had ordered some food and now it was put in front of them. Thinking she was ravenous, Alice had ordered seared tuna and glass noodles. Now she noticed that there were sesame seeds in the dressing and they looked like tiny myriapods. If she examined them more closely she imagined that she would see the filaments of their legs. Very deliberately she sliced a corner of fish, wound it in a web of noodle and placed it in her mouth. The food had a strange metallic taste.
‘Alice, are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes, of course I am.’ She smiled at Becky. ‘I’ve learned to be frivolous. I’ve got it completely sorted. I don’t need Pete and his antics. I’m just dropping everything and swanning off to Antarctica for months, aren’t I?’
‘That doesn’t sound particularly carefree and impetuous to me. It sounds very uncomfortable and rather dangerous.’
‘But I get to look at 400-million-year-old sedimentary rocks that hardly anyone’s ever seen before. I’ll wear a butch survival suit and learn how to drive a skidoo and how to rescue myself from a crevasse, and on really good days I’ll get a turn at cleaning the base kitchen. Dr Shoesmith promised me that.’ Her gaiety was convincing to herself, at least.
‘Oh, God.’ Becky grimaced.
Through the open fronts of her Christian Louboutin sandals, her toenails were clearly visible. They were painted a softly luminous shell-pink and each nail was delicately rimmed in white. Her legs were smooth and tanned, and her fingernails were manicured too. There were small diamond studs in her ears and everything about her said clean. They looked at each other and laughed.
Alice realised that she had finished her drink and had even drunk most of the melted ice.
‘Shall we have another couple of these?’
‘I’ve got to work this afternoon, unfortunately. But what the hell. I’ll have a glass of wine,’ Becky said. ‘You will come back safely from down there, won’t you?’
‘I will,’ Alice promised.
No one ever comes back unchanged, she remembered.
‘How does Jo seem?’ Becky asked.
They drank their wine and Becky finished her food. They talked about Jo and the babies and whether Vijay was exactly or only approximately the man Becky was looking for. None of this was any different from the dozen lunches that Becky and she had shared this year alone, but Alice felt as if she had moved a little distance apart. There was a voice in her ear, a waterfall of syllables. Antarctica.
From the upright chair beside her bed, Margaret saw Alice walk down the ward towards her. She didn’t want Alice to know how anxiously she had been looking out for her so she allowed herself only the quickest glance before composedly folding the newspaper in her lap. But she could see even in a second that there was more colour about her, her face had opened like a flower in the sun. The news must be good.
A flood of memories rose up and washed away the stuffy ward. Almost exactly forty years ago she had felt like Alice looked now: poised on the brink of the central years of her life with the whole breadth of Antarctica waiting for her. Even now, with pain twisting her joints so cruelly that she could hardly stand, she could remember what it was like to lie in a field tent with the wind banging and raging at the walls, or to stare down into the greedy blue throat of a crevasse where a snow bridge threatened to collapse in the late-season sun. Antarctica was a painful, perfect place. There was the astringent flavour of envy in Margaret’s mouth and she reminded herself that it was absurd to feel envy at her age. Alice would go back there instead of her. Through Alice she would live in Antarctica one more time.
‘There you are. What an age you’ve been, when I’m dying to hear all about it. Sit down. No, wait. Could you get that girl to bring us a cup of tea, d’you think?’
Alice kissed the top of Margaret’s head where the shiny pink of her scalp showed through the strands of thinning hair. ‘Do you want tea, before I tell you?’
‘Don’t be so damned annoying. Put me out of my misery.’
‘Yes. I’m going. All right?’
Margaret’s face sagged briefly with relief and the crosshatching of tiny lines deepened beneath her eyes. ‘Good,’ she said firmly and took possession of her face once more.
Alice sat down and Margaret listened intently as she described her hour with Richard Shoesmith.
‘I met his grandfather, you know,’ Margaret said.
Gregory Shoesmith had been an old man, sitting with a plaid rug over his knees and a stick leaning against his chair – just like me, now. Where do time and strength slip away to? – but he had taken her hand between his two and leaned forward so their faces almost touched. He said, ‘We have been privileged, you and I. We have seen places that we will never forget.’ He had known war and too many deaths, and he had lived a long life, but it was the ice that filled his mind. Even in old age he was a powerful man.
Alice didn’t look surprised. ‘You met everyone.’
Margaret was listening, her head nodded at every point that Alice made, but she was caught up in the teeming mass of her memories. They swirled around her, thicker and faster, like a blizzard. Alice would inherit the memories. They would be different in their precise content but they would be made of the same material. It was like handing on your own genes, mother to daughter. Antarctica was what made me, Margaret thought. It will be the making of my child too, and she needs that. Alice has always been reticent, and now she will come into bloom.
Margaret had no fears for her, any more than she had ever had for herself.
It had started to rain, and thick runnels slid down the windows. It was making her eyes swim. To clear her vision she looked down at her hands, resting on the blue cellular blanket that covered her knees. It always surprised her to realise that these veined and knotted appendages, with their swollen knuckles and brown blotches, were her own hands that had once been so strong and dexterous. The pain in her joints and in her chest sometimes seemed to belong to someone else too, to some old person who was leaning on her and whose weight she could thrust aside and step lightly away from.
Alice was talking about medical assessment.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Margaret said. Alice was so young, she moved so unthinkingly and confidently. ‘You’re just like me. As I used to be. Strong as a horse.’
‘And less skittish.’ Alice smiled. ‘Than a horse, I mean.’
Margaret was tired now. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes, and think about what she had done and what Alice would do.
Alice saw it and she stood up, pretending to look at her watch. ‘I’ll come in tomorrow.’
‘Do that. There’s a lot you’ll need to know.’
They kissed each other quickly.
‘I’m glad, Mum. I’m glad to be going.’
‘That’s good,’ Margaret answered. She was thinking, I may be old but I’m not daft. I know what it takes to do well down there and you have it, my Alice. You’re more like me than you want to admit.
