[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter

by John Banville

  JOHN

  BANVILLE

  THE NEWTON LETTER

  PICADOR

  WORDS FAIL ME, Clio. How did you track me down, did I leave bloodstains in the snow? I won’t try to apologise. Instead, I want simply to explain, so that we both might understand. Simply! I like that. No, I’m not sick, I have not had a breakdown. I am, you might say, I might say, in retirement from life. Temporarily.

  I have abandoned my book. You’ll think me mad. Seven years I gave to it—seven years! How can I make you understand that such a project is now for me impossible, when I don’t really understand it myself? Shall I say, I’ve lost my faith in the primacy of text? Real people keep getting in the way now, objects, landscapes even. Everything ramifies. I think for example of the first time I went down to Ferns. From the train I looked at the shy back-end of things, drainpipes and broken windows, straggling gardens with their chorus lines of laundry, a man bending to a spade. Out on Killiney bay a white sail was tilted at an angle to the world, a white cloud was slowly cruising the horizon. What has all this to do with anything? Yet such remembered scraps seem to me abounding in significance. They are at once commonplace and unique, like clues at the scene of a crime. But everything that day was still innocent as the blue sky itself, so what do they prove? Perhaps just that: the innocence of things, their non-complicity in our affairs. All the same I’m convinced those drainpipes and that cloud require me far more desperately than I do them. You see my difficulty.

  I might have written to you last September, before I fled, with some bland excuse. You would have understood, certainly at least you would have sympathised. But Clio, dear Cliona, you have been my teacher and my friend, my inspiration, for too long, I couldn’t lie to you. Which doesn’t mean I know what the truth is, and how to tell it to you. I’m confused. I feel ridiculous and melodramatic, and comically exposed. I have shinned up to this high perch and can’t see how to get down, and of the spectators below, some are embarrassed and the rest are about to start laughing.

  I SHOULDN’T HAVE gone down there. It was the name that attracted me. Fern House! I expected—Oh, I expected all sorts of things. It turned out to be a big gloomy pile with ivy and peeling walls and a smashed fanlight over the door, the kind of place where you picture a mad stepdaughter locked up in the attic. There was an avenue of sycamores and then the road falling away down the hill to the village. In the distance I could see the smoke of the town, and beyond that again a sliver of sea. I suppose, thinking about it, that was much what I expected. To look at, anyway.

  Two women met me in the garden. One was large and blonde, the other a tall girl with brown arms, wearing a tattered straw sun hat. The blonde spoke: they had seen me coming. She pointed down the hill road. I assumed she was the woman of the house, the girl in the sun hat her sister perhaps. I pictured them, vigilantly silent, watching me toiling toward them, and I felt for some reason flattered. Then the girl took off her hat, and she was not a girl, but a middle-aged woman. I had got them nearly right, but the wrong way round. This was Charlotte Lawless, and the big blonde girl was Ottilie, her niece.

  The lodge, as they called it, stood on the roadside at the end of the drive. Once there had been a wall and a high pillared gate, but all that was long gone, the way of other glories. The door screeched. A bedroom and a parlour, a tiny squalid kitchen, a tinier bathroom. Ottilie followed me amiably from room to room, her hands stuck in the back pockets of her trousers. Mrs Lawless waited in the front doorway. I opened the kitchen cupboard: cracked mugs and mouse-shit. There was a train back to town in an hour, I would make it if I hurried. Mrs Lawless fingered the brim of her sun hat and considered the sycamores. Of the three of us only blonde Ottilie was not embarrassed. Stepping past Charlotte in the doorway I caught her milky smell—and heard myself offering her a month’s rent in advance.

  What possessed me? Ferns was hardly that Woolsthorpe of my vague dreams, where, shut away from the pestilence of college life, I would put the final touches to my own Principia. Time is different in the country. There were moments when I thought I would panic, stranded in the midst of endless afternoons. Then there was the noise, a constant row, heifers bellowing, tractors growling, the dogs baying all night. Things walked on the roof, scrabbled under the floor. There was a nest of blackbirds in the lilacs outside the parlour window where I tried to work. The whole bush shook with their quarrelling. And one night a herd of something, cows, horses, I don’t know, came and milled around on the lawn, breathing and nudging, like a mob gathering for the attack.

