The Still Point Page 3
As he shaved, a trickle of music interrupted the order of his mind, unbidden. He was a boy, fluff appearing in patches quite dark already on his chin, sitting down all awkward skinny and long at the piano and playing out, hesitant, a few first bars of the concerto that woke them this morning. Wondering and hoping that he might one day perfect them. And splashing his clean face, grown handsome perhaps, grown older, he thought, Where are wonder and hope? Not in so many words; he is not a man to despair; it is a cloud that passes. Moments later he couldn’t recall what he was thinking, which annoyed him; he caught back at the notes as they faded, remembered Rachmaninov and thought he should find the CD for Julia before he left. He is not without kindness. But by the time he’d sat down to his eggs, the tune had again eluded him, and he forgot.
Now it is ten o’clock, or thereabouts. There is work to be done but no reason to forgo the sun — Julia’s research, such as it is, can be conducted just as well in the garden. To this end, she’s brought out a blanket to lie on and a book, which she isn’t reading; instead, she is stroking the sun-warmed fur of a purring tabby named Tess. She has pegged the washing out on the line, so that the sheets billow fresh white at the edge of her vision like the sails of a ship; she is afloat in the summer morning. She has an appointment in the afternoon, but there are hours to pass before she has to make herself presentable for this rare break to the day, which is otherwise stretching out in the sun just as lazy as her own limbs. Any revelations can wait; she is, anyway, quite unwitting of whatever the approaching visitor may bring, and does not know that there is a revelation to come.
As she’s laid out here, so well lit and lethargic, we might take a closer look. She is quite small, really. She looks quite small and slight lying there. Her skin is pale gold, and shiny with sun cream. She has lots of hair; we saw it loose about her shoulders at the window but it’s pinned up now and still damp from the shower, and when she moves the coconut smell of her shampoo catches the air. Her face is placid and clear — she will most likely put make-up on later, and then she will look a little older. Her features might then strike her visitor as verging on the beautiful, but she will be perhaps a little less lovely than she is now, stroking Tess with her hair falling free of its knot. She is wearing an old, favourite summer dress, with fading printed flowers; she lies on her belly and her ankles are crossed in the air like a girl’s. It is possible that here, now, in the garden, in the green, she is as lovely as she ever will be. The sun falls thick around her, lighting up golden the laburnum she lies under. There are fruit trees in the garden, there are dark cherries ripening in the heat, sweetness, fullness, leaves hot and glossy; there are tiny flowers dense as stars, pale blue, there are tall stems, violet, pink and cream, heart’s-ease and phlox, gentle lupin, tall hollyhocks. Julia isn’t sure what phlox is. An English country garden; as a child she heard ‘heart cease’ in the song. But a heart is eased, surely, when at last it ceases to beat? She stretches out a hand to take the bud of a brilliant fuchsia between two fingers to pop it. The air, heavy and scented, sings of roses, foxgloves. Forget-me-nots.
She is old enough that we might expect her to have children, but she does not. She has Tess, who is looking up through pale brown slits only slightly yellower than Julia’s own eyes. She strokes her; is there sadness? Perhaps it is just the last of the red wine. The little girl next door is laughing and screaming in the garden; the chains that hold her swing clank and pull alarmingly at the frame, so that Julia looking up wants to call out, ‘Careful! Be careful…’ because she knows that she would fear for her own daughter to swing so high. Back and forth, little feet in sweet blue shoes poke over the top of the fence with a giggle and a ‘Wheee!’
