The Still Point (25 page)

 

Julia opens the door and finds the frame filled by a man putting his hand out to be shaken. The handshake is firm and sure, not crushing, the kind of handshake she likes.

Jonathan Mackley is, like Julia, John’s great-grandchild. His father was the son of John and Arabella’s second son, Thomas, who was Aunt Helen’s other brother. A little older than Julia, Jonathan is, then, some kind of cousin
— she will work it out at some point, the removes. The surname has come to him through four generations; since Julia married, he is the last Mackley left to bear it, and has not yet passed it on. Names are borne like fruit, ripening on the old family tree, she thinks. He looks nothing like her, or like a Mackley; although as he clasps her hand and appraises her with his bright eye, she thinks she sees for a moment Edward’s gaze, looking out of the portrait and far beyond, to the north and glory. Jonathan’s very blue eyes are not black but they have that same stare about them. He is tall, not so tall as Simon, but broader, powerful and thick-set. His surprising orange hair (from Arabella’s side) is beginning to fade and he has a pale blond neat beard and almost invisible eyebrows, lost against his ruddy face, and wears a very clean-looking white shirt, no tie, and little round glasses on a little pointed nose which give him the appearance of an intellectual, friendly, slightly overweight ferret. She notices that they are still shaking hands, and also that his eye has not left hers, and she wonders what he makes of her and feels suddenly very conscious of her red lips.

‘This
must
be Julia,’ he says warmly, and she feels pleasure flush her chest, knowing by his emphasis that he remembers her fondly, and admires what she has become.

‘Yes, I suppose it must. How nice to see you, Jonathan.’

She leads him to the drawing room and asks if he would like a drink before they go upstairs, and adds hurriedly that most of the archive is housed in the attic if he’d like to see it while he’s here, because she fears her question might have sounded salacious. Then she has to stop herself thinking about what it might be like to sleep with Jonathan Mackley, who is after all a cousin, albeit at some remove, and not an especially attractive one at that — or at least, she corrects herself, not to her taste; she doesn’t wish to be cruel.

‘A gin and tonic would hit the spot’ is his response, not tea or coffee or even lemonade or water which was what Julia had imagined herself to be offering, on a weekday afternoon. But in the kitchen as she hears the ice clink into the glass, scents the sharp lime and the bitter spice of the spirit, she anticipates the tang and bite on her own tongue and wholeheartedly agrees — what an instinct for the apposite this cousin of hers displays. Look at him there with his ankle resting on his knee at such wonderful ease in his armchair, smiling at her as she comes in, without adjusting his pose; the way a man sits in a room alone will tell much, she thinks. She hands him the tall glass and he settles back, the redness visibly leaving his face as he lets out a long exaggerated sigh of contentment.

‘That’s just the ticket. I’m afraid London makes me thirsty; I can’t take the heat on a day like today.’ He speaks with a trace of an American accent; Great-uncle Thomas moved to Boston as a young man in the Twenties and this branch of the family have rarely been seen on this side of the ocean until Jonathan’s return, although they have determinedly clung to their clipped English vowels through three generations. Under the influence of Jonathan’s mid-Atlantic intonation, and in her soft peach slip and red lipstick and sipping her gin, Julia feels herself suddenly cast as some sparky Golden Age Hollywood heroine or sultry
femme
, in some noir or screwball, a feeling that could never fail to please her. She watches him, and remembers a midsummer-themed birthday party, an awkward, rather plump, older ginger boy too embarrassed by his accent to speak, looking longingly at the sweets; she remembers how she chose the nicest little cake and held it out to him on her hand.

Jonathan’s broad face beams in the sun from the window.

‘Ah, that’s hit the spot, sure enough,’ he smiles. He sips from his glass
happily, strangely delicate in his big hands. His eye comes to rest on the Mackley family portrait on the wall opposite Edward and Emily, which is haunted by four dim spectres, the light reflecting on its dark, oily surface so that only the starkest contrasts are visible. Two gaunt and thin figures on the left, the smaller just taller than the other’s knee; the pale amorphous mass of Arabella on the right, with a fat pallid blob of baby on her knee, his own grandfather-to-be.

