[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (2 page)

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.

I said I hadn’t known the hothouse was here, I was
impressed, she must be an enthusiastic gardener. I was
babbling. She looked at me carefully. “It’s how we make
our living,” she said. I apologised, I wasn’t sure for
what, and then laughed, and felt foolish. There are people
to whom you feel compelled to explain yourself. “I
got lost,” I said, “in the garden, believe it or not, and
then I saw you here, and . . .” She was still watching
me, hanging on my words; I wondered if she were perhaps
hard of hearing. The possibility was oddly touching.
Or was it simply that she wasn’t really listening?
Her face was empty of all save a sense of something
withheld. She made me think of someone standing on
tiptoe behind a glass barrier, every part of her, eyes,
lips, the gloves that she clutches, straining to become
the radiant smile that awaits the beloved’s arrival. She
was all potential. On the bench where she had been
working lay an open secateurs, and a cut plant with
purple flowers.

We went among the tables, wading through a dead
and standing pool of air, and she explained her work,
naming the plants, the strains and hybrids, in a neutral
voice. Mostly it was plain commercial stuff, apple tree-lets, flower bulbs, vegetables, but there were some
strange things, with strange pale stalks, and violent blossoms,
and bearded fruit dangling among the glazed, still
leaves. Her father had started the business, and she had
taken it over when her brother was killed. “We still
trade as Grainger Nurseries.” I nodded dully. The heat,
the sombre hush, the contrast between the stillness here
and the windy tumult pressing against the glass all
around us, provoked in me a kind of excited apprehension,
as if I were being led, firmly, but with infinite tact,
into peril. Ranked colours thronged me round, crimson,
purples, and everywhere green and more green, glabrous
and rubbery and somehow ferocious. “In Holland,”
she said, “in the seventeenth century, a
nurseryman could sell a new strain of tulip for twenty
thousand pounds.” It had the flat sound of something
read into a recorder. She looked at me, her hands folded,
waiting for my comment. I smiled, and shook my head,
trying to look amazed. We reached the door. The summer
breeze seemed a hurricane after the silence within.
My shirt clung to my back. I shivered. We walked a
little way down a path under an arch of rhododendrons.
The tangled arthritic branches let in scant light, and there
was a smell of mossy rot reminiscent of the tang of damp
flesh. Then at once, unaccountably, we were at the rear
of the house. I was confused; the garden had surreptitiously
taken me in a circle. Charlotte murmured something,
and walked away. On the drive under the
sycamores I paused and looked back. The house was impassive, except where a curtain in an open upstairs
window waved frantically in the breeze. What did I
expect? Some revelation? A face watching me through
sky-reflecting glass, a voice calling my name? There was
nothing—but something had happened, all the same.

The child’s name was Michael. I couldn’t fit him to the
Lawlesses. True, he was given, like Edward, to skulking.
I would come upon him in the lanes roundabout,
poking in the hedge and muttering to himself, or just
standing, with his hands behind him as if hiding something,
waiting for me to pass by. Sitting with a book
under a tree in the orchard one sunny afternoon, I looked
up to find him perched among the branches, studying
me. Another time, towards twilight, I spotted him on
the road, gazing off intently at something below the
brow of the hill where he stood. He had not heard me
behind him, and I paused, wondering what it was that
merited such rapt attention. Then with a pang I heard
it, rising through the stillness of evening, the tinny music
of a carnival in the village below.