Wheee! When I was a girl there was a swing at the end of this garden. Two ropes tied to that apple tree, with a stick lashed to the bottom. Miranda would insist that Jumbles had a turn. Jumbles? Mumbles? Gumbles it was, the imaginary badger. She’d push the swing as hard as she could and catch it and push again and I’d hop up and down beside her squealing because it wasn’t fair. Then she’d swing herself, and when she wanted to get off she just let go, right at the top of her swing, just let go and landed eight feet away like some circus artist. I came outside one evening alone, I watched my white shoes among the daisies, both brilliant against the deep blue grass, deep blue evening, bewitched. The night soft, and anything possible. Alone, I swung higher than ever, than anyone ever, wheee… and when I came to the top of my biggest swing I jumped, I flew through the air like my soaring extraordinary sister. I flew, I flew, silent like a night bird, and landed with a thump. Face down, hands out, dazed until my heart slowed and I felt the pain and I cried very quietly, but when I felt the scrape on my face I bawled.
On a day like this, these little nostalgias float in the air like so many seed pods and pollens and spiders. Julia has known and loved this garden since she was a little girl. It is the garden that appears in her mind when a garden is required as the setting for a story or a dream. It is narrow and long, it is far from neat. The apple tree at the end has, in its time, let its white blossom fall upon a fairytale giant. High walls have built themselves so that only Julia can enter through a little hidden door. There have been many mad tea parties on the lawn — in fact, it is true that Julia’s Aunt Helen knew a great many eccentrics, and artists have stretched out with their bare-breasted girlfriends in this very spot. A lean, dark adventurer has strolled here by moonlight with the woman who would be his wife. He asks for her hand and places his heart in it; she promises to hold it until he returns. Edward and his Emily. Julia has played the part countless times in her mind.
Tess purrs under stroking fingers. The book lies open: it is close to the end of the tale, although there are many blank pages remaining. Even on a day such as this, you will still feel the frost on them if you touch lightly; the chill of resignation, of despair, of regret for a story untold. A man, fallen through the ice, is dying. Julia stares at the handwritten page without reading a word.
Edward Mackley’s diary was found in an aluminium case in a frozen grave in Franz Josef Land, still clutched in his blackened hand along with a picture of his wife and a pocket watch, in the spring of 1959. His last days were spent in the endless dark on a small northern island, hoping for a sunrise he didn’t live to see, squinting to see his own scrawl by dim greasy lamplight so that the world might know what had befallen them, should the truth ever be brought into the flawless Arctic light. After years of mystery, the Persephone expedition of 1899 was at last revealed to have been a valiant failure; he came painfully, dismally close, hopelessly far from triumph, and turned back too late to save them. ‘I cannot go on with it, I fear,’ he wrote; ‘I cannot go on.’ His wife Emily, an old woman now who had waited sixty years for news of her vanished husband, wept with pride and the pity of it and died that same summer.
Glass
Far to the north, over the Pole, the sun reaches the apex of a day that will last until the next one, so that the dazzle of this shadowless noon is only a little brighter than midnight. But here in England, too, the midday sun is brilliant and the afternoon it slips into will stretch well into the evening. Askance, the sky is blue, but let the zenith fill your vision and you will fall into a blue-black depth more endless than an ocean.
Julia is no longer in the garden. The cries of little Jenny next door have been quieted; she is indoors, devouring ham sandwiches. Tess is still recumbent in the sun, relishing the tranquillity. She has forgotten already the giggles and squeals that earlier disturbed her and is quite at peace, the sun bright on her tabby back. The flowers bloom and burst a little more every minute. Snuff the air and you will smell the sheets that are hanging bright white on the line, barely stirred by the breeze; the peaches ripening, the crisp apple skins, the deep yellow odour of floating pollen. Bees are fussing about the delphinium, stripping each column busily one blue blossom at a time, rolling in the powder like addicts. Painted Ladies and Peacocks strut upon the buddleia, crowding the purple with umbe
r, gold, amethyst and white, sucking at nectar greedy and deep. In the shade of this frenzy, there are nettles growing, an acrid spike in the scent of the bush and the earth. And upon one particular nettle leaf, something is feasting. It is ragged-edged, burnished orange and oak; it folds its wings graciously to show an extraordinary patchwork of blue, grey and violet on the underside, then opens out to rest full-spread. Stay for just a moment to watch me, says the Comma butterfly. But it will not remain, it will be gone by the time Simon, who has long been waiting for just this brief pause, returns home. A pity for Simon, but he will never know, and a lucky escape for the Comma, who will live to see tomorrow, and maybe even another day, poor short-lived beauty.
