As soon as it landed and the rotors stopped the doors flew open. Andy and Mick sprang out and manoeuvred steps. A man clambered down and walked backwards across the snow with a camera on his shoulder. Another man followed with a recorder and a microphone, and a third emerged and stood beside him. The pilots grinned at the waiting line, but the other new arrivals formed a semicircle beside the helicopter with hardly a glance over their shoulders. There was a moment’s pause, then a woman appeared. She was tall, and even in her padded parka she looked slender and elegant. Jochen gave a low whistle.
Beverley Winston had skin the colour of pale milk chocolate and the cheekbones of a goddess carved out of stone. Her lips were a set of perfectly symmetrical seductive curves. She was the most beautiful woman any of them had ever set eyes on.
This vision looked coolly around her, then lifted one hand in a signal as she stood aside. The cameraman began filming,
the third man spoke urgently into the microphone held close to his mouth by the second. Lewis Sullavan appeared at the door of the Squirrel.
He stood still to allow his television crew to film his proprietorial gaze out over the ice. He stepped slowly and confidently on to the snow and they filmed that too. Then he smilingly held out his hand to Richard, who was hesitating in the middle of the waiting line. Richard hurried forward and they shook hands. Lewis Sullavan was shorter than he was, but he still managed to look bigger and broader, and more powerful in every way. He had a high gloss to him, as if he had been hand-buffed with rolled-up wads of money. The camera and mike homed in.
‘Welcome to Kandahar,’ Richard said, his voice somehow catching in his throat and coming out cracked.
Lewis swept his arm in a broad gesture that took in the line of waiting scientists and staff, the homely red huts, a pair of watching penguins, and the glittering expanse of snow and blue bay water. ‘This is a wonderful place,’ he intoned. ‘This is a place to treasure and to preserve. It is ours, for as long as we do valuable work here, but we must always remember that even though the flag of the European Union flies overhead, Antarctica truly belongs to the community of the world.’
It was an excellent performance, Alice thought. The humility of the words in no way masked Lewis Sullavan’s proprietary manner. He acted just as if he owned the whole place.
And in effect, of course, he did. Without his money none of them would be here.
Richard and Alice stood close together, smiling to order, just next to the peeling red wall of the lab hut. A sweep of snow was satisfactorily visible behind Richard’s left shoulder, but even Laure had not been able to persuade the penguins required by the director to wander into shot.
‘We’ll cut in some bird footage,’ he said to the cameraman.
Alice shuffled her feet. Either God or Lewis Sullavan had arranged a day of scintillating sunshine, but it was cold standing in one place while the TV crew conferred.
Beverley Winston came out of the main hut. She was wearing wrap-round sun goggles and a gilet made of some long-haired silvery fur that fired off tiny rainbow darts as she walked. All the men, who were working to set up the shot or otherwise trying to look busy, stopped what they were doing to watch her. She was five inches taller than the harassed director.
‘We’ll be ready for him in just a couple of minutes, Beverley,’ the man said.
Phil and Rooker finished screwing the plaque to the wall of the hut and Russell checked that it was level. All three
of them were taking exaggerated care over the tiny job. No one else paid any attention, however. Wherever Beverley was, her beauty absorbed all the available regard. And then, when Lewis Sullavan was present, she reflected on him, so that he was bathed in the lustre of having such a creature for his handmaiden. Not that Lewis himself was physically unimpressive. For a medium-sized man with ordinary features he glowed with supernatural amounts of power and energy. When the two of them were in the room at the same time they seemed to take up all the available oxygen, leaving everyone else feeling dim and lifeless.
‘What about the flag?’ she asked the director now, having consulted her pocket organiser.
‘Well, Beverley, we tried it draped over the plaque so that Lewis could unveil it.’
Valentin had stood in for Sullavan during this exercise. He had whisked the blue and yellow flag back and forth several times, winking and mugging for the camera.
‘But it looked too cheesy, if you know what I mean.’
‘Cheesy?’
Beverley turned her stone goddess head slowly to look at him. Her expression was unreadable behind the black shades but they could all guess at it.
