‘It’s New Zealand,’ Alice said mildly, ‘to begin with. Not Outer Mongolia. Of course what I’m leaving here is still important to me. But I have to do my best to find him; if I sit and do nothing my life here will be diminished by more than I’m prepared to accept.’
They came to a set of china. ‘Pack or leave?’ Jo asked.
‘Leave. People might as well use it, mightn’t they?’
Enough foreign academics visited Oxford to make letting a house easy. The chairs, pictures, china that furnished hers were just things, now. She had no anxieties about leaving them. There were infinitely more important assets that couldn’t be stored in cupboards.
‘Jo? When I left for the south, I thought you were jealous of my freedom.’
Jo stood upright. She brushed back her hair, ready to make a serious statement, the way she had been doing since they were fourteen years old. ‘I was, of course. Our situations were completely different then and what you were doing showed up my dissatisfaction with mine. But now we are in the same place.’
‘Not really. You have Harry, a family, you’ve made a set of commitments and it isn’t a capitulation to be here. It’s a promise.’
‘You could have Pete. You could be a family.’
Alice closed a cupboard door with a small, decisive click. ‘That isn’t what I want,’ she said.
Margaret was much more difficult to deal with.
‘New
Zealand
? For how long?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘You can’t, Alice, and that’s flat. Not running after some safety officer who…’
‘Would it be different if he were a scientist?’ Alice asked.
‘Not at all.’ Although Alice didn’t think that was quite the truth. ‘You’ve got a child now, you have responsibilities.’
Didn’t you
? Alice wanted to ask. But that would not have been fair. As a child she had had Trevor, they both had. Always: Trevor had always been the given in Margaret’s life as well as in her own. He sat on the sofa now, with the cat
beside him. He was rubbing the worn corduroy of his trouser legs, massaging warmth into his thin legs even though it was a balmy, still evening. It was Trevor’s constancy that had enabled Margaret’s unpredictability and without him she would have been half the person. Marriages were infinitely complex, Alice thought. Aspects of her parents’ could still take her by surprise. She saw their partnership now as if it were a rock specimen, revolving on a display plinth, presenting her with new facets as it rotated.
‘I’m not abandoning her,’ she said quietly. ‘Where I go, she goes.’
‘What will you do about money?’ Margaret asked. She was always frugal. Money was for saving, not spending.
Alice had resigned her teaching and research post. ‘I’ve got the rent from the house. Some savings. I’ll have to be careful, that’s all.’
Trevor looked straight at her. ‘I’ve got a bit put by. You can have that.’
Margaret cried, ‘No. She can’t. That’s not the way to handle this.’
But Trevor held up his hand. He said in a tone that Alice had never heard him use before, ‘Be quiet, Margaret.’
Margaret shrank. Tears came into her eyes. ‘I’m not that well, Alice. You know I’m not. When am I ever going to see Meg?’
Alice put her arms round her mother’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head where the strands of thin hair parted to reveal pink scalp. ‘Often,’ she comforted her. ‘I’ll make sure of it.’
Pete tried cajoling, then anger and outrage, and finally threats. ‘You can’t take her without my consent. I won’t let you do it.’
Alice took his two hands and turned them over in hers,
looking at the nailbeds with purple hammer bruises and cuticles rimmed with plaster dust. ‘Don’t do this to us,’ she begged at last. ‘Not when we could stay friends.’
They were in the Jericho house where the last few boxes of Alice’s clothes and books were waiting to be taken back to store. He broke away from her and leaned his forehead against the wall, beating at the paintwork with his clenched fist. ‘This is our home,’ he groaned.
‘It was. Everything changes, Pete. You can’t fix life like…like a sample catalogued in a drawer. All you can do is move with it.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ he mumbled, and there was real pain in his voice. ‘She’s my daughter.’
‘Pete, she will always be your daughter. For the rest of your life and hers.’
He lifted his head. ‘Yes.’ He sighed then. ‘Make sure you bring her back to me.’
‘Of course I will.’
Becky said, ‘I think you are doing the right thing. I don’t want you to go, but that’s for selfish reasons.’
‘It is the right thing,’ Alice agreed.
