As if a wound had been reopened, she was suddenly flooded by all the anguish of the seventeen-year-old girl whose world had collapsed around her one summer long ago. There had been no firm ground to stand on that summer, for everything that she had taken for granted had shown her another face, a demonic face, ugly and frightening beyond belief.
Frantically Kathrin fought to collect her wits. She might have been knocked off balance a few minutes ago; but she was not so disoriented as to challenge Jud’s anger in the camp kitchen in front of an audience as rapt as any play-wright could have wished. With a fresh spurt of fury she realised how easily Jud had gained the advantage over her, just by sitting out of sight of the door and waiting for her to walk into the room. All her shock and horror had been written on her face for him to read. Him, and everyone else in the kitchen.
Pam was still holding out the plate of food, while Garry, Karl, and Calvin had been listening to every word in a fascinated silence. With a gallant effort to achieve normality Kathrin said lightly, ‘Well, no one’s going to miss the soap operas tonight, are they? Jud and I grew up together, parted on somewhat less than amicable terms, and haven’t seen each other for seven years.’ She glanced over at Calvin. ‘And that’s all you’re getting out of me. Pam, that looks wonderful, thanks.’
She took the dinner plate with hands whose tremor she could not quite disguise, and pulled up a chair as far from Jud’s as she could. The plate was heaped with roast chicken, mashed potatoes and canned green beans, and she had totally lost her appetite. Grimly she began to eat.
Garry, who disliked too much emotion, said bluffly, ‘Guess I’ll go check the sauna,’ and strode out of the room with visible relief. Pam sat down next to Kathrin, blocking her from Jud’s view, and started describing the latest antics of the Arctic fox that came scavenging at the kitchen door every evening. Calvin and Karl were talking to Jud. Kathrin chewed and swallowed, and with a quiver of inner laughter that hovered on the edge of hysteria realised that she was also furious with Jud for spoiling her first real meal in five days.
When Pam pushed back from the table to get Kathrin some coffee, Jud’s chair scraped the floor as well. He was on the opposite side of the table from Kathrin. Unable to help herself, she watched as he walked past her to the stove to refill his own mug. He still moved with the long-limbed grace that had characterised him even as a boy, for he had never gone through that awkward, gawky stage of most adolescents. While he had always been lean and narrow-hipped, she had not remembered his shoulders being quite so broad or so impressively muscled. Instinctively she was sure he could move with the lethal speed of a bullwhip. Prison would have done that for him, she thought sickly, and stared hard at the remains of her mashed potato as he walked back to his chair.
Pam put a mug of steaming coffee and a piece of apple pie in front of her and sat down again. ‘You didn’t mind being alone out there?’
‘I loved being alone,’ Kathrin said in a carrying voice. ‘It’s a place that calls for solitude.’ Garry, what seemed like aeons ago but was probably only a few minutes, had mentioned she might have company on her next trek to the muskoxen. If Garry was cherishing the slightest thought that she was going back to the valley with Jud tomorrow, he could think again. Jud, watching her every move? Jud, sleeping in a tent only feet from hers? She’d die rather than go anywhere alone with Jud; and the sooner Garry understood that, the better.
Ignoring the vigour with which Kathrin was attacking her pie, Pam said with a chuckle, ‘You’re hooked. Garry always says he can tell within a week the people who are counting the days until the end of summer, and the ones who’ll be back north on the first plane at spring break-up.’
Glancing through the window at the rectangular patch of blue sky, Kathrin said, ‘Up here, I forget there are days.’
‘Cooking breakfast every morning keeps me on track,’ Pam said drily. ‘More pie?’
The piece of apple pie seemed to have disappeared. Kathrin shook her head. ‘That was delicious, Pam, thanks. Maybe I’d better go over to my place and find some clean clothes...you don’t know how much I’m looking forward to the sauna.’
On cue, Garry pushed open the door. ‘It’s up to temperature,’ he said. ‘You and Pam go first, Kathrin, and one of you let me know when you’re through.’
The sauna, at the far end of the camp, was heated by an oil-driven generator, and as such was treated as a luxury item. Kathrin got up, carried her plates to the sink, and left the room with Pam, all without so much as glancing Jud’s way. ‘Ready in five minutes,’ she called to Pam, and hurried across the road to the little blue hut that, as the only other woman in the camp, she occupied alone. The outer door creaked on its hinges; she left her boots on the mat and went inside.
The interior of the hut consisted of one room with unpainted wooden walls. Two bunk beds, a desk, a chair, and a set of plain board bookshelves were the entirety of the furniture, along with a kerosene stove. But Kathrin had arranged her books and some rocks from the shore on the shelves; the colourful mat her mother had braided and that went everywhere with her lay on the floor by her bed. Cheap flowered curtains softened the two small windows and she had pinned four of her favourite photographs on the walls. The room was neat, for Kathrin had lost the careless untidiness of her teenage years—along with so much else—when she had been banished from Thorndean: neatness gave her an illusion of control that she still needed. The room was also, despite the sparseness of its furnishings, very welcoming.
She leaned her pack against the wall. Her toilet articles were on one of the shelves; she put them in a plastic bag along with two towels, and from one of the drawers under her bed took out the clean clothes she would need. There. That was everything.
But beneath her socked feet she was suddenly aware of the thickness and warmth of her mother’s rug. One of the braided strands was a deep blue; it had been a shirt of Jud’s the winter he had turned fifteen. Kathrin sat down hard on the chair, closing her eyes. Jud was here. A man she had thought never to see again had thrust his way into her life, confronting her with a past as painful now as it had been seven years ago.
To the best of her ability she had worked at healing the damage Ivor had done. But she now knew how deeply she had buried Jud’s betrayal, not even allowing herself to recognise how badly it had scarred her.
Someone knocked on her door. She gave a violent start, terrified that it might be Jud, then with a rush of relief heard Pam’s cheerful voice. ‘Ready, Kathrin?’
‘Coming!’ she called in a cracked voice and scrambled to her feet, grabbing her clothes and the plastic bag.
Pam was waiting outside. If she saw the strain on Kathrin’s face, she chose not to mention it, saying instead as they set off down the road, ‘I wish it weren’t so difficult to get an oil supply up here—then we could do this more often.’
Because everything had to be flown in, the camp was prohibitively expensive to run, and part of Garry’s job was juggling the figures to enable the research to be carried out each summer. ‘If we could have a sauna every night, we wouldn’t appreciate it nearly as much,’ Kathrin said fliply.
‘Try me!’ said Pam. ‘By the way, Garry’s going to run the washer for a couple of hours tomorrow if you’ve got dirty clothes...isn’t the sky beautiful?’
From eleven at night until one in the morning was Kathrin’s favourite time, for the light had a gentleness, a tranquillity that she found very appealing. Although the sun was well above the horizon, the clouds were tinged with the softest of pinks and golds, and the tundra itself seemed to harbour that gold as if gilded by the most skilful of artists. Aware of the first measure of peace since she had heard Jud’s voice in the kitchen, Kathrin jogged down the slope to the sauna.
It was shaped like an igloo with a metal stove-pipe and a low door. Behind a plywood screen Pam and Kathrin took off their clothes. Then Kathrin pulled the door open and they went inside. Pans of water were heating on the hot rocks. She poured some in one of the plastic bowls on the counter and started shampooing her hair, luxuriating in the steamy heat. In a casual