The Still Point (27 page)

‘This is William?’ she asked.

‘So like him,’ said Emily, quietly, tired. Edward’s diary lay open on the bedside; Emily’s eyes watered with frustration every time she tried to read it. Helen took it up, unasked, and read to her the gentle parts, of the sky, the lights, the star-sparkled ice, for an hour or more, watching her drowse and drift as she made her way over the snow towards him, back over the years to the time of their innocence, before he was lost, before she was.

When she seemed at peace, far beyond the world, Helen quietly closed the book; but then Emily started suddenly and grasped at her wrist, the jerk of her waking closely followed, as ever, by the perpetual disappointment of
finding herself old; it was not snow that half blinded her after all, just age, just time, clouding over.

‘Helen,’ said Emily, recalling herself to the present with an unwilling effort.

‘Yes, Aunt Emily? Can I fetch you something?’

‘There’s something, it’s Edward, there’s a secret I told him… I wonder, should I tell you…’ Emily, in her later years, was prone to this kind of whimsical self-address, as if the person she really wanted to talk to was absent, even when there were others in the room. She sighed, sinking back; her grip loosed.

‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ said Helen, whose voice was hoarse from reading and holding back tears, tired herself, truth be told, and now seeing her aunt’s eyes film over again with snow.

‘I’m tired, true enough. Yes, I’m tired, Helen.’

‘What did you want to tell me?’

Emily breathed a long, shaking breath. ‘I don’t suppose… Does it matter, now? All these years waiting… perhaps it doesn’t really matter now,’ she said, dozing off.

 

Unless she woke to speak again to the one who had always walked invisible beside her, those were her last words, for when Helen brought her soup that lunchtime her white eyes were fixed wide open, unmoving, the pupils shrunk to a tiny point in the milky brown, as if flooded with light.

It is close to seven. The clock in the drawing room clacks loudly in the silence that has fallen between the two cousins. Jonathan is feeling a little woozy from the sun and three gins on an empty stomach. He can smell the hot fat and rosemary of the lamb. Julia seems distracted, gazing into the dust in the evening sunlight, so that it seems to shimmer over the surface of her eyes. He wonders if it is necessary to look at the archive or if he can escape without seeming rudely uninterested. But his pretty and highly strung cousin and the savoury, homely smell of the meat are making him think of the long journey back to his own wife; the dark portraits and the dust are becoming oppressive.

‘When do you expect Simon home?’ he asks. Julia looks at him blankly for a moment, as if trying to recall who he means. She glances at the clock: almost seven.

‘I’m not sure. Any time now, I should think.’ This is a small lie. He is usually home around half past, by eight at the latest. And besides, he said something about working later tonight, possibly. She remembers him saying something of that sort, as he wiped up the last of his egg. But she wants this cousin of hers, with his bright blue eyes and his casual revelations, to go now. She wants to be left alone.

‘Well, I must let you get on with whatever it is that smells so delicious; if I don’t get on the road now I’ll never get home.’ Jonathan’s stomach growls audibly, anticipating its plastic-wrapped service-station dinner. He hopes she
doesn’t think he is angling for an invitation; it crosses her mind but she cannot bring herself to ask him to stay. Their desires are in perfect accord. He stands, places his glass carefully upon the cabinet.

‘I do hope I didn’t upset you today. I really had no idea, my father told me so long ago it’s become a sort of — you know, a family myth.’ (Yes; this she knows.)

‘Not at all; it was a surprise, that’s all. Please don’t worry. It’s been so good to see you, we mustn’t be such strangers. Any time you’re in London just give me a call,’ says Julia, standing too, pushing absent-mindedly at her hair and talking quickly now, and they are almost wedged together in the doorway in their hurry to leave the room.

‘Give my love to Laura,’ she says, hoping that she has remembered his wife’s name; if she hasn’t he is too polite to say so.

‘And my regards to Simon. If you’d like to visit sunny Sheffield, we’d be glad to have you.’

‘Oh that would be lovely. Let’s do that.’

They have made it to the front door; the clock clunks and begins its whirr, winding the pendulum, and strikes. Get out now, please, seven times over.

