The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

  ‘Do you want to change?’ she asked. She was wearing a short puffy skirt she knew he disliked. She should have known, at least.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For dinner. We’re supposed to be there by eight.’

  When he walked in the door it was 6.52.

  ‘Supposed to be where?’

  Simon knows, deep in the appointments diary of his soul, that he wasn’t told of wherever it is. He doesn’t forget appointments. He makes a point of writing them down even though he knows he won’t forget them. Now, he pointedly takes his diary from the inside pocket of the suit jacket (which has crumpled on his way home). The evening, as he knew, is filled with nothing but blue feint lines.

  ‘We’re going to James and Michelle’s,’ she says, uncertain now.

  ‘Are we. When did “we” arrange this?’ He feels a nasty satisfaction in seeing the precision of his punctuation hit home. She was in a good mood but it’s fading now.

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘Dinner with the Watsons.’

  ‘With Michelle, and James, yes’; as if he might somehow have forgotten their first names.

  ‘Julia…’ he sighs. ‘I wish you… you could have told me before now. I’m tired. I’ve been in meetings all day and I have to be at work early tomorrow. When did you… why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I did,’ she insists, but Julia’s inefficiency has been proved too many times for her to attempt indignation for long. ‘I’m sure I did. She called last week. I remember, you were upstairs in the study so I called up to you and I assumed you’d heard.’

  ‘You assumed. You shouted up the stairs and took my total lack of response or acknowledgement as a tacit acceptance of the invitation.’

  Julia smiles sheepishly, even giggles a little. It may be a nervous giggle; she knows she’s in the wrong. It is certainly, regardless, a very annoying giggle under the circumstances. Simon walks past her, ignoring the hand she puts to his arm as he passes. He makes his measured way up the stairs, not stamping.

  ‘Simon? Are you… what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to change.’ He stops on the stairs but doesn’t look down at her. ‘I believe I was meant to get changed.’

  ‘I just thought you’d like to. You don’t have to, if you don’t want.’

  ‘Hm. I’ve been wearing the same shirt since I got up at seven this morning. I’m hot and uncomfortable and yes, I’d probably like to change, for dinner. With the Watsons. Thank you for suggesting it.’ He stamps the last six stairs and blames her, too, for the hot peevish flush he feels as he reaches the bedroom.

  He descends again a quick wash and a fresh shirt later, sharp-creased through the sleeves and collar (James will be all rolled-sleeved linen lightness and starchy Simon will despise and envy him for it). Julia is gone. He finds her in the sitting room, and is astounded to see her painting her toenails. He hates painted toenails, and they are running late.

  ‘Oh, that was quick. Nearly done,’ she says.

  ‘Shall we go, then? I assume I’m driving?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind really. What do you think? I just need to wait two minutes and I can put my sandals on. If you’re driving I can just carry them to the car, actually…’

  ‘I’ve arrived at this assumption on the basis of the prior assumption that you haven’t, in the twelve hours since I last saw you, learned to drive and obtained a licence. And if we’re expected at eight, we’re already late, so yes, my dear, I think you will have to set out barefoot.’

  Julia winces. Simon’s terms of endearment are infrequent and almost never affectionate.

  ‘Sorry. I thought you might want to take a cab, is what I meant.’

  ‘Have you booked one?’

  A very small voice now: ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’m driving. I don’t want to drink anyway. It’s fine. If we leave now we’ll be there by quarter past.’

  Julia checks the silver watch he gave her, six years ago, as a gift. Before then she said she’d never had much use for one and he sometimes wonders if she’s worked out how to read it yet.

  ‘I should call them. They said seven-thirty for eight, actually — no one ever means that though, do they?’

  ‘So when you said an hour, you meant half an hour. For God’s sake, Julia…’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know you’d be back late.’

  Simon, instead of shouting, So now it’s my fucking fault that you can’t even tell the time, calmly takes his car keys from the table by the door and marches out into the evening, which is as unpleasantly hot as the day has been and shows no sign of relenting; the growing darkness has only condensed it. He waits by the car and tries to subdue the infuriation which increases with every passing second of her non-emergence. It would serve her right if he did, he thinks (without allowing himself to imagine the thing he might do, without allowing himself to contemplate the possible consequences of a misplaced kiss); but he knows it wouldn’t. Still it remains to be seen if he will do it anyway.

  Suddenly the traffic started moving again, the gasp and roar of engines all around jolting Simon back to the morning. A mile and a half on, two cars and a van had been hauled to the side of the road. A man that Simon took to be the van’s driver was talking to a policewoman. He was sweating and his head was cut; Simon couldn’t tell if he was crying. One of the cars was badly dented, the other crushed from back to middle, the front almost comically intact, half of an accordion, and there was blood all over the windscreen, and then there were people putting up screens but Simon had already seen enough to imagine the mess of hair matted into the glass. He thought again of the pheasant. He remembered driving too fast. He imagined Julia’s head, instead, hitting the same spot from inside, making the same noise, not bang or crunch, and spending the rest of his life shadowed by the guilt of it, and of not having forgiven her. He asked himself why he was imagining such a thing. He felt sick. He kept imagining it over and over until he reached the station, egg yolk gluey at the back of his throat. As he locked the car he could hear his train announced; as he ran up the metal stairs, terrified of slipping but determined not to miss it, he heard the train pull in; he slipped through the doors at the last possible closing beep and had to stand all the way to Waterloo, shaky and damp until he gathered himself, and reached the office late, flushed and already crumpled.

