The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

  Two miles more of quiet driving. Then a sad, flat crow at the side of the road; Simon opened his mouth, remembered that he’d mentioned the law about pheasants an hour ago (passing a smear of pigeon), and was interrupted anyway by Julia:

  ‘Shall we pick it up for dinner? We weren’t the ones that hit it, after all.’

  ‘It’s just pheasants.’

  ‘Oh,’ she smiled. ‘Silly me.’

  In the pause that followed, he could feel her deciding whether or not to push it. Some invisible betrayal of irritation warned her not to.

  ‘It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it, to have Miranda down?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Molly must be getting big. It’s been three months since we saw her.’

  They had last seen Miranda and her three children at Aunt Helen’s funeral. Which meant that Julia had calculated from that date; it was unlike her to remember a lapse of time so precisely.

  ‘It’s amazing she finds the time to look after them all,’ said Simon, for something to say.

  ‘She’s a great mum. He’s a good dad, too, for all his faults.’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  Matthew’s faults, in Julia’s terms, include a lack of imagination, and having poor taste in shirts and footwear (shiny pointy business shoes, awful sandals in summer). In Simon’s view Matthew is just dull, a television sports spectator. Julia’s sister presumably has her reasons for loving him.

  ‘They’re great kids.’

  In the car, Julia and Simon fell again into silence. She no longer sang.

  There are many words that have gone unsaid in those ten years, to fill the silences that widen between them. There are all kinds of things they don’t say. They think about hospitals. He thinks of rushing to her and finding her thin and bloodless, knowing that flowers wouldn’t have helped anyway but wishing he’d brought just one useless rose, at least, wishing he wasn’t so empty-handed, so helpless. These are the spaces between them that they may not, or may yet, cross. Unsaid words and empty hospital vases. And this is the feeling that troubles him still, which he cannot articulate, as he sits in the office not thinking about it; Simon’s troubled and stifled thoughts all circle about this lack, always gaping at the back of his mind, the space between them that he cannot reach across, the impossible white distance beyond which she lies heedless.

  By the time they reached the house, Julia was once again bright. Since he’d first thought of it, of bringing her back here, Simon had imagined himself catching her up to carry her over the threshold they met across all those years before; he had thought the gesture would be fitting. He would carry her through the hallway and lay her down on the fur where they first lay together.

  Now, as he pulled up outside, he realized the impracticality of his plan and felt foolish to have rehearsed it so carefully; the night before, he had carried her in and laid her down, carried her in, fur against skin, looping relentless against sleep. Now here they were and he had barely killed the engine and she was out of the car, keys in her hand because of course the keys were hers, the house is hers, and she waited for him at the door but he could see no way to do it, now, to lift her, and it would be dark and cold within, with no fire in the grate. With the key in the lock already she turned back radiant and he followed her in. And every time he enters this house, he feels that he follows her in, as she was then, for ever an echo of the first day he met her, the first moment he saw her, for ever framed in the doorway, inviting him in.

  They spent their days unpacking, shifting furniture, pictures, china, silver, to find spaces for the surviving remnants of their own meagre home. He gave up helping, seeing how anxious it made her if a particular teaspoon or box of broken beads was moved out of place, and not knowing what was precious to her or why. The master suite had not been used for years; they couldn’t get the heating working for the first week and slept under a mound of chilly blankets, with heavy stone hot-water bottles wrapped in wool socks that made Julia nostalgic for her childhood holidays there and stubbed Simon’s long toes. He couldn’t sleep for the weighty tick of the grandfather clock in the hall below, although it was he that had reset and wound it. The old bed creaked, and Simon and Julia, who had always lived with neighbours above, beside and below through only a wall or floor’s thickness, could not get used to allowing it to do so, but did not speak of abandoning the old frame. They made love tentatively, holding back vigour, not wishing to wake the ghosts.

  He came home one night, a few weeks after they arrived, and spied her shadow in the corner by the lamp in the drawing room, watching for him through a barely parted gap in the curtain. The door opened just as he raised his key to the lock; she swept him in from the cold and kissed him — ‘Aniseed! I’d know your kiss in a million,’ she said — and took him by the hand and led him up the stairs half-backwards, without needing to see or even count to know the stairs, her other hand slipping up the oak banister with the surety of those who had smoothed it for her. She was flushed and sheened with excitement, anticipation flecking her eyes golden, leading him up the stairs well before bedtime, and he was stirred by her and just as he was thinking it was unlike her to be so bold she stopped halfway up on the landing, with a ‘Ta-da!’ — she had moved the butterflies. The picture that had hung there — he couldn’t recall it — had left its outline on the wallpaper, framing the smaller frame.

  She wanted to please him, and she did; it was a gesture to the memory of their own romance, and he wanted to pick her up, so small and slight after all that he can lift her easily, to pick her up and carry her down to the bearskin, but did not.

