Against the crumbling house he looked even more buffed and polished than he had done at Kandahar. His handmade
suit fitted every contour of his compact body, his shoes and leather attaché case and cropped silvery hair all gleamed in the May sunshine. When Margaret came out to greet him he held her knotty hands in his and kissed her.
‘Come in, then. You’ll have to take us as you find us, you know.’ She smiled at him. Lewis was not much taller than she was but beside him she was like a bird, a tropical bird with very bright plumage. She had put on a red tweed skirt and a jumper that almost matched it, and draped a multicoloured silk scarf round her shoulders.
‘It’s good to see you, Maggie. You don’t look any different.’
Her face glowed. Apart from Trevor, Lewis Sullavan was the only person who had ever called her Maggie. ‘It’s twenty years, my dear. Of course I look different. Here’s Trevor, now.’
The two men shook hands. Trevor quickly removed his from Lewis’s grasp and replaced it in his cardigan pocket, but otherwise he was affable. There was nothing in the air except sunshine and the scent of early mown grass. The two old people limped ahead down the hallway and showed Lewis into the living room. A tray of coffee was already waiting.
‘Would your driver like a cup?’ Trevor asked.
‘What’s that? No. He’ll be fine, thank you.’
Trevor sat down firmly in Margaret’s desk chair, opposite Lewis and Margaret on the sofa.
‘I wanted to come in person.’ Lewis smiled. ‘I see you’ve got some photographs, Maggie. That’s good. It was a rather remarkable season. And I’ve come to tell you, promise you, that next season both the main house and Margaret Mather House will be entirely rebuilt. Out of the ashes a new lab building will rise. Bigger and better, improved facilities. I
think we shall get extra funding from Brussels to support the work.’
That was how he would present it. There was no fading or failure in Lewis’s world. If human error or fallibility or awkward truth didn’t fit into his picture, the image could be adjusted or rubbed out altogether. The line was that Kandahar had survived both ice and fire. Everything moved forward, gathering momentum, growing and flourishing. The two old people sat and took this in.
‘And of course there is the miracle of your granddaughter. I wouldn’t have chosen such a thing to happen to one of my scientists…’
‘Yours?’ Trevor murmured, but neither of the others seemed to hear him.
‘…But they are both safe, thank God, and it’s a story that has appealed to thousands of people. A new birth, a rebirth for a science station, a growing community. It’s rather marvellously appropriate, when you think of it.’
‘Thank you for putting it like that.’ That was Trevor again.
‘Where are they?’ Lewis asked, his smile widening.
‘I’ll call Alice.’
Alice came down the stairs with Meg in her arms. She presented the baby to Lewis.
He peered down at her, adopting the right genial expression. ‘She is almost as beautiful as her mother and grandmother.’
‘Thank you,’ Alice said.
‘I have brought you a small present.’
In Lewis’s briefcase there were two identically sized giftwrapped packages. One was an album into which someone had pasted all the Sullavanco press cuttings relating to Meg’s birth.
‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’
In the second album there were photographs.
‘The cameraman who came with us was a good stills photographer too,’ Lewis said.
Alice slowly turned the pages. There was the old hut, with its walls glowing fire-red in the low sunlight. There was a slice of lemon-yellow dawn, and clouds hanging over the glacier, and a pair of Adélie penguins amongst the ice debris on the frozen shore. The pictures lifted a blindfold. Everything, every detail, far more than a set of photographs could ever contain, spread out again in her mind’s eye.
Their tiny camps out at the Bluff and the vast desert of whiteness with vortices of spindrift dancing across it. The blue cathedrals in the heart of icebergs, the countless shirred and grained and polished textures of the snow.
There were pictures of the expedition members, too.
Phil sitting astride a skidoo. Laure, with a hundred penguins standing sentinel at her feet. Richard, with the shadow from the hood of his parka slicing his face but still with the ghost of his grandfather in his features. And Rook. He was standing bareheaded at the door of the lab hut with a corner of Margaret’s plaque showing behind him. He wasn’t smiling, but there was the premonition of a smile round his eyes and mouth. Alice wanted to touch her fingertip to the dark mole at the centre of his forehead. Of course he existed. Here he was, whole and complete.
