She looked around her with a sudden falling-away sensation. ‘
Santiago
? Wait. The pilot…the helicopter pilot. Where is he? I have to speak to him. I thought the ship would wait for the other people to come aboard from Kandahar…’
The doctor shook his head.
Alice grabbed at his wrist. ‘Why not?’
Her vehemence made him demur, ‘I am only the medical man. I will find someone to tell you.’
The ship’s first officer knocked and came in. He wore a white shirt with epaulettes, the buttons straining over his generous paunch. He told Alice that the helicopter had landed again at Kandahar.
‘Thank you,’ she managed to whisper, over the disablement of relief.
The man twinkled at her. ‘You are VIP, I think.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We have already urgent radio instructions from the big man, we are straight to Santa Ana and a special plane for you and the baby, all the way to hospital in Santiago.’
The big man.
Alice struggled to tease some sense out of the tide of bewilderment. It must be Lewis Sullavan. ‘And the others?’
The officer almost shrugged. ‘Another ship. Maybe one, two days. But by then you will be in a safe place. By order.’ He patted her hand and turned down a corner of the wrappings in order to gaze benignly at Meg’s sleeping face.
Alice let her head rest against the pillows. She stared unseeingly at the metal cupboards that lined the walls of the ship’s clinic, the stainless-steel sinks and the square of colourless Antarctic sky beyond the square porthole.
‘Please will you thank everyone for me? The sailors on the Zodiac and the radio operator and the captain. Everyone,’ she repeated.
The officer patted her hand again. ‘It is not every day,’ he murmured.
When he had gone and the doctor was at his desk in the corner writing notes, Alice shut her eyes. The tape instantly started playing its jerky scenes again and she knew that she would be living with them for a long time yet.
She could hear his voice too, a desperate low exclamation,
I am a murderer
.
She had answered,
I don’t care what or who you are. I love you
.
That was the simple truth.
Midway through the flight from Madrid to Heathrow the Sullavanco PR woman turned to Alice. ‘There may be some press at the airport. You don’t have to say anything, of course. But there will be photographers. Just so you’re ready, okay?’
‘I see,’ Alice replied.
The PR woman, who introduced herself as Lisa, had met them off the plane from Santiago and escorted them to the London flight. She offered to carry Meg to the departure gate, but Alice declined.
In the five days since they had flown out of Antarctica she had never let the baby out of her sight and most of the time she had held her in her arms. Meg slept and cried her small mewing cry, and Alice watched her and fed her, realising in bewilderment that she had hardly unwrapped the first layer of the package that she and Rook had delivered into the world. Sometimes, in the hazy midday sunshine of her room at the Clinica Providencia in Santiago, she felt confident that they would come to know each other in good time. At others, mostly in the lonely small hours when Meg was asleep and she lay staring at the small picture of the
Virgin on the wall opposite her bed, she wondered in terror how she would ever find a mother’s instincts within herself after the way it had all begun.
The ship had taken her to Santa Ana and as the second day of Meg’s life dawned they went ashore in the Zodiac again. This time she carried the baby wrapped in layers of ship’s blankets. She refused a stretcher, but most of the Chilean personnel came out anyway to help her walk the few metres up to the base. When she was ensconced in the living area one or two of them shyly asked if they could take photographs of her holding Meg. Alice nodded distractedly; all she could think of was how to contact Rooker back at Kandahar.
‘Please try to raise them for me,’ she begged Miguel, the radio operator. ‘Please? Now?’
The Chilean leader was explaining that a Dash-7 chartered by Lewis Sullavan was on its way from Punta Arenas to collect her and would land at the permanent ski-way in about two hours’ time. Sullavan had sent a radio message, would she like to read it?
Alice was amazed. Less than twenty-four hours had elapsed since Meg’s arrival, but from wherever he was in the world Lewis was already dealing with matters. Or his people were. All this would be for Margaret’s sake, she guessed, and long-ago memories.
