The Still Point Read Online Free PDF Page A

extraordinary sister. I flew, I flew, silent like a night bird, and landed with a thump. Face down, hands out, dazed until my heart slowed and I felt the pain and I cried very quietly, but when I felt the scrape on my face I bawled.
     
    On a day like this, these little nostalgias float in the air like so many seed pods and pollens and spiders. Julia has known and loved this garden since she was a little girl. It is the garden that appears in her mind when a garden is required as the setting for a story or a dream. It is narrow and long, it is far from neat. The apple tree at the end has, in its time, let its white blossom fall upon a fairytale giant. High walls have built themselves so that only Julia can enter through a little hidden door. There have been many mad tea parties on the lawn — in fact, it is true that Julia’s Aunt Helen knew a great many eccentrics, and artists have stretched out with their bare-breasted girlfriends in this very spot. A lean, dark adventurer has strolled here by moonlight with the woman who would be his wife. He asks for her hand and places his heart in it; she promises to hold it until he returns. Edward and his Emily. Julia has played the part countless times in her mind.
    Tess purrs under stroking fingers. The book lies open: it is close to the end of the tale, although there are many blank pages remaining. Even on a day such as this, you will still feel the frost on them if you touch lightly; the chill of resignation, of despair, of regret for a story untold. A man, fallen through the ice, is dying. Julia stares at the handwritten page without reading a word.

    Edward Mackley’s diary was found in an aluminium case in a frozen grave in Franz Josef Land, still clutched in his blackened hand along with a picture of his wife and a pocket watch, in the spring of 1959. His last days were spent in the endless dark on a small northern island, hoping for a sunrise he didn’t live to see, squinting to see his own scrawl by dim greasy lamplight so that the world might know what had befallen them, should the truth ever be brought into the flawless Arctic light. After years of mystery, the Persephone expedition of 1899 was at last revealed to have been a valiant failure; he came painfully, dismally close, hopelessly far from triumph, and turned back too late to save them. ‘I cannot go on with it, I fear,’ he wrote; ‘I cannot go on.’ His wife Emily, an old woman now who had waited sixty years for news of her vanished husband, wept with pride and the pity of it and died that same summer.

Glass
    Far to the north, over the Pole, the sun reaches the apex of a day that will last until the next one, so that the dazzle of this shadowless noon is only a little brighter than midnight. But here in England, too, the midday sun is brilliant and the afternoon it slips into will stretch well into the evening. Askance, the sky is blue, but let the zenith fill your vision and you will fall into a blue-black depth more endless than an ocean.
    Julia is no longer in the garden. The cries of little Jenny next door have been quieted; she is indoors, devouring ham sandwiches. Tess is still recumbent in the sun, relishing the tranquillity. She has forgotten already the giggles and squeals that earlier disturbed her and is quite at peace, the sun bright on her tabby back. The flowers bloom and burst a little more every minute. Snuff the air and you will smell the sheets that are hanging bright white on the line, barely stirred by the breeze; the peaches ripening, the crisp apple skins, the deep yellow odour of floating pollen. Bees are fussing about the delphinium, stripping each column busily one blue blossom at a time, rolling in the powder like addicts. Painted Ladies and Peacocks strut upon the buddleia, crowding the purple with umber, gold, amethyst and white, sucking at nectar greedy and deep. In the shade of this frenzy, there are nettles growing, an acrid spike in the scent of the bush and the earth. And