‘I would like Alice Peel’s address, please.’
‘I’m afraid we can’t give out expedition members’ personal details, Mr Rooker. The Polar Office will forward any communications, of course.’
He was standing in a mid-town phone booth, his bag at his feet, waiting to pick up the express bus for JFK. A hooting stream of yellow cabs and buses and cars poured past him, cruelly glittering in the low sunshine. Rooker frowned into the glare. He still wasn’t sure whether or not to go to England. Prickles of indecision ran down his spine like beads of sweat. In spite of his promise to Frankie it would be easy – too easy – to find a way not to do it.
‘Could I speak to Beverley Winston?’
‘Just a moment, please.’
The line went dead and he thought the transatlantic connection had failed, but at last the woman’s voice came back. ‘You could try her on this number.’
Rooker crooked the receiver to his ear and scribbled the digits on the reverse of his air ticket folder. He pressed the disconnect button and rapidly dialled again.
‘Hello.’ The low voice was warm, and sweet as molasses.
‘Hello, Beverley. This is James Rooker.’
‘This is a surprise.’
‘I might be going to London.’
Beverley laughed. ‘And?’
‘I’m thinking of looking some people up.’
The laugh again. ‘You already have my number, apparently.’
‘I’ll call you. Can you help me with something else? I’d like to see Alice Peel, but the Polar Office won’t bend the rules. It’s like dealing with some Brit secret society that I’m not eligible to join.’
That touched a chord, as he had intended it to do. After a fractional hesitation she said, ‘I know. It’s comical, isn’t it? Wait a minute.’
Rooker leaned against the glass, breathing in the scent of dirt. He heard a keyboard clicking.
‘I’ve got it.’
The only telephone number listed belonged to Alice’s parents, but the address was hers: 32 Cranbrook Street, Oxford. He wrote that down too, although he didn’t need to because it had already stamped itself in his mind. He said goodbye to Beverley.
The bus was waiting in its bay, sweating people milling around it with their suitcases. Rooker lifted his single bag. He was travelling light now. His feet carried him forward. Ten minutes later the bus swung out into the late-afternoon Manhattan traffic.
At the airport, while he tried to decide whether or not to board the London flight, he went to a bar and bought a whisky that he didn’t want.
He stared down into the glass. After the lonely weeks of travelling, Frankie’s generous goodwill had unshackled him. Frankie liked him, loved him, even, and she trusted him to be around her kids. Meg would grow up, like Corinna was
growing. He wanted to see that happening and he wanted to share it with Alice.
For how many years, Rooker thought, had he hated the sound of
we
, for all the obligations and restrictions and the potential for disloyalty and bitterness that could be contained in a single syllable?
Ever since she had failed him, he supposed. It hadn’t been her fault, he didn’t blame her. All he felt now was the soft ache of sympathy. But aversion was what there had been, ever since
we
hadn’t meant the trust or security of a real family.
But now there was a chance that
we
might mean himself and Alice and her daughter. If Alice would allow it. If he hadn’t already spent too long wandering the world, ruled by fear and self-disgust, instead of believing that love might take root and flourish, even for him.
Outside the windows of the terminal the jets took off in a steady stream, lights blinking in the thickening sky, chains of them linking all the airports and all the people who were waiting and watching. When the ‘Boarding’ sign flickered against his flight, Rooker got up and walked uncertainly to the gate.
Alice sat upright in bed. She looked at her travel clock and saw that it was only 2.15. Her heart was thumping but she couldn’t recall the details of her dream, only that it had been to do with hurrying and missing something that was terribly urgent.
It’s all right, she told herself.
She was ready. Everything was packed and ready to go. Her luggage stood out as a dark hump on the bedroom floor. Meg was asleep. Trevor would drive them to Heathrow again in time for the evening’s flight, London to Auckland, via Singapore. Twenty-five hours of travelling and then a
stopover in Auckland before flying on to Christchurch.
She lay down and settled herself for sleep once more.
In the morning, Trevor arrived in good time. ‘All set?’ he asked. Meg’s carry-seat was strapped in the back of the car, their two suitcases were loaded in the boot.
