John Banville: The Newton Letter

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.