The Still Point (6 page)

 

She has left a joint of lamb marinating in the kitchen, in wine and herbs and anchovy, the savoury smell of it twitching at Tess’s whiskers. Tess is as agile as any self-respecting feline should be but has learned her lesson from the last time she tried to reach the top of the tall, smooth-sided fridge, and succeeded only in scrabbling at the dish there and upending a fish pie on herself. It’s true she had the chance to lap a little off the floor before Julia, alerted by the crash, found her, but it had all been most undignified. So the lamb remains out of paws’ reach, ready to be offered up this evening.

Julia wants to please Simon today; she knows, although neither one has
said it, and despite the fact that they made love (on a Wednesday), that she annoyed him last night; that the nuisance of an evening he would rather have avoided, and hadn’t expected to have to endure, will hang over him all day and her too. ‘Remember dinner tonight with the Watsons’ — she was irritated at breakfast, imagining him saying it, when in fact it is she that should have reminded him, and didn’t, whatever she chose to call them. He is right to be annoyed; she is annoyed with herself, for being so hopeless and disorganized and always proving him right. When did this lethargy set in? When did she cease to enchant him?

She remembers, with a clutch of pain and shame, her tears; the bird’s black eye; when did she last cry in front of him? Not when Aunt Helen died; not when… there was a time when she should have gone to him and let him hold her, and could not. But it won’t do to dwell on it. She must try to work hard, today; she will work hard so that he will see she is happy here as the family archivist; it was his gift, he wanted to make her happy. She must try. It will be like the days a decade ago when she told him the story, imagining it over for him as they lay safe together all through the winter, his head in her lap as they lay outstretched on the bearskin and she stroked his dark hair back, tracing with a fingertip the slightly receding hairline that only she could see. She will find something new to fascinate him. She will set about her task with renewed vigour.

So, when she lifted those strawberries to smell them, she was breathing the scent of new optimism, of hope for the evening to come — this was the hope that swung in her hips past the man in his garden, past her opposite neighbour (who is even now making her way across town, trying to make the last hours before the evening go faster).

When she tasted the tomatoes at the table, when she stroked at Tess’s soft fur, when she wriggled her toes on the warm stone, she was full of the possibilities the long day proffered, wide and clear as the sky. She chopped rosemary and garlic and rubbed olive oil into the meat and watched her own strong hands with pride and imagined a version of herself and Simon sitting down to dinner and laughing together; she would think of something to say that he would laugh at and he would forgive her; there would be nothing to forgive. When the plate slipped from her hand the day threatened to darken but she wouldn’t allow it, it was just a cheap plate, and tonight she would set the table in the conservatory with silver and their glasses would shine in the lamplight and the night would gleam with moths and fireflies dancing, out in the dark blue garden.

 

The butterflies that Julia is now admiring were not captured by Simon, although they were placed in this prominent position in his honour, for they are what brought him to her. A collection of Arctic Whites gathered in Alaska and mounted by a friend of Edward’s from his first expedition, presented as a wedding gift: these are the pale ghosts now hanging in the stairwell, but they were once kept in a little-visited guest room. There are fifty of them, arranged in series, five by ten; it is one of the finest, most complete collections of this particular species of Arctic Lepidoptera, and includes — and it is this pair of tiny wings that Simon, years ago, came to see–a variety now thought to be extinct, a female, with a bluish tint. They are less than two inches in wingspan and like many northern creatures they have no need for boldness. These butterflies never know darkness; they will wait in their pupae for two years or more, shifting fuzzily, growing by increments, waiting for their day in the
perpetual sun; and, once emerged, will die before it sets for winter. They are not, perhaps, spectacular. It takes a careful, patient, searching eye to see the subtlety of their whites, like an egg, like a petal, like snow. An eye like Simon’s. Even when his father was chasing Ladies, Simon was content with the quiet moths and the pale green brimstones. It isn’t dullness, on Simon’s part. It is not a lack of imagination, but a love of the delicate.

Now, as Julia passes them on her way to the attic, she remembers Simon as he was when they met ten years ago, and feels an unexpected surge of affection which reveals, by contrast, the complacent irritation that has become her customary feeling towards him. What a strange creature he is, she’d thought then, somehow old-fashioned and adolescent at once, a man with a hobby that drives him to overcome such obvious shyness and seek out a bunch of butterflies in a stranger’s house. Yes, this is the house where he found her. He wore a tie, on that first visit, he’d come from a meeting, and he held it between his fingers (which she could see, looking sidelong, were suited to delicate tasks), and he rubbed the fabric of the back of it with his thumb, a tiny movement, a kind of almost-static fidget that she caught out of the corner of her eye. She remembers his tremor beside her and the surprise she felt at the answering warmth of her skin. Taking out his glasses and pushing them on, bringing his face nearer the glass with a ‘Hm’ so that she, too, pushed her pointed chin forward — she had to crane upwards to follow his long finger to the particular insect that seemed to have settled on its tip.

She thinks of the ordered stack of drawers he showed her a few months later so bashfully, which have found their home now in the new shed out in the garden; the innocent pleasure of sliding out each one in turn on its smooth runners to reveal the jewels within, twenty pairs of wings to a drawer, seagreen
in one, pearl in another, pale brown like her eyes he said once, in an unguarded moment (when had she last seen Simon unguarded?)

 

 

Each drawer so meticulous, the subtle shifts in size and shape and colour so carefully accounted for in Latin. Looking at the butterflies on the landing now, she feels inspired by the neat labels beneath each one, still true a century later. And she thinks that if she were to somehow emulate him, if he were to come home to find everything in order, that this too might somehow please him.

