‘Yes, ma’am,’ Pete murmured. He gathered Alice up and rolled adroitly so that she ended up on top. He never voiced any criticism of Alice’s mother, the formidable Margaret Mather, but there was not much love lost. Alice didn’t pursue this line of thought either. Now was not the time to be thinking about Margaret. Now was not the time to be thinking of anything but this.
Afterwards they lay with their legs interlocked, listening to the small sounds of the street through the open window. Pete hummed a little, an unborn sequence of notes reverberating deep in his chest. Alice smiled, her cheek against his shoulder sticky with their mingled sweat.
She would call in and see her parents in the morning.
Margaret Mather sat at the gate-legged table in the large bay window of the house on Boar’s Hill. Books and papers and correspondence leaned in haphazard piles on either side of her computer monitor and keyboard. She had never been tidy, or even faintly house-proud, and the table was littered with half-full teacups and dirty plates as well as her sheaves of work. The rest of the room was cluttered and dusty, and the Persian rugs were matted with cat hair. The cat itself, a fat white creature with a penetrating smell, lay on the sofa and licked its rear parts.
Margaret’s husband Trevor worked or read in his small upstairs study with a view of the sloping garden. His room was bare by comparison and together with Alice’s old bedroom it represented the only ordered area in the entire house. Although Alice had long ago left home, her room remained exactly as it had always been. Her teenage books filled the shelves and there were framed school and netball team photographs on the walls. It wasn’t that Margaret had preserved it as any kind of shrine to her daughter’s childhood, rather that she had never got around to doing anything else with it. In the same way, a hopbine gathered on a country holiday twelve years earlier was still rakishly pinned to the beam in the kitchen, and was now a dust-and-grease fossil of its former self.
Margaret was listening to music and working through the morning’s e-mails. She peered at the screen through her bifocals, reading interesting titbits aloud to herself and muttering the responses as she prodded them out of her keyboard. She was in her seventies, but she took to new technology with enthusiasm. E-mail made her complicated correspondences with friends and with fellow scientists all over the world much easier. She loved to explain to anyone who would listen that, for example, she could now chat on a daily basis with her old friend Harvey Golding who was based in San Diego and whom she hadn’t seen in the flesh for more than twelve years.
‘And I can keep abreast. See what the others are up to. It’s all there on the net, you know. Much easier nowadays.’
By ‘the others’ she meant scientists working in her field, marine mammal biology.
In the 1960s Margaret had made a series of television films about whales and seals in the seas surrounding Antarctica. She spent many months of the year living down on the ice, even doing most of her own underwater camerawork. She wrote the films’ drily lyrical commentaries too, and narrated them in her strong Yorkshire accent. The series made her and her voice famous.
She was never short of energy. Even after she had become a celebrity she continued her research and maintained her reputation as a serious scientist. Her meticulous work on the breeding patterns of Weddell seals pioneered a subsequent generation of Antarctic studies.
This morning, Margaret was replying to a personal message from Lewis Sullavan.
There had been a succession of increasingly insistent communications from his staff and now there was one from the great man himself. She sat for a moment with her fingers resting beside the keyboard. She looked out into the garden without seeing the heavy trees that leaned over into the lane, then shook herself and began.
‘My dear friend, I really cannot accept your kind invitation,’ she recited as she picked out the words. ‘Much as I would like to. The fact is that I am now 77 years of age and I have severe arthritis. However, there remains the alternative proposal.’
The cat yawned and stood up to claw the sofa cushions. Margaret heard Trevor’s footsteps crossing the upstairs landing from the bathroom to his study. The floorboards creaked as they always did.
‘My daughter is very interested in the idea,’ Margaret typed and whistled through her teeth as she sat back to review what she had written.
‘We’ll see, eh?’ she said, addressing the last remark to the cat.
She heard a car and quickly looked up. Alice’s car rounded the overgrown circular flowerbed that blocked the space between the house and the gate to the road, and drew up outside the front door.
‘Soon enough,’ Margaret added. She saved her unfinished message to Lewis Sullavan and was hobbling away from a blank screen by the time Alice came in.
‘Ah, there you are at last,’ Margaret said briskly.
Alice had brought a bunch of bright orange lilies with chocolate-speckled throats, her mother’s favourite flowers. She wrapped her arms round Margaret, hugging her close. She saw that the room looked as it always did; it was her mother who seemed smaller, as if the disorder might finally be on the point of overwhelming her.
‘Hello, Mum. Here I am.’
After a brief embrace Margaret leaned away, apparently for a better view of her daughter.
Alice’s hair was thick and slightly wavy, the same texture and silvery blonde colour as Margaret’s had also once been. Margaret’s was white now, and she wore it bluntly chopped round her face They were both slightly built, but Alice seemed to grow taller as Margaret’s painful stoop increased. Margaret said that her daughter was much more contemplative and serious-minded than she had ever been, but Trevor insisted that she was so like her mother at the same age that they could have passed for twins. Neither woman believed him.
‘Mum, the music’s very loud. Can I turn it down a bit?’
‘Is it? All right.’
Margaret motioned to the CD player and watched with a touch of envy as Alice swung with an unthinking fluid movement and muted the sound.
‘How do you feel?’ Alice asked.
‘I’m grand,’ she answered, although the pain was bad today. ‘And we’re away on holiday in three days, even though we don’t do so much here that needs taking a holiday from.’
‘Come on, you’re just going to stay in a nice hotel in Madeira and enjoy being waited on for once. Why don’t you sit down?’
Margaret gave an impatient shrug but she let Alice guide her gently to the sofa. They sat down once Alice had pushed the cat aside.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’ll be down as soon as he realises you’re here. I want a word first.’
‘Is something wrong? Have you seen Dr Davey?’
‘Don’t fuss, Alice. I’m perfectly fine.’ Margaret’s feet in elastic-sided shoes were placed flat on the floor, exactly together, toes pointing forward. She sat upright, hands folded.
Her mother wanted to be invulnerable, to remain as allcapable and all-knowing as she had always managed to be. Alice understood that perfectly. She knew that she despised her own increasing physical frailty, as if it were some moral weakness. In fact, there was nothing weak about Margaret and there never had been. She had been one of the first women scientists to penetrate the male domain of Antarctic research; she had filmed her seals beneath the ice of the polar sea and she had never shrunk from anything just because she was a woman, or a wife, or a mother. Her great energy and singlemindedness