The Still Point (23 page)

 

With every passing midnight the skies began to grow perceptibly darker. Soon, twilight was upon them. The eiders’ eggs grew scant within two weeks of their landing, and one evening, as they settled for the night, Hugh called out to them in a voice so measured and sane that they were drawn outside to find him gazing at the pale purple sky, against which the sad silhouette of hundreds upon hundreds of birds on the wing was cast. Wherever this island was, the five men were left alone upon it; unable to take flight so easily for warmer climes, they must make it their home for the winter.

 

High over the house, a flock passes, wings spread and rising on an updraught. Julia watches as they vanish into the depthless blue, with a soar of sadness, knowing that homesick pull of the heart.

The weeks passed. They struggled to keep a fire burning with the little fuel they could scavenge, and knew that the darkness would grow ever colder; they stayed huddled together for twenty hours in the day, having brought a chastened and haggard Hugh back into the fold. They covered the floor with what grasses they could crop; the interior of the hut, windowless but for a small hole for a chimney, was dank and reeking despite the cold, the oil that they burned giving off a greasy black smoke which still could not cover the stink of their own effluence. There was nothing to hunt for; the winter sea was barren, the nests empty, disintegrating and finally covered with snow. The sea froze again, ice clinging to the coast and spreading outwards over the open water like a creeping bloom on fruit skin, flowering in patches until all around was whiteness, under the dark and flashing sky. Edward’s record becomes largely diagrammatic, numerical: he lists their ever-decreasing supplies; the angle of the lowering sun, and the moon when it makes its appearance in September; his few active hours spent mapping and mapping the unknown coastline. When he can bear to write in words, he can only offer despair: ‘How impatient I was to leave our safe, warm ship for this. If any of us live they will say I was a fool, and rightly. Your foolish husband again bids you goodnight, for it seems the sun has set.’

 

Late evening, the sun long since vanished now: in her mind Julia inks in the contours of an unknown vista, a silhouette against the snow.

Edward gazed out over the frozen sea. The sky shivered gold and rose above him, silver cords winding across it. The lights no longer seemed to blaze the fire of his own ambition; they were remote, aloof, teasing his vanity with their impossible insubstantial beauty. He was half blind with hunger. Then something moved, out on the ice: a fox, now as motionless as one of John’s mounts, paw raised to run. His sight sharpened; he watched her with a clarity akin to hallucination. He could see her skinny flanks shudder. He could see the rime of her breath on the air. She could smell the stink of him. Her black eyes met his. He fired.

The faces of his companions appeared at the door to the shelter, alerted by the blast in the silence. It echoed about their heads, as hollow as the night. Edward had reached his kill; they watched as he lifted her, scrambling up a ramp of rock and ice until he reached the top and fell to his knees, laying her down so that he could support himself with both hands, light-headed, laughing. He struggled to his feet. He could barely carry her; he brought the body to them, holding her aloft by the scruff of her scrawny neck.

‘A pity to let this one pass me by.’ It was as close as he could come to a joke in this misery.

And so they fell upon that last feast, the last fresh blood they would taste. They retreated to the shelter, hunkering in together, pulling the lice from their rags and slipping them between their lips, just to feel the crunch between the teeth. They did not speak unless it was to speak of dying; none believed they would be saved in death.

 

Julia puts a hand to her mouth, forces herself past it, past the place she has so often stopped. Having followed him so far, all through his journey, she cannot now abandon him.

Two days later, by Edward’s reckoning, Andreev died.

 

Dr Wilkinson began to fade, as quietly as he had lived; Hugh, distraught at the loss of the man who had pitied him, fussed around him with futile, frostbitten hands, swabbing at his face with a dirty cloth. In the half-sleeping fug of the shelter, Edward became aware of a muttering, low and unceasing for hours, stopped only by the precious pieces of freshwater ice that Hugh placed on his patient’s tongue. In what should have been the morning, the murmur of the doctor’s mind at last ran down. Hugh, who had let his head drop exhausted in the man’s lap, was woken by the silence, filling it with a wail when he saw the dead eyes, the jaw agape. He was alone with the corpse; he could hear outside the striking of metal against earth like iron; Edward and Nordahl were digging a grave in the hard ground.

 

It was some hours before they returned for the doctor’s body, exhausted, to find their labour doubled; for the boy lay prone, spittle still foaming at the
corners of his cracked mouth, his pupils flooding his eyes black, wide with terror at whatever he had last gazed upon. They had to prise the drained glass phial from the clutch of his dead hand.

This, at least, is Edward’s tale; and there is no other to contradict him, so we must trust with Julia that this is how the boy met his end. ‘Hugh is dead, and the last of the tincture gone. For Lars and I there will be no last escape into oblivion. Perhaps I cannot blame him; perhaps I envy him. But now at least there is not the temptation; we will not be unmanned but go sober to our end if it comes.’

He was calmed by the moonlight but terribly, desperately lonely, a loneliness that was so hopeless it became one with the feeling of calm. No panic now; no fear or trembling, but for the cold. ‘The human spirit, Emily,’ he writes, ‘has reserves of fortitude that I had never wished to imagine, and that I hope you must never plumb the depths of; for they are what I call upon in the quiet emptiness of this desolation.’

 

And Edward is right: these weeks of darkness and ending are far beyond the safety of today’s sunshine; he does not have the liberty of simply setting the book down. To Julia, this above all is hardest to conceive of, this period of nothing but survival, of sleep and half waiting for the ease of death, and imagining sometimes, waking to darkness, that it is already come. But Emily, who lived and waited in comfort while he was starved and frozen, still knew in her way what it was to feel quiet and empty, and desolate.

