The Still Point (11 page)

Later in the evening, as they bid good-night, John presses Emily’s hand and says quietly, ‘This, I think, was the token meant for you, sister.’ In her room, she opens her fingers and sees that a tiny silver anchor has left its impression, squeezed against her palm. Safe harbour.

Emily wears a silver charm on a chain about her neck; Julia’s hand goes to it unconsciously, to touch where it now rests between her own collarbones. But the
Persephone
, still held fast, had no need of an anchor. The earth turned, inexorable, beneath the still point.

 

Edward and his crew could do nothing but wait for it to turn, through its one, long day. The sun rose again; they celebrated like pagans, with meat and wine and feasting, and staged a play in the saloon. Freely’s free adaptation of
The Winter’s Tale
, to mark the passing of the season, with much made of an exit pursued by a great white bear (Janssen, stumbling over the verse, was content to roar). They tended to the rigging, set up wood and metal workshops on the deck, performed the exercises Edward prescribed to keep them fit and occupied, and began, as the summer drew on, to make preparations for the following spring. So the days passed, and the evenings too, which grew slowly to resemble the days; they went to their beds in bright sunshine, knowing the darkness below decks to be false, and lay awake like children on a long school holiday, sensing the daylight they couldn’t see. The nacreous dome of the polar day encased them like an oyster shell. They took to late nights, lingering in the saloon. Life became one long, timeless afternoon. There were always more stories, and when reminiscence failed, there was another hand to be played, the same songs to sing, the jokes at Compton-Hill’s expense which never seemed
to pall (and which the boy, to his credit, took with patient condescension).

If living in such proximity was ever an irritant, then Edward does not betray it, although his diary is filled with solitudes — and he had, after all, his private berth to retreat to, while the crew slept four to a cabin. He was often to be found out on the ice alone. Miles from the ship, he would imagine himself free as he sped over the ice on snowshoes, or pulled by the dogs that at last, after months of practice, did his bidding. At the end of every day, after the turning back that he must always wrench his mind around to (it would be so easy to go on, and on, the ice so flat, less than five hundred miles now), he would lie on his bed and feel the pull in his thighs still, and let his body speed in his dreams through the night. The ship edged north, slipped back, drifted west. The light, everywhere, reflected off the surface and suffused what should have been shadowed. As the summer drew on and the ice broke up, they began to see the tell-tale dark cast of water against the flat sky, and could sail at a stretch across occasional polynya, the wide lakes an inky shock in the expanse of pastel white. Travel on foot across the ice became impossible; even a short distance from the ship could prove fatal if the current parted the floes, stranding the hapless walker on a tiny drifting island.

Come late August, twilight and the ice closed in again upon them.
Persephone
groaned, but would not crumple. By crunching, painful degrees, they edged onward. Every other day, the measure was taken, with compass, quadrant and watch. Edward marked their route on the map, a scribble of increments which crossed and recrossed. He was frustrated, but not concerned; he had seen the same tangled knot of progress, drift and backslide in other men’s accounts, and he did not doubt he would reach the Pole. It seemed to him that since he was a child in the nursery he had been toddling on uncertain legs
towards it, waiting to grow strong. He could not remember a time when this desire did not consume him. Had he joined the navy only for this reason? It seemed so to him now. Others had set out for the north in the service of ambition, to advance up the ranks; for him, the career itself was a means to the end of this sole purpose. He would reach it; he must.

But what of Emily? Was there room in his heart for her? She was always in his thoughts, at his side. Her passion met his own, spurred it on; she kindled to his ambition and her flame kept his burning through every long night. Every night, when he lay down to dream and let his mind loose on the ice, he was striving towards her, where she waited at the Pole. In the ship’s log, he never uses her name. He wrote no long laments at her absence; it haunts every line, as if she is just at his back as he sits at his desk, a hand upon his shoulder as if it were their drawing room, not some cubby-hole on the border of the civilized, the known and charted world.

All through the pages of 1900, all the long year, he makes his promise to her: ‘I shall surely reach it; it is within grasp.’

If a man repeats his conviction daily, how could his belief be doubted? How, indeed, could it fail to come true?

