The Still Point Read online

  ‘I like this tune,’ she says, as if to annoy him, to make the point that his plan has backfired and nothing can spoil her perfect day, her perfect summer day doing nothing apparently, while he has to be at work in — damn — an hour and twenty-five minutes, he’s lost five minutes just lying here, will he have time to shower and have breakfast as well? He is about to say, ‘Do you even know what it is?’ when she asks:

  ‘Did you sleep okay? Shall I make you breakfast while you have a shower?’ and he is suddenly rather ashamed, and decides instead to tell her:

  ‘It’s Rachmaninov.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ (she yawns, dozy, contented, not bored, not yet bored by the day) ‘I like it.’

  ‘I have it downstairs, on CD. Hm. I must say I’ve never thought of it as music to herald the dawn,’ he opines. And seeing her face fall just a little, and hating himself just a little for it, he adds, ‘I like it too, though. Gets the blood going, I suppose. Eggs would be nice — if you’re getting up.’

  Julia smiles again; Simon graciously allows a last tragic chord to fade to the point when it is almost certainly silent and switches off the radio just before the presenter starts speaking. Julia gets off the bed in that peculiar way she has, looking until the last second as if she intends to simply roll off the edge to the floor. She puts on a jade-green silky gown, a gift from him and far more glamorous than that of her neighbour, that towelling misery she failed to witness. She hums to herself, ‘How do you like your eggs in the morning?’, but she knows his answer already, and although it is not that which the song prescribes, although he fails to join the duet, ‘I like mine with a kiss…’, she applies it anyway — to his further surprise — on his forehead on her way out of the room. He likes his eggs in the morning poached until the white has just set.

  So begins the day. There is no reason that this particular Thursday should be anything other than ordinary; but already, as they surface into it, it is proving unusual. What has happened to so transform Simon and Julia’s morning? This affection on her part, this talk of concertos? This request for cooked breakfast when, but moments before, he was huffily contemplating a hasty bowl of bran, standing at the kitchen counter, every scratchy woodchip spoonful somehow blamed on her? Any number of things have added up to this anomaly: a dinner; a little death; infidelity. These lazy high-summer days are long, and anything might quietly happen before night falls.

  Eggs and pheasant

  Julia and Simon live in a Victorian house which, like almost everything in this very pretty market town, is listed. There is the attic, the master suite, several other bedrooms of various proportions, another bathroom, a basement kitchen, a small but much-loved wine cellar, an elegant reception room, a grand dining room, a cosy squashy much less tidy sitting room, other rooms that we probably won’t have a use for. This is a house full of books, of prints and paintings and photographs on the walls and pottery and glass, and dark, weighty furniture; there are rugs and heavy curtains, there’s a piano that Simon could but doesn’t play, there are stuffed animals. Mounted, we should say, animals.

  This house groans in the night, freighted with memories. They are stashed in every cupboard, they lurk in every corner, they gleam in the eyes of the albatross in the attic… Listen, and you will catch the echoes. Attend to the vanishing glint at the corner of your eye: great men have talked, slept, drunk and dined here, under a different, richer yellow light. History took its course here, and might yet be coursing through the corridors, to be caught at. Julia and Simon have lived here less than a year, but she has known these rooms for as long as she can remember, and a part of her has always been wandering through them.

  Julia is descended from an important man. A hero even. Julia’s father was the son of Edward Mackley, whose father was John, whose brother was also an Edward — the famous Edward Mackley, the explorer. John Mackley was himself a man not lacking in distinction, a prominent member of the Royal Geographical Society, a respected academic and physician. This is John’s house; it is John’s menagerie in the attic. But while the elder brother stayed at home carefully emptying and refilling animals for posterity, it was Edward and his like who brought home the spoils. It was John who inherited their father’s home and practice, but it is Edward, the second son who had to make his own path, Edward — young, dashing, dead — that history remembers. And it is Edward who occupies Julia’s days, to whom she has turned her archivist’s ear, tracing the story that rimed the edges of their dreams with ice, honing the myth long since fixed and frozen. Edward, who was drawn to the Pole like a flake of iron to a magnet, who was lost in the snow.

