‘I’m sorry, I have disturbed you. I couldn’t resist listening.’
From then on, their evenings were filled more often than not with music and John’s enthusiasm, the clack of the clock and the ponk of Arabella’s ever-industrious needles drowned out by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin; Emily rapt and John enraptured, leafing through papers or some weighty volume that could not possibly interest him more than the back of her neck and her quick clever fingers, caught in the corner of his eye.
Then four Norwegians were found on Spitzbergen, the last presumed survivors of the Persephone, the ship abandoned to the ice to be forced down into the underworld for ever; and Emily took to her bed, and his wife too was resting, and after little Edward was born there was no more music heard in that house. When Helen asked, many years later, if Emily could play, she replied that she had fallen out of the habit, somehow, and had probably forgotten, and she blushed a dark red that had not burned her cheeks for a long time, for too long. And John said, ‘Don’t pester your aunt, Helen,’ and the subject was not raised again. And so the piano went largely unplayed. For a century it was touched only roughly, by overexcited guests and children, or with the mechanical delicacy of an occasional tuner whom Aunt Helen brought in on the off-chance someone might take pity on the poor old thing and play properly, she said. She would be pleased to see Simon sitting there now, to know her efforts were not wasted; for when he came into the room this evening, thinking he would finally recover that CD for Julia, and found himself instead lifting the lid off the keyboard and making a tentative approach to those first creeping phrases, he found that, just as it had been last April when he had refused to play on, it was almost perfectly in tune. A few years of neglect had only slightly flattened the low notes; he recalled the ugly pale yellow instrument he had been compelled to play at school, and forgave the deep mahogany timbre of the Mackleys’ piano for this minor fault.
Julia creeps through the dining room into the conservatory, so as not to disturb him, and sets out the plates and dishes on the table, and pours the wine and takes a deep red sip and breathes in the quiet evening and the music that suffuses it.
Then she carries both glasses through to the drawing room, where Simon, in deference to her, has lit only the small lamp on top of the piano, not wishing to shatter the darkness with harsh crystal light. She leans shyly in the open doorway, watching him. He is intent upon the keys, frowning, but not angrily; he slows and quickens as his fingers trace the path down years of forgetting; he picks the melody out and the chords follow with a rightness that beguiles her. A phrase loops upon itself, another loop, more gentle, and a diminuendo upon the last variation; a pause, a half-bar’s rest which seems to suspend the air, to contain the day and the night, so that all is held within and turns upon it. Then his resting fingers come to sudden, fluttering life, as fast and subtle as the wings he’s caught so many times between them, and there is a flurry of notes doubling back and pushing on, higher, some sure and strong and others barely a shiver, as if his hands are cupped about her heart and it beats in time with this hectic crescendo, an overspilling of something that can’t be contained in one single simple rhythm but seems to burst free of its bars… She can hear that some of the notes are wrong, but he does not stop or slow down, his long hand graceful even in error, trailing down and rushing up the keys until a last, tragic chord… which he allows to briefly linger before letting the pedal go with a bang, so that their eyes meet in an abrupt silence. Then he laughs.
‘Something like that, anyway.’
She laughs too, delighted, and remembers that she can’t applaud because she’s still holding the glasses, and rushes to him to hand him his with a kiss on the cheek and then claps wildly with the ends of her fingers against the inside of her wrist, splashing her wine on the rug — it’s seen worse and they ignore it.
‘Bravo!’
‘Rachmaninov–I wanted to find it for you. The opening is wonderful. Like this,’ he says, and sets down the glass and plays again, more surely now, the sequence that she heard from the kitchen which has haunted him all day. He does not need to look at the keys, he looks into her face as he plays, his elbow cramped into his side, his head dipped between his shoulders, really Simon your posture is appalling his piano teacher would tell him but Julia, seeing that boyish stoop, his concentration and the appeal in his eyes, says:
‘Ah! You’re right, it’s lovely. I love you.’
Midnight
The day is almost over. They sit at last at the table, with only a candle to see by. Her hands circle, the silver knife glinting as she gestures, like a signal in the darkness; Simon cuts and compiles neat forkfuls with a little of everything, attentive to her voice and her hands and the flare and flicker of the lights in her eyes caught by the candle, dancing; she tells him the story of her day, which we, having witnessed, need not strain to hear in detail. He watches and listens and swallows this full-bodied, berry-scented wine which he knows, without checking the bottle, she has chosen for him; he lets it fill his mouth with deep simple luxury and watches her hands circle, her eyes wide.
They eat slowly, with pleasure, in no hurry to finish the evening. At last Simon lays down his cutlery; first the knife, then the fork, at a perfect right angle to himself, the careful gesture which Julia now observes with affection, and finds her own hands repeating. They take up their glasses and sit, side by side, on the wicker divan.
