[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (10 page)

Charlotte began distractedly to cry.

“In the village, probably,” Ottilie said. She stood,
with her hands behind her, leaning back against the
door, her swollen eyes shut. Michael was sitting on the
stairs, watching through the banisters. Had he been there
to hear me pledge my troth to poor unheeding Charlotte?

The doctor and I, with Ottilie’s help, lifted Edward
and hauled him up the stairs. He opened his eyes briefly
and said something. The smell, the slack feel of him,
was horrible.

“Let him sleep,” the doctor said, “there’s nothing to be done.” He turned to Charlotte, watching from the
doorway. “And you, Mrs Lawless, are you all right?
Have you your pills?” She continued to look at Edward’s
head sunk in the pillows. She nodded slowly, like a
child. “Try and sleep now.” The doctor glanced, inexplicably
sheepish, at Ottilie and me—good god, was
he in love with Charlotte too? “He’ll be all right now.
I’ll come back in the morning.”

Ottilie and I went with him to the door. The night
came in, smelling of wet and the distant sea. “Can I
drive you back?” I said.

Ottilie pushed past me out on the step. “I’ll do it.”

“He should be kept an eye on,” the doctor said,
throwing me a parting scowl. “He’ll go down fast, after
this.”

The gaseous light of dawn was filtering into the garden
when she came back. I went outside to meet her. I had
stood at the window watching for her, listening breathlessly
for a sound from upstairs, afraid to leave, but
fearful that she would return and find me indoors, trap
me, make me drink tea and talk about the meaning of
life. Even at that late stage I was still misjudging her.
She came up the steps, hugging herself against the cold,
and stopped, not looking at me, swinging the car key.
I asked a question about the doctor, for something to
say.

“Old fraud,” she said, distantly, frowning.

“Oh?”

We were wary as two strangers trapped by a downpour
in a shop doorway. A seagull swaggered across the
lawn, leaving green arrow-prints in the grey wet of the
grass.

“Feeding her that stuff.”

She waited; my go.

“What stuff?” I felt like a straight-man.

“Valium, seconal, I don’t know, some dope like
that. Six months she’s been on it. She’s like a zombie—didn’t
you notice?” with a tiny flick of contempt.

“I wondered,” I said, “yes.”

Wonder is the word all right.

A blood-red glow was swelling among the trees. I
felt—I don’t know. I was cold, and there was a taste of
ashes in my mouth. Something had ended, with a vast
soft crash.

“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.