The Still Point (32 page)

He breathed his own hot breath back off the pane for the next four stops; then, as ever, the exodus freed him and he was left to a half-empty carriage, pushing on into the night, escaping from under the city’s orange sky. He found a seat on his own. This was worse. There is nothing like the crushing proximity of others, the putrid commute of a summer’s night, to clear the mind of everything but desperate and immediate disgust. Now he sits, cooled by the air from the open window rushing, and despair begins to close upon him, a narrowing chasm.

The beer is making him drowsy; he can feel his senses dulling as if he is wrapped in a thick layer of glass (or ice); sounds are muted, the bright carriage interior falls away. Narrowing, crushing. How tightly she held him last night, how silent she was, how innocent of his sin, still crying and gripping him to her, her eyes tight closed as ever, and he felt her heart against him, a spasm, soundless, tightening around him…

 

and then she falls away from him, dissolving, beyond his reach, impossibly distant, retracting to a point in the centre of a vast white plain. Then he is on a boat sailing into a narrow gully, crushing, the fingers he feels gripping his skin are red-nailed, tearing his skin and leaving scratches to show she owns him, and biting at his neck and shoulders, a fleshy, powerful body beneath him, on top of him now, a big brutal bright mouth and she keeps her eyes wide open, a chasm, and he is crushed, crushed from all sides, with a groan, and he wakes with a guilty start as the train squeals into the station, halting just beyond the platform and easing in slowly enough to let his blood ebb. He is shamefully
engorged, like a boy on the school bus, he thinks; but by the time he must stand it has subsided, although the shame remains, thick and red.

The train spits Simon on to the platform and trundles off with a wheeze to the coast, where it could fall off the end of the country into the ocean for all he cares. He checks his watch — two minutes past nine. He is late. He told her he’d be late. No cause for suspicion or alarm.

He gets into his car and sits for a minute, for two, for three at the wheel, his hands resting on it, staring at himself in the windscreen, projected out onto the darkening night. His head drops; he sits with head bowed for a moment, for two, then raises it, pushes his glasses back on to his nose, turns the key and sets off for home, hoping the road is clear.

 

Julia is in the bedroom; in the kitchen, the lamb is resting, ready to carve, the broad beans are steaming, the beetroot is roasted and tossed in dressing, the wine is breathing quietly, steadily, letting the warm air soften its cherryrich savours. She has upended the laundry basket and is folding towels, her stomach a little grip of hunger and nerves; where is he? She strips the bed, pulling off the sheets and cases, and dumps the dirty linen in one pile, the naked duvet and the pillows in another, surrounded by the familiar pleasing crump of duck feather and down. She checks her watch; ten past nine. She matches the corners of the duvet to the inside-out corners of the fresh cover, thinking as always as she grips through the linen of a little mittened hand, the little fingers lost in padding. She glances at the bedside clock — 21:06. Well, her watch is a little fast. But even if it is four minutes earlier than she thought, he is still late. She is amazed to feel the back of her throat strain and catch, the tightness of starting tears through her nose and jaw. Hormones, she
thinks, almost time again, again, the remorseless flow.

The child that Julia and Simon didn’t have would be four years old now. Its fifth birthday would be soon, today even, if it had arrived a little early. If it had arrived only a little early rather than much, much earlier, far too early. Julia doesn’t like to think of the child as ‘it’ but it was too soon to tell. In fact, Julia doesn’t like to think of it at all. Only sometimes, like now, as she straightens and tidies haphazardly, the fingers of her left hand graze the place where that bump had just begun to grow. It is flat and soft now, that place, tight with nothing but foreboding, but her fingers remember the tautening skin.

 

 

She flumps the just-filled pillows and slaps at the sheets of the bed to smooth them, then straightens the duvet on top.

 

 

She folds a towel with an uncharacteristic, smart flick to straighten it. But the hand, when the towel is stowed on the pile, wanders back.

 

 

It may or may not please her if she knew it was, indeed, a boy.