  Flag

  Poor Simon, stretched out thin and torpid with the endless afternoon, chilled by air conditioning, clammy with caffeine-sweat, eyes aching from the glare of the screen; when he looks up the vast spotless sky filling his window offers no relief, the river dazzling like glass (or snow or ice). No, he absolutely will not think of it. He will not think of cold baths or bearskins or tissues, or red lips; he will not think of coming home to a glass of wine and the warmth of his wife and family, a sleepy well-behaved boy waiting up to say goodnight to him — this last in particular he pushes away, merciless, only to find himself confronted with the cold bath again. No. The clock in the corner of the screen, synced with the meridian — no foolish margins for error — shows 16.23. His mobile phone, aligned with the edge of the desk, agrees, but Simon has not glanced at it for over half an hour now.

  He pushes up his glasses and turns to his drafts. Yes, he is a long parabola of precision, from his dark eye through the hunch of his shoulder to the tidy, quick fingers that trace over the page. He sharpens his attention to a point, letting all fall with the curling slivers of wood that he carves away from the graphite. Fresh pencil shavings: this is one of his favourite smells, along with mint leaves, cedar wood, aniseed and honeysuckle, which blooms abundant in the garden, drawing dusty moths to its scent when dusk falls. But he is not thinking about the moths in the garden or honeysuckle. No, he will not think of her, in that house where dust drifts like snow in the corners until she’s as frosted over as every other relic, a living memory of the first time he lay with her; this endless reaching for her, every time since, as she retreats from him and he watches her across the distance and waits for her to dissipate…

  And here, however we try to tease it out, his mind pulls to a stubborn halt. Because every act of love echoes every other in retrospect; and last night was no different from any other time, and although he loves her and desires her still there is always, as he enters, this halt; and it is this, in the end, that he won’t allow himself to think about for fear of what it means. Every time, her limbs freeze for a second like a panicked animal, every time; and then she lets herself surrender, but she surrenders only her body and retreats from him — as he seeks the depth of her she retreats from him, further than he can reach. She doesn’t care if they leave the light on, but she always closes her eyes. Yes, as she acquiesces, she dissipates. He cannot
grasp her; even as her fingers clutch his arms, his back, her heels grip about his thighs, even as she holds him so fast it sometimes bruises and he watches amazed as her head tilts back, in that moment she is lost to him, she dissolves into the air —

  Skin against snow, spread out across the sky…

  And when it’s over and she opens her eyes, the pupils widen with pleasure but for a moment, he’s sure, they are pinpricks, as if flooded with brightness, so that she must adjust to the dim world she returns to from wherever she’s been, lost in the snow.

  He loves his wife and does not wish to betray her, especially with a woman for whom he tells himself he feels no desire at all. And yet that same woman called yesterday and, if he were honest with himself, which he isn’t, he felt the scald of red-hued lust; and ignored it but still agreed to meet, since (he told himself) it was the decent thing to do, to say it to her face; and the evening is near enough now to be inevitable, and he is tired and wishes he had not slept badly. He will not think of that single, wet, illicit kiss, or of unspoken irritation and guilt, or of any of the things he lost sleep not thinking of. He is pressed upon from all sides; he is still trapped in that Arctic he dreamed of, jagged, bitter, hard, crushed by the frozen sea.

  He stares out of the window that stretches all across the wall to his left, over the city, as impressive a view as one might hope to find, and brilliant in the sun today. Today it is especially fine. The leaves are filled with green light; Westminster is pale and golden against a sky so massively deep blue and clear that it almost hurts to look up. But Simon isn’t looking at the sky or the trees or the towers, he is looking at the river, and he is seeing a cold grey sea, and between its banks, just drifting past the plane trees of Victoria Gardens, an iceberg is jutting out absurdly into the summer day, vast, overwhelming, vertiginous.

  He pinches the bridge of his nose under his glasses. When he opens his eyes again there is nothing but the dirty old Thames, glittering brightly. A dream of an icy sea… but Simon doesn’t dream. He’s not a person that ever dreams.

  He takes a sip of lukewarm coffee and measures to the point. He checks from another angle. He marks the cross. He knows beyond doubt that the place is the right one.

  For a moment he thinks of a flag in the snow.

  (The flag that Julia’s Great-great-uncle Edward failed to plant was also buried with him, six hundred miles from the North Pole. Emily, a woman singularly lacking in the skills the age expected of her, had nevertheless taken silks, needle and thread and assiduously stitched the pieces, blotting her pricked fingers on the red cross of England, trying to avoid the white and the blue.)

  Simon hauls himself back, one last time, from the brink of distraction. He will not be diverted by dreams or flags or family myths, or anything else that is insubstantial, or kisses and their consequences for that matter. Yes, the point he has marked is the right one.

  What Julia would call finicky (with a kind of affection), Simon would call just and true. Since the painstaking years of his childhood, Simon has loved balance. A well-engineered structure has its own grace, without which mere ornament is a shallow flattery. Elegance is born of unseen depth and strength, like a cathedral, full of light (like an iceberg glittering in sunshine…). Even as he takes pleasure in the sureties of his profession, a phrase skates across the surface of his thoughts: Foundations cannot be laid in snow. Simon barely even shapes the words, but as we’ve caught them passing, they are worth catching at. What solid thing, after all, did Edward Mackley ever lay upon the surface of the world? Where is the edifice that attests to his greatness? There is none, there is none, there is only his body, still frozen where they found it and buried it again, more than fifty years after he died.

