[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter

by John Banville

  “What?”

  “Never mind. To gloat. You heard her with Charlotte: you poor thing.” She made a simpering face. “Make you sick.”

  The kettle, like a little lunatic bird, began to whistle shrilly.

  “He’s not that bad,” I said, “is he, Edward?”

  She did not answer. We returned to the drawing-room. A dreamy sort of silence had settled there. They sat, staring at nothing, enchanted figures in a fairy tale. Bunny glanced at us as we came in and a flicker of interest lit her hard little eyes. She would be good at ferreting out secrets. I moved away from Ottilie.

  “You’re quite at home, I see,” Bunny said.

  “People are kind,” I answered, and tried to laugh. My legs were not working properly. Bunny lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “That’s true,” she said. She was thinking. I lost interest in her. Edward knocked the bottle against my glass. His face was ashen. His breath hit me, a warm brown cloud. I looked at Charlotte, the only dark among all these fair. She sat, back arched and shoulders erect, slim arms extended across her lap, her pale hands clasped, a gazelle. Poor thing. My heart wobbled. The bruised light of late afternoon conjured other days, their texture felt but they themselves unremembered. I seemed about to weep. Edward cracked his fingers and sat down to the scarred upright piano. He played atrociously, swaying his shoulders and crooning. Bunny tried to speak over the noise but no one listened. Michael sat in the middle of the floor, playing sternly with the toy car I had given him. I took Ottilie’s hands in mine. She stared at me, beginning to laugh. We danced, stately as a pair of tipsy duchesses, round and round the faded carpet. Bunny fairly ogled us. His repertory exhausted, Edward rose and led Charlotte protesting to the piano. She fingered the keys in silence for a moment and then began hesitantly to play. It was a tiny delicate music, it seemed to come from a long way off, from inside something, and I imagined a music box, set in motion by a chance breeze, a slammed door, launching into solitary song in its forgotten spot in the corner of an attic. I stopped to watch her, the dark glossy head, the pale neck, and those hands that now, instead of Ottilie’s, seemed to be in mine. Light of evening, the tall windows—Oh, a gazelle! Ottilie moved away from me, and knelt beside Michael. The toy car had fallen over drunkenly on its side, whirring. He narrowed his eyes. He had been trying all this time to break it. Edward took up the mangled thing and examined it, turning it in his thick fingers with a bleared brutish lentor. I looked at the three of them, Ottilie, the child, the ashen-faced man, and something stirred, an echo out of some old brown painting. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They receded slowly, slowly, as if drawn away on a piece of concealed stage machinery. And then all faded, Bunny, her fat husband, their brats, the chairs, the scattered cups, all, until only Charlotte and I were left, in this moment at the end of a past that now was utterly revised. I hiccupped softly. On the piano lid there was an empty glass, a paper party hat, a browning apple core. These are the things we remember. And I remember also, with Ottilie that night moaning in my arms, feeling for the first time the presence of another, and I heard that tiny music again, and shivered at the ghostly touch of pale fingers on my face.

  “What’s wrong,” Ottilie said, “what is it?”

  “Nothing,” I answered, “nothing, nothing.”

  For how should I tell her that she was no longer the woman I was holding in my arms?

  Next morning along with the hangover came inevitably the slow burn of alarm. Had I said anything, let slip some elaborate gesture? Had I made a fool of myself? I recalled Bunny smirking, the tip of her little nose twitching, but that had been when I was still with Ottilie. Even so sharp an eye surely would not have spotted my solitary brief debauch by the piano? And later, in the dark, there had been no one to see me, save Ottilie, and she did not see things like that. Like what? In every drunkenness there comes that moment of madness and euphoria when all our accumulated knowledge of life and the world and ourselves seems a laughable misapprehension, and we realise suddenly that we are a genius, or fatally ill, or in love. The fact is obvious, simple, beyond doubt: why have we not seen it before? Then we sober up and everything evaporates, and we are again what we are, a frail, feckless, ridiculous figure with a headache. But in vain I lay in bed that morning waiting for reality to readjust itself. The fact would not go away: I was in love with Charlotte Lawless.