The butterflies, then, heave and clamber; the bees bustle and hum; Tess is up and prowling, licking the last of a juicy bluebottle from her teeth with luxuriant tongue. Everywhere the creak and sigh of growing things, of life, but there is only a rumpled blanket, a discarded book, where we left Julia. The air stirs, lifting the pages until they hesitantly turn; the words grow faint until there is only regret remaining, ‘I cannot go on’ whispering across the garden, and then the merciful breeze turns onto the ending, where there is only unfilled white.
She is not in the conservatory either, which is unsurprising as it is unbearably hot; the palms flourish in the humidity, but we shall wilt. Let us pass through the doors to the dining room it leads on to, before we give up and collapse on the wicker divan, fanning ourselves with a hopeless paperback that we are too warm to persevere with. It is cooler here, and as the eye recovers from the brightness it becomes clear that the room is unoccupied; no one dines at the long table, which has stood for a hundred years here, more. If we were to lift it the squares of the rug flattened by its legs would reveal a brilliant crimson, faded and dirtied by years. There is a sideboard stretching along one wall (pull it away to reveal the true pattern of the damask); upon it are china tureens, an etched crystal fruit bowl, a silver serving dish — and a vase, unadorned, elongated, out of keeping with the period, incongruous on its crochet round. All over the house, Julia has placed her precious things beside what belongs here. She can’t bring herself to sell anything, to move anything even. Surfaces are crowded with keepsakes, her own, her family’s, piling up over the years so that a thick layer of memory blankets all alike. It is sometimes hard to move in a house like this.
The vase has an azure glaze, chipped at the base on the journey home. Bend an ear to its narrow opening and you might just catch a dim echo of Parisian market-clamour; peer in for a glimpse of Simon, younger, reaching for his wallet, hot and hungry and happy to please her with a gift. Hold it in your hands so that the palms are all in contact with the cool curve of its bowl; at a street café where they stopped for kir, Julia held it once eight years ago, just so. She lifted it and kissed it, set it down carefully, held Simon’s flushed face instead, the same way, and kissed that.
If we too set it down to pass through the open double doors to the drawing room, we will find the same quiet dust here, the same hush of history pressing in. What need have you of Paris and its pretty lights? wheedles the chandelier. A crystal decanter sits upon its silver tray. Julia is scared to use it, although she remembers her aunt pouring whisky from it. Her father, a quiet man who never drank liquor except when Aunt Helen plied it upon him, would accept glass after glass because he’d rather be steaming drunk, provided he could stand and talk when necessary without slurring, than be rude and decline. In his later years, of course, he couldn’t stomach it, or anything else. She remembers her mother and her aunt, after he died, drinking from the same decanter; brandy this time. She remembers her seventeen-year-old self, seeking solitude, finding solace. They looked up when she came in, they were tear-stained and laughing, and poured her a glass. And after the third one, at last, after three days of silence and a dry-eyed funeral, Julia laughed too, and cried. The taste of brandy, taken unawares, can still make her weep.
But before it was Aunt Helen’s, like everything in the house, the decanter belonged to John Mackley. This is the very same decanter from which, on numberless evenings at the end of the nineteenth century, John poured port for his brother. Edward Mackley himself, who might have been knighted if he’d ever returned, held that slender neck in his strong hand. Now, you feel the weight of the thing. The wide flat bottom, the chink of the stopper as the ground glass slides out, and the satisfying heaviness of the ball in your hand. The diamonds cut into its side reflect the yellow light, everything is dazzling… But no, it is the sunlight. The chandelier is of course not lit. It is just past noon — the long hand of the Viennese clock on the wall has just clacked around to a quarter past twelve. The clock is old, and the beauty of its inlaid face can’t be quite trusted, despite Simon’s attentions. But whether his watch would tell us that it is a minute earlier, or forty-eight seconds later, it is enough to remind us that we are at the apex of a glorious midsummer day in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it is more than a hundred years since Edward Mackley drank port in the drawing room, and more than a hundred years since he died.
