John Banville - The Newton Letter

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?”