[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (3 page)

One evening Edward stopped at the lodge on his
way up from the village. He had the raw look of a man
lately dragged out of bed and thrust under a cold tap,
his eyes were red-rimmed, his hair lank. He hummed
and hawed, scuffing the gravel of the roadside, and then
abruptly said: “Come up and have a bite to eat.” I think that was the first time I had been inside the house. It
was dim, and faintly musty. There was a hurley stick
in the umbrella stand, and withered daffodils in a vase
on the hall table. In an alcove a clock feathered the silence
and let drop a single wobbly chime. Edward paused to
consult a pocket watch, frowning. In the fusty half-light
his face had the grey sheen of putty. He hiccupped softly.

Dinner was in the big whitewashed kitchen at the
back of the house. I had expected a gaunt dining-room,
linen napkins with a faded initial, a bit of old silver
negligently laid. And it was hardly dinner, more a high
tea, with cold cuts and limp lettuce, and a bottle of salad
cream the colour of gruel. The tablecloth was plastic.
Charlotte and Ottilie were already halfway through their
meal. Charlotte looked in silence for a moment at my
midriff, and I knew at once I shouldn’t have come. Ottilie
set a place for me. The barred window looked out
on a vegetable garden, and then a field, and then the
blue haze of distant woods. Sunlight through the leaves
of a chestnut tree in the yard was a ceaseless shift and
flicker in the corner of my eye. Edward began to tell a
yarn he had heard in the village, but got muddled, and
sat staring blearily at his plate, breathing. Someone
coughed. Ottilie pursed her lips and began to whistle
silently. Charlotte with an abrupt spastic movement
turned to me and in a loud voice said:

“Do you think we’ll give up neutrality?”

“Give up . . . ?” The topic was in the papers. “Well,
I don’t know, I—”

“Yes, tell us now,” Edward said, suddenly stirring
himself and thrusting his great bull head at me, “tell us
what you think, I’m very interested, we’re all very interested,
aren’t we all very interested? A man like you
would know all about these things.”

“I think we’d be very—”

“Down here of course we haven’t a clue. Crowd
of bog-trotters!” He grinned, snorting softly and pawing
the turf.

“I think we’d be very unwise to give it up,” I said.

“And what about that power station they want to
put up down there at Carnsore? Bloody bomb, blow us
all up, some clown with a hangover press the wrong
button, we won’t need the Russians. What?” He was
looking at Charlotte. She had not spoken. “Well what’s
wrong with being ordinary,” he said, “like any other
country, having an army and defending ourselves? Tell
me what’s wrong with that.” He pouted at us, a big
resentful baby.

“What about Switzerland?” Ottilie said; she giggled.

“Switzerland?
Switzerland?
Ha. Milkmen and chocolate
factories, and, what was it the fellow said, cuckoo
clocks.” He turned his red-rimmed gaze on me again.
“Too many damn neutrals,” he said darkly.

Charlotte sighed, and looked up from her plate at
last.

“Edward,” she said, without emphasis. He did not
take his eyes off me, but the light went out in his face, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him. “Not that
I give a damn anyway,” he muttered, and meekly took
up his spoon. So much for current affairs.

