‘Sure you do,’ Phil murmured as Beverley followed Lewis up the step into the cabin. Everyone watched her rear as she ducked inside.
The rotors sliced the sky and spun into a blur. No one moved as the helicopter lifted off the snow square and buzzed away northwards. It disappeared quickly into a crystalline haze and only then was there a collective sigh of relief. Russell marched straight back to the hut. Laure announced to no one in particular that she was going for a walk.
Rooker had been looking at an iceberg out in the bay. The berg was the size of a church and the lower sides were an intense, sepulchral sapphire pocked and sculpted into twisted pillars and grottoes. The blue ice was the oldest, hundreds of years old, calved from the heart of the glacier.
Richard swung round to him. ‘I want to speak to you.’
The others moved off. One of the difficulties of living at
Kandahar was that there was nowhere for private conversation except outside.
With an effort, Rooker took his eyes off the berg. ‘I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have decked you,’ he muttered.
Richard sagged. The spontaneous admission took the wind out of his intended rebuke. He had prepared a sharp warning that any more disruptions would see Rooker on his way back to Ushuaia on the next supply.
‘Does it hurt?’ Rooker mildly asked.
Richard tried to regain control. ‘I won’t stand for any more from you. You’re surly, you drink on the base, you’re subversive. You can either get yourself into key with the rest of us or get out. Do you understand?’
Rooker stood and listened. It seemed that he had been hearing a version of this speech for as long as he had been able to understand the words. His response had been to shrug and ignore it until, sooner or later, it became easier to get out than to stay. This place, though, was different. He didn’t want to leave, because of the silence and the light and the blue-ice cathedral majestically drifting in the bay, and also just because it was so far that there was nowhere else to go. If he ended up back in Ushuaia he could head northwards again, or he could go back to the hotel site and try to make the Mexicans work. He was momentarily struck by the oblique similarities between his role there and Richard Shoesmith’s here. Making unwieldy compromises, making the best of poor materials under difficult conditions.
His mouth hooked in a smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
Richard’s fists clenched. He had expected his anger to be met with anger but Rooker outmanoeuvred him. ‘I should have hit you back.’
Rooker’s short laugh clearly said
As if
.
Richard was watching the iceberg now, too. The wind was driving it aground in the shallow water at the head of
the bay. It would remain captive for the rest of the season for them to admire, and for the wind and waves to sculpt into further fantasies. They stood with a yard of shingle separating them, the space prickling with antipathy.
At last Richard sighed. Almost to himself he admitted, ‘I underestimated the force of it.’
‘Of what?’
‘Sex. It’s the real power in a closed world like this, isn’t it? There’s no money, no hierarchy to speak of, no physical escape, no distraction apart from work. Then sex unfolds in a blank landscape and it’s overwhelming.’
Rooker shrugged. He hadn’t noticed that Richard was so smitten by Beverley Winston. Then he realised that he wasn’t talking about Beverley at all.
It’s the geologist, he understood. Dr Alice Peel, with her deceptive mildness and an occasional flash in her eyes that betrayed the opposite. Rooker disliked this thought and the surprise caused him to consider what Shoesmith had said.
Edith had wielded a certain kind of power, that was true, and so had some of the other women he had known over the years. But it was a short-lived, tawdry version of it. Even in this confined environment Beverley’s appeal hadn’t been overwhelming, not by any means. He had felt momentary lust and had casually taken the opportunity to gratify it. Only her perfume remained with him. He remembered how it had cloaked him in the generator hut when Shoesmith clumsily opened the door, then his own thwarted desire and the wave of anger that it had triggered.
But in the back of his mind Rooker knew that there was a force much more powerful than sex. He was fumbling to identify it while Shoesmith was still talking.
‘At least my grandfather never had to take account of
that
.’
In the hut photographs of celebratory dinners, or in the
stories of superhuman sledging feats, there had been no swooning perfume or little fur designer gilets, only beards and frozen mittens, and the absolute courage of men out of the sphere of women.
‘Do you wish you were him?’ Rook asked.
‘I never could be. I only do what I can here, in my own way.’
