The Still Point by Amy Sackville Read Free Book Online Page B

of argument–a concerto, a
dead pheasant, a cat in the garden, a trace of lipstick, the taste of vine tomatoes, of aniseed, a lily? How can we hope to do more than snatch at our quarry? It cannot be netted and pinned. Even butterflies, so captured, show only one side of themselves. What of that Comma that escaped Simon’s sentence of death? He would have it show its colours, certainly, but in doing so would hide the subtler underside, some would say the more lovely part.
    Perhaps this underestimates Simon. It may come to pass, one summer’s day like this one, this year or in ten years’ time, that he will catch his Comma and find that its blues and browns and bruise purples are indeed more intriguing than the upside, and decide to buck convention (for he is not in all things conventional), and mount it downwards. It may be that he places it alone in a frame, and presents it to Julia as a gift, and she will hang it above her desk where she will, at last, have settled, and will sometimes glance up mid-sentence and pause.
    But who knows if the Comma will ever return to the nettle? And what are the chances that Simon, too, will be hovering about the spot? Tess has been known to eat butterflies, has been found with a wing poking out of her shimmering grin… Let’s not break the bounds of the day. It is exhausting enough, snatching at the past as it slides through the present, without letting the future interfere.
     
    In the attic, Julia sits surrounded by boxes of Edward’s possessions, and Emily’s, which have found their way here over the years unsorted. As girls, Julia and her sister Miranda would creep up here and open them at random to pull out hats and muffs and mysterious swathes of sealskin. She remembers the big windproof anoraks they’d wear to cross the icy landscape at the
top of the house together, struggling against the snow until they caught sight of each other and collapsed giggling into the icy wind. Or she would pull a fur around her and step out on her top-hatted sister’s arm to an opera or a waltz.
    When Aunt Helen moved out, Julia’s grandfather Edward — John’s son — had the animals hauled up here too. They were morbid, he mumbled, and they’d have to sell the place sometime, although no one made any move to do so. After his first shuffling visit, unable to manage the stairs even, he lost all interest in the home he was born in and had inherited from his father. Although it belonged to him he had never been its master, having lived in London since leaving to study there at seventeen, and had visited rarely in the intervening years; he seemed reluctant even to return. And now he was an old man and hadn’t the energy for a sale, had money enough to see him through his last lonely years. He died quietly in his own bed in Belgravia at the age of ninetynine, and the house here stood empty, settling into its own memories, letting them sigh down into the dust that had been so rudely disturbed by the animals’ exodus to the attic. Simon, whose careful fingers are suited to such tasks, learned to restore the mounts (although they did not please him like his own winged captives), and has groomed and sleeked them back to something closer to life, patched where necessary, eyes replaced.
    Now those glass eyes, some new, some old, look upon Julia for the second time today as she sits on the swept floor. In the gloomy warmth, she tastes cold sea salt on her lip.
     
    Cold waves washing and my feet bare, my Great-great-uncle Edward somewhere out upon the water. I saw him at the prow, proud, his dark eyes looking out. Skin slapped
red, I wouldn’t step out of the sea, I too would one day have an adventure, the waves would lift and lull me, when the sea became rough I would batten the hatches, take in the topsail, look lively. I would grow used to the vile brown taste of rum. I would be quick and clever like Edward, I would be wise and strong, I would not die in the snow.
     
    Julia is sitting on the