, the silence was thick enough to touch.
Richard flushed, but otherwise it was as if he hadn’t heard.
Alice had begun to distinguish undercurrents of tension between several of the expedition members. Valentin often made a mocking little pout at the sight of Arturo’s earring or coordinated clothes, and Arturo retaliated by delicately pressing one finger to his ear when Valentin spoke, as if his voice was just too loud. Laure lifted a scornful eyebrow whenever Jochen leaned too close to her or dropped his big hand on her knee, although Jochen never seemed to notice this. But the discord between Richard and Rooker was like a big boulder just under the surface of a fast-flowing stream. For now the water cloaked it with a glassy skin but the smallest alteration would expose the jagged edge.
Valentin spoke first: ‘The team.’ He stood up and drained his glass, everyone else raised theirs and drank. Richard sat back, two red patches still showing on his cheekbones. Russ turned away and slotted a CD into the player, and the moment passed.
Somehow, against the odds, the evening was turning into
a party. The music was a Latin-American compilation and Alice danced the tango with Valentin until she was breathless. He was an excellent dancer. Russell and Niki and Arturo snapped their fingers and stamped their feet in accompaniment. Alice noticed that Rook was watching. The nape of her neck prickled under his cool scrutiny.
Valentin moved on to partner Laure, and they performed an exhibition samba while everyone whistled and clapped. There came a moment, later on, when everyone was dancing – even Rook. No one bothered with partners. Pent-up energy from the days of confinement burned off in swaying and singing and waving of whisky glasses. When she looked at the clock again, Alice was amazed to see that it was almost midnight.
She had been aware of the door opening and closing, and stabs of cold air slicing through the warm fug in the room, and now Valentin took her by the elbow. ‘You will come to look?’
She followed him, pulling on the parka he handed to her as they stepped outside the hut.
‘See?’ Valentin said. He made a theatrical and totally unnecessary sweep of his arm.
The air was magically still, although the lead-coloured overhead clouds were ragged from the storm. Over the bay the cloud had thinned away to long streamers of apricot and pale violet, tinged on the underside with jade. The snowfields and glaciers were washed with delicate shades of lavender and faded rose-pink, and the sea rippled with a long streak of molten gold. Alice drew in a breath. The sun just rested on the horizon. It was a perfect orb of brilliant flame-orange, except for the faintest flattening at its lowest margin. She glanced down at her watch. It was midnight exactly. From now, the beginning of November, until February there would be no darkness.
‘Not bad?’ Valentin chuckled. He was only wearing a T-shirt. The midnight sun turned the grizzled hairs on his arms to threads of gold.
‘Not…bad,’ Alice murmured. She wanted to have this moment to herself. The unearthly beauty of it struck a shaft straight into her heart.
He nodded and heaved a sigh. After a moment he patted her on the shoulder and stumped away.
Alice clambered down the rocks to the beach. The chunks of ice lapped by waves looked as if they were made of pure silver. Wet shingle crunched under her boots and the smell of salt and sea water stung within the chambers of her head. After the three days of the blizzard and all the small anxieties and human abrasions of the hut, it felt like walking out of a dark cellar and stepping into paradise.
She was so entranced that she walked all along the shoreline until she reached the tongue of rocks that marked the boundary of Kandahar Bay. The convoluted layers of rough sandstone were lightly whiskered with snow and she paused for a moment, out of long-ingrained habit, to follow the sedimentary contours by eye. But the murmur of the dying surf and the clinking of ice distracted her. There were fleece gloves in the pocket of her parka and she gratefully put them on before climbing the rocky outcrop. She reached the flat top with its icing of snow and looked down. On the other side lay a perfect crescent of shingle beach, with a dozen penguins standing like sentries on the shelves of rock.
She climbed down, enjoying the stretching of muscles and the precise search for toeholds with the tip of her boot. She exchanged a solemn stare with the nearest penguin as she passed by. Over the next rocky outcrop she found yet another crescent, smaller and more intimately enfolded by rock. The sound of waves breaking was caught and amplified here, filling her head with music. She stood looking out to sea.
Her mind was empty, all the questions and doubts that nagged her soothed away by the wonder of the scenery and by sunshine at midnight. The sun steadily lifted clear of the horizon and turned to a flat disc of blazing gold.
Alice turned slowly round, with coppery-green pennies of light dancing on her retinas. She looked up at the folded and crimped bands of rock, at the centre point of the beach’s arc, and through the fading rain of sun spots she saw a flight of pale stone steps. They led straight from the shingle up to the overhang of snow at the clifftop, as precise as if a stonemason had just chipped them free.
It was a common geological formation, known as a dyke.
A column of hot magma had intruded into a crack in the existing layers of sand- and mudstone. The igneous rock showed as a shaft of a completely different colour and texture from the surrounding folds, and differential weathering had sliced it into horizontal and vertical planes, just like the treads of a staircase.
Alice knew all this as well as she knew her own name, but she didn’t think of it. She saw the pristine steps leading from water to white skyline, perfect in their own mysterious logic, and she knew for certain that this was a remarkable place. She felt its holiness, just as if a hand had been laid on her head in blessing.
She sat down on a flat-topped stone to look at the steps and to let the atmosphere seep into her. This place was a temple, she thought, with the endless waves for music and with nature’s flawless architecture to contain its spirit.
A breath of premonition stirred, coming from nowhere like a cold wind fanning her cheek.
Superstitiously, she tilted her head to look up at the summit of the steps, but they led to nothing more than a curling overhang of unmarked snow.
It wasn’t that the temple disturbed her, just that its
crystalline calm had opened up a new channel. Somewhere within her there was a buried fear, but she couldn’t grasp what it was. It lay deep, but as she groped around its outlines she felt sure that when the time came, when she needed to, she would be able to face it and then reach beyond it.
It was very cold. The temperature was dropping as the skies cleared. Alice jumped up, flapping her arms and stamping her feet to restore the circulation. She was surprised by the direction her thoughts had just led her. She didn’t believe in signs or warnings and she wasn’t religious, but this place was the holiest she had ever known and she couldn’t explain what she had just experienced as anything other than a premonition. She shivered.
‘I’m a scientist,’ she said aloud, trying a firm, cheery voice modelled on Roger Armstrong’s, her parents’ neighbour. But it came out thin and flat, hardly a voice at all, and was swallowed up by the immensity around her. Why am I thinking about
Roger
, of all people? she wondered. Was Antarctica unbalancing her, between a blizzard and a sky painted with more colours than she had ever dreamed of?
The circulation was coming back to her feet, but her nose and ears and fingertips were nipped with cold. Alice turned deliberately away from the temple steps and scrambled up and over the first rock tongue. She passed the penguins and scaled the second outcrop. From the top she saw the warm lights of the base and the broad sweep of the water, now as flat as mercury. Then she stopped short. There was a man sitting below her, looking out to sea, directly in her path to the beach.
She looked left and right for another route that would lead her safely down. She didn’t want to disturb him. Even though his back was to her, every line of his body indicated disconnection, distance, abstraction. His hands hung loosely between his knees and his head and shoulders drooped.
Alice hesitated but there was no other way to descend. She began to down-climb, moving deliberately but noisily to announce herself. At last, when she was almost on top of him, the man looked round. It was Rooker.
‘Be careful,’ he said in a low voice. He moved aside a little and she was about to step past when he indicated a rock seat beside him. In silent surprise she sat down.
‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked.
Alice thought these were the first remarks he had addressed to her, except for ordering her to put on the life jacket in the Zodiac. Without waiting for an answer he took the whisky bottle out of the pocket of his parka, wiped the flat of his hand over the neck and passed it to her.