The Still Point (24 page)

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.

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 lift 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.

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:

 

 

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

 

 

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.

 

 

She looks up at the polar bear; it roars back, unhelpfully silent.

 

 

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…

 

 

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:

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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).

 

 

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?