The Still Point Read online

  But who knows if the Comma will ever return to the nettle? And what are the chances that Simon, too, will be hovering about the spot? Tess has been known to eat butterflies, has been found with a wing poking out of her shimmering grin… Let’s not break the bounds of the day. It is exhausting enough, snatching at the past as it slides through the present, without letting the future interfere.

  In the attic, Julia sits surrounded by boxes of Edward’s possessions, and Emily’s, which have found their way here over the years unsorted. As girls, Julia and her sister Miranda would creep up here and open them at random to pull out hats and muffs and mysterious swathes of sealskin. She remembers the big windproof anoraks they’d wear to cross the icy landscape at the top of the house together, struggling against the snow until they caught sight of each other and collapsed giggling into the icy wind. Or she would pull a fur around her and step out on her top-hatted sister’s arm to an opera or a waltz.

  When Aunt Helen moved out, Julia’s grandfather Edward — John’s son — had the animals hauled up here too. They were morbid, he mumbled, and they’d have to sell the place sometime, although no one made any move to do so. After his first shuffling visit, unable to manage the stairs even, he lost all interest in the home he was born in and had inherited from his father. Although it belonged to him he had never been its master, having lived in London since leaving to study there at seventeen, and had visited rarely in the intervening years; he seemed reluctant even to return. And now he was an old man and hadn’t the energy for a sale, had money enough to see him through his last lonely years. He died quietly in his own bed in Belgravia at the age of ninetynine, and the house here stood empty, settling into its own memories, letting them sigh down into the dust that had been so rudely disturbed by the animals’ exodus to the attic. Simon, whose careful fingers are suited to such tasks, learned to restore the mounts (although they did not please him like his own winged captives), and has groomed and sleeked them back to something closer to life, patched where necessary, eyes replaced.

  Now those glass eyes, some new, some old, look upon Julia for the second time today as she sits on the swept floor. In the gloomy warmth, she tastes cold sea salt on her lip.

  Cold waves washing and my feet bare, my Great-great-uncle Edward somewhere out upon the water. I saw him at the prow, proud, his dark eyes looking out. Skin slapped red, I wouldn’t step out of the sea, I too would one day have an adventure, the waves would lift and lull me, when the sea became rough I would batten the hatches, take in the topsail, look lively. I would grow used to the vile brown taste of rum. I would be quick and clever like Edward, I would be wise and strong, I would not die in the snow.

  Julia is sitting on the wooden boards of the attic’s floor, tapping the tip of a fine ballpoint pen (stolen from Simon’s supply) against a pad beside her. A nebulous mass of dark specks is swarming into the margin, beside where she has written

  Box 004

  — thinking the additional zeroes will add an air of authority to her filing, the appearance of a system —

  Item 8: Rifle

  — followed by an emphatic full stop

  .

  She sights along the rifle at the bear in the corner. Then feels suddenly guilty, and then has at least the sense to feel ridiculous. But Edward once lifted this same barrel, perhaps, in this same pose that Julia holds steadily, and hit the bear square in the eye — so the story goes, the unlikely story that explains why she is scarless. It might have been the taxidermist’s skill that made her so; or she was found dead already, although she is reckoned to be only eleven, too young to have died of old age. Edward kept no records on his first expedition. The ship’s log reports: ‘Young Mackley returned excited from a morning’s hunt, to recruit two pairs of hands to help him drag his kill back to the ship; a fine specimen, with not a mark on her, a gift for his brother he says although I dare say he might make a second killing if he takes it to auction.’ Which wouldn’t help Julia solve this particular mystery, even if that log was in her possession and not buried somewhere in a Kensington archive. She is, besides, happy to believe in the bullet in the eye.

  Poor polar bear. Dying with a roar or posed like that. Great-grandpa John forcing the mouth wide, hand between its jaws. Holding it by the paw like a dancer.

