The Still Point (18 page)

He could not have known he would end here when he set out all those months before, as Emily waved him off from the shore. He had thought to be better, greater.

The ship’s log remains open on the desk at the page where Julia left off reading, the point at which, halfway down the page, a more scratching and less eloquent hand has taken up the pen. On the last day of February 1901, the captain of the
Persephone
recorded his last entry. As he prepared to depart the next morning, he expressed his confidence, both in his own venture and in the ship’s eventual return; they would rendezvous at Franz Josef Land and either attempt to sail south or, if need be, weather another winter in the ice; he was certain that the polar current would eventually bear them out to the Atlantic. He entrusted the ship, the ship’s log and the lives of the crew to the last remaining Englishman on board, an officer in the Royal Navy, Raymond Parkes (a melancholy man who had kept to himself for much of the voyage, and is barely mentioned by Edward before this; in the depths of another long winter, he hanged himself in his cabin and was left on board in the coffin they’d meant to bring him home in). On the eve of his select team’s departure, Edward made a last speech to his crew. He thanked them for their vigour, their good cheer, their expertise; and he assured them again he would not turn back. He told his party that it would be no shame if they wished to, that they could do so at any time, but if he had to push on alone he would.

On 1 March, Edward and his five men set out for the North Pole. He had waited two long winters and a summer for the moment; he had waited, he thought, his whole life. They had spent months preparing kayaks, sleds,
provisions. He had borrowed much from Nansen, bucking British convention by using dogs, studying carefully so that he might take the same wise precautions, calculating weights and capacities, but for one detail which he knew would be his making or undoing: he would not turn back. Six men set out, intrepid, for the Pole. None returned or were heard from again.

In the autumn of the following year, four Norwegian sailors, the survivors of a desperate band who had left the
Persephone
still frozen and failing three months before, were found by a Russian whaling vessel, frostbitten, exhausted and barely alive on the shores of Spitzbergen. They had lost toes, fingers, companions, almost all hope. The ship, abandoned with the hanged corpse of her surrogate captain in the hold, was never found.

They were warmed and changed, bathed and fed. They ate soft white bread for the first time in two years; they smoked real tobacco, they drank ale like nectar. There was a new monarch on the throne of their captain’s country, they were told; they raised a glass to King Edward, and another and another to their captain, who had not returned. In the hard months of their toil, their struggle through snow and cracking ice and salt-sludge seas, they had told each other tales of a Union Jack, planted at the Pole beside their own flag by the brave English officer. And now they learned that he had not triumphed, that nothing was known of him since the day he left the ship more than a year before them. So they raised a glass to his country, to his king, and to Edward Mackley, with tears in their smarting eyes. There was a picture in
The Times
, on the third page; a carefully pressed though yellowed copy remains among the family’s papers, the same presumably that was laid by an unwitting butler in its usual place on John’s desk, when the ink was fresh as the morning’s bread.

‘Four Norwegians have been found on Spitzbergen,’ John Mackley tells his brother’s wife, standing in the doorway of the morning room. ‘They left the
Persephone
in the spring.’

Emily, drawn and tear-stained, looks up from her reading.

 

No. That cannot be it; she cannot have wept since the day he departed, she cannot have cried all that time, while Edward fought and lost against the snow. Julia knows that she too was noble and strong. There is scant record to call upon of those years as they passed quietly in the house he’d left behind, and it is hard to imagine how his wife might have lived in his absence; but a woman cannot live on longing alone. She must have called upon the forbearance that her husband had trusted she held in reserve; she must somehow have found a way through her days.

 

Emily simply looks up, then, from her reading.

‘And Edward?’

‘Was not with them. Emily — ’ John steps into the room, closing the door behind him. In one hand he holds the newspaper; he puts out the other as he approaches, as if to console her, but finds he does not know how to do so and lets it fall on the back of a chair as if that was what he had meant.

‘Edward left the ship in March last year, as he’d always intended. To walk to the Pole.’

‘And did not return?’

‘And did not return.’

Emily is silent, looking past him into a distance he can’t measure.

 

‘I am very sorry.’

The sound of her own voice recalls her. ‘Do they bring news, the Norwegians? Do they know anything of him at all?’

‘They waited at the meeting point; Edward didn’t arrive. They were under instruction to sail before the winter set in. They drifted too far north, the ship was trapped in the ice again and couldn’t break free in the spring. Their supplies were running low, the man Edward left in charge has… was ill. He died.’ John is scanning the story over as he speaks, glad of the paper barrier of simple reported fact. ‘They had to abandon ship. A party of twelve set out to seek help. They thought the ship would soon break up.’

‘Of twelve?’

‘Eight died.’

‘God help them,’ said Emily, who did not believe in God. And then, perhaps, went back to her book…

 

There is no known surviving record, in fact, of Emily’s immediate response, which was of a greater significance than Julia could guess at — but all in good time. What Julia knows, what has been passed down, is this: in the course of the month that followed the announcement in
The Times
, NORWEGIAN PARTY FOUND AT SPITZBERGEN, Emily tied up the last three years of letters with black satin ribbon and stowed them in her bureau; she made what calls she must upon her neighbours; she laid away skirts and furs; she ordered a great stack of books — natural history, poetry, French novels, Gibbon, Walter Scott
— and then went to bed, for the better part of a year. Julia finds it possible, almost, to imagine this period as a perpetual dozy morning, laid out on the cool white sheet, tracing the wedding-cake patterns of the ceiling rose, as she herself dreamed hours away in that room as a girl; time had passed so easily then, unnoticed, or so it seems to her now, when the days take so long to fill, although the years slip by so quickly. So she envisions Emily’s blank limbo of not-waiting, not-mourning.

