[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (8 page)

That afternoon was to contaminate everything. I looked
at the others with a new surmise, full of suspicions. They
were altered, the way someone you have known all your
life will be altered after appearing, all menace and maniacal
laughter, in a half-remembered dream. Up to now
they had been each a separate entity. I hadn’t thought
of them as husband and wife, mother, son, niece, aunt—aunt!—but now suddenly they were a family, a closed,
mysterious organism. Amazing questions occurred to
me. What really did they mean to each other? What did
Charlotte feel for the child? Did Edward and she resent
orphan Ottilie’s presence? Were the women jealous of each other, did they circle each other warily, as Edward
and I did? And what did they all think of me, how did
they behave when I was not there, did they talk about
me? What did they see when they looked at me?—a kind
of shadow, a trick of light, a ghost grown familiar of
whom no one is frightened anymore? I felt a new shyness
in their presence, an awkwardness. I was like an embarrassed
anthropologist realising that what he had for
months taken to be the ordinary muddle of tribal life is
really an immense intricate ceremony, in which the tiniest
gesture is foreordained and vital, in which he is the
only part that does not fit.

All questions came back to the one question: why
had she chosen
that
room? Impulse? A simple prank? Or
did she have some intimation of the delicate dance I was
doing with Charlotte in my mind
(I thought you might
like to . . . here . . . )
? And if so, did Charlotte—my god,
did Charlotte herself suspect, did she feel when I came
near something reach out and touch her timidly, the
moist pale limb of my longing? There are people you
cannot, will not imagine
doing it
, but now I could not
stop myself speculating on the nightworld of Ferns.
Why did Charlotte and Edward have no children? Which
of them was . . . ? The names wove a web of confusion
in my mind. I began to have lurid dreams in which the
four of them slipped and slithered, joining and sundering,
exchanging names, faces, voices, as in some obscene
surrealist fantasy. I lay in bed in the lodge and tried to
imagine Edward here, younger, less besotted, watching the old man Charlotte’s father, waiting for him to die,
planting his claim to Ferns by seducing the daughter,
perhaps on this very mattress . . . I sat up, as suddenly
as I had that day in that other bed. I was sweating.
The girl my fevered imaginings had put in Edward’s
arms was not Charlotte. Away in the woods a
night bird was singing. Sixteen, for god’s sake, she was
only sixteen!

Impossible.

The weather broke. I wakened in the middle of the night
to a noise of shipwreck, a smashed mast, doomed sailors
crying in the wind. In the morning when I looked out
the kitchen window the scenery was rearranged. The
storm had brought down a tree. It lay, a great stranded
corpse, in a tangle of brambles and twisted branches not
a foot from the gable end of the lodge. The day had a
hangdog air, mud everywhere, and granite clouds suspended
over the fields. Snails crunched under my tread.
The summer was over.

Edward came down the drive in a shabby raincoat
and a ridiculous tweed hat. “Some night, eh?” He peered
at the fallen tree. “By Christ that was a close one, nearly
got you.” I found it hard to look him in the face, and
studied his extremities instead, the brown brogues, twill
trousers, the cuffs of his raincoat. Was I imagining it,
or was he shrinking; his clothes seemed made for someone a shade fuller. He looked ghastly, ashen-faced and
blotched by the cold. Another hard night. Where did
he do his drinking? Once or twice I had seen him sloping
into the hotel bar in the village, but latterly he had been
keeping to the house. Perhaps he kept a cache of bottles
stowed under floorboards, at the back of the linen cupboard,
as domesticated drunks are said to do. Or maybe
he drank openly, turning his back on Charlotte’s sad
gaze. “Planted that tree myself,” he said, “Lotte and
me, one day.” He looked up, smiling sheepishly, shrugging.
“That’s the summer gone.” Something came off
him, a kind of mute plea. For what, for sympathy? I
was afraid he would start maundering again about
women, life and love. A warm gush of contempt rose
like gorge in my gullet. He felt it, for he laughed, shaking
his head, and said: “You’re a hard man.” For a
moment I could not make out the emphasis, then I realised
that
he
was sympathising with
me
. By god! I stared
at him—on your knees, cur!—but he only laughed again,
and turned away.

Going up to the house that evening, I met in the hall a
large red-faced man in a blue suit. He winked at me,
and ran a finger down his fly. Above our heads the
lavatory was still noisily recovering from his visit. “Bad
old weather,” he said, jauntily. We went together into
the drawing-room; tea was being served there in the visitor’s honour. Edward leaned against the mantelpiece
in his squire’s outfit of tweed and twill, one hand in his
trousers pocket wriggling like a conjuror’s rabbit. I tried
to see him as a seducer. It was surprisingly easy.
Younger, hair slicked down, creeping up on her. Give
us a kiss? I’ll tell Charlotte. Ah you wouldn’t now. Let
go! Yum yum, lovely titties . . . Charlotte was looking
at me in mute dismay: she had forgotten it was Sunday.
Tough. Visitors were rare, I wasn’t about to miss this
one. She came at us quickly, her hands out, like someone
stepping in to stop a fight. “Mr Prunty is in the seed
business.” I looked at Mr Prunty with interest. He
winked again.

