‘Julia’s been sorting the archive,’ explains Simon. ‘All the uncle explorer’s stuff. In the house.’
‘Ah, of course. How is the house?’
‘Last week we were invited to contribute pasta salad to a street party. It’s very… It’s very pasta salad. Associations. A real grocer. Butcher, baker, et cetera. The house and the town and the market. It’s charming.’
‘Charming, you say. No doubt.’
Simon waves the hint of his own cynicism away. ‘It’s great, really. It’s very peaceful and calm and there are no sirens at night. Julia seems happy.’
‘Seems?’
‘As far as I can tell.’
‘Have you considered asking?’
No, Simon has not considered asking. He does not want to think of her saying that no, she isn’t sad, he believes she would say yes, she’s happy, and is not sure he’d believe her, and would prefer not to have to question why. James is frank with drinking, but Simon hasn’t touched a drop.
‘She’s got a cat; she always wanted one. We have a garden.’
‘And you?’
‘It’s good to have space. The house is ridiculous, of course. Crammed full of dados and cornicing and coving and corners — lots of corners. Lots of little poky spaces and big grand inefficient ones.’
‘You love it.’
Simon smiles, shrugs. ‘I can’t help it.’
It’s true. Simon, who likes his lines clean, his palette neutral, his angles sharp, has come to find comfort in the senseless arrangements of the house, so different from the hard cities he helps to build.
But would Simon say he is happy? Well, again, he would not consider asking himself this question; he would prefer not to. He certainly seems, to himself, to be. He has his extraordinary house and his own shed and a job he often enjoys and his butterflies, and the moths at night in the garden, and his wife.
And yet — we may as well pry, now, having asked the question — yesterday, Simon answered his office phone to a strange number, and a remembered kiss rose to his mouth like bile when he heard the voice on the line. Simon had almost persuaded himself, until he regrettably answered that call, to forget a stray business card, mistakenly handed over in a moment of confusion; it had been efficiently filed away in the corner of his mind that he prefers not to visit. All sorts of things are in there: the time he accidentally killed their canary in an experiment with the oven. The time he accidentally broke the wing of a Fritillary that his father had been pursuing for hours and given him to mount. The time he accidentally lost his virginity to a girl who didn’t deserve it. The time he has spent in silence, not saying what he should say to his wife, not knowing what to say. The time he hasn’t spent with the children he doesn’t have… This shameful little crevice is where Simon has stored a single kiss, the one unfaithful act he has ever committed. Is this, we might ask, the behaviour of a happy man? And what, precisely, was the nature of that errant kiss?
Two weeks ago, the woman who lives over the road cornered him in the corner shop, thrusting out a large and well-manicured, red-nailed hand to be shaken. She was wearing a suit with a silk blouse, high-heeled shoes that had rubbed her foot red at the base of the big toe but in which she walked as if they didn’t hurt her, and a strong musky perfume. She had just moved in, she explained; they’d been there less than a year themselves, he said. A fellow interloper. She laughed, showing off neat white teeth and a quiver of pink tongue, and he was pleased by this moment of complicity, by her private smile for him. They should all get together, he said. The ‘all’ was deliberate, so she wouldn’t get the wrong impression. And why would she? Why for that matter should he worry that she might? It was surely not disappointment that made her mouth twitch; he had probably imagined it. He was only hoping to make friends with the neighbours, thinking of Julia alone all day. He even thought he might make a joke about being chatted up by a Telegraph reader. Except in the end he forgot to mention it to Julia at all. He thought that she wouldn’t like this Sandra — she would find her overbearing, and the choice of newspaper was a bad sign — and this may be why he didn’t say anything about it. Those nails, that lipstick — Simon allowed himself conveniently to forget that it is he who disapproves of red, as Julia has learned long since. But then when the phone rang one Saturday a couple of weeks ago, and Julia was out shopping, he heard himself inviting Sandra over and saying, ‘I don’t bite,’ rather unconvincingly. Unconvincing, because this is not the kind of phrase that comes naturally to Simon, and he wasn’t sure why he was using it; not because he might bite after all. That comes later.
