Pages of diagrams follow, transcribing the tricks of the moon and tracing what seem to be routes through the archipelago, with Mackley’s Land transposed upon other islands or the open sea. In one, it becomes an additional Orkney — ‘so close we are, my love’; in another it sprouts a vast tail, becomes a whale that will swim them to safety on her back. Every entry in the diary is dated, but Edward is often unsure if he has slept for one hour or thirteen, eight or twenty. He might have slept through the year, even, or ten, and still the night was unchanging. On what he takes to be Christmas Day they savour one of the choicer last morsels of chewy meat, and share an omelette of surely rotten egg, and take a hard ship’s biscuit each. As they choose to welcome the New Year they sing in cracked voices the songs that Lars, long ago in a distant city, had taught the captain and his new wife. And on what he believes to be 20 January 1902, he writes five final pages in a hand barely strong enough to mark the paper. What is not illegible is often nonsensical.
He is nearing the end. No hope of the sun rising; the darkness has entered his eyes and his mind, so that even by the lit fire he sees only dimly. But he is close, he is close to it, he writes; he tries to write it down for her, what he can see now in the darkness. An Arctic map, he writes, is a map of concepts. Edgeless, shifting — no fixed centre, but I would have known it, had I walked upon it and felt the world turn. I set out now upon the ice in my mind and draw near it, now, my mind is as wide and clear as the white plain before me. Boundless, edgeless. The still point will come to meet me. Grace, all around me. I am nearing it. Circling. It is beautiful yet, this terrible place, the senseless lovely lights across the sky. It is dark now, I cannot see. A shard of ice has splintered my eye and she will come to carry me north to the still point. All about her is frozen but within her cloak it is warm, covered in her dark brass hair and warmed by a crimson blush…
These are the last faded ribbons of his tattered mind, which Helen did her best to unravel and reweave for Emily to catch at; Julia now takes up their frayed endings. A last fragment of clarity, and then the pages are nothing but white: ‘I am sorry that I did not reach it and that you waited in vain; if I find that there is a place beyond this then I shall wait for you there in turn. I cannot go on with it, I fear; I cannot go on.’
So it ends for Edward. It’s over, again. The old lament: ‘I cannot go on.’ Julia, too, cannot. And in another hand, the echo, ‘I cannot go on without…’ She lets the book fall upon her chest; she lets her eyes close.
In 1959 a Soviet scientific expedition found evidence of a makeshift shelter on a minor island in the north of Franz Josef Land, containing the petrified corpse of what had once been an unusually tall, broad-shouldered man, his red hair still clinging in strands to his skull; close by, four tin crosses marked a row of shallow graves. Upon exhumation, the fourth on the right gave up the body of Edward Mackley, skin stretched taut over his handsome cheeks, eyes milkwhite, white teeth protruding under the straggle of moustache that hung from
his shrunken black lips; when they tried to move him, they found his back was firmly glued into a solid block of ice filling the base of the coffin. The grave was rudely raided by the party that found it, in the hope of identifying the man whose name was unknown to them, so that his last effects were taken from him. To avoid upsetting the strained international relations of the time, after their government’s inspection confirmed that there was nothing untoward, their findings were handed over to the Royal Navy. So his diary and the photograph he held as he was dying were returned to England, along with the remnants of the camp, which included an old tin telescope and a broken silver watch.
Emily was eighty-one years old, the heat of her youth and the loss of her maidenhood long since forgotten. She took care herself not to recall it, and was rarely troubled in those days by dreams. After sixty years of waiting, she looked down at her twenty-year-old self, the flush of her cheeks in the picture quite faded just as she herself had paled into old age, and wept. It was little more than the spilling over of an old woman’s watery eyes.
But I was waiting
In the afternoon sun that streams through the attic, a hundred years after Edward Mackley died, the words that his wife heard at last at the end of her life now rest against Julia’s heart. She exhales, exhausted, half sleeping. ‘I cannot go on with it.’
But I waited
The words whisper about the house and into the garden and out, a sigh caught on the breeze and borne across the sea to the north, stretching ever north, the longing scribed indelibly in memory’s invisible ink. Julia is lost in the snow.
Waiting all that time, outstretched at the still point, I did not weep. I waited and he did not come, and I could not go on without
But she did, patient Emily, she went on without him, and when at last she knew he was gone, she let him go.
When Edward’s body was at last found buried on a small island in the Franz Josef Land archipelago, Emily Mackley sighed the long, deep sigh that breathes through these rooms still, and went to bed until she died. She had lived patiently alone in her husband’s brother’s house so that he would know where to find her if he found his way back; she had lived through two world wars, seen three kings die and another abandon his crown for a wife, and seen a woman once again take the throne; she had suffered, and seen suffering, and done what she could to aid those that suffered; and all the time Edward had been resting, far from bombs and all the horrors and the wonders and triumphs of the century he’d seen only the cusp of, out in the snow. And now it was her turn to rest, and she lay down and rested. A little less than a year later, she died. They said she’d finally allowed her patient heart to break. The truth was less romantic, but it may have been that her liver was holding out for her heart’s sake, just long enough to be sure at last. At the age of eighty-two she had had, they said, a good innings. She kept her figure, and her looks, well into old age; she enjoyed a drink, and why shouldn’t she? A well-preserved old lady, pickled in gin, they said, with the affection families have for their harmless alcoholics.