Alice stood back and looked up at her house. It was clean, closed up, waiting for the new tenants. The sun reflected back from the windows, making her shield her eyes. ‘All set,’ she answered. She put the keys in her pocket. They would drop them off at the lettings agency on their way out of town.
They headed east and the homebound traffic whirled past them in the opposite direction.
The centre of Oxford, when Rooker finally reached it, was a tangle of one-way streets and pedestrian zones. He fumed in his hire car as another massed party of Japanese blocked the road. He wound down the window and asked for directions, only to be told that he shouldn’t really have come this way because the bypass would have been much easier. At last he was turning into Cranbrook Street. He saw a row of rosy brick houses, all with pointed gables and recessed porches with stone-lined arches. He could smell roses and fresh paint.
His chest felt hollow round the drumbeat of his heart. His mouth was dry with anxiety as he counted off the house numbers: 26, 28, 30.
This was the one. He checked in his inner pocket for a curled scrap of Velcro fabric that he had carried with him since they half dragged him out of the Squirrel at Kandahar. It was still there.
There was someone standing on the path in front of number 32.
Not Alice.
Rooker stepped stiffly out of the car. The young man outside Alice’s front door glanced incuriously at him, then with more attention as he unlatched the little gate.
‘I’m looking for Dr Peel.’
The man had spiky gelled hair, unhealthy skin. He was wearing a suit and tie. ‘I’m afraid you’ve missed her.’ He stepped hastily back as Rooker advanced on him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She is travelling abroad. I’m just the letting agent.’ He glanced down for reassurance at the inventory sheet in his hand. ‘We have tenants coming in…’
His back was against the porch now. He shrank as Rooker loomed over him, black-faced. ‘I have to know where she has gone. It’s very urgent.’
The man faltered, ‘New Zealand, I believe. But…’
Where? The white light of instant comprehension exploded painfully behind Rooker’s eyes. Their paths had crossed. He had arrived just too late because she had set off to look for him. It dawned on him in the same second that he must reach her. He knew with absolute certainty that without her there was less than nothing in the world.
‘When?’
‘An…hour or so. She dropped these keys in…’
Rooker’s mind was tearing away, leapfrogging hours and miles. Wait. He had her parents’ telephone number somewhere, scribbled in New York on the back of an airline ticket wallet. He held the alarmed agent pinned against the porch while he searched his pockets. The creased folder was still there, with the stub of his boarding card.
‘Phone. I need to telephone.’
The man swallowed. ‘There’s a call box…no, you can use my mobile.’
Rooker took the miniature device and stabbed out the numbers. A woman’s voice answered.
‘My name is James Rooker. I need to speak to Alice.’
There was a beat and then, ‘I am afraid she’s gone. She’s at the airport.’
Unrelated impressions worked at the margins of his mind. Her voice reminded him of long ago. Way back. The divorcée he had lodged with after leaving the Jerrolds, she had come from Yorkshire too, like Alice’s mother. The tiny phone felt slippery, he was afraid of crushing it between his fingers.
‘Do you have the flight number?’
‘Wait a moment.’ The voice was cold. Alice’s mother didn’t approve of him. It didn’t matter now. He could pick up on all this later, stitch all the contexts and memories back together, try to reintroduce himself. The only thing that mattered at this instant was reaching her.
‘Here it is. Singapore Airlines. SQ 328. Terminal Three. Ten p.m.’
Rooker waved his hand at the agent. The man was sweating, he noticed, but he obligingly produced a pen from his pocket.
‘Thank you. Does she have a mobile with her?’
‘No. Not for New Zealand.’ The voice turned sharper still. Of course, because he was at the root of all this. ‘Her father is driving her. But I see his telephone is still here.’
‘Thank you.’ There was no time for anything else. He would just have to retrace his steps to Heathrow. Rooker tossed the little phone back to its owner.
As he accelerated away, he saw the agent mopping his face in relief.
Alice and Trevor were at the check-in desk as it opened. Alice was assigned a bulkhead seat and promised a sky cot for Meg. They watched the suitcases as they travelled along the belt and disappeared. Afterwards they went and drank tea at the same food court as when they were waiting for
her flight to Antarctica. They didn’t talk very much, but the silence between them was comfortable.