By the river we sat, my sister and I, and we smoked. I liked the narrowing of her eyes when she inhaled. I liked the way she pulled her hand back and held it out defiant and the pause before she breathed out. Watching the flash on the water, the bright empty air and the yellow dust on the dry paving and the disapproval of the people passing. We pretended not to care what our parents would say as we frantically chewed mints and sprayed ourselves with perfume in the chemist. I chose the one my aunt wore, in a white china bottle. Old-fashioned floral. We must have smelled like smart old ladies, those ladies that go to matinées together, with high heels and set hair and two-piece suits: comfits and freesias and the faintest waft of fag smoke.
Julia laughs at herself gently in the attic, all these years later, twisting her neck to extinguish the stub. Her body could not be moved now from the cushions, is becoming one with the furniture; chair she italicizes, in French it means flesh, ma chair, ma chérie; she smiles again, sleepy.
The pages dig into her belly; a line of pressure, of solidity, through her middle. On either side, above and below, she is slowly, heavily vanishing, like a sheet of bible paper weighted only by a fold. The words are barely visible in the brightness, through her eyelashes; like Edward
Item 11: Snow goggles, leather, rubber and tinted glass
sunblind. Light diffusing through dust. She lets the diary fall against her chest, so that her entire body is no more than that square of paperweight, a weight made of paper to hold her down; she is acutely aware of her fingertips and the book warm from lying in the patch of sun from the window that has at last found her.
Brightness, blue, blue and white, silent still; skin against the snow. Sky deep above me, ice deep beneath and ocean deeper. The sun has risen, rose and gold. I am elated, I am waiting…
The hot, woody dust-smell of the attic grows thicker as the afternoon draws on, the heat of the house rising and gathering here and the sun beating on the roof unabated. She tries to let the blank sky blot and fill her mind, letting time grow as dense as the air about her, until she can see him as she knows he was, setting out and holding on to hope as he sailed into the unknown; holding on to the hope of the Pole, an idea to be mastered, a mast to steady the world by.
When I was a girl we cut holes in the world. Opening a way into an unused air, cold and clean and sharp as snow. Putting our faces close to the gap so we could smell it, taste the pale blue bite of it, careful not to slip through.
I shall walk into that other air and strand myself, after all.
Far in the dreaming blue distance a figure, she thinks, approaches; too far off to see yet if it is man, bear, apparition even. There is the steel-white of the snow, the deep and bright impossible sky, and emerging between them a figure: yes, a man. She can make out sealskin, furred fringes. His pace is purposeful, he is still strong despite the cold. Tall, bold, strident; more than simple history. A Hyperborean, a heavenly being, beyond the world of men; he has passed through the storms and emerged into brilliant, sunlit, infinite myth. She sets out to meet him.
He is next to her now, they have covered the distance so quickly. ‘Good God, woman,’ he says, ‘you’ve not a scrap on you, what the devil are you doing?’ But he is laughing as he says it, and she looks down at herself and, seeing that she is naked, she laughs too. ‘I’m waiting, I was waiting for you,’ she says. And he opens his coat and folds her inside with him to keep her warm, but she is warm already and in his coat it is cold, his skin against hers is cold, and he takes her hands between his to warm them but his fingers are black all through, and she looks up at his face and his nose is black too, and it spreads and his black lips pull back from his teeth and his eyes turn to milk as the lids contract and she feels his body spasm and shudder, cold against her, and this is how, more than a hundred years ago, Emily woke beside her husband for the last time, for this is her dream, recurring always.
‘Please, don’t go,’ she says. She can hear his breathing, as steady as his spirit. He lies on his back. He jerks again in his sleep; this is what woke her (already the horror is fading to unease). He is righting his balance on deck, she knows it. She too has felt her legs remember, the sea roll under her, as if their bed were cast adrift, not safely landed in this snug room. It is the first night in two weeks that they have slept on solid ground. It is the last they will spend together; tomorrow, they sail on different ships, bound for different seas.
The fire has burned out to embers and there is only the faintest orange light on his lovely face. This is not a word she uses out loud, she would be laughed at. But here, in this quiet glow, tracing with a fingertip the line of his brow, she sees only loveliness in the gloss of his closed lids. Too fine and strong to be merely handsome. Furniture and dowager aunts are handsome.
The fire has burned out but the room is still warm, the heavy drapes at the windows shielding them from cold and brightness alike. So that it might almost be night-time, real, English night-time. Many miles from them, their homeland sleeps in darkness; in a couple of hours it will begin to recede. It is June, the spring has come to fullness. Dawn has crept in earlier each day, peeling the night back a little more each time with a sly thief’s fingers; and now those mornings have come, which seem to come so suddenly, when one wakes to a pale and fragrant air, the curtains thrown wide, and one must no longer dress in the dark. She remembers now that sunlight from another life, her bedroom, lilac, rose, palest peppermint green, virginal. How she would wake as fresh as the dew, untouched by the night. How she would think of the day’s engagements and think, Perhaps today is the day that He will come for me. Some tall and foreign stranger with dancing eyes. And later, when He had a name, she would think, Perhaps today Edward will come, a different thrill, not romantically abstract but physical and real and not to be spoken, not to be thought of until safely stayed by whalebone.
