[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (6 page)

I was astonished, of course, but there was too a
familiar shiver of fright and not wholly unpleasurable
disgust. It was like that moment in a childhood party
game when, hot and flustered, every nerve-end an eye,
you whip off the blindfold to find that the warm quarry
quivering in your clasped arms is not that little girl with
the dark curls and the interestingly tight bodice whose
name you did not quite hear, but a fat boy, or your
convulsed older sister, or just one of Auntie Hilda’s
mighty mottled arms. Or a middle-aged woman, emphatically
married, with middle-aged hands, and wrinkles around her eyes, and the faint beginnings of a
moustache, who had spoken no more than twenty
words to me and who looked at me as if I were, if not
transparent, then translucent at least. There it was, all ,
the same, sitting in bed with me, still in its party frock,
with an impudent smile: love.

The secret pattern of the past months was now
revealed. I saw myself that first day in the doorway of
the lodge offering her a month’s rent, I stumbled again
down the grassy bank to the glasshouse, sat in her
kitchen in sunlight watching the shadows of leaves stirring
by her hand. I was like an artist blissfully checking
over the plan of a work that has suddenly come to him
complete in every detail, touching the marvellous, still-damp
construct gently here and there with the soft feelers
of imagination. Ottilie a sketch, on the oboe, of the
major theme to come, Edward at once the comic relief
and the shambling villain of the piece, Michael a Cupid
still, the subtlety of whose aim, however, I had underestimated.
Even the unbroken fine summer weather was
a part of the plot.

Of course there were to be times when the whole
thing would seem a delusion. I would remark the fact
that the actual life I led—burnt cutlets, the bathroom
to be cleaned—was far from that ideal which somehow
I would manage to think I was leading: the quiet scholar
alone with books and pipe and lamplight, lifting melancholy
eyes now and then to the glossy block of night
in the window and sighing for
die ferne Geliebte
. When Ottilie came to me I saw myself as one of those tragic
gentlemen in old novels who solace themselves with
a shopgirl, or a little actress, a sort of semi-animate
doll with childlike ways and no name, a part for which
my big blonde girl was hardly fitted. But then, as
suddenly as they had come, the doubts would depart,
and the dream would take wing again into the empyrean,
when I saw her coming up from the glasshouse
with flowers in her arms, or glimpsed her lost in
thought behind a tall window in which was reflected
one tree and a bronze cloud. Once, listening idly to
the shipping forecast on the radio, I saw her come out
on the steps in the tawny light of evening and call to
the child, and even still always I think of her when I
hear the word
Finisterre
.

In moments like that you can feel memory gathering its
material, beady-eyed and voracious, like a demented
photographer. I don’t mean the big scenes, the sunsets
and car crashes, I mean the creased black-and-white
snaps taken in a bad light, with a lop-sided horizon and
that smudged thumb-print in the foreground. Such are
the pictures of Charlotte, in my mind. In the best of
them she is not present at all, someone jogged my elbow,
or the film was faulty. Or perhaps she was present
and has withdrawn, with a pained smile. Only her glow
remains. Here is an empty chair in rain-light, cut flowers on a workbench, an open window with lightning
flickering distantly in the dark. Her absence throbs in
these views more powerfully, more poignantly than any
presence.

When I search for the words to describe her I can’t
find them. Such words don’t exist. They would need
to be no more than forms of intent, balanced on the
brink of saying, another version of silence. Every mention
I make of her is a failure. Even when I say just
her name it sounds like an exaggeration. When I write
it down it seems impossibly swollen, as if my pen had
slipped eight or nine redundant letters into it. Her
physical presence itself seemed overdone, a clumsy representation
of the essential she. That essence was only
to be glimpsed obliquely, on the outer edge of vision,
an image always there and always fleeting, like the
afterglow of a bright light on the retina.

If she was never entirely present for me in the flesh,
how could I make her to be there for me in the lodge,
at night, in the fields on my solitary rambles? I must
concentrate on things impassioned by her passing. Anything
would do, her sun hat, a pair of muddied wellingtons
standing splay-footed at the back door. The
very ordinariness of these mementoes was what made
them precious. That, and the fact that they were wholly
mine. Even she would not know their secret significance.
Two little heart-shaped polished patches rubbed
on the inner sides of those wellingtons by her slightly
knock-kneed walk. The subtle web of light and shade that played over her face through the slack straw of the
brim of her hat. Who would notice such things, that
did not fix on her with the close-up lens of love?

Love. That word. I seem to hear quotation marks
around it, as if it were the title of something, a stilted
sonnet, say, by a silver poet. Is it possible to love someone
of whom one has so little? For through the mist
now and then I glimpsed, however fleetingly, the fact
that what I had of her was hardly enough to bear a great
weight of passion. Perhaps call it concentration, then,
the concentration of the painter intent on drawing the
living image out of the potential of mere paint. I would
make her incarnate. By the force of my unwavering,
meticulous attention she would rise on her scallop shell
through the waves and
be
.

I did nothing, of course, said nothing, made no
move. It was a passion of the mind. I had given up all
pretence of work on the book. You see the connection.