‘I didn’t have a single picture. They were all burned,’ she managed to say.
‘I know,’ Lewis answered.
Trevor saw her delight at having these two-dozen coloured images to hold and for a moment he looked differently at Lewis.
For the rest of the short visit, Lewis talked about his plans for the next Antarctic season and the personnel he hoped to attract.
‘No use asking a new mother.’ He laughed.
‘No. What about Richard?’
‘I don’t know that he would want to lead another expedition.’ That was all.
‘And Rooker?’
Lewis laughed again. ‘That would be to repeat himself. It would go against all the man’s instincts. Some of the other personnel may rejoin.’
Five minutes later a mobile phone purred discreetly. Lewis looked at his watch. The visit to Boar’s Hill was over. ‘I’m proud that you allowed us to use your name,’ he said to Margaret. And added, including Trevor in his smile, ‘And grateful for the contribution your daughter and granddaughter made to Kandahar.’ They shook hands and Lewis kissed Margaret once more. ‘Look after her,’ he said to Trevor.
‘I believe I always have done.’
It was Alice alone who followed him to his car. The chauffeur stepped out to open the door.
‘Do you know where he is?’
Lewis was too all-knowing even to miss a beat. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Will you help me to find him?’
The car door was open. The chauffeur took the attaché case and stowed it inside.
‘That was the bargain, I think? Your cooperation with a little publicity, our cooperation over addresses and other details?’
Alice met his eye. ‘That’s right.’
He smiled once more, fine wrinkles showing in the tanned skin round his eyes. ‘I remember the crevasse, Alice. It’s me who owes you the favour, rather than vice versa. I’ll do what I can.’
She hadn’t thought of that.
He eased himself into the black leather cocoon of the back seat. The driver patted the door shut, climbed into his own seat and swung the car past the flowerbed. Alice stood with her hand raised in a wave, watching it edge out of sight.
In the house, Margaret was irritably gathering up coffee cups. ‘Well, that’s a whole morning gone. And now I suppose it’s time to think about lunch.’
The next day another package arrived for Alice. She glanced at the foreign stamps and the unfamiliar handwriting and quickly opened it.
Inside was a card with an illustration of a fluffy stork holding a pink baby bundle in its beak, clipped to her old copy of
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. Jochen had written, ‘I think you will like to have this book from your childhood to give to your own daughter. With warm wishes from your colleague.’
Most of Alice’s belongings were packed ready to go back to the house in Jericho, but the album of photographs lay on her bed. She placed the old book next to it and opened the album to look into the heart of the ice yet again.
There was no sign of him, no way to reach him. The photographs were all she had.
Alice contemplated the two worlds. She lived in one, going through the motions of her old life. The other was dark and deserted but it still called to her day and night.
June came, and the Oxford streets turned black and white with students in exam clothes. Two weeks later it was party dresses and champagne bottles for the week of the summer balls. And then, as the incoming tide of tourists and summerschool students swelled, the University sank into the torpor of the long vacation. Most of her colleagues from the Department were heading out and scattering around the world for a summer of field studies, but Alice and the baby were staying in Oxford. There were no rock samples from Kandahar to work on; she struggled to rekindle enthusiasm for the research projects that had seemed worthwhile before she went out to Antarctica.
One day Alice put Meg into her new super-buggy, which Pete had insisted on buying, and pushed her through the streets towards the Parks. This morning Jo and the twins were waiting for her at the café where all those months ago
she had had tea with Pete and Mark the sculptor, and had listened to the men debating art.
Charlie and Leo were almost a year old now. They were sturdy babies, already walking, with tiny sandals buckled on their feet. They pottered between the chair legs, picking up the chunky educational toys that Jo had thoughtfully brought along.
