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do you know this media mogul and what is Kandahar Station?’
    ‘I met him many years ago when I was making my first series for the television.’ It was always the television, in Margaret’s old-fashioned way.
    ‘I didn’t know that.’
    Margaret’s brief nod seemed to acknowledge that therewere many episodes in her life that the passage of years and the accumulation of success had left half submerged. ‘It’s a very long time ago.’
    She sounded tired , Alice realised with a stab of anxiety. It was a good thing that Trevor had been able to persuade her to take a ten-day break in Madeira.
    Margaret withdrew her hands and smoothed her trousers over her knees. The jersey fabric was baggy and whiskered with cat hair. When she was younger, Alice remembered, her mother had had an ambivalent attitude to clothes. She had loved style and making a statement, but had been hampered by the suspicion that this didn’t go with serious science. So she had adopted a look that was all her own, in which plain suits and conservative dresses were enlivened with wicked shoes, or ethnic necklaces, or a wide-brimmed hat looped with scarves. These days, however, she dressed mostly for comfort.
    ‘Kandahar Station is Lewis’s current toy,’ she continued and her briskness came back again. ‘It’s a new research base. Largely funded at present by Sullavan himself, but with some EU support. As you know, he’s passionately pro-Europe. The intention is that Kandahar will ultimately offer facilities for European scientists and joint European research initiatives across all the relevant disciplines.’
    This sounded like a speech. And if Margaret had rehearsed it, then what she was going to say must be important.
    ‘And where is it?’ Alice asked, although she knew the answer to this question too.
    ‘Antarctica.’
    Of course.
    Alice had grown up with the waterfall sound of the word. The pictures of it were as familiar as the view from this window. Some of them still adorned the walls and mantel here in Margaret’s room. In the most famous one of all, theyounger Margaret crouched beside a hole in the ice shelf, dressed in the corpulent rubber folds of a diver’s drysuit. She had pulled off her rubber hood and the wind blew her hair away from her head like a silvery halo. A seal’s head poked up out of the ice hole and it looked as if they were amiably chatting together.
    In another a stiffly posed group of bearded men stood in the snow outside a low-built wooden hut. Margaret’s figure at the end of the line looked tiny, like an afterthought, but her head was held erect and her chin jutted firmly forward.
    Margaret was in her forties before her only child was born and most of her polar adventures were already behind her, but to the small Alice, hearing the stories, her mother’s doings and those of Scott and Shackleton and the others had run together into a continuous and present mythology of snow and terrible cold and heroic bravery. She curled up under her warm blankets and shivered, full of admiration and awe, as well as pride that her own mother somehow belonged to this bearded company. At the same time she made a childish resolution that she would never venture to such a place herself and her decision seemed to be endorsed by the fact that her father had never been there either.
    More than twenty-five years later, Alice saw no reason to change her mind. ‘No,’ she said now, smiling as she did so but without letting a tremor of uncertainty colour her voice.
    ‘Alice, it’s an honour. Sir Lewis wants to name the laboratory block Margaret Mather House. What do you think of that?’
    ‘It is an honour,’ Alice gently agreed. ‘Do you think it would be too much for you to go yourself? To see the ice again?’
    Margaret’s face flooded with longing but she shook herhead. ‘I would go if…if I didn’t have damned arthritis and if I wasn’t going to be a nuisance and a liability.’
    Anyone planning to travel south would