Two and a half hours later, in fact, and it turns out to be her that bites; they are in the conservatory, perched together on the wicker sofa, and she is vibrant in a poppy-printed summer dress, her blonde hair bouncing, she has laughed loudly at a passing joke he has made and pushed his thigh gently as if she is a little scandalized; she does not take her hand away and he feels himself caught now in those long red talons. He notices that one nail is chipped and a little bitten, and feels a reddening surge of something like repugnance or lust and in its ebb something like pity or tenderness; then he feels the other set of nails press into the flesh under his chin to turn his face to hers and he knows she’s overpowered him, and finds that it is easy, allowing himself to be powerless. And suddenly she is nipping at his neck without restraint; and, in fairness, he is not attempting to restrain her. Julia returns from her trip into town just as a manicured hand is making its determined way down his shirtfront, tormenting that ticklish torso so that he is already starting to squirm away from her when the door slams — you have to slam the door to make sure it closes, remember, and thank goodness, for Simon’s sake. He jumps back and the brazen neighbour makes a quick recovery, her heart beating so hard he can see the silk of her dress twitch; she laughs and gives him a wide-eyed ‘Naughty me’ look, fingertips to her mouth. She stands and asks for his business card, which, bewildered, he gives her; she leaves through the garden gate. Simon is flustered. He rubs at his neck, hearing Julia calling for him. ‘Ah, here you are,’ she says, and plumps down beside him on the sofa. She doesn’t notice the sticky smell of perfume that he is sure is all over his hands; or if she does, he thinks guiltily, it would never occur to her to question it. She shows him her new leather notebooks happily. Now she has all that she needs to really set to work. All she was lacking was the proper stationery, she laughs.
‘Is your neck okay? It looks awfully red.’
‘Hm. Just been out in the sun too long, I suppose.’
She looks at him quizzically — he is not one to linger in the garden — then shrugs, with a little shake of her head and a frown, tells him he should be more careful, and makes them some tea.
Simon loves his wife. He might well suffer in comparison with the portrait that hangs in the drawing room; certainly he does not feel heroic. True, he too is dark, cheeks hollow, tall; if he could be persuaded to grow a moustache — and Julia has tried on occasion, only half joking — he might just look the part. Strength and fidelity, surety, courage. Would she wait for him so long, if he were to set out so bravely? He would not want her to, perhaps; perhaps the world is no longer so romantic. But he loves his wife and he would like to make her happy; he is forever striving to cross that incommensurable distance, to meet her. He has no desire to betray her. He suspects he will always fail her.
In his worse moments, Simon wonders if he would have Julia at all had he not been there when she needed him, when they first met; and now all these years later he would simply like to feel that he can sometimes meet that need, knowing that he has already failed her once, at least once, constantly… He recalls her tears last night, and all of her tears, so infrequent he thinks he can remember every one; and those she would not weep, when he wished that she would come to him and weep. His love for her, the frail and lovely edifice that is the wife he loves, is built as much from the knowledge of the sadness she keeps hidden as it is from the shimmering he first longed to captu
re; the memory of her head against his chest when she was suffering is painful of course, but it also brings him pleasure, to remember being needed.
Butterflies and bearskins
It was Simon that suggested they make the house their own, two months after Aunt Helen died. She had by then been living in a ‘home’ for seven years — not once did she fail to voice those inverted commas when referring to it as such, although she didn’t resent it. It agonized Julia to think of her there, but she knew she couldn’t give her the care she needed; and Aunt Helen had been furious at the very suggestion that she should spend the first years of her marriage looking after an old woman. In her clean, sunny, bland little room, she turned the pages of Edward’s diary peaceably, laughing out loud sometimes or sharing some particularly gruesome detail with nurses, doctors, fellow inmates, the empty room. She had meant to find a publisher for it, to make sense of the last fading pages and present his tale to the world, restored and whole; but she somehow ran out of time. She knew the story by heart, which was just as well as she could no longer hold one sentence in her head for long enough to connect it to the next. When Julia visited, they would exchange tales of the ice as if the memories were their own. Simon remembers now the vivid recollections that they span together as he took a seat at the edge of the room, listening, remote from them as if watching through a window while they played in the snow. She died on a high-summer’s day not unlike this one, last year; Julia and the nurse on duty found her in her chair by the window, napping, it seemed, in the peace of the bright afternoon, her skin warmed on the surface by the sun but her blood quite cool.