They do not speak of it. She was not even three months’ gone; no one had noticed the bump, but she could feel it. She put Simon’s hand on it. His face, intent upon her skin, rounding and dipping, his warm gentle palm curved below her navel; she can’t bear to recall his face, then, the sincerity of his awe. They have not tried again. Julia is frightened. The first was an accident, they didn’t plan it; a happy accident, they agreed at the time, but have never spoken of another. It is perhaps a conversation they should have. The words that Simon can’t find in the silence:

‘I am sorry that I cannot find a way to make you happy, I am frightened that you will never be happy, I am frightened of your sadness. I will not leave you alone, you should not be alone, I do not think that we should be alone.’

And she:

‘I am so frightened of death. I am scared of growing old and of not growing old, and dying. I am frightened that all my babies will die, that you will die, and of dying.’

The things they do not say only grow louder with time, no matter how neatly the towels are stacked, how clean the sheets. But the bed is made now, and Julia closes her ears to the words that have gone unspoken and tells herself the clutching emptiness in her belly is just hunger. And it’s true, she is hungry; it’s getting late. The smell of herbs drifting up from the kitchen reminds her.

 

 

She sits at the dressing table and carefully wipes off the last traces of her red
mouth; she brushes her hair; Tess lands lightly on her lap, taking care not to catch the dress on a claw, and starts to turn and settle, but is lifted before she can make even one exploratory revolution, and carried out of the room. Julia flicks the switch and closes the door just in time to miss the searchlight sweep of Simon’s car pulling into the driveway.

 

The house is dark as he approaches. Bedroom, drawing room, attic windows and all in between unlit, as if sleeping or abandoned. He cannot remember seeing it so, aside from the night they moved in, and as he makes his way up the gravel drive the sound of his own footsteps seems detached from his own tread, as if in a dream, displaced.

 

Edward Mackley followed this dreaming path many times over; he dreamed of coming home, and knew with the certainty of nightmares that all the rooms were dark and empty; that they were occupied by others who would not know him, and would not allow him in; that his own family, his wife, would not know him, and would scream at his blackened skin; that all within were slaughtered, somehow by his hand. But always he woke before the door could open, and could recall only how close he had come, how he had almost reached the end of his long journey home, and cursed himself for waking.

 

Now Simon approaches the house and sees, in that space of a few crunching gravelled steps, visions of Julia at the centre of the darkness, waiting for him, knowing somehow what he has done and unable to forgive him for a single kiss, for even contemplating betrayal for an instant; sitting waiting in the darkness submerged in cold black water. He does not know if he will tell her the
truth, if it would hurt her irreparably to do so and who he would in truth be sparing if he spared her that. He does not know if the truth is always necessary, if it is sometimes better to conceal, or if that is merely selfishness, and if selfishness is inherently wrong. He knows only that he does not want to lose her, and also that he cannot go on with it as it is. He cannot go on failing to fulfil what she lacks, aching to fill the emptiness she won’t acknowledge, whatever it is that she is without.

He has reached the door, keys in hand; he opens it cautiously (9.18). Creeping inside, he can just make out the dying flowers, the mirror (he avoids the spectral version of himself therein, the pale face and guilt-darkened eyes); he calls her name. There is no answer. He smells lamb cooking, knows she wants to please him and hopes it isn’t spoiled. But he told her he would be late home.

He must slam the door to close it; the reverberation shudders the air into a thousand pairs of fluttering wings, clamouring about him in a panic and settling back into dusty slumber. He calls her name again, ‘Julia?’, gently, as if she is already beside him, invisible; as if he wishes to summon just this one of the spirits without agitating the rest.

In the drawing room, the ladies’ white forms in the portraits are brilliant in the darkness, a full moon opposite a crescent; Edward’s and John’s shadowed eyes, across from each other, watch their living likeness pass between as Simon runs the gauntlet of her ancestors without turning the light on. He moves into the dining room. The crystal and glass catch facets of yellow light; the doors to the conservatory are open to reveal a table set with silver, candlelit, and beyond, looking out to the garden, is Julia.

