[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter Read online

  I said I hadn’t known the hothouse was here, I was impressed, she must be an enthusiastic gardener. I was babbling. She looked at me carefully. “It’s how we make our living,” she said. I apologised, I wasn’t sure for what, and then laughed, and felt foolish. There are people to whom you feel compelled to explain yourself. “I got lost,” I said, “in the garden, believe it or not, and then I saw you here, and . . .” She was still watching me, hanging on my words; I wondered if she were perhaps hard of hearing. The possibility was oddly touching. Or was it simply that she wasn’t really listening? Her face was empty of all save a sense of something withheld. She made me think of someone standing on tiptoe behind a glass barrier, every part of her, eyes, lips, the gloves that she clutches, straining to become the radiant smile that awaits the beloved’s arrival. She was all potential. On the bench where she had been working lay an open secateurs, and a cut plant with purple flowers.

  We went among the tables, wading through a dead and standing pool of air, and she explained her work, naming the plants, the strains and hybrids, in a neutral voice. Mostly it was plain commercial stuff, apple tree-lets, flower bulbs, vegetables, but there were some strange things, with strange pale stalks, and violent blossoms, and bearded fruit dangling among the glazed, still leaves. Her father had started the business, and she had taken it over when her brother was killed. “We still trade as Grainger Nurseries.” I nodded dully. The heat, the sombre hush, the contrast between the stillness here and the windy tumult pressing against the glass all around us, provoked in me a kind of excited apprehension, as if I were being led, firmly, but with infinite tact, into peril. Ranked colours thronged me round, crimson, purples, and everywhere green and more green, glabrous and rubbery and somehow ferocious. “In Holland,” she said, “in the seventeenth century, a nurseryman could sell a new strain of tulip for twenty thousand pounds.” It had the flat sound of something read into a recorder. She looked at me, her hands folded, waiting for my comment. I smiled, and shook my head, trying to look amazed. We reached the door. The summer breeze seemed a hurricane after the silence within. My shirt clung to my back. I shivered. We walked a little way down a path under an arch of rhododendrons. The tangled arthritic branches let in scant light, and there was a smell of mossy rot reminiscent of the tang of damp flesh. Then at once, unaccountably, we were at the rear of the house. I was confused; the garden had surreptitiously taken me in a circle. Charlotte murmured something, and walked away. On the drive under the sycamores I paused and looked back. The house was impassive, except where a curtain in an open upstairs window waved frantically in the breeze. What did I expect? Some revelation? A face watching me through sky-reflecting glass, a voice calling my name? There was nothing—but something had happened, all the same.

  The child’s name was Michael. I couldn’t fit him to the Lawlesses. True, he was given, like Edward, to skulking. I would come upon him in the lanes roundabout, poking in the hedge and muttering to himself, or just standing, with his hands behind him as if hiding something, waiting for me to pass by. Sitting with a book under a tree in the orchard one sunny afternoon, I looked up to find him perched among the branches, studying me. Another time, towards twilight, I spotted him on the road, gazing off intently at something below the brow of the hill where he stood. He had not heard me behind him, and I paused, wondering what it was that merited such rapt attention. Then with a pang I heard it, rising through the stillness of evening, the tinny music of a carnival in the village below.

  One evening Edward stopped at the lodge on his way up from the village. He had the raw look of a man lately dragged out of bed and thrust under a cold tap, his eyes were red-rimmed, his hair lank. He hummed and hawed, scuffing the gravel of the roadside, and then abruptly said: “Come up and have a bite to eat.” I think that was the first time I had been inside the house. It was dim, and faintly musty. There was a hurley stick in the umbrella stand, and withered daffodils in a vase on the hall table. In an alcove a clock feathered the silence and let drop a single wobbly chime. Edward paused to consult a pocket watch, frowning. In the fusty half-light his face had the grey sheen of putty. He hiccupped softly.

