[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (7 page)

Perhaps this sense of displacement will account for
the oddest phenomenon of all, and the hardest to express.
It was the notion of a time out of time, of this
summer as a self-contained unit separate from the time
of the ordinary world. The events I read of in the newspapers
were, not unreal, but only real
out there
, and
irredeemably ordinary; Ferns, on the other hand, its daily minutiae, was strange beyond expressing, unreal,
and yet hypnotically vivid in its unreality. There was
no sense of life messily making itself from moment to
moment. It had all been lived already, and we were
merely tracing the set patterns, as if not living really,
but remembering. As with Ottilie I had foreseen myself
on my deathbed, now I saw this summer as already a
part of the past, immutable, crystalline and perfect. The
future had ceased to exist. I drifted, lolling like a Dead
Sea swimmer, lapped round by a warm blue soup of
timelessness.

I even went back to the book, in a way. I needed
something on which to concentrate, an anchor in this
world adrift. And what better prop for the part of hopeless
lover than a big fat book? Sitting at my table before
the window and the sunlit lilacs I thought of Canon
Koppernigk at Frauenburg, of Nietzsche in the Engadine,
of Newton himself, all those high cold heroes who
renounced the world and human happiness to pursue
the big game of the intellect. A pretty picture—but
hardly a true one. I did little real work. I struck out a
sentence or two, rearranged a paragraph, corrected a
few solecisms, and, inevitably, returned again to the
second, and longer, of those two strange letters to
Locke, the one in which N. speaks of having sought
a
means of explaining the nature of the ailment, if ailment it
be, which has afflicted me this summer past
. The letter
seemed to me now to lie at the centre of my work,
perhaps of Newton’s too, reflecting and containing all the rest, as the image of Charlotte contained, as in a
convex mirror, the entire world of Ferns. It is the only
instance in all his correspondence of an effort to understand
and express his innermost self. And something
is
expressed, understood, forgiven even, if not in the lines
themselves then in the spaces between, where an extraordinary
and pitiful tension throbs. He wanted so
much to know what it was that had happened to him,
and to say it, as if the mere saying itself would be redemption.
He mentions, with unwonted calm, Locke’s
challenge of the absolutes of space and time and motion
on which the picture of the mechanistic universe in the
Principia
is founded, and trots out again, but without
quite the old conviction, the defence that such absolutes
exist in God, which is all that is asked of them. But then
suddenly he is talking about the excursions he makes
nowadays along the banks of the Cam, and of his encounters,
not with the great men of the college, but with
tradesmen, the sellers and the makers of things.
They
would seem to have something to tell me; not of their trades,
nor even of how they conduct their lives; nothing, I believe,
in words. They are, if you will understand it, themselves the
things they might tell. They are all a form of saying
—and
there it breaks off, the rest of that page illegible (because
of a scorch mark, perhaps?). All that remains is the brief
close:
My dear Doctor, expect no more philosophy from my
pen. The language in which I might be able not only to write
but to think is neither Latin nor English, but a language none
of whose words is known to me; a language in which commonplace things speak to me; and wherein I may one day have
to justify myself before an unknown judge
. Then comes that
cold, that brave, that almost carven signature:
Newton
.
What did he mean, what was it those commonplace
things said to him, what secret did they impart? And so
I sat in the shadow of lilacs, nursing an unrequitable love
and reading a dead man’s testament, trying to understand
it.

W
HATEVER
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 think 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.