She stirred restlessly, her golden hair, tied severely back, catching the late sunlight and flaming into life. The heavy book on her lap fell open at the title page, and the stewardess, glancing down inquisitively on her way past, stopped for nearly a minute simply to read the title, and then moved on, still not understanding it:
FOOD IN THE ARCTIC
Observations upon some aspects of the cryobiology of Phytoplanktons in certain areas of the High Arctic – with special reference to the varying productivity of the genus Cosindodisus in the shallow coastal waters of the larger land-masses contingent thereupon. Lectures to the Royal Society, Summer 1970.
By C. J. Warren.
Memories of him washed over her. She had a habit of observing herself as clinically as she observed any plant specimen, and she knew and accepted how important he had been to her, and for all the wrong reasons.
The last time she had seen him, not counting television, was ten years ago, at her mother’s funeral. She had been called home from school just before the exams, which all of her friends had thought was the most super luck, to find her mother bedridden, almost mindless, and so wasted that her great beauty was lost forever. In her mind, Kate could see herself as though she were watching a film of someone else’s life, the colours too bright to be real, the emotions too vivid. She could see her mother’s huge cavernous room, its high ceiling crossed with beams, the long olive velvet curtains which reached to the floor, the deep red carpet, the beautiful, dark, indistinct paintings on the walls, a tall mahogany chiffonier full of leather-bound books, the great marble-framed fireplace, fire blazing, making everything golden, its crisp comforting crackling covering the sound of the wind against the windows. And against the wall, opposite the fire, the huge antique bed with the tiny figure of her mother lying in it, strangely immobile like a doll waiting in a child’s bed for the child to come and hold it. Kate could see the girl who was herself, tall for her age, willow-straight, hands clasped tightly before her, head high, golden hair loose and gleaming in the firelight, moving across the room, as though through a church. She had worn her green tartan kilt that day. What else, she was not sure; but she remembered the kilt quite clearly, and the big silver kilt-pin caught the firelight and gleamed in her memory. She saw herself, eyes full of tears, going over to the huge bed.
There was a smell, for some reason, of lavender; it had made her feel ill. Her mother had looked terrible, her face like a skull. It had given her nightmares for years, that face. She had kissed it but her mother hadn’t woken or even stirred, so Kate had gone out of the room again. She had existed, stunned, through the next week, under the forbidding wing of her mother’s elder sister who had come to run the house until Mother recovered, and who now found herself arranging a funeral instead.
She had expected it to rain the day Mother was buried, but it had been sunny and hot and she had been standing roasting in a heavy black coat by the graveside, feeling positively wretched, and wondering whether to cry, when her father had arrived. Although Aunt Jane was forever telling her that being fourteen meant that you were a grown-up and should act like one, she had torn away from the little congregation of mourners and run to him, throwing herself into his arms, crying at last. Even then, it seemed to her, he had been bald. The circle of hair, fluffy and white now, covering his ears, had been dark and slicked back. His face had been thinner too, and his glasses, the lenses hugely thick, had been those ghastly National Health type. Even at fourteen, she had been almost as tall as he was, though her slim figure had been completely lost against the breadth of his chest, the girth of his stomach. He had been wearing his baggy green Donegal-tweed jacket with leather elbows and cuffs. There had been a black band on his right arm. He had hesitated when he saw her coming towards him, and later realised he had not recognised her; but he hugged her and petted her, had tea with her – and tucked her up in bed before going away. She hadn’t seen him since.
Oh, there had been letters, birthday cards, an occasional present; but always only Aunt Jane at Parents’ Evenings and Prize-Givings, at the concerts and the plays. On her sixteenth birthday he had been in the Amazon studying fungi; he had sent her a letter from Rio full of words she hadn’t understood, names she couldn’t find even in her new botany book, and a piece of dried fern – which he wrote was very rare indeed – which had crumbled to dust as she took it out of the envelope. When she had played Cleopatra in the school play he had been in Italy studying lichens on volcanic rocks. She had sent him the review of her performance (really quite flattering) from the local paper – five column inches of it, and he had replied by sending her the whole of a five page article in the London Times devoted to his work. She already had a copy neatly folded in her scrap-book. When she was awarded her scholarship to Oxford, he was in the Antarctic. She had written and told him, of course, but he probably never received the letter, the post being what it is in the Antarctic – certainly he had never replied. When she had graduated with honours and marks rivalled only by his own marks twenty years earlier, he was in Iceland, and didn’t even realise his own daughter had learned his own subject in his old college every bit as well as he.
Now she was the most brilliant postgraduate student in the Faculty of Science, and the darling of the whole staff. The gawky, bony, ugly-duckling girl had become a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman who made nothing of her beauty – why should she? Her mother had been far more lovely and Father had still gone away – a student with a tireless thirst for knowledge, a true genius for assimilating facts about plants and structuring them into lucid, controlled arguments; always patient, unassuming, self-effacing in all but her work; ready to pitch in and help, able and more than willing to go on the most gruelling field trips, cheerful, steady, useful to have around. But she had always kept men at a distance. No, that wasn’t quite so. She always kept young men at a distance. She got on perfectly well with men of her father’s generation – Professor Brownlow, the head of the Faculty of Science at her college, who had in fact been an undergraduate there with her father; Jon Thompson, her tutor and friend, another lifelong friend of her father’s; others, senior men in half a dozen leading faculties of science all over the world, all known to her, all caring for her, all friends of her father’s. No friends of her own age – no husband-figures; only father-figures.
Kate shifted in her seat. The stewardess, passing again, paused and looked at her for a moment. The golden hair looked real enough, she thought enviously, although the brows and lashes were quite dark. The nose was quite long, as was the upper lip – an English beauty, though there was nothing of the horse about her face. A round chin, broad cheekbones, the corners of her wide mouth turning up. A complexion the stewardess would have given her eye-teeth for. A little pale though, some sign of strain around the eyes.
A light flashed commandingly. The stewardess hurried on, thinking, what would a girl who looked like that be going to Alaska for?
Kate was going to Alaska in answer to an advertisement in The Times. Her tutor, Jon Thompson, had seen it weeks ago, very plain and unassuming at the bottom of a compact column:
Wanted, assistant to botanist working in Arctic Alaska.
Suitable for post-grad. student. Reply as soon as possible
with curriculum vitae and references.