I wondered if she were aware of being so passionately
watched. Now and then I thought I caught
her squirming, as if she had felt my slavering breath
brush her flesh. She had a way of presenting me suddenly
with unbidden bits of fact, like scraps thrown
down to divert the attention of a dog that she feared
might bite her. She would turn her head, consider for
a moment my right shoulder, or one of my hands,
with that strange blank gaze, and say: My father imported
that tree from South America. And I would
nod pensively, frowning. I learned the oddest things from her. Why a ha-ha is so called. That Finland was
the first European country to give women the vote.
Occasionally I could link these obscure pronouncements
to something I had said or asked days ago, but
mostly they were without discernible connection. Having
spoken, she would go on gazing at me for a moment
longer, as if waiting for some large sign of my acknowledgment
that she was solid, that, see, she knew
things, like real people do—or just that she was too
dry for this dangerous dog to bother biting.

I recall one Saturday, when she was driving into
town to deliver stuff from the nurseries, and I asked her
for a lift. It was raining, the fields a speeding blur beyond
the misted windows. We were past the village when she
took her foot off the pedal and let the car bump slowly
to a stop. “Puncture,” she said. But she did not get out.
We looked in silence at a wild apple tree shimmering
before us in the streaming windscreen. The wheels on
my side had climbed the grass verge, and everything
was slightly crooked. There was no puncture. A strange
moment, I remember it, the rain,’ the sound of the rain,
the worn sticky feel of the car seat. She took off her
spectacles, and a strand of hair fell across her face. What
was she thinking about? I did not like the way she wore
her glasses on a cord, it made her look matronly. An
old harridan within me suddenly muttered:
She
’
s forty if
she
’
s a day
, and was immediately silenced. A minute went
by. I rolled down my window and let in the smell of
woodbine and wet earth. Charlotte rubbed the fogged windscreen with a fingertip. “Perhaps we should go
back,” she said, and then, looking at my knees: “Edward
is not well.” The sibyl had spoken. I nodded, a puzzled
priest of the shrine. What was expected of me? Whatever
it was I could not give it, and she turned with vague
helplessness to the plants and punnets of fruit stacked
on the back seat. Her eyes, what colour were her eyes?
I can’t remember! She started up the car. We drove on.

Thus, always, it would teeter on the brink of being
something.

At first I was afraid I’d give the game away, snatch up
her hand and kiss it, or get drunk again and fall at her
feet bawling, something like that. But of course I
wouldn’t. I was like a young bride who has rushed home
to tell hubby that the pregnancy is confirmed, only to
go suddenly shy and strange at the sight of familiar
things, his hat, that new sofa, the kitchen sink. In the
midst of the old life I hugged this brand-new secret to
my breast. It gave me a curious sense of dignity, of quiet
wisdom. Is this what love is really for, to lend us a new
conception of ourselves? My voice sounded softer to
me, my every action seemed informed by a melancholy
grandeur. My smile, faintly flecked with sadness, was
a calm benediction upon the world.

I had feared too I might reveal myself before Ottilie,
by showing a sudden coldness. But in fact, I was if anything fonder of her now. I even warmed toward
Edward; I fairly doted (at a safe distance) on the child.
They were nearer to Charlotte, in the commonplace
world of breakfasts and bedtimes, than I could ever be.
And they were the keepers of that most precious thing,
her past, That they could not hope to achieve the proximity
to her that I did, in my love, was something for
which they could not be blamed, but only pitied. I spent
hours, a smiling spider, weaving webs to trap them into
talking about her, so that it would be always they who
appeared to have brought up the subject. The hardest
part was to keep them from straying on to other things.
Then I was forced to take desperate action, and, elaborately
casual, would jump in with: But what you were
saying about Charlotte, it was interesting, did she really
never have a boyfriend before Edward? And a red-hot
coal of panic would briefly glow behind my breastbone
when Ottilie paused, and glanced at me, struck I suppose
by the incongruity of putting together such words as
Charlotte
and
boyfriend
.

Being a man with a secret was a full-time role.
Sometimes I almost lost sight of the beloved herself in
the luxuriant abundance of my mission. When Ottilie
was in my arms I was careful not to speak, for fear of
crying out the wrong name—but there were moments
too when I was not sure which was the right one, moments
even when the two became fused. At first I had
conjured Charlotte’s presence to be only a witness to
the gymnastics in my narrow bed, to lean over us, Ottilie and me, with the puzzled attention of a pure spirit
of the night, immune herself to the itch of the flesh yet
full of tenderness for these sad mortals struggling among
the sheets, but as time went on this ceased to be enough,
the sprite had to fold her delicate wings, throw off her
silken wisps, and, with a sigh of amused resignation,
join us. Then in the moonlight my human girl’s blonde
hair would turn black, her fingers pale, and she would
become something new, neither herself nor the other,
but a third—Charlottilie!

There was a fourth, too, which was that other version
of myself which stood apart, watching the phenomenon
of this love and my attendant antics with a
wry smile, puzzled, and at times embarrassed. He it was
who continued to, I won’t say love, but to value Ottilie,
her gaiety and generosity, her patience, the mournful
passion that she lavished on me. Was there, then, another
Ottilie as well, an autochthonous companion for that
other I? Were all at Ferns dividing thus and multiplying,
like amoebas? In this spawning of multiple selves I
seemed to see the awesome force of my love, which in
turn served to convince me anew of its authenticity.