Free Sun at Midnight by Rosie Thomas

wondered. Or was I just determined to be? ‘Go on,’ she said miserably.
    ‘Pete didn’t see him, because he had his tongue down some woman’s throat at the time. That’s how Harry put it. He said they didn’t look as if they were going to get as far as the car park before they…well. I’m sorry, Al. I’m so tactless. I’ve forgotten how to talk to real people, haven’t I?’
    ‘Was it Georgia?’
    ‘It didn’t sound like her.’
    ‘No. I see.’
    In the Moses basket Charlie stirred and gave an experimental whimper. Jo said, ‘It’s coming up to his lively time. He’ll be awake now until about ten. I thought you sort of knew about Pete and that was the way you chose to handle it. Knowing and not knowing.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ Alice murmured. Humiliation made her want to bend double, as if she had a stomach-ache.
    ‘You deserve better,’ Jo observed, lifting Charlie out of his basket as full-scale crying got under way. She rocked him gently, shushing him softly.
    ‘Perhaps,’ Alice said again.
    ‘Do you love him?’
    Yes, she loved him. Or was it actually the idea of him that she loved, the concept of Pete? Not just the illusory domesticity that they had enjoyed, but the very way his disarray and lack of precision had made an anarchic foil for her own selfimposed orderliness?
    Perhaps that was it. His work, his pieces of sculpture, were only just on the right side of giant rubbish heaps. (Of course they are, he would say. It is all a metaphor for our world. Arbitrary arrangements scraped together in a disintegrating society, drowning in its own discarded refuse. Or something like that. She never had quite mastered the language.) Whereas she had grown up with Trevor, sitting on a sun-warmed stone and watching her father frowning and scribbling stratigraphic measurements in his notebook. She had loved the names of the rocks. Gabbro and dolerite and basalt. The earth’s apparent solidity and her father’s dependability had somehow fused into a reassuring constant. It was only much later, as a geology student herself, that she began to appreciate the immense scale of the earth’s restlessness. And now, in her mid-thirties, as the balance of power between them shifted and her parents grew frailer, and as Pete’s shape shifted, her notions of what was solid and dependable were all being overturned.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she told Jo now. The realisation that she truly didn’t know shocked her.
    ‘What will you do? Tell him to behave or else?’
    ‘It’s a bit late for that. I was going to ask if I could stay here until he’s moved out?’
    They were both holding a baby. The sun had moved off the garden and the light was fading.
    Jo said immediately, ‘Of course you can.’
    Alice made pasta for dinner while Jo bathed the babies and fed them again. Harry came home, his face creased from the day, and they juggled the wakeful twins between the three of them while they ate. Pete rang Alice’s mobile every half-hour, but she didn’t take the calls. He rang Jo and Harry’s number too, and Harry did pick up the phone.
    ‘Yeah, she’s here. But I’d leave it for a while, mate, if I were you.’
    The calls stopped after that. Before she went to bed Alice spoke to her father in the hotel in Madeira. ‘Is she feeling any better?’
    ‘The doctor called in again. He’s been very good. We think she might be better off at home, you know, so we’re going to take a flight tomorrow. All being well, that is.’
    ‘Can you put her on?’
    Alice put the flat of her hand against the wall of Jo’s spare bedroom, wanting to feel its solidity.
    ‘It’s very annoying,’ Margaret said into the phone. The words were hers but her voice was almost unrecognisable, falling between a whisper and a sigh.
    ‘You’ll be fine. Once you’re home. A couple of days and you’ll be yourself again.’
    ‘Will I?’ She asked the question as though she were a child.
    ‘Yes,’ Alice said with a tremor in her voice.
    In their