The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

No. That cannot be it; she cannot have wept since the day he departed, she cannot have cried all that time, while Edward fought and lost against the snow. Julia knows that she too was noble and strong. There is scant record to call upon of those years as they passed quietly in the house he’d left behind, and it is hard to imagine how his wife might have lived in his absence; but a woman cannot live on longing alone. She must have called upon the forbearance that her husband had trusted she held in reserve; she must somehow have found a way through her days.

  Emily simply looks up, then, from her reading.

  ‘And Edward?’

  ‘Was not with them. Emily — ’ John steps into the room, closing the door behind him. In one hand he holds the newspaper; he puts out the other as he approaches, as if to console her, but finds he does not know how to do so and lets it fall on the back of a chair as if that was what he had meant.

  ‘Edward left the ship in March last year, as he’d always intended. To walk to the Pole.’

  ‘And did not return?’

  ‘And did not return.’

  Emily is silent, looking past him into a distance he can’t measure.

  Everything is equidistant, all is far from me as he is far from me and I will stretch out over the distance, until he returns, I am peaceful and will not weep, I am waiting

  ‘I am very sorry.’

  The sound of her own voice recalls her. ‘Do they bring news, the Norwegians? Do they know anything of him at all?’

  ‘They waited at the meeting point; Edward didn’t arrive. They were under instruction to sail before the winter set in. They drifted too far north, the ship was trapped in the ice again and couldn’t break free in the spring. Their supplies were running low, the man Edward left in charge has… was ill. He died.’ John is scanning the story over as he speaks, glad of the paper barrier of simple reported fact. ‘They had to abandon ship. A party of twelve set out to seek help. They thought the ship would soon break up.’

  ‘Of twelve?’

  ‘Eight died.’

  ‘God help them,’ said Emily, who did not believe in God. And then, perhaps, went back to her book…

  There is no known surviving record, in fact, of Emily’s immediate response, which was of a greater significance than Julia could guess at — but all in good time. What Julia knows, what has been passed down, is this: in the course of the month that followed the announcement in The Times, NORWEGIAN PARTY FOUND AT SPITZBERGEN, Emily tied up the last three years of letters with black satin ribbon and stowed them in her bureau; she made what calls she must upon her neighbours; she laid away skirts and furs; she ordered a great stack of books — natural history, poetry, French novels, Gibbon, Walter Scott — and then went to bed, for the better part of a year. Julia finds it possible, almost, to imagine this period as a perpetual dozy morning, laid out on the cool white sheet, tracing the wedding-cake patterns of the ceiling rose, as she herself dreamed hours away in that room as a girl; time had passed so easily then, unnoticed, or so it seems to her now, when the days take so long to fill, although the years slip by so quickly. So she envisions Emily’s blank limbo of not-waiting, not-mourning.

  However it was that the time passed, it is known that one morning in 1903, not long after midsummer’s day (four years since she had bidden him farewell), Emily woke — perhaps to the sound of her new nephew’s cry in the night nursery above her, or to the dream that plagued her of her lover decaying, or perhaps just to the birds at the window; whatever it was that woke her, she got up and dressed and appeared at the breakfast table smelling faintly of the mothballs her clothes had been kept in. She said yes, she would take an egg, and some toast. She said yes, she felt a great deal better, thank you. She said no, she had not given up hope. She could wait. She waited. She put away finery and would wear only sober dark blue and dove-grey (but never, for the rest of her life, black). She did not open that drawer again and her letters remained unread until Helen tugged at it after she died; it unstuck and released the last of the rose scent, so carefully captured there for more than fifty years and sour with sadness.

