[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter

by John Banville

  WHATEVER I had felt Ottilie in the beginning, there was not much left now save lust, and irritation, and a kind of grudging compassion. She sensed the change, of course, and began to probe it. She came to the lodge more often, as if to test my endurance. She said she wanted to stay all night, she didn’t care what they thought at the house. Then she would look at me, not listening to my excuses, only watching my eyes and saying nothing. I began cautiously to try to disengage myself. I talked a lot about freedom. Why tie ourselves down? This summer would end. She was too young to throw away the best moments of her life on a dry old scholar. Her eyes narrowed. I too wondered what I was getting at—but no, that’s not true, I knew damn well. It was devious, and heartless, and horribly pleasurable. Who knows the sweet stink of power like the disenchanted lover renouncing all claim to loyalty? I pictured her known flesh soiled by some faceless other, yet gloried in the knowledge that I need only give the reins the faintest twitch and she would come running back to me, awash in her lap.

  I look back on myself in those days, and I do not like what I see.

  We spent hours in bed, entire afternoons seeped away into the sheets. We invented new positions, absurd variations that left us gasping, our sinews aquiver. She had me bind her hands and tie her to chairs, to the legs of the bed. We made love on the floor, against the walls. If Michael had not been liable to pop up from the undergrowth she would have dragged me naked out into the grass to do it. When she bled we devised a whole manual of compromises. No witch could have worked at her dark art more diligently than she.

  Sometimes this frenzied sorcery of the senses frightened me. Squatting before her with my face in her lap, staring in silent fascination at the brownish frills and violet-tinted folds of her sex, I would suddenly feel something blundering away from me, an almost-creature of our making, damaged and in pain, dragging a blackened limb along the floor and screaming softly. It was an image of guilt, of my shame and her desperation, the simple fear that she would get pregnant, and of things too more deeply buried. Its counterpart, light to that dark, was the pale presence of a third always with us, who was my private conjuring trick. “Look at me!” Ottilie would say, “Look at me when we’re doing it, I want you to see me!” I looked at her, that was easy. But after these bouts of ghostly troilism I hardly had the nerve to face Charlotte.

  Curiously, I seemed to see Ottilie more clearly now than ever before. Receding from me, she took on the high definition of a figure seen through the wrong end of a telescope, fixed, tiny, complete in every detail. Anyway, from the first I had assumed that I understood her absolutely, so there was no need to speculate much about her. I suppose that is why I had never asked her about the child. It seems incredible to me, now, that I didn’t. She could not have been more than sixteen when he was born. Who was the father—some farmhand, or a local young buck, a wandering huckster perhaps who had come to the door one day and captivated her with his patter and his wicked eye? That she was the mother I never doubted. But she said nothing, and neither did I, and as the weeks and months went on the unasked question became faded, like one of those huge highway signs so worn by being looked at that its message has gone mute.

  I don’t remember when it was exactly that this skeleton began to rattle its bones with a new urgency in the Lawless cupboard. It might have been the day of Michael’s party, when I turned starry-eyed from the piano and saw the three of them, Ottilie and Edward and the child, posed in a north light by the window like models for the Madonna of the Rocks, but probably I’m being fanciful. It was later, anyway, before I began to brood in earnest, when my love for Charlotte was demanding other, grosser conspiracies to keep it company. Then everything was in flux, and anything was possible. One Sunday, for instance, Ottilie casually remarked that she had skipped the family excursion to Mass to be with me. Mass? They were Catholics? My entire conception of them had to be revised.

  And then there was the day she played that extraordinary trick on me. She came to the lodge, out of breath and grinning slyly. Edward and Charlotte were in Dublin, Michael was at school. “Well?” she said, hands in her pockets, shoulders hunched, smiling and swaying, imitating some film star; “you’ve never seen my room.” We walked up the drive under the sycamores. It was an eighteenth-century day, windswept and bright, the distances all small and sharply defined, as if painted on porcelain. The trees were that dry tired green that heralds their turning. Prompted by intimations of autumnal sadness I took her hand, and remembered suddenly, vividly, as I still can, the first time she had shown herself to me naked. In the hall she stopped and looked around her at the clock, the mirror, the hurley stick in the umbrella stand. She sighed. “I hate this place,” she said, and I kissed her open mouth with a sweet sense of sin. The sight of the child’s room sobered us; we crept past. At the next door she hesitated, biting her lip, and then threw it open. The bed was a vast squat beast with curlicues and wooden knobs. There was a smell of stale clothes and face-powder. In a corner the flowered wallpaper was bubbled on a damp patch. Is there anything more cloyingly intimate than the atmosphere of other people’s bedrooms? The window looked across the lawn to the lodge. “I see you can keep an eye on me,” I said, and laughed gloomily, like a travelling salesman in a brothel. She cast a vague glance at the window. She was already halfway out of her clothes. There was a black hair on the pillow, like a tiny crack in enamel.

