The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

  In the days following their father’s funeral, the girls sat dazed in their rooms or in the conservatory, delaying the question of a return to their studies. They sat side by side, sometimes talking, sometimes quiet, sharing cigarettes; in the evenings they ate with their mother and Aunt Helen and poured out memories along with bottles of white wine. After four days of this, they went to the pub along the road before dinner; although they didn’t admit it even to each other, they were stifling in the nearness of their mother’s grief. They got talking to a local boy, home for the weekend from college. Julia felt awkward and shy and underage, although no one out here in the country seemed to care; Miranda let him buy them one vodka and orange after another, and told him all about the Mackleys. Her bright nails, painted just before they left the house in defiance of mourning and death — Julia can see them now, magenta and fuchsia, so many words for pink there were in those days, cerise — her nails clashing with the orange in the glass, and touching the boy’s leg lightly so that Julia looked away embarrassed and wished she hadn’t come. ‘You should see the place, it’s like a museum,’ said Miranda, as if it was only a lot of old junk. The boy said he’d love to see the polar bears and came home with them for dinner. If Aunt Helen and their mother were aware of him leaving in the early hours of the morning, neither one said a word, tacitly agreeing that Miranda too was grieving, she was nineteen years old, after all, and deserved to take her comfort where she found it.

  Julia remembers how she’d heard him pass her door and minutes later heard Miranda’s creeping tread creak on the landing. She knocked gently and came in without waiting to be asked, sat down on the side of the bed and lit a cigarette. Her eyes were wet; they reflected the flame, shining in the neardarkness.

  ‘He freaked out,’ said Miranda.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I started crying. After. He thought it was my first time and started being all manly about it so I told him it wasn’t that, and that my dad was dead. Then I really started crying.’

  Julia remembers herself sitting up in bed, the cool early morning, remembers Miranda’s damp forehead under her fingers as she brushed at her fringe.

  ‘And he left?’

  ‘Yeah. He did say sorry.’

  ‘Well that’s all right then. God, Miranda.’

  ‘It’s okay. These beds are tiny anyway.’

  ‘True. Want to get in? We’re only small.’

  They slept side by side that night, as they had when they were younger and Miranda still lived at home, when she would come in from friends’ house parties and forbidden clubs and climb in beside her little sister smelling of cheap drinks and perfume, to tell her the secrets of the evening. That night they slept soundly, although it was not a bed for two people to sleep in. It was the bed that Emily Mackley came back to, the guest bed that she should have only rested in for a spell, before her husband came home to lay her down on their marriage quilt.

  Laid out here with the space beside her. The endless cold white sheet. The snow. A foot of space which should have been wider, which couldn’t have been emptier, which should have been filled with him. Warm, soft like snow her skin. Waiting.

  The white curtains stir in the air from the open window, fluttering out into the room.

  Wind in the sails pushing her homeward. The white sail billows. She will soon be ashore. Assured of his love, of his courage. She would wait for her husband the hero who would not fail. She could not have him fail. Even now he is striding, his footprints track a path in the snow to victory. He will come back to find her waiting. He will lay her down on the whiteness and she will warm him. She waited for the day, watching the horizon, laid out waiting, and he did not come.

  A snowflake-patterned bedspread covers the bed. This thread has come loose: tug at it gently and it will pull free. Where the stitching has taken it below the surface, the pale sea green remains unfaded. Arabella Mackley made it for her sister-in-law, to keep her warm; it is embroidered with a design of her own devising, each flake as in nature unique. It is hard to know what Arabella meant by this quilt over which she laboured, this masterwork of envy and restraint. It may have been nothing more than a tribute to the snows that Emily longed for; a lapse in tact, possibly, to bury her too under ice, but not necessarily a cruel or stupid act. Emily kept the window open all through the year so that she could feel the cold sky on her skin, dreaming under her blanket of snow just as her husband lay under his (although she did not know then that he was buried, and no longer dreaming).

  Lying there alone, night after night, it may have been that she wanted only a husband, not a hero. It may have been that she did not care if his heart was with her always, that the weak charm of his words lost their power to warm after months upon months, after a year, after three. Yearning hopelessly after him, night after night, the memory of him physically, actually present fading inevitably even as she grasped after it, until she could no longer recall his actual pulse beating against her palm.

  Emily, lying prone on her bed, is far out to sea in a boat, alone. The sides nudge against icebergs, drifting all about her as she floats on the cold, black sea; she does not feel the chill through the boards under her back. No, she cannot feel a thing. Four Norwegians have been found on Spitzbergen. After a hundred days, Edward and his men had not returned. She can see the words still, the photograph, their four gaunt faces that she cannot recognize, her own tears falling upon them. Mourning the hope that was torn from her when she turned that page.