The intensity in the words was startling, but Rook only blinked. Indifference was a defence. He didn’t want to hear Shoesmith’s story, or risk its effects on him. He wanted to maintain his distance, because to be distant was to remain impervious.
It was Richard who turned and made Rooker face him. He held out his hand. ‘Shall we declare a truce, then? I don’t expect friendship, or even loyalty if that’s really beyond you, but I do require absolute cooperation.’
Rooker recoiled from this.
Shake, like a gentleman. Your word is your bond.
It was Uncle Henry incarnate, every Victorian mock-heroic syllable of it. He stood still for a long, insulting minute while Richard’s conciliatory smile slowly congealed. Then he lifted his hand and shook Richard’s as if it were a dead snake.
‘Good,’ Richard said carefully. ‘That’s good.’
They walked back up to the hut, not exactly together – Rooker stepped deliberately three paces behind – but they arrived simultaneously. Russell was cooking again, the others were clearing up the mess left by too many people living without a daily routine. The smells of coffee and baking bread competed with cleaning fluids. The floor was no longer gritty underfoot. Valentin was rubbing the windows with one of the newspapers that Lewis had brought. There was an air of expectancy and some sidelong glances to see how the face-off had proceeded.
‘There will be no more fights of any kind on this base,’
Richard announced stiffly. No one spoke. ‘We are here to cooperate and collaborate.’
Phil didn’t actually say that he personally would have been happy to collaborate with Beverley at any time, given the chance, but everyone knew what he was thinking anyway.
Richard maintained just enough dignity to hold their silent attention, even with the split skin from Rooker’s knuckles angry on his jaw. There was no joking or muttering.
‘And now that our guests have gone, we can all get back to work. Rook?’
‘Right,’ Rooker agreed.
Looking around the table when they gathered for lunch, Alice noticed that the change that had begun before Lewis Sullavan’s arrival appeared complete. The intrusion of people who didn’t belong to the group or understand the subtle mechanics of it had forged a team spirit. Everyone was talking and smiling, united by their relief at the departure of the visitors.
Laure was herself again, joking with Jochen over the division of the food. Richard discussed the next month’s work schedule that would keep the scientists and support staff fully occupied. No one mentioned Beverley but there was an unspoken collective expectation that in the end, in time, the havoc that her availability and her choice of Rooker had caused would become one of the jokes on the base. Alice watched him covertly, and she also saw that the men checked from time to time to see how he was reacting or what he might be thinking. The episode had improved his standing, but he gave no sign of being aware of this. He was impassive, as always.
It was nine days before Christmas.
That was the beginning of the best time at Kandahar.
The weather was extraordinary. ‘There is no such thing as ordinary weather down here,’ Arturo always said and the experienced Antarctic hands agreed with him, but even so the present spell was unusual. The skies were almost always clear, the sunshine only veiled from time to time by thin high cloud like a layer of tattered lace. Dozens of rainbows arched delicate filaments against the blue backdrop and rays of pale-green and apricot and rose-pink fanned upwards from the horizon, so that it looked as if immense stage footlights played on the sky from somewhere beyond the blocks and crumpled ice tenements of the glacier across the bay. Often, when the sun was high, beams of coloured light struck from each quarter like outstretched arms. At the end of each arm another sun was suspended in a nimbus of soft hazy colour and in turn more rays struck from each of the new suns, until it looked as if the firmament had been invaded and conquered by a new population of suns which obeyed none of the old laws of the mundane universe.
Alice knew that these suns were parahelia, sun dogs caused by ice crystals falling with their bases level to the horizon and bending the light through their tiny prisms, but knowing the physical explanation for the phenomenon did nothing to decrease her wonder at the sight of them.
At night, which was night by the clock although no darkness came, the sky to the south of them burned with richer colours, complex meshed layers of viridian and indigo and scarlet, while the sun hung like a copper ball at the centre of the skein and the glaciers and ice cliffs were splashed with orange and gold and saffron-yellow. Alice went regularly along the water’s edge to the secluded bay where the flight of natural stone steps climbed to the clifftop. She sat on the top step with her parka hood pushed back, even though the cold was intense, so as not to miss even an eye’s
blink of the light show. She believed that the baby was somehow absorbing the light and colours as it unfurled within her.