  John, white-bearded, takes the massive claw with a bow, his big doctor’s hand crushably tiny in its grasp. He has to reach above his own head to ask for the waltz; the smile in his mischievous eye is captured in silver. Helen took the photograph. It hangs in the upstairs hallway.

  Julia rises, her knees stiff from kneeling. In the steps between her and the bear her hobble straightens, so that by the time she reaches her partner she is quite ready to dance. Suddenly shy, she reaches to take a paw. Who will lead? The bear after all is a lady, and perhaps mindful of the conventions of her day. It might be lonely, here in the attic, with no one to admire her. Aunt Helen used to greet her whenever she came through the front door; Miranda and Julia would imitate her, delighted. ‘Hello, polar bear. Hello, bear cub.’ It is a habit now engrained in her passage, so that every time she enters she almost says it aloud before seeing the empty corner and remembering, sadly, that the bear is gone.

  ‘Hello, polar bear,’ she whispers now in the attic.

  Julia’s Aunt Helen was in fact a great-aunt, her grandfather’s sister, John’s daughter; much younger than her brothers, she was born late to Arabella Mackley one peaceful spring morning in 1916 while shells and mortar fire tore apart Europe. She was in her fifties when Julia was born; her dark hair just turning to silver, her lively face beginning to crease. If we wish to know Julia, we must know something of this aunt, Helen Mackley, who told Edward’s stories like fairy tales (of the best sort, thrilling and gruesome), who had in turn learned them from Emily, Edward’s unwitting, waiting widow. To Julia, this is not so much John’s house as Aunt Helen’s; it was in her keeping from the end of the thirties. No one had ever questioned her right to it, since she had lived there her whole life, and her brothers made no claims upon it. With Emily she had seen it through the war, opening its doors to children from the city, sitting with them around the kitchen table, overseeing them in the schoolroom where she and her brothers had been taught, and telling stories of explorers and polar bears (the stories that Emily had told many times over, that Helen first heard from her, and told to Julia and Miranda in turn), and tucking the awestruck evacuees into beds that they thought they’d be swallowed by, so that more than one dragged their blankets to the floor by morning. The staff dwindled as the war went on. By the 1950s, Aunt Helen managed the house more or less alone, with élan and aplomb (these are words that Julia reserves especially for memories of Aunt Helen), and as the country emerged from post-war darkness she invited bright, brilliant guests to enliven the once-gloomy rooms of her Edwardian childhood, and had parties and picnics and poured wine and champagne, and posed for photographs and painted in the garden. At least twice a year she ventured alone across the Channel, travelling by train across the continent and returning with souvenirs and stories. When Julia was a child, the house was still busy with her visitors and the tales she told, brimful of the family’s reminiscing, so that the departed and the long-dead jostled with the living. Aunt Helen conducted them all through the house and the garden, opening cupboards and books and secrets, each more enchanting than the last, dazzling her guests (and her great-nieces in turn) with the glamour she cast over everything.

  Her strength and brightness belied her age almost to the end, until the confusion of her last years. Well into her eighties, when most of the old guests were gone, she was to be found in the garden, pruning or painting, or baking cakes in the kitchen, or inviting young men to tea. She had never married; she had taken lovers but hers, she said, was not a heart to settle. She loved children, but had none of her own. So when her nephew William brought Julia and Miranda to visit, she lavished them with attention, with Turkish delight and chocolates, and pastries for breakfast and, when they
grew older, half-glasses of wine with dinner. She’d set them up with easels and let them use her paints, and didn’t care a bit about the mess they made, and framed their masterpieces and proclaimed that her nieces were, without a doubt, the most talented of the many talented artists it had been her privilege to meet. Julia adored her. As a teenager she would borrow her aunt’s scarves and beads and her catchphrases, would say ironic things like ‘How jaunty!’ and try to raise one eyebrow. They spent summer holidays there and Christmas too, and went on doing so even after their father died. Aunt Helen worried for her nephew’s widow, and besides would not have given the girls up so easily. And then four short years later, Maggie, their mother, died too, having ignored a cramp in her guts for a year that she had put down to sadness. And Miranda had just qualified and taken a job at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, where she’d studied, and then she married and had her own home and children to tend to, and it was just Julia and Aunt Helen in the holidays, against the world.

