Читать книгу The Still Point - Amy Sackville - Страница 10

The garden

It is ten o’clock, or thereabouts — Julia is in the garden, and has left her watch indoors. Two and a half hours have passed since Simon’s departure on the dot of half-past seven. After the toast, Julia realized that the dull pressure at the back of her head and the mild disgust of the egg pan were only red-wine remnants, now staining the creases of her brain brown. She took a painkiller and went back to bed, until woken an hour later by a pheasant falling out of the night and smack into her eyes. The bedroom was bright and harmless, but hot; she had left the blind open.

The shower helped to rinse away dreams and headache alike, cool water on a blank mind. Best not to try to plan the day, or to think that the day should be planned. She closed her eyes and tilted up her face and imagined rain, heavy warm summer rain upon her eyelids like the time that… When?

Running down the street in shorts in a hot city on holiday, not caring, Rome, it was Rome. Brown dust, deep pink evening and the bold red burst of tomatoes for dinner, and eating an artichoke, pulling it to pieces and sucking the pulp, and my sister laughing at polipo meaning octopus which I’d also never eaten, but when I chewed it I couldn’t get the word out of my mouth, pulpy between the teeth until I had to spit it out. The rain, yes, the rain was in Rome. The man was Italian. The first man that watched me, dark eyes he had, he was short I suppose, his hair shining and my bra showing through the shirt I wore clinging, water running down my face and my thighs, and he watched me and for the first time I thought, I like that man watching me, caught in this torrent.

In the shower two hours before this, while Julia poached his eggs, Simon planned his day with care. He went over appointments and projects in process. He made a mental note to remind his personal assistant to rearrange a meeting next Thursday, and to book him a table for lunch. He thought about the menu and decided to have steak. He had a taste for simple, good red meat; the Watsons last night served some elaborate, spiny little birds that he couldn’t bring himself to pick up and eat with his fingers. He turned his face up to the water and splashed off this prickle of irritation. He would start the morning with a fresh look at a set of plans that had been troubling him, and a fresh cup of black coffee; he would find Joanne making one when he arrived and she’d offer, as she did every morning. It was a routine. He would sharpen his pencils and begin.

As he shaved, a trickle of music interrupted the order of his mind, unbidden. He was a boy, fluff appearing in patches quite dark already on his chin, sitting down all awkward skinny and long at the piano and playing out, hesitant, a few first bars of the concerto that woke them this morning. Wondering and hoping that he might one day perfect them. And splashing his clean face, grown handsome perhaps, grown older, he thought, Where are wonder and hope? Not in so many words; he is not a man to despair; it is a cloud that passes. Moments later he couldn’t recall what he was thinking, which annoyed him; he caught back at the notes as they faded, remembered Rachmaninov and thought he should find the CD for Julia before he left. He is not without kindness. But by the time he’d sat down to his eggs, the tune had again eluded him, and he forgot.

Now it is ten o’clock, or thereabouts. There is work to be done but no reason to forgo the sun — Julia’s research, such as it is, can be conducted just as well in the garden. To this end, she’s brought out a blanket to lie on and a book, which she isn’t reading; instead, she is stroking the sun-warmed fur of a purring tabby named Tess. She has pegged the washing out on the line, so that the sheets billow fresh white at the edge of her vision like the sails of a ship; she is afloat in the summer morning. She has an appointment in the afternoon, but there are hours to pass before she has to make herself presentable for this rare break to the day, which is otherwise stretching out in the sun just as lazy as her own limbs. Any revelations can wait; she is, anyway, quite unwitting of whatever the approaching visitor may bring, and does not know that there is a revelation to come.

As she’s laid out here, so well lit and lethargic, we might take a closer look. She is quite small, really. She looks quite small and slight lying there. Her skin is pale gold, and shiny with sun cream. She has lots of hair; we saw it loose about her shoulders at the window but it’s pinned up now and still damp from the shower, and when she moves the coconut smell of her shampoo catches the air. Her face is placid and clear — she will most likely put make-up on later, and then she will look a little older. Her features might then strike her visitor as verging on the beautiful, but she will be perhaps a little less lovely than she is now, stroking Tess with her hair falling free of its knot. She is wearing an old, favourite summer dress, with fading printed flowers; she lies on her belly and her ankles are crossed in the air like a girl’s. It is possible that here, now, in the garden, in the green, she is as lovely as she ever will be. The sun falls thick around her, lighting up golden the laburnum she lies under. There are fruit trees in the garden, there are dark cherries ripening in the heat, sweetness, fullness, leaves hot and glossy; there are tiny flowers dense as stars, pale blue, there are tall stems, violet, pink and cream, heart’s-ease and phlox, gentle lupin, tall hollyhocks. Julia isn’t sure what phlox is. An English country garden; as a child she heard ‘heart cease’ in the song. But a heart is eased, surely, when at last it ceases to beat? She stretches out a hand to take the bud of a brilliant fuchsia between two fingers to pop it. The air, heavy and scented, sings of roses, foxgloves. Forget-me-nots.

She is old enough that we might expect her to have children, but she does not. She has Tess, who is looking up through pale brown slits only slightly yellower than Julia’s own eyes. She strokes her; is there sadness? Perhaps it is just the last of the red wine. The little girl next door is laughing and screaming in the garden; the chains that hold her swing clank and pull alarmingly at the frame, so that Julia looking up wants to call out, ‘Careful! Be careful…’ because she knows that she would fear for her own daughter to swing so high. Back and forth, little feet in sweet blue shoes poke over the top of the fence with a giggle and a ‘Wheee!’

Wheee! When I was a girl there was a swing at the end of this garden. Two ropes tied to that apple tree, with a stick lashed to the bottom. Miranda would insist that Jumbles had a turn. Jumbles? Mumbles? Gumbles it was, the imaginary badger. She’d push the swing as hard as she could and catch it and push again and I’d hop up and down beside her squealing because it wasn’t fair. Then she’d swing herself, and when she wanted to get off she just let go, right at the top of her swing, just let go and landed eight feet away like some circus artist. I came outside one evening alone, I watched my white shoes among the daisies, both brilliant against the deep blue grass, deep blue evening, bewitched. The night soft, and anything possible. Alone, I swung higher than ever, than anyone ever, wheee… and when I came to the top of my biggest swing I jumped, I flew through the air like my soaring 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.