The Still Point. Amy Sackville
faded and dirtied by years. There is a sideboard stretching along one wall (pull it away to reveal the true pattern of the damask); upon it are china tureens, an etched crystal fruit bowl, a silver serving dish — and a vase, unadorned, elongated, out of keeping with the period, incongruous on its crochet round. All over the house, Julia has placed her precious things beside what belongs here. She can’t bring herself to sell anything, to move anything even. Surfaces are crowded with keepsakes, her own, her family’s, piling up over the years so that a thick layer of memory blankets all alike. It is sometimes hard to move in a house like this.
The vase has an azure glaze, chipped at the base on the journey home. Bend an ear to its narrow opening and you might just catch a dim echo of Parisian market-clamour; peer in for a glimpse of Simon, younger, reaching for his wallet, hot and hungry and happy to please her with a gift. Hold it in your hands so that the palms are all in contact with the cool curve of its bowl; at a street café where they stopped for kir, Julia held it once eight years ago, just so. She lifted it and kissed it, set it down carefully, held Simon’s flushed face instead, the same way, and kissed that.
If we too set it down to pass through the open double doors to the drawing room, we will find the same quiet dust here, the same hush of history pressing in. What need have you of Paris and its pretty lights? wheedles the chandelier. A crystal decanter sits upon its silver tray. Julia is scared to use it, although she remembers her aunt pouring whisky from it. Her father, a quiet man who never drank liquor except when Aunt Helen plied it upon him, would accept glass after glass because he’d rather be steaming drunk, provided he could stand and talk when necessary without slurring, than be rude and decline. In his later years, of course, he couldn’t stomach it, or anything else. She remembers her mother and her aunt, after he died, drinking from the same decanter; brandy this time. She remembers her seventeen-year-old self, seeking solitude, finding solace. They looked up when she came in, they were tear-stained and laughing, and poured her a glass. And after the third one, at last, after three days of silence and a dry-eyed funeral, Julia laughed too, and cried. The taste of brandy, taken unawares, can still make her weep.
But before it was Aunt Helen’s, like everything in the house, the decanter belonged to John Mackley. This is the very same decanter from which, on numberless evenings at the end of the nineteenth century, John poured port for his brother. Edward Mackley himself, who might have been knighted if he’d ever returned, held that slender neck in his strong hand. Now, you feel the weight of the thing. The wide flat bottom, the chink of the stopper as the ground glass slides out, and the satisfying heaviness of the ball in your hand. The diamonds cut into its side reflect the yellow light, everything is dazzling… But no, it is the sunlight. The chandelier is of course not lit. It is just past noon — the long hand of the Viennese clock on the wall has just clacked around to a quarter past twelve. The clock is old, and the beauty of its inlaid face can’t be quite trusted, despite Simon’s attentions. But whether his watch would tell us that it is a minute earlier, or forty-eight seconds later, it is enough to remind us that we are at the apex of a glorious midsummer day in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it is more than a hundred years since Edward Mackley drank port in the drawing room, and more than a hundred years since he died.
The front door slams. And here in the hallway, at last, is Julia. It is dim and cool; she is suspended for a moment in the amber light from the etched-glass oval of the door. Here is Julia at last, pausing at the mirror, her skin a faint shiver after the midday heat of the street. Gilt-framed, some spotting at the bottom left corner. She is still a little sun-blind and can see the room behind her only darkly; the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs is only a tall, pale-faced brown shadow, thudding softly in the dust. She cannot meet her own eyes, unable to focus on the immediate centre of her vision; slowly her pupils grow huge, adjusting, and fix upon their own reflection. At this moment, she hangs somewhere between herself and her image, trapped by the glass.
Many hundreds of lives have been framed by this gilt. Might we yet scry something? What, after all, happens to them all, all the reflections that have passed through the mirror — might they not linger somewhere, those that have glanced or paused here? It may be that there is another young woman, another bronze-flecked gaze behind Julia’s eyes, still flickering in the depths of the silver surface. The past is not to be dispensed with easily, today. Everywhere it insists itself in this house, encroaching. The chandeliers, it seems, might after all be lit.
On a fine evening in October 1897, this very glass had the good fortune to reflect the image of nineteen-year-old Emily Gardiner, who, having excused herself from the party, made a quick assessment of her appearance and found it wanting. Brown eyes far too bright like a fever and a high colour in her cheeks as if she herself had just come in from the snow. It wouldn’t do. She must try to calm down and refuse any further offers of punch. For Jane Whitstable was sitting in the next room and had held the same cup all evening, sipping, speaking charmingly when spoken to, even conjuring a lovely pink blush when Edward Mackley bent to kiss her hand. When a man returns from the wilderness, such is the woman he wants to find waiting. Not some redcheeked heathen with a wild look in her eye.
But how could she not be thrilled by the Norwegian’s words? As Dr Nansen spoke of his journey, of the lights, the ice, she had glanced across at Edward and felt sure that he, too, was transported; he was taut, his forearm on the mantel, his jaw. The dogs, and the sleds, and the men; the walruses and the whales, the waves, and everywhere the ice. The heave and the groan of it. And to hear the sky described so. To see the pallid flash of the lights across the night, to see the moon and then the sun circle the horizon for weeks on end. To hear the freezing sea turning, and the stars, ice white; the night deep blue-black and white. To eat plain hard biscuits out on the floe, to return to the ship for darts and beer and singing. To come home to the wife that waved from the shore, at last, after months of longing. To be the woman longed for. To lie beside a hero… No, this would not do at all. This carnality in the hallway; no wonder her cheeks were flaming. She smoothed her stomach and her skirts, correcting the S shape so that she was, if not so swan-like as Jane Whitstable, at least something like respectable. She breathed in, watching herself in the mirror, seeing her chest rise as the nostrils pinched. Pretty as a peach Jane Whitstable might be, but her funny little nose was nothing in comparison with Emily’s fine, straight, perfectly proportioned one. There. That was the finishing touch she needed and now she was ready, quite ready to resume the party with her chin (also, actually, rather good) held high.
And so she returned to the drawing room, and on that night the great romance of the Mackleys began; the story that the family has told itself for a century, that has passed down the years through a dozen retellings to reach Julia, now — the story that has been her favourite since childhood. The dashing, somewhat thin young officer whom Emily remembered, who had departed for the north when she was only fourteen and fanciful — although she might have liked him a little broader, and not quite so dark — had returned. And now the ten years between them were narrower; in the years that had passed, his chest had filled out and she had discovered poetry and come around to the possibility that a man with a brooding countenance and a flash in his almost-black eyes might, after all, be ideal. A man with a set to his jaw and a strong forearm upon the mantel.
The ship upon which Edward had sailed in 1892 — leaving Emily to her adolescence — set out to explore the known, and no more. It reached a respectable enough latitude. The summer was spent hunting, and refining the contours of other men’s maps. They were far enough north to be embedded for two winters, and when the ship was released by the ice in the second spring, having survived the crush and the dull months of darkness, the captain set a course for the coast of Canada, with an enraged Edward stationed at the stern, furious to be turning back. He bade farewell to the lightening world he was leaving behind, jade and lilac in the slow dawn, and swore he would return as his own master. There was still space enough for his name to be writ large across that vast white semblance of a land, visible for ever in the snow, bright under the Arctic moon and the brilliant day alike.
When he heard Dr Nansen speak, at his brother’s invitation, in the family’s own drawing room, he thought: I might take that path, and sail north-east for Spitzbergen. And also, he thought: I could go further. Further than this man’s Farthest North; to the northernmost point, to find it, to fix it, to feel the world turn below me. This, then, was what Emily