However it was that the time passed, it is known that one morning in 1903, not long after midsummer’s day (four years since she had bidden him farewell), Emily woke — perhaps to the sound of her new nephew’s cry in the night nursery above her, or to the dream that plagued her of her lover decaying, or perhaps just to the birds at the window; whatever it was that woke her, she got up and dressed and appeared at the breakfast table smelling faintly of the mothballs her clothes had been kept in. She said yes, she would take an egg, and some toast. She said yes, she felt a great deal better, thank you. She said no, she had not given up hope. She could wait. She waited. She put away finery and would wear only sober dark blue and dove-grey (but never, for the rest of her life, black). She did not open that drawer again and her letters remained unread until Helen tugged at it after she died; it unstuck and released the last of the rose scent, so carefully captured there for more than fifty years and sour with sadness.

 

What had happened to Edward? England asked the same question, for a year or two. Then began to forget; then in 1909 an American claimed the Pole, and any last vestige of interest in a British attempt waned; and the century went on to fight its wars and revolutions without him. And then, in 1959, his body was
found, unsought for decades. And with it the diary he kept, open to the first page now and spread on Julia’s knee, as she sets out with him:

This is the first entry, written on their first night on the ice, snug in the tent after supper. They drank champagne and raised a toast to the Pole and the last of luxury. This diary, found buried in its aluminium canister with his body, is quite different from the official ship’s log that he left for Parkes to maintain, which was brought faithfully to England by
Persephone
’s survivors. This diary is a testament to his best self; he writes as a safeguard against the loss of the man he was, husband and hero; it is the voice that Julia hears when she listens for him. When they were children, Aunt Helen read to the girls from both the ship’s log and the diary; a judicious editor, she honed out an adventure, sparing them the days of nothing but weather reports, bearings, dredging and sounding, and retaining just enough gruesome detail to make the tale exciting. So Julia, who has been told this story for as long as she can remember, embellished by the years curled up in bed or by the fireside, cannot comprehend Emily’s many years of not knowing, or what it meant to know after so long waiting. For her, Edward has always been complete, his words so familiar that
she hardly needs to read them; she has known him always as a hero to the last. But Helen had read the diary before, many, many times over, to Emily, whose eyes by then were milked over with cataracts, and who had for so many years not known the man he was in his last days. Nothing was left out of that telling, there were to be no improvisations or edits. She was urged on through suffering by a wife who had waited too long to bear any more omissions; it was all she could do now to flesh out the shade who had always walked beside her.

He knew that, if he returned, he could rework a public version which obscured any trace of the too-sentimental (or, later, of despair); otherwise, it would be found by some other, or never found at all, and he would be past caring. And if it was found, then he wished his Emily to know he loved her; this slim, leather-bound book is one long address to the wife who was waiting, and her hundreds of letters may be weighed in the balance against it. He could not have known that it would come into the care of his brother’s great-granddaughter, that eyes like Emily’s would one day scan the pages, on a glorious summer afternoon such as those he dreamed of through the Arctic night. His life in her hands — strong, long hands like Emily’s. She must do it justice now; no omissions; but what of the gaps? Has she the right to imagine?

The diary’s partner, the book he left his wife as a gift, remains curiously empty but for the poem he wrote in it, and on the next page a single entry in her hand, undated, incomplete as if interrupted: ‘Edward, what will you think of me? I cannot go on without’… Aunt Helen gave the book to Julia on her sixteenth birthday; how she longed to know the end of the sentence, and how she longed to make the remaining pages her own. But every page she scribbled on would be squandered, every line would lessen the blank perfection of its possibility. She has it still, unfilled.

Julia casts herself out into the white expanse that would swallow his story for more than half a century. There are pages in the diary that are water-stained, the ink leached pale; places near the end where there is only the barest trace of graphite; but as she turns it slowly, we can still make out the words, although parts are indistinct. And for us there is always the liberty of what may be conjecture, even if Julia, supine on the chaise, struggling against her own legends, does her best to reject it.

 

Edward set out, then, into the unknown. Doubtless, dauntless, sure-footed upon the snow that would bury him.

At first, they travelled in half-darkness for much of the morning, marching on in the pale twilight and stopping when the barely risen sun had fully set; by the end of the month, it was almost light when they woke. Taking turns to ride upon the sleds, the men gave in to the breathtaking rush of beauty, speeding towards triumph on their dog-drawn chariots, exhilarated in the violet flush of the long dawn. On plains of sheer ice, the pack was fast and tireless, and on snowshoes the men too easily covered the distance. At such a pace, it seemed they would reach their goal in moments; they were higher upon the world than any man now, far beyond all that was ordinary, like gods in a land of immaculate light and splendour.