  The lift was crowded and it stank of commuting. Simon was worried that he, too, must smell by now. He slipped a furtive hand into his armpit, lifted it to stroke his cheek (still smooth) and discreetly sniffed the palm. Soap. Good. But he’d worn a blue shirt and there was sweat down his back soaking through. Joanne was sitting at her desk with her mug already; she gave a little guilty start when he came in, and quickly closed a window on her screen. He hesitated before asking her to make more coffee for him. He didn’t want to patronize her; it wasn’t her job to serve drinks. Was it? It wasn’t her job to check private email or read gossip sites either. She was his personal assistant. He could ask her to go out and buy him a fresh shirt if he wanted.

  ‘Would you mind making me a coffee if you can spare the time, Joanne,’ he’d said, before closing his door with an unnecessary bang.

  By this time, evidently, Simon was irritable in the extreme. Don’t judge him too harshly: he was sticky, hot, he’d been the victim of musical travesty, he’d driven past death, he was plagued by visions of skulls sliced against glass and metal, he’d almost been crushed by the door of the train, he’d been sarcastic to a woman he actually liked and respected and sat down to his desk already feeling small for it. An evening appointment was casting its long shadow already on the day; a decision he didn’t want to think about making, a mistake he didn’t want to make worse, that possibility he can’t allow himself to contemplate. He’d lost forty-five precious minutes with his pencils and his plans, and all he really wanted was to bring a little balance to the world.

  By half past eleven he was feeling a little better, and had almost recovered from the morning. The sound of
a head hitting the windscreen had not thudded into his thoughts for an hour now. He had succeeded in resolving the problems that the proposals before him were proposing, and was pleased with the progress of another project, taking its early miniature form out in the openplan office. It would nod to neo-classicism while evading pomposity or pastiche. His part in the design cleverly resolved the question of the windows. But this brief satisfactory respite lasted only for the hour before lunchtime.

  An oak-panelled old-fashioned city steakhouse: while Julia scents strawberries, swings her winsome hips, slices tomatoes, breaks plates, Simon, meanwhile, sits before the remnants of his tasteless sirloin, feeling jaded. An empty sauce-smeared plate before him, empty years stretching ahead (his thoughts become maudlin when he is overfed and bored — don’t mind too much his pessimism). Feeling hot and bloated in a loud restaurant, the staleness of the morning’s sweat lingering under new dampness. Everywhere the bray of businessmen at leisure. He is thinking of a kiss he can’t take back and a phone call; and he is also remembering Julia’s skin against the fur before the fire. He is thinking of buying her flowers (just as the lily shivers off its last petals).

  When he considers the matter more carefully, he is not sure that there is a practical way for him to do so. Because he always buys from the same stall close to the office, but the evening meeting that he is not allowing himself to think about (and about which he is constantly not thinking) is arranged for a pub near the station, so he would have to either return for the flowers — which would make him even later than he will be already, which is possibly suspiciously late — or take them with him, which is as unthinkable as the meeting itself. To arrive with flowers and to say, ‘These are not for you’; no, he could not be so callous. Would that be more or less cruel than to say, ‘I love my wife’? This is also something Simon may prove incapable of saying. How terrible, that such a statement should find a context in which it could be cruel. That he could have made such a context possible.

  Anyway he knows that flowers won’t solve anything.

  Opposite him, his client is contemplatively picking scraps of meat from his teeth. Simon cannot understand why some people don’t chew sufficiently in the first place. The client is new and needs to be impressed, but not important enough to spend too much on. They shared a bottle of mid-range wine and ordered distinctly average steaks — that is, the steaks they ordered were distinctly average, they didn’t order them to be so. Simon drank one small glass and watched his client wash down his meat with the rest of the bottle, and is considering if he can bear to offer whisky. Protocol would demand it; but even a minute longer with this man might be more than he can stomach (the rich sauce sloshes). Midway through watching the second glass go down, it became apparent that his client was going to tell him about his mistress, was going to use the word ‘mistress’ (a word Simon doesn’t care for, especially today), and would be expecting Simon to make the correct faces and noises, which Simon duly did. His client spoke almost continuously, and also ate without pause, so that inevitably his mouth was required to fulfil both functions simultaneously. Simon watched, fascinated and appalled, his client’s cheek bulge out as he stored the chunk he was eating there for a moment to speak, before allowing the purple-grey bolus to slide into slimy view before swallowing. By listening only to inflections, he found it was possible to pick up the correct face and noise cues without having to hear the details of the affair, which allowed him also to block out at least the audible aspect of the processes of salivation and mastication.