  But the weather that late May was splendid, sunny and still, and tinged with sadness. I killed whole days rambling the fields. I had brought guidebooks to trees and birds, but I couldn’t get the hang of them. The illustrations would not match up with the real specimens before me. Every bird looked like a starling. I soon got discouraged. Perhaps that explains the sense I had of being an interloper. Amid those sunlit scenes I felt detached, as if I myself were a mere idea, a stylised and subtly inaccurate illustration of something that was only real elsewhere. Even the pages of my manuscript, when I sat worriedly turning them over, had an unfamiliar look, as if they had been written, not by someone else, but by another version of myself.

  Remember that mad letter Newton wrote to John Locke in September of 1693, accusing the philosopher out of the blue of being immoral, and a Hobbist, and of having tried to embroil him with women? I picture old Locke pacing the great garden at Oates, eyebrows leaping higher and higher as he goggles at these wild charges. I wonder if he felt the special pang which I feel reading the subscription: I am your most humble and unfortunate servant, Is. Newton. It seems to me to express better than anything that has gone before it Newton’s pain and anguished bafflement. I compare it to the way a few weeks later he signed, with just the stark surname, another, and altogether different, letter. What happened in the interval, what knowledge dawned on him?

  We have speculated a great deal, you and I, on his nervous collapse late in that summer of ’93. He was fifty, his greatest work was behind him, the Principia and the gravity laws, the discoveries in optics. He was giving himself up more and more to interpretative study of the Bible, and to that darker work in alchemy which so embarrasses his biographers (cf. Popov et al.). He was a great man now, his fame was assured, all Europe honoured him. But his life as a scientist was over. The process of lapidescence had begun: the world was turning him into a monument to himself. He was cold, arrogant, lonely. He was still obsessively jealous—his hatred of Hooke was to endure, indeed to intensify, even beyond the death of his old adversary. He was—

  Look at me, writing history; old habits die hard. All I meant to say is that the book was as good as done, I had only to gather up a few loose ends, and write the conclusion—but in those first weeks at Ferns something started to go wrong. It was only as yet what the doctors call a vague general malaise. I was concentrating, with morbid fascination, on the chapter I had devoted to his breakdown and those two letters to Locke. Was that a lump I felt there, a little, hard, painless lump . . . ?

  Mostly of course such fears seemed ridiculous. There were even moments when the prospect of finishing the thing merged somehow with my new surroundings into a grand design. I recall one day when I was in, appropriately enough, the orchard. The sun was shining, the trees were in blossom. It would be a splendid book, fresh and clean as this bright scene before me. The academies would be stunned, you would be proud of me, and Cambridge would offer me a big job. I felt an extraordinary sense of purity, of tender innocence. Thus Newton himself must have stood one fine morning in his mother’s garden at Woolsthorpe, as the ripe apples dropped about his head. I turned, hearing a violent thrashing of sm
all branches. Edward Lawless stepped sideways through a gap in the hedge, kicking a leg behind him to free a snagged trouser cuff. There was a leaf in his hair.

  I had seen him about the place, but this was the first time we had met. His face was broad and pallid, his blue eyes close-set and restless. He was not a very big man, but he gave an impression of, how would I say, of volume. He had a thick short neck, and wide shoulders that rolled as he walked, as if he had constantly to deal with large soft obstacles in air. Standing beside him I could hear him breathing, like a man poised between one lumbering run and another. For all his rough bulk, though, there was in his eyes a look, preoccupied, faintly pained, like the look you see in those pearl and ink photographs of doomed Georgian poets. His flaxen hair, greying nicely at the temples, was a burnished helmet; I itched to reach out and remove the laurel leaf tangled in it. We stood together in the drenched grass, looking at the sky and trying to think of something to say. He commended the weather. He jingled change in his pocket. He coughed. There was a shout far off, and then from farther off an answering call. “Aha,” he said, relieved, “the rat men!” and plunged away through the gap in the hedge. A moment later his head appeared again, swinging above the grassy bank that bounded the orchard. Always I think of him like this, skulking behind hedges, or shambling across a far field, rueful and somehow angry, like a man with a hangover trying to remember last night’s crimes.