  I was astonished, of course, but there was too a familiar shiver of fright and not wholly unpleasurable disgust. It was like that moment in a childhood party game when, hot and flustered, every nerve-end an eye, you whip off the blindfold to find that the warm quarry quivering in your clasped arms is not that little girl with the dark curls and the interestingly tight bodice whose name you did not quite hear, but a fat boy, or your convulsed older sister, or just one of Auntie Hilda’s mighty mottled arms. Or a middle-aged woman, emphatically married, with middle-aged hands, and wrinkles around her eyes, and the faint beginnings of a moustache, who had spoken no more than twenty words to me and who looked at me as if I were, if not transparent, then translucent at least. There it was, all , the same, sitting in bed with me, still in its party frock, with an impudent smile: love.

  The secret pattern of the past months was now revealed. I saw myself that first day in the doorway of the lodge offering her a month’s rent, I stumbled again down the grassy bank to the glasshouse, sat in her kitchen in sunlight watching the shadows of leaves stirring by her hand. I was like an artist blissfully checking over the plan of a work that has suddenly come to him complete in every detail, touching the marvellous, still-damp construct gently here and there with the soft feelers of imagination. Ottilie a sketch, on the oboe, of the major theme to come, Edward at once the comic relief and the shambling villain of the piece, Michael a Cupid still, the subtlety of whose aim, however, I had underestimated. Even the unbroken fine summer weather was a part of the plot.

  Of course there were to be times when the whole thing would seem a delusion. I would remark the fact that the actual life I led—burnt cutlets, the bathroom to be cleaned—was far from that ideal which somehow I would manage to think I was leading: the quiet scholar alone with books and pipe and lamplight, lifting melancholy eyes now and then to the glossy block of night in the window and sighing for die ferne Geliebte. When Ottilie came to me I saw myself as one of those tragic gentlemen in old novels who solace themselves with a shopgirl, or a little actress, a sort of semi-animate doll with childlike ways and no name, a part for which my big blonde girl was hardly fitted. But then, as suddenly as they had come, the doubts would depart, and the dream would take wing again into the empyrean, when I saw her coming up from the glasshouse with flowers in her arms, or glimpsed her lost in thought behind a tall window in which was reflected one tree and a bronze cloud. Once, listening idly to the shipping forecast on the radio, I saw her come out on the steps in the tawny light of evening and call to the child, and even still always I think of her when I hear the word Finisterre.

  In moments like that you can feel memory gathering its material, beady-eyed and voracious, like a demented photographer. I don’t mean the big scenes, the sunsets and car crashes, I mean the creased black-and-white snaps taken in a bad light, with a lop-sided horizon and that smudged thumb-print in the foreground. Such are the pictures of Charlotte, in my mind. In the best of them she is not present at all, someone jogged my elbow, or the film was faulty. Or perhaps she was present and has withdrawn, with a pained smile. Only her glow remains. Here is an empty chair in rain-light, cut flowers on a workbench, an open window with lightning flickering distantly in the dark. Her absence throbs in these views more powerfully, more poignantly than any presence.

  When I search for the words to describe her I can’t find them. Such words don’t exist. They would need to be no more than forms of intent, balanced on the brink of saying, another version of silence. Every mention I make of her is a failure. Even when I say just her name it sounds like an exaggeration. When I write it down it seems impossibly swollen, as if my pen had slipped
eight or nine redundant letters into it. Her physical presence itself seemed overdone, a clumsy representation of the essential she. That essence was only to be glimpsed obliquely, on the outer edge of vision, an image always there and always fleeting, like the afterglow of a bright light on the retina.

  If she was never entirely present for me in the flesh, how could I make her to be there for me in the lodge, at night, in the fields on my solitary rambles? I must concentrate on things impassioned by her passing. Anything would do, her sun hat, a pair of muddied wellingtons standing splay-footed at the back door. The very ordinariness of these mementoes was what made them precious. That, and the fact that they were wholly mine. Even she would not know their secret significance. Two little heart-shaped polished patches rubbed on the inner sides of those wellingtons by her slightly knock-kneed walk. The subtle web of light and shade that played over her face through the slack straw of the brim of her hat. Who would notice such things, that did not fix on her with the close-up lens of love?