  It is Julia’s task, since she has left her job in the city, to sort the orts and fragments of her inheritance, and to somehow extract and assemble them into Edward Mackley’s legacy. His body remains half preserved in the ice; his Life is in her indolent hands.

  For now, Julia is in the kitchen. She will not find Edward here, but she is otherwise occupied with poaching eggs for her husband’s breakfast — her famous ancestor, who has been buried in the hard Arctic ground for more than a century, can remain on ice a little longer.

  She negotiates her way around the table, plates, chairs, pans, hob, with a lazy shuffle. She is enjoying the sleepiness of her limbs and the mess she knows her hair is, and the blankness of being alone here while the water boils, the shower running upstairs. She will wait until she hears it stop, and then depress the toaster’s lever, and then wait a further minute, and then she will carefully lower the eggs into the pan and the toast will pop and she will spread both slices with butter, not too much but all the way to the edges, by which time precisely the whites of the eggs will be just set and she will lift them out on to a plate and place the triangled toast alongside, because the eggs on top make it soggy. And she will set it down next to a cup of tea just as Simon comes into the room. It isn’t like her, this precision on Julia’s part, but this morning she is eager to please, and nothing pleases Simon like precision. For now, though, she is shuffling sleepily, aimless, and peering into the pan.

  Snow; I was dreaming about the sky, snow, something blue, something… the pale blue sunrise this morning, so perfect. Like Scotland that time, where was it? Scotland. Yes, but where was it? A hill? A house? The sun, the sea. Water’s boiling, let it boil, turn it down when the toast goes in. Sun, sea and sand… no, it was a pebble beach, a grey pebble beach and there was a stone I found that I kept which had magic in it because it was so smooth and oval white with the magic dark grey line across the centre, a dark blue line, indigo, the richest word in the rainbow.

  Hearing the shower stop she thinks, It will be good to make him happy. The eggs will make him happy. Because last night she almost hated him and that won’t do at all. Pedant, pheasant… her irritation twists around a half-rhyme.

  Simon arrives in the kitchen, clean and stubble-free, to find that Julia’s egg and toast plan has been successfully executed; he takes a seat at the solid old oak table and the plate is set, hot, before him. He makes a small incision in the top of each egg, then pours salt into the palm of his hand, pinching it with finger and thumb and circling above each one in turn, three times clockwise and finishing with a flourishing flick. Julia, sitting opposite, notices that one of the yolks is much more yellow than the other, a deep full yellow like the sound ‘yolk’. The other is insipid, a perfect yellow for a lemon, but it’s not a lemon, and it’s not what a yolk should be. She wonders which he will eat first and guesses, correctly, the paler. Each egg white carefully sliced away from the yolk’s periphery, laid on top of a neat piece of toast, then dipped. Was the darker one fresher? Or was it fertilized, and the other not? Or both, but the pale one more recently? Why should proximity to chickenhood make a difference? He is now beginning the second egg. She would like to watch that lovely yellowness bulge before bursting under a crisp corner, and spill unctuous on to the plate, but Simon’s egg yolk somehow stays contained within its circle, becomes its own little dipping pot.

  Last night h
e drove them home from the Watsons’. He calls them the Watsons, which she finds sometimes merely anachronistic, sometimes actually annoying, as if she is a housewife in the 1950s or the 1970s or she’s not sure when exactly. A time when middle-class people called their friends ‘the Watsons’ instead of James and Michelle, their names, by which they’ve always known them. In fact Julia has no real recollection of when she learned that surname in connection with this couple, perhaps when they were engaged or married but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that there is no reason now to say, ‘Don’t forget dinner tonight with the Watsons,’ as if they were going to be greeted by glasses of sherry and a horrid bowl of bright green olives fished out of a jar of brine, and some waxy cheese on sticks and pickles, most likely, as they would be in the vaguely located but vivid time in which Julia imagines people saying such things.