  PART IV

  North:

  ( )

  Blank, white, vast and silent but for the slish of the summer ice. It is not the heave and roar of the darker months, but a constant drip, the rush of a hundred rivulets. A slick sheen over everything as if coated in glass. There are no shadows here, beneath the Arctic sun. There is no sense of depth, only massive solid forms without contour and, between, the black sea. The sky is almost white. Don’t look up, or let your gaze rest anywhere for too long. The sun is in everything; try to keep your eyes half closed, the brightness will blind you.

  Beyond this shore is nothing but the uninterrupted ocean; and, somewhere at its centre, the Pole. We can go no further north on land, although if it were spring we could travel on foot across the ice. Six hundred miles merely, the length of the British Isles, to an invisible point in the whiteness; we won’t know it when we get there. We will take bearings and will have to believe that we have aimed true and hit the target. You wish to set out? Six hundred miles of this treacherous, tearing white, cracked with black. Row across the open water — it is freezing and unthinkably deep, there are mountains below us — hope the kayak has not been too damaged from months of dragging it over the winter ice. Hope there are no walruses waiting to roar out of the depth. Stand on the floes and they might split beneath you, or drag you back to behind where you began. It will shift and yawn and grin into gullies before us; it will betray us. Time, suspended by the constant sun, will begin to spiral. It would be folly to attempt it. It is too late in the year.

  Beneath our feet, the holes where Edward Mackley’s eyes were stare out of his leathered skull, which still half resembled him when it was last dug up; they stare for ever across this hopeless distance, his last vista. He came closer than this. He turned back to find land. This is where he came to rest, just as the sun was setting, hoping to wait out the winter. This is where he was buried, before he saw the sun again. The tin cross there marks the spot: the fourth one, on the right. Below, he lies in a makeshift coffin, which was once the kayak he hoped to sail to safety in. They couldn’t tell what he died of by the time they found him, his skin blackened but intact, his insides melted to slush. Starvation, exhaustion, guilt. Frustration and failure.

  He could not have known he would end here when he set out all those months before, as Emily waved him off from the shore. He had thought to be better, greater.

  Papers

  The ship’s log remains open on the desk at the page where Julia left off reading, the point at which, halfway down the page, a more scratching and less eloquent hand has taken up the pen. On the last day of February 1901, the captain of the Persephone recorded his last entry. As he prepared to depart the next morning, he expressed his confidence, both in his own venture and in the ship’s eventual return; they would rendezvous at Franz Josef Land and either attempt to sail south or, if need be, weather another winter in the ice; he was certain that the polar current would eventually bear them out to the Atlantic. He entrusted the ship, the ship’s log and the lives of the crew to the last remaining Englishman on board, an officer in the Royal Navy, Raymond Parkes (a melancholy man who had kept to himself for much of the voyage, and is barely mentioned by Edward before this; in the depths of another long winter, he hanged himself in his cabin and was left on board in the coffin they’d meant to bring him home in). On the eve of his select team’s departure, Edward made a last speech to his crew. He thanked them for their vigour, their good cheer, their expertise; and he assured them again he would not turn back. He told his party that it would be no shame if they wished to, that they could do so at any time, but if he had to push on alone he would.

  On 1 March, Edward and his five men set out for the North Pole. He had waited two long winters and a summer for the moment; he had waited, he thought, his whole life. They had spent months preparing kayaks, sleds, provisions. He had borrowed much from Nansen, bucking British convention by using dogs, studying carefully so that he might take the same wise precautions, calculating weights and capacities, but for one detail which he knew would be his making or undoing: he would not turn back. Six men set out, intrepid, for the Pole. None returned or were heard from again.

  In the autumn of the following year, four Norwegian sailors, the survivors of a desperate
band who had left the Persephone still frozen and failing three months before, were found by a Russian whaling vessel, frostbitten, exhausted and barely alive on the shores of Spitzbergen. They had lost toes, fingers, companions, almost all hope. The ship, abandoned with the hanged corpse of her surrogate captain in the hold, was never found.

  They were warmed and changed, bathed and fed. They ate soft white bread for the first time in two years; they smoked real tobacco, they drank ale like nectar. There was a new monarch on the throne of their captain’s country, they were told; they raised a glass to King Edward, and another and another to their captain, who had not returned. In the hard months of their toil, their struggle through snow and cracking ice and salt-sludge seas, they had told each other tales of a Union Jack, planted at the Pole beside their own flag by the brave English officer. And now they learned that he had not triumphed, that nothing was known of him since the day he left the ship more than a year before them. So they raised a glass to his country, to his king, and to Edward Mackley, with tears in their smarting eyes. There was a picture in The Times, on the third page; a carefully pressed though yellowed copy remains among the family’s papers, the same presumably that was laid by an unwitting butler in its usual place on John’s desk, when the ink was fresh as the morning’s bread.

  ‘Four Norwegians have been found on Spitzbergen,’ John Mackley tells his brother’s wife, standing in the doorway of the morning room. ‘They left the Persephone in the spring.’

  Emily, drawn and tear-stained, looks up from her reading.