  Love. That word. I seem to hear quotation marks around it, as if it were the title of something, a stilted sonnet, say, by a silver poet. Is it possible to love someone of whom one has so little? For through the mist now and then I glimpsed, however fleetingly, the fact that what I had of her was hardly enough to bear a great weight of passion. Perhaps call it concentration, then, the concentration of the painter intent on drawing the living image out of the potential of mere paint. I would make her incarnate. By the force of my unwavering, meticulous attention she would rise on her scallop shell through the waves and be.

  I did nothing, of course, said nothing, made no move. It was a passion of the mind. I had given up all pretence of work on the book. You see the connection.

  I wondered if she were aware of being so passionately watched. Now and then I thought I caught her squirming, as if she had felt my slavering breath brush her flesh. She had a way of presenting me suddenly with unbidden bits of fact, like scraps thrown down to divert the attention of a dog that she feared might bite her. She would turn her head, consider for a moment my right shoulder, or one of my hands, with that strange blank gaze, and say: My father imported that tree from South America. And I would nod pensively, frowning. I learned the oddest things from her. Why a ha-ha is so called. That Finland was the first European country to give women the vote. Occasionally I could link these obscure pronouncements to something I had said or asked days ago, but mostly they were without discernible connection. Having spoken, she would go on gazing at me for a moment longer, as if waiting for some large sign of my acknowledgment that she was solid, that, see, she knew things, like real people do—or just that she was too dry for this dangerous dog to bother biting.

  I recall one Saturday, when she was driving into town to deliver stuff from the nurseries, and I asked her for a lift. It was raining, the fields a speeding blur beyond the misted windows. We were past the village when she took her foot off the pedal and let the car bump slowly to a stop. “Puncture,” she said. But she did not get out. We looked in silence at a wild apple tree shimmering before us in the streaming windscreen. The wheels on my side had climbed the grass verge, and everything was slightly crooked. There was no puncture. A strange moment, I remember it, the rain,’ the sound of the rain, the worn sticky feel of the car seat. She took off her spectacles, and a strand of hair fell across her face. What was she thinking about? I did not like the way she wore her glasses on a cord, it made her look matronly. An old harridan within me suddenly muttered: She’s forty if she’s a day, and was immediately silenced. A minute went by. I rolled down my window and let in the smell of woodbine and wet earth. Charlotte rubbed the fogged windscreen with a fingertip. “Perhaps we should go back,” she said, and then, looking at my knees: “Edward is not well.” The sibyl had spoken. I nodded, a puzzled priest of the shrine. What was expected of me? Whatever it was I could not give it, and she turned with vague helplessness to the plants and punnets of fruit stacked on the back seat. Her eyes, what colour were her eyes? I can’t remember! She started up the car. We drove on.

  Thus, always, it would teeter on the brink of being something.

  At first I was afraid I’d give the game away, snatch up her hand and kiss it, or get drunk again and fall at her feet bawling, something like that. But of course I wouldn’t. I was like a young bride who has rushed home to tell hubby that the pregnancy is confirmed, only to go suddenly shy and strange at the sight of familiar things, his hat, that new sofa, the kitchen sink. In the midst of the old life I hugged this brand-new secret to my breast. It gave me a curious sense of dignity, of quiet wisdom. Is this what love is really for, to lend us a new conception of ourselves? My voice sounded softer to me, my every action seemed informed by a melancholy grandeur. My smile, faintly flecked with sadness, was a calm benediction upon the world.

  I had feared too I might reveal myself before Ottilie, by showing a sudden coldness. But in fact, I was if anything fonder of her now. I even warmed toward Edward; I fairly doted (at a safe distance) on the child. They were nearer to Charlotte, in the commonplace world of breakfasts and bedtimes, than I could ever be. And they were the keepers of that most precious thing, her past, That they could not hope to achieve the proximity to her that I did, in my love, was something for which they could not be blamed, but only pitied. I spent hours, a smiling spider, weaving webs to trap them into talking about her, so that it would be always they who appeared to have brought up the subject. The hardest part was to keep them from straying on to other things. Then I was forced to take desperate action, and, elaborately casual, would jump in with: But what you were saying about Charlotte, it was interesting, did she really never have a boyfriend before Edward? And a red-hot coal of panic would briefly glow behind my breastbone when Ottilie paused, and glanced at me, struck I suppose by the incongruity of putting together such words as Charlotte and boyfriend.

