all is a lady, and perhaps mindful of the conventions of her day. It might be lonely, here in the attic, with no one to admire her. Aunt Helen used to greet her whenever she came through the front door; Miranda and Julia would imitate her, delighted. ‘Hello, polar bear. Hello, bear cub.’ It is a habit now engrained in her passage, so that every time she enters she almost says it aloud before seeing the empty corner and remembering, sadly, that the bear is gone.
‘Hello, polar bear,’ she whispers now in the attic.
Julia’s Aunt Helen was in fact a great-aunt, her grandfather’s sister, John’s daughter; much younger than her brothers, she was born late to Arabella Mackley one peaceful spring morning in 1916 while shells and mortar fire tore apart Europe. She was in her fifties when Julia was born; her dark hair just turning to silver, her lively face beginning to crease. If we wish to know Julia, we must know something of this aunt, Helen Mackley, who told Edward’s stories like fairy tales (of the best sort, thrilling and gruesome), who had in turn learned them from Emily, Edward’s unwitting, waiting widow. To Julia, this is not so much John’s house as Aunt Helen’s; it was in her keeping from the end of the thirties. No one had ever questioned her right to it, since she had lived there her whole life, and her brothers made no claims upon it. With Emily she had seen it through the war, opening its doors to children from the city, sitting with them around the kitchen table, overseeing them in the schoolroom where she and her brothers had been taught, and telling stories of explorers and polar bears (the stories that Emily had told many times over, that Helen first heard from her, and told to Julia and Miranda in turn), and tucking the awestruck evacuees into beds that they thought they’d be swallowed by, so that more than one dragged their blankets to the floor by morning. The staff dwindled as the war went on. By the 1950s, Aunt Helen managed the house more or less alone, with élan and aplomb (these are words that Julia reserves especially for memories of Aunt Helen), and as the country emerged from post-war darkness she invited bright, brilliant guests to enliven the once-gloomy rooms of her Edwardian childhood, and had parties and picnics and poured wine and champagne, and posed for photographs and painted in the garden. At least twice a year she ventured alone across the Channel, travelling by train across the continent and returning with souvenirs and stories. When Julia was a child, the house was still busy with her visitors and the tales she told, brimful of the family’s reminiscing, so that the departed and the long-dead jostled with the living. Aunt Helen conducted them all through the house and the garden, opening cupboards and books and secrets, each more enchanting than the last, dazzling her guests (and her great-nieces in turn) with the glamour she cast over everything.
Her strength and brightness belied her age almost to the end, until the confusion of her last years. Well into her eighties, when most of the old guests were gone, she was to be found in the garden, pruning or painting, or baking cakes in the kitchen, or inviting young men to tea. She had never married; she had taken lovers but hers, she said, was not a heart to settle. She loved children, but had none of her own. So when her nephew William brought Julia and Miranda to visit, she lavished them with attention, with Turkish delight and chocolates, and pastries for breakfast and, when they grew older, half-glasses of wine with dinner. She’d set them up with easels and let them use her paints, and didn’t care a bit about the mess they made, and framed their masterpieces and proclaimed that her nieces were, without a doubt, the most talented of the many talented artists it had been her privilege to meet. Julia adored her. As a teenager she would borrow her aunt’s scarves and beads and her catchphrases, would say ironic things like ‘How jaunty!’ and try to raise one eyebrow. They spent summer holidays there and Christmas too, and went on doing so even after their father died. Aunt Helen worried for her nephew’s widow, and besides would not have given the girls up so easily. And then four short years later, Maggie, their mother, died too, having ignored a cramp in her guts for a year that she had put down to sadness. And Miranda had just qualified and taken a job at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, where she’d studied, and then she married and had her own home and children to tend to, and it was just Julia and Aunt Helen in the holidays, against the world.
There was always, for Julia, something enchanted about their nights out in the garden, or by the fire in the sitting room, preserving between them the memory of all that was lost; together in the warm, lawless places of the house, the spaces that were not all oak and grandeur but filled with secrets and softness, cushions and flowers, the smell always of lavender and roses, and upon which they cast a spell of ice so that it crept over the walls and enclosed them, glittering. The story passed from Emily to Helen and on, through a line of surrogate daughters; this is the legacy that Julia owes a debt to, both the legend of the figure in the snow, and the woman left behind who shaped the legend while she waited. In the quiet of the attic, all the rooms now empty, Julia still feels the quiver of some vibrant invisible thing about which the house throngs.
Julia’s squinting eye ranges the room. She twists the telescope, which turns still with a grudging grind, until the malformed leopard’s eye fills the other end with darkness; then returns it to the tasselled bag it has at some time acquired but was almost certainly never carried in, and sets it down at the end of a lengthening row of objects extracted from Box 004, as labelled in Julia’s curled and forward-slanting hand. She returns to her desk and writes:
Item 5: Telescope. Tin. Found in camp beside grave site discovered F.J. Land 1959; believed property of Edward Mackley.
It may, in truth, have belonged to any one of the five found there; but he was the navigator, after all. And she would like to believe that through this same curve of glass he watched his wife grow distant on the shore. The lens is intact, if a little scratched, and looking through it now we might yet spy Emily Mackley trapped under the glass, waving as she watched her husband shrink, while he adjusts the focus, again and again, sharpening her outline each time it blurs until at last it will turn no further.
Edward, as his ship set sail, watched her diminish, long after she had lost him among the other tiny figures on the deck. So they dwindled from each other’s lives and could only hope to be close again. The crew set about their business, glad to be under way at last. Edward lowered the telescope, and watched until the land slipped over the curve and there was only the sea, the sky, the long, long day between them, just a paleness at the far edge of the world which would in time be blinding. It was July, the nights still light. He was on his way to glory. There was a long way to go and it would only grow colder.
Their honeymoon had been spent in Norway while Edward made his preparations and recruited the last of his crew. Emily, released from stays, had learned to ski, had learned liberty. In these brief months of their marriage, she had learned what a lover is; she knew now that a wife is not a delicate bloom to be kept under glass, but a woman, with strength as well as soft skin. Arriving at Edward’s side at the bottom of a slope, she slipped and skidded on her hip into his legs, laughing, and he lifted her and laughed too and her eyes were bright, her face red with the cold and her gleeful descent, and he kissed her. They walked hand in hand through the little town; they joked and played and threw snowballs, lovingly made of the softest snow, and in the evenings the trees were frosted and twinkled in torchlight and the cabin they stayed in was warm, and they ate simply, fish and black bread and a sweet brown cheese like caramel, and drank light ale, and felt whole and healthy and fell into bed almost, but not quite, exhausted.
In too few weeks, the ship was ready to sail for the north. Norwegianbuilt to spend months in darkness, locked in the ice and, with luck, borne up by it, to meet the spring on the other side. She was christened Persephone. Captain Edward Mackley stood at the prow, broke the bottle and named her, with his wife by his side.
Emily came as far as she could with him, and would have gone further, he knew; she said she would follow him to the ends of the earth, but he could allow her only as far as Vardø — which was close enough. They sailed around the coast to this northernmost point, between the islands, every fjord a gasp of awe; they stood together on deck and looked out at the mist in the mornings, the mountains and the air which Emily would never forget, would try to describe for the rest of her life,
