“In northern countries they call this the wolf hour,” I said. A fact! Pity Charlotte was not there to hear me, learning the trick at last. “What is it he has?”
“Edward?” She looked at me then, with scorn, pityingly. “You really didn’t know,” she said, “all this time, did you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She only smiled, a kind of grimace, and looked away. Yes, a foolish question. I felt briefly like a child, pressing his face against the cold unyielding pane of adult knowingness. She was the grown-up. I shrugged, and went down the steps. The seagull flew away, scattering its mewling cries upon the air.
THERE’S not much left to tell. That same morning I packed as many of my belongings as I could carry and locked up the lodge. I left the key in an envelope pinned to the door. I thought of writing a note, but to whom would I have written, and what? I stood in the gateway, afraid Ottilie might see me, and come after me—I could not have borne it—taking a last brief view of the house, the sycamores, that broken fanlight they would never fix. Michael was about. He too had grown, already the lineaments of what he would someday be were discernible in the way he held himself, unbending, silent, inviolably private. He was no longer a Cupid. Not a golden bow and arrow, but a flaming sword would have suited him now. I waved to him tentatively, but he pretended not to see me. I set off down the road to the village. The sun was shining, but too bright; it would rain later. The leaves were turning. Farewell, happy fields!
A long low car came up the hill. I almost laughed: it was the Mittlers. Had Bunny turned her little nose twitching to the wind and caught a whiff of disaster? Maybe Charlotte had called them. What did I know? They passed me by with a toot on the deep-throated horn, gazing at me through the smoked glass, the four of them, like manikins. Bunny noted my bag. Before they were past she had turned to her husband, her mouth working avidly.
On the train I travelled into a mirror. There it all was, the backs of the houses, the drainpipes, a cloud out on the bay, just like the first time, only in reverse order. In the dining-car I met Mr Prunty: life will insist on tying up loose ends. He remembered my face, but not where he had seen it. “Ferns, was it,” he cried, “that’s it!” and jabbed a finger into my chest. I was pleased. He seemed somehow right: vivid yet inconsequential, and faintly absurd. He spoke of Edward in a whisper, shaking his head. “Has it in the gut, I believe, poor bugger—you knew that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I know.”
Two letters awaited me at the flat, one calling me to an interview in Cambridge, the other offering me the post here. The contract is for a year only. Was I crazy to come? My surroundings are congenial. There is nothing I could wish for, except, but no, nothing. Spring is a ferocious and faintly mad season in this part of the world. At night I can hear the ice unpacking in the bay, a groaning and a tremendous deep drumming, as if something vast were being born out there. And I have heard gatherings of wolves too, far off in the frozen wastes, howling like orchestras. The landscape, if it can be called that, has a peculiar bleached beauty, much to my present taste. Tiny flowers appear on the tundra, slender and pale as the souls of dead girls. And I have seen the auroras.
Ottilie writes every week. I catch myself listening for the postman panting up the stairs. She once told me, at Ferns, that when she was away from me she felt as if she were missing an arm—but now I seem weighed down by an extra limb, a large awkward thing, I don’t know what to do with it, where to put it, and it keeps me awake at night. She sent me a photograph. In it she is sitting on a fallen tree, in winter sunlight. Her gaze is steady, unsmiling, her hands rest on her knees; there is the line of a thigh that is inimitably hers. There is something here, in this pose, this gaze at once candid and tender, that when I was with her I missed; it is I think the sense of her essential otherness, made poignant and precious because she seems to be offering it into my keeping. She’s in Dublin now. She abandoned her plan to go to university, and is working in a shop. She feels her life is only starting.
Of all the mental photographs I have of her I choose one. A summer night, one of those white nights of July. We had been drinking, she got up to pee. The lavatory was not working, as so often, and she had brought in from the garage, to join her other treasures, an ornate china vessel which she quaintly called the jolly-pot. I watched her squat there in the gloaming, her elbows on her knees, one hand in her hair, her eyes closed, playing a tinkling chamber music. Still without opening her eyes she came stumbling back to bed, and kneeling kissed me, mumbling in my ear. Then she lay down again, her hair everywhere, and sighed and fell asleep, grinding her teeth faintly. It’s not much of a picture, is it? But she’s in it, ineradicably, and I treasure it.