The cameraman waded in to the rescue. ‘Too like the Queen opening a new leisure centre in Gateshead or somewhere?’
Cheesy might be perfectly all right for the Queen, but it certainly would not do for Mr Sullavan. Beverley nodded briskly. ‘We thought that tracking away to it flying up there would be better.’
Eight flags, representing each of the nationals at Kandahar, flew from the poles above the window of the radio room. Phil had insisted that the Welsh dragon was included. Above them a much bigger EU flag fluttered in the stiff breeze,
with the glinting silver filaments of radio antennaecriss crossing in front of it. A skua strutted on the hut roof.
‘Good. We’ll do that, then. Is everything else okay?’
Beverley checked that there was nothing untoward between the two huts for Lewis’s gaze to fall upon, then went to see if he was ready for the camera.
Lewis wore the apparently identical red parka, complete with the EU and Sullavan logos, as all the Kandahar personnel, but his looked less stiff and unwieldy, and it was a subtly more attractive shade. ‘Let’s do it.’ He beamed, as if he had been as involved as everyone else in the meticulous setting up.
The new plaque on the lab hut wall read simply:
Margaret Mather House
The sound recordist held up the mike as the director spoke his intro and the cameraman panned over the line of flags. Theatrically, the skua spread its wings, then settled again.
The camera came in on Lewis. He gave a little speech almost identical to the one he had made when he stepped out of the helicopter, but it sounded spontaneous as well as sincere. He said how proud he was that the operations at Kandahar were being headed up by two scientists whose names were already written in the history books. Alice wondered how Laure and the others would react to the suggestion that as a recent no-no she was capable of heading up anything polar.
When her turn came she delivered her rehearsed soundbite about Margaret’s career as one of the first women to work this far south and added that times had changed. Antarctica now offered opportunities for all scientists, regardless of race or gender, and Kandahar was in the forefront of this revolution.
A shot of Laure and herself sharing a skidoo ride or even performing some science together might be cut in here, she thought. Unless the idea was rejected as too cheesy.
When Richard’s turn came he spoke about his grandfather’s legend and how proud he was, almost ninety years later, to have followed him south. He made a graceful tribute to Lewis for having the vision and determination to bring Kandahar Station back to life and give it a new incarnation.
There was a drumming of mittened applause, firmly led by Beverley.
Lewis came forward again. He tilted his head at a respectful angle. ‘In honour of Dr Margaret Mather, biologist and inspiration to two generations of scientists, this laboratory block is named Margaret Mather House.’
The low sun made the plaque shine like a square of molten gold. Alice was always proud of her mother but sometimes the pride was diluted by exasperation. Today, however, it was as uncomplicated as the day long ago when Margaret came to talk to her school. She thought of how single-minded she was and how brave she could be, and she felt her mother’s presence as strongly as if she were standing at her side. The cameraman closed in to film Alice studying the plaque.
She was glad she had kept her secret. If she had blurted it out as soon as she had got back from Wheeler’s Bluff she would almost certainly be on her way home by now. She would have missed this, and with the liquid gold blinding her eyes, spiky cold air prickling her skin and the heat of family pride in her blood, she knew that it was one those memories that you should keep, and hold, and remember when you were tempted to ask yourself whether anything really mattered.
The filming of the small ceremony was over. Lewis strode back towards the main hut, pounding his hands together
and talking to Richard, and calling instructions to the director. The expedition members turned away too, thinking about dinner. Russell had been cooking for most of the day and the centrepiece of the evening meal was to be a saddle of roast New Zealand lamb. Everyone on the base had been looking forward to this treat for days.
Left to herself, Alice traced the line of her mother’s name with the pyramid of her mittened fingers.
If the baby is a girl, she thought. If she is, I’ll call her Margaret.
When they gathered later they found that Russell had transformed the mess table with a white cloth, wineglasses and candles.
