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,’ she called and they all nodded, waving and understanding perfectly.
They went in Alice’s car, with Alice driving, but he did jump out at the other end to open the car door for her. He followed her up the familiar path, took her key out of her hand and unlocked the front door as well. They half turned to each other, hesitating, then Pete tipped her face up to his. ‘I wish you’d let me say I’m sorry.’
‘You can say it.’ Her voice was raw in her throat.
‘I wish you’d let me show you I’m sorry.’
Alice lifted her hand. It started as a warding-off gesture but her fingers seemed to melt. They rippled over the vee of her top which felt too tight, as if it only just contained her breasts, and fluttered over her belly. Her skin seemed to have developed a million new nerve endings.
Why not? she thought.
Why not just once more, after so many other times?
‘To say goodbye?’ she murmured.
There was a flash of triumph in his eyes, quickly extinguished. But you are wrong, the triumph’s really mine, she thought.
‘If that’s what you truly want to say,’ he answered.
He followed her into the house and closed the door behind them.
The shelves in the bedroom, the top of the chest of drawers, the bedside tables were all bare. Alice’s kitbags with the flag and logo stood packed against one wall.
Pete slid his hands over her, cupping her breasts, drawing her hips against him. ‘You’re different. You’re lovelier,’ he breathed.
Am I? I am not sure that I even recognise myself, she thought.
But her body remembered the familiar rhythms well enough and improved on them. Their lovemaking had always been affectionate, well-practised, almost invariably satisfactory, but tonight it went much further than that. In the absence of intimacy and trust, they were naked and greedy.
Afterwards, Pete lay with his head against her heart, listening to its beat. Her hand lightly cupped the curve of his skull. She could feel his limbs growing heavy as he drifted towards sleep.
I have just taken what I wanted, she thought, without weighing up whether it would hurt him or not.
The notion of revenge had never crossed her mind and this didn’t feel like it, but there was a symmetry here.
Alice closed her eyes and thought of the long journey ahead and the ice waiting for her at the end of it.
In the morning Pete sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and watching her as she made toast from the end of a loaf. She emptied the crumbs out of the bread