She turns now and curls against him, wishing they could stay in their den for ever, warm beneath the furs like savages. ‘Please don’t go,’ she says, and then sees that his eyes are open and smiling. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m quite content where I am,’ he says, reaching for her. But it is three o’clock already. ‘For only an hour more,’ she says helplessly, unable to stop herself, suppliant for some last kind words to add to her store for the months and years ahead. He sighs, and strokes at her temple with the tips of his fingers. ‘I can’t leave you for ever. I shall have to come back for my heart.’ It will have to be enough.
‘I will reach it, Emily. I will reach it,’ he promises; he has murmured it to her every night like words that lovers use, and they are what she loves him for. Under their blankets in the dark below deck, with no windows.
‘I will reach it, and I will come back to you’; he whispers it every night when she is far from him, in ship’s cabin and cold tent, as he did when she was near.
‘I will wait. I will know when you have reached it, if you think of me,’ she answers. She pledges this in return, the night before he leaves her and every night since, in a strange Norse cot grown suddenly chill, in the narrow bunk she longs to share as she sails for England, and in the too-soft too-wide single bed she sleeps in alone for so many years in a place that wasn’t meant to be her home.
‘I think of you always. You will know.’
And night after night she waits for him there; lying there waiting at the still point, the world turns under her and still he does not come.
Bare skin against the snow. Bathed in the clean air, scentless. I am waiting.
PART III
Quietly, now.
In the dimming attic, Julia’s breath comes slowly, the constant sigh of the house filling and falling from her chest. A hush has settled with the dust, the animals ranged patient about her. And below, the remnants and traces of lives are stilled; the echoes that people the rooms make barely a whisper; the years and the heat weigh upon them. Caution and grace, now; do not stir them.
The sitting room: at the corner of the ground floor, sheltered from eyes from all sides, f
acing into the garden. The alembic into which the quiet distils. It was once, many years ago, amplified by the double-time tick of a fussy French carriage clock which remains on the mantel, but is now for ever halted. When the otherwise speechless seconds were counted by its insistent wittering, this was the morning room — the room in which the ladies’ mornings dissolved seamlessly into afternoons, punctuated only by lunches and tea and the pricking of needles; the silence of this room, now at peace, was once stretched thin across every half-second the clock counted.
Helen, as a child, would sit and sketch between her mother and her aunt, until she thought the scrape of her own pencil and the ticking and ticking and the faint ponk of needles puncturing taut linen and the hiss of silks drawn through it might make her scream; instead, she sat and sketched. When Arabella died, Helen and Emily stripped out the stuffiness and lace, the spindly fretwork and wicker that had clung precariously to its edges since the end of the last century. They did not rewind the clock, so that it is always noon or midnight here; even Simon, after his one attempt to wind it, agrees that each of its prissy tickings is a singularly miserable sound. They painted the walls and ceiling a daring maroon and hung them with dozens of photographs and paintings; they installed a gramophone, which sits now in gracious retirement, having given up its place to uglier, more functional devices. They tossed tapestries and cushions over every soft surface, and covered the floor with a bearskin, upon which, years later, Simon would lay out his own most treasured memory.
Imagine now a night in October, ten years ago. It is warm, yes, but suppose it is the heat of the fire, lit in the grate to ward off the night; with the heavy drapes drawn we can believe in darkness. The fur of the rug is long and surprisingly silky, a bear-hug of a rug if laid upon. It tempts the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, the cheek, the bare belly, all the parts of the body that most love softness. It is a rug to scrunch into. Julia, in the attic three floors up, won’t know we’re here; imagine her laid out here, her eyes golden in the light from the fire, her warm limbs soft against the fur, barely breathing, but close enough to damp his skin. So she lay beside Simon when first they lay together.
And again, hush: listen for the whisper, lingering here still, of a secret she hasn’t told him: she imagined, that first time, that she was Emily. Since she was a little girl, hiding in a hot, damp pocket of duvet in the bed Emily had slept in, in the sleepless half-light of bedtime, she had imagined over and over the romantic farewell. The promise of return, the yearn of the years and the miles which would soon stretch out between them, which made the hours so precious, before she even understood what such hours might be filled with. Still when she thinks of love, she thinks of longing. It was not a conscious fantasy but a habit of mind, then, to imagine that the man whose quick fingers slipped her dress off and tangled in her hair was her Arctic hero (tall, dark, lean, like Simon), that it was her great-great-aunt’s wedding night and that the fire they stretched before was burning a hundred years ago…
Soon we will sail for cold places and make our den together through the long nights; soon we will sail and too soon we will part and I must take as much of him as I can before then, I must take him in and hold him here for as long as he will stay. Because soon he will sail on alone and I will wait for his return and he will not come back to me…
When Julia thinks of what a husband means, the impossibility of giving herself up daily, she thinks of her sick father fading and her mother clutching after him, fading with him, so that her teenage years were spent on tiptoes, not wishing to break into the hush that surrounded them.