Afterwards they steered the babies under the trees beside the river. Jo’s face and bare arms were dappled with shadows. She was talking about pre-school learning and she was earnest and smiling at the same time. Meg had fallen asleep. Alice tried hard to listen and make the right responses, but Jo suddenly stopped and faced her. ‘You’re not listening.’
They were at the curve in the river where Pete had leaped out of the punt and swum ashore. She remembered his dripping, gangling figure wading up on to the path just ahead of where they were now and she smiled.
In the past weeks he had often looked in to see Meg. He was generous with presents and offers of money, although Alice insisted that she could manage. He told her that
Desiderata
was now the centrepiece of an exhibition of his work at a London gallery and she read a couple of favourable notices of the show. And from another of their friends Alice heard that very recently he had begun to console himself with a girl with long red hair. He’s a good man, she judged, as she always did at this point. He just doesn’t have the longest attention span.
‘I am listening,’ Alice protested. ‘You were saying…’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Jo sighed.
‘Of course it does. It’s important to give them a good start. But – music and movement? Isn’t it a bit early?’
Jo had settled. Once she had forgiven her boys and Harry for the loss of her freedom, she began to turn into a
committed mother. From now on there would be no investment in the twins’ future that she would not make if it lay within her power. Meanwhile, Becky was taking the challenge of finding the right husband more seriously than even a year ago. She had confided to Alice that if she and Vijay weren’t going to get married soon, she would have to start looking for a replacement.
‘I don’t think it
can
be too early, do you?’ Jo was saying. They walked on, through the tunnel of trees. When she lifted her head, Alice saw jigsaw pieces of blue sky between the leaves.
Here were safety and caution, and somewhere beyond here there was freedom as well as fear. She felt as if the tendrils of familiarity were reaching out and wrapping round her ankles and calves, like vines, growing and thickening and anchoring her in this place that had once been hers and no longer was. Trapping her.
The roots of her dissatisfaction didn’t just lie in her longing for Rooker. If he had sent her a single word, just a sign, she could have gone on waiting. Maybe Rook was fading into his own photograph, reality becoming a memory. Perhaps he had just been the agent of change, a way of knocking the scales from her eyes that was almost as cruel as it had been wonderful.
But I
can
see now, she thought. All my life I have been bending and conforming, doing what I ought rather than what I could. I’ve applied myself to science and closed my eyes to art; I have rejected fantasy and adopted reason. What was I afraid of?
I can’t do it any longer.
This sudden certainty was the awkward, half-unwelcome, non-returnable gift that Antarctica had given her. No one who goes to the ice comes back the same person.
What can I do instead?
A vertiginous space opened at
her feet and she almost stumbled before tightening her grip on the moulded handles of the buggy.
They turned to walk towards the gates again. Keble Chapel held up black filigree fingers against the sky.
‘Have you put her name down for the nursery?’ Jo was asking.
‘Not yet.’
‘You must. The waiting list’s endless and you’ll need some childcare, won’t you, when next term starts?’
‘Yes.’ Or no.
At the gates, where traffic slowly rolled past towards the science labs in South Parks Road, they stood for five more minutes chatting until Jo suddenly looked at her watch. ‘Oh, God. I’ve got to get the car or they’ll ticket me.’
They hugged each other and Alice stood for a minute to watch her old friend as she walked away, leaning forward to give the proper momentum to the cumbersome double buggy, her head down and her hips outlined by the folds of her summer skirt. Then she crossed the road in the opposite direction and walked the familiar route back to the house in Jericho; so familiar that she could have done it blindfold.
The house was sunny and silent. From inside the front door she could see straight through to the crab-apple tree in the back garden. Her first action after settling Meg was to check her voice-mail. She always did it, always hoping.
The first of the two new messages was from Margaret, wanting to know if she was bringing Meg up to see them later that day. Margaret’s arthritis had been troubling her and recently she had been having problems with her eyesight, which meant that she couldn’t read as much as she wanted or even keep up with her e-mails. She was irritable and found fault with everything Trevor and Alice did, but she was always eager to see her granddaughter. Alice skipped
to the second message, resolving to call her mother later.