In the evergreen bushes that grow thickly not far from the conservatory, a curious night-lurker might find an opportune spot to observe from. From here it would once have been possible to witness the flowering of a famous romance; a bloom out of season, for, this being a fine October evening in 1897, there were then no roses in the garden. None but the dark red blossom on the cheeks of a young woman, not yet twenty, flushed as if she had just come in from the snowy landscape that the man beside her is describing. The northern lights crackle between them in the air, invisible. He takes her hand in his, nervous as a boy now, and she is bold for all her blushes, and clasping her fingers about his, draws his palm up to her mouth, to kiss it. The grass is already glistening with the frost that has sharpened the stars. On the cold north wind we might catch a promise, forged in this first sudden passion and never forgotten: ‘I will reach it’; ‘I will wait.’
Well, so began the Mackley romance; she shivered, they went in, to the relief of the hidden watcher, because October can be bitterly cold as well as beautifully frost-clear in England. But the couple that recline on the wicker divan tonight are not so straight-backed and perching, with neither whalebone nor an exaggerated sense of propriety to hold them rigid.
Fragments are all that can reach us in the darkening garden, where we may relish the night’s warm splendour, in these last minutes before midnight. ‘It’s strange, I think I dreamed last night about Edward; about the Arctic anyway; huge bones in the water; the crushing ice; it woke me and I couldn’t sleep. Formaldehyde.’ ‘Cheese before bedtime.’ ‘James and his peerless Stilton…’ (She laughs.) ‘Ice on every side, grinding and crushing.’ ‘Have you read, do you remember? The way he describes it’ (far in the distance, the deep heart-boom).
‘I didn’t know what to do, I wanted to tell you… but then Miranda said…’ ‘Hm. It is sad. Very sad. Poor Emily.’ ‘I keep thinking what she wrote — it must have been after, but how long after? “I cannot go on without,” she wrote — but she did, she went on without anything.’ ‘All those years, pretending.’ ‘Never saying a word.’ ‘Watching her son grow without knowing.’ ‘But at least able to watch him. Not quite alone.’
They quiet to a murmur now; it is hard to catch the sense of what they are saying. An apology? An admission of guilt? No, he will not tell her; perhaps another day. There is no need for that now; Sandra Mitchell cannot touch them, they have closed upon themselves and we, too, must struggle to draw near. But still, ‘Sorry; I’m sorry…’ A memory; a moth flitters. Do you remember? she says; and Do you?; the pond in the park; honeysuckle, aniseed… a
street café in Paris, drinking pastis (but no, it was kir, she says); I wanted to buy you flowers today, and remembered… remembered how I wished I had brought you flowers. When I came empty-handed and could not speak or reach you. I’m sorry. And hesitant, a promise whispered: there will be a better time to buy you flowers.
When I was a girl I cut holes in the world, and I’ve slipped through somehow and now I live alongside you, stranded in a different air, and I am fighting now to come back to you and breathe your breath again, in when you breathe out, skin against skin.
They are almost soundless now. Sometimes their lips move but the words are all but lost.
Skin against snow and the sky all around us, the sky and the snow, stars vast all around as you lie down beside me to watch the gold and rose across the sky, snow rounding and dipping like skin, soft like skin against skin, at a still point…
She slips down to rest her head on his chest and he puts his mouth to her hair, and they stay there for a long time in a silence no longer restrained. The clock whirrs and strikes twelve, but they do not hear it; the clock in the morning room, which has been waiting for midnight, marks it in silence.
At last they rise; he takes her by the hand; the wine has weighted their limbs with languor. He cups a hand about the flame, breathes, and they are enfolded by the darkness; we might imagine the tiniest fizz as he pinches the smouldering wick with wet fingers. She leads him out, a wisp in the milkmoonlight; she knows her way through the house in the dark.
She leads him through the drawing room; the chandelier is not lit. Dr Nansen’s icy slide-show has left no trace upon the wall; we will strain to hear the remnant chatter of voices here. The piano is closed, humming to itself with the barest vibration of pleasure at the recent memory of being touched again. In the hallway the mirror hangs in darkness, all its reflections now melted to silver.
The butterflies hover pearl-white in the stairwell. Upstairs, in the master bedroom, Arabella slumbers one hundred years ago; her husband turns restless on the cot beside her, always recoiling at the precipice of dreaming. But they must forgo their places, cede them to a later generation; Julia and Simon undress in the darkness and lie down on top of the sheets, still fresh from the garden air. It is another warm night, perhaps not so heavy as the last; the window has been open since Simon pulled it up all those hours ago, and as they lie here the long, strange day shifts and settles over their skin. Without speaking, they reach for each other; in the faint streetlight he sees the bronze flash in her eyes, and when she lets herself fall, pupils wide and filled with an indigo sky, she falls into the black gaze that holds hers in the dark without pause, without elision.
