Midnight Sun's Magic

It was over lunch that Great-Aunt Mary remarked suddenly: ‘Of course, I should very much have preferred it if you had been getting married, though not to Arthur. You’re twenty-seven, aren’t you, Annis?’ she eyed her niece’s splendid figure across the table, ‘and there can’t be all that number of men in the world to match up to you.’

‘Match up to me?’ asked Annis faintly.

‘Looks, my dear, and height, and come to that, size. You’re hardly petite, are you? Perhaps there’ll be someone suitable among the Norwegians.’

Annis giggled. ‘I’ll keep an eye open,’ she promised.

She left early that evening with regret. The little house looked delightful in the late sunshine and the hills around were turning to golden. Snow and ice, she thought—I must be mad!

But due reflection made it obvious to her that it was rather less mad to go traipsing off to the top of the world than to continue the lukewarm and far too cautious relationship with Arthur. At least Spitzbergen was different, or she hoped it would be; indeed, the more she thought about it the better she liked the idea. She slept soundly on it, ate a good breakfast and arrived, unruffled and very neat, in good time for her flight.

She had flown before, but only short flights, and she was disappointed to find that the journey was over so quickly. She had expected that the six-hour trip would have given her plenty of time to look at the passing world beneath her, but what with take-off and coffee and then, just as she was picking out the coastline below, lunch, she had very little time to peer out of her porthole. They were landing before she had had more than a glimpse of Tromso, on the islands below her, hugging Norway’s rugged coast.

Freddy was waiting for her and although she was a girl well able to look after herself, she was more than pleased to see him. There were any number of questions she wanted answered too.

‘Not now, Sis, I’ve got a company plane waiting to take off.’

‘Oh, don’t we have any time at all here? A cup of tea…?’

He grinned. ‘They’ll wait that long. Come on, over here, just stand there while I get someone to take your luggage.’

It wasn’t tea, but coffee, strong and dark, accompanied by large, satisfying buns. ‘How long does it take?’ asked Annis, her mouth full.

‘It’s eight hundred miles—about three hours; as it doesn’t get dark at all we don’t have to worry about landing.’

‘Oh, but how shall we…?’

Freddy was on his feet. ‘We’ll have to go—there’ll be plenty of time to talk later.’

She had expected that they would return to the airfield, but Freddy got into a small Saab with the driver already at the wheel and she got in with him, prudently asking no more questions. There was plenty to keep her occupied. Tromso was delightful with the forest all around it, joined to the mainland by a long bridge, its wooden houses gay with flowers, and having an air of happy bustle. There were ships of all sorts in its harbour, too, and she looked at Freddy, a little puzzled; he had said a plane…

‘Out there,’ he said laconically, and nodded towards a seaplane a few hundred yards out. The Saab stopped and Annis found herself being ushered into a small boat, her luggage piled in after her and Freddy beside her while the driver started the outboard motor; she barely had time to take a last lingering look at Tromso before she was clambering on board.

There was already someone there, a slight young man, who grinned at her with an easy ‘Hullo—so Freddy found you.’ He whistled: ‘And aren’t you a lovely surprise—hefty,’ he added, ‘strong as a horse and never turns a hair.’ He put out a hand. ‘I’m Jeff Blake, I do the book work and sometimes I’m allowed to pilot the plane—this one, that is, not Jake’s.’

Annis laughed at him, told Freddy that he was a wretch and added: ‘But I am as strong as a horse, you know.’

Jeff gave her a wicked look. ‘Never mind the strength, just so long as you can bathe a fevered brow and cook.’ He turned to Freddy. ‘All set? Let’s go, then.’

The two men talked shop, quite unintelligible to Annis, but she didn’t mind. This trip was so much more exciting than the flight from London that morning; the Norwegian coast quickly disappeared and there was nothing but the sea below and the clear sky all around. She sat quietly, mulling over her day. It had all happened too quickly for her; she would have to go back to Tromso and take time to explore—which reminded her about things like days off…

‘Do I get any free time?’ she asked, ruthlessly cutting in on electronic jargon.

‘Lord, yes,’ Freddy assured her. ‘There are only twenty of us, you know, and most of the time we’re fighting fit; all we want are three good meals a day, some help with the books and a soothing hand if we’re ill.’ He turned to pick up a Thermos flask. ‘And Jake sees to it that we never are. He doesn’t mind the odd accident, but he draws the line at headaches and vague disorders.’

‘And who is this Jake?’

‘The doctor—the company needed one while we were at the radio station and he fancied a holiday.’ He grinned at her. ‘Wait till you meet him.’

‘Oh—why?’