 

And the year was passing for Emily, too, with no promise of adventure. She did her best to take pleasure in the daily round of visiting and strolling in the garden and gracious welcomes. She was cheerful and bright and helpful, doing what she could to assist Arabella in the running of the house, taking on her share of invitations to tea. Her laugh was attractive, she had gained confidence, maturity, composure. She was at all times exceedingly composed. Her heart, thoroughly laced in, was breaking.

She was alarmed to find that ladies were expected to be ever more waspwaisted. There was a great pinch between the centuries; tottering about with chests thrust forward and backsides held high, the women of England were an absurd and uncomfortable flock, and Emily had no choice but to join their feathered ranks. No more could she loll in her liberty bodice; whalebone (culled at such cost from the seas her husband sailed on) gripped her tight. Her only escape took the form of a tennis dress, donned for an occasional ladylike game when Arabella could be persuaded; her opponent puffed and fanned and grew quickly bored, as did Emily of her meek returns. She longed for the cold, for the speed and freedom of the snow. She wished to be nothing but the laughing heap she had been at her husband’s feet. Instead, she patted the ball, back and forth. Her body did not fit the age. Her shoulders were too square, her legs too strong, her back too straight. It did not want to curve, and when she unlaced herself at last and lay down at night she felt the hollow at its base, where once he had kissed her, aching against the bed. The too-soft, empty bed.

 

At the little writing desk in what was once Emily’s bedroom, the hundred letters penned and blotted there leave no trace. Its walnut shine betrays nothing of the sadness that was spilled over it in neat lines of ink. Its drawers are still lined with the papers she placed in them, the vestige of rose-scent long since overwhelmed by beeswax, polish and the acrid tang of camphor. But the desk is still there, as solid as it was when she took her place before it every day, at first, biting the skin inside her bottom lip and gripping its edge to keep steady and writing letter after letter that she couldn’t send.

They were left in their drawer for fifty years or more, tied with black ribbon, and carefully replaced when at last they were found. Julia has taken
them from the room they were written in and brought them up to the attic, seeking the Emily that lived in Edward’s absence, listening out for her voice, which is quieter than his; she is addressing only her husband, whereas he must address the whole world. Julia remembers sitting with her mother and sister on the side of Emily’s bed (which Julia slept in as her aunt’s guest) and slipping the bow, the dusty satin still shining where it had been knotted; she loosens now the knot her mother retied all those years ago, and which she has slipped and fastened so many times since. The half-learned words loop an indigo line across her mind, writing themselves over as she reads them. The rhythm of the ink is constant and strong, never smeared with tears, resistant to despair. ‘You will be pleased to learn that Arabella is teaching me to crochet. It is slow progress, I fear; I am forever unravelling. By the time you return I may just have completed a tiny blanket, with which you may cover one knee’; ‘Your brother I find has excellent taste and my big monkey hands, as you once so dearly described them, have been put to task stretching octaves at the piano nightly’; ‘It is spring, and the cherry trees are showing off, all pink and blowsy about the town; the little apple tree at the bottom of the garden blossoms white and quietly, and as I sit beneath it they fall about me, like snow, my sweet, like snow…’; ‘Today we rode out to the country and I thought how green, how lovely, and wondered, do you miss the smell of earth, of leaves and grass, darling? As I sorely miss the sharp scent of mist and salt water…’; ‘I have been wicked and not written for a week, for my thoughts, like my days, are quite empty. It has been gloomy and dull this month past and the summer is over; and you will be trapped again in the darkness. Under the same moon, but I cannot see it — there is only some will o’ the wisp, haunting the clouds.’

‘I have been so long without you now. What colour are your eyes? They are almost black, of course; I remember. I pray that they look upon this earth still; that they look upon its summit, even; and then recall that you and I are heathens with no one to pray to, and must content myself with hoping.’

‘All the leaves are fallen now, with no word of you, and so I know I must wait another winter — as you warned me I might, so I cannot call you cruel’; ‘What hope blooms in me with the coming of this spring! I shall see you again, surely, in a matter of weeks, you cannot be far now’; ‘We have been taking tea out in the garden, these last warm days, as you and I used to — it seems an age ago, another time. Everywhere life at its fullest, yet you are absent still from my side and the green world is grey to me until you return.’

