Too hot to wear black, you idiot, absorbing heat, white reflects like ice, like snow, oh to lie down now in the soft snow… I’ll have to change, wear white, silk like snow like a wedding, no, not like a wedding, ridiculous, too much for a Thursday afternoon…
She flips through her wardrobe, each possibility dismissed with the satisfying metallic swoosh of a hanger on the rail. The wardrobe, which was Arabella’s and once had to accommodate layer upon layer of lace and satin, is vast. In what Arabella thought of as the French style, it is as shiny-smooth as stretched skin, bulging at the sides as if it can barely contain the contents of its belly, although it somehow contrives to look gracious, tottering on its little feet and topped with intricate twists and curls of foliage. Julia’s more modest collection of skirts, shirts and dresses now hangs alongside a few remaining furs, including a sable stole which she coveted as a child and wouldn’t dare to wear now that it is hers, although she sometimes brings it out to touch the soft, almost sickening crinkle of the edges of the skin. Her clothes had been crushed together in the small closet in their Balham flat; when she hung them here they shook themselves out, brushed themselves down and breathed a sigh of uncrumpled relief — only to be left in neglected piles on the floor as they always had been.
She selects, finally, a pale peach shift which she remembers wearing last week and discovers retreating under the bed. She checks her watch — it is almost half past — and, as an afterthought, clips it on. As she brushes her hair one last time and attempts to bind it neatly in a bun (it begins to slide as soon as her back is turned), she hears the doorbell, the old-fashioned ding-dong that has announced visitors since 1910. She once again descends the stairs, hopping on the landing with one hand on the banister to wipe at her foot with a tissue (the butterflies, implacable above their labels, rest in their rows), pulls on a pair of sandals she has fortuitously abandoned by the door, takes a moment to check herself in the hallway mirror and, meeting with the approval of the glass her ancestors passed through, turns to the dark form that looms without, a brown shadow through the amber glass.
So a stranger is about to intrude upon Julia’s day, a real, living person to join the ghosts that she has woken and which swarm still about her. She is a little light-headed, a little giddy from her reverie, and she is still adjusting to the warm, solid world after hours following in Edward’s path through the bright snow. She almost had him, today, she thinks. She could almost touch him, with Emily’s hand. And she feels strangely nervous of opening the door, as if the spell of sanctuary she has cast about her will be broken. She puts the odd twist in her stomach down to the flurry of her waking. But it may presage something; she may be unwise to dismiss it. Who can say what a stranger will bring in his wake?
Julia opens the door and finds the frame filled by a man putting his hand out to be shaken. The handshake is firm and sure, not crushing, the kind of handshake she likes.
Jonathan Mackley is, like Julia, John’s great-grandchild. His father was the son of John and Arabella’s second son, Thomas, who was Aunt Helen’s other brother. A little older than Julia, Jonathan is, then, some kind of cousin — she will work it out at some point, the removes. The surname has come to him through four generations; since Julia married, he is the last Mackley left to bear it, and has not yet passed it on. Names are borne like fruit, ripening on the old family tree, she thinks. He looks nothing like her, or like a Mackley; although as he clasps her hand and appraises her with his bright eye, she thinks she sees for a moment Edward’s gaze, looking out of the portrait and far beyond, to the north and glory. Jonathan’s very blue eyes are not black but they have that same stare about them. He is tall, not so tall as Simon, but broader, powerful and thick-set. His surprising orange hair (from Arabella’s side) is beginning to fade and he has a pale blond neat beard and almost invisible eyebrows, lost against his ruddy face, and wears a very clean-looking white shirt, no tie, and little round glasses on a little pointed nose which give him the appearance of an intellectual, friendly, slightly overweight ferret. She notices that they are still shaking hands, and also that his eye has not left hers, and she wonders what he makes of her and feels suddenly very conscious of her red lips.
‘This must be Julia,’ he says warmly, and she feels pleasure flush her chest, knowing by his emphasis that he remembers her fondly, and admires what she has become.
‘Yes, I suppose it must. How nice to see you, Jonathan.’