  We lay for a long time without stirring, in silence, desireless. A parallelogram of sunlight was shifting stealthily along the floor beneath the window. Against the pale sky I watched a flock of birds wheeling silently at a great height over the fields. A memory from childhood drifted up, paused an instant, showing the gold of its lazily beating fins, and then went down again, without breaking the surface. I kissed the damp thicket of her armpit. She stroked my cheek. She began to say something, stopped. I could feel her trying it out in her head. I waited; she would say it. There are moments like that, sunlit and still, when the worst and deepest fear of the heart will drift out with the dreamy innocence of a paper skiff on a pond.

  “You’ve lost interest,” she said, “really, haven’t you.”

  A little cloud, like a white puff of smoke, appeared in the corner of the window. Summer is the shyest season.

  “Why do you say that?”

  She smiled. “So you’ll tell me it’s not true.” She had a way of looking at me, tentative and cool, as if she had spotted a small fault in the pupil of my eyes, and were wondering whether or not she should mention it.

  “It’s not true.”

  “Could I take that to mean, now, that you love me?”

  “Oh, all this love,” I said wearily, “I’m weary of it.”

  “All what love?” pouncing, as if with the winning line of a word game.

  “See that cloud?” I said. “That’s love. It comes along, drifts across the blue, and then . . . ”

  “Goes.”

  Silence.

  She sat up, hugging the sheet to her breast. “Well,” she said briskly, “will I tell you something?” Her face above me, foreshortened, glazed by reflected sunlight, was for a moment an oriental mask. “This is not my room.”

  “What? Then whose . . . ?” She grinned. “Jesus Christ, Ottilie!” I leapt up like a scalded cat and stood, naked and aghast, staring at her. She laughed. “You should see your face,” she said, “you’re all red.”

  “You are mad.” It was an extraordinary sensation: disgust, and a kind of panic, and, incredibly, tumescence. I turned away, scrabbling for my clothes. I felt as if I had been turned to glass, as if the world could shine through me unimpeded: as if I were now a quicksilver shadow in someone else’s looking-glass fantasy. What had possessed her, to bring me here? Was I perhaps not the only one who played at plots of sexual risk and renunciation? “I’m going for a piss,” she muttered, and flung herself from the room. I dressed, and stood at bay, breathing through my mouth in order not to smell the flat insinuating odour of other people’s intimacies. All I could th
ink of was Edward’s clumsiness, the way his sausage fingers fumbled things. A book would erupt in his hands like a terrified bird, pages whirring, dust-jacket flapping, while he looked away, talking over his shoulder, until the thing with a crisp crack dropped lifeless, its spine broken, and then he would peer at it with a kind of guilty puzzlement. How could I be doing this, to a man like that. Doing what? I realised I felt as I would feel if I had cuckolded him. Ottilie came back. She sat down on the side of the bed and clasped herself in her arms. “I’m cold.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ottilie—”

  “Oh, what harm is it?” she said. “They’ll never know.” She looked up at me resentfully, pouting, a big naked child. “I thought you might like to . . . here . . . that’s all.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “No I’m not. I know things,” slyly, “I could tell you things.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll have to find out for yourself, won’t you? You don’t know anything. You think you’re so clever, but you don’t know a thing.”

  I slapped her face. It happened so quickly, with such a surprising, gratifying precision, that I was not sure if I had not imagined it. She sat quite still, then lifted a hand to her already reddening cheek. She began to cry, without any sound at all. “I’m sorry,” I said. I left the room and closed the door carefully behind me, as if the slightest violence would scatter the shards of something in there shattered but still all of a precarious piece. Outside, in the ordinary light of afternoon, I still felt unreal, but at least I could breathe freely.

  That afternoon was to contaminate everything. I looked at the others with a new surmise, full of suspicions. They were altered, the way someone you have known all your life will be altered after appearing, all menace and maniacal laughter, in a half-remembered dream. Up to now they had been each a separate entity. I hadn’t thought of them as husband and wife, mother, son, niece, aunt—aunt!—but now suddenly they were a family, a closed, mysterious organism. Amazing questions occurred to me. What really did they mean to each other? What did Charlotte feel for the child? Did Edward and she resent orphan Ottilie’s presence? Were the women jealous of each other, did they circle each other warily, as Edward and I did? And what did they all think of me, how did they behave when I was not there, did they talk about me? What did they see when they looked at me?—a kind of shadow, a trick of light, a ghost grown familiar of whom no one is frightened anymore? I felt a new shyness in their presence, an awkwardness. I was like an embarrassed anthropologist realising that what he had for months taken to be the ordinary muddle of tribal life is really an immense intricate ceremony, in which the tiniest gesture is foreordained and vital, in which he is the only part that does not fit.

  All questions came back to the one question: why had she chosen that room? Impulse? A simple prank? Or did she have some intimation of the delicate dance I was doing with Charlotte in my mind (I thought you might like to . . . here . . . )? And if so, did Charlotte—my god, did Charlotte herself suspect, did she feel when I came near something reach out and touch her timidly, the moist pale limb of my longing? There are people you cannot, will not imagine doing it, but now I could not stop myself speculating on the nightworld of Ferns. Why did Charlotte and Edward have no children? Which of them was . . . ? The names wove a web of confusion in my mind. I began to have lurid dreams in which the four of them slipped and slithered, joining and sundering, exchanging names, faces, voices, as in some obscene surrealist fantasy. I lay in bed in the lodge and tried to imagine Edward here, younger, less besotted, watching the old man Charlotte’s father, waiting for him to die, planting his claim to Ferns by seducing the daughter, perhaps on this very mattress . . . I sat up, as suddenly as I had that day in that other bed. I was sweating. The girl my fevered imaginings had put in Edward’s arms was not Charlotte. Away in the woods a night bird was singing. Sixteen, for god’s sake, she was only sixteen!