The last of the staff had departed some years since, but she had no need of a nursemaid as she neared the end; Helen was on hand, watching as she slept a little more each day. She brought her trays, plying her scant appetite with crackers, smoked salmon, sometimes a boiled egg; sweet tea in the morning with whole milk; thick, dark hot chocolate at night, a shared ritual that Helen had brought back from Milan; and, in between, gin and stories. They drank slowly and steadily, sipping away at a slow cocktail hour that began after lunchtime and, after a brief hiatus for Emily’s afternoon nap, resumed and lingered until the sun had fully set.
PART V
Listen:
. . . . .
Five o’clock is happening all over the house, at intervals. It started five minutes ago, in the drawing room, the clack of the clock so decisive that there’s no sense arguing, although it is mistaken. Then the silent steel hands of the kitchen clock slid into place. They have been counting the hours unobtrusively since 1973, with occasional pauses of sometimes days at a time before anyone notices the battery has gone, and often even then a week or more might pass before someone takes the trouble to drag a kitchen stool to the doorway and clamber up to change it and reset the hands to whatever their own possibly erroneous timepiece deems it to be. (Simon could reach it effortlessly from the ground, but it was Julia who spotted the poor thing stuck at the sad downturned angle of twenty-five to six last May. Dark so early? she’d thought at first, then realized the truth was two and a half hours later at least.)
Five o’clock, then, as set in accordance with some other inaccurate dial, has passed in the kitchen. The lamb should go into the oven soon, but Julia is not here, and even Tess has given up her vigil; she is curled up quite illegally on the rug in the bedroom, just beside the head which has been left attached to the empty fur. It is a favourite spot, forbidden to her, but the door was left open and Tess is hardly a stickler for the rules; and Simon, who she knows would lif
t her and drop her without ceremony in the corridor, isn’t around.
Julia’s wristwatch has not been sought since it was laid out carefully on the dressing table last night; neglected as ever by her gaze, it lights delicately upon the hour (a tiny silver line is all that marks it, covered by the slender silver hand entirely). One minute and thirteen seconds later, the red digits of the radio alarm follow suit.
In an office overlooking the plane trees lining the Thames, at precisely the moment the bedside clock changes, five o’clock occurs, reverberating to Big Ben’s assertive bong. There is no drawn-out process of anticipation and catchup here; the display on Simon’s computer, on the mobile phone he’s still ignoring, and on his watch are all in soundless but assured synchrony.
As the distinctive clonk of the grandfather clock in the hallway triggers the ratchet of the lead weight, and the chiming of the hour commences with a thud (only eighty-four seconds late), Julia wakes with a start in the attic.
A visitor
It is hard to say if it is clonk, ratchet, thud or chime that stirs Julia’s snooze, or if it is the imminence of this sequence, like a sleeper who is so accustomed to the minute of their daily waking that they always anticipate their alarm clock by a second. For while she does not habitually wake at this hour, she had planned to prepare herself at five for her guest, and the soft thudding of the clock is constant in her, her heart keeping time with the house. She does not even hear it in bed, as Simon does; it is just a part of the sound of the night.
So, here is Julia, waking with a start at the striking of the hour. Her neck is stiff; the rose-coloured bolster has become squashed down into the crevice between the seat cushion and the arm of the chaise so that the ridge of her skull is now jammed against hard upholstered wood. Her hair is damp at the nape with day-sleep sweat; when she stands up (rolling as if to the floor and then suddenly upright), she finds her dress is stuck to her back, her knickers uncomfortably wedged, her skin tacky with sweat and dust. She catches at an echo in the air, five chimes hanging in the silence:
Five chimes after the thud; why should I wake with a start? What is it I should be starting?
The sun has passed over the apex now, and the dimmed attic is thick with a viscid brown heat. Only a few faint motes dance in the deep yellow light.
She looks down at the detritus of her morning’s work: telescope, rifle, snow goggles, paper everywhere. Her notebook open on the desk with doodles of a fox in the margin, a double moon, a dog baring horrible teeth, a set of snowshoed footprints disappearing off the edge of the page. A bundle of letters now retied with black ribbon. A photograph in faded silver of a young woman laughing, her eyes still bright, skis just visible below a skirt to the ankles
Setting out upon the snow to meet him. Too hot for snow. Too hot, I’m too hot.
She stands for a moment longer, uncomfortable in her sticky skin, lifting her hair away from her neck with one hand, snapping at her underwear’s elastic to straighten it with the other. She ruffles the hair at the crown, matting it, then scratches the top of her head with her nails in an unconscious cartoon gesture of puzzlement that Simon used to find hilarious. The shock of her waking has left an empty sick-feeling pit in the wake of her stomach’s lurch.