She felt as well as she had ever done in her life and reasoned that, if she was well, the baby couldn’t be otherwise. She ate heartily, and although the work she was doing was hard and often physical she didn’t find it too much for her. She climbed rocks in the course of her mapping and sampling, and pulled sledges and spent long days out in the sunshine. Her face was deeply tanned, like all the others’, with white blinkers over their eyes where the skin was shielded by glacier goggles.
The boxes of bagged and labelled rock samples slowly filled up. There were other valuable fossil discoveries, but nothing that intrigued Richard as much as the Wheeler’s Bluff gastropod. While they worked in the lab hut together he talked about the paper he would write on it and how it would break major new ground in his field.
At night, Alice slept as she had never done before. It was like falling and flying into a huge cloud of feathers. She gave herself up eagerly to the soft oblivion, and woke every morning to the view from the bunk-room window of the giant berg stranded in the bay, and the silver and cobalt ripples of water fanning around it. Sometimes she dreamed – tiny, detailed vignettes from her childhood, or reassuring and mundane reworkings of the day that had just gone.
She began to be friends with Laure. One morning Laure brought her a mug of tea in bed and after that they took it in turns, so that the other could lie there a little longer and watch the kaleidoscopic water. Alice was relieved that she didn’t feel sick – she hadn’t felt even remotely ill since the ship’s crossing, and before that in the hectic days of Margaret’s time in hospital and her rushed preparation for the expedition – but she was grateful for a few extra
minutes to emerge from the heavy oblivion of sleep. They talked a little, in the bunk room, when they were changing after work or getting ready to go out again.
‘I think I was being stupid.’ Laure sighed as she brushed her hair. Her neat bob was growing out in a series of frayed kinks round her neck.
‘What about?’
‘Ah, about Monsieur Rooker.’
‘Why?’
‘I was dreaming of love.’
‘I don’t think he’s the right character to fit into that particular dream.’
‘No. It’s so easy to make these mistakes. I have been doing it since, ha, since I was a teenager. This boy, you know, everyone knows he is a bad sort but I can make the difference, I can make him be a good sort. Then – hm – he’s doing whatever it is with some other girl, your good friend more than likely, and you are crying in your bedroom for one week.’
Alice laughed. Laure’s eyes danced as she deprecated herself.
‘I know. It’s a pattern. Falling for the same but different Mr Wrong over and over again.’
‘I am like this now, with my boyfriend in France. I think, one of these days I can make him put more value to me than his mother. But we have been together for four years and still
maman
is the first in his life. If she says come, Paul is running. So I am away for my Antarctic season, maybe then Paul will miss me. Not that I am not here for penguin work too, of course,’ she added hastily. She sighed and put her hairbrush away in her Chanel bag. ‘But I cannot see any great signs of how much I am missed.’
‘Maybe it will be different when you get home,’ Alice said, without too much conviction.
‘And maybe I will look for someone else altogether. But he is very handsome, though, and so sexy, don’t you think? A bit of a dish?’
Alice laughed again. ‘Rook, you mean? Yes, he’s a bit of a dish all right. But not one I want to eat off, thanks all the same.’
‘You are right and again I am crying in my bedroom. I think maybe you are always right, Aleece. You are very sensible.’
‘Not really,’ she said.
Briefly, she thought how luxurious it would be to confide in Laure.
For one thing, it was becoming difficult to manoeuvre herself while dressing and undressing to hide the distinct bulge of her stomach. By her calculations Alice reckoned that she must be not quite twelve weeks gone. She went through it in her mind, over and over again. There had been the heavy, abnormally heavy and cramping, bleeding around the first week of October when Margaret had been so ill and she had been too busy to pay any attention. After that, nothing. And then the last night with Pete before she left to travel south. That was right, it all made sense. Even in her relative ignorance Alice knew that you counted in weeks from the first day of your last period. She wouldn’t have expected anything to show yet, but then everyone’s body was different. She had been thin before and so perhaps the changes were more noticeable.