[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter

by John Banville

  It was contingency from the start, and it stayed that way. Oh, no doubt I could work up a map of our separate journeys to that bed. There would be a little stylised tree on it and a tumbling Cupid, and an X in crimson ink marking a bloodstain, and pretty slanted blue lines indicating rain. But it would be misleading, it would look like the cartography of love. What can I say? I won’t deny her baroque blonde splendour touched me. I remember her hands on my neck, the violet depths of her eyes, her unexpectedly delicate pale feet, and her cries, the sudden panic of her coming, when she would clutch me to her, wet teeth bared and her eyelids fluttering, like one falling helplessly in a dream. But love?

  She burrowed into my life at the lodge with stealthy determination. She brought prints clipped from glossy magazines and pinned them over the bed, film stars, Kneller’s portrait of Newton, the Primavera. Flowers began to sprout around me in jam jars and tin cans. A new teapot appeared, and two cups, of fine bone china, each with an identical crack. One day she arrived lugging an ancient radio that she had salvaged from the garage. She played with it for hours, gliding across the stations, mouth a little open, eyes fixed on nothing, while Hungarian disc jockeys or Scots trawlermen gabbled in her ear, and the day waned, and the little green light on the tuning panel advanced steadily into the encroaching darkness.

  I think more than sex, maybe even more than love, she wanted company. She talked. Sometimes I suspected she had got into bed with me so that she could talk. She laid bare the scandals of the neighbourhood: did I know the man in Pierce’s pub was sleeping with his own daughter? She recounted her dreams in elaborate detail; I was never in them. Though she told me a lot about the family I learned little. The mass of names and hazy dates numbed me. It was all like the stories in a history book, vivid and forgettable at once. Her dead parents were a favourite topic. In her fantasy they were a kind of Scott and Zelda, beautiful and doomed, hair blown back and white silk scarves whipping in the wind as they sailed blithely, laughing, down the slipstream of disaster. All I could do in return was tell her about Newton, show off my arcane learning. I even tried reading aloud to her bits of that old Galileo article of mine—she fell asleep. Of course we didn’t speak much. Our affair was conducted through the intermediary of these neutral things, a story, a memory, a dream.

  I wondered if the house knew what was going on. The thought was obscurely exciting. The Sunday high teas became an institution, and although I was never comfortable, I confess I enjoyed the sexual freemasonry with its secret signs, the glances and the covert smiles, the way Ottilie’s stare would meet and mingle with mine across the table, so intensely that it seemed there must grow up a hologram picture of a pair of tiny lovers cavorting among the tea things.

  Our love-making at first was curiously innocent. Her generosity was a kind of desperate abasing before the altar of passion. She could have no privacy, wanted none, there was no part of her body that would hide from me. Such relentless giving was flattering to begin with, and then oppressive. I took her for granted, of course, except when, exhausted, or bored, she forgot about me. Then, playing the radio, brooding by the stove, sitting on the floor picking her nose with dreamy concentration, she would break away from me and be suddenly strange and incomprehensible, as sometimes a word, one’s own name even, will briefly detach itself from its meaning and become a hole in the mesh of the world. She had moments too of self-assertion. Something would catch her attention and she would push me away absentmindedly as if I were furniture, and gaze off, with a loony little smile, over the brow of the hill, toward the tiny music of the carnival that only she could hear. Without warning she would punch me in the chest, hard, and laugh. One day she asked me if I had ever taken drugs. “I’m looking forward to dying,” she said thoughtfully; “they give you that kind of morphine cocktail.”

  I laughed. “Where did you hear that?”

  “It’s what they give people dying of cancer.” She shrugged. “Everybody knows that.”

  I suppose I puzzled her, too. I would open my eyes and find her staring into the misted mirror of our kisses as if watching a fascinating crime being committed. Her hands explored me with the stealthy care of a blind man. Once, gliding my lips across her belly, I glanced up and caught her gazing down with tears in her eyes. This passionate scrutiny was too much for me, I would feel something within me wrapping itself in its dirty cloak and turning furtively away. I had not contracted to be known as she was trying to know me.

