[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (4 page)

“I think he dislikes me,” I said.

“What? No. He was embarrassed.”

“Do children get embarrassed?”

“Oh yes,” she said softly, and looked at me at last,
“Oh yes.”

It’s strange to be offered, without conditions, a body
you don’t really want. You feel the most unexpected
things, tenderness of course, but impatience too, curiosity,
a little contempt, and something else the only
name for which I can find is sadness. When she took off
her clothes it was as if she were not merely undressing,
but performing a far more complex operation, turning
herself inside out maybe, to display not breast and bum
and blonde lap, but her very innards, the fragile lungs,
mauve nest of intestines, the gleaming ivory of bone, and her heart, passionately labouring. I took her in my
arms and felt the soft shock of being suddenly, utterly
inhabited.

I was not prepared for her gentleness. At first it
seemed almost a rebuff. We were so quiet I could hear
the rain’s whispered exclamations at the window. In the
city of the flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist:
and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the
blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness,
a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least
expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square,
the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with
soft cries in my arms.

We lay, damp and chill as stranded fish, until her
fingers at the back of my neck gave three brisk taps and
she sat up. I turned on my side and gazed in a kind of
fond stupor at the two folds of flesh above her hip bone.
She put on her trousers and her lumpy sweater and
padded into the kitchen to make tea. Our stain on the
sheet was the shape of a turtle. Grey gloom settled on
my heart. I was dressed when she came back. We sat
on the bed, in our own faintly ammoniac smell, and
drank the strong tea from cracked mugs. The day darkened,
the rain was settling in.

“I suppose you think I’m a right whore,” she said.

It was contingency from the start, and it stayed that
way. Oh, no doubt I could work up a map of our separate
journeys to that bed. There would be a little stylised
tree on it and a tumbling Cupid, and an X in
crimson ink marking a bloodstain, and pretty slanted
blue lines indicating rain. But it would be misleading,
it would look like the cartography of love. What can I
say? I won’t deny her baroque blonde splendour touched
me. I remember her hands on my neck, the violet depths
of her eyes, her unexpectedly delicate pale feet, and her
cries, the sudden panic of her coming, when she would
clutch me to her, wet teeth bared and her eyelids fluttering,
like one falling helplessly in a dream. But love?

She burrowed into my life at the lodge with stealthy
determination. She brought prints clipped from glossy
magazines and pinned them over the bed, film stars,
Kneller’s portrait of Newton, the
Primavera
. Flowers
began to sprout around me in jam jars and tin cans. A
new teapot appeared, and two cups, of fine bone china,
each with an identical crack. One day she arrived lugging
an ancient radio that she had salvaged from the garage.
She played with it for hours, gliding across the stations,
mouth a little open, eyes fixed on nothing, while Hungarian
disc jockeys or Scots trawlermen gabbled in her
ear, and the day waned, and the little green light on the
tuning panel advanced steadily into the encroaching
darkness.

I think more than sex, maybe even more than love,
she wanted company. She talked. Sometimes I suspected she had got into bed with me so that she could talk. She
laid bare the scandals of the neighbourhood: did I know
the man in Pierce’s pub was sleeping with his own
daughter? She recounted her dreams in elaborate detail;
I was never in them. Though she told me a lot about
the family I learned little. The mass of names and hazy
dates numbed me. It was all like the stories in a history
book, vivid and forgettable at once. Her dead parents
were a favourite topic. In her fantasy they were a kind
of Scott and Zelda, beautiful and doomed, hair blown back and white silk scarves whipping in the wind as they
sailed blithely, laughing, down the slipstream of disaster.
All I could do in return was tell her about Newton,
show off my arcane learning. I even tried reading aloud
to her bits of that old Galileo article of mine—she fell
asleep. Of course we didn’t speak much. Our affair was
conducted through the intermediary of these neutral
things, a story, a memory, a dream.

I wondered if the house knew what was going on.
The thought was obscurely exciting. The Sunday high
teas became an institution, and although I was never
comfortable, I confess I enjoyed the sexual freemasonry
with its secret signs, the glances and the covert smiles,
the way Ottilie’s stare would meet and mingle with mine
across the table, so intensely that it seemed there must
grow up a hologram picture of a pair of tiny lovers
cavorting among the tea things.

Our love-making at first was curiously innocent.
Her generosity was a kind of desperate abasing before the altar of passion. She could have no privacy, wanted
none, there was no part of her body that would hide
from me. Such relentless giving was flattering to begin
with, and then oppressive. I took her for granted, of
course, except when, exhausted, or bored, she forgot
about me. Then, playing the radio, brooding by the
stove, sitting on the floor picking her nose with dreamy
concentration, she would break away from me and be
suddenly strange and incomprehensible, as sometimes a
word, one’s own name even, will briefly detach itself
from its meaning and become a hole in the mesh of the
world. She had moments too of self-assertion. Something
would catch her attention and she would push me
away absentmindedly as if I were furniture, and gaze
off, with a loony little smile, over the brow of the hill,
toward the tiny music of the carnival that only she could
hear. Without warning she would punch me in the chest,
hard, and laugh. One day she asked me if I had ever
taken drugs. “I’m looking forward to dying,” she said
thoughtfully; “they give you that kind of morphine
cocktail.”