Hungry?
She looks up at the polar bear; it roars back, unhelpfully silent.
Polar bear posed with a roar, John taking the paw… John. John?
With a rush of clarity she remembers the lamb and, more urgently, the impending arrival of her cousin Jonathan, who is in London on business and dropping by for a visit before driving back to Sheffield, where he now lives, having left America two years ago; he got married, but she hasn’t seen him since he was a boy, because he’s busy with his job doing…
Something… And didn’t come to Aunt Helen’s funeral because…
But Julia has dashed from the attic down the stairs, the end of the thought suspended, having no time now for biography (and leaving the ship’s clock in Box 002 to make it to five in its own time). Barefoot, she does not clatter as she goes, and pads speedily along the corridor past John and his waltzing bear, and down the wider stairs to the first floor (creak, crack, no longer avoiding the tired wood of the centre), stripping off her dress as she crosses the bedroom. In the adjoining bathroom (airless, even hotter than it was at night, although the extractor fan whirrs noisily to life as she switches the light on), she takes the soft natural sponge from the shower, still floppy with damp and now clammy from the morning, and runs it under the cold tap and presses it over her skin. Her joints are surprisingly flexible; there is no place on her back she cannot reach with ease. Her shoulders, cramped in the chaise for too long, relish the stretch. A similar sponge, in its neatly labelled jar in the attic, bobs briefly to the surface of her mind:
Sponge in alcohol, old soak…
But all other thoughts are dispelled by the cool air from the window on her dampened skin as she returns to the bedroom. She drops her dress beside Tess on the rug on her way to the dressing table, noting out loud in passing, for the sake of appearances, that she is a bad cat. Tess glances up for a moment before curling back into yellow slit-eyed contentment in the fur, turning her head half upside down to expose the chin, in case anyone should feel inclined to stroke it. But Julia is at the mirror now, and Tess understands the need for preening.
Julia combs out her hair, pulling it free of the band which is valiantly clinging to a few last locks, and tugging first her hands and then a brush through it until it shines again. She sits on the padded stool in her underwear and pulls her cheeks down long with both long hands, exposing the inside lids under her eyes, and utters a little groan, which means
When I was a girl, my face was uncreased and wrinkles were something old people had, and make-up was excitingly bright pink and cheap purple and anyway forbidden and rouge was a word I longed for, and now I must struggle to attain what they call a natural look and there is nothing more unnatural or unfair than ageing.
Her mind is as creased as her skin from sleeping; she is groggy from the stifling heat in the attic and the half-dreams of Edward and Emily that linger about her, caught in the folds of thought, the shifting below her, the roll of the sea, the fall through the ice, the waiting, the horrible drawn-out death… She smoothes a cream with her hands about the contours of her face, across the forehead, which puckers briefly in annoyance at the small worry line between her brows; up the fine, high Mackley cheekbones that her mother admired; covering the darkness that has crept below her bronze-brown eyes, through which, following the line of their gaze as they meet themselves now in the mirror, we might still glimpse a remnant of the Arctic night, a deep, deep indigo lit by glittering stars. She frames them in kohl, smudging the edges gently so she doesn’t look sharp, and brushes her lashes with black, and flutters briefly a butterfly kiss to her own reflection; coquette. The word prompts a whim, and she takes up a red lipstick that she knows Simon can’t stand, and paints it on thick to receive her guest; her cousin will see how glamorous she is, how well the house fits about her beautiful life.
To match, she chooses a simple black dress and steps into it so as not to smudge the red, wriggles it up over her hips, zips and belts it, brushes her hair again, and runs down the stairs to the kitchen. The sun has shifted around, no longer pooling on the floor, so that she can feel only the residue of it on the tiles through her soles
Terra cotta, terra firma, better put some shoes on…
The kitchen is half submerged in the cool earth, and offers some respite from the heat. Nevertheless, by the time she has turned on the oven, stretched up to lift the lamb from the top of the fridge, foraged in the dusty wine cellar for a particular bottle she knows Simon likes, which of course is stowed in the most awkward possible corner, wrestled with the over-stuffed salad tray to pull out the beans and beetroot that have burrowed their way to the bottom and then forced everything back in so that she can close the fridge again, grappled with the clatter of the drawer full of
obscure utensils to find the meat thermometer, speared the lamb with it and placed it in the oven, blowing out her cheeks as she opens the door as if hoping to push the blast of heat back in, and trodden in a carelessly abandoned chunk of fish by Tess’s bowl — by the time all this has been accomplished, she is regretting her lack of planning and wishing she had come here first, before dressing. Her hair has reglued itself to the back of her neck, her hands feel grimy from the bottles of wine and the grease of the roasting pan, her foot presumably smells of tuna… She rushes back up the stairs (without pausing, this time, to admire the butterflies).
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