‘It’s been a time since I was last here. Not since I was a boy,’ he says, peering into the viscous depths; then, returning his gaze to Julia, remembers something he had meant to say. ‘I am sorry I couldn’t come to Aunt Helen’s funeral. I haven’t been to this house since I was a boy,’ he repeats, ‘but it seems just yesterday that she sat where you sit now. Extraordinary woman.’

‘Yes,’ Julia smiles, in a way that does not include him, although she does not mean to be rude. There is a pause. Jonathan again casts about the room. He recalls a warm summer’s day, a tableau of nymphs, of little well-behaved fairygirls with narrow faces weaving flowers into each other’s hair, sitting around his extraordinary aunt who wore… Did she wear a peach evening dress? Were her lips carmine? He remembers them whispering and laughing in a pretty, secret way and then fluttering off and alighting again on their butterfly wings, calling to each other, ‘Peaseblossom!’ ‘Cobweb!’ He thinks it was Julia that offered him one of their tiny cakes, peppermint-green and impossibly dainty with a pair of cake-wings settled on the cream, as if it might fly off teasing from his fat little hand. This scene has not occurred to him in many years; but here he is again in the very same room. Julia reclines in the wing-back chair, bare legs crossed and one shoe dangling, her arm resting on the chair’s arm and the oak knob nestled in the hollow of her palm as if shaped by it, just as Aunt Helen sat. He looks around him; the brightness suspends what he sees in
a shimmer of dust, as if this little pocket of time that seems to clack on with the clock was called to a halt some decades ago, and the hands that move about the dial are an illusion only, always counting off the same hours. The rug is faded gold and blue. The walls are faded ochre. The faded curtains hide channels of rich sapphire in their folds; they are rarely drawn over the muslin drapes in summer. Jonathan senses that beneath every object, where surfaces have been hidden from the years, everything is vivid still; beneath the fade of time, the past still thrives. He wants to ask if it was indeed her who held out that tiny sugar-dusted treat on the palm of her hand. He sips his gin. He says:

‘You don’t think of redecorating?’

Julia, still smiling to herself, almost starts at this.

‘Oh, you know. All the family things…’

Jonathan doesn’t know, but makes a politely prompting noise in the hope of an explanation. He remembers, vaguely, that Julia is some kind of historian, an archivist. She is not at work. There was no question of her being at work when he asked if he might visit. Perhaps there is a connection.

‘I’m trying to sort it all. It’s all such a mess. And Aunt Emily’s, too. So much has been left here. Valuable things. I should say Great-aunt, shouldn’t I. No, Great-great-aunt, isn’t she? Helen was Great-aunt. John was Great-grandfather, and Edward Great-great-uncle and the other Edward not great, just Grandfather. But your great-uncle, so he was great too I suppose. So much greatness.’

Julia is blushing now. She has quite lost her thread. But Jonathan laughs as if it is a joke she meant to make, which he finds most amusing.

‘All these Mackley generations, half of us called the same thing. We all just collapse in on each other,’ he says; he is so understanding, she thinks, so kind.

‘As if he might walk in at any moment with the ice still on him,’ she says gratefully, unexpectedly.

Jonathan looks surprised, but only for a moment. He is finding the conversation refreshingly free-wheeling after the stuffy boardroom. ‘If only he had, I suppose. But then I might not be enjoying such delightful company this afternoon. Who knows how it might have gone, if he’d come back?’

Julia laughs. ‘I should hope I would still be right here! With perhaps one or two more polar bears to keep me company.’

‘Well, yes. Perhaps. But where would Edward be?’

‘Edward?’

‘Your grandfather, I mean. The son. Would he have come about, would he have been a different man? You know.’ But Julia, in turn, does not know. There is that twist in her stomach again. Just the gin, she thinks.

‘I’m not sure I…’

‘I wonder if everyone’s family is so fascinating.’

‘Why would he not…’

‘Just imagine, if he’d come back too late,’ oblivious Jonathan plunges on.

‘Too late?’ falters Julia.

‘If Edward had already been born. Would they have told him?’

She takes another sip; another nauseous twist. The ice cube she’s munched and swallowed has become an unbearable lump of chill in her stomach suddenly. The freeze is spreading to her forehead. Far out on the edge of her awareness, Julia hears something massive groaning. A judder in the world that resounds in her chest. Something shifts and threatens to split.

