Rooker had shaken off his reverie of horror, whatever had caused it. His glance leaped at hers and for an instant their eyes locked. ‘I’m going for the supplies,’ he said. The shed door opened on a hanging curtain of smoke.
‘Look at you,’ Laure cried. She grabbed at Alice’s hand. The blood had dried again. Phil and Laure made her take off her filthy, ice-stiff parka. They eased back her sleeve and revealed a long gash in her forearm. Alice gazed at it in surprise.
‘Needs a stitch or two, I’d say.’ Phil’s warm Welsh voice seemed to come from a distant place.
The medical supplies were all gone. They had been stored in the main hut.
‘Is anyone else hurt?’ Phil asked. No one spoke. Richard sat next to the door with his parka drawn round him, apparently studying the metal floor between his feet. The days of shed squash were a long way off, but a dented ping-pong ball lay like a broken eggshell close to the toe of his boot.
Rook came back with a Primus, a set of camping pans and some of the neat boxes of dried field rations. Russ crawled outside to the pipeline and a minute later there was the smell of gas and the hiss of blue flame. It made the cramped tin hut feel briefly like the haven of a tent out in the field.
‘We’ve got fourteen two-man days,’ Rooker reported.
Enough food, just about, for three days for all of them.
‘Gas?’ Valentin asked. He had been raking through his pockets and now he brought a crushed pack of Marlboro out of the depths. There were two cigarettes left. He hesitated, then put the pack away.
‘Four cylinders after this one.’
Russ and Phil exchanged looks. It would take a lot of gas to cook for nine people.
Arturo kneeled upright and began opening the ration boxes. He found a set of packet soups and poured the contents into the pan of water, then unfolded his pocket knife and began stirring. ‘It will be enough,’ he said calmly. ‘And there’s always penguin.’
Stranded on Elephant Island for four and a half winter
months while their leader went for help, Shackleton’s men had lived almost entirely on boiled or fried seal and penguin. No one spoke of this, but it was in all their minds. Their present situation, black as it might be, was a summer picnic by comparison. Only Alice shivered as she watched the blade of Arturo’s knife swirling gobbets of soup powder on the surface of the water.
Laure tightened an arm round her shoulders. ‘I will dress it for you in a moment,’ she said, misunderstanding. ‘I will make hot water next.’
Her concern made Alice’s eyes burn with unexpected tears. ‘It’s all right,’ she lied.
Gratefully, they drank the hot soup. Valentin and Niki morosely murmured to each other in Russian, Niki’s hugely elongated shadow curving up over the corrugated wall with Valentin’s big round head nodding next to it like a pumpkin. Russell was silent and sombre, and Phil rested his chin on his drawn-up knees and gazed into space. It was Arturo who had tipped soup into tin mugs and handed them round with a smile of encouragement. Except for the soot blacking his face, Rooker looked just as if he were sitting at the mess table on any ordinary night. Alice reflected that his impassivity must have been developed in childhood as a form of self-defence. So what could he have seen in the hut flames that was powerful enough to have transfixed him with such horror, even for a moment?
She wanted to go and kneel beside him, to take his huge hands between hers and rub warmth into them both, but she couldn’t do it with seven pairs of eyes on them. There wasn’t room to move in the shelter in any case. The cramped floor space was a thicket of jammed-together limbs.
Food and relative warmth slowly thawed them. The immediate shock ebbed, and they looked into one another’s smokestreaked, exhausted faces and began to take stock.
A helicopter rescue was now their only hope and it would have to come quickly. But without radio communication there was no way of letting the outside world know of their plight and summoning that assistance.
Niki’s hollow face looked even more gaunt. They all knew that what would happen next was dependent on his expertise. ‘I shall try my best,’ he said into the quiet of the tin shell, although no one had spoken a word. ‘I will wait until the morning, when the light comes, and I will investigate what I can do. In the meantime’ – he shrugged wearily – ‘the best thing is maybe sleep.’
Everyone else had hungrily finished their soup, but Richard hadn’t even picked up his.
‘You do not want?’ Arturo gently asked.
Seeming to rouse himself, Richard reached out one hand, but the fingers were tightly curled and he couldn’t grasp the handle.