I cursed myself for being there, and yet I was agog.
A trapdoor had been lifted briefly on dim thrashing
forms, and now it was shut again. I watched Edward
covertly. The sot. He had brought me here for an alibi
for his drinking, or to forestall recriminations. I saw the
whole thing now, of course: he was a waster, Charlotte
kept the place going, everything had been a mistake,
even the child. It all fitted, the rueful look and the glazed
eye, the skulking, the silences, the tension, that sense I
had been aware of from the beginning of being among
people facing away from me, intent on something I
couldn’t see. Even the child’s air of sullen autonomy
was explained. I looked at Charlotte’s fine head, her
slender neck, that hand resting by her plate. Leaf-shadow
stirred on the table like the shimmer of tears.
How could I let her know that I understood everything?
The child came in, wrapped in a white bath-towel. His
hair was wet, plastered darkly on his skull. When he
saw me he drew back, then stepped forward, frowning,
a robed and kiss-curled miniature Caesar. Charlotte held
out her hand and he went to her. Ottilie winked at him.
Edward wore a crooked leer, as if a smile aimed at the
centre of his face had landed just wide of the target.
Michael mumbled goodnight and departed, shutting the
door with both hands on the knob. I turned to Charlotte
eagerly. “Your son,” I said, in a voice that fairly throbbed, “your son is very . . . ” and then floundered,
hearing I suppose the tiny tinkle of a warning bell. There
was a silence. Charlotte blushed. Suddenly I felt depressed,
and . . . prissy, that’s the word. What did I
know, that gave me the right to judge them? I shouldn’t
be here at all. I ate a leaf of lettuce, at my back that great
rooted blossomer, before me the insistent enigma of
other people. I would stay out of their way, keep to the
lodge—return to Dublin even. But I knew I wouldn’t.
Some large lesson seemed laid out here for me.

Ottilie came with me out on the step. She said
nothing, but smiled, at once amused and apologetic.
And then, I don’t know why, the idea came to me.
Michael wasn’t their child: he was, of course, hers.

THANKS
for the latest Popov, it arrived today.
Very sly you are, Cliona—but a library of Popovs would
not goad me into publishing. I met him once, an awful
little man with ferret eyes and a greasy suit. Reminded
me of an embalmer. Which, come to think of it, is apt.
I like his disclaimer:
Before the phenomenon of Isaac Newton,
the historian, like Freud when he came to contemplate
Leonardo, can only shake his head and retire with as much
good grace as he can muster
. Then out come the syringe
and the formalin. That is what I was doing too, embalming
old N.’s big corpse, only I
did
have the grace
to pop off before the deathshead grin was properly fixed.

Newton was the greatest genius that science has produced
.
Well, who would deny it? He was still in his twenties when he cracked the code of the world’s working. Single-handed he invented science: before him it had all been
wizardry and sweaty dreams and brilliant blundering.
You may say, as Newton himself said, that he saw so far I
because he had the shoulders of giants to stand on: but
you might as well say that without his mother and father
he would not have been born, which is true all right, but
what does it signify? Anyway, when he defined the gravity
laws he swept away that whole world of giants and
other hobgoblins. Oh yes, you can see, can’t you, the
outline of what my book would have been, a celebration
of action, of the scientist as hero, a gleeful acceptance of
Pandora’s fearful disclosures, wishy-washy medievalism
kicked out and the age of reason restored. But would you
believe that all this, this Popovian Newton-as-the-greatest-scientist-the-world-has-known, now makes me feel
slightly sick? Not that I think any of it untrue, in the sense
that it is fact. It’s just that another kind of truth has come
to seem to me more urgent, although, for the mind, it is
nothing compared to the lofty verities of science.

Newton himself, I believe, saw something of the
matter in that strange summer of 1693. You know the
story, of how his little dog Diamond overturned a candle
in his rooms at Cambridge one early morning, and
started a fire which destroyed a bundle of his papers,
and how the loss deranged his mind. All rubbish, of
course, even the dog is a fiction, yet I find myself imagining
him, a fifty-year-old public man, standing aghast
in the midst of the smoke and the flying smuts with the singed pug pressed in his arms. The joke is, it’s not the
loss of the precious papers that will drive him temporarily
crazy, but the simple fact that
it doesn’t matter
. It
might be his life’s work gone, the
Principia
itself, the
Opticks
, the whole bang lot, and still it wouldn’t mean
a thing. Tears spring from his eyes, the dog licks them
off his chin. A colleague comes running, shirt-tails out.
The great man is pulled into the corridor, white with
shock and stumping like a peg-leg. Someone beats out
the flames. Someone else asks what has been lost. Newton’s
mouth opens and a word like a stone falls out:
Nothing
. He notices details, early morning light through
a window, his rescuer’s one unshod foot and yellow
toenails, the velvet blackness of burnt paper. He smiles.
His fellows look at one another.

