Yes, families and myths.
Julia turns to herself in the mirror. She reaches to the back of her neck and unclasps the silver anchor, feels it hot in her hand from the skin of her chest. Bright bronze eyes flash back as if fevered. Her cheeks are crimson. She sees the resemblance and finds herself wanting. On an autumn day in 1902, Emily Mackley saw her sin burn thus. And here is her great-granddaughter, staring back now at those same eyes — and holding the gaze steady; she will not let her look away.
NORWEGIAN PARTY FOUND AT SPITZBERGEN reads the headline in Monday’s Times, dated 29 September 1902. It is Emily’s privilege to receive the papers first — it was not, then, placed by an unwitting butler on John’s breakfast tray as we supposed, but here on the little round table by Emily’s usual seat. John, often busy with patients or otherwise occupied with his animals, will turn his attention briefly to the world at teatime, finding politics more palatable with a teacake in hand. So it was Emily, in fact, who first read this headline, cruelly hidden on the third page so that from the front the day’s news seemed innocuous.
Emily sits in the morning room with the paper before her, the first page turned, until the clock has ticked its way through almost an hour and a half. She stares at the faces of the men who had sailed with her husband, who she must have met during that first leg of the journey she joined him on; they are unrecognizable now, gaunt and bearded; and it seems so long ago. These men had watched him set out upon the ice; and what was she doing on that day, she wonders, what was she doing on 1 March last year when her husband set out upon the ice?
(She was moping. The weather was dismal, she longed to walk outside but couldn’t bear explaining herself to her nosy maid when she came back damp and muddy-shoed to change for dinner. So she spent the afternoon half reading and looking out at the grey garden. As she sat down to her soup that evening, feeling oppressed by the day spent indoors and the dulling sky, Edward was enjoying his first meal upon the ice, toasting his companions and the Pole with champagne and thinking of his wife at home, wondering what she was doing, seeing the time and knowing that she must be just sitting down to the soup.)
She reads the dates over and over; and the phrase ‘after one hundred days, they had not returned’. Edward had set out with provisions for one hundred days. He believed they would reach the Pole in forty, and take as many again to return; they could not carry the load of any greater contingency. He had planned his course and hoped to reach the camp at Cape Flora around eighty days after setting out, where they would find enough provisions to sustain them until they were collected. Persephone was to make her way to that point, if possible, as soon as the ice released her. It loosened in May and they managed to navigate a course, breaking through when there was no open water, and reached the island ninety-four days after bidding their captain farewell, expecting to find him there. A week after their arrival, the party had still not returned. Persephone was at risk of being trapped for the winter if they waited too long; they had agreed with Edward that they would not endanger her by doing so. Still they held out a further twenty days, dissolving in and out of the fog (they did not know it, and so Emily could not either, but that same fog was blanketing the captain and his team in their lonely struggling kayaks less than two hundred miles away). A hundred and twenty days after Edward and his party had left the ship, the crew of the Persephone set sail, telling themselves that he would surely have the wherewithal to winter over, and that they would return the following spring. They would arrive at the log cabin and find the six of them, feasting on seal meat around a roaring fire. ‘What took you so long?’ they would cry from the shore; ‘We’ve no flags to wave for you, we’ve left them at the Pole!’ And a great ‘Hurrah’ would sound out across the water.
After fifteen days’ sailing the ship was again enveloped in the thick fog, and they could not get their bearings; when it cleared they found they had been carried far out to the north-west, beyond the archipelago. Then the ice began to close in. When the sun set for the long winter they were once again trapped and drifting; in the violent packing of the early spring, they heard for the first time the ship’s timbers groan and crack. It was a deep freeze that year, they were still far to the north, and the ice failed to release them as the summer drew on; provisions and morale were low. The English surrogate captain was dead. Seeing no alternative, not trusting the ship to last out another winter, the remaining crew of twelve brave men struck south upon the ice as soon as it was passable, hoping to reach Spitzbergen before the long night fell. They struggled for six weeks towards salvation. Eight men died. Four survived. The Russian whaler that took them in a week after they reached land had no news of the Persephone or its captain.