  Simon, too, carefully mopping his plate with a last piece of toast reserved for the purpose, is thinking of the drive home from dinner. He had driven because he’d wanted to be at work early in the morning and had decided not to drink. Julia had no such qualms; and James has very good taste in wine, as Simon knows. Had he not known it, then Julia’s enthusiasm for every sip would soon have impressed it upon him. James is the kind of man who is allowed, encouraged even, to dominate social gatherings. Simon is willing to concede that he is witty, clever, attractive perhaps, although he is growing louder as the years go on and all that good wine might just be going to his paunch.

  Michelle still works in arts heritage, as Julia did before she took up her inheritance. She is reasonably successful, somewhat rounded, wears high heels, the swell of her calves showing off very fine ankles, an alluring firmness to her buttocks. He dwells again upon these plump charms, as he did while driving, Julia beside him in a wine-red snooze. He appears so prim, so lacking in ardour as he sits at the table; it seems we have some things to learn about Simon.

  The last trace of yellow is gone, and he lays his knife and then his fork across the plate, at a perfect right angle to himself, and rises. Julia has her elbows on the table on either side of her mug, resting her face in her hands and staring down into it, so that her cheeks are pulled back and her lips are stretched long. She looks up, slightly out of focus, and he places a kiss on the top of her head and thanks her for breakfast before glancing at his watch and pulling on his jacket. Julia wonders, watching him, whether he will be too hot but decides not to say anything. Perhaps she is a little annoyed by him, a man who puts a suit jacket on to drive to the station on a summer’s day, perhaps this is her little revenge in turn; but she is rarely so calculating or malicious, certainly not before breakfast. It is more a drift across the surface:

  Warm, to wear a suit, won’t you be too… too hot for eggs. I don’t want that cloy. Back of the throat. Yellow yolk yellowyolkyellow. I’ll just have toast.

  When she hears the door slam — it has to be slammed to properly close — she stands and wanders to the kitchen counter. It is only a few steps but Julia can incorporate a wander into any journey when the mood takes her. She boils the kettle for more tea, puts a slice of bread in the toaster. While she’s waiting for the toast she peers into the pan again, now cold and grimed with greyish albumen, and briefly enjoys the word albumen, and decides to wash it up later. She spreads her toast thickly, with real butter, and then with real plum jam that she’s still amazed she made herself, and thinks that indolence will make the perfect housewife of her yet.

  The night before: Simon, impatient, driving a little too fast. The roads between their home and the Watsons’ — it’s catching — have no lines down the centre as there is room for only one car comfortably. In the rear-view mirror his eyes are shadowed, glancing at the dark behind and the empty back seat, the cat’s eyes as they flare and stretch out to dimness, the same, the same, the same in soporific rhythm all down the road. Julia in the morning, over her slice of toast and second mug of tea, lulled by the wet rumble of the washing machine, is remembering:

  Slash of bright before the sound, light is faster than sound; travelling too fast. Out of black, smack against the glass. Sound without a word for it, not bang or crunch, Simon shouting, ‘Fuck’ half asleep himself (she smiles) otherwise he wouldn’t swear, not while I was there, maybe when I’m not too I don’t know I’m not there. Thud two thuds off the bonnet. Please not the pheasant fact, don’t say it don’t or I’ll hate you…

  ‘Pheasant. Sorry, darling.’

  Don’t say it

  ‘Whoever’s behind us can pick it up for dinner.’

  Don’t

  ‘If someone finds it, they can pick it up. It’s illegal to pick up a pheasant you’ve hit yourself, you know. There’s a law, to stop people trying to hit them on purpose.’

  She thinks of saying: ‘Hunting with cars,’ but doesn’t because it’s not very funny and it’s what she said last time, or ‘Yum, roadkill,’ but she’s sure she’s used that at least twice.

