The Still Point (2 page)

There were corpses in the sea, afloat among the ice. The carcasses of whales which, when flensed — stripped of blubber and skin — are called
crangs
. It is a very loud word for something so vast and silent, for something so irrefutably dead. And rank, he’s heard, or read. The hardiest of seamen quailed at the stench, their hot vomit hissing as it hit the water. In the dream the smell was formaldehyde, for he has never smelled flesh decaying.

In a waking doze, letting his hand rest on exposed skin, he thinks, Julia is very soft beside me. In her own Arctic, she is still dreaming, this:

 

 

While Julia lies outstretched across the still point of the turning world, sleepless Simon, by what may be a rare coincidence, is thinking of that same pole that we dance around. Men of action have suffered to attain it. Julia’s Great-great-uncle Edward, struggling through the snow towards it. It is something sacrosanct, a constant to believe in. Simon imagines himself standing upon it, exalted as Edward might have been. Proud, at peace, knowing he has reached the pinnacle and the centre, thrusting the flag in. Thrusting a flag into ice? Expecting it to stay there?

The truth, he knows, is endurance and farce. Once within range, the crazed compass uselessly struggling for a different north (a point several hundred confusing kilometres south by now), the exhausted and intrepid explorer must pace the area around and over so that, upon returning, he might say, ‘I must have crossed it.’ There is nothing but one’s own doggedness to
believe in — nothing but dogs to eat, either, or so it was in the days when Julia’s beloved ancestor trod those hopeless paths. There is no knowing which footstep is the true one, the moment when the whole earth turns below. You cannot pause upon it. You move, oblivious, over the still point.

The poets can’t be blamed for this. The world is built around it. The grid is traced from this fixed point. So-called; a necessary, a useful fiction, but — and this, since he is unwilling to turn his thoughts inwards, is what is keeping Simon awake — it is not fixed, it isn’t still at all. This is what incenses him: the still point wobbles. Yes, wobbles, an absurd and undignified word for the truth. The Earth is not constant on her axis. There is no great rod in space, holding her steady through the middle. She rolls, just a little, as the years roll on.

These thoughts continue to arch and slide in and out of coherence until, exhausted by his anger at the earth’s inconstancy, Simon at last sleeps. According to the digital clock it is 04:29, and you can be assured that the time displayed at this particular bedside, on Simon’s side of the bed, is accurate. The hands of his wristwatch concur.

 

A little later, in the creeping brightness, the heat of tomorrow already hovering in the clear air, Julia wakes. Abruptly, she flings off the covers (which at some point in the intervening hours she has pulled over herself) and swings out of bed. Toes deep in thick white fur, a little unwelcome luxury for her hot feet. Stepping with automatic care over the rug’s massive head, her soles touch wood and she pads out of the room.

That is the word she thinks of as she walks, of the hard cushioned pads of her feet. She pads upstairs to the second floor, keeping close to the wall to avoid squeaks, makes her way along the corridor and turns up another crooked
flight without once missing her footing, knowing her way through the dark at the centre of the house. She carefully pushes open the narrow door at the top.

This long attic room, which runs the length of the front, is stacked literally to the rafters with books, papers, letters, chests, boots and sealskins, skis and ski poles, instruments of navigation — all the saved scraps of Edward’s legacy. In the corners, dust has been dredging for decades. Near the door, a heap of black canvas suitcases sits incongruous, only just beginning to fluff. Odd items of furniture, last pieces of once-grand suites, fade and tatter here; a chaise longue lolls invitingly, despite the wear at its edges. Someone has spent months procrastinating upon it: close by, a drift of magazines litters the floor — winter-warming casserole recipes, spring fashions, this year’s best beach reads — three seasons’ worth of newspaper supplements. A small kneehole desk has been set against a wall, a pile of black leather notebooks, seemingly little used, arranged neatly upon its green leather top, which is otherwise cluttered with framed photographs, pots, pens, paperweights and other oddments.

There is also, you will no doubt have noticed, a polar bear towering over you, her head grazing the beams. She roars protective over the cub crouched beside her. There is, in fact, a whole menagerie, all trophies from a hundred years ago, all, of course, long since stuffed. Simon would frown — the preferred term is ‘mounted’. Technically they belong to Julia, but it is he who tends the animals. He has become adept in the care of fur, feathers and hide, although his own mounts are smaller, stickily furred and dusted, and kept elsewhere, carefully pinned wide in drawers.

Why has she come here at this dark lilac hour, Julia alone with the animals, the inherited relics and dead things from a century before? Certainly it is not
her habit to rise so early, but she is not much a creature of habit. She woke and crept here under half-conscious compulsion; perhaps she is seeking the stillness of her sleep, seeking Arctic blue in a summer dawn. The gazelle at the window watches her doe-eyed and hopeful — she hasn’t gone so far as to imagine what it hopes for. She strokes its pelt and guiltily brushes the fine hairs from her palm. Maria is her private name for it, which she does not share with Simon for fear of being sneered at (and her fear might be well founded, but she does not see how lovingly her husband writes their Latin names on labels).

Like the bedroom, the attic faces the almost-rising sun, and a curious brightness fills the air, gilding Julia’s naked skin and the glass eyes that gaze upon it. Opening a gabled window, she leans out into the approach of dawn. The heaviness of the day before has been refreshed by a moist coolness, a green-hazed promise of brilliance which will burn off in the morning sun. She closes her eyes and relishes it, elixir on her eyelids: Julia enchanted. If we were to transfer ourselves to the window opposite, so that we could look upon her and into the room beyond — but wait. We have been gazumped, for here, hidden, someone is watching. A woman in a towelling dressing gown, risen for the day, is curling her hair lock by patient lock, and all the while she is watching. From here, we cannot see the polar bear and her doleful cub, the albatross which soars on his wires above, the ill-stuffed silver leopard with his too-long face. The woman watching does not look beyond Julia anyway, she is too much absorbed in admiring bitterly the shining hair, loose about fineboned shoulders; her breasts, squashed by her clasped arms, for warmth and comfort, not modesty. Bitterly? Too late — with a cloud of hairspray and a puff of perfume, the watcher is gone.

Julia remains, oblivious, apparently entranced, until her closed eyes flood
apricot and she opens them to see the sun breach the rooftops opposite; she inhales, deeply, the grapefruit freshness of the sky before turning and padding out of the room. Only the anxious little white bear glances after her-a glance, if it can be so called, which is for ever fixed in glazed arrest upon the door.

She lies down as lightly as possible on top of the covers so as not to disturb Simon, but he is nonetheless disturbed. She falls immediately asleep and is woken twenty minutes later by the radio alarm, which is very loud and which he does not reach to turn off. Simon, whose night has churned past too quickly, is taking a small revenge for having the last twenty minutes of it snatched from him. He lies for a while tracing the horrible familiar fussy curls in the ceiling’s plaster, knowing he has to get up; the skin around his eyes feels swollen by tiredness. In truth, as we know, he lost less than an hour to his own peculiar preoccupations. But he is a fastidious sleeper, and is not, to repeat, much in favour of dreaming; he is not looking forward to the day and would rather not face it exhausted, and they retired later than usual last night after an evening not in keeping with routine; and, to top it all, the act of love. When he turns his head he is surprised to see his wife curled towards him, smiling, not angered by his thoughtlessness (his thought-out thoughtlessness; he is never unknowingly thoughtless). A smile not quite so radiant as the morning, perhaps, but possibly pleased to see him.

‘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.

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.