Half past twelve twitters past and Arabella, whose rumbling stomach has been softly disturbing the quiet for the last half-hour, glances up to say, ‘I wonder what can be keeping lunch’; but she gets no further than ‘I won…’ (an empty victory) because she sees that Emily has not passed the third page of the paper and appears to be weeping over a picture of four fur-hatted men (one of their wind-burned faces on the yellowed page in the attic is indeed blurred out by her tears).
‘My dear…’ she says, at which John enters the room, his expression grave, delivering her from the need for compassion by asking that they might be excused. Arabella gathers up her silks, the question on her face unanswered, and goes in to lunch alone.
Perhaps we needn’t pry into what passed between her husband and their sister-in-law while she enjoyed an extra serving of each course; perhaps it is unnecessary, unkind. But Julia will not allow them to get away with it so easily, will not let them off the hook although history has done so. She knows full well that two bodies meeting in defiance of death are not always tender. She sees Emily go to him — yes, she would go to him first, right there in the morning room where Julia first made love to her own husband, not knowing the place was sullied, and the love she had imagined all spoiled. Emily goes to him and weeps against his chest and he, barely knowing what he is doing, kisses her hair and smoothes it back from her face, kisses her forehead, her weeping eyes, stroking her head as if to soothe a child, and she stretches up to meet his lips and he resists, at first, but her mouth wet with tears is too much for him, and he clasps her and returns her kiss, and they clutch at each other, they wrestle together with her stays and stockings, frantic now, he tears at them with his big doctor’s hands and grasps at her thighs, lifting her onto him, both crying, and it is over in seconds; so Julia imagines them, spending their rage and grief upon each other in a burst of frenzy until there is nothing but the fingerprint bruises on her skin and silence and guilt between them. And then she straightens her skirts over her shame, thinks how she will have to hide the torn evidence from the maid, straightens her bodice and leaves him there in his damp shirt-tails, trousers round his ankles. And in the hallway on her way to her room, she meets her own eye in the mirror, sees the red flush of her cheeks and her eyes bright. But how, thinks Julia, could she have looked herself in the eye then?
And nine months and seven days after that fateful article appeared in The Times, Edward Mackley was born, quietly, and passed to his father’s wife. And Emily, taking her seat at the breakfast table, said she would go on waiting.
Julia retreats numbly to the morning room and lies down upon the rug; but it gives no comfort. The Arctic hero, the wife bidding farewell, waiting… It is all spoiled.
Laid out on bearskin, desolate. Poor Edward in the night, the snow and the darkness for miles around him and the north wind, struggling, nearing the still point where she should be waiting, unable to go on, unable without… I cannot fill this want, this lack… I want Simon.
Simon; yes, she wants to speak to Simon. A feeling of physical want gaping suddenly so wide and empty that it shocks her, it has been so long since she felt it; but it should not surprise us or her. True, there is much that they have not confided in the last few years — there are longings and fears and losses festering — but she coul
d not go on alone now as she was before he found her, before he followed her over the threshold. She wants her husband; there is nothing strange in that. She wants to tell him — she’s not sure what. She wants to ask for forgiveness; she’s not sure what for.
She reaches for the phone, grasping blind with one hand above her on the table by her head. It gives a faint ting as she hooks a finger under the rest for the handset and brings the old thing down to her, resting it on her stomach. She insisted on keeping it, and it pleases her every time she uses it; so she stretched out here as a girl, twisting the cord about her fingers as she chatted, back when her worries were so pressing, exciting and short-lived; before life started taking everyone from her. Apart from Simon. Now without thinking she rings each impatient digit round the dial, barely letting it wheel back before catching it and spinning the next number round, and listens for the clicks of connection and hears it start to ring, somewhere in London; after eight rings, nine, ten, Joanne answers, a little breathless; she was just stepping out the door, she says, no he left ten minutes ago; Julia’s normal voice thanks her and says she’ll try his mobile, hangs up, again flicks each number with quick, nervous fingers, and hears it ring. And somewhere in London, Simon’s phone rings on unanswered.