There she stands: facing out to the night, her back to him, her loose hair
flickering bronze. Strange how peaceful she looks, framed by the square panes of the open French doors, as if part of a painting in which the artist has imposed the same muted blue upon the stillness of the garden beyond and the unwitting sitter’s repose. She does not move as he watches from the darkness at the back of her. Nothing stirs; the night is silent. It would be possible now to creep behind her, slip off shoes and pad across the rug and step out onto the warm tiled floor, and sweep her hair forward from her neck and blow upon it gently, or kiss the sharp nub of her spine just below the nape, just where the fine fronds curl and wisp, put a hand to her waist and let her head fall against the breastbone behind her…

Simon watches. He finds that he is holding his breath, and lets it out very gently, soundless. Then he steals out into the corridor, and down the short flight of steps to the kitchen, turning no lights on; it is hot, the oven has been on for hours and, he sees from its orange glow, is keeping dinner warm; but still he unlatches the door, at which Tess has been idly scratching, so that she streaks out into the night before him. He makes his way up the path, like pale stepping stones over water, tiny icebergs, white on black. He does not look back at the house, so that they can both pretend she hasn’t seen him; when he reaches the shed and sneaks a glance back to the conservatory, she is gone.

But she has not gone. She has merely taken a step back into the darkness, as we will discern if we take a moment to discover the gleam of her eyes. She has retreated so that, if he were to look back, he won’t know she’s seen him. A few moments ago, she thought he was behind her, thought she felt the darkness shift to accommodate another form; she thought she felt him approach and waited, hoping, almost feeling his fingers brush the nape of her neck, but when she turned the room was empty and when she turned again, she saw him
on the path in the moonlight. He did not come to find her. He does not want to find her. She wants to go to him but finds she cannot. Did he savour the scent of the meat, at least? She stares into the flame and at the moths that hover about it. She cannot go on without.

Simon is sitting at his desk in his shed. This shed, his own, is at the far end of the garden, behind the one that belongs to the house, which is full of old gardening tools and predictable cobwebs, clutter and dust, a confusion of worn wood and prongs and paint tins. Simon’s shed is tidy and clean; it smells of pine and cedar and the coal-tar pong of naphthalene — mothballs, to the layman, to protect dead wings from the living. Behind him, on the wall, a series of Brimstones, caught when he was fourteen, have settled above their names, which he wrote out proudly with a fountain pen — his first mounts, simple, delicate, greenish-white.

A set of wide, shallow drawers occupies most of the far wall. Simon sits on a straight-backed chair, from which he tends to hunch forward. In front of him is a window onto the garden, with a blackout blind. Sitting at the desk in the evenings, with the angle-poise lamp beaming bright into the garden, Simon had too many times been startled by the smack of a moth upon the pane. Although he cannot credit them with a sense of irony, still he found this pelting of furry death distasteful, in light of his occupation behind the glass. So the blind was installed to insulate him from the night.

Tonight, Simon is very still, and for once sitting straight; there is nothing before him on the desk to hunch over; the blind is open, the lamp is not lit. His expression is hard to discern in the dimness; the little light from the moon reflects on his glasses; his eyes may be open or shut. His long hands rest on the desk.

He has left Julia behind in the house, she has not seen him; he has escaped into the blue garden, warm and still, full of insect clicks and piping, heavy with the honeysuckle that for weeks he has forgotten to come out and relish the scent of. What is he doing here while she waits inside? He sat down at his desk here and found he could not turn the lamp on, he could not open the drawer or take up his tools to set a catch which should be dry now in its jar, and ready to mount; he is not sure this was ever his intention. His hand instead raised the blind, left closed to keep the space cool, and then came to rest two feet away from the other on the desk, and he has been sitting for perhaps four minutes now in this position. He doesn’t quite know what he’s doing here, while she waits inside. He does not check his watch.