‘No, this is about you,’ Margaret announced.
Alice tried not to sigh. ‘Go on. I’m listening,’ she said.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ Margaret glanced over the top of her bifocals towards the kitchen, as if this were some hitherto-unexplored wilderness region. It wasn’t that it daunted her, more that it didn’t offer interesting opportunities. Her lack of culinary ability was legendary.
‘Later. I’ll make it.’
‘All right. Now. Where were we? Yes. Listen to me. I’ve got a tip-top invitation for you.’
Margaret clapped her hands, then paused for dramatic effect while Alice wondered what awards dinner or institution’s prize-giving her mother had been asked to preside over, and at which she would be offered as a disappointing last-minute substitute. Being Margaret Mather’s daughter didn’t mean that she could make an audience eat out of her hand the way her mother did.
‘You have been invited to go to Kandahar Station,’ she announced grandly.
Alice had never heard of it, so couldn’t express either enthusiasm or reluctance. ‘What?’
‘Lewis Sullavan has personally asked you.’
‘Lewis Sullavan doesn’t know me from a hole in the fence.’
But Alice knew who he was. His media empire had been founded in the 1960s with a stake in one of the early commercial television companies. It had grown, hydra-headed, since then and now included newspapers and magazines in the UK and Europe, a Hollywood film company and interests in television companies across the world.
‘And if he doesn’t know me, why would he invite me out of the blue to go to some station I’ve never heard of?’
Margaret didn’t even blink. Age had rimmed her eyes with red and faded her dark eyelashes to the colour of dry sand, but her gaze was as sharp as it had ever been.
Alice quietly answered the question for herself. ‘Because of you.’ For as long as she could remember she had been notable because of her mother’s achievements rather than her own.
It made her feel mean and small to be resentful of this, and as an adult she was learning to accept what she couldn’t change, but she used to wish that she could be just Alice Peel, making her own way via her own mistakes and minor triumphs. Instead, she was always living in the half-light of reflected glory. The house she lived in had been purchased with her mother’s financial assistance and she even had a suspicion, lying just the other side of rationality, that her lectureship at the University was hers as much because of who she was as what she could do.
Even her choice of subject had been influenced by her mother. Alice might have wished to become a biologist herself, but there was no question that she could, or would, ever compete with what Margaret had done. Instead, she had chosen geology, her father’s speciality. In her teens they had taken camping trips alone together, looking at rocks. These times, when she had had the undivided attention of one of her parents, were amongst the happiest of Alice’s life.
Now, sitting beside her mother on the cat-scented sofa, she took Margaret’s dry hands between hers, noting the tiny flicker of resistance that came before submission. Margaret had never been physically demonstrative. In her view excessive hugging and kissing were for film actors, not real people.
‘Go on. Tell me. How do you know this media mogul and what is Kandahar Station?’
‘I met him many years ago when I was making my first series for the television.’ It was always the television, in Margaret’s old-fashioned way.
‘I didn’t know that.’
Margaret’s brief nod seemed to acknowledge that there were many episodes in her life that the passage of years and the accumulation of success had left half submerged. ‘It’s a very long time ago.’
She sounded tired, Alice realised with a stab of anxiety. It was a good thing that Trevor had been able to persuade her to take a ten-day break in Madeira.
Margaret withdrew her hands and smoothed her trousers over her knees. The jersey fabric was baggy and whiskered with cat hair. When she was younger, Alice remembered, her mother had had an ambivalent attitude to clothes. She had loved style and making a statement, but had been hampered by the suspicion that this didn’t go with serious science. So she had adopted a look that was all her own, in which plain suits and conservative dresses were enlivened with wicked shoes, or ethnic necklaces, or a wide-brimmed hat looped with scarves. These days, however, she dressed mostly for comfort.
‘Kandahar Station is Lewis’s current toy,’ she continued and her briskness came back again. ‘It’s a new research base. Largely funded at present by Sullavan himself, but with some EU support. As you know, he’s passionately pro-Europe. The intention is that Kandahar will ultimately offer facilities for European scientists and joint European research initiatives across all the relevant disciplines.’
This sounded like a speech. And if Margaret had rehearsed it, then what she was going to say must be important.
‘And where is it?’ Alice asked, although she knew the answer to this question too.
‘Antarctica.’
Of course.
Alice had grown up with the waterfall sound of the word. The pictures of it were as familiar as the view from this window. Some of them still adorned the walls and mantel here in Margaret’s room. In the most famous one of all, the younger Margaret crouched beside a hole in the ice shelf, dressed in the corpulent rubber folds of a diver’s drysuit. She had pulled off her rubber hood and the wind blew her hair away from her head like a silvery halo. A seal’s head poked up out of the ice hole and it looked as if they were amiably chatting together.
In another a stiffly posed group of bearded men stood in the snow outside a low-built wooden hut. Margaret’s figure at the end of the line looked tiny, like an afterthought, but her head was held erect and her chin jutted firmly forward.
Margaret was in her forties before her only child was born and most of her polar adventures were already behind her, but to the small Alice, hearing the stories, her mother’s doings and those of Scott and Shackleton and the others had run together into a continuous and present mythology of snow and terrible cold and heroic bravery. She curled up under her warm blankets and shivered, full of admiration and awe, as well as pride that her own mother somehow belonged to this bearded company. At the same time she made a childish resolution that she would never venture to such a place herself and her decision seemed to be endorsed by the fact that her father had never been there either.
More than twenty-five years later, Alice saw no reason to change her mind. ‘No,’ she said now, smiling as she did so but without letting a tremor of uncertainty colour her voice.
‘Alice, it’s an honour. Sir Lewis wants to name the laboratory block Margaret Mather House. What do you think of that?’
‘It is an honour,’ Alice gently agreed. ‘Do you think it would be too much for you to go yourself? To see the ice again?’
Margaret’s face flooded with longing but she shook her head. ‘I would go if…if I didn’t have damned arthritis and if I wasn’t going to be a nuisance and a liability.’
Anyone planning to travel south would have to undergo medical and fitness examinations. Margaret knew she wouldn’t pass any tests. And it would be Margaret’s idea of misery, of course, to feel that she might be a burden.
‘So. I want you to go instead. In my place. Lewis has asked for you.’
The imperiousness of her demand grated on Alice. ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ she answered as calmly as she could. Antarctica was her mother’s love, not hers. The idea of the southern continent