The Still Point. Amy Sackville
of Edward’s possessions, and Emily’s, which have found their way here over the years unsorted. As girls, Julia and her sister Miranda would creep up here and open them at random to pull out hats and muffs and mysterious swathes of sealskin. She remembers the big windproof anoraks they’d wear to cross the icy landscape at the top of the house together, struggling against the snow until they caught sight of each other and collapsed giggling into the icy wind. Or she would pull a fur around her and step out on her top-hatted sister’s arm to an opera or a waltz.
When Aunt Helen moved out, Julia’s grandfather Edward — John’s son — had the animals hauled up here too. They were morbid, he mumbled, and they’d have to sell the place sometime, although no one made any move to do so. After his first shuffling visit, unable to manage the stairs even, he lost all interest in the home he was born in and had inherited from his father. Although it belonged to him he had never been its master, having lived in London since leaving to study there at seventeen, and had visited rarely in the intervening years; he seemed reluctant even to return. And now he was an old man and hadn’t the energy for a sale, had money enough to see him through his last lonely years. He died quietly in his own bed in Belgravia at the age of ninetynine, and the house here stood empty, settling into its own memories, letting them sigh down into the dust that had been so rudely disturbed by the animals’ exodus to the attic. Simon, whose careful fingers are suited to such tasks, learned to restore the mounts (although they did not please him like his own winged captives), and has groomed and sleeked them back to something closer to life, patched where necessary, eyes replaced.
Now those glass eyes, some new, some old, look upon Julia for the second time today as she sits on the swept floor. In the gloomy warmth, she tastes cold sea salt on her lip.
Cold waves washing and my feet bare, my Great-great-uncle Edward somewhere out upon the water. I saw him at the prow, proud, his dark eyes looking out. Skin slapped red, I wouldn’t step out of the sea, I too would one day have an adventure, the waves would lift and lull me, when the sea became rough I would batten the hatches, take in the topsail, look lively. I would grow used to the vile brown taste of rum. I would be quick and clever like Edward, I would be wise and strong, I would not die in the snow.
Julia is sitting on the wooden boards of the attic’s floor, tapping the tip of a fine ballpoint pen (stolen from Simon’s supply) against a pad beside her. A nebulous mass of dark specks is swarming into the margin, beside where she has written
Box 004
— thinking the additional zeroes will add an air of authority to her filing, the appearance of a system —
Item 8: Rifle
— followed by an emphatic full stop
.
She sights along the rifle at the bear in the corner. Then feels suddenly guilty, and then has at least the sense to feel ridiculous. But Edward once lifted this same barrel, perhaps, in this same pose that Julia holds steadily, and hit the bear square in the eye — so the story goes, the unlikely story that explains why she is scarless. It might have been the taxidermist’s skill that made her so; or she was found dead already, although she is reckoned to be only eleven, too young to have died of old age. Edward kept no records on his first expedition. The ship’s log reports: ‘Young Mackley returned excited from a morning’s hunt, to recruit two pairs of hands to help him drag his kill back to the ship; a fine specimen, with not a mark on her, a gift for his brother he says although I dare say he might make a second killing if he takes it to auction.’ Which wouldn’t help Julia solve this particular mystery, even if that log was in her possession and not buried somewhere in a Kensington archive. She is, besides, happy to believe in the bullet in the eye.
Poor polar bear. Dying with a roar or posed like that. Great-grandpa John forcing the mouth wide, hand between its jaws. Holding it by the paw like a dancer.
John, white-bearded, takes the massive claw with a bow, his big doctor’s hand crushably tiny in its grasp. He has to reach above his own head to ask for the waltz; the smile in his mischievous eye is captured in silver. Helen took the photograph. It hangs in the upstairs hallway.
Julia rises, her knees stiff from kneeling. In the steps between her and the bear her hobble straightens, so that by the time she reaches her partner she is quite ready to dance. Suddenly shy, she reaches to take a paw. Who will lead? The bear after all is a lady, and perhaps mindful of the conventions of her day. It might be lonely, here in the attic, with no one to admire her. Aunt Helen used to greet her whenever she came through the front door; Miranda and Julia would imitate her, delighted. ‘Hello, polar bear. Hello, bear cub.’ It is a habit now engrained in her passage, so that every time she enters she almost says it aloud before seeing the empty corner and remembering, sadly, that the bear is gone.
‘Hello, polar bear,’ she whispers now in the attic.
Julia’s Aunt Helen was in fact a great-aunt, her grandfather’s sister, John’s daughter; much younger than her brothers, she was born late to Arabella Mackley one peaceful spring morning in 1916 while shells and mortar fire tore apart Europe. She was in her fifties when Julia was born; her dark hair just turning to silver, her lively face beginning to crease. If we wish to know Julia, we must know something of this aunt, Helen Mackley, who told Edward’s stories like fairy tales (of the best sort, thrilling and gruesome), who had in turn learned them from Emily, Edward’s unwitting, waiting widow. To Julia, this is not so much John’s house as Aunt Helen’s; it was in her keeping from the end of the thirties. No one had ever questioned her right to it, since she had lived there her whole life, and her brothers made no claims upon it. With Emily she had seen it through the war, opening its doors to children from the city, sitting with them around the kitchen table, overseeing them in the schoolroom where she and her brothers had been taught, and telling stories of explorers and polar bears (the stories that Emily had told many times over, that Helen first heard from her, and told to Julia and Miranda in turn), and tucking the awestruck evacuees into beds that they thought they’d be swallowed by, so that more than one dragged their blankets to the floor by morning. The staff dwindled as the war went on. By the 1950s, Aunt Helen managed the house more or less alone, with élan and aplomb (these are words that Julia reserves especially for memories of Aunt Helen), and as the country emerged from post-war darkness she invited bright, brilliant guests to enliven the once-gloomy rooms of her Edwardian childhood, and had parties and picnics and poured wine and champagne, and posed for photographs and painted in the garden. At least twice a year she ventured alone across the Channel, travelling by train across the continent and returning with souvenirs and stories. When Julia was a child, the house was still busy with her visitors and the tales she told, brimful of the family’s reminiscing, so that the departed and the long-dead jostled with the living. Aunt Helen conducted them all through the house and the garden, opening cupboards and books and secrets, each more enchanting than the last, dazzling her guests (and her great-nieces in turn) with the glamour she cast over everything.
Her strength and brightness belied her age almost to the end, until the confusion of her last years. Well into her eighties, when most of the old guests were gone, she was to be found in the garden, pruning or painting, or baking cakes in the kitchen, or inviting young men to tea. She had never married; she had taken lovers but hers, she said, was not a heart to settle. She loved children, but had none of her own. So when her nephew William brought Julia and Miranda to visit, she lavished them with attention, with Turkish delight and chocolates, and pastries for breakfast and, when they grew older, half-glasses of wine with dinner. She’d set them up with easels and let them use her paints, and didn’t care a bit about the mess they made, and framed their masterpieces and proclaimed that her nieces were, without a doubt, the most talented of the many talented artists it had been her privilege to meet. Julia adored her. As a teenager she would borrow her aunt’s scarves and beads and her catchphrases, would say ironic things like ‘How jaunty!’ and try to raise one eyebrow. They spent summer holidays there and Christmas too, and went on doing so even after their father died. Aunt Helen worried for her nephew’s widow, and besides would not have given the girls up so easily. And then four short years later, Maggie, their mother, died too, having ignored a cramp