Читать книгу The Still Point - Amy Sackville - Страница 14

PART II

Look: here is Edward in his cabin as they sail out of Tromsø, the first Arctic city and their last port of call before Vardø and parting. The cabin is already the cosy, cramped nest of a bachelor. The shelves just visible at the top of the picture are stuffed with socks, sealskins, waterproofs; the bed is a neat nook made up with three blankets; Edward himself sits at a chair at his small desk, in a pose of easy authority, his diary open before him, smoking one of several pipes that hang on the wall. No open flames allowed below decks — except in the galley and in the captain’s cabin.

On a shelf above the bed, we can make out a slim collection of John Donne’s poems, slipped alongside the handful of books of reference (the ship’s main library is kept in the saloon). There are several volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, including Vol. 35 (MacCarwell-Maltby). It will never be known if Edward discovered, between Brigadier William Mackintosh of Borlum and Charles Macklin, the actor, the entry his playful wife tacked in, describing the life of the eminent explorer and exemplary husband Edward Mackley — the tale she wrote for him, telling how he reached the Pole and revived England’s pride and passion; his brilliant, tall sons and beautiful tawny daughters, brilliant also: the Mackleys, who shaped the new century. But if Emily knew him at all, she was surely right to guess that he would turn, from time to time, to the page that his name would one day appear on — as, indeed, it now does, not interleaved but printed and irrevocable. When the editors called upon her to check the details for the 1912 supplement, the difference between their entry and her own, which she had written with such a proud, light heart over a decade before, was a pain almost too great to bear. The volume was to account for those who had died between 1901 and 1911. It seemed by then a sure assumption. She could not pass the word ‘lost’ and asked John to finish the task for her.

In the photograph all this is in the future; the biographer’s subject has not reached the point of departure, when the myth she’d written for him was to split from the one she had to make do with. He has not yet even entered the fog that would shroud him as he sailed from her. But when it descended, this was the cabin that Edward was to read and write and smoke his evenings away in; this was the cabin in which Emily imagined him, and this is the picture that sits on Julia’s desk, the place that she too will embark from. Smoking his pipe as the fog descends: here is Edward.