  Impossible.

  The weather broke. I wakened in the middle of the night to a noise of shipwreck, a smashed mast, doomed sailors crying in the wind. In the morning when I looked out the kitchen window the scenery was rearranged. The storm had brought down a tree. It lay, a great stranded corpse, in a tangle of brambles and twisted branches not a foot from the gable end of the lodge. The day had a hangdog air, mud everywhere, and granite clouds suspended over the fields. Snails crunched under my tread. The summer was over.

  Edward came down the drive in a shabby raincoat and a ridiculous tweed hat. “Some night, eh?” He peered at the fallen tree. “By Christ that was a close one, nearly got you.” I found it hard to look him in the face, and studied his extremities instead, the brown brogues, twill trousers, the cuffs of his raincoat. Was I imagining it, or was he shrinking; his clothes seemed made for someone a shade fuller. He looked ghastly, ashen-faced and blotched by the cold. Another hard night. Where did he do his drinking? Once or twice I had seen him sloping into the hotel bar in the village, but latterly he had been keeping to the house. Perhaps he kept a cache of bottles stowed under floorboards, at the back of the linen cupboard, as domesticated drunks are said to do. Or maybe he drank openly, turning his back on Charlotte’s sad gaze. “Planted that tree myself,” he said, “Lotte and me, one day.” He looked up, smiling sheepishly, shrugging. “That’s the summer gone.” Something came off him, a kind of mute plea. For what, for sympathy? I was afraid he would start maundering again about women, life and love. A warm gush of contempt rose like gorge in my gullet. He felt it, for he laughed, shaking his head, and said: “You’re a hard man.” For a moment I could not make out the emphasis, then I realised that he was sympathising with me. By god! I stared at him—on your knees, cur!—but he only laughed again, and turned away.

  Going up to the house that evening, I met in the hall a large red-faced man in a blue suit. He winked at me, and ran a finger down his fly. Above our heads the lavatory was still noisily recovering from his visit. “Bad old weather,” he said, jauntily. We went together into the drawing-room; tea was being served there in the visitor’s honour. Edward leaned against the mantelpiece in his squire’s outfit of tweed and twill, one hand in his trousers pocket wriggling like a conjuror’s rabbit. I tried to see him as a seducer. It was surprisingly easy. Younger, hair slicked down, creeping up on her. Give us a kiss? I’ll tell Charlotte. Ah you wouldn’t now. Let go! Yum yum, lovely titties . . . Charlotte was looking at me in mute dismay: she had forgotten it was Sunday. Tough. Visitors were rare, I wasn’t about to miss this one. She came at us quickly, her hands out, like someone stepping in to stop a fight. “Mr Prunty is in the seed business.” I looked at Mr Prunty with interest. He winked again.

  “Have a drink,” said Edward.

  Charlotte turned quickly. “The tea is ready!”

  He shrugged. “Oh, right.”

  Ottilie and the child came in.

  Mr Prunty was a great talker, and a great eater; his laughter made the table tremble. He was trying to buy the nurseries. I suspect he had already a hold on the Lawlesses. When business matters were mentioned he grew ponderously coy. I studied him. I had seen him before: he was a type. His money made, he was after style now, and class. He gazed upon the Lawlesses, with a kind of fond indulgence. He loved them, a ripe market. There would be no stopping him. Gently, lovingly, he would relieve them of Ferns. Eventually he would become a patrician, change his name, maybe, breed a brood of pale neurotic daughters to sit in this room doing needlepoint and writing hysterical novels. “It’s a fair offer,” he said seriously, glancing round the table, a forkful of food suspended before him. “I think it’s a fair offer.” And he laughed.

  They sat looking back at him, glumly, a little stupidly even, like a small band of supplicants come from the sacked city to beg for clemency before the emperor’s tent. I had not spoken to Ottilie since the afternoon in the Lawlesses’ bedroom. Edward coughed.

  “Well—” he began.

  Charlotte, who had been gazing at the large blue man with
hypnotic fascination, dragged herself out of her trance.

  “He’s writing, you know,” she said to Mr Prunty, pointing at me, “a book, he is. On Newton. The astronomer.”

  All eyes turned to me, as if I had that moment descended from the sky into their midst.

  “Is that right now,” Mr Prunty said.

  Charlotte’s look pleaded with me. “Aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I was.” They waited. I was blushing. “I seem to have given it up . . . ”

  “Oh?” Ottilie put in, icily bright. “And what are you doing instead?”

  I would not look at her.

  “Yes,” said Mr Prunty, after a pause. “Well as I was—”