  There was always, for Julia, something enchanted about their nights out in the garden, or by the fire in the sitting room, preserving between them the memory of all that was lost; together in the warm, lawless places of the house, the spaces that were not all oak and grandeur but filled with secrets and softness, cushions and flowers, the smell always of lavender and roses, and upon which they cast a spell of ice so that it crept over the walls and enclosed them, glittering. The story passed from Emily to Helen and on, through a line of surrogate daughters; this is the legacy that Julia owes a debt to, both the legend of the figure in the snow, and the woman left behind who shaped the legend while she waited. In the quiet of the attic, all the rooms now empty, Julia still feels the quiver of some vibrant invisible thing about which the house throngs.

  Julia’s squinting eye ranges the room. She twists the telescope, which turns still with a grudging grind, until the malformed leopard’s eye fills the other end with darkness; then returns it to the tasselled bag it has at some time acquired but was almost certainly never carried in, and sets it down at the end of a lengthening row of objects extracted from Box 004, as labelled in Julia’s curled and forward-slanting hand. She returns to her desk and writes:

  Item 5: Telescope. Tin. Found in camp beside grave site discovered F.J. Land 1959; believed property of Edward Mackley.

  It may, in truth, have belonged to any one of the five found there; but he was the navigator, after all. And she would like to believe that through this same curve of glass he watched his wife grow distant on the shore. The lens is intact, if a little scratched, and looking through it now we might yet spy Emily Mackley trapped under the glass, waving as she watched her husband shrink, while he adjusts the focus, again and again, sharpening her outline each time it blurs until at last it will turn no further.

  Edward, as his ship set sail, watched her diminish, long after she had lost him among the other tiny figures on the deck. So they dwindled from each other’s lives and could only hope to be close again. The crew set about their business, glad to be under way at last. Edward lowered the telescope, and watched until the land slipped over the curve and there was only the sea, the sky, the long, long day between them, just a paleness at the far edge of the world which would in time be blinding. It was July, the nights still light. He was on his way to glory. There was a long way to go and it would only grow colder.

  Their honeymoon had been spent in Norway while Edward made his preparations and recruited the last of his crew. Emily, released from stays, had learned to ski, had learned liberty. In these brief months of their marriage, she had learned what a lover is; she knew now that a wife is not a delicate bloom to be kept under glass, but a woman, with strength as well as soft skin. Arriving at Edward’s side at the bottom of a slope, she slipped and skidded on her hip into his legs, laughing, and he lifted her and laughed too and her eyes were bright, her face red with the cold and her gleeful descent, and he kissed her. They walked hand in hand through the little town; they joked and played and threw snowballs, lovingly made of the softest snow, and in the evenings the trees were frosted and twinkled in torchlight and the cabin they stayed in was warm, and they ate simply, fish and black bread and a sweet brown cheese like caramel, and drank light ale, and felt whole and healthy and fell into bed almost, but not quite, exhausted.

  In too few weeks, the ship was ready to sail for the north. Norwegianbuilt to spend months in darkness, locked in the ice and, with luck, borne up by it, to meet the spring on the other side. She was christened Persephone. Captain Edward Mackley stood at the prow, broke the bottle and named her, with his wife by his side.

  Emily came as far as she could with him, and would have gone further, he knew; she said she would follow him to the ends of the earth, but he could allow her only as far as Vardø — which was close enough. They sailed around the coast to this northernmost point, between the islands, every fjord a gasp of awe; they stood together on deck and looked out at the mist in the mornings, the mountains and the air which Emily would never forget, would try to describe for the rest of her life, always grasping for clarity. The ship rolled in rough water; it was built for ice, with a wide shallow bottom, and Hugh Compton-Hill retched over the side for a week so that Edward wondered if the boy would stand the journey, but he couldn’t be set down — his father had bought his place on the expedition with funds that Edward couldn’t afford to lose. Emily was not sick once; she was, he said, his finest shipmate, and he would be sorry to lose her. She held firm and only asked for champagne when she felt queasy (a fine excuse, he said). It is hard to say if it was seasickness, or the memory of the bottle broken on the bowsprit, which explained her distaste for it in later years.