  Simon likes to impart this information upon passing any poor corpse in the road — not just pheasants, but foxes, pigeons, even moles if he spots them, however smeared, mangled or crushed, however sad and tiny. But this is, in fact, the first time their own car has hit a pheasant or any other bright streak in the night, and when it really happened, she so much wanted him to not say it. She can’t think of anything to say in response, can’t bring herself to respond, and realizes when minutes have passed that it’s too late to say anything at all, and says anyway, ‘Maybe it isn’t…’ but can’t manage the word ‘dead’ and then notices that she feels sick, is trembling. Hearing again the crack of the beak against the glass, imagining she caught for an instant its frightened black eye before the impact. A terrible empty hollow where moments before she felt well fed and full. He almost but doesn’t say, ‘If not, it soon will be.’ She opens the window and faces away from him, eyes dry and wide; he looks across and sees her pale face quite without colour, quite bloodless. He begins to reach for her, finds that his hand, too, is unsteady, and returns it to the wheel. She shakes, all the way home, in a small way she hopes he won’t notice. He doesn’t speak as he opens the door, as he turns to take her coat from her he doesn’t speak. And she hands him her coat and bursts into rare tears, and he folds his arms around her then, and she remembers how tall he is, remembers the place for her head beside his breastbone, which has been there ten years, was there always, waiting for her, and he still doesn’t speak, but places his mouth against her hair gently. He knows how close she is always to mourning and wishes he could make this count for all of it. But she is grateful to him, for his silence; she could not begin to find words for grief.

  When he gets into bed ten minutes later, he finds her limbs cold and still trembling a little… and there it is again, that little ellipsis, and we’ve caught up with ourselves. On a Wednesday, of all nights of the week, and almost midnight, is his last thought before sleeping. But he is glad that she is warm now, and had need of him.

  The garden

  It is ten o’clock, or thereabouts — Julia is in the garden, and has left her watch indoors. Two and a half hours have passed since Simon’s departure on the dot of half-past seven. After the toast, Julia realized that the dull pressure at the back of her head and the mild disgust of the egg pan were only red-wine remnants, now staining the creases of her brain brown. She took a painkiller and went back to bed, until woken an hour later by a pheasant falling out of the night and smack into her eyes. The bedroom was bright and harmless, but hot; she had left the blind open.

  The shower helped to rinse away dreams and headache alike, cool water on a blank mind. Best not to try to plan the day, or to think that the day should be planned. She closed her eyes and tilted up her face and imagined rain, heavy warm summer rain upon her eyelids like the time that… When?

  Running down the street in shorts in a hot city on holiday, not caring, Rome, it was Rome. Brown dust, deep pink evening and the bold red burst of tomatoes for dinner, and eating an artichoke, pulling it to pieces a
nd sucking the pulp, and my sister laughing at polipo meaning octopus which I’d also never eaten, but when I chewed it I couldn’t get the word out of my mouth, pulpy between the teeth until I had to spit it out. The rain, yes, the rain was in Rome. The man was Italian. The first man that watched me, dark eyes he had, he was short I suppose, his hair shining and my bra showing through the shirt I wore clinging, water running down my face and my thighs, and he watched me and for the first time I thought, I like that man watching me, caught in this torrent.

  In the shower two hours before this, while Julia poached his eggs, Simon planned his day with care. He went over appointments and projects in process. He made a mental note to remind his personal assistant to rearrange a meeting next Thursday, and to book him a table for lunch. He thought about the menu and decided to have steak. He had a taste for simple, good red meat; the Watsons last night served some elaborate, spiny little birds that he couldn’t bring himself to pick up and eat with his fingers. He turned his face up to the water and splashed off this prickle of irritation. He would start the morning with a fresh look at a set of plans that had been troubling him, and a fresh cup of black coffee; he would find Joanne making one when he arrived and she’d offer, as she did every morning. It was a routine. He would sharpen his pencils and begin.