  What had happened to Edward? England asked the same question, for a year or two. Then began to forget; then in 1909 an American claimed the Pole, and any last vestige of interest in a British attempt waned; and the century went on to fight its wars and revolutions without him. And then, in 1959, his body was found, unsought for decades. And with it the diary he kept, open to the first page now and spread on Julia’s knee, as she sets out with him:

  I looked out upon this morning, this first of the month of March (1901), under one of the first risen suns of the year, and of the new century; never have I seen the ice so lovely, so bare. The blue shadows long in the shallowest ridges, the sky pallid. So short a stretch it seems until we attain our goal; and just a stretch longer until we are home, my dear, and you can tell me what has passed in my absence, and we shall between us plan what the next hundred years may bring.

  This is the first entry, written on their first night on the ice, snug in the tent after supper. They drank champagne and raised a toast to the Pole and the last of luxury. This diary, found buried in its aluminium canister with his body, is quite different from the official ship’s log that he left for Parkes to maintain, which was brought faithfully to England by Persephone’s survivors. This diary is a testament to his best self; he writes as a safeguard against the loss of the man he was, husband and hero; it is the voice that Julia hears when she listens for him. When they were children, Aunt Helen read to the girls from both the ship’s log and the diary; a judicious editor, she honed out an adventure, sparing them the days of nothing but weather reports, bearings, dredging and sounding, and retaining just enough gruesome detail to make the tale exciting. So Julia, who has been told this story for as long as she can remember, embellished by the years curled up in bed or by the fireside, cannot comprehend Emily’s many years of not knowing, or what it meant to know after so long waiting. For her, Edward has always been complete, his words so familiar that she hardly needs to read them; she has known him always as a hero to the last. But Helen had read the diary before, many, many times over, to Emily, whose eyes by then were milked over with cataracts, and who had for so many years not known the man he was in his last days. Nothing was left out of that telling, there were to be no improvisations or edits. She was urged on through suffering by a wife who had waited too long to bear any more omissions; it was all she could do now to flesh out the shade who had always walked beside her.

  He knew that, if he returned, he could rework a public version which obscured any trace of the too-sentimental (or, later, of despair); otherwise, it would be found by some other, or never found at all, and he would be past caring. And if it was found, then he wished his Emily to know he loved her; this slim, leather-bound book is one long address to the wife who was waiting, and her hundreds of letters may be weighed in the balance against it. He could not have known that it would come into the care of his brother’s great-granddaughter, that eyes like Emily’s would one day scan the pages, on a glorious summer afternoon such as those he dreamed of through the Arctic night. His life in her hands — strong, long hands like Emily’s. She must do it justice now; no omissions; but what of the gaps? Has she the right to imagine?

  The diary’s partner, the book he left his wife as a gift, remains curiously empty but for the poem he wrote in it, and on the next page a single entry in her hand, undated, incomplete as if interrupted: ‘Edward, what will you think of me? I cannot go on without’… Aunt Helen gave the book to Julia on her sixteenth birthday; how she longed to know the end of the sentence, and how she longed to make the remaining pages her own. But every page she scribbled on would be squandered, every line would lessen the blank perfection of its possibility. She has it still, unfilled.

  Tent

  Julia casts herself out into the white expanse that would swallow his story for more than half a century. There are pages in the diary that are water-stained, the ink leached pale; places nea
r the end where there is only the barest trace of graphite; but as she turns it slowly, we can still make out the words, although parts are indistinct. And for us there is always the liberty of what may be conjecture, even if Julia, supine on the chaise, struggling against her own legends, does her best to reject it.

  Edward set out, then, into the unknown. Doubtless, dauntless, sure-footed upon the snow that would bury him.

  At first, they travelled in half-darkness for much of the morning, marching on in the pale twilight and stopping when the barely risen sun had fully set; by the end of the month, it was almost light when they woke. Taking turns to ride upon the sleds, the men gave in to the breathtaking rush of beauty, speeding towards triumph on their dog-drawn chariots, exhilarated in the violet flush of the long dawn. On plains of sheer ice, the pack was fast and tireless, and on snowshoes the men too easily covered the distance. At such a pace, it seemed they would reach their goal in moments; they were higher upon the world than any man now, far beyond all that was ordinary, like gods in a land of immaculate light and splendour.