  I walked back along the path under the apple trees and came out on the lawn, a cropped field really. Two figures in wellingtons and long black buttonless overcoats appeared around the side of the house. One had a long-handled brush over his shoulder, the other carried a red bucket. I stopped and watched them pass before me in the spring sunshine, and all at once I was assailed by an image of catastrophe, stricken things scurrying in circles, the riven pelts, the convulsions, the agonised eyes gazing into the empty sky or through the sky into the endlessness. I hurried off to the lodge, to my work. But the sense of harmony and purpose I had felt in the orchard was gone. I saw something move outside on the grass. I thought it was the blackbirds out foraging, for the lilacs were still. But it was a rat.

  In fact, it wasn’t a rat. In fact in all my time at Ferns I never saw sign of a rat. It was only the idea.

  The campus postman, an asthmatic Lapp, has just brought me a letter from Ottilie. Now I’m really found out. She says she got my address from you. Clio, Clio . . . But I’m glad, I won’t deny it. Less in what she says than in the Lilliputian scrawl itself, aslant from corner to corner of the flimsy blue sheets, do I glimpse something of the real she, her unhandiness and impetuosity, her inviolable innocence. She wants me to lend her the fare to come and visit me! I can see us, staggering through the snowdrifts, ranting and weeping, embracing in our furs like lovelorn polar bears.

  She came down to the lodge the day after I moved in, bringing me a bowl of brown eggs. She wore corduroy trousers and a shapeless homemade sweater. Her blonde hair was tied at the back with a rubber band. Pale eyebrows and pale blue eyes gave her a scrubbed look. With her hands thrust in her pockets she stood and smiled at me. Hers was the brave brightness of all big awkward girls.

  “Grand eggs,” I said.

  We considered them a moment in thoughtful silence.

  “Charlotte rears them,” she said. “Hens, I mean.”

  I went back to the box of books I had been unpacking. She hesitated, glancing about. The little square table by the window was strewn with my papers. Was I writing a book, or what?—as if such a thing were hardly defensible. I told her. “Newton,” she said, frowning. “The fellow that the apple fell on his head and he discovered gravity?”

  She sat down.

  She was twenty-four. Her father had been Charlotte Lawless’s brother. With his wife beside him one icy night when Ottilie was ten he had run his car into a wall—“that wall, see, down there”—and left the girl an orphan. She wanted to go to university. To study what? She shrugged. She just wanted to go to university. Her voice, incongruous coming out of that big frame, was light and vibrant as an oboe, a singer’s voice, and I pictured her, this large unlovely girl, standing in a preposterous gown before the tiered snowscape of an orchestra, her little fat hands clasped, pouring forth a storm of disconsolate song.

  Where did I live in Dublin? Had I a flat? What was it like? “Why did you come down to this dump?” I told her, to finish my book, and then frowned at the papers curling gently in the sunlight on the table. Then I noticed how the sycamores were stirring faintly, almost surreptitiously in the bright air, like dancers practising steps in their heads, and something in me too pirouetted briefly, and yes, I said, yes, to finish my book. A shadow fell in the doorway. A tow-haired small boy stood there, with his hands at his back, watching us. His ancient gaze, out of a putto’s pale eyes, was unnerving. Ottilie sighed, and rose abruptly, and without another glance at me took the child’s hand and departed.

  I WAS born down there, in the south, you knew that. The best memories I have of the place are of departures from it. I’m thinking of Christmas trips to Dublin when I was a child, boarding the train in the dark and watching through the mist of my breath on the window the frost-bound landscape assembling as the dawn came up. At a certain spot every time, I can see it still, day would at last achieve itself. The place was a river bend, where the train slowed down to cross a red metal bridge. Beyond the river a flat field ran to the edge of a wooded hill, and at the foot of the hill there was a house, not very big, solitary and square, with a steep roof. I would gaze at that silent house and wonder, in a hunger of curiosity, what lives were lived there. Who stacked that firewood, hung that holly wreath, left those tracks in the hoarfrost on the hill? I can’t express the odd aching pleasure of that moment. I knew, of course, that those hidden lives wouldn’t be much different from my own. But that was the point. It wasn’t the exotic I was after, but the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas.

