is it?’ (she yawns, dozy, contented, not bored, not yet bored by the day) ‘I like it.’
‘I have it downstairs, on CD. Hm. I must say I’ve never thought of it as music to herald the dawn,’ he opines. And seeing her face fall just a little, and hating himself just a little for it, he adds, ‘I like it too, though. Gets the blood going, I suppose. Eggs would be nice — if you’re getting up.’
Julia smiles again; Simon graciously allows a last tragic chord to fade to the point when it is almost certainly silent and switches off the radio just before the presenter starts speaking. Julia gets off the bed in that peculiar way she has, looking until the last second as if she intends to simply roll off the edge to the floor. She puts on a jade-green silky gown, a gift from him and far more glamorous than that of her neighbour, that towelling misery she failed to witness. She hums to herself, ‘How do you like your eggs in the morning?’, but she knows his answer already, and although it is not that which the song prescribes, although he fails to join the duet, ‘I like mine with a kiss…’, she applies it anyway — to his further surprise — on his forehead on her way out of the room. He likes his eggs in the morning poached until the white has just set.
So begins the day. There is no reason that this particular Thursday should be anything other than ordinary; but already, as they surface into it, it is proving unusual. What has happened to so transform Simon and Julia’s morning? This affection on her part, this talk of concertos? This request for cooked breakfast when, but moments before, he was huffily contemplating a hasty bowl of bran, standing at the kitchen counter, every scratchy woodchip spoonful somehow blamed on her? Any number of things have added up to this anomaly: a dinner; a little death; infidelity. These lazy high-summer days are long, and anything might quietly happen before night falls.
Eggs and pheasant
Julia and Simon live in a Victorian house which, like almost everything in this very pretty market town, is listed. There is the attic, the master suite, several other bedrooms of various proportions, another bathroom, a basement kitchen, a small but much-loved wine cellar, an elegant reception room, a grand dining room, a cosy squashy much less tidy sitting room, other rooms that we probably won’t have a use for. This is a house full of books, of prints and paintings and photographs on the walls and pottery and glass, and dark, weighty furniture; there are rugs and heavy curtains, there’s a piano that Simon could but doesn’t play, there are stuffed animals. Mounted, we should say, animals.
This house groans in the night, freighted with memories. They are stashed in every cupboard, they lurk in every corner, they gleam in the eyes of the albatross in the attic… Listen, and you will catch the echoes. Attend to the vanishing glint at the corner of your eye: great men have talked, slept, drunk and dined here, under a different, richer yellow light. History took its course here, and might yet be coursing through the corridors, to be caught at. Julia and Simon have lived here less than a year, but she has known these rooms for as long as she can remember, and a part of her has always been wandering through them.
Julia is descended from an important man. A hero even. Julia’s father was the son of Edward Mackley, whose father was John, whose brother was also an Edward — the famous Edward Mackley, the explorer. John Mackley was himself a man not lacking in distinction, a prominent member of the Royal Geographical Society, a respected academic and physician. This is John’s house; it is John’s menagerie in the attic. But while the elder brother stayed at home carefully emptying and refilling animals for posterity, it was Edward and his like who brought home the spoils. It was John who inherited their father’s home and practice, but it is Edward, the second son who had to make his own path, Edward — young, dashing, dead — that history remembers. And it is Edward who occupies Julia’s days, to whom she has turned her archivist’s ear, tracing the story that rimed the edges of their dreams with ice, honing the myth long since fixed and frozen. Edward, who was drawn to the Pole like a flake of iron to a magnet, who was lost in the snow.
It is Julia’s task, since she has left her job in the city, to sort the orts and fragments of her inheritance, and to somehow extract and assemble them into Edward Mackley’s legacy. His body remains half preserved in the ice; his Life is in her indolent hands.
For now, Julia is in the kitchen. She will not find Edward here, but she is otherwise occupied with poaching eggs for her husband’s breakfast — her famous ancestor, who has been buried in the hard Arctic ground for more than a century, can remain on ice a little longer.
She negotiates her way around the table, plates, chairs, pans, hob, with a lazy shuffle. She is enjoying the sleepiness of her limbs and the mess she knows her hair is, and the blankness of being alone here while the water boils, the shower running upstairs. She will wait until she hears it stop, and then depress the toaster’s lever, and then wait a further minute, and then she will carefully lower the eggs into the pan and the toast will pop and she will spread both slices with butter, not too much but all the way to the edges, by which time precisely the whites of the eggs will be just set and she will lift them out on to a plate and place the triangled toast alongside, because the eggs on top make it soggy. And she will set it down next to a cup of tea just as Simon comes into the room. It isn’t like her, this precision on Julia’s part, but this morning she is eager to please, and nothing pleases Simon like precision. For now, though, she is shuffling sleepily, aimless, and peering into the pan.
Snow; I was dreaming about the sky, snow, something blue, something… the pale blue sunrise this morning, so perfect. Like Scotland that time, where was it? Scotland. Yes, but where was it? A hill? A house? The sun, the sea. Water’s boiling, let it boil, turn it down when the toast goes in. Sun, sea and sand… no, it was a pebble beach, a grey pebble beach and there was a stone I found that I kept which had magic in it because it was so smooth and oval white with the magic dark grey line across the centre, a dark blue line, indigo, the richest word in the rainbow.
Hearing the shower stop she thinks, It will be good to make him happy. The eggs will make him happy. Because last night she almost hated him and that won’t do at all. Pedant, pheasant… her irritation twists around a half-rhyme.
Simon arrives in the kitchen, clean and stubble-free, to find that Julia’s egg and toast plan has been successfully executed; he takes a seat at the solid old oak table and the plate is set, hot, before him. He makes a small incision in the top of each egg, then pours salt into the palm of his hand, pinching it with finger and thumb and circling above each one in turn, three times clockwise and finishing with a flourishing flick. Julia, sitting opposite, notices that one of the yolks is much more yellow than the other, a deep full yellow like the sound ‘yolk’. The other is insipid, a perfect yellow for a lemon, but it’s not a lemon, and it’s not what a yolk should be. She wonders which he will eat first and guesses, correctly, the paler. Each egg white carefully sliced away from the yolk’s periphery, laid on top of a neat piece of toast, then dipped. Was the darker one fresher? Or was it fertilized, and the other not? Or both, but the pale one more recently? Why should proximity to chickenhood make a difference? He is now beginning the second egg. She would like to watch that lovely yellowness bulge before bursting under a crisp corner, and spill unctuous on to the plate, but Simon’s egg yolk somehow stays contained within its circle, becomes its own little dipping pot.
Last night he drove them home from the Watsons’. He calls them the Watsons, which she finds sometimes merely anachronistic, sometimes actually annoying, as if she is a housewife in the 1950s or the 1970s or she’s not sure when exactly. A time when middle-class people called their friends ‘the Watsons’ instead of James and Michelle, their names, by which they’ve always known them. In fact Julia has no real recollection of when she learned that surname in connection with this couple, perhaps when they were engaged or married but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that there is no reason now to say, ‘Don’t forget dinner tonight with the Watsons,’ as if they were going to be greeted
