The Still Point Read Online Free PDF

upon one particular nettle leaf, something is feasting. It is ragged-edged, burnished orange and oak; it folds its wings graciously to show an extraordinary patchwork of blue, grey and violet on the
underside, then opens out to rest full-spread. Stay for just a moment to watch me, says the Comma butterfly. But it will not remain, it will be gone by the time Simon, who has long been waiting for just this brief pause, returns home. A pity for Simon, but he will never know, and a lucky escape for the Comma, who will live to see tomorrow, and maybe even another day, poor short-lived beauty.
    The butterflies, then, heave and clamber; the bees bustle and hum; Tess is up and prowling, licking the last of a juicy bluebottle from her teeth with luxuriant tongue. Everywhere the creak and sigh of growing things, of life, but there is only a rumpled blanket, a discarded book, where we left Julia. The air stirs, lifting the pages until they hesitantly turn; the words grow faint until there is only regret remaining, ‘I cannot go on’ whispering across the garden, and then the merciful breeze turns onto the ending, where there is only unfilled white.
     
    She is not in the conservatory either, which is unsurprising as it is unbearably hot; the palms flourish in the humidity, but we shall wilt. Let us pass through the doors to the dining room it leads on to, before we give up and collapse on the wicker divan, fanning ourselves with a hopeless paperback that we are too warm to persevere with. It is cooler here, and as the eye recovers from the brightness it becomes clear that the room is unoccupied; no one dines at the long table, which has stood for a hundred years here, more. If we were to lift it the squares of the rug flattened by its legs would reveal a brilliant crimson, 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