The Still Point (31 page)

 

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 inherently 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.

It was impossible now to imagine the marriage that never was. He could not have tolerated the life she had been compelled to lead in this house, and she could not now imagine another; he would have grown more restless and dissatisfied with every scrape and crunch. They would scrape and stifle thus until he went away again, sooner or later, on another adventure, and if he came back he would have left again, and again, and their life would be always this parting and waiting and each reunion would diminish in joy as the years went on, perhaps, and she grew each time noticeably older and thicker in his absence
and weighed down with nothing but waiting; and the romance of that must surely pall. Because what was she expected to do but wait?

If Emily gave in to such bitterness sometimes then she smoothed it, in the evenings and sometimes in the afternoons, with a glass of gin and reminiscence. Having nothing else to hold on to, she remembered herself as she had been and resurrected nightly the man she had loved, carefully preserved just as his corpse was, although she didn’t know it. She remembered skiing and playing in the snow, and the mist clearing from the fjords in the morning, and the brief months of what seemed now to her a perpetual consummation, of tenderness and laughter and passion. She read the ship’s log that the Norwegians brought to England and laughed aloud to herself, saying, ‘How like him, how like him,’ willing herself to remember him, to hear his voice and almost believing she heard it. At first she would read parts out loud until she realized, from the inattentive smiles of her listeners, that she had read this part before perhaps; she found it hard to recall. Edward out on the snow; shooting the fox; the ice, the sky. She told the children the stories. She was saddened by little Edward’s polite boredom, as if he wished to distance himself from the name he’d been given; Thomas, in whom she had little interest, was anyway too restive to sit and listen for long; so when Helen was born, she found a welcome and unexpected ally. The girl would ask her to tell the same stories over and over, reviving them with her questions — what did she wear on this occasion, on that? Was her corset awfully tight? Was Dr Nansen very brilliant, did she speak to him? How did Edward look, how did he stand, with his arm on the mantel and the fire of ambition burning? Did he really shoot the bear, right through the eye? What did he say when they met, when they parted? Did she really love to ski, did she fall in the snow? Were the Norwegians
terrible and huge like Vikings? What colours flashed across the sky? — so that new details emerged, new vibrancy and life, and it became difficult to extract what was true from the tales she had embellished for the child. By then, she was over forty. If she had ever hoped for another life she had made no mention of it; and now it was too late.

Each evening she rose and made her way, at times a little unsteadily, to her room, bidding the polar bears goodnight. She climbed the stairs and tried not to notice how it grew harder as the years drew on, how her knees grew stiff; she closed the door to her room behind her and undressed and quickly pulled on her plain brushed-cotton nightdress so as not to touch her own breasts or her belly, rounding and sagging gently from her skinny frame; she unpinned her hair and took care not to see the fade of its lustre, took care not to meet her own eye in the mirror, preferring to sit in half-darkness with only the bedside lamp lit; then she would climb into bed to read, and if the letters swam it was probably only the gin, not her sight failing, and never tears.

 

She waited sixty years to hear the end of the story, read to her in this same bedroom that she had slept alone in for so long. One day in January 1902, Edward had slipped from the world without her knowing, and now she could not say if she had dreamed of him that night, even. His body was preserved by the ice, they said; only his skin had blackened and contracted, his dark eyes like hers pearled over. How long it had been since she dreamed of him. Helen read the tale, all the way to the end, trying to follow his maps, to trace a route through the rambling torment of his dying — always pushed on by Emily, who wanted to know. She would answer, sometimes — ‘No, they do not call you a fool, dear’ — as if he were beside her and in need of reassurance; ‘There is
nothing to forgive, Edward, if you can ever forgive me’; ‘Yes, goodnight, sleep well, goodnight’ as if she stretched out beside him where he lay, transformed by the frozen sea: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes, now, Helen. Look!’

When at last she gave up her secret to his namesake, there was nothing more to tell.

 

Laid out on the cold white sheet, on the snow, with the vast deep sky above and the ice deep below, the beat of her heart escalating, coruscating, high and skating across the sky, dying as he came to meet her across the snow.

Deep evening.

