The Sun At Midnight

Kathrin dropped her jacket over the back of a chair and hauled her sweater over her head. More of her hair was tugged free of its braid, to lie in chestnut strands on the shoulders of her green shirt. ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘I followed the herd for nearly five days—I think I’ll go back out tomorrow.’ She caught sight of Garry standing by the stove, his bearded face flushed from the heat, and added, ‘After I have a sauna, right?’

‘It’ll be ready in half an hour,’ he rejoined. ‘And you might have company to go and see the muskoxen tomorrow—we have a visitor.’

As she raised her brows in inquiry, not best pleased at the thought of sharing her solitude, a voice spoke from behind her, a man’s voice. ‘Hello, Kit,’ it said.

Only one person in the world had ever called her Kit.

Swept back into the past with an immediacy that petrified her, Kathrin felt her eyes widen with shock and her muscles tense in rejection. Her whole body rigid, she clutched at the sweater she had draped on top of her jacket. She would wake up in a minute and find this had all been a dream. Or a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep.

Because it couldn’t be true. Jud couldn’t be here.

Not Jud.

Very slowly, aware at some distant level that Karl was looking puzzled and Calvin gaping at her, Kathrin turned her head. A man was sitting in the far corner of the room, his chair tipped back, his thumbs tucked in his belt. His eyes were fastened on her face. In front of him on the flowered plastic tablecloth was an empty coffee mug.

She recognised him immediately, and at the same time saw that he was unutterably altered from the man she had known so many years ago. She could not have smiled to have saved her soul, for the flesh seemed to have frozen to her face and she could feel herself being drawn into the cold blue pits of his eyes in a way that appalled her. No one else she had ever known had eyes of so intense and vivid a blue as Jud; yet right now they reminded her of nothing so much as the meltwater that collected in pools on glaciers, deep turquoise over hidden depths of ice. Struggling to find her voice, she croaked, ‘Jud...Jud Leighton.’

Pam banged a saucepan on the stove and said matter-of-factly, ‘Your supper’s ready, Kathrin.’

Rescue. With a huge effort Kathrin unlocked her gaze from her antagonist’s—for instantly she had known that was what he was—wondering in some dim recess of her brain if she were physically capable of walking across the room and taking the plate that Pam was holding out to her. It’s not Ivor sitting at the table, she thought dazedly, it’s Jud. Ivor was the brother she had been in love with, the one who should have roused this storm of emotion in her breast. Even though Jud had materialised without warning in a place thousands of miles from Thorndean, she would never have expected him to have upset her so strongly. So why was she standing here as stiff-limbed as a plastic doll?

Because Jud’s betrayal had been worse than Ivor’s.

Ten times worse.

This new knowledge slammed into Kathrin’s body with the force of a fist. She should have known it seven years ago, and had not. It had taken Jud’s sudden reappearance into her life to make it clear to her how deep was the wound he had inflicted. Deeper than Ivor’s more physical wounds. Deeper, too, than her exile from Thorndean, terrible though that had been. Numbly she became aware that Pam was now standing in front of her holding out the plate, her long-lashed grey eyes concerned. ‘Are you OK?’ Pam asked. ‘You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.’ She turned an unfriendly gaze on the man on the other side of the table. ‘Jud didn’t tell us he knew you.’

Not hurrying, Jud lowered the legs of his chair to the floor and leaned his arms on the table. ‘I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. There must be more than one Kathrin Selby in Canada.’

In an unexpected and invigorating rush, like flame seizing upon dry wood, Kathrin lost her temper. ‘More than one with red hair and brown eyes, who loves wild places and wild animals?’ she blazed. ‘Give me a break, Jud!’

‘You overestimate yourself,’ he mocked. ‘I didn’t bother asking for any details. When I heard your name, I just tucked myself in the corner and waited to see who would walk in the door.’

His voice might be as smooth as the exquisite silk scarf he had given her for her sixteenth birthday; but she still knew him well enough to realise that beneath a thin veneer of control he was furiously angry. He had no right to be angry, Kathrin thought blankly. None whatsoever. She was the one who had been wronged, not him.

As if a wound had been reopened, she was suddenly flooded by all the anguish of the seventeen-year-old girl whose world had collapsed around her one summer long ago. There had been no firm ground to stand on that summer, for everything that she had taken for granted had shown her another face, a demonic face, ugly and frightening beyond belief.

Frantically Kathrin fought to collect her wits. She might have been knocked off balance a few minutes ago; but she was not so disoriented as to challenge Jud’s anger in the camp kitchen in front of an audience as rapt as any play-wright could have wished. With a fresh spurt of fury she realised how easily Jud had gained the advantage over her, just by sitting out of sight of the door and waiting for her to walk into the room. All her shock and horror had been written on her face for him to read. Him, and everyone else in the kitchen.

Pam was still holding out the plate of food, while Garry, Karl, and Calvin had been listening to every word in a fascinated silence. With a gallant effort to achieve normality Kathrin said lightly, ‘Well, no one’s going to miss the soap operas tonight, are they? Jud and I grew up together, parted on somewhat less than amicable terms, and haven’t seen each other for seven years.’ She glanced over at Calvin. ‘And that’s all you’re getting out of me. Pam, that looks wonderful, thanks.’