  For the first weeks, they made good progress. They were fortunate: the weather stayed clear, the ice for the most part passable. The sleds crossed easily over narrow gullies when they came to them. They covered nine or ten miles on a good day, trudging on over uneven patches, hauling the sleds where the dogs could not pull them, speaking little to keep their breath in the thin air. Careful not to exert themselves too much, for despite the ever-encroaching sun it was bitterly cold, and sweat freezes at such temperatures; but always moving enough to keep warm. They rested twice only in ten hours of marching, for only five minutes’ pause each time, stamping up and down and clutching chocolate in awkward mittens to stave off the cold. The ache of every limb, of thighs and arms and across their shoulders when at last they bedded down, made their relished sleep as deep and heavy as that of exhausted children.

  The tent they carried was made of silk, lightweight and strong, round, and large enough to accommodate a stove at the centre, and the six of them in three double sleeping bags — the advantage of shared body heat having long since overcome any English regard for privacy. Freely and Edward were old bedfellows; Hugh Compton-Hill, the diplomat’s son, was paired at first with Nordahl but found the mild Dr Wilkinson more tolerant of a squirming, muttering sleeper — truth be told, the good doctor was reminded of his wife, and after months alone in a narrow bunk which had seemed to him luxuriously wide was oddly comforted to have his nights again disturbed. And so Nordahl and Andreev, both large but stolid men, squeezed into the last bag and lay flat on their backs together like kings on a marble tomb, as if cast from the monument they deserved but would not, alas, receive. This was Edward’s team of brave men — and the boy he was compelled to bring with him.

  Each evening, as the sun spread across the horizon, the day’s march was called to a halt and the tent assembled, the white silk like the snow bathed crimson. They made it fast, secured the sleds while Andreev tended the dogs, and on a clear night could be snug inside within forty minutes. They climbed into their bags and waited for their clothes to thaw — stiff with ice, they cracked and squeaked as they flexed their limbs and it took an hour or more to warm themselves. When they could move again, they set about preparing supper; the simple, repetitive bill of canned and reheated fare seemed manfully spartan after Persephone’s lavish spreads. At night they slept in their wet clothes, drying the sodden wool lining of their boots with their own body heat, laid like compresses on the chest, so tired they barely felt discomfort.

  The days were varied only by the changing consistencies of light and snow, the lowering or thinning clouds, the thickness of the air and the depth underfoot. Edward’s diary is a series of measures assiduously taken, the reckoning of rations and of the horizon, the scale of the ice forms that towered about them more vast than any they had seen aboard ship or had imagined, ‘great monuments and temples such as gods might toss up effortless, in their own honour’. Through it all, pride and love and the promise of triumph and return. And beginning every entry, that essential measure: how far north. Almost every day is otherwise much the same, but for that figure creeping up daily through the 80s, recorded first and foremost without fail. The priority is never forgotten, so that more exceptional events are recorded as an afterthought — on 28 March, for example: ‘85° 72’ N. We must surely reach soon the 86th parallel; we are fast covering the distance’, and also: ‘Last night we were attacked by a huge bear. None were hurt but for one of the dogs; today we have been feasting.’

  The story of the bear proved a favourite with the girls. Julia’s father would prowl about the tent, growling, and the sisters would clutch at each other laughing, terrified, needing to pee. Early versions omitted the details of the murder, but one summer, by the campfire, Aunt Helen decided they were old enough to hear it, and knew when she saw their narrow faces aghast with grisly satisfaction that her judgement, as ever, was true.

  Edward and his men sweated and steamed in the damp heat of their own bodies in the tent, and cracked coarse jokes of which no record remains (not an appropriate legacy, thought Edward, to leave to his wife or the world). One night, Anton Andreev halted them with a raised hand. The gesture in itself was so unlike him, who rarely joined their banter with more than a bobbing, smiling laugh, that all were hushed.

  ‘Listen. It is Anna.’

