The Still Point. Amy Sackville
And Miranda had just qualified and taken a job at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, where she’d studied, and then she married and had her own home and children to tend to, and it was just Julia and Aunt Helen in the holidays, against the world.
There was always, for Julia, something enchanted about their nights out in the garden, or by the fire in the sitting room, preserving between them the memory of all that was lost; together in the warm, lawless places of the house, the spaces that were not all oak and grandeur but filled with secrets and softness, cushions and flowers, the smell always of lavender and roses, and upon which they cast a spell of ice so that it crept over the walls and enclosed them, glittering. The story passed from Emily to Helen and on, through a line of surrogate daughters; this is the legacy that Julia owes a debt to, both the legend of the figure in the snow, and the woman left behind who shaped the legend while she waited. In the quiet of the attic, all the rooms now empty, Julia still feels the quiver of some vibrant invisible thing about which the house throngs.
Julia’s squinting eye ranges the room. She twists the telescope, which turns still with a grudging grind, until the malformed leopard’s eye fills the other end with darkness; then returns it to the tasselled bag it has at some time acquired but was almost certainly never carried in, and sets it down at the end of a lengthening row of objects extracted from Box 004, as labelled in Julia’s curled and forward-slanting hand. She returns to her desk and writes:
Item 5: Telescope. Tin. Found in camp beside grave site discovered F.J. Land 1959; believed property of Edward Mackley.
It may, in truth, have belonged to any one of the five found there; but he was the navigator, after all. And she would like to believe that through this same curve of glass he watched his wife grow distant on the shore. The lens is intact, if a little scratched, and looking through it now we might yet spy Emily Mackley trapped under the glass, waving as she watched her husband shrink, while he adjusts the focus, again and again, sharpening her outline each time it blurs until at last it will turn no further.
Edward, as his ship set sail, watched her diminish, long after she had lost him among the other tiny figures on the deck. So they dwindled from each other’s lives and could only hope to be close again. The crew set about their business, glad to be under way at last. Edward lowered the telescope, and watched until the land slipped over the curve and there was only the sea, the sky, the long, long day between them, just a paleness at the far edge of the world which would in time be blinding. It was July, the nights still light. He was on his way to glory. There was a long way to go and it would only grow colder.
Their honeymoon had been spent in Norway while Edward made his preparations and recruited the last of his crew. Emily, released from stays, had learned to ski, had learned liberty. In these brief months of their marriage, she had learned what a lover is; she knew now that a wife is not a delicate bloom to be kept under glass, but a woman, with strength as well as soft skin. Arriving at Edward’s side at the bottom of a slope, she slipped and skidded on her hip into his legs, laughing, and he lifted her and laughed too and her eyes were bright, her face red with the cold and her gleeful descent, and he kissed her. They walked hand in hand through the little town; they joked and played and threw snowballs, lovingly made of the softest snow, and in the evenings the trees were frosted and twinkled in torchlight and the cabin they stayed in was warm, and they ate simply, fish and black bread and a sweet brown cheese like caramel, and drank light ale, and felt whole and healthy and fell into bed almost, but not quite, exhausted.
In too few weeks, the ship was ready to sail for the north. Norwegianbuilt to spend months in darkness, locked in the ice and, with luck, borne up by it, to meet the spring on the other side. She was christened Persephone. Captain Edward Mackley stood at the prow, broke the bottle and named her, with his wife by his side.
Emily came as far as she could with him, and would have gone further, he knew; she said she would follow him to the ends of the earth, but he could allow her only as far as Vardø — which was close enough. They sailed around the coast to this northernmost point, between the islands, every fjord a gasp of awe; they stood together on deck and looked out at the mist in the mornings, the mountains and the air which Emily would never forget, would try to describe for the rest of her life, always grasping for clarity. The ship rolled in rough water; it was built for ice, with a wide shallow bottom, and Hugh Compton-Hill retched over the side for a week so that Edward wondered if the boy would stand the journey, but he couldn’t be set down — his father had bought his place on the expedition with funds that Edward couldn’t afford to lose. Emily was not sick once; she was, he said, his finest shipmate, and he would be sorry to lose her. She held firm and only asked for champagne when she felt queasy (a fine excuse, he said). It is hard to say if it was seasickness, or the memory of the bottle broken on the bowsprit, which explained her distaste for it in later years.
They reached the northern port late one evening and a banquet was held in their honour; they were toasted past midnight, leaving a scant handful of hours together before he was to depart at four in the morning. Masses of birds crowded the island across the bay from the small city; their cries, too alien, too early, woke them to the pale sun. She would return to England the next week, and he was assured she would be well looked after. How long it had been since they had sat at his brother’s table; and how many months she would sit there without him.
Parting is the Mackley romance. Parting, waiting, and romantic loss. Edward and Emily sailed out for the north on their honeymoon; their first and only months together were a journey to the place of their leave-taking. Julia’s Arctic is a dream of brilliant distance —
Everything is equidistant; everything is as far from me as he is far from me, I am heedless, I reach out from my centre towards him at the top of the world…
Waiting, serenely, with a pale ache. Desire over great distances: this is the romance of the story, Emily’s legacy. Emily waiting, waiting, the sea growing wider and hardening to ice as she stretched out towards him, watching him grow distant.
Who is this giant, after all? A man who set out for glory and failed to find it. A man who loved his wife, but left her for something greater; had he not been handsome, he might have passed quite unnoticed. Had she not waited so faithfully, as if there could be no man on earth to replace him — this man who wasn’t made for earth at all, but for a place beyond its edge. Had she not made of him a hero.
He is little known, it’s true, beyond the family’s circle. The memories and treasures that fill the house are, to the visitor, little more than curios for the curious, scraps for specialists. His name appears in the records of the Royal Geographical Society three times: with Godspeed and accolades upon his departure; with hope, that he will be found; with regret, when he is, years after hope is gone. His diaries remain unpublished. He might have been the century’s first champion, reaching the pinnacle as the world turned under him; as it is he is only, to most, a vestige of Victoriana. Simon hadn’t heard of him, until he learned that Freely’s butterflies still hung in his brother’s house.
Still, his dark eyes in the portrait downstairs are fixed on greatness. They see to the top of the world. There is something about him that won’t relinquish, that cannot dim.
PART II
Look: here is Edward in his cabin as they sail out of Tromsø, the first Arctic city and their last port of call before Vardø and parting. The cabin is already the cosy, cramped nest of a bachelor. The shelves just visible at the top of the picture are stuffed with socks, sealskins, waterproofs; the bed is a neat nook made up with three blankets; Edward himself sits at a chair at his small desk, in a pose of easy authority, his diary open before him, smoking one of several pipes that hang on the wall. No open flames allowed below decks — except in the galley and in the captain’s cabin.
On a shelf above the bed, we can make out a slim collection of John Donne’s poems, slipped alongside the handful of books of reference (the ship’s main library is kept in the saloon). There are several volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, including Vol. 35 (MacCarwell-Maltby). It will never be known if Edward discovered, between Brigadier William Mackintosh of Borlum and