  She had sat as always in the morning room; the needle punctured and pulled; she turned the page. She stared at it for half an hour or more before complacent Arabella noticed a different pitch to the silence and looked up, saying, for something to say (although it was not yet twelve), ‘I don’t know why it is, but I’m quite ravenous today. I do hope lunch isn’t late. I wonder if cook has coped with the soufflé.’ She liked to say the word with an especially sophisticated French emphasis, and would very much have liked to share her concern with someone about Mrs MacLaverty’s inability to conjure an acceptably fluffy rise — barely half an inch last time, she’d reckoned — and John seemed so indifferent to these matters (‘Shall I fetch my steel rule, dear?’ he had said, rather drily she’d thought; she coloured at the memory). But the hope of a confidante was deflated as she looked up, because Emily was bent over the paper which she’d barely turned since sitting down to it, her hands and forearms flat on the table, her nose not six inches from the third page, over which she was weeping quietly.

  ‘I do hope… my dear. Are you unwell?’ At which Emily stood up abruptly, and asked to be excused, and hurried out of the room as fast as her skirts would allow her, without seeming even to hear Arabella ask if she would be coming down to join them, or should they have a tray sent up?

  Emily is far out on the icy sea, alone. Thinking of nothing. This is the lie she is telling herself. Nothing, nothing. No more tears. A bleak and empty, freezing sea. She must think of nothing. After one hundred and twenty days, the ship set sail; they had not returned. The Norwegians brought no news. Nothing, nothing. She stretches out north and cannot find him. No news from the north. A barren frozen sea. He is lost to the frozen sea.

  There is a knock. She can attach no meaning to the sound. Another, more persistent, a man saying her name softly. Ah, he has come back to her after all! How like him to surprise her. But no, she cannot deceive herself thus for longer than one fond moment. Gingerly she sits up, as if by moving quickly she might wake herself, and knowing that to be awake, to be aware, would be calamitous. She must stay afloat. It is all a strange dream, in which she is floating out in a little boat, alone, and cannot reach him…

  ‘Come in,’ says a woman’s voice, her own but hollow and even.

  John pushes the door gently. He takes a step into the room, but his other foot is reluctant to cross the threshold, leaving him with a foolish feeling spreading from his intruding knee to his chest, which he suddenly feels to be puffed, pompous, hopelessly inadequat
e to this task.

  ‘Emily… Arabella told me…’

  ‘Would you tell her that I’d rather not take lunch today, thank you. I am not feeling myself.’ Or anything, she assures herself, I am not feeling anything, I am not anyone, as empty as the sea. Nothing, nothing.

  ‘Emily. I saw the paper. I am very sorry. I… You mustn’t despair. We mustn’t.’ His voice catches. ‘I am sure Edward is safe; he will find his way home.’

  Emily looks up and sees what John is withholding, what she, as a woman and a wife, can be permitted (although she will not permit it, she will not weep). She remembers that her husband is also John’s brother, and sees that he, too, could not bear to lose him. She puts a hand out to him and his black eyes fill with ink; he will not allow them to spill.

  Then he steps forward, closing the door behind him, and takes her hand. They cannot think now of propriety, which should halt him there at the threshold. He means only to sit beside her, with her hand in his. They each need only understanding, which they find in this grasp. He sits beside her, her long hand in his large one. He turns it and strokes the palm with his thumb. Then, although the foolishness has spread now across his shoulders and down his arms, and he is red with embarrassment and unsure of what he does, he raises it and kisses the centre, and presses it to his cheek, and then puts his to hers. They sit that way, each barely touching the other, for a long time. They hear the bell for lunch and do not stir. Their palms are wet with each other’s tears. Eight men have died. Her husband, his brother, has not returned from the north.

  Then, with tremendous care, keeping the keel steady, he unlaces her and lays her down on the bed, on the floor of the boat, with the indifferent sea all around them, rocked by it, and clinging tightly… She could allow him this, once only, the smallest space, opening for him to slide into

  …

  And then they are two bodies in the English sun, streaming through the window, and she weeps, and weeps, and he strokes her hair at the temple and she wonders if she can ever stop waiting, if she could permit herself or be permitted, what purpose it would serve to only stand and wait. She listens to his breathing even out beside her before she opens her eyes to see that his eyelids, still wet, are dark like Edward’s. She kisses each one like a sister; she knows their lips will not meet again.

  Nine months and seven days later, Edward Mackley was born with the briefest of cries, and passed quietly into Arabella’s arms. Emily sat down at the breakfast table and said yes, she had hope still; yes, she would wait.

  So this was where she sat, and watched herself fill out, grow round, and then age and slacken. Julia sees herself in the mirror now, the faint lines about her eyes that she earlier despaired of; when Emily was her age she hadn’t been touched for ten years. She watched her son grow up; she played with him as an aunt ought to; at first her breasts ached and leaked to feed him but she did not. She was grateful, perhaps, that they took him, that they let her stay, that she could be near him. Where else could she go? She watched as his face took the shape of Edward’s — and, of course, John’s — his brow, his nose, the angle of the head upon the neck.