Come October, autumn was giving way to a drizzling winter and dark afternoons. The will was settled, the grieving ostensibly over, the house empty for too long and full of the family’s things, waiting to be cleared.
Simon came home a little later than usual one day to find Julia in the bath. She looked up and slightly past him and smiled, when he came into the tiny bathroom — she had left the door open. He hesitated over his intrusion, then knelt beside her, not quite sure of her or himself or desire, but when his hand bent to cup the water over her skin, he found it was cold; not just tepid, but freezing as a northern sea.
‘How long have you been sitting here?’ he asked, very casually, feeling it was important to betray no alarm or haul her out and wrap her in something warm or hold her, although these things, too, he felt were important things he should do.
‘Not long. I don’t know. What time is it? Half an hour, I think.’
Simon checked his watch. He had come in the door at 7.43; he remembered glancing at his watch. He reckoned perhaps six or seven minutes had passed. Nevertheless, he checked again and could not help but indulge for a moment the pleasure of his correct estimate.
‘It’s almost eight’ — 7.49 — ‘Julia… the water…’ How to address this? ‘Isn’t the water a bit cold? Are you sure you’ve only been here half an hour?’
Simon imagined her leaving work early again, without telling her colleagues (and how long could they continue to indulge her? How long is one allowed to grieve?). She would have arrived at home, run a bath, left a pile of clothes on the floor and climbed in, hours contracting as the water cooled and Julia blank as the surface of the water. But he put this vision from his mind because it was surely the behaviour of a mad person, or a person who is too unhappy to be reached.
‘Oh, yes. I know.’ She knew. Relief rinsed over him until he realized that this was not, in itself, an explanation.
‘There was no hot water left. So I just ran it cold.’
‘I see. Then you got in. It really is. Cold.’ Some silent minutes passed. In the flat above, a washing machine thumped through its spin cycle. When Simon thinks of the Balham flat now, of the years they spent there, he remembers the muffled constant banging of other domestic lives all around them, and he remembers also the bathroom window, the muck-streaked runnels of rain lit orange in the streetlight. All their life together compressed into a black square of ugly frosted glass, curtainless, letting the night in. A car horn blared in the street; somebody shouted, an engine snarled a threat. He perched on the side of the bath, staring into nothing.
It’s easy to be drawn to Julia and her beauty, her lightness, her vagueness. Just hearing her cat’s-tread upon the stair, we follow. But sitting on the side of his wife’s cold bath, Simon wondered if that elusive quiver he’d fallen for might elude him always. There is, after all, reality to contend with, as well as romance. Simon sometimes grows weary with unworldliness. He cannot always be the one to bear the world’s burdens alone.
Suddenly she shivered violently and crouched forward with a chilly splash that shocked Simon out of his daze, his sleeve soaked. She pulled her knees up like a child and hugged them and seeing the bones of her spine all down her narrow back he was touched almost unbearably; she had thinned to transparency, in the last months; all the gold was gone from her skin, she was as pale as blue-shadowed ice. He would have liked to cry for her the tears that were dripping silently from her chin into the water. Then at last he lifted her, taking her elbow and raising her, guiding her, numb and pliable, from the bath, folding her in a towel and in his arms and letting her sob soundless on his shoulder.