The front door slams. And here in the hallway, at last, is Julia. It is dim and cool; she is suspended for a moment in the amber light from the etched-glass oval of the door. Here is Julia at last, pausing at the mirror, her skin a faint shiver after the midday heat of the street. Gilt-framed, some spotting at the bottom left corner. She is still a little sun-blind and can see the room behind her only darkly; the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs is only a tall, pale-faced brown shadow, thudding softly in the dust. She cannot meet her own eyes, unable to focus on the immediate centre of her vision; slowly her pupils grow huge, adjusting, and fix upon their own reflection. At this moment, she hangs somewhere between herself and her image, trapped by the glass.
Many hundreds of lives have been framed by this gilt. Might we yet scry something? What, after all, happens to them all, all the reflections that have passed through the mirror — might they not linger somewhere, those that have glanced or paused here? It may be that there is another young woman, another bronze-flecked gaze behind Julia’s eyes, still flickering in the depths of the silver surface. The past is not to be dispensed with easily, today. Everywhere it insists itself in this house, encroaching. The chandeliers, it seems, might after all be lit.
On a fine evening in October 1897, this very glass had the good fortune to reflect the image of nineteen-year-old Emily Gardiner, who, having excused herself from the party, made a quick assessment of her appearance and found it wanting. Brown eyes far too bright like a fever and a high colour in her cheeks as if she herself had just come in from the snow. It wouldn’t do. She must try to calm down and refuse any further offers of punch. For Jane Whitstable was sitting in the next room and had held the same cup all evening, sipping, speaking charmingly when spoken to, even conjuring a lovely pink blush when Edward Mackley bent to kiss her hand. When a man returns from the wilderness, such is the woman he wants to find waiting. Not some redcheeked heathen with a wild look in her eye.
But how could she not be thrilled by the Norwegian’s words? As Dr Nansen spoke of his journey, of the lights, the ice, she had glanced across at Edward and felt sure that he, too, was transported; he was taut, his forearm on the mantel, his jaw. The dogs, and the sleds, and the men; the walruses and the whales, the waves, and everywhere the ice. The heave and the groan of it. And to hear the sky described so. To see the pallid flash of the lights across the night, to see the moon and then the sun circle the horizon for weeks on end. To hear the freezing sea turning, and the stars, ice white; the night deep blue-black and white. To eat plain hard biscuits out on the floe, to return to the ship for darts and beer and singing. To come home to the wife that waved from the shore, at last, after months of longing. To be the woman longed for. To lie beside a hero… No, this would not do at all. This carnality in the hallway; no wonder her cheeks were flaming. She smoothed her stomach and her skirts, correcting the S shape so that she was, if not so swa
n-like as Jane Whitstable, at least something like respectable. She breathed in, watching herself in the mirror, seeing her chest rise as the nostrils pinched. Pretty as a peach Jane Whitstable might be, but her funny little nose was nothing in comparison with Emily’s fine, straight, perfectly proportioned one. There. That was the finishing touch she needed and now she was ready, quite ready to resume the party with her chin (also, actually, rather good) held high.
And so she returned to the drawing room, and on that night the great romance of the Mackleys began; the story that the family has told itself for a century, that has passed down the years through a dozen retellings to reach Julia, now — the story that has been her favourite since childhood. The dashing, somewhat thin young officer whom Emily remembered, who had departed for the north when she was only fourteen and fanciful — although she might have liked him a little broader, and not quite so dark — had returned. And now the ten years between them were narrower; in the years that had passed, his chest had filled out and she had discovered poetry and come around to the possibility that a man with a brooding countenance and a flash in his almost-black eyes might, after all, be ideal. A man with a set to his jaw and a strong forearm upon the mantel.