The soft light flattered the dilapidated room by hiding the stained wood and peeling paintwork. It flattered the faces of the expedition members too by disguising the cracked lips and chapped skin, and the dirt that seemed to stay faintly ingrained in their skin no matter how diligently they scrubbed at it. In their best approximations of clean clothing most of the men looked like suntanned polar heroes from another age, burly and invincible behind their dark beards, yet with the paler circles left by goggles that made their eyes seem peeled and vulnerable. Arturo kept to the shadows, probably on Richard’s orders, concealing his unsightly injuries as best he could.
Lewis automatically took Richard’s place at the head of the table, overthrowing the established order and setting up an immediate alert for where Beverley would place herself. Without a second’s hesitation she sat down next to Rooker, the only person who had already taken his usual seat. The five extra place settings meant that the chairs were crowded together and people’s shoulders were touching. Jochen van Meer used his weight to push himself in on her other side.
There was an almost audible sigh of disappointment from the other men.
Alice found herself between Philip and Valentin, which suited her fine. She glanced around the table and briefly caught Laure’s eye. A smile flickered, their only mutual acknowledgement so far of how unkempt Beverley made them feel. In the women’s room her soft, rich clothes were hanging next to their stained and stiff ones. Then there was her scent. Of the five senses, smell was the only one that was understimulated at Kandahar. There were few scents that were strong enough to survive the cold and the scouring wind, which was on balance a good thing, Alice reckoned. But the general absence of ambient smells made Beverley’s perfume the more striking. It was warm and vibrant, a distillation of blossom and citrus absolutely remote from Antarctica. When Beverley walked or turned, the sweet drift of scent made Alice think of home and, more disturbingly, of sex.
Laure’s gaze moved on. She was looking at Rooker, who was now talking to Beverley. Alice wasn’t surprised, because Laure was always stealing surreptitious and then not so surreptitious glances at him. Rooker generally ignored her. Beverley poured red wine into his glass and her loose cuff fell back a little to reveal her bare wrist and its fragile knob of bone. Jochen looked as if he might fall on the inch of naked flesh and devour it.
In a room full of men who suddenly seemed unaccountably desirable, Alice also noticed how handsome Rooker was. The dark mole on his forehead, just at the hairline, drew her eyes. His beard was trimmed closer than the other men’s and it emphasised the shape of his mouth.
Is that an order, or an invitation?
He had been drunk, that night. But the memory of his finger pointing to her name label still made Alice shift in her seat.
Lewis and Richard were leading a general conversation about geopolitics. Russell and Niki brought the glossy lamb and dishes of fresh vegetables to the table.
Next to her, Philip was muttering something. ‘Are they an item, then?’
‘Who?’
‘
Her
. And himself.’ He jerked his chin, certain that no one was looking at them.
‘
I
don’t know. No. I shouldn’t think so. Didn’t he get married again a year or so ago?’ She rummaged in her memory for the details of a magazine article she had read. There had been photographs of a luxuriantly pregnant bride in white lace Versace with Sullavan beaming beside her. Pregnancy, then marriage. Alice coughed and talked faster. ‘That’s right, he married an American film actress. Gabrielle somebody. She had a baby, so he’s on his third family. He’s been married twice before. He wouldn’t bother having liaisons with the paid help, would he? No, I’m sure Beverley’s role is to prove that he
can
have someone like her just to manage his diary and field his phone calls. She looks after his every need. She heightens his lustre.’
Philip sighed. ‘Do you think she ever goes off duty? I’m as horny as one of my dad’s old rams in a pen full of ewes.’
‘Fancy your chances, do you?’
He groaned, loudly enough to make Arturo on his other side look round. Arturo and Rooker were the only ones apparently unaffected by Beverley’s presence.
‘A man can dream, you know,’ Phil said. ‘A man can dream.’
Alice turned to Valentin. His round dark eyes were moist with longing. He forked lamb and carrots into his mouth as if he had never seen food before. ‘I must feed one appetite, or die of the other,’ he murmured.
This is just
one woman
, Alice thought. She was dismayed,
as well as amused. The even balance of their life at Kandahar seemed suddenly precarious, that it should be rocked by the arrival in their midst of one desirable woman.