  Like the Snow Queen’s chambers, the chambers of Emily’s heart grew vast, empty and cold. They cracked and ached with ice in the night. She would wake and find her fingers clutching and frozen. Only young Edward could melt her, but he was brought up to be sensible, with none of his namesake’s fire; a rather chilly little boy with a pedant’s brow and a serious purse to his lips. John taught him morals, Arabella taught him manners, and Emily could rarely persuade him to make mischief. Once she lifted him to ride the snow leopard, treasuring his giggling delight as she cried, ‘Faster! Oh, Edward, the bears are coming, we must go faster!’ Hearing his father descend the stairs, they froze, forming a brief tableau with the animals, suspended in motion as if they had never been animate (but moments before, how the leopard had run!). She put a hand on his mouth and lifted him gently down so that John found them quite innocently examining the baby bear’s paws. He paused to ask distractedly ‘what on earth the pair of them were up to’ before passing through the hallway with a bemused smile. In truth, he was uneasy around his son, and more so around Emily; he was comfortable only with those he could gently condescend to, his patients, his wife.

  Emily, too, felt embarrassed by young Edward’s presence, and by his adoptive mother’s indifference to it; the more so when little Thomas arrived, a robust, sanguine boy, instantly (and naturally) his mother’s favourite, forever upsetting whatever delicate project his brother was occupied by, and clamouring for Emily’s attention with a child’s intuition that she loved his brother better. Even though his mother doted on him so and was not awkward with him as she was with Edward, even though his father withheld something from his older brother that he himself did not want for, even though, indeed, he wanted for nothing, still this preference on his aunt’s part seemed to Thomas unfair. But Arabella praised him lavishly, for his strength and his appetite and his lovely bright hair, especially in Emily’s presence. When the boys were led in to visit them in the afternoon, before they all sat down to tea, she would heave him onto her knee — ‘Such a big boy!’ — and jiggle him while Edward and Emily sat separately, alone, each intent on a book, and if Arabella meant to prove by this that she was the victor, then Emily could not hope to dispute it.

  The children, of course, spent most of their time in the nursery, which later became the schoolroom. Emily would drop in on them occasionally, longing to interrupt and take over a poetry lesson but knowing she had no right, no place there. Her days were spent for the most part, as ever, with Arabella; Arabella with her pudgy face, her nose as pointed as a pin, her rounded shoulders, her surprisingly small and clever hands, sitting when she remembered with her back straight and slowly sagging until the call for lunch revived her. They could offer each other no comfort. Was it for her sister-in-law’s sake that Emily surrendered the remainder of her youth to drabness, that she wore dark blue and grey, that her hair was pulled into a sober bun, that she was calm and placid with company and no longer allowed her dark gold skin to flush crimson? Was it out of tact or penance that she transformed herself into her son’s maiden aunt? Or did she fear the consequences of allowing her eyes to flare in John’s presence?

  Very little of Arabella survives in the house. All that remains of her is a drift of cloths and cushions and coverlets; of the doilies that each heirloom is placed on. Always in the corner of conversations, she lived by needle and hoop and hook, turning a crocheted circle around and about or puncturing linen and pulling the silk through, silent, possibly bitter or jealous or only sad. History can be cruel; she was only an ordinary woman, washed out by the dazzle of the remarkable family she married into, for ever on the edges of the Mackleys. In photographs, the light seems never quite to reach her, an indistinct human mass by John’s side, expanding as the years roll on.

  It had always seemed to Julia that it was Arabella who was pushed to the edges; but she sees now that in life she was triumphant, even if the record doesn’t bear this out, even if it is Emily who is remembered. In the early pictures, that brief period when Edward and his young bride are captured together, they seem somehow to radiate distinction and brilliance through the faded half-tones of sepia or silver, as if the plate can only hint at what they shone with. Beside Edward, John is the lankier, older, more conventional brother, but still together they are a handsome pair; and Arabella, to her husband’s side, does not quite fit with this trio of striking individuals. In later pictures Edward has vanished, but whenever Emily makes an appearance, although she is reduced, thinner, wilfully plain, alone, always it is to her that the gaze is drawn.

  It was usually John — one of the last true Victorian dilettantes, a keen amateur in this as in so many things — who set up the shot. It is easy to imagine that the blurred white-pink mass of Arabella, swathed in lace and satin, was as overlooked in life as she was by the photographer’s composition. But perhaps it was not that Arabella was i
nherently nebulous; perhaps the focus of the lens betrayed John’s eye, which in life he would never again have allowed to wander, having more than learned his lesson. In the family portrait in the drawing room his gaze is turned indulgently upon his wife, as it should be. But there is an unsettling oddity in the otherwise orthodox arrangement of the painting, a dark gap between the elder son at his father’s side and the mother with babe in arms. As if there is a figure missing, who has no right to be there.

  Emily went on living in her husband’s family’s house, having no other option. Taking tea in primrose-patterned cups, spreading toast with the pale yellow shells of butter that were pared off daily with a silver butter-curler. Receiving guests and answering politely their questions about her husband. ‘Well, he may yet be found,’ they would say, scraping butter on toast complacently, the same phrase every time gaining in absurdity as the years passed. Eventually, it was clear that they could only be referring to his body, and yet it was said in the same way. And ‘Yes, we may hope,’ Emily would reply politely, in the same way every time, as they crunched, crunched, scraped and crunched. It was never suggested that she should do otherwise, that she should cease to hope, that she should consider forgoing the childless dignity of the widow. So she lived with her secret son and her nephew and a man who painfully resembled the one she fell in love with, so that it was difficult sometimes to recall the details in which his features differed.