“Have a drink,” said Edward.

Charlotte turned quickly. “The tea is ready!”

He shrugged. “Oh, right.”

Ottilie and the child came in.

Mr Prunty was a great talker, and a great eater; his laughter made the table tremble. He was trying to buy the nurseries. I suspect he had already a hold on the
Lawlesses. When business matters were mentioned he
grew ponderously coy. I studied him. I had seen him
before: he was a type. His money made, he was after
style now, and class. He gazed upon the Lawlesses, with
a kind of fond indulgence. He loved them, a ripe market.
There would be no stopping him. Gently, lovingly, he
would relieve them of Ferns. Eventually he would become
a patrician, change his name, maybe, breed a
brood of pale neurotic daughters to sit in this room doing needlepoint and writing hysterical novels. “It’s a fair offer,” he said seriously, glancing round the table, a forkful of food suspended before him. “I think it’s a fair offer.” And he laughed.

They sat looking back at him, glumly, a little stupidly
even, like a small band of supplicants come from
the sacked city to beg for clemency before the emperor’s
tent. I had not spoken to Ottilie since the afternoon in
the Lawlesses’ bedroom. Edward coughed.

“Well—” he began.

Charlotte, who had been gazing at the large blue
man with hypnotic fascination, dragged herself out of
her trance.

“He’s writing, you know,” she said to Mr Prunty,
pointing at me, “a book, he is. On Newton. The astronomer.”

All eyes turned to me, as if I had that moment
descended from the sky into their midst.

“Is that right now,” Mr Prunty said.

Charlotte’s look pleaded with me. “Aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “I
was
.” They waited. I was blushing.
“I seem to have given it up . . . ”

“Oh?” Ottilie put in, icily bright. “And what are
you doing instead?”

I would not look at her.

“Yes,” said Mr Prunty, after a pause. “Well as I was—”

“Given it up?” Charlotte said. With her sorrowing eyes, pale heart-shaped face, those hands, she might have
stepped out of a Cranach garden of dark delights.

“Like Newton,” I said. “He gave up too.”

“Did he?”

“It’s not the money that’s the point,” Edward was
saying, “it’s not the main thing,” and Mr Prunty, trimming
the fat from a piece of ham, pursed his lips, and
pretended to be trying not to smile.

“Yes,” I said, “his work, his astronomy, everything.
He was fifty; he went a little mad.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. Michael looked
around cautiously and put the jammy blade of his knife
into his mouth. “Why was that?”

“Ferns is a family affair,” Edward said grumpily,
“there’s a tradition here.”

“Because—”

“Stop that!” Ottilie snapped. Michael slowly removed
the knife from his mouth, looking at her.

“Oh true, true,” said Mr Prunty smoothly, “the
Graingers
have been in this house a long time.”

Charlotte, a hand to her naked throat, gave a tiny
shudder. O Isaac, make haste to help me!

“Because he had to have certain absolutes,” I said,
look at me, keep looking at me, “certain absolutes of
of of, of space, time, motion, to found his theories on.
But space, and time, and motion,” beats, soft beats, soft
heartbeats, “can only be relative, for us, he knew that,
had to admit it, had to let them go, and when they went,” O my darling, “everything else went with
them.” Ah!

A vast dark cloud sailed into the window.

“Well,” said Prunty, routed finally, “I’ve made my
offer, I hope you’ll consider it.” My lap was damp.
Charlotte, as if nothing at all had happened, turned to
him coolly and said: “Of course, thank you.”

There was some more chat, the weather, the crops,
and then he left. Charlotte saw him out. “Bloody gombeen
man,” Edward said, and yawned. Under the table
Ottilie’s foot touched mine, retreated, and then came
back without its shoe. I suppose she had caught a whiff
of rut, and thought the trail led to her. Charlotte returning
stopped in the doorway. “Was that lightning?”
We turned to the window expectantly. Rain, grey light,
a trembling bough. Why do I remember so clearly these
little scenes? Because they seemed somehow arranged,
as certain street scenes, in quiet suburbs, on dreamy
summer evenings, will seem arranged, that postbox, the
parked van, one tree in its wire cage, and a red ball
rolling innocently into the road down which the lorry
is hurtling. A tremendous clap of thunder broke above
our heads. “By Christ,” Edward said mildly. He turned
to Charlotte. A glass of whiskey had appeared in his
hand out of nowhere.

“Well?” he said. “What do you think?” She shook
her head. “You’ll have to sell, you know,” he said,
“sooner or later.”

There was a silence, and once again I had that sense of them all turning away from me toward some black
awful eminence that only they could see.

“We,” Charlotte said, so softly I hardly heard it;
“
we
, you mean.”