 

The night drew on, day after day, without lightening; they waited for the sun. Their brief hours of daily toil were divided between exhausting ventures upon
the floe, for freshwater ice to melt for drinking; salvaging what they could of sleds and snowshoes; and digging a last grave, so that one at least might be decently buried if such a time came. Edward does not reflect on this morbid labour, perhaps to the last resisting total despair; he insists on his belief in the spring. ‘We can do nothing but wait for the first light, and hope to last so long; wait for the birds to return and then I will walk back to you, if I have to crawl.’

Pages of diagrams follow, transcribing the tricks of the moon and tracing what seem to be routes through the archipelago, with Mackley’s Land transposed upon other islands or the open sea. In one, it becomes an additional Orkney — ‘so close we are, my love’; in another it sprouts a vast tail, becomes a whale that will swim them to safety on her back. Every entry in the diary is dated, but Edward is often unsure if he has slept for one hour or thirteen, eight or twenty. He might have slept through the year, even, or ten, and still the night was unchanging. On what he takes to be Christmas Day they savour one of the choicer last morsels of chewy meat, and share an omelette of surely rotten egg, and take a hard ship’s biscuit each. As they choose to welcome the New Year they sing in cracked voices the songs that Lars, long ago in a distant city, had taught the captain and his new wife. And on what he believes to be 20 January 1902, he writes five final pages in a hand barely strong enough to mark the paper. What is not illegible is often nonsensical.

He is nearing the end. No hope of the sun rising; the darkness has entered his eyes and his mind, so that even by the lit fire he sees only dimly. But he is close, he is close to it, he writes; he tries to write it down for her, what he can see now in the darkness. An Arctic map, he writes, is a map of concepts. Edgeless, shifting — no fixed centre, but I would have known it, had I walked
upon it and felt the world turn. I set out now upon the ice in my mind and draw near it, now, my mind is as wide and clear as the white plain before me. Boundless, edgeless. The still point will come to meet me. Grace, all around me. I am nearing it. Circling. It is beautiful yet, this terrible place, the senseless lovely lights across the sky. It is dark now, I cannot see. A shard of ice has splintered my eye and she will come to carry me north to the still point. All about her is frozen but within her cloak it is warm, covered in her dark brass hair and warmed by a crimson blush…

These are the last faded ribbons of his tattered mind, which Helen did her best to unravel and reweave for Emily to catch at; Julia now takes up their frayed endings. A last fragment of clarity, and then the pages are nothing but white: ‘I am sorry that I did not reach it and that you waited in vain; if I find that there is a place beyond this then I shall wait for you there in turn. I cannot go on with it, I fear; I cannot go on.’

 

So it ends for Edward. It’s over, again. The old lament: ‘I cannot go on.’ Julia, too, cannot. And in another hand, the echo, ‘I cannot go on without…’ She lets the book fall upon her chest; she lets her eyes close.

 

In 1959 a Soviet scientific expedition found evidence of a makeshift shelter on a minor island in the north of Franz Josef Land, containing the petrified corpse of what had once been an unusually tall, broad-shouldered man, his red hair still clinging in strands to his skull; close by, four tin crosses marked a row of shallow graves. Upon exhumation, the fourth on the right gave up the body of Edward Mackley, skin stretched taut over his handsome cheeks, eyes milkwhite, white teeth protruding under the straggle of moustache that hung from
his shrunken black lips; when they tried to move him, they found his back was firmly glued into a solid block of ice filling the base of the coffin. The grave was rudely raided by the party that found it, in the hope of identifying the man whose name was unknown to them, so that his last effects were taken from him. To avoid upsetting the strained international relations of the time, after their government’s inspection confirmed that there was nothing untoward, their findings were handed over to the Royal Navy. So his diary and the photograph he held as he was dying were returned to England, along with the remnants of the camp, which included an old tin telescope and a broken silver watch.

Emily was eighty-one years old, the heat of her youth and the loss of her maidenhood long since forgotten. She took care herself not to recall it, and was rarely troubled in those days by dreams. After sixty years of waiting, she looked down at her twenty-year-old self, the flush of her cheeks in the picture quite faded just as she herself had paled into old age, and wept. It was little more than the spilling over of an old woman’s watery eyes.

 

 

In the afternoon sun that streams through the attic, a hundred years after Edward Mackley died, the words that his wife heard at last at the end of her life now rest against Julia’s heart. She exhales, exhausted, half sleeping. ‘I cannot go on with it.’

 

 

The words whisper about the house and into the garden and out, a sigh caught on the breeze and borne across the sea to the north, stretching ever north, the longing scribed indelibly in memory’s invisible ink. Julia is lost in the snow.

 

 

But she did, patient Emily, she went on without him, and when at last she knew he was gone, she let him go.

When Edward’s body was at last found buried on a small island in the Franz Josef Land archipelago, Emily Mackley sighed the long, deep sigh that breathes through these rooms still, and went to bed until she died. She had lived patiently alone in her husband’s brother’s house so that he would know where to find her if he found his way back; she had lived through two world wars, seen three kings die and another abandon his crown for a wife, and seen a woman once again take the throne; she had suffered, and seen suffering, and done what she could to aid those that suffered; and all the time Edward had been resting, far from bombs and all the horrors and the wonders and triumphs of the century he’d seen only the cusp of, out in the snow. And now it was her turn to rest, and she lay down and rested. A little less than a year later, she died. They said she’d finally allowed her patient heart to break. The truth was less romantic, but it may have been that her liver was holding out for her heart’s sake, just long enough to be sure at last. At the age of eighty-two she had had, they said, a good innings. She kept her figure, and her looks, well into old age; she enjoyed a drink, and why shouldn’t she? A well-preserved old
lady, pickled in gin, they said, with the affection families have for their harmless alcoholics.