  Dinner was in the big whitewashed kitchen at the back of the house. I had expected a gaunt dining-room, linen napkins with a faded initial, a bit of old silver negligently laid. And it was hardly dinner, more a high tea, with cold cuts and limp lettuce, and a bottle of salad cream the colour of gruel. The tablecloth was plastic. Charlotte and Ottilie were already halfway through their meal. Charlotte looked in silence for a moment at my midriff, and I knew at once I shouldn’t have come. Ottilie set a place for me. The barred window looked out on a vegetable garden, and then a field, and then the blue haze of distant woods. Sunlight through the leaves of a chestnut tree in the yard was a ceaseless shift and flicker in the corner of my eye. Edward began to tell a yarn he had heard in the village, but got muddled, and sat staring blearily at his plate, breathing. Someone coughed. Ottilie pursed her lips and began to whistle silently. Charlotte with an abrupt spastic movement turned to me and in a loud voice said:

  “Do you think we’ll give up neutrality?”

  “Give up . . . ?” The topic was in the papers. “Well, I don’t know, I—”

  “Yes, tell us now,” Edward said, suddenly stirring himself and thrusting his great bull head at me, “tell us what you think, I’m very interested, we’re all very interested, aren’t we all very interested? A man like you would know all about these things.”

  “I think we’d be very—”

  “Down here of course we haven’t a clue. Crowd of bog-trotters!” He grinned, snorting softly and pawing the turf.

  “I think we’d be very unwise to give it up,” I said.

  “And what about that power station they want to put up down there at Carnsore? Bloody bomb, blow us all up, some clown with a hangover press the wrong button, we won’t need the Russians. What?” He was looking at Charlotte. She had not spoken. “Well what’s wrong with being ordinary,” he said, “like any other country, having an army and defending ourselves? Tell me what’s wrong with that.” He pouted at us, a big resentful baby.

  “What about Switzerland?” Ottilie said; she giggled.

  “Switzerland? Switzerland? Ha. Milkmen and chocolate factories, and, what was it the fellow said, cuckoo clocks.” He turned his red-rimmed gaze on me again. “Too many damn neutrals,” he said darkly.

  Charlotte sighed, and looked up from her plate at last.

  “Edward,” she said, without emphasis. He did not take his eyes off me, but the light went out in his face, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him. “Not that I give a damn anyway,” he muttered, and meekly took up his spoon. So much for current affairs.

  I cursed myself for being there, and yet I was agog. A trapdoor had been lifted briefly on dim thrashing forms, and now it was shut again. I watched Edward covertly. The sot. He had brought me here for an alibi for his drinking, or to forestall recriminations. I saw the whole thing now, of course: he was a waster, Charlotte kept the place going, everything had been a mistake, even the child. It all fitted, the rueful look and the glazed eye, the skulking, the silences, the tension, that sense I had been aware of from the beginning of being among people facing away from me, intent on something I couldn’t see. Even the child’s air of sullen autonomy was explained. I looked at Charlotte’s fine head, her slender neck, that hand resting by her plate. Leaf-shadow stirred on the table like the shimmer of tears. How could I let her know that I understood everything? The child came in, wrapped in a white bath-towel. His hair was wet, plastered darkly on his skull. When he saw me he drew back, then stepped forward, frowning, a robed and kiss-curled miniature Caesar. Charlotte held out her hand and he went to her. Ottilie winked at him. Edward wore a crooked leer, as if a smile aimed at the centre of his face had landed just wide of the target. Michael mumbled goodnight and departed, shutting the door with both hands on the knob. I turned to Charlotte eagerly. “Your son,” I said, in a voice
that fairly throbbed, “your son is very . . . ” and then floundered, hearing I suppose the tiny tinkle of a warning bell. There was a silence. Charlotte blushed. Suddenly I felt depressed, and . . . prissy, that’s the word. What did I know, that gave me the right to judge them? I shouldn’t be here at all. I ate a leaf of lettuce, at my back that great rooted blossomer, before me the insistent enigma of other people. I would stay out of their way, keep to the lodge—return to Dublin even. But I knew I wouldn’t. Some large lesson seemed laid out here for me.