‘Let’s have a look,’ Phil demanded. Richard made to withdraw but Phil caught his wrist and turned the hand palmup. It was burned and blistered raw, soot-caked but weeping and with the seared flesh curling and hanging in loose shreds. Phil drew in a breath and reached for the other hand. It was the same.
Phil’s own fingertips were black and hardened with frostbite from his trek to find the sea margin. Alice looked from one pair of damaged hands to the other.
‘I was trying to save my gastropod,’ Richard said in the strange flat voice. ‘But Rooker came and dragged me out.’
They had looked as if they were fighting, Alice remembered. ‘It’s a fossil,’ she repeated in a high, hard voice. ‘It’s not worth a life.’
Rooker had risked his for Richard. Awe and admiration and another feeling, hot and wild, flooded through her. She wanted to look at Rooker but she dared not.
‘We’ll have to try and dress those,’ Phil muttered. He was staring around at the ruined clothes and the puddled floor and the crowded bodies. ‘What’s clean?’
There was nothing.
Arturo held the tin cup of soup to Richard’s mouth. ‘Drink this,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Laure cried. She began pulling off her parka, then one by one the layers of down and fleece beneath. The innermost layer was a white long-sleeved vest with a tiny frill of lace and a ribbon bow at the neck. Without hesitation she stripped that off too. Her bra was underwired, palepink and lacy. Her exposed skin was ethereally white in the lamplight, the pallor intensified by the black of her throat and wrists.
‘Christ. My first sight of a real live woman in her bra in five months and I’m busy ripping up her vest for bandages,’ Phil said. Valentin laughed, and a second later they were all wildly giggling and coughing with the remnants of smoke in their throats. Richard only stared blankly at them.
Laure scrambled back into her outer clothes. Water was boiled and allowed to cool, and she and Russ did their best to clean Richard’s burns and wind strips of bandage round them. While the attention was on this, Alice dared to turn her head and at once met Rooker’s eyes. To her surprise he smiled, a smile full of warmth and understanding that was as relaxed as if they had been sitting on either side of the hearth in a safe and familiar home.
Rooker wasn’t afraid. And if she was with him, she realised, she didn’t fear anything either.
‘Aleece, now you,’ Laure said. They peeled back her sleeve again and while Russ held the edges of the wound together she dipped a fragment of white vest in the water and sponged away the blood and dirt. When it was as clean as they could make it, Laure tightly bound her arm.
‘It should be stitched,’ Phil fretted.
‘Don’t worry.’
‘I think you will have a dramatic scar,’ Laure said.
‘If that’s the worst thing that comes out of all this we’ll count ourselves lucky, eh?’
Rooker was still watching her.
There was nothing left for them to do but try to sleep. The skidoo shelter didn’t offer enough space for everyone to lie down so Niki had already gone to curl up next to the generator in the other hut. Alice felt the baby languorously move and then the sudden, vigorous digging of a small limb beneath her ribcage. Relief that it was unaffected by the night’s exertions, and the belated realisation that for hours she had hardly even thought of her child, made her want to jump up and pace up and down to contain her racing thoughts. She clambered over the legs and torsos to reach the door and half fell out into the darkness. The sky was inky black and after the stuffy shelter the cold was like a bell ringing loud and painful inside her head.
She stood up, drawing her clothes round her. Her arm was throbbing.
The main hut was a mess of black wreckage from which a pillar of grey smoke rose like a lazy ghost, but the lab hut was less damaged than she had feared. Three walls and part of the roof were still standing, although they were black with smoke. Alice walked in a slow circle over the filthy snow. The water that they had poured and spilled had frozen into a sheet of ice as slippery as glass.
Russell and Phil had put a half-barrel in the loose snow a few yards past the shelter. As she used it she heard the start of a distant low moaning that steadily rose in volume. It was the wind getting up at the head of the glacier. Soon enough, she knew from experience, it would start gathering speed and howling dementedly as it rushed down the steep
slopes towards the sea. Some bad weather was coming in the wake of the brief lull.
She plodded back towards the shelter with the wind already tugging at the loose flaps of her parka. Rooker was standing in her path.