  They listened. There was no wind, no sound, only stifled breathing; no leaves beyond the window, no familiar house-creak, no night-bird’s cry. Only the endless, patient quiet of the Arctic. They grew nervous; the tent, after all, a warm little glowing circle of solidarity, was very small, very thin, very lonely. They sat rigid, spines straight with attention, for minutes like hours of silence, until Compton-Hill slumped and laughed.

  ‘What did she say, old boy? You’ll have to translate, you know: we don’t speak Russian — or wolfhound, for that matter.’

  ‘Listen,’ Andreev said again. His features seemed carved by the orange light of the stove, his eyes shining below his dark brow. And then they heard it: a whine, very faint, but distinct. And another.

  ‘They’re dreaming of rabbits, Anton,’ said Edward, to calm his men, feeling their fear creep over his scalp.

  ‘No. They are not sleeping.’

  Edward held the Russian’s gaze. ‘No,’ said Edward. As carefully as he could in the cramped space, he slid himself out of the sleeping bag, staying Freely as he did so but motioning Andreev to step out with him. And then, crashing through the silence, the barking started; a furious frightened din, alarmingly close to them. In the tent, the men froze. Edward and Andreev’s eyes met and they began to move with quiet speed, pulling on boots and loading rifles. They heard the clamour subdued to a growl as they unlaced the tent. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light afforded by the new moon’s sliver, they saw the clear line of savagery, from the straining leashes through the slavering pack, long snouts all low-snarling at the point where a dark trail across the snow ended. A bare twenty yards off, the poor carcass of one of their number was still pinned by a pair of massive claws. As the men emerged, the bear raised its bloodied muzzle for a moment before deciding there was time enough and returning, placid, to his feast. They were close enough to hear the soft grunts, the rip of gristle. Close enough for a good clean shot.

  Bear meat is a delicacy relished by all who venture far enough to taste it. Andreev mourned for the dead hound, Yerik, an old friend; but it may be that revenge lent his supper that night an especially sweet savour.

  In early April a light snow began to fall; the air closed in upon them and thickened to a pale bright grey as dense as the snow beneath their feet, so that they could not see the meeting point between ground and sky or even a hand outstretched. Shadow and contour vanished. They were forced to send scouts ahead without the sleds, to find a path; any step might have run against a wall or plunged them into an unseen gully. They marched on, back and forth across the same ground to gather the whole party in increment
s, disorientated and frustratingly slower by the day, carrying the weight of the water frozen into their clothing so that they dragged the landscape with them at every step. Tiny fine crystals clung to their clothes, their eyebrows, rimed their nostrils. From the front, they were frosted white, driving into it; their backs remained duncoloured, so that they might have been pop-up cut-outs from an ice plain made of cardboard. Every hour the flakes grew fatter.

  Flurries and blinking conspired to blur their vision impossibly; their heads were so swaddled they could barely hear; so when Dr Wilkinson, bringing up the rear, plunged his foot deep into a hidden crack filled with slush, they were thirty yards on by the time they heard him calling. A faint and lonely human sound in the blizzard. They ran back, at the sinking helpless pace of a dream, hauled him out; he was quite all right, he said, just couldn’t get a purchase to pull himself up; his trouser froze solid so quickly that his leg wasn’t even touched by the cold. But Edward at last had to take the sign; it was too risky to press on. They made camp, picking at frozen knots with numb hands, wrestling with the sleds and the tent for two hours against the wind, then crawled inside and prepared to wait it out.

  They spent two nights in a strange, muffled proximity, the snow insulating the tent so that sunlight and sound were dampened. Every couple of hours they would check, in turn, the weather, and report back to their companions of the void. Groundless, depthless, airless, white. They could not take a bearing without sun or stars, compounding their frustration; they might be anywhere, or nowhere in the world. The dogs, in a makeshift shelter outside, curled about one another and slept all day and night; and the men, too, felt a curious instinct towards hibernation, their blood and breathing slow in the dim-filtered light.