  And for the first time in my life I began to feel my age. It sounds silly, I know. But things had been happening to me, and to the world, before she was born. The years in my life of her non-being struck me as an extraordinary fact, a sort of bravura trick played on me by time. I, whose passion is the past, was discovering in her what the past means. And not just the past. Before our affair—the word makes me wince—before it had properly begun I was contemplating the end of it. You’ll laugh, but I used to picture my deathbed: a hot still night, the lamp flickering and one moth bumping the bulb, and I, a wizened infant, remembering with magical clarity as the breath fails this moment in this bedroom at twilight, the breeze from the window, the sycamores, her heart beating under mine, and that bird calling in the distance from a lost, Oh utterly lost land.

  “If this is not love,” she said once in that dark voice of hers, for a moment suddenly a real grown-up, “Jesus if this isn't love then what is!”

  The truth is, it seemed hardly anything—I hear her hurt laugh—until, with tact, with deference, but immovably, another, a secret sharer, came to join our somehow, always, melancholy grapplings.

  MICHAEL’S birthday was at the end of July, and there was a party. His guests were a dozen of his classmates from the village school. They were all of a type, small famished-looking creatures, runts of the litter, the girls spindle-legged and pigtailed, the boys watchful under cruel haircuts, their pale necks defenceless as a rabbit’s. Why had he picked them, were they his only friends in that school? He was a blond giant among them. While Charlotte set the table in the drawing-room for their tea, Ottilie led them in party games, waving her arms and shouting, like a conductor wielding an insane orchestra. Michael hung back, stiff and sullen.

  I had gone up to the house with a present for him. I was given a glass of tepid beer and left in the kitchen. Edward appeared, brandishing a hurley stick. “We’ve lost a couple of the little beggars, haven‘t seen them, have you? Always the same, they go off and hide, and start dreaming and forget to come out.” He loitered, eyeing my glass. “You hiding too, eh? Good idea. Here, have a decent drink.” He removed my beer to the sink and brought out tumblers and a bottle of whiskey. “There. Cheers. Ah.”

  We stood, like a couple of timid trolls, listening to the party noises coming down the hall. He leaned on the hurley stick, admiring his drink. “How are you getting on at the lodge,” he said, “all right? The roof needs doing—damn chilly spot in the winter, I can tell you.” Playing the squire today. He glanced sideways at me. “But you won’t be here in the winter, will you.”

  I shrugged; guess again, fella.

  “Getting fond of us, are you?” he said, almost coyly.

  Now it was my turn to exercise the sideways glance.

  “Peace,” I said, “and quiet: that kind of thing.”

  A cloud shifted, and the shadow of the chestnut tree surged toward us across the tiled floor. I had taken him from the start for a boozer and an idler, a lukewarm sinner not man enough to be a monster: could it be a mask, behind which crouched a subtle dissembler, smiling and plotting? Impossible. But I didn’t like that look in his eye today. Had Ottilie been telling secrets?

  “I lived there one time, you know,” he said.

  “What—in the lodge?”

  “Years ago. I used to manage the nurseries, when Lotte’s father was alive.”

  So: a fortune hunter, by god! I could have laughed.

  He poured us another drink, and we wandered outside into the gravelled yard. The hot day hummed. Above the dist
ant wood a hawk was hunting.

  Lotte.

  “Still doing this book of yours?” he said. “Used to write a bit of poetry, myself.” Ah, humankind! It will never run out of surprises. “Gave it up, of course, like everything else.” He brooded a moment, frowning, and the blue of the Dardanelles bloomed briefly in his doomy eyes. I watched the hawk circling. What did I know? Maybe at the back of a drawer somewhere there was a sheaf of poems that unleashed would ravish the world. A merry notion; I played with it. He went into the kitchen and fetched the bottle. “Here,” handing it to me, “you do the honours. I’m not supposed to drink this stuff at all.” I poured two generous measures. The first sign of incipient drunkenness is that you begin to hear yourself breathing. He was watching me; the blue of his eyes had become sullied. He had a way, perhaps because of that big too-heavy head, of seeming to loom over one. “You’re not married, are you?” he said. “Best thing. Women, some of them . . . ” He winced, and thrust his glass into my hand, and going to the chestnut tree began unceremoniously to piss against the trunk, gripping that white lumpy thing in his flies with the finger and thumb of a delicately arched hand, as if it were a violin bow he held. He stowed it away and took up his hurley stick. “Women,” he said again; “what do you think of them?”