She took the dinner plate with hands whose tremor she could not quite disguise, and pulled up a chair as far from Jud’s as she could. The plate was heaped with roast chicken, mashed potatoes and canned green beans, and she had totally lost her appetite. Grimly she began to eat.

Garry, who disliked too much emotion, said bluffly, ‘Guess I’ll go check the sauna,’ and strode out of the room with visible relief. Pam sat down next to Kathrin, blocking her from Jud’s view, and started describing the latest antics of the Arctic fox that came scavenging at the kitchen door every evening. Calvin and Karl were talking to Jud. Kathrin chewed and swallowed, and with a quiver of inner laughter that hovered on the edge of hysteria realised that she was also furious with Jud for spoiling her first real meal in five days.

When Pam pushed back from the table to get Kathrin some coffee, Jud’s chair scraped the floor as well. He was on the opposite side of the table from Kathrin. Unable to help herself, she watched as he walked past her to the stove to refill his own mug. He still moved with the long-limbed grace that had characterised him even as a boy, for he had never gone through that awkward, gawky stage of most adolescents. While he had always been lean and narrow-hipped, she had not remembered his shoulders being quite so broad or so impressively muscled. Instinctively she was sure he could move with the lethal speed of a bullwhip. Prison would have done that for him, she thought sickly, and stared hard at the remains of her mashed potato as he walked back to his chair.

Pam put a mug of steaming coffee and a piece of apple pie in front of her and sat down again. ‘You didn’t mind being alone out there?’

‘I loved being alone,’ Kathrin said in a carrying voice. ‘It’s a place that calls for solitude.’ Garry, what seemed like aeons ago but was probably only a few minutes, had mentioned she might have company on her next trek to the muskoxen. If Garry was cherishing the slightest thought that she was going back to the valley with Jud tomorrow, he could think again. Jud, watching her every move? Jud, sleeping in a tent only feet from hers? She’d die rather than go anywhere alone with Jud; and the sooner Garry understood that, the better.

Ignoring the vigour with which Kathrin was attacking her pie, Pam said with a chuckle, ‘You’re hooked. Garry always says he can tell within a week the people who are counting the days until the end of summer, and the ones who’ll be back north on the first plane at spring break-up.’

Glancing through the window at the rectangular patch of blue sky, Kathrin said, ‘Up here, I forget there are days.’

‘Cooking breakfast every morning keeps me on track,’ Pam said drily. ‘More pie?’

The piece of apple pie seemed to have disappeared. Kathrin shook her head. ‘That was delicious, Pam, thanks. Maybe I’d better go over to my place and find some clean clothes...you don’t know how much I’m looking forward to the sauna.’

On cue, Garry pushed open the door. ‘It’s up to temperature,’ he said. ‘You and Pam go first, Kathrin, and one of you let me know when you’re through.’

The sauna, at the far end of the camp, was heated by an oil-driven generator, and as such was treated as a luxury item. Kathrin got up, carried her plates to the sink, and left the room with Pam, all without so much as glancing Jud’s way. ‘Ready in five minutes,’ she called to Pam, and hurried across the road to the little blue hut that, as the only other woman in the camp, she occupied alone. The outer door creaked on its hinges; she left her boots on the mat and went inside.

The interior of the hut consisted of one room with unpainted wooden walls. Two bunk beds, a desk, a chair, and a set of plain board bookshelves were the entirety of the furniture, along with a kerosene stove. But Kathrin had arranged her books and some rocks from the shore on the shelves; the colourful mat her mother had braided and that went everywhere with her lay on the floor by her bed. Cheap flowered curtains softened the two small windows and she had pinned four of her favourite photographs on the walls. The room was neat, for Kathrin had lost the careless untidiness of her teenage years—along with so much else—when she had been banished from Thorndean: neatness gave her an illusion of control that she still needed. The room was also, despite the sparseness of its furnishings, very welcoming.

She leaned her pack against the wall. Her toilet articles were on one of the shelves; she put them in a plastic bag along with two towels, and from one of the drawers under her bed took out the clean clothes she would need. There. That was everything.

But beneath her socked feet she was suddenly aware of the thickness and warmth of her mother’s rug. One of the braided strands was a deep blue; it had been a shirt of Jud’s the winter he had turned fifteen. Kathrin sat down hard on the chair, closing her eyes. Jud was here. A man she had thought never to see again had thrust his way into her life, confronting her with a past as painful now as it had been seven years ago.

To the best of her ability she had worked at healing the damage Ivor had done. But she now knew how deeply she had buried Jud’s betrayal, not even allowing herself to recognise how badly it had scarred her.

Someone knocked on her door. She gave a violent start, terrified that it might be Jud, then with a rush of relief heard Pam’s cheerful voice. ‘Ready, Kathrin?’

‘Coming!’ she called in a cracked voice and scrambled to her feet, grabbing her clothes and the plastic bag.

Pam 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.’