  Ottilie came with me out on the step. She said nothing, but smiled, at once amused and apologetic. And then, I don’t know why, the idea came to me. Michael wasn’t their child: he was, of course, hers.

  THANKS for the latest Popov, it arrived today. Very sly you are, Cliona—but a library of Popovs would not goad me into publishing. I met him once, an awful little man with ferret eyes and a greasy suit. Reminded me of an embalmer. Which, come to think of it, is apt. I like his disclaimer: Before the phenomenon of Isaac Newton, the historian, like Freud when he came to contemplate Leonardo, can only shake his head and retire with as much good grace as he can muster. Then out come the syringe and the formalin. That is what I was doing too, embalming old N.’s big corpse, only I did have the grace to pop off before the deathshead grin was properly fixed.

  Newton was the greatest genius that science has produced. Well, who would deny it? He was still in his twenties when he cracked the code of the world’s working. Single-handed he invented science: before him it had all been wizardry and sweaty dreams and brilliant blundering. You may say, as Newton himself said, that he saw so far I because he had the shoulders of giants to stand on: but you might as well say that without his mother and father he would not have been born, which is true all right, but what does it signify? Anyway, when he defined the gravity laws he swept away that whole world of giants and other hobgoblins. Oh yes, you can see, can’t you, the outline of what my book would have been, a celebration of action, of the scientist as hero, a gleeful acceptance of Pandora’s fearful disclosures, wishy-washy medievalism kicked out and the age of reason restored. But would you believe that all this, this Popovian Newton-as-the-greatest-scientist-the-world-has-known, now makes me feel slightly sick? Not that I think any of it untrue, in the sense that it is fact. It’s just that another kind of truth has come to seem to me more urgent, although, for the mind, it is nothing compared to the lofty verities of science.

  Newton himself, I believe, saw something of the matter in that strange summer of 1693. You know the story, of how his little dog Diamond overturned a candle in his rooms at Cambridge one early morning, and started a fire which destroyed a bundle of his papers, and how the loss deranged his mind. All rubbish, of course, even the dog is a fiction, yet I find myself imagining him, a fifty-year-old public man, standing aghast in the midst of the smoke and the flying smuts with the singed pug pressed in his arms. The joke is, it’s not the loss of the precious papers that will drive him temporarily crazy, but the simple fact that it doesn’t matter. It might be his life’s work gone, the Principia itself, the Opticks, the whole bang lot, and still it wouldn’t mean a thing. Tears spring from his eyes, the dog licks them off his chin. A colleague comes running, shirt-tails out. The great man is pulled into the corridor, white with shock and stumping like a peg-leg. Someone beats out the flames. Someone else asks what has been lost. Newton’s mouth opens and a word like a stone falls out: Nothing. He notices details, early morning light through a window, his rescuer’s one unshod foot and yellow toenails, the velvet blackness of burnt paper. He smiles. His fellows look at one another.

  It had needed no candle flame, it was already ashes. Why else had he turned to deciphering Genesis and dabbling in alchemy? Why else did he insist again and again that science had cost him too dearly, that, given his life to live over, he would have nothing to do with physics? It wasn’t modesty, no one could accuse him of that. The fire, or whatever the real conflagration was, had shown him something terrible and lovely, like flame itself. Nothing. The word reverberates. He broods on it as on some magic emblem whose other face is not to be seen and yet is emphatically there. For the nothing automatically signifies the everything. He does not know what to do, what to think. He no longer knows how to live.