She leads him to the drawing room and asks if he would like a drink before they go upstairs, and adds hurriedly that most of the archive is housed in the attic if he’d like to see it while he’s here, because she fears her question might have sounded salacious. Then she has to stop herself thinking about what it might be like to sleep with Jonathan Mackley, who is after all a cousin, albeit at some remove, and not an especially attractive one at that — or at least, she corrects herself, not to her taste; she doesn’t wish to be cruel.
‘A gin and tonic would hit the spot’ is his response, not tea or coffee or even lemonade or water which was what Julia had imagined herself to be offering, on a weekday afternoon. But in the kitchen as she hears the ice clink into the glass, scents the sharp lime and the bitter spice of the spirit, she anticipates the tang and bite on her own tongue and wholeheartedly agrees — what an instinct for the apposite this cousin of hers displays. Look at him there with his ankle resting on his knee at such wonderful ease in his armchair, smiling at her as she comes in, without adjusting his pose; the way a man sits in a room alone will tell much, she thinks. She hands him the tall glass and he settles back, the redness visibly leaving his face as he lets out a long exaggerated sigh of contentment.
‘That’s just the ticket. I’m afraid London makes me thirsty; I can’t take the heat on a day like today.’ He speaks with a trace of an American accent; Great-uncle Thomas moved to Boston as a young man in the Twenties and this branch of the family have rarely been seen on this side of the ocean until Jonathan’s return, although they have determinedly clung to their clipped English vowels through three generations. Under the influence of Jonathan’s mid-Atlantic intonation, and in her soft peach slip and red lipstick and sipping her gin, Julia feels herself suddenly cast as some sparky Golden Age Hollywood heroine or sultry femme, in some noir or screwball, a feeling that could never fail to please her. She watches him, and remembers a midsummer-themed birthday party, an awkward, rather plump, older ginger boy too embarrassed by his accent to speak, looking longingly at the sweets; she remembers how she chose the nicest little cake and held it out to him on her hand.
Jonathan’s broad face beams in the sun from the window.
‘Ah, that’s hit the spot, sure enough,’ he smiles. He sips from his glass happily, strangely delicate in his big hands. His eye comes to rest on the Mackley family portrait on the wall opposite Edward and Emily, which is haunted by four dim spectres, the light reflecting on its dark, oily surface so that only the starkest contrasts are visible. Two gaunt and thin figures on the left, the smaller just taller than the other’s knee; the pale amorphous mass of Arabella on the right, with a fat pallid blob of baby on her knee, his own grandfather-to-be.
‘It’s been a time since I was last here. Not since I was a boy,’ he says, peering into the viscous depths; then, returning his gaze to Julia, remembers something he had meant to say. ‘I am sorry I couldn’t come to Aunt Helen’s funeral. I haven’t been to this house since I was a boy,’ he repeats, ‘but it seems just yesterday that she sat where you sit now. Extraordinary woman.’
‘Yes,’ Julia smiles, in a way that does not include him, although she does not mean to be rude. There is a pause. Jonathan again casts about the room. He recalls a warm summer’s day, a tableau of nymphs, of little well-behaved fairygirls with narrow faces weaving flowers into each other’s hair, sitting around his extraordinary aunt who wore… Did she wear a peach evening dress? Were her lips carmine? He remembers them whispering and laughing in a pretty, secret way and then fluttering off and al
ighting again on their butterfly wings, calling to each other, ‘Peaseblossom!’ ‘Cobweb!’ He thinks it was Julia that offered him one of their tiny cakes, peppermint-green and impossibly dainty with a pair of cake-wings settled on the cream, as if it might fly off teasing from his fat little hand. This scene has not occurred to him in many years; but here he is again in the very same room. Julia reclines in the wing-back chair, bare legs crossed and one shoe dangling, her arm resting on the chair’s arm and the oak knob nestled in the hollow of her palm as if shaped by it, just as Aunt Helen sat. He looks around him; the brightness suspends what he sees in a shimmer of dust, as if this little pocket of time that seems to clack on with the clock was called to a halt some decades ago, and the hands that move about the dial are an illusion only, always counting off the same hours. The rug is faded gold and blue. The walls are faded ochre. The faded curtains hide channels of rich sapphire in their folds; they are rarely drawn over the muslin drapes in summer. Jonathan senses that beneath every object, where surfaces have been hidden from the years, everything is vivid still; beneath the fade of time, the past still thrives. He wants to ask if it was indeed her who held out that tiny sugar-dusted treat on the palm of her hand. He sips his gin. He says:
‘You don’t think of redecorating?’
