The Sun At Midnight. Sandra Field

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СКАЧАТЬ was waiting outside. If she saw the strain on Kathrin’s face, she chose not to mention it, saying instead as they set off down the road, ‘I wish it weren’t so difficult to get an oil supply up here—then we could do this more often.’

      Because everything had to be flown in, the camp was prohibitively expensive to run, and part of Garry’s job was juggling the figures to enable the research to be carried out each summer. ‘If we could have a sauna every night, we wouldn’t appreciate it nearly as much,’ Kathrin said fliply.

      ‘Try me!’ said Pam. ‘By the way, Garry’s going to run the washer for a couple of hours tomorrow if you’ve got dirty clothes...isn’t the sky beautiful?’

      From eleven at night until one in the morning was Kathrin’s favourite time, for the light had a gentleness, a tranquillity that she found very appealing. Although the sun was well above the horizon, the clouds were tinged with the softest of pinks and golds, and the tundra itself seemed to harbour that gold as if gilded by the most skilful of artists. Aware of the first measure of peace since she had heard Jud’s voice in the kitchen, Kathrin jogged down the slope to the sauna.

      It was shaped like an igloo with a metal stove-pipe and a low door. Behind a plywood screen Pam and Kathrin took off their clothes. Then Kathrin pulled the door open and they went inside. Pans of water were heating on the hot rocks. She poured some in one of the plastic bowls on the counter and started shampooing her hair, luxuriating in the steamy heat. In a casual voice Pam said, ‘Want to tell me about Jud?’

      Pam was both discreet and kind-hearted. But she also lived with Garry, who would make the final decision whether Jud would accompany Kathrin to watch the muskoxen. Kathrin said, sluicing the shampoo from her long hair, ‘If I tell you what happened, would you pass it on to Garry for me, Pam? I can’t go out with Jud tomorrow, I just can’t!’ Biting back the panic that had made her voice rise, she poured another bowl of water.

      ‘Garry makes his own decisions about the camp, Kathrin, you know that as well as I do—but he’s fair, too. Sure, I’ll tell him.’

      Kathrin reached for the soap, lathered it on her facecloth and began to talk, deliberately detaching her emotions from the words she was recounting. ‘I grew up north of Toronto. My mother was the housekeeper on a big estate called Thorndean, owned by a man named Bernard Leighton. You may have heard of him—he’s a major entrepreneur with business interests all over the country: mining, forestry, a couple of newspapers. My mother was there for years, because my father had been the head gardener. He died when I was two, and my mother stayed on.’

      She scrubbed her arms as if getting clean were her only care in the world. ‘Bernard Leighton had two sons. Ivor, the elder, by his first wife, and Jud, whom you’ve now met, by his second. Ivor was the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.’ She gave a rueful laugh. ‘I fell in love with him when I was about six, I guess...I thought the sun rose and set on him. He never paid much attention to me—he was eight years older, after all—so it was Jud I spent time with, not Ivor.’

      ‘Ivor’s better-looking than Jud?’ Pam interposed incredulously. ‘I’d get up at four a.m. any day of the week to make Jud Leighton his breakfast. It’s just as well I’m in love with Garry—Jud’s gorgeous, Kathrin!’

      ‘I suppose so,’ Kathrin said without much interest. She had never seen Jud in that light and wasn’t about to start now. ‘He and I were buddies, Pam. Friends. More like brother and sister than anything else, I suppose. When I flunked an English test and when I had to get braces on my teeth and when my best girlfriend moved away—Jud was the one I went to for comfort and advice. My mother and I were never that close, so I suppose it was natural that I gravitated to Jud. Besides, we both liked the same things—the outdoors and animals and roaming the countryside. And there were only four years between us.’ She stretched to scrub her back. ‘Jud always had a wild streak in him, something untamed and uncontrollable. He used to skip school on a regular basis because he couldn’t stand being cooped up.’ For a moment her voice faltered. One of the many thoughts she had smothered over the years had been how Jud, who had found the brick walls of the school a prison, had ever been able to stay sane in a real prison.

      That was none of her concern, she thought fiercely, and picked up the thread of her story, only wanting it to be done. ‘Jud might have been wild. But he was—or so I thought—totally honest and trustworthy. If he was going to do something to you he’d do it to your face, never behind your back.’

      ‘That’s kind of the way he looks,’ Pam said thoughtfully.

      ‘It’s fake,’ Kathrin said curtly. ‘The summer I was seventeen, he was caught embezzling money from his father’s business. Caught red-handed. It had been going on for months.’

      Pam padded over to the stove and helped herself to more hot water. ‘Are you sure? That’s so sneaky and underhanded. He doesn’t look the type.’

      ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Kathrin’s voice thinned. ‘There was an anonymous phone call tipping off the police. At the trial Jud tried to pin the call on Ivor. But Ivor was with me; he couldn’t have done it.’

      Ivor and she had been in bed together, she thought, ducking her head in a wave of dizziness. ‘It’s awfully hot in here,’ she mumbled.

      ‘It’s a sauna,’ Pam said, reasonably enough. ‘You can’t stop there, Kathrin—what happened?’

      With a complete lack of emotion Kathrin said, ‘Bernard—their father—was so upset that Jud could have accused Ivor that he had a stroke. A relatively mild one, but a stroke, nevertheless. The prosecution had already produced evidence that Jud had been systematically stealing for months, salting the money away in different accounts. He finally confessed, and he was sent to prison. End of story.’

      Pam shook out her cluster of black curls. ‘You never married Ivor,’ she said, making it more question than statement.

      Kathrin said rapidly, ‘Right after the trial Ivor told his father he and I had made love. Bernard fired my mother, and she and I left the next day. I never saw Ivor or Jud or their father again.’

      ‘Until tonight when Jud turned up at the kitchen table. No wonder you looked as if you’d seen a ghost,’ Pam said, obviously intrigued. ‘It all sounds terribly feudal...like one of those family sagas on TV. Didn’t his father think you were good enough for Ivor?’

      ‘The housekeeper’s daughter? I should say not! He couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.’

      ‘He was nuts,’ Pam said succinctly.

      Kathrin managed a weak smile. ‘That’s sweet of you. But Pam, you do see why I can’t possibly go out with Jud tomorrow—I don’t want to be anywhere near him!’

      ‘I’ll speak to Garry,’ Pam said decisively. ‘I’m sure he’ll understand.’

      ‘Thanks,’ Kathrin rejoined in true gratitude, ‘you’re a real friend. Now, are we going into the lake or not?’

      The sauna was on the shores of Loon Lake, which was still partially frozen, and it was the custom of the more stalwart of the scientists to follow their sauna with a swim. ‘Not me,’ Pam announced. ‘The last time I did that, it took me the whole night to warm up.’

      But Kathrin needed some kind of drastic action to shake off the mood of her story. She had told Pam the truth. But she had not told the whole truth, and it was the gaps in the story that were bothering her as much as its СКАЧАТЬ