He sent his congratulations, adding that they were no less warm for being unexpected, and his best wishes for both Alice’s good health and the baby’s, following the dramatic circumstances of her arrival. (Lewis evidently knew all the details.) She was to allow him the privilege of making arrangements for them from now on. Professor Peel and Dr Mather were being informed of her whereabouts, and she would of course be able to speak to them from Santiago. In the meantime, so that she could rest and recover, it would
be simpler if she were to let Sullavanco do any talking that might be necessary.
What talking? Alice wondered in surprise, before she put the message aside. She wasn’t thinking properly yet even about Trevor and Margaret. All that mattered were her daughter and the radio connection to Kandahar.
The minutes crawled while she drank tea and waited. The Santa Ana people had improvised a cradle for Meg out of a cardboard carton lined with towels and in order not to seem ungrateful she laid the baby in it. Her sleeping face was a pucker of closed-up features with one fist pressed against her mouth. The men gathered round and peered at her, awkwardly smiling. Mike, the second helicopter pilot, Miguel and the leader were the only ones who spoke English.
Miguel’s head came round the connecting door to the radio room. ‘If you like to talk…’
Alice stumbled forward.
Niki’s voice greeted her. ‘You are well, and lucky, I hear.’
She gasped, ‘Nik…oh, Nik, are you all right, all of you?’
‘A little cold, a little hungry, but not so bad.
Polar Star
will come back or maybe another ship, but first we must have no mist in order to fly.’
Alice tripped over the words in her anxiety. ‘That’s good, I mean, not good that you’re still there. I’m sorry I took the ship away and everything. Nik, please, I need to speak to Rooker. Is he there? Over.’
‘He is waiting here.’
In her mind’s eye she saw the generator hut and the improvised table and the tilley lamp hanging from the hook overhead. And Rook’s face.
‘Alice. Can you hear me?’ His familiar voice sounded remote.
‘I’m here. Tell me. I know you landed, but the flight back, was it all right? Over.’
‘It was less eventful.’
‘Rook. Thank you for everything you did.’
The words were so dry and colourless. She could only pray that he knew what lay behind them. She closed her eyes on a sudden rush of tears, then opened them again to see the blurred clutter of the Chilean radio room. Two hundred miles of ice already separated them, and soon the distance would stretch to thousands more.
She said urgently, ‘When you get out of there, will you come to England?’
There was a static silence and she glanced in dismay at Miguel before Rook’s voice finally cut in again. ‘I told you something, do you remember?’
‘I don’t care, it doesn’t matter, all that matters is now.
Please
.’ She couldn’t contain the explosion of sobs. Tears ran down her face as a flood of exhaustion and confusion and grief swept through her.
‘It matters to me. Look after Meg, and yourself. Goodbye, Alice.’
‘
No
,’ she howled. Miguel’s hand descended and uncertainly patted her shoulder.
A second later Niki’s voice came back again. ‘Santa Ana, Santa Ana. Weather report, please.’
She handed over the mike and pressed the flat of her hands into her eyes. The dressing that the
Polar Star
doctor had put on her arm must be too tight because the veins throbbed in her wrist. Someone came and led her away from the radio room and someone else gave her another mug of sweet hot tea.
Two hours later they were in the air. The plane swept her away from Rooker and Antarctica.
Her room in the private hospital was full of flowers. There were scarlet and flame lilies with fiercely speckled throats, lush purple orchid stems and the spiky black and orange heads of birds-of-paradise, all from Sullavanco. In the car from the airport she had seen huge trees in the city parks, their leaves beginning to turn with autumn colours. There were skyscraper buildings all shining with glass and steel, lines of traffic steaming in the heat, shop windows crowded with goods. She had forgotten that the ordinary world held so much variety, and noise and relentless activity. There was too much
detail
, and she turned her head from it and looked down at Meg instead.
Her doctor at the Clinica was a young woman called Cecilia Vicente. She had thick, glossy black hair held back with tortoiseshell combs, and serious brown eyes. She gave Meg a thorough examination. She weighed only just over four pounds but she was having no problems with her breathing, she was alert and she would soon begin to gain weight. The baby was in good health, considering the circumstances of her birth. It was Dr Vicente’s opinion that she had been delivered about five or six weeks before full term.