  I didn’t like the way this was going, old boys together, the booze and the blarney, the pissing into the wind. In a minute we’d be swapping dirty stories. He took back his drink, and stood and watched me, beetling o’er his base. He had violence in him, he would never let it out, but it was all the more unsettling that way, clenched inside him like a fist.

  “They’re here to stay, I suppose,” I said, and produced a laugh that sounded like a stiff door opening. He wasn’t listening.

  “It’s not their fault,” he said, talking to himself. “They have to live too, get what they can, fight, claw their way. It’s not their fault if . . . ” He focused on me. “Succubus! Know that word? It’s a grand word, I like it.” To my horror he put an arm around my shoulder and walked me off across the gravel into the field beyond the chestnut tree. The hurley he still held dangled down by my side. There were little tufts of vulpine fur on his cheekbones and on the side of his neck behind his earlobe. His breath was bad. “Did you see in the paper,” he said, “that old woman who went to the Guards to complain that the man next door was boring holes in the wall and putting in gas to poison her? They gave her a cup of tea and sent her home, and a week later she was found dead, holes in the bloody wall and the fellow next door mad out of his mind, rubber tubes stuck in the wall, a total lunatic.” He batted me gently with his stick. “It goes to show, you should listen to people, eh? What do you think?” He laughed. There was no humour in it. Instead, a waft of woe came off him that made me miss a step. What was he asking of me?—for he was asking something. And then I noticed an odd fact. He was hollow. I mean physically, he was, well, hollow. Oh, he was built robustly enough, there was real flesh under his tweeds, and bones, and balls, blood, the lot, but inside I imagined just a greyish space with nothing in it save that bit of anger, not a fist really, but just a tensed configuration, like a three-dimensional diagram of stress. Even on the surface too something was lacking, an essential lustre. He seemed covered in a fine fall of dust, like a stuffed bird in a bell jar. He had not been like this when I came here. The discovery was peculiarly gratifying. I had been a little afraid of him before. We turned back to the house. The bottle, half-empty, stood on the windowsill. I disengaged his arm and filled us another shot. “There,” I said. “Cheers. Ah.”

  A station wagon, the back bristling with flushed children, headed down the drive. At the gate it pulled up with a shriek of brakes as a long sleek car swept in from the road and without slowing advanced upon the house. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Edward said: “The Mittlers.” He retreated into the kitchen. The visitors were already at the front door, we heard their imperious knock and then voices in the hall.

  “I’ll be going,” I said.

  “No you don’t.” He reached out a hand to grab me, draining his glass at the same time. “Family, interesting, come on, meet,” and with a hanged man’s grimace thrust me before him down the hall.

  They were in the drawing-room, a youngish woman in grey and a fat man of fifty, and two pale little girls, twins, with long blonde candle-curls and white socks.

  “This is Bunny,” Edward said, “my sister, and Tom, Tom Mittler; Dolores, here, and Alice.”

  One twin pointed a thumb at the other. “She’s Alice.”

  Tom Mittler, fingering his cravat, nodded to me and mumbled something, with a fat little laugh, and then performed the curious trick of fading instantly on the spot. His wife looked me up and down with cool attention. Her skirt was severely cut, and the padded shoulders of her jacket sloped upward, like a pair of trim little wings. An impossible pillbox hat was pinned at an angle to her tight yellow curls. It was hard to tell if her outfit were the latest thing, but it gave her an antiquated look that was oddly sinister. Her mouth was carefully outlined with vermilion glaze, and looked as if a small tropical insect had settled on her face. Her eyes were blue, like Edward’s, but harder. “My name is Diana,” she said. Edward laughed. She ignored him. “So you’re the lodger?”

  “I’m staying in the lodge, yes,” I said.

  “Comfy there?” and that little red insect lifted its wing-tips a fraction. She turned away. “Is there any chance of a cup of tea, Charlotte? Or is it too much trouble?”

