The Still Point (33 page)

He tries to steady and gather himself in the darkness, but he cannot pursue any single thought; he is at the mercy of his own memories, flitting and battering about his head, and he is powerless to drive them away. Every bitter disappointment, every grate of shame, every time he’s wished for something different from himself or someone else.

His mother, washing up at the kitchen sink, leaves soap suds on her face from the hand she swipes her cheek with so he will not see her crying. He leans against her hip, pressing his face into her, and receives a damp hard squeeze of the shoulder, quickly withdrawn with a sigh. ‘What do you
want
, Simon?’

He tugs at his father’s sleeve one too many times; his father’s hand slips, botches the pin, pulls away angrily. ‘
What
, Simon?’

They can’t afford a piano, they tell him; he will have to practise at school, he will have to practise there to be the best. He plays at the concert. He gets the most applause. They say well done then praise at length the choir and Rebecca Jones who read a poem. Simon would not dare to speak or sing. He did not dare
to hold the last chord quite long enough. This means that he played the last chord wrong. He mentions it, hesitant, in the car on the way home. His mother says, to comfort him, ‘I’m sure no one cared.’

Julia is surprised, delighted, to find him sitting one evening at the old piano in the drawing room. She has been out with a friend but has come home early, he did not expect her. They have known each other for ten years, they have been married for eight. She didn’t know he could play the piano. How is it possible that she didn’t know? She pleads with him to play for her. He hasn’t played for years, he says. He won’t remember. He wasn’t very good. Go on, she says. He doesn’t want to. He won’t. He shuts the lid; he doesn’t mean to bang it. She winces. Her voice is very quiet. ‘I just didn’t know you could play.’

The tips of his fingers are pressing against the wood of the desk, the rhythm of the first notes she missed this morning. His eyes are closed. He takes off his glasses without opening his eyes, pinches his nose, presses forefinger and thumb hard into the corners of the deep sockets until blue lights flash across the dark maroon; he opens them and feels the resurgent blood spread across the bridge of his nose and up across his scalp. Carefully, he sets his glasses down, stands and ventures out, closing the door softly behind him, and picks his path step by round pale step back to the house through the scented garden.

Standing at the top of the stone stair to the kitchen, he sees that the countertop light is now switched on. In the dark of the house, Julia has cast this single circle of electricity about herself. She moves beyond it and then he sees her face brightened again in the glow from the oven as she opens the door to lift out plates and dishes, blowing out her cheeks as she does so, as she always does. It is a gesture so familiar that he could not recall now the first time he saw
it (it was scones, on his fifth visit — he’d remember the scones, if he were reminded. If reminded, he would recall the decadence of clotted cream, the home-made jam, the contrast with the dense, claggy, margarine-spread treats of his childhood). She places the plates in the pooled light on the countertop, then presses her hands to the foil-wrapped meat, checking it hasn’t gone cold he supposes, then moves back to the hob; she is just barely lit now, a warm sheen on her skin. She stirs a pan in her ponderous way, staring into it as if she is divining something in the sauce, and lifts the wooden spoon, stretching her head towards it instead of bringing it close so as not to spill it (so that her lovely neck emerges from the mass of her hair); she puts her lips to it gingerly, holding the spoon lifted for a second after sipping, reaching for the salt and changing her mind, resuming her slow stirring with a satisfied smile which is very close to sadness. And all of this together, the fine downy arm that stirs, stirs, the peer into the pan, her long neck, the sound of that tiny sip and her sad smile, sets off a ripple in Simon which swells into a wave of tenderness, building, building, so powerful that he fears he will be drowned, which he wishes he could unleash in a great cascade down the steps before him, but he cannot unleash it and he feels something in him reaching, but still he does not know how to reach her.

 

Julia stirs, stirs. At the centre of the rich wine-brown sauce, a circle of glutinous bubbles bulges and pops like a swamp, satisfying to watch. Should she go out to him in the garden, tap on the door of the shed? It’s getting late. But there is an unspoken rule, that he would never ask of her, and which she yet obeys, that she does not disturb him there. But it’s getting late. But he did not come to find her; she heard the door slam and half heard him call, but only
once (he only half wanted her to hear him). And then he was out in the moonlight alone, and doesn’t want her to follow. She stirs. Tastes —

 

 

Resignedly, she resumes stirring. She hears, in the garden, a purring mmrrriaow of pleasure which means that someone has stroked Tess’s fur backwards. She looks up, startled by the sound so near to her when she thought herself unseen in her little lit circle.