  Being a man with a secret was a full-time role. Sometimes I almost lost sight of the beloved herself in the luxuriant abundance of my mission. When Ottilie was in my arms I was careful not to speak, for fear of crying out the wrong name—but there were moments too when I was not sure which was the right one, moments even when the two became fused. At first I had conjured Charlotte’s presence to be only a witness to the gymnastics in my narrow bed, to lean over us, Ottilie and me, with the puzzled attention of a pure spirit of the night, immune herself to the itch of the flesh yet full of tenderness for these sad mortals struggling among the sheets, but as time went on this ceased to be enough, the sprite had to fold her delicate wings, throw off her silken wisps, and, with a sigh of amused resignation, join us. Then in the moonlight my human girl’s blonde hair would turn black, her fingers pale, and she would become something new, neither herself nor the other, but a third—Charlottilie!

  There was a fourth, too, which was that other version of myself which stood apart, watching the phenomenon of this love and my attendant antics with a wry smile, puzzled, and at times embarrassed. He it was who continued to, I won’t say love, but to value Ottilie, her gaiety and generosity, her patience, the mournful passion that she lavished on me. Was there, then, another Ottilie as well, an autochthonous companion for that other I? Were all at Ferns dividing thus and multiplying, like amoebas? In this spawning of multiple selves I seemed to see the awesome force of my love, which in turn served to convince me anew of its authenticity.

  Perhaps this sense of displacement will account for the oddest phenomenon of all, and the hardest to express. It was the notion of a time out of time, of this summer as a self-contained unit separate from the time of the ordinary world. The events I read of in the newspapers were, not unreal, but only real out there, and irredeemably ordinary; Ferns, on the other hand, its daily minutiae, was strange beyond expressing, unreal, and yet hypnotically vivid in its unreality. There was no sense of life messily making itself from moment to moment. It had all been lived already, and we were merely tracing the set patterns, as if not living really, but remembering. As wi
th Ottilie I had foreseen myself on my deathbed, now I saw this summer as already a part of the past, immutable, crystalline and perfect. The future had ceased to exist. I drifted, lolling like a Dead Sea swimmer, lapped round by a warm blue soup of timelessness.

  I even went back to the book, in a way. I needed something on which to concentrate, an anchor in this world adrift. And what better prop for the part of hopeless lover than a big fat book? Sitting at my table before the window and the sunlit lilacs I thought of Canon Koppernigk at Frauenburg, of Nietzsche in the Engadine, of Newton himself, all those high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect. A pretty picture—but hardly a true one. I did little real work. I struck out a sentence or two, rearranged a paragraph, corrected a few solecisms, and, inevitably, returned again to the second, and longer, of those two strange letters to Locke, the one in which N. speaks of having sought a means of explaining the nature of the ailment, if ailment it be, which has afflicted me this summer past. The letter seemed to me now to lie at the centre of my work, perhaps of Newton’s too, reflecting and containing all the rest, as the image of Charlotte contained, as in a convex mirror, the entire world of Ferns. It is the only instance in all his correspondence of an effort to understand and express his innermost self. And something is expressed, understood, forgiven even, if not in the lines themselves then in the spaces between, where an extraordinary and pitiful tension throbs. He wanted so much to know what it was that had happened to him, and to say it, as if the mere saying itself would be redemption. He mentions, with unwonted calm, Locke’s challenge of the absolutes of space and time and motion on which the picture of the mechanistic universe in the Principia is founded, and trots out again, but without quite the old conviction, the defence that such absolutes exist in God, which is all that is asked of them. But then suddenly he is talking about the excursions he makes nowadays along the banks of the Cam, and of his encounters, not with the great men of the college, but with tradesmen, the sellers and the makers of things. They would seem to have something to tell me; not of their trades, nor even of how they conduct their lives; nothing, I believe, in words. They are, if you will understand it, themselves the things they might tell. They are all a form of saying—and there it breaks off, the rest of that page illegible (because of a scorch mark, perhaps?). All that remains is the brief close: My dear Doctor, expect no more philosophy from my pen. The language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, but a language none of whose words is known to me; a language in which commonplace things speak to me; and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge. Then comes that cold, that brave, that almost carven signature: Newton. What did he mean, what was it those commonplace things said to him, what secret did they impart? And so I sat in the shadow of lilacs, nursing an unrequitable love and reading a dead man’s testament, trying to understand it.