  Charlotte, poised outside our little circle, suddenly stirred herself. “Yes, yes, I’m sorry—”

  “I’ll get it,” Ottilie said, and slouched out, making a face at me as she went past.

  Bunny looked around, bestowing her painted smile on each of us in turn. “Well!” she said, “this is nice,” and extracted from her hat its long steel pin. “But where’s the birthday boy?”

  “Hiding,” Edward murmured, and winked at me.

  “Full of fun today,” his sister said. She looked at the hurley stick still in his hand. “Are you coming from a game, or going to one?”

  He waggled the weapon at her playfully. “Game’s just starting, old girl.”

  “Haw!” Tom Mittler said, and vanished again instantly.

  There was a small commotion as Ottilie brought in the tea on a rickety trolley. Michael came after her, solemnly bearing the teapot like a ciborium. At the sight of him Bunny gave a little cry and the twins narrowed their eyes and advanced; their father made a brief appearance to hand him his present, a five-pound note in a brown envelope. Bunny shrugged apologetically: “We didn’t have time to shop. Ottilie, this is lovely. Cake and all! Shall I be mother?” The visitors disposed themselves around the empty fireplace and ate with gusto, while the tenants of the house hovered uncertainly, temporarily dispossessed. Edward muttered something and went out. Bunny watched the door closing behind him and then turned eagerly to Charlotte. “How is he?” eyes alight, dying to know, tell me tell me.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Oh,” Charlotte said, “not . . . I mean . . . all right, you know.”

  Bunny put down her cup and sat, a study in sorrow and sympathy, shaking her head. “You poor thing; you poor thing.” She looked up at me. “I suppose you know about . . . ?”

  “No,” Charlotte said swiftly.

  Bunny put a hand to her mouth. “Oops, sorry.”

  Edward came back bearing the whiskey bottle. “Here we are: now, who’s for a snort?” He paused, catching something in the silence. Then he shrugged. “Well I am,” he said, “for one. Tom: you? And I know you will.” He poured Mittler and me a measure each. Tom Mittler said: “Thanky voo.” Edward lifted his glass. “What will we drink to?”

  “August the twenty-seventh,” Bunny said, quick as a flash.

  They turned blank looks on her. I remembered.

  “Mountbatten?” I said. One of their dwindling band of heroes, cruelly murdered. I was charmed: only they would dare to make a memorial of
a drawing-room tea party. “Terrible thing, terrible.”

  I was soon disabused. She smiled her little smile at me. “And don’t forget Warrenpoint: eighteen paras, and an earl, all on the one day.”

  “Jesus, Bunny,” Edward said.

  She was still looking at me, amused and glittering. “Don’t mind him,” she said playfully, “he’s a West Brit, self-made. I think we should name a street after it, like the French do. The glorious twenty-seventh!”

  I glanced at her husband, guzzling his tea. Someone had said he was a solicitor. He had a good twenty years on her. Feeling my eye on him he looked up, and smoothed a freckled hand on his scant sandy hair and said cheerfully: “She’s off?”

  Bunny poured herself another cup of tea, smirking.

  “It’s dead men you’re talking about,” Edward muttered, with the sour weariness of one doing his duty by an argument that he has long ago lost.

  “There’s nothing wrong with this country,” Bunny said, “that a lot more corpses like that won’t cure.” She lifted her cup daintily. “Long live death! Is this your own cake, Charlotte? Scrumptious.”

  I realised, with the unnerving clarity that always comes to me with the fifth drink, that if there were to be a sixth I would be thoroughly drunk.

  One of the twins suddenly yelped in pain. “Mammy mammy he pinched me!”

  Michael looked at us from under sullen eyebrows, crouched on the carpet like a sprinter waiting for the off. Bunny laughed. “Well pinch him back!” The girl’s face crumpled, oozing thick tears. Her sister watched her with interest.

  “Michael,” Edward rumbled, and showed him the hurley stick. “Do you see this . . . ?”

  Ottilie left to make more tea, and I followed her. Outside the kitchen windows the chestnut tree murmured softly in its green dreaming. The afternoon had begun to wane.

  “Quite a lady,” I said, “that Diana.”

  Ottilie shrugged, watching the kettle. “Bitch,” she said mildly. “She only comes here to . . . ”