  They reached the northern port late one evening and a banquet was held in their honour; they were toasted past midnight, leaving a scant handful of hours together before he was to depart at four in the morning. Masses of birds crowded the island across the bay from the small city; their cries, too alien, too early, woke them to the pale sun. She would return to England the next week, and he was assured she would be well looked after. How long it had been since they had sat at his brother’s table; and how many months she would sit there without him.

  Parting is the Mackley romance. Parting, waiting, and romantic loss. Edward and Emily sailed out for the north on their honeymoon; their first and only months together were a journey to the place of their leave-taking. Julia’s Arctic is a dream of brilliant distance —

  Everything is equidistant; everything is as far from me as he is far from me, I am heedless, I reach out from my centre towards him at the top of the world…

  Waiting, serenely, with a pale ache. Desire over great distances: this is the romance of the story, Emily’s legacy. Emily waiting, waiting, the sea growing wider and hardening to ice as she stretched out towards him, watching him grow distant.

  Who is this giant, after all? A man who set out for glory and failed to find it. A man who loved his wife, but left her for something greater; had he not been handsome, he might have passed quite unnoticed. Had she not waited so faithfully, as if there could be no man on earth to replace him — this man who wasn’t made for earth at all, but for a place beyond its edge. Had she not made of him a hero.

  He is little known, it’s true, beyond the family’s circle. The memories and treasures that fill the house are, to the visitor, little more than curios for the curious, scraps for specialists. His name appears in the records of the Royal Geographical Society three times: with Godspeed and accolades upon his departure; with hope, that he will be found; with regret, when he is, years after hope is gone. His diaries remain unpublished. He might have been the century’s first champion, reaching the pinnacle as the world turned under him; as it is he is only, to most, a vestige of Victoriana. Simon hadn’t heard of him, until he learned that Freely’s butterflies still hung in his brother’s house.

  Still, his dark eyes in the portrait downstairs are fixed on greatness. They see to the top of the world. There is something about
him that won’t relinquish, that cannot dim.

  PART II

  Look: here is Edward in his cabin as they sail out of Tromsø, the first Arctic city and their last port of call before Vardø and parting. The cabin is already the cosy, cramped nest of a bachelor. The shelves just visible at the top of the picture are stuffed with socks, sealskins, waterproofs; the bed is a neat nook made up with three blankets; Edward himself sits at a chair at his small desk, in a pose of easy authority, his diary open before him, smoking one of several pipes that hang on the wall. No open flames allowed below decks — except in the galley and in the captain’s cabin.

  On a shelf above the bed, we can make out a slim collection of John Donne’s poems, slipped alongside the handful of books of reference (the ship’s main library is kept in the saloon). There are several volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, including Vol. 35 (MacCarwell-Maltby). It will never be known if Edward discovered, between Brigadier William Mackintosh of Borlum and Charles Macklin, the actor, the entry his playful wife tacked in, describing the life of the eminent explorer and exemplary husband Edward Mackley — the tale she wrote for him, telling how he reached the Pole and revived England’s pride and passion; his brilliant, tall sons and beautiful tawny daughters, brilliant also: the Mackleys, who shaped the new century. But if Emily knew him at all, she was surely right to guess that he would turn, from time to time, to the page that his name would one day appear on — as, indeed, it now does, not interleaved but printed and irrevocable. When the editors called upon her to check the details for the 1912 supplement, the difference between their entry and her own, which she had written with such a proud, light heart over a decade before, was a pain almost too great to bear. The volume was to account for those who had died between 1901 and 1911. It seemed by then a sure assumption. She could not pass the word ‘lost’ and asked John to finish the task for her.