 

Outside, the last of the gold has dripped from the leaves of the willow, leaving them burnished copper-green. The sky has softened into violet. The air is still balmy from the day’s heat, but it is not so fierce now; the curtains flutter in the cooling air, the room grows dim, the glass darkens. It no longer returns any gaze, for we are alone now with Emily’s fading ghost; the room is settling into emptiness. Julia, who was moments ago reflected in the gathering shadows, has left this thought trailing behind her:

Following the trail of it through the dark house, we will find her once more in the garden; how different now in the twilight, no longer scorched by the sun. Pause now with her on the lawn and breathe in; listen to the insects and the rustle of plants, leaves furling, the fluff and settle of feathers, earth shifting under tiny paws and turned by pallid grubs and worms; the garden easing into the blue darkness. Night flowers open cautiously, quietly, the warmth of the day transformed into deep sweet perfume. More vibrant blooms are dimmed without the sun to brighten them, and give up their glory to the pale, fragrant
flowers of the dusk. The night-scented stock, innocuous by daylight, releases its essence. Honeysuckle, cupping its hands to hold nectar for the moths to sup. The scent of the garden, the tiny white blossoms like stars fallen on the lawn, and her bare feet white against the grass, and the white sheets; and the moths, intoxicated.

Out in the darkening garden the sheets are indeed still aflutter. She washed and hung them out this morning after last night’s crumpled rest; the bedlinen has for two weeks tangled nightly about their too-hot limbs, and she’d forgotten to launder the spare set. And daily comforts must be served even as the world turns through its more momentous changes, and if Julia is unsettled then there is at least the certainty of cool, clean linen to lie down on. If she leaves them to flap on the line they will be dew-soaked by morning, and will disturb the darkness of tonight’s garden. Simon will be distracted by them, as he is by all that is misplaced, and she will sense him struggling with himself all through the dinner she has planned (which she needs to attend to, because he must surely be home soon?). She will sense his distraction as he appears to listen, to enjoy, to praise her cooking and savour the wine that she has chosen specially, but he may not even notice the choice she has made because he will be resolutely keeping his eyes away from the sheets while deciding whether to mention it (which would irritate her and so spoil the evening) or discreetly take them in himself once they are finished (in which case his rising from the table at the first opportunity will spoil the evening with disappointment), so it is vital, yes, it is a matter of preserving the life of their undernourished marriage, it is a matter of this frail thing’s survival that she take in the sheets.

Shadowed wings flutter about her, drawn to the brightness and the sweet air, creamy with scent:

 

 

The sheets spread in the night have reminded Julia of this, years ago, not long after they were married and visiting Aunt Helen; of how Simon had hesitantly asked her if he could set out a trap in the garden, if she would like to join him. It was a moths’ paradise, he said, that garden. He named the flowers that grew there that would draw them and she was surprised to learn he knew these words, surprised by his love of honeysuckle, did not know then of the nights he’d spent wrapped in the smell of it and the silence, the whisper of dusky wings, patient by the lamp alone and glad of his father’s absence (who was interested only in brazen butterflies).

She loved him for it. She loved him, then, for his careful labels, for his delicate hands, which she watched in fascination as he drove the pin in and laid tape across the wings to set them, for his patience —

‘What now?’ she’d said when the catch was all covered, the one she’d chosen that he said he’d set for her.

‘Now we wait,’ he’d smiled.

‘For how long?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Two weeks!’

‘You have to learn to enjoy anticipation.’

‘Oh’ (sigh). ‘Well, what else now?’

‘For a start, turn the lamp off and take in the sheet. And get it washed before Aunt Helen sees we’ve covered it in wing-dust.’

Later, on a different, clean sheet, she’d lain out cruciform —

‘Would you like to set and pin me?’

‘But you are so lovely in flight.’

Yes, she loved him for this, for all of this, which she hasn’t thought of in so long. She unpegs and bundles the sheets into the basket, and checks her watch, and could it be wrong? It is almost nine now. Where is Simon? When will he be home?

 

Simon is on his way, he is stuck on a busy train, which all the force of his will could not move faster. He had emerged from the underground into the station with minutes to spare, only to find that his usual train was arbitrarily cancelled. He found an angry crowd around the announcements board, and joined the chorus of watch-checking sighs, tuts and muttering. He called home but the line was engaged, and, upon realizing that he was relieved at this, felt a fresh twist of the horrible guilt that he had allowed to be subdued by the press of strangers on the Tube. He pushed his way onto the first service available, glad of the advantage his height gave him and trying to justify his urgency as he turned to face out, nose almost squashed into the glass, to see those left behind, a woman close to tears, laden with shopping, a couple in evening dress, an old
man. How could he have helped them? Every man for himself… how he loathed himself.