and shape and colour so carefully accounted for in Latin. Looking at the butterflies on the landing now, she feels inspired by the neat labels beneath each one, still true a century later. And she thinks that if she were to somehow emulate him, if he were to come home to find everything in order, that this too might somehow please him.
Let us follow as she makes her way up the stairs, staying close to the wall to avoid the creaks that sound softly under her feet. She is thinking of lining the attic with glass cases and placing her relics in them; of making a label for everything.
The archivist
There is a soothing continuity to Julia’s life, these days; it has slowed to a comforting dawdle through the rooms of her childhood. When she sees old friends — which is rarely — they laugh fondly at her easy life, and are unsure whether to feel pleased or concerned. She seems happier than she has been in years, since her beloved Aunt Helen was first taken into care; she laughs more readily, never looks as if she might have been crying alone, enjoys herself guiltlessly again. But she is also somehow distant, somehow gauzy.
She has spent so many hours here, since she was a child, picking up whatever comes to hand and setting it down again, each handling adding to the patina, the shine on scratched glass, the lustre of a fabric now faded. Now, her wanderings have a purpose; she will eventually have to bring it all to account, and present Edward Mackley in a neat package–a catalogue, a Life, a bill of sale, she is unsure of the binding. She prefers not to dwell on it; she will know when the time comes. She prefers not to dwell on when that will be. So, she makes occasional notes in notebooks; she wraps, unwraps, rewraps; she reads letters and journals and jottings; she strays from the task to straighten cushions or make jam.
If she is daunted by her task, if she has been procrastinating, can we blame her for preferring to lounge in the sun? Can a life be composed of other men’s accounts, diaries, journals, notebooks, newspapers and relics of a wrecked expedition any more than it can of — for the sake 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 wooden boards of the attic’s floor, tapping the tip of a fine ballpoint pen (stolen from Simon’s supply) against a pad beside her. A nebulous mass of dark specks is swarming into the margin, beside where she has written
Box 004
— thinking the additional zeroes will add an air of authority to her filing, the appearance of a system —
Item 8: Rifle
— followed by an emphatic full stop
.
She sights along the rifle at the bear in the corner. Then feels suddenly guilty, and then has at least the sense to feel ridiculous. But Edward once lifted this same barrel, perhaps, in this same pose that Julia holds steadily, and hit the bear square in the eye — so the story goes, the unlikely story that explains why she is scarless. It might have been the taxidermist’s skill that made her so; or she was found dead already, although she is reckoned to be only eleven, too young to have died of old age. Edward kept no records on his first expedition. The ship’s log reports: ‘Young Mackley returned excited from a morning’s hunt, to recruit two pairs of hands to help him drag his kill back to the ship; a fine specimen, with not a mark on her, a gift for his brother he says although I dare say he might make a second killing if he takes it to auction.’ Which wouldn’t help Julia solve this particular mystery, even if that log was in her possession and not buried somewhere in a Kensington archive. She is, besides, happy to believe in the bullet in the eye.
Poor polar bear. Dying with a roar or posed like that. Great-grandpa John forcing the mouth wide, hand between its jaws. Holding it by the paw like a dancer.
John, white-bearded, takes the massive claw with a bow, his big doctor’s hand crushably tiny in its grasp. He has to reach above his own head to ask for the waltz; the smile in his mischievous eye is captured in silver. Helen took the photograph. It hangs in the upstairs hallway.
Julia rises, her knees stiff from kneeling. In the steps between her and the bear her hobble straightens, so that by the time she reaches her partner she is quite ready to dance. Suddenly shy, she