In the attic, the light from the window gleams off tooth and claw, shining in the glass of eyes that are also unblinking. Those same creatures are all that remain of the dreams of two little boys in the night nursery: two mismatched forms, one narrow and dark, one round and red, lost in their respectively solemn and boisterous fantasies. Beneath them, in the bed where Julia later settled into the dip of the mattress that had shaped itself around Emily Mackley, Emily herself lies beneath a snowflake-patterned counterpane as the century turns, outstretched upon the snow, waiting, feeling her belly grow bigger, feeling it slacken as all but memory fades and her boy cries out above her.
Tess slips out into the garden; after a long day of drowsing and idle, halfhearted play, the night’s hunt can at last begin. In the dark, in her element, she is longer, sleeker, stripes silvered in the moon. She slinks under a hole in the fence and is gone, lost to a rodent-rustling wilderness that the human inhabitants of the road would never guess at.
Little Jenny next door rocked herself to sleep hours ago, feeling the pull and rush of the swing still beneath her. Two doors down, over the road, Sandra Mitchell can be seen through her curtains by the light of an unwatched documentary; she has fallen asleep on the sofa, and will no doubt wake through the night sickly with white wine and shame and disappointment; but she is the sort who will pick herself up again, tomorrow. Further up the road, the old man who admired Julia as she passed now sleeps exhausted from his day in the garden, in the sun, and finds his wife waiting for him, in a sundress she never owned. The grocer dreams on a bed of lettuce. The baker’s head is pillowed on a soft white roll.
In London, a man of the world bids goodnight to his mistress and sets off home to his unsuspecting spouse, pleased with his day’s efforts; free lunch, good wine, good whisky, his new development shaping up, a diverting evening, you can have it all he thinks (he will come home to find a house half empty and a cursory note signed Your estranged wife, Susan).
In a town two hundred miles away, Julia’s cousin of some remove is talking in the darkness to Laura, a woman who has no role in the story he is telling her about the Mackleys and the house he hasn’t visited since he was a boy. She may not belong to this story but this woman, his wife, is at the centre of Jonathan’s world; she thinks she may be pregnant and she is right; between them another life is readying itself, another Mackley will be born.
And pushing north, through hills and towns and dales and moors, past the silver city where Miranda is washing her hands again and thinking of a man she isn’t married to, and of the children sleeping innocent, and of her sister and her father and her mother; through lowlands and highlands and on to the sea; past islands and over a half-frozen black ocean, on to the ice, north, north, leaving the night behind us, into the endless day, here is Edward Mackley, sleeping still under the snow, under the bright Arctic sun; and push a little further and here at last is the Pole, and the world turning beneath us.
Julia’s eyes trace the curls of the ceiling; Simon’s are closed, his dark lids sheened. Emily Mackley’s great-granddaughter turns to face her sleeping husband:
Simon. Pure as the driven…
She feels her mind widening in a slow spiral, and she gives herself to sleep, turning her back to him. A few minutes later, he does the same. Their breathing falls into a rhythm with a harmony of its own, a syncopated sighing that cannot be transcribed. But listen: it is peaceful. The symmetry of them, naked above the sheets, the shape of an urn. His knees are drawn up higher so that if they were to move their feet backwards… but look: the soles of their feet are already touching, her toes curled hot under his.
Acknowledgements
In researching this book, among the many sources referred to the following were particularly useful: Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2003); Valerian Albanov’s In the Land of White Death (New York: The Modern Library, 2001); Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (London: Harvill, 1999. For the curious, this is most likely the book that Simon has been reading); Sarah Moss’s Scott’s Last Biscuit (Oxford: Signal, 2006); and Francis Spufford’s I May Be Some Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1996) and The Ends of the Earth, ed. Spufford and Kolbert (London: Granta, 2007) — with thanks to Francis for the kind gift of these last two.
I would like to express my gratitude to Peter Straus, Jenny Hewson and everyone at RCW, and to all at Portobello Books, particularly Laura Barber for her sensitive and judicious editing. Thanks are also due to Pamela Johnson, Blake Morrison, Maura Dooley and Francis Spufford at Goldsmiths, and to my classmates on the Creative and Life Writing MA. I would also like to thank my family for their endless faith and support, the Thorpe family, and Alistair, for many things and especially for his patience.
Copyright © 2010 by Amy Sackville. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in the UK in 2010 by Portobello Books Ltd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43866-5
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