‘Oh,’ Alice said uncertainly. Another wave of utter bewilderment threatened to overwhelm her. Her body felt cumbersome and not fully under her control, as if it belonged to someone else and she was only exercising squatter’s rights.
She put Meg down in the basket. Margaret held out her arms and suddenly they were clinging together, swaying a
little, making small noises of comfort. It was rare for them to hug each other, but now it seemed not so fraught with risk. They stood for a long time, just holding on.
In the end Alice laid her cheek on the red felt crown of her mother’s hat and Margaret told her not to crush it, and then she said that with the windburn and the white goggle marks Alice looked like a real polar explorer. She put her hands up to cup Alice’s face and asked her why she hadn’t come home as soon as she knew that she was pregnant.
Alice met her eyes. Margaret should know at least part of the reason. ‘I wanted to finish what I had started. That is something I learned from you.’
‘And why didn’t you tell anyone?’
‘Because I didn’t know what to say. And because I thought the only person to take responsibility for what I
had
decided should be me.’
Margaret frowned and swallowed hard. She let go of Alice. She sniffed and took a paper tissue out of the sleeve of her cardigan and blew her nose. ‘I am not sure that was entirely logical. But ordinary logic doesn’t work down south, does it? I remember that.’
There was a store of memory; maybe now they could begin to tap it together.
‘Mum, how are you?’
‘I’ve got arthritis. I’m as good as you could expect, at my age. I’m a grandmother, you know.’ Her sharp expression softened. ‘Just look at her, Alice. Did you ever see anything so perfect?’
‘I know. I’m amazed, too.’
They gazed into the basket until Margaret collected herself. She said with a show of briskness, ‘Now then, I suppose we’d better go down and get our cup of tea before it goes cold. Leave her there to sleep; she’s been dragged around quite enough already. You’ll hear her if the door’s
open. I’ll shut the cat out in the garden until you get a cat net, although he won’t be interested in her anyway.’
The doorbell was ringing. Trevor puffed along the hallway to answer it and take delivery of the first cellophane sheaf of pink-ribbon-puffed flowers.
Later Alice took a nap in her own bed, with Meg in her basket alongside, but she woke up again the instant the baby began to whimper. She undid her dressing gown to start feeding her again. She gazed around her old bedroom with the netball team photographs and her girlhood books on the shelf, as if she had never seen it before. It felt utterly strange to be back here after so much had happened.
She thought about Rook and the words he had blurted out as the sailors carried her away. I am a murderer. What did he mean by that? He
wasn’t
a murderer, she would have wagered her own life on it, but what was it that lay in his past like a dark obstacle between them?
Every mile that separated her from Rook was painful. All her instincts still told her to fly south and search, and go on searching until she found him and uncovered the truth. But she couldn’t any longer do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted it, because her rhythms must now become the baby’s. She began to understand why Jo had been hit so hard by motherhood and she longed to talk to her, but there was another call that had to be made first.
When Meg fell asleep again, she called him on the number he had left with Trevor. ‘Pete?’
There was a silence, then his words rushed at her. ‘You’re home. Al, my God, Al. Why didn’t you tell me about this? Why? She is mine, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she’s yours.’
‘My God,’ he said again, now in a whisper. ‘How is she?’
‘She is perfect.’
‘I’m on my way. I’ll be there in half an hour.’
‘Pete, I…it’s not…’
‘I will be there in half an hour.’
It would have been more in character for him to appear anything up to half a day later, but he was as good as his word. Trevor opened the front door to him and he whirled in with his camera bag and a bunch of tulips spilling out of a sheaf of tissue paper.
‘Hello. Come on in. I’ll, ah, make some coffee,’ Trevor muttered.
Alice hadn’t wanted to see him in her bedroom, and the big living room downstairs doubled as Margaret’s study. By some unlikely leap of empathy Margaret had said that she thought she would go out for a little walk and leave Alice to talk to ‘that boy’, as she usually referred to him. She was putting on her green padded jacket and tying a scarf as Peter juggled his flowers and camera in the hallway.
‘You look rather discombobulated,’ she observed.
