There had been a barefaced passion, where once there had been intimacy. She did remember that, quite clearly.
Her period was now more than three weeks late. Therefore, counting from the date of her last period (it was
like insisting on a correct punctuation mark, this accuracy, in a torrent of feverish babble), she could be about seven weeks pregnant.
She writhed on the air mattress, twisting as if she were delirious.
This was not possible. She had taken responsible precautions. It was a mistake and the real reason for the absence of her period would become plain if only she could think clearly enough.
Instead, she remembered something else.
Becky and Jo had been waiting for her in a café. Jo had a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of her, Becky an untouched glass of water. They were all eighteen and it was a hot July day at the end of their last week at school.
Alice slid into the seat facing them. The red plastic covering was hot against her bare legs.
‘Well?’
Becky slowly shook her head. ‘The only really likely explanation for a missed period in a healthy, sexually active young woman is pregnancy.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I rang a family planning clinic. Gave them your name, actually.’
Even in a crisis Becky tried to joke. Then she held up a Boots bag. ‘This is the test. I’m going to do it tomorrow.’
In the end Becky had had an abortion and had gone up to Cambridge that same autumn as if nothing had happened. Only Jo and Alice knew how much the ordeal had affected her. And the exact words she had muttered on that hot afternoon came back to Alice now.
The only likely explanation. She was young enough and certainly healthy, and she had been sexually active.
Wait, she thought. Don’t jump to conclusions. There
could
be all sorts of reasons: cold, exertion, anxiety. But as
she ran her hands over her body she knew, with a woman’s certainty that she would have denied only an hour ago, that she
was
pregnant. Her breasts were fuller, and her thighs and hips had acquired a new solidity, as if under skin and dense layers of muscle the blood itself was richer and circulated with more purpose. Her fingers met over her abdomen. There was a dome where once there had been a hollow. Already? Was that possible?
A flood tide of dismay swept through her as she realised that she had no idea.
She lay on her back and tried to think rationally. But all that came was panicky non sequiturs, flutters of astonishment and spasms of terror that squeezed her heart. It was as if all her years of training as a scientist melted away in an hour. She had been a meticulous layer of plans, always prepared with facts and data, and now there was an inner chamber of herself that was susceptible to none of her scientific armoury and yet would change everything in her world.
The hours passed. She lifted her wrist once in a while to see the luminous dial of her watch. Sleep was unthinkable.
At ten minutes to six she heard Richard moving around in his tent. The wind had dropped during the night, but it had started to snow. She had listened absently and unreflectingly to the slithering kiss of it on the tent’s panels. The nylon sagged slightly above her head with the accumulating weight.
At six o’clock, wearily shaking herself, Alice crawled out of her sleeping bag. She dressed in her layers of clothes, managing the zips and toggles even though her fingers trembled, and crawled outside to fill a pan with snow for tea. The world that met her eyes was drained of all colour and definition. The Bluff and the ice sheet were invisible behind veils of spiralling snow. Snow had drifted against the sides
of the tents and over the skidoo. A reddish shape lumbered a few feet away from her. It was Richard in his windproofs, already dismantling the radio antennae in preparation for moving camp.
‘A thick day,’ he called. ‘But I think we can travel.’
Alice licked her dry lips. ‘Right.’
She melted snow, then stirred oats and dried milk powder into the hot water to make their breakfast porridge. While they were eating she listened to Richard outlining the day’s objectives. She nodded and spooned up the food, thinking of it as fuel. Do what was expected of her, that was all she could hope for today. When there was time to think properly, when the shock had subsided, she would decide what to do.
They loaded the sledge with mounds of gear and the heavy boxes of rock samples. The final task was to take down the tents. Alice slid the telescopic poles out of hers first, leaving the fabric securely pegged until the last, when she was ready to bundle it up and stow it. Richard sealed up the bag of their frozen waste and hoisted the lidded barrel that contained it on to the back of the sledge. Everything, even this, was classified as ‘retro’ – to be flown back to Kandahar and, in the end, shipped out of Antarctica.