  He relents, offers a digestif. It is inevitably accepted. They stand to move to the bar; Simon likes to stand beside potential clients — especially squat, selfimportant, slightly balding ones. He is feeling particularly tall today (Simon is tall in relation to most people, although it’s true he is especially tall in relation to Julia who, remember, is quite small, and has a place for her head on his chest which has been there for years, since they first held each other, a few weeks after they met).

  The client is saying something which Simon anticipates will be followed with a laugh, and prepares himself to join in. Crash, bang. The flensed carcass of a whale is called a crang, he thinks, and wonders when his mind grew so incongruous.

  A kiss

  And now here we find him, hunched over his plans as ever, but strangely inattentive. Simon is tired. His eyes ache. He should have them tested, he knows: he has worn the same glasses for years. He is having a long day and it is only early afternoon. His own writing, neat with a slight back-slant and a subtle serif, is somewhat too small for him to read; he finds himself squinting, sighs when he makes out the word ‘buttress’. A clunk of a word for a clumsy feature; this is what the client demands. The proposal document is open on his screen, and he’d like to finish it before the end of today, if only so that tomorrow he won’t have to contemplate turrets or tudor façades. He is nothing but a slave, he thinks, to the vulgarity of others.

  Another cup of coffee which he needs but feels he shouldn’t drink sits before him. Joanne brought it to him, having noticed the darkness under his eyes, although she knows he has a rule about caffeine after lunchtime. He focuses his attention on the screen. His desk phone, and his mobile, obtrude upon the edge of his awareness, and his eyes flick to one and then the other at intervals, as if nervous of a pounce. He is thinking of two women: Julia and her amber eyes, her hair the colour of nutmeg, and the smell of spice on her breath; and another, with blonde curls and a big, generous, bitter mouth. Bright laughter, red and full, brightness brushing his skin… But he does not love the showy moths. He likes the muted ones, tawny, bronze and brown, the intricacy of their patterning, how they shine under scrutiny. So why this persistent brightness, as if from the corner of his eye?

  He thinks of his father, who liked large, brilliant Blues, as big as birds; and he thinks of his mother, miserable in South Africa before he was born, depressed by this relentlessly vivid country. Wanting the grey-brown scrubfield mud, the grey-blue sky, the grey buildings of her memories of England, insisting they return to raise their boy there. And he thinks of them together, of his childhood, his father lost in Shropshire craving colour and his mother hating butterflies. And he wonders, did he whisper to her ever, or kiss the top of her head? Did he leave her any comfort before dying? He wonders if his mother is at least content now, without him, without the burden of pretending, when she has never been up to the task of happiness. She no longer wears turquoise on her eyelids.

  He remembers a meadow, he remembers her smiling and batting at the wings all around her, sitting on a picnic blanket, and remembers running after his father, running back to her with his net streaming behind and a jar with a big burly purplish thing hurling itself at the glass, his first catch, holding it out before him as he ran and then stopping, confused, at the edge of the blanket, because she was crying. It was hayfever, she said; no, she wasn’t sad.

  Simon’s mouth becomes full of a phantom pork pie, heavy, greasy, dry, the yellowish jelly. A mouthful of queasy disappointment that he can’t choke down. His stomach gurgles and he swills his mouth with coffee.

  And you, Simon? asked James last night (and well he might). Are you happy?

  Last night, after dinner: Julia and Michelle are in the kitchen, Simon and James in the living room. James lolls on the sofa; Simon has taken the edge of an armchair, one knee optimistically advanced and askance, ready to leave. He is thinking of the drive ahead and his early start. Listening to Julia laughing in the next room, he is beginning to feel depressingly sober, and, having spent much of the evening listening to the others talk, he feels that some conversational gambit is now required of him.

  ‘Hm,’ he announces, the little pedantic cough, born of awkwardness, that makes him seem more middle-aged than he is. ‘Hm. Did you know, I read recently, did you know that there’s no single definition of the Arctic’s southern limit?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I came across this book of Julia’s, the other day. There’s
the treeline, the latitude where the sun doesn’t rise or set on the solstices, the reach of the ice. Some of them are perfect circles, others are all over the shop.’

  There is a pause. James looks expectant.

  ‘No fixed centre, and no single edge,’ he adds, a finger pointing and orbiting the point, to clarify.

  Simon’s mind circles and circles the Arctic’s unsatisfactory edges; this is the spiral that will later trap him through his sleepless hour. An Arctic map, he explains, is a map of concepts. A red line, scribing an uneven round, denotes the icecap’s furthest reach, as at a particular date. There is another line beyond which no trees grow. And then again, circumscribing the ice and crossing through eight countries, a line at a latitude of 66° 33’ 39” (assuming the map is moderately recent, for this line too shifts with time). Stand upon this line or north of it and the sun, on at least one day in the year, does not rise, and at its other solstice does not set: the so-called Arctic Circle.

  ‘Is that right?’ says James.

  Simon laughs, shakes his head, becomes young again. He hunches forward, pinches the bridge of his nose although he has taken off his glasses.

  ‘You’re looking at me like I’ve gone mad.’

  James, too, laughs; he has known Simon long enough. ‘It’s not that I’m not interested. It all sounds fascinating.’