Sometimes secrets are patient and will wait a century to be revealed; they
seem solid enough to build upon; they will hold, perhaps; but perhaps there is some animal sense, something that tells us that they will eventually give way. So we should not be surprised by the freeze that is stealing upon Julia, a sensation akin to panic. She has waited for this, without knowing there was anything to know. If she’d looked closer, she might have seen it in her own eyes in the mirror, but why would she think to seek secrets there? What does that indigo at the centre hide, dark as the Arctic night?

‘I’m sorry, Jonathan,’ says Julia, rising to take his glass, mixing more drinks at the cabinet. There she stands with her back to the room, wondering if she should fetch more ice and lime from the kitchen and if there can possibly be any sense to what he’s saying. Her narrow back, and hair just beginning to work itself free again, a runnel of cold sweat between her sharp shoulders, but quite composed and casual except for the rattle of the bottle on the rim of the glass as if she has the shakes, drinking on a hangover, what can you expect, she thinks, what can he possibly be saying? She is watching herself from a distance, watching herself moving and speaking like an ordinary person might, in a voice that sounds like it ought to if she were the ordinary slightly glamorous middle-class housewife she appears to be… ‘Told him what? I’m afraid I’m being rather dense.’

Jonathan has been rolling a cigar back and forth between his fingers, wondering if they might take a stroll outside and waiting for an appropriate pause to suggest it, and only now registers the incomprehension his idle imaginings have met with. The strong strain of tactless inattention has survived all through Arabella’s line, although it has been tempered in this man with kindness.

‘Well, you know. About Emily and John.’

Julia looks politely blank.

‘Did no one ever tell you?’

 

The creak and groan that sounded from afar grows more urgent, becomes a physical lurch beneath the feet. The frozen sea is roaring. What seemed solid will not remain so. The ice in their glasses has melted in the heat. She should certainly restore it.

‘Let me get more ice and we’ll go into the garden,’ says Julia in her normal voice, seeing the cigar. Smoking seems like a good idea, a good, normal thing to do. She takes the glasses into the kitchen and yanks at the stuck freezer drawer and bangs the ice-cube tray on the counter so hard that the ice flies everywhere and she takes the pieces that fell on the floor and puts them in her own glass, its rim distinctly smeared with red, which seems the socially correct thing to do; then she slices two more wedges of lime, taking extra care not to cut herself, which she so often does, being so easily distracted. But now she is certainly concentrating on the knife, there was something Jonathan was saying, something rather important, but for now she is slicing a lime. He can explain it in the garden.

Here they are, walking in the garden. She tries not to hear the words whispering, I cannot go on with it, I cannot go on.

 

 

Jonathan, failing to register the seismic heave his words have triggered, seeing only Julia’s apparent calm and enjoying his cigar in the sunshine, is telling the story. Julia is smoking her second cigarette of the day as she listens to his voice
beside her, far off; she gave no thought to lighting it, she is barely aware of the thing in her hands or the smoke she takes in deep with every inhalation because what had seemed solid is slowly, slowly cracking beneath her, wider and slow

 

 

She cannot think beyond this, she is falling into this empty echo. It is cruel perhaps to force the thought into the shape of words.

 

She is Emily’s great-grandchild.

 

 

Emily did not wait. She could wait no longer alone, in the cold. She could not go on without. So soon, she betrayed him. Julia herself exists because of this betrayal.

It is so hot this afternoon. The day is relentless, pressing up against the evening with a close threat as if on the point of drenching, although the sky is endlessly blue, a depthless ocean, a blue that looks black if you look up long enough to let it consume you. The sun has been too long on Julia’s dark blonde head, soaking through, her mind all sun-stroked; she is dizzy with the gin and the nicotine, the heat and the glare. She is silent. They smoke together and admire the garden. The smoke will make the sheets smell, she thinks. She hasn’t taken the washing in; she considers this. It doesn’t seem to matter. The silence becomes awkward. And why after all should they have anything in common? Blithe, blundering, kind Jonathan; Julia, born of betrayal. Jonathan starts
talking again, he is saying something about Edward and Thomas, something about death; about Aunt Helen, did Aunt Helen not know? Julia is overheated and frozen to the core; there is sweat on her brow and down her spine. She lights another cigarette and inhales deeply and flutters out over the chasm.