For Emily, waiting for her Edward, there was no slow souring, no flagging indulgence; and no need to witness any gruesome, petty, griping illness and death. There is only a hero, vanishing; his wife a figure on the shore.
So he is emerging from the snowstorm that obscures him: Simon’s rival, frozen in his prime. The man that Julia has helplessly loved, like all the women of her family, since she and her sister first stood on either side of their aunt in the drawing room before the portrait of the two of them, Emily and Edward, and heard the story. His hand rests on her shoulder; he is at once fond and fierce.
The iris she holds in her lap, for faith, wisdom and valour, is velvet-purple against her white silk skirts. On a table by her elbow lies a compass, to signify her constancy, which will keep his course true. His love will burn as bright as his ambition.
Julia, it would seem, is not planning to move far this afternoon, and can perhaps be safely left alone to her wanderings in the snow for the time being. What of her husband, Edward’s avatar and rival? It may be that Simon is no hero, is unworthy of a hero’s niece and her devotion. But it is not entirely Simon’s fault. There are other kinds of love story. Simon, too, wants to be loved, and loves, as much as he can. Simon’s love story is not epic in scale, but he has no desire for anything grander. He would like to be admired, he would like to be needed, he would like to be noticed. It is not always simple to live with the flicker he fell in love with; he has for ten years now flown relentlessly into her flame.
To the city
Here he sits, in his spacious, uncluttered office in the city. How different from the house he left this morning; no surprising corners or unexpected stairways in this building, just a succession of fluid identical spaces, full of air, and nowhere to hide. No obstacles to thought and nowhere for memories to nestle. And yet Simon, today, is unusually beset by them, as if he has helplessly trailed the house’s aura with him.
Simon is devoting only the smallest possible part of his mind to the plans spread before him. These complex diagrams and calculations, with their very precise angles and firm graphite marks, are Simon’s greatest professional pleasure. Following his always accurate lines, structures emerge that are sound, balanced, in three dimensions in the real world, and for Simon, his part in the symmetry of things is a reward greater than any other. On most days, then, we would find him quite absorbed, each day growing a little more curved in the back as he bends close to the fine paper, relishing the pencils he has always used for these first drafts. But today he is out of sorts.
What then, while his wife roamed the rooms of the house until she came to rest in the snow, has Simon been doing? Julia’s morning smile and his breakfast eggs have so far, sadly, been the only pleasures of his day.
So, to circle back:
He arrived at work rather later than he’d hoped to; there was an accident on the road. Within half a mile of his turning onto the short stretch of dual carriageway that takes him to the station, the traffic stopped inexplicably. He waited. He took off his jacket. He was still hot. The windows were down but the air, like the cars, was at a standstill. One by one people switched off their engines, leaving their music playing so that he was assaulted from all sides by anodyne presenters, and hits from the Sixties, and, for pity’s sake, Neil Sedaka. And the man next to him was listening to a classical station broadcasting one of Simon’s favourite Bach concertos, but it was a poor recording and the radio was staticky, the bass chords lost, the ivory high notes thin as plastic, so that he wanted to get out of his car and get into the car of the man next to him and turn it off so that the extremely eloquent and pithy lecture on the value of actually listening to what you listen to that he was currently rehearsing could be very clearly heard and perhaps even understood. But, thought Simon with a sigh, trying to relax his angry grip on the wheel, what hope was there of understanding? I hope your crappy radio makes your battery flat, you ignorant arsehole, he thought. He restrained himself from saying it out loud. Julia was correct, Simon almost never swears, even when he’s alone, except in his head. His head, in this stationary traffic, threatened to implode with all the words he wasn’t saying out loud.
There were sirens. They waited. Simon drummed his middle finger on the wheel and checked his watch every twenty seconds or so, knowing he’d missed his train, wondering if he’d miss the next. Listening to the sirens, waiting, Simon was thinking that this was
Julia’s fault. He knew this was quite irrational, which served only to add to his irritation. It was her fault he was tired, and that he was going to be late. He’d been tired when he came home from work yesterday and the last thing he had needed was an impromptu dinner party with the sodding Watsons, with their nice wines that yes, he was sure he’d better not have even just one little glass of, with their poussins (‘Just pick it up, we don’t mind!’) and the fuss over the bottle of wonderful Pouilly-Fuissé and their lovely suburban home just a short hour’s backwoods drive away, with her big breasts in his face and his big belly laugh and the endless Bordeaux… all of this was too much, unforewarned, at the end of a long, stressful day and a horrible hot journey home. When he had stepped through the door to find Julia emerging from the cellar with a bottle, and saying ‘There you are’ with a blithe kiss on the cheek, his heart sank even before he knew why it might be that she had expected him earlier.
The Still Point Page 9