Let us follow as she makes her way up the stairs, staying close to the wall to avoid the creaks that sound softly under her feet. She is thinking of lining the attic with glass cases and placing her relics in them; of making a label for everything.

There is a soothing continuity to Julia’s life, these days; it has slowed to a comforting dawdle through the rooms of her childhood. When she sees old friends — which is rarely — they laugh fondly at her easy life, and are unsure whether to feel pleased or concerned. She seems happier than she has been in years, since her beloved Aunt Helen was first taken into care; she laughs more readily, never looks as if she might have been crying alone, enjoys herself guiltlessly again. But she is also somehow distant, somehow gauzy.

She has spent so many hours here, since she was a child, picking up whatever comes to hand and setting it down again, each handling adding to the patina, the shine on scratched glass, the lustre of a fabric now faded. Now, her wanderings have a purpose; she will eventually have to bring it all to account, and present Edward Mackley in a neat package–a catalogue, a Life, a bill of sale, she is unsure of the binding. She prefers not to dwell on it; she will know when the time comes. She prefers not to dwell on when that will be. So, she makes occasional notes in notebooks; she wraps, unwraps, rewraps; she reads letters and journals and jottings; she strays from the task to straighten cushions or make jam.

If she is daunted by her task, if she has been procrastinating, can we blame her for preferring to lounge in the sun? Can a life be composed of other men’s accounts, diaries, journals, notebooks, newspapers and relics of a wrecked expedition any more than it can of — for the sake of argument–a concerto, a
dead pheasant, a cat in the garden, a trace of lipstick, the taste of vine tomatoes, of aniseed, a lily? How can we hope to do more than snatch at our quarry? It cannot be netted and pinned. Even butterflies, so captured, show only one side of themselves. What of that Comma that escaped Simon’s sentence of death? He would have it show its colours, certainly, but in doing so would hide the subtler underside, some would say the more lovely part.

Perhaps this underestimates Simon. It may come to pass, one summer’s day like this one, this year or in ten years’ time, that he will catch his Comma and find that its blues and browns and bruise purples are indeed more intriguing than the upside, and decide to buck convention (for he is not in all things conventional), and mount it downwards. It may be that he places it alone in a frame, and presents it to Julia as a gift, and she will hang it above her desk where she will, at last, have settled, and will sometimes glance up mid-sentence and pause.

But who knows if the Comma will ever return to the nettle? And what are the chances that Simon, too, will be hovering about the spot? Tess has been known to eat butterflies, has been found with a wing poking out of her shimmering grin… Let’s not break the bounds of the day. It is exhausting enough, snatching at the past as it slides through the present, without letting the future interfere.

 

In the attic, Julia sits surrounded by boxes of Edward’s possessions, and Emily’s, which have found their way here over the years unsorted. As girls, Julia and her sister Miranda would creep up here and open them at random to pull out hats and muffs and mysterious swathes of sealskin. She remembers the big windproof anoraks they’d wear to cross the icy landscape at the
top of the house together, struggling against the snow until they caught sight of each other and collapsed giggling into the icy wind. Or she would pull a fur around her and step out on her top-hatted sister’s arm to an opera or a waltz.

When Aunt Helen moved out, Julia’s grandfather Edward — John’s son — had the animals hauled up here too. They were morbid, he mumbled, and they’d have to sell the place sometime, although no one made any move to do so. After his first shuffling visit, unable to manage the stairs even, he lost all interest in the home he was born in and had inherited from his father. Although it belonged to him he had never been its master, having lived in London since leaving to study there at seventeen, and had visited rarely in the intervening years; he seemed reluctant even to return. And now he was an old man and hadn’t the energy for a sale, had money enough to see him through his last lonely years. He died quietly in his own bed in Belgravia at the age of ninetynine, and the house here stood empty, settling into its own memories, letting them sigh down into the dust that had been so rudely disturbed by the animals’ exodus to the attic. Simon, whose careful fingers are suited to such tasks, learned to restore the mounts (although they did not please him like his own winged captives), and has groomed and sleeked them back to something closer to life, patched where necessary, eyes replaced.

Now those glass eyes, some new, some old, look upon Julia for the second time today as she sits on the swept floor. In the gloomy warmth, she tastes cold sea salt on her lip.

 

 

Julia is sitting on the wooden boards of the attic’s floor, tapping the tip of a fine ballpoint pen (stolen from Simon’s supply) against a pad beside her. A nebulous mass of dark specks is swarming into the margin, beside where she has written

 

 

— thinking the additional zeroes will add an air of authority to her filing, the appearance of a system —

 

 

— followed by an emphatic full stop

 

.

 

She sights along the rifle at the bear in the corner. Then feels suddenly guilty, and then has at least the sense to feel ridiculous. But Edward once lifted this same barrel, perhaps, in this same pose that Julia holds steadily, and hit the bear square in the eye — so the story goes, the unlikely story that explains why
she is scarless. It might have been the taxidermist’s skill that made her so; or she was found dead already, although she is reckoned to be only eleven, too young to have died of old age. Edward kept no records on his first expedition. The ship’s log reports: ‘Young Mackley returned excited from a morning’s hunt, to recruit two pairs of hands to help him drag his kill back to the ship; a fine specimen, with not a mark on her, a gift for his brother he says although I dare say he might make a second killing if he takes it to auction.’ Which wouldn’t help Julia solve this particular mystery, even if that log was in her possession and not buried somewhere in a Kensington archive. She is, besides, happy to believe in the bullet in the eye.