She’s pregnant. Yes, the most banal ending of all, and yet the one I least expected. Wait, that’s not true. I have a confession to make. That last night in bed with her, when she sobbed in my arms: I told you she went immediately to sleep, but I lied. I could not resist her tear-drenched nakedness, the passionate convulsions of her sobbing. God forgive me. I believe that was when she conceived; she thinks so too. More sentimentality, more self-delusion? Probably. But at least this delusion has a basis in fact. The child is there. The notion of this strange life, secret in its warm sea, provokes in me the desire to live—to live forever, I mean, if necessary. The future now has the same resonance that the past once had, for me. I am pregnant myself, in a way. Super-numerous existence wells up in my heart.
I set out to explain to you, Clio, and to myself, why I had drown’d my book. Have you understood? So much is unsayable: all the important things. I spent a summer in the country, I slept with one woman and thought I was in love with another; I dreamed up a horrid drama, and failed to see the commonplace tragedy that was playing itself out in real life. You’ll ask, where is the connection between all that, and the abandoning of a book? I don’t know, or at least I can’t say, in so many words. I was like a man living underground who, coming up for air, is dazzled by the light and cannot find the way back into his bolt-hole. I trudge back and forth over the familiar ground, muttering. I am lost.
Edward survived the winter. He’s very low, bedridden: you wouldn’t know him, she says. As if I ever did. I remember one day he tried to tell me about dying. Oh not directly, of course. I can’t recall what he said, what words he used. The subject was the countryside, farming, something banal. But what he was talking about, I suppose, was his sense of oneness now with all poor dumb things, a horse, a tree, a house, that suffer their lives in silence and resigned bafflement, and die unremarked. I wish I could have erected a better monument to him than I have done, in these too many pages; but I had to show you how I thought of him then, how I behaved, so that you would see the cruelty of it, the wilful blindness.
Of Charlotte she makes no mention. That was only to be expected. I brood on certain words, these emblems. Succubus, for instance.
What shall I do? Find that fissure in the rocks, clamber down again into that roomy and commodious grave? I hope not. Begin afresh, then, learn how to live up here, in the light? Something is moving under the ice. Oh, I'm not in despair, far from it. I feel the spring around me, the banality of it, the heedless power. Emotions flourish in these frozen wastes. I stop sometimes, staring at a white hill with the tender porcelain of the sky behind it, and I feel such a sense of . . . of something, I don't know. All kinds of things appear on that white screen: a house, a chestnut tree, a dark window with a face reflected in it. Oh and other things, too many to mention. These private showings seem an invitation. Go back to Ferns, move in, set up house, fulfil some grand design, with Ottilie, poor Charlotte, the two boys—for I feel it will be a boy, it must be—become a nurseryman and wear tweeds, talk about the weather, stand around chewing a straw? Impossible. All the same, I shall go back. And in the end, it’s come to me just this moment, in the end of course I shall take up the book and finish it: such a renunciation is not of this world. Yet I'm wary. Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research
, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken and deceived, in the midst of new ruins?
Dublin–Iowa–Dublin
Summer 79–Spring 81
THE NEWTON LETTER
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn, Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976), Kepler (which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1981), Mefisto, The Book of Evidence (which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and won the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award), Ghosts, Athena and The Untouchable. John Banville is the literary editor of the Irish Times and lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons.
ALSO BY JOHN BANVILLE
Long Lankin
Nightspawn
Birchwood
Doctor Copernicus
Kepler
Mefisto
The Book of Evidence
Ghost
Athena
The Untouchable
to Vincent Lawrence
I seem to have been only as a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton
This edition published in 1999 by Picador
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Copyright © John Banville 1982
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Endnotes
* I have since learned that this contention is mistaken; cf Polkolski, F. X., Interface Tribal Situations in Southeast Ireland: a structuralist study (M. I . T. 1980).
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