Whisky, ale and wine
Julia would never betray her husband. The very thought of betrayal is anathema to everything she believes in, the whole fragmenting edifice she has staked her identity on. But, unknown to her, infidelity has been hovering at the edges of this day, disturbing sleep and lending the morning its oddly affectionate cast. It is a possibility only, an opportunity, somewhere in London, about to be offered.
Julia will never be unfaithful to her husband. She is not the nearly guilty party.
The afternoon has dragged past inevitably, but painfully slowly, for Simon. He has been laying foundations on paper while Julia’s have crumbled; while Julia’s world has splintered and split, Simon has been making new structures solid. But he himself, he knows, cannot stand so firm. Seven o’clock has at last bonged out across Westminster, and he has been forced to forgo the refuge of work and face consequences. Now he is pushing his way through the everpresent horde outside Parliament. The Gothic immensity of it is so familiar that he doesn’t even glance up at the towers and spindles, golden in the evening sun, which have mesmerized the gaping tourists that crowd the pavement, striking them dumb. In every sense of the word, Simon grumbles to himself, as he narrowly escapes the back-stepping trainer of a photographer moving out for a wider angle without thinking to look behind her. Simon is rushing for an appointment he has serious misgivings about attending at all. He checked his phone before setting out, hoping that he might somehow have missed a call or message to cancel, knowing he hadn’t. 19.06. If he hurried, he could have a drink before she got there.
Simon reaches the pub and orders the only single malt he can spot. He has arrived ten minutes early. This is not like him. He is, as you might expect, a punctual man. This means that he likes to arrive at any destination precisely on time, so that no time is wasted in the place before the minute of the assignation. Yet here he is, ordering himself a whisky at the bar, having deliberately allowed himself this time alone. Could it be that a spot of Dutch courage is called for? It would seem so. He doesn’t want to seem on edge. No, he doesn’t want to seem anything, suave or indifferent or boyish or… A clean break, just as he has already decided. Several times over. He fidgets with the glass, in the measured way that passes for a fidget in Simon’s fingers, rotating it round and around. Staring into its amber depths, thinking of his wife’s eyes, thinking of her sleepy, surprising smile — the first notes of the concerto creep into his mind, and he recalls that she didn’t get to hear them, that the alarm barged in right at the end of the piece, without regard for the careful layering of intensity, the suggestion building to insistence that precedes the final culmination; he has remembered too late what he forgot at the bathroom mirror, and resolves to find the CD for her when he gets home — and he will be home soon, just as soon as…
Here she is. He has stationed himself cleverly so that he is far from the door and partly hidden by the pillars of the long bar, but with a clear view of anyone entering. She is early, too. The old man further along the bar turns to look lasciviously — or so Simon imagines the look to be, with a prick of indignation that he quells before he can acknowledge it. He picks up the whisky and swallows it down, while she scopes the gloom, sunglasses incongruous on the top of her head. Simon had thought this place neutral, and wonders now if it is possibly bordering on the insulting, a grubby run-of-the-mill pub among a wealth of more pleasant options. Or if otherwise, to a certain turn of mind, there might be some sort of romance about the place. Some sort of run-down post-war glamour. He isn’t sure which would be preferable. He wishes he had another whisky (his father’s drink. He is not a big drinker. He is not like him. Certainly he’d never known his father to be nervous). Too late, she has seen him and he hurriedly puts the empty glass away from him and stands to greet her with a decorous kiss on the cheek, which she repeats on the other unexpectedly, awkwardly, and he shrivels inside. He orders an ale that he really doesn’t want and a white wine for her — ‘Oh, anything, medium dry,’ she says, and he feels an automatic inward sneer that he is, at least, ashamed of. He motions her to a table in the middle of the room so that they are quite exposed, avoiding the cosy booths around the edges, although he can see her speculating. Imagining the accidental brush of an ankle. Craven, he knows he is craven.