‘Julia…’

‘You scared me! I thought I heard the door…’

‘I’m so sorry I’m so late.’ He comes down the stairs now and into her circle of light. ‘I told you I had that meeting — but then the train was cancelled. I called when I came in but you didn’t answer so I thought you must be upstairs.’ (Although, he thinks, there were no lights on, which he couldn’t fail to have noticed, so he cannot believe his own lie; but she seems to, she doesn’t know that he noticed, she has no reason to doubt him. He cannot explain to her that he saw her standing in the darkness, and wanted to go to her but couldn’t.) She is still stirring, so that he cannot encompass her entirely as he’d like to. Instead he touches her elbow and kisses the top of her head, just as if this were any other day.

‘I was worried–I called the office and Joanne said you’d left about seven. Then I tried to phone and you didn’t answer.’ She is trying to keep the reproach out of her voice.

‘I had to meet a client for a drink. Awful man. I thought I’d told you, sorry.’ Simon knows full well that he kept the details as vague as possible; but
he is relying on her inattentive morning manner and knows she will, again, believe him. And this is anyway not quite a lie, but a conflation and omission of truths — which still feels as nasty and spineless as a lie. ‘I tried to call you back but the line was engaged.’

‘Oh, I was speaking to Miranda maybe — I’m sure you did tell me. It doesn’t matter, you’re home now. How was your day?’

‘Hm, you know. The usual. How’s Miranda?’

‘She’s fine, she… I had a bit of an odd day, actually. With Jonathan.’

‘Ah, I’d forgotten.’

Julia has put down her spoon now. She turns to him with a strange soft sad look about her, which he can’t remember seeing before. ‘Simon…’ A hand, hesitant, on his chest; then her head laid gently beside it. He holds it to his breastbone and strokes the small of her back with his thumb, and kisses again, more tenderly this time, the top of her head. He thinks she may be crying but when he takes her shoulders and holds her away, forcing himself to meet her eyes, he sees only that same softness, as if she is trying to say something. For a moment longer they stay there, wordless, as if about to speak.

And then, because it all happened a hundred years ago, and now it’s late on a Thursday, and she has opened a good bottle of wine, she gives herself a little shake and says:

‘Hungry?’

‘Absolutely. I hope I’m not too late.’

‘Well, a minute later and it would have been Tess’s lucky day — but you know her table manners are appalling. I’d much rather eat with you.’

‘Why don’t you serve up and I’ll go and put some music on,’ he says, with a last squeeze of her elbow.

Tess, who has followed Simon down to the kitchen, has for the duration of this exchange been noisily licking up the last of her fish, the plastic bowl scraping on the tiles; having heard her name mentioned and seen them looking down at her, she has taken this as an invitation and is now attentively, affectionately curling about Julia’s ankles, in the hope of a scrap of fresh-cut meat. Julia is somehow able to move freely, unconstrained by this furry figure of eight; she takes a shred of the meat’s crust and drops it into the waiting maw. Tess carries her morsel to a corner, pins it carefully with a paw and gnaws at it contentedly.

Julia carves the lamb onto warmed plates, perfectly tender and not spoiled at all. A sequence of notes creeps up on her from the drawing room. The theme is familiar, but she cannot place it. She wonders what he has chosen; it is not their habit to listen to music together, it is one of his secret provinces. He is making her an offering, she thinks. She has to strain to hear; has it stopped? No, there again; the same sequence a little stronger this time, it seems to loop into itself, this tune; whatever it is, she likes it. It halts and trips and goes on; a wrong note? What would she know — but yes, there again, a pause and corrective repeat. This is not a recording. Someone is playing the piano.

 

On quiet evenings, when the Mackleys were not entertaining, the family retired to the drawing room to play cards, to converse, to read, to smoke. These were the days when leisure was an organized affair, when the hours before bedtime were structured and edifying, before the century slumped into passivity. Every large house then had its piano; the Mackleys’ was largely neglected aside from social occasions, upon which Jane Whitstable (or some such) would warble
her way through a repertoire of pastoral ditties and German folk song, to the plodding accompaniment of whichever young man most hopelessly admired her. John would occasionally strike up at Christmas; Arabella had no ear. It was brushed far more often by a maid’s duster than by a musician’s touch.

But John came in from town one afternoon in the early spring of 1901 to hear, as he handed over his coat and hat in the hallway, the sound of a favourite sonata played with simple elegance and passion — so much of the latter that Emily did not hear him greeted at the door — and of course in those days the wood had not yet swelled and there was no slam to alert her. He came into the room to find his sister-in-law seated there, eyes closed as her long quick fingers found the keys, unerring; her thumb finished a phrase with the barest depression of the ivory, sliding off as her foot held the pedal for a moment longer, and as her foot lifted she lifted her head too and saw him, and the blush of her fervour darkened to its deepest crimson.

‘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.