The Still Point by Amy Sackville Read Free Book Online

it is she that should have reminded him, and didn’t, whatever she chose to call them. He is right to be annoyed; she is annoyed with herself, for being so hopeless and disorganized and always proving him right. When did this lethargy set in? When did she cease to enchant him?
    She remembers, with a clutch of pain and shame, her tears; the bird’s black eye; when did she last cry in front of him? Not when Aunt Helen died; not when… there was a time when she should have gone to him and let him hold her, and could not. But it won’t do to dwell on it. She must try to work hard, today; she will work hard so that he will see she is happy here as the family archivist; it was his gift, he wanted to make her happy. She must try. It will be like the days a decade ago when she told him the story, imagining it over for him as they lay safe together all through the winter, his head in her lap as they lay outstretched on the bearskin and she stroked his dark hair back, tracing with a fingertip the slightly receding hairline that only she could see. She will find something new to fascinate him. She will set about her task with renewed vigour.
    So, when she lifted those strawberries to smell them, she was breathing the scent of new optimism, of hope for the evening to come — this was the hope that swung in her hips past the man in his garden, past her opposite neighbour (who is even now making her way across town, trying to make the last hours before the evening go faster).

    When she tasted the tomatoes at the table, when she stroked at Tess’s soft fur, when she wriggled her toes on the warm stone, she was full of the possibilities the long day proffered, wide and clear as the sky. She chopped rosemary and garlic and rubbed olive oil into the meat and watched her own strong hands with pride and imagined a version of herself and Simon sitting down to dinner and laughing together; she would think of something to say that he would laugh at and he would forgive her; there would be nothing to forgive. When the plate slipped from her hand the day threatened to darken but she wouldn’t allow it, it was just a cheap plate, and tonight she would set the table in the conservatory with silver and their glasses would shine in the lamplight and the night would gleam with moths and fireflies dancing, out in the dark blue garden.
     
    The butterflies that Julia is now admiring were not captured by Simon, although they were placed in this prominent position in his honour, for they are what brought him to her. A collection of Arctic Whites gathered in Alaska and mounted by a friend of Edward’s from his first expedition, presented as a wedding gift: these are the pale ghosts now hanging in the stairwell, but they were once kept in a little-visited guest room. There are fifty of them, arranged in series, five by ten; it is one of the finest, most complete collections of this particular species of Arctic Lepidoptera, and includes — and it is this pair of tiny wings that Simon, years ago, came to see–a variety now thought to be extinct, a female, with a bluish tint. They are less than two inches in wingspan and like many northern creatures they have no need for boldness. These butterflies never know darkness; they will wait in their pupae for two years or more, shifting fuzzily, growing by increments, waiting for their day in the
perpetual sun; and, once emerged, will die before it sets for winter. They are not, perhaps, spectacular. It takes a careful, patient, searching eye to see the subtlety of their whites, like an egg, like a petal, like snow. An eye like Simon’s. Even when his father was chasing Ladies, Simon was content with the quiet moths and the pale green brimstones. It isn’t dullness, on Simon’s part. It is not a lack of imagination, but a love of the delicate.
    Now, as Julia passes them on her way to the attic, she remembers Simon as he was when they met ten years ago, and feels an unexpected surge of affection which