‘Oh, it’s just too hot for shopping today!’ she says, dropping carrier bags, fanning herself and sitting in the chair emphatically. She pouts her underlip to blow away a hair; it remains stuck to her forehead. Her cleavage is beaded with sweat and the red lipstick she wears is blurring her mouth at the edges. In the airless gloom, the grimy windows filtering the sun and casting a sickly light upon all within, she looks a little older than he’d remembered.
‘Buy anything nice?’ asks Simon politely.
He is relentlessly polite throughout the half-hour conversation that follows, politely evading any attempt at flirtation. She tries harder. She puts her hand on the table close to his and, without meaning to, he pulls away sharply. He notices her nails are now immaculate, newly manicured. For his benefit. He puts his hand on hers. His last chance: he might, then, have given into the crackle now coursing up his arm from his palm; offered a compliment; he might have smiled bashfully and suggested that they walk along the river, perhaps. But his hand is on hers out of kindness, his hand on hers has forced the moment to its crisis, so that there is nothing left to do but say:
‘I think I should apologize for my behaviour. It was inexcusable.’
Watching his lips make the words, Sandra’s own quiver just a little before she clamps them firm, a tightness at the corners the only hint of instability. She withdraws her hand delicately to lift her wine. She nods, understanding. A brief, murmured conversation follows; the words are the same as ever. My wife deserves better and so do you; in different circumstances, he implies, in another life, he lies…
But other lives are not our business. It is over, before it began. It might have gone differently, had it not been for the pheasant, for that shiver and the tenderness that followed; the unexpected smile and Rachmaninov and the eggs for breakfast, the accident on the road, the awful client and his squalid stories about his mistress. If the steak had been a better excuse for good wine, which might have induced him to drink more, and made the afternoon irrational. If the day hadn’t been so hot; in short, had it not been today. There are any number of factors, some of which we have surely missed or cannot know, that compel Simon to stand now and leave her with another peck on the cheek (this time she makes no attempt at symmetry). She holds her smile until he’s out of the door, and she’s left with a large glass of white wine that has no savour. It is an unpleasant yellow that makes her think of a man’s piss. She drinks it anyway, quietly despising everything, including herself,
staring at the table between acrid sips and not letting go of the stem. Then she dumps her over-stuffed handbag on the table and roots around for her lipstick.
She is almost relieved. She never meant to be a home-wrecker. She has been lonely since she left her husband. She’d like to make friends. She’d like a lover. She’s not sure which she wants more. She wants to wear scruffy summer dresses and still look beautiful, like her neighbour. She wants to stand in the dawn sun naked and not be ashamed. She doesn’t think a vicious kiss in the conservatory to be much of a triumph, in the face of that unassailable easy loveliness. A kiss like that has no hope in it. Thoughtful, she takes out her compact and carefully reapplies lipstick and powder although she’s quite aware that her make-up will soon be ruined anyway, the moment she gets in the door if she can keep herself together for the whole of the train journey home, because she cries all the bloody time, these days, and it’s making her eyes puffy.
Simon, meanwhile, is making purposeful strides for the Tube. He feels his mobile vibrate in his pocket and remembers thinking he felt it before, on his way to the pub; this time, he draws it out and sees that it’s Julia. When she calls him, her face fills the screen, her lips pouting for a kiss. This is her doing; she likes to surprise him with such things. When he first saw it, he shook his head and smiled. Now he quickly slips it back into his pocket, hiding her wide, trusting eyes. He feels sick. He drank the pint far too quickly, on top of the whisky too, so desperate was he to abandon Sandra with her near-full glass of wine; his stomach turns and turns again. The vibrating stops, and starts again almost immediately. He told her he’d be back late, he thinks, with a surge of irritation, was she listening to him? He is doing his best to get home to her now, he’s rushing for the Tube, he can’t answer or he’ll miss the train, what more does she want of him? She’ll just have to wait until he gets back.
The Still Point Page 21