I laughed. “Where did you hear that?”

“It’s what they give people dying of cancer.” She
shrugged. “Everybody knows that.”

I suppose I puzzled her, too. I would open my eyes
and find her staring into the misted mirror of our kisses
as if watching a fascinating crime being committed. Her
hands explored me with the stealthy care of a blind man.
Once, gliding my lips across her belly, I glanced up and caught her gazing down with tears in her eyes. This
passionate scrutiny was too much for me, I would feel
something within me wrapping itself in its dirty cloak
and turning furtively away. I had not contracted to be
known as she was trying to know me.

And for the first time in my life I began to feel my age.
It sounds silly, I know. But things had been happening
to me, and to the world, before she was born. The years
in my life of her non-being struck me as an extraordinary
fact, a sort of bravura trick played on me by time. I,
whose passion is the past, was discovering in her what
the past means. And not just the past. Before our affair—the
word makes me wince—before it had properly begun
I was contemplating the end of it. You’ll laugh, but
I used to picture my deathbed: a hot still night, the lamp
flickering and one moth bumping the bulb, and I, a
wizened infant, remembering with magical clarity as the
breath fails this moment in this bedroom at twilight, the
breeze from the window, the sycamores, her heart beating
under mine, and that bird calling in the distance
from a lost, Oh utterly lost land.

“If this is not love,” she said once in that dark voice
of hers, for a moment suddenly a real grown-up, “Jesus
if this isn't love then what is!”

The truth is, it seemed hardly anything—I hear her
hurt laugh—until, with tact, with deference, but immovably,
another, a secret sharer, came to join our
somehow, always, melancholy grapplings.

MICHAEL
’
S
birthday was at the end of July,
and there was a party. His guests were a dozen of his
classmates from the village school. They were all of a
type, small famished-looking creatures, runts of the litter,
the girls spindle-legged and pigtailed, the boys
watchful under cruel haircuts, their pale necks defenceless
as a rabbit’s. Why had he picked them, were they
his only friends in that school? He was a blond giant
among them. While Charlotte set the table in the drawing-room for their tea, Ottilie led them in party games,
waving her arms and shouting, like a conductor wielding
an insane orchestra. Michael hung back, stiff and
sullen.

I had gone up to the house with a present for him. I was given a glass of tepid beer and left in the
kitchen. Edward appeared, brandishing a hurley stick.
“We’ve lost a couple of the little beggars, haven‘t seen
them, have you? Always the same, they go off and
hide, and start dreaming and forget to come out.” He
loitered, eyeing my glass. “You hiding too, eh? Good
idea. Here, have a decent drink.” He removed my beer
to the sink and brought out tumblers and a bottle of
whiskey. “There. Cheers. Ah.”

We stood, like a couple of timid trolls, listening to
the party noises coming down the hall. He leaned on
the hurley stick, admiring his drink. “How are you getting
on at the lodge,” he said, “all right? The roof needs
doing—damn chilly spot in the winter, I can tell you.”
Playing the squire today. He glanced sideways at me.
“But you won’t be here in the winter, will you.”

I shrugged; guess again, fella.

“Getting fond of us, are you?” he said, almost
coyly.

Now it was my turn to exercise the sideways
glance.

“Peace,” I said, “and quiet: that kind of thing.”

A cloud shifted, and the shadow of the chestnut tree
surged toward us across the tiled floor. I had taken him
from the start for a boozer and an idler, a lukewarm
sinner not man enough to be a monster: could it be a
mask, behind which crouched a subtle dissembler, smiling
and plotting? Impossible. But I didn’t like that look
in his eye today. Had Ottilie been telling secrets?

“I lived there one time, you know,” he said.

“What—in the lodge?”

“Years ago. I used to manage the nurseries, when
Lotte’s father was alive.”

So: a fortune hunter, by god! I could have laughed.

He poured us another drink, and we wandered outside
into the gravelled yard. The hot day hummed.
Above the distant wood a hawk was hunting.

Lotte.

“Still doing this book of yours?” he said. “Used to
write a bit of poetry, myself.” Ah, humankind! It will
never run out of surprises. “Gave it up, of course, like
everything else.” He brooded a moment, frowning, and
the blue of the Dardanelles bloomed briefly in his doomy
eyes. I watched the hawk circling. What did I know?
Maybe at the back of a drawer somewhere there was a
sheaf of poems that unleashed would ravish the world.
A merry notion; I played with it. He went into the
kitchen and fetched the bottle. “Here,” handing it to
me, “you do the honours. I’m not supposed to drink
this stuff at all.” I poured two generous measures. The
first sign of incipient drunkenness is that you begin to
hear yourself breathing. He was watching me; the blue
of his eyes had become sullied. He had a way, perhaps
because of that big too-heavy head, of seeming to loom
over one. “You’re not married, are you?” he said. “Best
thing. Women, some of them . . . ” He winced, and
thrust his glass into my hand, and going to the chestnut
tree began unceremoniously to piss against the trunk, gripping that white lumpy thing in his flies with the
finger and thumb of a delicately arched hand, as if it
were a violin bow he held. He stowed it away and took
up his hurley stick. “Women,” he said again; “what do
you think of them?”