‘I’ve never become a father before. And certainly not at three days’ notice.’
‘You’ll get used to it.’ Margaret patted her headscarf. ‘They’re in there.’
Peter nudged open the door with his toe.
Alice was sitting on the sofa with Meg at her breast.
Peter stopped short, the tulips drooping in his hand. For once, he couldn’t find a word.
He had chunks of plaster sticking to his jeans and his hair was thick with plaster dust. He was wearing a looseknit jersey with an unravelling neckline and his hands were grimy from the studio. Alice felt her heart quicken with affection at the sight of him, but that was all. The knowledge that here was Meg’s father didn’t make her want to try to love him again. She saw that he was just Pete; he was a good man, but he wasn’t the one she wanted.
He came awkwardly and half kneeled in front of her. He
touched one fingertip to Meg’s nearest cheek and the baby sighed. She stopped sucking and gave a tiny theatrical yawn.
‘My God.’ Pete breathed again. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘I know. A whole person, not me, not you, but herself.’
It was this individuality that struck Alice most of all. There was a whole separate future within the baby, like a long message written in tiny handwriting and hidden inside a nutshell. She was so small and fragile compared with the world, with the majestic and fearful backdrop of the ice where her life had started, but there was a spark in her, a continuation of a long, long story, that somehow held its own with all the vast perspectives of Antarctica.
Pete found a seat beside them. He sat with his long arms and legs folded, the fingers of one hand pinching the bridge of his nose, his eyes screwed shut.
‘What do you want?’ he asked at length. ‘I’m here, you know. I’ll do whatever you like.’
She knew what he was offering. She took his other hand and held it against her cheek. ‘I don’t want anything,’ she whispered. ‘But thank you.’
‘Marry me.’
‘No. I can’t do that. But it means so much that you asked me.’
Pete shouted now. ‘
Shit
. And
fuck
, and all that, and I swear right now that she’ll never hear me swear again. D’you know what you’re saying, Alice?
I
am her father.
Me
.’
‘I know you are. Nothing’s going to change that. You can see her whenever you like, share her with me, take responsibility for her sometimes if that’s what you want. But asking me to marry you involves me as well, and I don’t want to.’
A tap on the door announced Trevor with the coffee tray. He put it on the table, glanced sharply at Alice, then vaguely nodded and smiled his way out of the room again.
Knowing the Peels’ coffee from past experience Peter didn’t
leap to the pot. He studied Alice’s face instead, revealed by the thin spring sunshine. He looked at the lines round her eyes and the fading white mask in the windburn, and the expression in her eyes. They could hear the clock ticking in the hallway and the baby’s soft snuffling. ‘You have changed,’ he said slowly.
Alice didn’t look away.
‘What has happened? It’s something big, isn’t it?’
‘Having a baby is big.’ She was trying to soften the impact.
But Pete wouldn’t be deflected. ‘I think you should tell me.’
He was right. She detached Meg and rearranged her clothes, then cupped the warmth of her up against her bare neck. The baby gave a triumphant belch. Peter watched and waited.
Alice searched for words. ‘Pete…I honestly didn’t know I was pregnant when I went south. But we’d both realised that it was finished between us, hadn’t we?’
‘You decided that.’
‘Whatever you were saying differently, you
acted
that,’ she began, then stopped herself. She took his hand instead and held it, rubbing the prominent knucklebones with her thumb. ‘I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean to sound accusing. Down south, when I worked out what was happening, I intended – what we intend never quite comes to pass, does it? – to come back here in good time for the baby to be born. To tell you about it, if I could, before anyone else, give you time to prepare yourself, to decide how much or how little you wanted to be involved. To let you know that I was happy. That was the plan.’
‘Instead?’
‘I miscalculated. I took a gamble, which I shouldn’t have done. The ice came early, I missed a chance to leave when
I probably could have done if I’d had the courage to insist, then there was a fire on the base. It seemed that in a matter of hours every way out was closed and the safety I’d relied on just melted away. It was stupid of me. I’d been there all those weeks and seen the weather, and lived with the cold like an affliction, and I
still
hadn’t understood how quickly and how close you can come to the edge. Then the baby came.’ Peter was looking intently at her. ‘A man called Rooker flew us out. She was born halfway between the base and the ship.’
