The Still Point Read Online Free PDF Page B

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