  Now I had another house to gaze at, and wonder about, with something of the same remote prurience. The lodge was like a sentry box. It stood, what, a hundred, two hundred yards from the house, yet I couldn’t look out my window without spotting some bit of business going on. The acoustics of the place too afforded an alarming intimacy. I could clearly hear the frequent cataclysms of the upstairs lavatory, and my day began with the pips for the morning news on the radio in Charlotte Lawless’s kitchen. Then I would see Charlotte herself, in wellingtons and an old cardigan, hauling out a bucket of feed to the henhouse. Next comes Ottilie, in a sleepy trance, with the child by the hand. He is off to school. He carries his satchel like a hunchback’s hump. Edward is last, I am at work before I spy him about his mysterious business. It all has the air of a pastoral mime, with the shepherd’s wife and the shepherd, and Cupid and the maid, and, scribbling within a crystal cave, myself, a haggard-eyed Damon.

  I had them spotted for patricians from the start. The big house, Edward’s tweeds, Charlotte’s fine-boned slender grace that the dowdiest of clothes could not mask, even Ottilie’s awkwardness, all this seemed the unmistakable stamp of their class. Protestants, of course, landed, the land gone now to gombeen men and compulsory purchase, the family fortune wasted by tax, death duties, inflation. But how bravely, how beautifully they bore their losses! Observing them, I understood that breeding such as theirs is a preparation not for squiredom itself, but for that distant day, which for the Lawlesses had arrived, when the trappings of glory are gone and only style remains. All nonsense, of course, but to me, product of a post-peasant Catholic upbringing, they appeared perfected creatures. Oh, don’t accuse me of snobbery. This was something else, a fascination before the spectacle of pure refinement. Shorn of the dull encumbrances of wealth and power, they were free to be purely what they were. The irony was, the form of life their refinement took was wholly familiar to me: wellington boots, henhouses, lumpy sweaters. Familiar, but, ah, transfigured. The nicety of tone and gesture to which I might aspire, they achieved by instinct, unwittingly.
Their ordinariness was inimitable.

  Sunday mornings were a gala performance at Ferns. At twenty to ten, the bells pealing down in the village, a big old-fashioned motor car would feel its way out of the garage. They are off to church. An hour later they return, minus Edward, with Charlotte at the wheel. Wisps of tiny music from the radio in the kitchen come to me. Charlotte is getting the dinner ready—no, she is preparing a light lunch. Not for them surely the midday feeds of my childhood, the mighty roast, the steeped marrowfat peas, the block of runny ice-cream on its cool perch on the bathroom windowsill. Edward tramps up the hill, hands in his pockets, shoulders rolling. In front of the house he pauses, looks at the broken fanlight, and then goes in, the door shuts, the train moves on, over the bridge.

  My illusions about them soon began, if not to crumble, then to modify. One day I struck off past the orchard into the lands at the back of the house. All round were the faint outlines of what must once have been an ornate garden. Here was a pond, the water an evil green, overhung by a sadness of willows. I waded among hillocks of knee-high grass, feeling watched. The day was hot, with a burning breeze. Everything swayed. A huge bumble bee blundered past my ear. When I looked back, the only sign of the house was a single chimney pot against the sky. I found myself standing on the ruins of a tennis court. A flash of reflected sunlight caught my eye. In a hollow at the far side of the court there was a long low glasshouse. I stumbled down the bank, as others in another time must have stumbled, laughing, after a white ball rolling inexorably into the future. The door of the glasshouse made a small sucking sound when I opened it. The heat was a soft slap in the face. Row upon row of clay pots on trestle tables ran the length of the place, like an exercise in perspective, converging at the far end on the figure of Charlotte Lawless standing with her back to me. She wore sandals and a wide green skirt, a white shirt, her tattered sun hat. I spoke, and she turned, startled. A pair of spectacles hung on a cord about her neck. Her fingers were caked with clay. She dabbed the back of a wrist to her forehead. I noticed the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, the faint down on her upper lip.