Richard took a compass bearing. The Bluff was intermittently visible through the white veil, but not reliably enough to navigate by. They started to move forwards. Alice drove the skidoo, Richard plodded a little ahead through the fresh snow with a long glacier probe in his hand. He stared into the blankness, trying to see a dip or hollow that might betray a big crevasse. The skidoo tracks rode up and down over the rigid waves of sastrugi. Alice concentrated as hard as she could, her eyes fixed on Richard, keeping the machine moving forward at the same slow pace.
After an hour they changed places and after another hour they changed back again.
It was the longest journey Alice had ever known. After four hours they stopped briefly to eat chocolate and drink from the Thermos.
‘How much further?’ Alice asked, trying to sound as if she were enquiring out of mere curiosity.
‘I reckon we’re halfway. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine.’
Cold and exhaustion gnawed at her when she drove the skidoo. When she trudged through the deepening snow her eyes ached and stung from staring at the white void and her leg muscles screamed with the effort of keeping going, but at least she was reasonably warm. At last, when she had begun to think that the walk would never end and life would for ever be a matter of putting one foot in front of the other or bumping over vicious ridges with cold racking her bones, Richard stopped. He stood with his back to the snow, extracted his GPS handset from an inner recess in his parka and took a reading. Then, to Alice’s joy, he jerked her the thumbs-up signal.
It was windier here than at their first camp. The Bluff was lower at this point and wind howled over the top of it, scouring up loose snow and flinging it into their eyes and mouths. They tried to work quickly, unloading boxes and preparing to set up the tents. By this time Alice was blundering with tiredness. She unpacked her tent and spread it out on the snow, turning aside for a second to pick up the poles. A strong gust of wind licked over the invisible Bluff and roared over the ice. It snatched at one corner of her tent, then sucked it into the air with a flap like a giant bird’s wing. She had forgotten Phil’s First Rule. Never leave your tent unpegged, even for a second.
Her hand, holding the now useless peg hammer, fell to
her side. The orange wing soared into the air beyond her reach and was whirled away into infinity.
She turned to Richard. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said tonelessly.
‘We’ll share.’ He pegged his all the way round before sliding in the poles.
They went through all the morning’s activities, in reverse.
At last they were crouching within the shelter of the remaining tent. Alice stirred a pan of chilli and beans while Richard made the scheduled radio contact with Niki.
‘Kandahar, Kandahar, this is Wheeler’s Bluff. How copy?’
‘Hello, Wheeler’s Bluff,’ Niki’s voice came back like a warm handshake. ‘How are you this fine evening?’
Niki gave them the weather forecast. ‘Put on your warm clothes out there.’
‘Okay, Kandahar. Thanks for that.’
Alice squatted on her mattress. With both their sleep kits laid out there was no room to move around.
‘Good job we travelled today. We may have to sit out a couple of stormy days,’ Richard said cheerfully.
‘And I let my tent blow away.’
She was wedged between two insolubles, the immediate one of tents and weather and isolation and the other, distant but so enormous that it overshadowed all the familiar scenery of her life. Her hand was shaking and the tin spoon rattled as she stirred the pot of food.
‘Worse things could have happened,’ Richard said. She wondered if he meant it or if he was repeating what his grandfather would have said, then felt ashamed at the thought.
They ate, sitting side by side with the stove still burning to keep the tent warm. Hours of cold and exertion meant that they were both hungry, although Alice was surprised by her appetite. Keep going, for now. That was all she could
do. Maybe I’m wrong, she kept thinking. But she knew she was not wrong.
The stove and the light of the tilley lamp and the food they were sharing made the tent an intimate place. But after they had eaten and wiped the plates and drunk some tea, there was no attempt to have their usual hour’s talk. There would be no saying goodnight to close the conversation safely, because they would be lying here side by side.
Alice took off a couple of layers of clothes and squirmed into her sleeping bag. She closed her eyes, lying as still as she could and resisting the impulse to lace her fingers over her stomach. Richard moved around for a few minutes, then he lay down next to her and turned out the lamp.
