Sun at Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 tended rather to make everyone around her feel weak by comparison. Recognition of this was one of the strongest of the many bonds between Alice and her father.
    ‘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