It had needed no candle flame, it was already ashes.
Why else had he turned to deciphering Genesis and dabbling
in alchemy? Why else did he insist again and again
that science had cost him too dearly, that, given his life
to live over, he would have nothing to do with physics?
It wasn’t modesty, no one could accuse him of that. The
fire, or whatever the real conflagration was, had shown
him something terrible and lovely, like flame itself.
Nothing
. The word reverberates. He broods on it as on
some magic emblem whose other face is not to be seen
and yet is emphatically there. For the nothing automatically
signifies the everything. He does not know
what to do, what to think. He no longer knows how
to live.

There was no fiery revelation to account for
my
crisis
of faith; there was not even what could properly be called
a crisis. Only, I wasn’t working now. The month of
June went by and I had not put pen to paper. But I was
no longer worried—just the opposite. It was like the
passing away of a stubborn illness. You don’t notice the
gradual calming of the blood, the cleared head, the
limbs’ new strength, you are aware only of waiting quietly,
confidently, for life to start up again. You won’t
believe me, I know: how could I drop seven years of
work, just like that? Newton was my life, not these dull
pale people in their tumbledown house in the hollow
heart of the country. But I didn’t see it as this stark
alternative: things take a definite and simple shape only
in retrospect. At the time I had only a sense of lateral
drift. My papers lay untouched on the table by the window,
turning yellow in the sunlight, when my eye fell
on them I felt impatience and a vague resentment; my
real attention was elsewhere, suspended, ready to give
itself with a glad cry to what was coming next.

What came was unexpected.

Consider: a day in June, birds, breezes, flying
clouds, the smell of approaching rain. Lunchtime. In the
kitchen the stove squats in a hot sulk after its labours,
the air is dense with the smoke of burnt fat. A knock. I drag open the door, cursing silently. Ottilie is standing
outside with the child unconscious in her arms.

He had fallen out of a tree. A cut on his forehead
was bleeding. I took him from her. He was heavier than
I expected, and limp as death, it seemed he might pour
through my fingers into a pale puddle on the floor. I
felt fright, and a curious faint disgust. I put him on an
old horsehair sofa and he coughed and opened his eyes.
At first there was only the whites, then the pupils slid
down, like something awful coming down in a lift. His
face was translucent marble, with violet shadows under
the eyes. A large bruise was growing on his forehead;
the blood had thickened to a kind of jelly. He struggled
up. Ottilie sat back on her heels and sighed: “Faugh!”

I took him in my arms again and carried him to the
house. We must have looked like an illustration from a
Victorian novelette, marching forward across the swallow-swept lawn: had Ottilie her hands clasped to her
breast? Michael turned his face resolutely away from
me. On the steps he wriggled and made me put him
down. Charlotte opened the door—and for a moment
seemed about to step back hurriedly and shut it again.
Ottilie said: “Oh he’s all right,” and glared at the child.
I left them. My lunch had congealed into its own fat.

An hour later Ottilie came to the lodge again. Yes,
yes, he was fine, nothing broken, the little brat. She
apologised for bringing him to me: mine had been the
nearest door. “I’m glad,” I said, not knowing quite what
I meant. She shrugged. She had put on lipstick. “I got a fright,” she said. We stood awkwardly, looking at
things, like people on a railway platform trying to think
of how to say a definitive goodbye. The sunlight died
in the window and it began to rain. A kind of bubble
swelled suddenly in my breast and I put my hands on
her shoulders and kissed her. There was a fleck of dried
blood on my wrist. Her lipstick tasted like something
from childhood, plasticine, or penny sweets. When I
stepped back she simply stood frowning, and moving
her lips, as if trying to identify a mysteriously familiar
taste.