‘Where does this letter find you? Will you come home safe to me? May I hold you to your promise, Edward? As I have been true to mine. I am waiting.’

Julia reads each one, and wonders if they could bear a different sort of scrutiny, a harsher light; if they would withstand the transition to print, if a woman’s courage and hope can be called history. Taking up the stack, shuffling them carefully to align the edges, the bundle she reties seems a very frail weight. She remembers the three of them sat on the bed together, knowing what Emily could not — that her hope, by the time of these last letters, was already misplaced.

 

 

Maggie, her mother, hovers at the edges of her memory and haunts the rooms too, absorbed into the past. There was lavender growing in the garden once, and it flourished all over the house for a time; Maggie brought it in by the bunch, stuffing it in bottles and bowls. Julia clipped a sprig to lay on the coffin and imagined she could smell it burning when she saw the smoke rise from the crematorium as they drove away. When they moved in last year she wrenched it out of the soil, while it was still winter, before it had time to flower (Simon came home to find her muddied and panting in the dark, unable to explain herself, and laughed at her, fond and nervous). And now with a similar wrench of will she banishes the scent from her mind.

 

The contents of
Box 004
are lying upon the floor. She reads over her inventory, glances over the morning’s notes. She has tried to bring it to account. She has tried to redeem the day, to give it meaning, to stay true to her purpose. The work of the last hours is arrayed in a neat line, and accounted for. She has reckoned dates, materials, origins, costings where she knows enough to estimate; she thought she would feel neat and clean, like Simon’s labels, but it leaves her feeling faded, dirtied, like the cardboard box lying on its side emptied of promise, become ordinary. These boxes of treasure that she rummaged as a child now just a succession of artefacts that she cannot place a value on. What use is it all, after all; what purpose in disturbing the dust? These relics and facts and guesses cannot come near to the sum of the man she is seeking. They are not the man that strides through her dreams, and they are nothing like the Edward that Emily remembered; he is more than the sketch of a silhouette, and will not be constrained in her mind by that outline.

Is there no other way to approach him? She must not give in yet again to
ennui
— a word she prefers to less glamorous, more worrying alternatives (why can she barely keep her eyes open through an afternoon? Surely not because she can’t think of anything worth staying awake for. Not that). She stands and takes up the second diary. She knows the story so well that she cannot remember the last time she read it first-hand.

A square of unhurried sunlight stretches and slides over the floor, as if seeking something. There is a silver filigreed pocket watch, looted from Edward’s grave, now waiting to be accounted for among the miscellany on the floor in the attic; but as it is irreparably broken and will not be wound, it cannot tell what hours have passed. If, however, we were to extricate the small brass ship’s clock which is currently muffled by a velvet wrapper in
Box 002
, it would reveal that the time is now a quarter past three. In fact it is closer to half past; it is still winding down from the last time it was brought to light a few days ago, and each second it counts off is just a little longer than the last; and why, after all these years, should it be in a rush to catch up?

 

Outstretched, Julia’s limbs are arranged in a manner appropriate to the chaise longue they’re draped upon. One hand trails upon the floor, palm up, in the manner of an opium addict. She is enjoying the
chaise
, italicized exotically in her mind. Since she was a teenager she has draped herself upon it, just so, reading one of her aunt’s books of poetry, feeling tragic, Romantic. The soporific warmth of the attic in the hot ceaseless summers of the south of England, of her girlhood. She is enjoying the memory of her body as it was then, the way her new breasts ached and the fine hair on her legs, and hours and weeks stretching out upon her, her life somewhere off in the hazy distance that she’d set out for sometime. She is enjoying the quiet and the sound of her own
breath. And most of all, her head back and resting on a rose-pink pillow, her eyes half open and watching her own hand and its long fingers and the thin plume of smoke curling brilliant through the dust in the light from the window, most of all Julia is enjoying her cigarette, her guiltiest and most delicious pleasure. She has cut down dutifully, from twenty, to ten, to five, to this one, unnecessary and perfect. Sometimes in the morning with coffee. Sometimes with a glass of wine at night. Sometimes she smokes when she’s angry or nervous and the pleasure is spoiled and she is disappointed in herself and in the cigarette, annoyed that she has squandered it. But the best cigarettes are those like the one that we’ve found her smoking now, for no reason at all.