the things she had to do, but only just. She went to see Dr Davey, who had been the family doctor ever since she was born.
‘You’ve never had a day’s illness in your life, my dear. I don’t need to run a battery of expensive tests to know you are in perfect health.’
He ticked a long list of questions, scribbled a paragraph at the end and signed the medical declaration. Alice countersigned it and sent it off to Beverley Winston.
She visited her dentist and had all her fillings checked. She went up to London and at a Sullavan-owned warehouse near the North Circular Road she was issued with her polar kit by a man with a heavy cold, who told her that he had spent six winter seasons down on the ice. There was a bewildering pile of fleece and Gore-tex inner and outer garments, all marked with the EU flag and Sullavanco logo, just as Richard had described. The massive red outer jacket, with matching windpants, had a big white rectangle on the back with the words ‘1st EU Antarctic Expedition’ stitched on it. On the front there was a Velcro sticker that read simply ‘Peel’. There was a pair of boots with insulated liners. And there was a balaclava helmet that covered her head except for a narrow eye slit. It was hot in the warehouse, and just trying all these items on made sweat run down and pool in the small of her back.
‘Good lug,’ the man with the cold said as she tottered away with her new wardrobe.
She went up to Cambridge for a three-day induction course run by the British Antarctic Survey for their own departing personnel, where she was the object of curiosity and envy.
‘I hear you people have got unlimited funding,’ a sandyhaired climatologist remarked enviously. ‘While we have to sign for every specimen bag and camp meal.’
A man wearing a jacket and tie laughed over his pint of beer. ‘Sullavan will need to spend a few of his millions putting Kandahar straight. How long is it since we pulled out of there?’
‘He wouldn’t even notice it, whatever it costs him. There’ll be en suite bathrooms and waiter service. Bit different from what we can expect, eh, Jack?’
The BAS men roared with laughter and Alice smiled politely.
They all went to lectures about the dangers of frostbite, and glacier travel, and ecological disposal of waste matter. There were practical sessions about mountaineering and survival. Trevor had taught Alice the basics of rock climbing on their Alpine holidays together. The instructor didn’t patronise her quite so much when he realised that she knew how to put on a climbing harness and could tie a figure of eight knot in a rope.
The preparations absorbed her attention on one level; on another she observed her own dashings around as if she had become a stranger. Even her body felt slightly unfamiliar. She had lost her appetite, and if she sat down to collect her thoughts between work and meetings and lists she found herself on the brink of falling asleep. This she put down to being too busy, to delayed anxiety about Margaret and perhaps a reaction to Peter’s absence. He often slipped into her thoughts, but she wouldn’t see him and she didn’t even know where he was living.
The last week came. The plane tickets for her complicated journey south were sent down from the Polar Office and she propped the folder on the small mantelpiece in her bedroom. She packed and repacked her books and clothes in the big orange kitbags supplied for the purpose. The house was tidy and empty – everything she didn’t need for Antarctica had been put into store, and the tenants would move in the day after her departure. It was odd to look from the bare rooms to the October sky beyond the windows, and to think of being away for a whole winter. When she came back the trees would be putting out new leaves. She watched the dazed new students flooding the streets and reflected that they would be confident old hands by the time she returned.
Two days before she left, Jo and Becky gave a goodbye party for her at Jo’s house.
‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ Alice asked her in concern.
‘It’s getting much better. Charlie only woke up once and Leo twice last night. There were two whole hours when all three of us were asleep.’
It was a good party, but different.
Alice wore the long johns and balaclava and huge insulated boots, until she got too hot in the crush and discarded them behind Jo’s sofa. She was pulling a fleece vest over her head and briefly revealing her black lace best bra, which had shrunk in the wash and exposed an unusual depth of cleavage, when she looked up and saw Pete. His eyes travelled over her. He had shaved and, apart from a mournful expression, looked just as he always did.
‘Did Jo…?’ Alice began, thinking that she would have preferred to know that he was coming.
He shook his head. ‘Nope. I wasn’t invited, but I came anyway and Harry didn’t turn me away from the door. You look wonderful. You must be excited.’
‘Oh, Pete.’
He held out his arms and she hesitated, then let them enclose her.
‘Dance?’ he asked.
She nodded and they swung across Harry’s sanded and sealed floorboards. They had always moved well together, she thought.
At the end of the evening, when most of the guests had hugged Alice and said goodbye and told her that she must take care to come home safely, Pete was still there. He hadn’t drunk very much, he had talked to everyone and bursts of laughter continually erupted around him. When he wanted to he could always make himself the centre of a gathering. Even though she hadn’t intended it, Alice kept track of where he was in the room and listened for his voice through the hubbub of music. The past had been swallowed up, the future was unreadable, and the present was nothing but this instant’s narrowest margin between sense and desire. She had the feeling that her good sense, always her strongest asset, was inexplicably deserting her.
It was time to go home. Alice had an armful of goodluck presents, several of which were toy polar bears even though the nearest real polar bears to Antarctica lived in the Arctic.
Becky kissed her, cupping her face briefly in both hands. ‘Come back soon, Ice Queen, d’you hear?’
Now that the moment was here, it seemed like for ever in prospect. Alice smiled as confidently as she could. ‘It’s six months or seven months at the very most. I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone away.’
Jo and Harry stood in the hallway with light spilling out into the darkness beyond the porch. Their house was full of the warmth and laughter of the evening. Alice felt that she was moving out of the web of friendship and familiarity.
Jo kissed her too.
‘Have a wonderful, thrilling time.’ She was envious, Alice could hear it. Jo would like to be going but she was tied to this house by her babies and Harry. Would I change places? she wondered. Yes, she thought, with the sad picture in her head of her own house empty but for the last boxes stacked in the hallway, and yet with Pete at her shoulder as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
And then, No, I would not.
‘Good luck, Al.’ Jo and Becky and Harry and Vijay gathered in the doorway to wave goodbye. Alice looked back at the tableau they made and framed it in her mind.
‘I’ll see you home,’ Pete murmured.
‘Pete’s going to see me home,’