‘I read about it, yes. My daughter, the first European citizen of Antarctica.’
There was an edge in his voice that gave away much more than his words. He was hurt and she understood that, and as he always did and probably always would do, he thought of the world as it related to himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered again. ‘It’s not how it was meant to happen. There was a chain of circumstances. And I was selfish, and I did put her and other people in danger. It wasn’t until…until I stood holding her in the airport in Santiago that I began to understand what
a mother
means.’ She chose her words with care, knowing that they must be the truth. ‘I promise you that from now on she is and always will be the most important person in the world to me.’
Not the only person.
The image and the absence of Rooker filled all her waking thoughts, but the decision at the airport in Santiago had been the first uncertain step in what she understood would be the longest journey. She would be Meg’s mother until her dying day, whatever else came.
Pete’s head was bent and she couldn’t see his face.
‘I don’t know how much danger you were in, Al. I don’t think I even want to know. What matters is that you are both safe and well now. But that’s not all, is it?’
The clock ticked steadily.
‘No. I fell in love.’
Peter exhaled a long breath. ‘I thought that must be it.’
He let go of her hand, stood up and went to the window, where he stared into the garden over the piles of Margaret’s papers and books. When he turned round again it was Meg he looked at. ‘Let me hold her.’
Alice passed the baby into his hands. He cradled her tenderly and awkwardly, as if she might break.
‘A man called Rooker?’
It was Alice’s turn to breathe harder now. ‘Yes.’
Meg moved her head, seeming to focus on her father’s face. Her tiny features puckered on the edge of breaking into a wail, but the impulse passed and she settled again. Peter began to hum a tune to her. When he stopped and spoke again it was as if he was thinking aloud. ‘You know what? I always guessed that when you did fall in love properly it would transform you. And it has.’
‘I loved you,’ Alice said humbly. Peter was a very good man, a better man than she had understood him to be.
‘In a way, yes.’ He tucked Meg’s blanket round her and handed her back. He added abruptly, ‘I’ve got to go now. There’s always going to be a connection between you and me, Al. It’s here. She’s here, between us.’
The tulips lay on a chair, a painterly splash of colour, with the camera bag on the floor beside them.
‘You sent me a picture of
Desiderata
,’ Alice remembered sadly. ‘It got burned in the fire.’
‘I’ll take another. And I’ll come back to take a picture of Meg. I don’t think I can actually do it today.’
He gathered up his bag, hesitating as if he were being pulled in two directions. Then he stumbled for the door. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he called over his shoulder and went without looking back.
Trevor came and found the coffee untouched. He poured a cup and gave it to Alice, and she took it unseeingly.
‘I’ve made him unhappy.’
‘It will pass,’ Trevor observed. ‘He’s quite robust.’
‘Have I made a mess of everything?’
‘I don’t think so. It depends rather on what happens next.’
‘Can I tell you about something?’
‘I hope you will.’ Trevor ran his hand over his thistledown hair and sat down in Pete’s place.
Beginning at the beginning, she told him the story of Kandahar and Rook. Trevor didn’t distract her or try to interrupt. He had always been a good listener. The only thing Alice didn’t mention was what Rooker had told her at the end.
‘Now I’ve got to take care of Meg. I have to be strong and help her to grow up strong, haven’t I? But I also know that Rooker and I belong together. It’s elemental. It’s like chipping open a chunk of Jurassic limestone and finding an ammonite. One embedded within the other.’ She lifted her eyes and searched her father’s face. ‘Does that make any sense?’
He nodded. ‘I understand. I know what it’s like to feel the way you do now.’
She thought of Margaret with Lewis Sullavan, and probably others too, and yet Trevor and Margaret had made it through their painful times. You couldn’t harness Rook or subdue him, but there were many different ways of being together, as many ways as there were people, and maybe Rooker and she could find their own.
At the thought of him impatience flooded through her again, and her feet itched and her heart thumped.