Julia, still smiling to herself, almost starts at this.
‘Oh, you know. All the family things…’
Jonathan doesn’t know, but makes a politely prompting noise in the hope of an explanation. He remembers, vaguely, that Julia is some kind of historian, an archivist. She is not at work. There was no question of her being at work when he asked if he might visit. Perhaps there is a connection.
‘I’m trying to sort it all. It’s all such a mess. And Aunt Emily’s, too. So much has been left here. Valuable things. I should say Great-aunt, shouldn’t I. No, Great-great-aunt, isn’t she? Helen was Great-aunt. John was Great-grandfather, and Edward Great-great-uncle and the other Edward not great, just Grandfather. But your great-uncle, so he was great too I suppose. So much greatness.’
Julia is blushing now. She has quite lost her thread. But Jonathan laughs as if it is a joke she meant to make, which he finds most amusing.
‘All these Mackley generations, half of us called the same thing. We all just collapse in on each other,’ he says; he is so understanding, she thinks, so kind.
‘As if he might walk in at any moment with the ice still on him,’ she says gratefully, unexpectedly.
Jonathan looks surprised, but only for a moment. He is finding the conversation refreshingly free-wheeling after the stuffy boardroom. ‘If only he had, I suppose. But then I might not be enjoying such delightful company this afternoon. Who knows how it might have gone, if he’d come back?’
Julia laughs. ‘I should hope I would still be right here! With perhaps one or two more polar bears to keep me company.’
‘Well, yes. Perhaps. But where would Edward be?’
‘Edward?’
‘Your grandfather, I mean. The son. Would he have come about, would he have been a different man? You know.’ But Julia, in turn, does not know. There is that twist in her stomach again. Just the gin, she thinks.
‘I’m not sure I…’
‘I wonder if everyone’s family is so fascinating.’
‘Why would he not…’
‘Just imagine, if he’d come back too late,’ oblivious Jonathan plunges on.
‘Too late?’ falters Julia.
‘If Edward had already been born. Would they have told him?’
She takes another sip; another nauseous twist. The ice cube she’s munched and swallowed has become an unbearable lump of chill in her stomach suddenly. The freeze is spreading to her forehead. Far out on the edge of her awareness, Julia hears something massive groaning. A judder in the world that resounds in her chest. Something shifts and threatens to split.
Sometimes secrets are patient and will wait a century to be revealed; they seem solid enough to build upon; they will hold, perhaps; but perhaps there is some animal sense, something that tells us that they will eventually give way. So we should not be surprised by the freeze that is stealing upon Julia, a sensation akin to panic. She has waited for this, without knowing there was anything to know. If she’d looked closer, she might have seen it in her own eyes in the mirror, but why would she think to seek secrets there? What does that indigo at the centre hide, dark as the Arctic night?
‘I’m sorry, Jonathan,’ says Julia, rising to take his glass, mixing more drinks at the cabinet. There she stands with her back to the room, wondering if she should fetch more ice and lime from the kitchen and if there can possibly be any sense to what he’s saying. Her narrow back, and hair just beginning to work itself free again, a runnel of cold sweat between her sharp shoulders, but quite composed and casual except for the rattle of the bottle on the rim of the glass as if she has the shakes, drinking on a hangover, what can you expect, she thinks, what can he possibly be saying? She is watching herself from a distance, watching herself moving and speaking like an ordinary person might, in a voice that sounds like it ought to if she were the ordinary slightly glamorous middle-class housewife she appears to be… ‘Told him what? I’m afraid I’m being rather dense.’