  There was no fiery revelation to account for my crisis of faith; there was not even what could properly be called a crisis. Only, I wasn’t working now. The month of June went by and I had not put pen to paper. But I was no longer worried—just the opposite. It was like the passing away of a stubborn illness. You don’t notice the gradual calming of the blood, the cleared head, the limbs’ new strength, you are aware only of waiting quietly, confidently, for life to start up again. You won’t believe me, I know: how could I drop seven years of work, just like that? Newton was my life, not these dull pale people in their tumbledown house in the hollow heart of the country. But I didn’t see it as this stark alternative: things take a definite and simple shape only in retrospect. At the time I had only a sense of lateral drift. My papers lay untouched on the table by the window, turning yellow in the sunlight, when my eye fell on them I felt impatience and a vague resentment; my real attention was elsewhere, suspended, ready to give itself with a glad cry to what was coming next.

  What came was unexpected.

  Consider: a day in June, birds, breezes, flying clouds, the smell of approaching rain. Lunchtime. In the kitchen the stove squats in a hot sulk after its labours, the air is dense with the smoke of burnt fat. A knock. I drag open the door, cursing silently. Ottilie is standing outside with the child unconscious in her arms.

  He had fallen out of a tree. A cut on his forehead was bleeding. I took him from her. He was heavier than I expected, and limp as death, it seemed he might pour through my fingers into a pale puddle on the floor. I felt fright, and a curious faint disgust. I put him on an old horsehair sofa and he coughed and opened his eyes. At first there was only the whites, then the pupils slid down, like something awful coming down in a lift. His face was translucent marble, with violet shadows under the eyes. A large bruise was growing on his forehead; the blood had thickened to a kind of jelly. He struggled up. Ottilie sat back on her heels and sighed: “Faugh!”

  I took him in my arms again and carried him to the house. We must have looked like an illustration from a Victorian novelette, marching forward across the swallow-swept lawn: had Ottilie her hands clasped to her breast? Michael turned his face resolutely away from me. On the steps he wriggled and made me put him down. Charlotte opened the door—and for a moment seemed about to step back hurriedly and shut it again. Ottilie said: “Oh he’s all right,” and glared at the child. I left them. My lunch had congealed into its own fat.

  An hour later Ottilie came to the lodge again. Yes, yes, he was fine, nothing broken, the little brat. She apologised for bringing him to me: mine had been the nearest door. “I’m glad,” I said, not knowing quite what I meant. She shrugged. She had put on lipstick. “I got a fright,” she said. We stood awkwardly, looking at things, like people on a railway platform trying to think of how to say a definitive goodbye. The sunlight died in the window and it began to rain. A kind of bubble swelled suddenly in my breast and I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her. There was a fleck of dried blood on my wrist. Her lipstick tasted like something from childhood, plasticine, or penny sweets. When I stepped back she simply stood frowning, and moving her lips, as if trying to identify a mysteriously familiar taste.

  “I think he dislikes me,” I said.

  “What? No. He was embarrassed.”

  “Do children get embarrassed?”

  “Oh yes,” she said softly, and looked at me at last, “Oh yes.”

  It’s strange to be offered, without conditions, a body you don’t really want. You feel the most unexpected things, tenderness of course, but impatience too, curiosity, a little contempt, and something else the only name for which I can find is sadness. When she took off her clothes it was as if she were not merely
undressing, but performing a far more complex operation, turning herself inside out maybe, to display not breast and bum and blonde lap, but her very innards, the fragile lungs, mauve nest of intestines, the gleaming ivory of bone, and her heart, passionately labouring. I took her in my arms and felt the soft shock of being suddenly, utterly inhabited.

  I was not prepared for her gentleness. At first it seemed almost a rebuff. We were so quiet I could hear the rain’s whispered exclamations at the window. In the city of the flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

  We lay, damp and chill as stranded fish, until her fingers at the back of my neck gave three brisk taps and she sat up. I turned on my side and gazed in a kind of fond stupor at the two folds of flesh above her hip bone. She put on her trousers and her lumpy sweater and padded into the kitchen to make tea. Our stain on the sheet was the shape of a turtle. Grey gloom settled on my heart. I was dressed when she came back. We sat on the bed, in our own faintly ammoniac smell, and drank the strong tea from cracked mugs. The day darkened, the rain was settling in.

  “I suppose you think I’m a right whore,” she said.