‘If you’re looking for the bathroom…’ She smiled, pointing back the way she had come to cover up the wild leap of her heart at the sight of him.
His answer was to put his hands inside her hood and cup her face. He stared down at her, with his mouth almost touching hers.
‘You came for me. The hut was on fire and you came to look for me.’
So he knew she had been searching for him, not Richard. That was good.
‘You did the same for him,’ she said quietly.
He bent his head so that his mouth came even closer. His breath was warm on her cold-pinched face. He shielded her from the wind, and blotted out the sky and the iron-hard glitter of the stars. ‘You can’t know how much that means to me.’
‘I was afraid…I was so fearful that you might be hurt.’
The truth of this seemed enormous, swelling up and washing over her.
I feared that the smallest part of you might be hurt or damaged, that you might be taken away before I had even the chance to tell you so.
He kissed her. The kiss warmed the blood in her veins and she forgot the fire and the reek of smoke and tomorrow’s difficulties. She forgot her pregnancy and the circumspection that had governed her ever since she first saw him. He held her in a tight lock, as if he expected her to run away. But Alice stood on tiptoe to reach closer to him, greedily and blindly kissing him back, digging her frozen fingers into the stiff carapace of his parka while the wind flapped and
battered at them, and everything else in the frozen world stood still as if time itself had frozen too.
She didn’t know how long they stayed locked together, buffered by all their clothes.
At last he raised his head, still holding her face between his warm hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said in a voice she had never heard him use before. His thumbs stroked the corners of her mouth and she didn’t know or care if it was ice crystals or gritty dirt that minutely chafed there.
She suddenly remembered his exquisite driftwood carving of a baby. It had been in her locker, with the Polaroid of Pete and
Desiderata
. ‘Your Christmas carving. It’s gone.’
‘I’ll do you another,’ he promised. They were only inanimate things.
He took her left hand, gently because of her gashed arm, and led her back to the tin shelter. There was nowhere else for them to go and the wind was already whipping the snow into the beginnings of a blizzard.
The tilley lamp had been turned out and as they squeezed inside there was a low rumble of complaint from the tangle of uncomfortable bodies. In the darkness Alice patted with her hand and discovered Laure’s shoulder. She slid into a space alongside her and Laure sighed and rearranged herself with her head on Alice’s shoulder. Rook folded himself into the draughty slot between Alice and the door. Warmth seemed to radiate out of him. They settled in a sitting position with their backs against the ridged wall, shoulders and hips touching, hand searching for, then clasping, the other’s. Alice couldn’t even think of sleep. Her heart was knocking too hard and disbelief and desire and wild excitement chased each other through her thoughts. They sat in the darkness, silently listening to the storm, feeling the rhythm of each other’s breaths. She wished that she could hear what he was thinking. There would be time, she promised herself, when
all this was over. There would be all the time they needed for him to tell her and for her to listen.
Alice opened her eyes. When she moved her head a stab of pain shot up her neck. Her mouth was dry and her throat was sore. She had drifted into sleep at some point in the long night and her head had awkwardly fallen against the end wall of the hut. Every inch of her body ached with cold and from lying on the hard floor, although someone had tucked a blanket round her.
Rook.
Wincing, she twisted her head to look for him but the only other person in the shelter was Laure. She lay fast asleep with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head in Alice’s lap. Remembering the details of the night, Alice tried to catch her breath as it turned ragged in her chest. Where was he now? The wind was a constant roar around the tin walls.
Laure stirred as if Alice’s wild thoughts had penetrated her sleep. Alice stroked matted locks of hair off the Frenchwoman’s face.
Abruptly, Laure came to full consciousness. ‘Aleece?’ she breathed. She turned to gaze up and her ear was pressed hard against Alice’s belly. Alice saw confusion, speculation and amazed certainty widening the other woman’s eyes. Laure was a biologist; she had heard the rapid tick-tick of the baby’s heartbeat. It was too late to push her away, too late to scramble to her feet or begin protesting. Instead, Alice sat calmly as Laure struggled upright, gaping in shock. Now she slipped her hand under Alice’s parka and explored the taut dome of her belly. ‘
Ce n’est pas possible. Tu es…?
’
Alice slowly nodded.
‘
Mais, personne sait pas?
’