Later, they sat with cups of tea in the sitting room, Julia wrapped in a blanket and occasionally convulsing from the cold left in the corners of her. And he remembered the year they met, the weekends at the old house. He remembered their first Christmas together there, with Aunt Helen and Julia’s sister and her husband and their first baby, feeling embarrassed and pleased to be part of their warmth. At Aunt Helen’s table, he had thought guiltily for a moment of his parents, spending Christmas alone together for the first time since he was born (he didn’t know it then, but it was also the last — the next March, a vessel burst in his father’s hard heart). He imagined them sitting opposite each other over a turkey far too big for the two of them, dried out in the oven by his mother’s caution. Then he thought, No, they won’t be opposite each other because they will sit where they always sit, my father will not relinquish the head of the table and will leave my place empty in recrimination and my mother will have to sit across from my absence and will not allow herself to consider what might have caused it. And instead of allowing his parents’ bitterness to twist into him across the distance, he looked to the head of the table where Aunt Helen had taken her place, brandishing carving fork and knife over a glistening goose and laughing. At that time she could laugh at her own oddness, she’d say something entirely out of place and then put her hand to her lips with a surprised giggle, as if someone else had used her mouth to say it.
He did his best to relax. He wore his paper hat, and forgot after a while the hot itch of it.
Sitting in a flat in Balham on a wet, dull night almost a decade later, he imagined a family of his own in that house. He thought of the bear rug in front of the open fire, of laying Julia down upon it again, as he had years before. How much warmer, wider, easier life would be, away from London, away from the dirt and the shouts in the street. How much happier she might be, in the house where the first days of their love affair — as tentative, gentle and delicate as any Victorian courtship — were played out. In the house where he first lay beside her…
Circling and circling, his mind returns to it. Among the clutter that catches at his thoughts in hints and snatches, Julia lies resplendent on the bearskin like a vivid half-forgotten dream. Is it possible to know her? Even what is past is not constant. Countless versions of her coalesce, flicker, disperse. She is lost moments and habits too familiar to recall and a turn of the head one Tuesday afternoon; memories will fold and flutter and resettle themselves; no, a lover cannot be set and pinned. Still he pursues her always; still he does love her, he tells himself, whoever she is. There is more than one kind of love story.
Simon and Julia met because of the butterflies, on a warm spring day, ten years ago. In the very same room in which Dr Nansen lectured and Emily, seeing
ambition blaze, set her sights on Edward; in that same room around a hundred years later, Simon gallantly gave up his handkerchief, and with it his heart, which Julia returned in a damp crumpled ball. He washed the handkerchief when he got home, but his heart never quite recovered.
Julia, too, a damp crumpled ball, and summoning a helpless smile; her head on his chest, which was later; the bearskin… We will come to all this in time. For now: they met because of the butterflies. He came to see the collection. When Aunt Helen was alive, the house functioned as a sort of ad hoc museum, much of its contents untouched since Emily Mackley returned alone from her honeymoon at the turn of the century to wait sixty years to die. Her husband was everywhere; his brother John had adorned the safe, solid walls of his home with the spoils of vicarious adventure. Aunt Helen somehow, through the mysterious channels of communication that formed the fine silver network of her world, let it be known that visitors were welcome. In her heyday, the house had been open to all comers — friends, artists, admirers, lovers, serious historians, dilettantes and dabblers. Simon was one of the last. He had come to see… When the door opened, he found himself helplessly pinned by pale brown eyes and a smile that went off to one side as if distracted. He made no move; behind her in the dim hallway, a polar bear was ready to pounce. It had not yet retreated to the top of the house.
Julia introduced herself and invited him in, happy enough with the explanation that he was Simon and had come to see the butterflies. Browsing a specialist journal that he subscribed to, he had caught sight of a poor and greyed photographic reproduction of a mounted series which, nevertheless, his curiosity snagged upon; there, in the far north, these creatures thrived in the bright, cold summer. He noticed the photo credit — ‘Gift of Lieutenant S. Freely, Mackley Family private collection’ and the name of a town not so far from London. He had heard of neither the benefactor nor the Mackleys, but when called for a consultation a few months later — the streets of this town are all subsiding grandeur — he remembered the name of the place, sought out the Mackley address and took the opportunity to pay a visit. A few months later and he might have forgotten; so coincidence shapes us (or fate if you prefer, but Simon, a rationalist, does not). He had written two weeks before to ask if he might see just this one of their treasures, and received a prompt response from a Miss Helen Mackley — it happened that her niece would be visiting that day and they would both be pleased to see him and show him whatever took his interest.
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