‘Thank you again, Julia, have a lovely evening.’

‘Safe journey!’ she cries, waving him off up the drive as he leans out of the open window, then he draws in his head, reverses through the gate, and he’s gone. She closes the door as the clock lets its weight unwind gently and settles back into its sonorous rhythm, and the house is again becalmed.

Yes, families and myths.

Julia turns to herself in the mirror. She reaches to the back of her neck and unclasps the silver anchor, feels it hot in her hand from the skin of her chest.
Bright bronze eyes flash back as if fevered. Her cheeks are crimson. She sees the resemblance and finds herself wanting. On an autumn day in 1902, Emily Mackley saw her sin burn thus. And here is her great-granddaughter, staring back now at those same eyes — and holding the gaze steady; she will not let her look away.

 

NORWEGIAN PARTY FOUND AT SPITZBERGEN reads the headline in Monday’s
Times
, dated 29 September 1902. It is Emily’s privilege to receive the papers first — it was not, then, placed by an unwitting butler on John’s breakfast tray as we supposed, but here on the little round table by Emily’s usual seat. John, often busy with patients or otherwise occupied with his animals, will turn his attention briefly to the world at teatime, finding politics more palatable with a teacake in hand. So it was Emily, in fact, who first read this headline, cruelly hidden on the third page so that from the front the day’s news seemed innocuous.

Emily sits in the morning room with the paper before her, the first page turned, until the clock has ticked its way through almost an hour and a half. She stares at the faces of the men who had sailed with her husband, who she must have met during that first leg of the journey she joined him on; they are unrecognizable now, gaunt and bearded; and it seems so long ago. These men had watched him set out upon the ice; and what was she doing on that day, she wonders, what was she doing on 1 March last year when her husband set out upon the ice?

(She was moping. The weather was dismal, she longed to walk outside but couldn’t bear explaining herself to her nosy maid when she came back damp and muddy-shoed to change for dinner. So she spent the afternoon half reading
and looking out at the grey garden. As she sat down to her soup that evening, feeling oppressed by the day spent indoors and the dulling sky, Edward was enjoying his first meal upon the ice, toasting his companions and the Pole with champagne and thinking of his wife at home, wondering what she was doing, seeing the time and knowing that she must be just sitting down to the soup.)

She reads the dates over and over; and the phrase ‘after one hundred days, they had not returned’. Edward had set out with provisions for one hundred days. He believed they would reach the Pole in forty, and take as many again to return; they could not carry the load of any greater contingency. He had planned his course and hoped to reach the camp at Cape Flora around eighty days after setting out, where they would find enough provisions to sustain them until they were collected.
Persephone
was to make her way to that point, if possible, as soon as the ice released her. It loosened in May and they managed to navigate a course, breaking through when there was no open water, and reached the island ninety-four days after bidding their captain farewell, expecting to find him there. A week after their arrival, the party had still not returned.
Persephone
was at risk of being trapped for the winter if they waited too long; they had agreed with Edward that they would not endanger her by doing so. Still they held out a further twenty days, dissolving in and out of the fog (they did not know it, and so Emily could not either, but that same fog was blanketing the captain and his team in their lonely struggling kayaks less than two hundred miles away). A hundred and twenty days after Edward and his party had left the ship, the crew of the
Persephone
set sail, telling themselves that he would surely have the wherewithal to winter over, and that they would return the following spring. They would arrive at the log cabin and find the six of them, feasting on seal meat around a roaring fire. ‘What took you so long?’
they would cry from the shore; ‘We’ve no flags to wave for you, we’ve left them at the Pole!’ And a great ‘Hurrah’ would sound out across the water.

After fifteen days’ sailing the ship was again enveloped in the thick fog, and they could not get their bearings; when it cleared they found they had been carried far out to the north-west, beyond the archipelago. Then the ice began to close in. When the sun set for the long winter they were once again trapped and drifting; in the violent packing of the early spring, they heard for the first time the ship’s timbers groan and crack. It was a deep freeze that year, they were still far to the north, and the ice failed to release them as the summer drew on; provisions and morale were low. The English surrogate captain was dead. Seeing no alternative, not trusting the ship to last out another winter, the remaining crew of twelve brave men struck south upon the ice as soon as it was passable, hoping to reach Spitzbergen before the long night fell. They struggled for six weeks towards salvation. Eight men died. Four survived. The Russian whaler that took them in a week after they reached land had no news of the
Persephone
or its captain.