But Jeff only laughed, it was Freddy who observed: ‘They’ll make a good pair.’

Annis forgot their remarks soon enough. Her first glimpse of Spitzbergen dispelled every other thought from her head; great grey snow-capped mountains on the horizon, a little frightening because suddenly she realised how far they were from everywhere else. ‘It looks bleak,’ she ventured.

‘It’s beautiful, so quiet you can hear the ice floes cracking on their way through the fjords down to the sea, birds of course and seals, and the odd whale.’

‘People?’

‘The odd thousand or so scattered between the three settlements. And us, of course.’

‘Are we very far from a—a settlement?’

‘An hour’s flight—someone goes once a fortnight to pick up provisions and post; the Coastal Express calls too with the odd crate.’

She had to be content with that. The men fell to talking technicalities once more, leaving her to contemplate the awe-inspiring landscape.

The sun was still shining brilliantly as Jeff brought the seaplane down close to a flat, lichen-covered tongue of rock, the mountains towered all round them with a narrow strip of rock between them and the sea, and scattered along it were wooden huts and what Annis vaguely supposed to be wireless stations; there was a round building too, standing well away from the rest. It looked remarkably lonely even in the late evening sun, but not for long. As they came to rest on the iron grey water she could see men emerging from the huts and running towards them. Two of them got into a small motorboat tied to a rickety pier and started towards the plane.

‘We’re here,’ said Freddy unnecessarily.

There was nothing lacking in her welcome; any doubts Annis might have still been harbouring were drowned in the enthusiastic greeting she got from the men. There were more than a dozen of them, shaking her by the hand the moment she stepped rather gingerly on the rock, telling her their names, declaring that she was the answer to a prayer—just what the doctor had ordered.

‘I wasn’t aware that I had done any such thing,’ drawled a voice behind her, and to the accompaniment of shouts of laughter Annis turned round, bristling a little because the voice had held mockery.

Its owner suited the scenery very well. He was large and rugged, with great shoulders and towering over everyone there. Good-looking too, only his dark eyes were cool and his mouth was a thought too straight for her liking. Not so very young either, she decided; his thick dark hair was grey at the temples.

She held out a hand. ‘How do you do?’ she said in her sweetest voice.

CHAPTER TWO

THE HAND which grasped hers was hard and firm and cool, and when she looked at the doctor’s face she could see no trace of mockery there; she must have imagined it.

He said in a deep slow voice: ‘Hullo, Annis, I’m so glad you have come—we’ve been taking it in turns to cook and we’re all very bad at it.’

She said with a touch of frost because he had called her Annis without even asking: ‘I’m a nurse.’

He said gravely: ‘We have almost no sickness here and—we hope—only occasional accidents, but if there is a mass outbreak of measles I, and I’m sure the rest of the team, won’t grumble.’

There was general laughter at that and she laughed too, not because she found it very amusing but because it was so obviously expected of her. She looked up and saw the gleam in the doctor’s eye; probably he wanted to annoy her. ‘I don’t know your name…’ she reminded him gently.

‘Jake—Jake van Germert. I hope you’ll call me Jake—we’re all on the best of terms; you’ve met most of us, but there are several on duty. You’ll meet them in the morning.’ He looked over the men’s heads to speak to a short, fat man, a good deal older than the rest of them. ‘How about Freddy taking Annis to their hut, Willy, while we dish the supper.’

She vaguely remembered shaking the fat man’s hand. Presumably he was the boss; he looked mild and absent-minded and probably had a remarkable brain. He smiled at her now and came to take her arm. ‘Lead on, Freddy. Annis, you can have ten minutes to make your beautiful self even more beautiful and then you shall have supper, such as it is.’

The hut, which looked bare and unwelcoming from the outside, was a surprise. Its furniture was comfortable and the covers and cushions were brightly coloured. Two rooms led from the small living room, small too, but her bed looked comfortable and there was a good sized cupboard and a dressing table. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but she was agreeably surprised now. It wasn’t for a few days that she discovered that she and Freddy had been moved into the hut shared by the boss and the doctor, who had taken up quarters in one of the other huts, which while comfortable, had no living room and was more cramped. She unpacked a few things, did her hair and her face and with Freddy beside her, crossed the bare rocky ground between them and a larger hut which, he explained, was their communal centre, where they ate and played cards, and played records and spent their leisure. ‘We go climbing too,’ he added, ‘and fishing; it’s pretty quiet in the winter, though.’

The understatement of the year, thought Annis. It seemed pretty quiet now, with nothing but the seabirds calling and the gentle wash of the icy water against the rock. ‘Holidays?’ she asked.