In their little bubble of shelter against the snow, Alice wondered how it would be if she raised her voice over the wind and said,
I think I am pregnant
. But even the thought made her hot with dismay. It would be to admit that without any warning her life had slipped out of her control – here, of all places, where control was the only way to survive against the elements. No. She would have to work out her own strategy and act on it.
A foot away from her, Richard was thinking too. When the pressure of anxiety forced her eyes open, she saw that he was watching her in the yellow light. He lifted one hand and touched her hair. Then his fingers moved across her cheek and rested on her mouth.
Last night – only
last night
? – she would have welcomed the caress. But now, with her body still defensive with shock, she flinched. She didn’t mean to, she should have caught his hand and held it, warmly, yet to stop him going any further. But it was too late.
He withdrew his hand as if she had bitten it and turned on to his back. ‘I’m sorry. That was completely
inappropriate.’ He sounded as stiff as a Victorian uncle. As if Gregory Shoesmith had ventured too far with a fellow officer’s sister at a tennis party.
‘No, it’s me. I mean…’ Her voice trailed away, was swallowed by the wind. She couldn’t tell him, it’s not that I don’t want you to, didn’t want you to, only this is happening and I don’t know anything any more…
‘I understand. One has to be very careful. Out here. It’s very easy to cross boundaries that then can’t be, you know, put up again. If necessary.’
She did understand what he was saying, in his chokedoff way. In this place raw feelings swelled much closer to the surface. She could read Richard’s face and the pucker of emotions that rippled under the skin. He could see her, and so could Valentin and Laure and Russell and the others. There was nowhere to hide: the light was too bright and clear, and the days were too long.
She would have to be
very
careful.
‘I know. Richard, I…’ She was going to tell him that she liked him. Admired him, whatever it was. Fancied him, then. But it sounded too banal.
‘Yes. Yes,’ he said quickly, so as not to have to hear anything else.
He turned a little on one side and hunched his shoulder. Alice lay still, waiting for whatever would happen next. Almost at once she fell into an exhausted sleep.
In the morning she crawled out of the tent and found Richard already outside, testing the air. It was cold and completely still. And then, when she lifted her face she saw that the heavens were thick with sparkling motes. Tiny pinpoints of ice cascaded out of a clear sky and caught the sun as they spiralled downwards. It was celestial confetti and the beauty of it took her breath away.
Diamond dust, that was what Margaret had called it.
‘I’ll think of you, with diamond dust falling,’ she had said when they parted.
To think of Margaret, and home, was to open channels that Alice wasn’t ready to navigate yet. Instead, she stood with her face to the sky, soaking in the glamour of the day and the place. Her concerns shrank, she felt her whole being shrinking until she was no more than one of the points of ice, and the awareness of infinity comforted her.
The sound of Richard’s voice made her jump. ‘We’ll get a day’s work in. Bad weather’s coming,’ he called.
They ate porridge, pulled on their windproofs and began on the new section of the Bluff.
Alice remembered it, oddly, as a perfect day. She threw herself into her work, into the rock page of the history book. The reckoning of years by the hundred million soothed her and silenced her racing thoughts. In the middle of the afternoon, just as she was beginning to tire, Richard called her over. From a section of black mudstone, residue of the ocean that had once covered this spot, he had hammered out a fossilised mollusc, complete in every detail. He laid it in the cup made by her gloved hands.
‘I don’t know what this is. Look at the whorls, there. It’s a species I don’t recognise.’
His voice was hoarse with excitement. He looked like a small boy on his birthday.
His elation touched her, caught fire in her too. ‘It’s a good day.’ She smiled.
That night the wind started again. It was a different wind, which came at them with a roar, then rose to a howl of fury.
As far as Rooker was concerned, sometimes the place was claustrophobic while at others it could be almost companionable, but being there mostly just meant that you quietly did your work, you slept or rested or drank a little, and you let the days slide by.