 

Half past twelve twitters past and Arabella, whose rumbling stomach has been softly disturbing the quiet for the last half-hour, glances up to say, ‘I wonder what can be keeping lunch’; but she gets no further than ‘I won…’ (an empty victory) because she sees that Emily has not passed the third page of the paper and appears to be weeping over a picture of four fur-hatted men (one of their wind-burned faces on the yellowed page in the attic is indeed blurred out by her tears).

‘My dear…’ she says, at which John enters the room, his expression grave, delivering her from the need for compassion by asking that they might be
excused. Arabella gathers up her silks, the question on her face unanswered, and goes in to lunch alone.

Perhaps we needn’t pry into what passed between her husband and their sister-in-law while she enjoyed an extra serving of each course; perhaps it is unnecessary, unkind. But Julia will not allow them to get away with it so easily, will not let them off the hook although history has done so. She knows full well that two bodies meeting in defiance of death are not always tender. She sees Emily go to him — yes, she would go to him first, right there in the morning room where Julia first made love to her own husband, not knowing the place was sullied, and the love she had imagined all spoiled. Emily goes to him and weeps against his chest and he, barely knowing what he is doing, kisses her hair and smoothes it back from her face, kisses her forehead, her weeping eyes, stroking her head as if to soothe a child, and she stretches up to meet his lips and he resists, at first, but her mouth wet with tears is too much for him, and he clasps her and returns her kiss, and they clutch at each other, they wrestle together with her stays and stockings, frantic now, he tears at them with his big doctor’s hands and grasps at her thighs, lifting her onto him, both crying, and it is over in seconds; so Julia imagines them, spending their rage and grief upon each other in a burst of frenzy until there is nothing but the fingerprint bruises on her skin and silence and guilt between them. And then she straightens her skirts over her shame, thinks how she will have to hide the torn evidence from the maid, straightens her bodice and leaves him there in his damp shirt-tails, trousers round his ankles. And in the hallway on her way to her room, she meets her own eye in the mirror, sees the red flush of her cheeks and her eyes bright. But how, thinks Julia, could she have looked herself in the eye then?

And nine months and seven days after that fateful article appeared in
The Times
, Edward Mackley was born, quietly, and passed to his father’s wife. And Emily, taking her seat at the breakfast table, said she would go on waiting.

 

Julia retreats numbly to the morning room and lies down upon the rug; but it gives no comfort. The Arctic hero, the wife bidding farewell, waiting… It is all spoiled.

 

 

Simon; yes, she wants to speak to Simon. A feeling of physical want gaping suddenly so wide and empty that it shocks her, it has been so long since she felt it; but it should not surprise us or her. True, there is much that they have not confided in the last few years — there are longings and fears and losses festering — but she could not go on alone now as she was before he found her, before he followed her over the threshold. She wants her husband; there is nothing strange in that. She wants to tell him — she’s not sure what. She wants to ask for forgiveness; she’s not sure what for.

She reaches for the phone, grasping blind with one hand above her on the table by her head. It gives a faint ting as she hooks a finger under the rest for the handset and brings the old thing down to her, resting it on her stomach. She insisted on keeping it, and it pleases her every time she uses it; so she stretched out here as a girl, twisting the cord about her fingers as she chatted, back when
her worries were so pressing, exciting and short-lived; before life started taking everyone from her. Apart from Simon. Now without thinking she rings each impatient digit round the dial, barely letting it wheel back before catching it and spinning the next number round, and listens for the clicks of connection and hears it start to ring, somewhere in London; after eight rings, nine, ten, Joanne answers, a little breathless; she was just stepping out the door, she says, no he left ten minutes ago; Julia’s normal voice thanks her and says she’ll try his mobile, hangs up, again flicks each number with quick, nervous fingers, and hears it ring. And somewhere in London, Simon’s phone rings on unanswered.