Jonathan has been rolling a cigar back and forth between his fingers, wondering if they might take a stroll outside and waiting for an appropriate pause to suggest it, and only now registers the incomprehension his idle imaginings have met with. The strong strain of tactless inattention has survived all through Arabella’s line, although it has been tempered in this man with kindness.
‘Well, you know. About Emily and John.’
Julia looks politely blank.
‘Did no one ever tell you?’
The creak and groan that sounded from afar grows more urgent, becomes a physical lurch beneath the feet. The frozen sea is roaring. What seemed solid will not remain so. The ice in their glasses has melted in the heat. She should certainly restore it.
‘Let me get more ice and we’ll go into the garden,’ says Julia in her normal voice, seeing the cigar. Smoking seems like a good idea, a good, normal thing to do. She takes the glasses into the kitchen and yanks at the stuck freezer drawer and bangs the ice-cube tray on the counter so hard that the ice flies everywhere and she takes the pieces that fell on the floor and puts them in her own glass, its rim distinctly smeared with red, which seems the socially correct thing to do; then she slices two more wedges of lime, taking extra care not to cut herself, which she so often does, being so easily distracted. But now she is certainly concentrating on the knife, there was something Jonathan was saying, something rather important, but for now she is slicing a lime. He can explain it in the garden.
Here they are, walking in the garden. She tries not to hear the words whispering, I cannot go on with it, I cannot go on.
But I waited…
Jonathan, failing to register the seismic heave his words have triggered, seeing only Julia’s apparent calm and enjoying his cigar in the sunshine, is telling the story. Julia is smoking her second cigarette of the day as she listens to his voice beside her, far off; she gave no thought to lighting it, she is barely aware of the thing in her hands or the smoke she takes in deep with every inhalation because what had seemed solid is slowly, slowly cracking beneath her, wider and slow
Wide and slow, a crevasse widens, a chasm, a chasm, a chasm…
She cannot think beyond this, she is falling into this empty echo. It is cruel perhaps to force the thought into the shape of words.
She is Emily’s great-grandchild.
I cannot go on without…
Emily did not wait. She could wait no longer alone, in the cold. She could not go on without. So soon, she betrayed him. Julia herself exists because of this betrayal.
It is so hot this afternoon. The day is relentless, pressing up against the evening with a close threat as if on the point of drenching, although the sky is endlessly blue, a depthless ocean, a blue that looks bla
ck if you look up long enough to let it consume you. The sun has been too long on Julia’s dark blonde head, soaking through, her mind all sun-stroked; she is dizzy with the gin and the nicotine, the heat and the glare. She is silent. They smoke together and admire the garden. The smoke will make the sheets smell, she thinks. She hasn’t taken the washing in; she considers this. It doesn’t seem to matter. The silence becomes awkward. And why after all should they have anything in common? Blithe, blundering, kind Jonathan; Julia, born of betrayal. Jonathan starts talking again, he is saying something about Edward and Thomas, something about death; about Aunt Helen, did Aunt Helen not know? Julia is overheated and frozen to the core; there is sweat on her brow and down her spine. She lights another cigarette and inhales deeply and flutters out over the chasm.
In the first damp chills of September, in 1902, four Norwegian survivors were found on Spitzbergen, and Emily Mackley ebbed away to her room where she was thought to be grieving, or whatever equivalent is left to the wives of the not dead but lost. But she emerged from her self-imposed confinement the following summer, fuller and quieter, and assured anyone who asked that she had not given up hope. A slip of the tongue and the truth is out: she was, indeed, confined, in the sense in which her contemporaries used the word. And no one knew; no one but John and Arabella, who had good reason to keep the secret hidden. Since winter, when the truth began to show, Arabella too had been concealed from the world. She lay upon her bed, reading romantic novels and stroking the spread flesh of her flat, if well-covered, stomach and hoping too, waiting… but of course they couldn’t afford to be betrayed by a genuine swelling. John was courteous, and bent down each night to wish her sweet dreams with a kiss on her soft, plump cheek, but had a cot made up for him beside the big double bed, and Arabella’s fingers, outstretched in the night, could just barely graze his quilt.
The Still Point Page 19