‘We will watch her carefully for one or two days. But I am not very worried about this little girl,’ she announced. ‘Now let us take a look at her mother. Would you like to tell me the details about how you came to give birth in Antarctica?’
Alice did her best to explain. The doctor listened as she examined her, nodding once in a while. At the end she said, ‘I see. I suppose this makes some just-about sense. I had thought at first that you must be a kind of a crazy person.’ The doctor had a smile like the sun coming out and Alice found herself smiling back at her. It was the first time in days that she hadn’t immediately winced with the pain of cold-cracked lips.
It was, Dr Vicente explained, not quite the only time in history that a woman had miscalculated her dates by as much as two months. The first time Alice had bled might have been caused by the implantation of the embryo, and the second much heavier loss a little more than a month later had almost certainly been a threatened miscarriage. ‘But here we are. Your daughter is a determined creature. She is born with determination in her bones, a true survivor.’ Yes, Alice thought. She will be Margaret’s granddaughter in all that.
The doctor stripped off her rubber gloves but instead of putting her hands into the pockets of her white coat and bustling away to the next patient, she sat down on the end of Alice’s bed. For a minute they both looked out in silence at the opposite wing of the Spanish colonial clinic building.
‘How do you feel?’ Cecilia asked.
Once, before Antarctica, Alice might have answered that she was fine. And as far as her body and her immediate circumstances were concerned it was the case. She was exhausted and the cut on her arm was slightly infected. She had perineal stitches that made it agony to sit down and her breasts ached and leaked with milk, but she was alive and the wounds would heal. Meg was going to be all right and they were lying in a warm sunny room banked with flowers sent by Lewis Sullavan. She had much to be grateful for, but she was not all right.
The loop of images from the helicopter journey and the birth and the events before and after kept going round and round in her head. The more they repeated themselves the more she realised how desperate it had all been, and the faster the what-if scenarios multiplied. These thoughts made her shudder with delayed terrors.
Meg might have been born dead, or strangled by the cord, or she herself might have haemorrhaged. They might have
crashed in the mist, or overturned on the ice, and all three of them would have died. She was only just comprehending the risks Rooker had taken for her sake. The more she thought about it the more she longed for him and the bigger the vacuum of his absence became. She had to learn to be a mother and go home to a life that could never be the same as the one she had known, and she didn’t know how she was going to do any of this without him.
It became important to try to answer Cecilia Vicente’s question without the old automatic defensiveness, but Alice was afraid that if she talked too much she would cry and never be able to stop. Whenever she was alone tears that tasted of longing filled her eyes.
‘Bewildered’ was what she finally said.
The doctor put her hand over Alice’s. It was smooth, lightly tanned, with short oval nails and a thin gold wedding band, and her own was rough and chapped, with the torn nails surrounded by half-healed fissures from working in the ice.
‘Where is the baby’s father?’
‘He is in England. But we are not together.’
‘Does that mean you are alone?’
‘I have parents, good friends.’ She paused. How to tell anyone, who had not been with them in Antarctica, about Rooker?
Her heart contracted with a beat of longing for Kandahar and the realms of ice, and all the people who had been there. For all of them, even poor Richard. Perhaps for Richard even more than the others, except for Rooker, because she knew and understood the heat and despair within his own layers of ice.
‘There is someone, the man who flew us out to the ship and delivered my baby. But he is not a person you can…put reins on.’
The doctor nodded her head. ‘I want you to remember that you have had a shock. A physical shock, yes, of course, but also an emotional one. You are too suddenly a mother but I believe there has always been a denial in you about this child, or you would not have been able to keep it so far to the back of your mind that you allowed yourself to become trapped on your base. Am I right, Alice?’
She thought about the past.
Pete, Margaret, Oxford. Science, the vast but measurable geological aeons, thesis and proof, self-control, quiet acceptance of her mother’s power. Trevor’s awareness, passed on to her, of how small individual human concerns appeared when you set them against the immensities of time and nature.