John Banville - The Newton Letter

We heard the car returning. So much for the wall of death. The doctor was an ill-tempered old man, still in his pyjamas, with a raincoat thrown over his shoulders. He glared at me, as if the whole affair were my fault. “Where is he? What? Why in the name of Christ didn’t you put him to bed?” Gruff, good with children, old women would dote on him. He knelt down, grunting, and felt Edward’s pulse. “Where was he drinking?”

Charlotte began distractedly to cry.

“In the village, probably,” Ottilie said. She stood, with her hands behind her, leaning back against the door, her swollen eyes shut. Michael was sitting on the stairs, watching through the banisters. Had he been there to hear me pledge my troth to poor unheeding Charlotte?

The doctor and I, with Ottilie’s help, lifted Edward and hauled him up the stairs. He opened his eyes briefly and said something. The smell, the slack feel of him, was horrible.

“Let him sleep,” the doctor said, “there’s nothing to be done.” He turned to Charlotte, watching from the doorway. “And you, Mrs Lawless, are you all right? Have you your pills?” She continued to look at Edward’s head sunk in the pillows. She nodded slowly, like a child. “Try and sleep now.” The doctor glanced, inexplicably sheepish, at Ottilie and me — good god, was he in love with Charlotte too? “He’ll be all right now. I’ll come back in the morning.”

Ottilie and I went with him to the door. The night came in, smelling of wet and the distant sea. “Can I drive you back?” I said.

Ottilie pushed past me out on the step. “I’ll do it.”

“He should be kept an eye on,” the doctor said, throwing me a parting scowl. “He’ll go down fast, after this.”

The gaseous light of dawn was filtering into the garden when she came back. I went outside to meet her. I had stood at the window watching for her, listening breathlessly for a sound from upstairs, afraid to leave, but fearful that she would return and find me indoors, trap me, make me drink tea and talk about the meaning of life. Even at that late stage I was still misjudging her. She came up the steps, hugging herself against the cold, and stopped, not looking at me, swinging the car key. I asked a question about the doctor, for something to say.

“Old fraud,” she said, distantly, frowning.

“Oh?”

We were wary as two strangers trapped by a downpour in a shop doorway. A seagull swaggered across the lawn, leaving green arrow-prints in the grey wet of the grass.

“Feeding her that stuff.”

She waited; my go.

“What stuff?” I felt like a straight-man.

“Valium, seconal, I don’t know, some dope like that. Six months she’s been on it. She’s like a zombie — didn’t you notice?” with a tiny flick of contempt.

“I wondered,” I said, “yes.”

Wonder is the word all right.

A blood-red glow was swelling among the trees. I felt — I don’t know. I was cold, and there was a taste of ashes in my mouth. Something had ended, with a vast soft crash.

“In northern countries they call this the wolf hour,” I said. A fact! Pity Charlotte was not there to hear me, learning the trick at last. “What is it he has?”

“Edward?” She looked at me then, with scorn, pityingly. “You really didn’t know,” she said, “all this time, did you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She only smiled, a kind of grimace, and looked away. Yes, a foolish question. I felt briefly like a child, pressing his face against the cold unyielding pane of adult knowingness. She was the grown-up. I shrugged, and went down the steps. The seagull flew away, scattering its mewling cries upon the air.

THERE’S not much left to tell. That same morning I packed as many of my belongings as I could carry and locked up the lodge. I left the key in an envelope pinned to the door. I thought of writing a note, but to whom would I have written, and what? I stood in the gateway, afraid Ottilie might see me, and come after me — I could not have borne it — taking a last brief view of the house, the sycamores, that broken fanlight they would never fix. Michael was about. He too had grown, already the lineaments of what he would someday be were discernible in the way he held himself, unbending, silent, inviolably private. He was no longer a Cupid. Not a golden bow and arrow, but a flaming sword would have suited him now. I waved to him tentatively, but he pretended not to see me. I set off down the road to the village. The sun was shining, but too bright; it would rain later. The leaves were turning. Farewell, happy fields!

A long low car came up the hill. I almost laughed: it was the Mittlers. Had Bunny turned her little nose twitching to the wind and caught a whiff of disaster? Maybe Charlotte had called them. What did I know? They passed me by with a toot on the deep-throated horn, gazing at me through the smoked glass, the four of them, like manikins. Bunny noted my bag. Before they were past she had turned to her husband, her mouth working avidly.

On the train I travelled into a mirror. There it all was, the backs of the houses, the drainpipes, a cloud out on the bay, just like the first time, only in reverse order. In the dining-car I met Mr Prunty: life will insist on tying up loose ends. He remembered my face, but not where he had seen it. “Ferns, was it,” he cried, “that’s it!” and jabbed a finger into my chest. I was pleased. He seemed somehow right: vivid yet inconsequential, and faintly absurd. He spoke of Edward in a whisper, shaking his head. “Has it in the gut, I believe, poor bugger — you knew that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I know.”

Two letters awaited me at the flat, one calling me to an interview in Cambridge, the other offering me the post here. The contract is for a year only. Was I crazy to come? My surroundings are congenial. There is nothing I could wish for, except, but no, nothing. Spring is a ferocious and faintly mad season in this part of the world. At night I can hear the ice unpacking in the bay, a groaning and a tremendous deep drumming, as if something vast were being born out there. And I have heard gatherings of wolves too, far off in the frozen wastes, howling like orchestras. The landscape, if it can be called that, has a peculiar bleached beauty, much to my present taste. Tiny flowers appear on the tundra, slender and pale as the souls of dead girls. And I have seen the auroras.

Ottilie writes every week. I catch myself listening for the postman panting up the stairs. She once told me, at Ferns, that when she was away from me she felt as if she were missing an arm — but now I seem weighed down by an extra limb, a large awkward thing, I don’t know what to do with it, where to put it, and it keeps me awake at night. She sent me a photograph. In it she is sitting on a fallen tree, in winter sunlight. Her gaze is steady, unsmiling, her hands rest on her knees; there is the line of a thigh that is inimitably hers. There is something here, in this pose, this gaze at once candid and tender, that when I was with her I missed; it is I think the sense of her essential otherness, made poignant and precious because she seems to be offering it into my keeping. She’s in Dublin now. She abandoned her plan to go to university, and is working in a shop. She feels her life is only starting .

Of all the mental photographs I have of her I choose one. A summer night, one of those white nights of July. We had been drinking, she got up to pee. The lavatory was not working, as so often, and she had brought in from the garage, to join her other treasures, an ornate china vessel which she quaintly called the jolly-pot. I watched her squat there in the gloaming, her elbows on her knees, one hand in her hair, her eyes closed, playing a tinkling chamber music. Still without opening her eyes she came stumbling back to bed, and kneeling kissed me, mumbling in my ear. Then she lay down again, her hair everywhere, and sighed and fell asleep, grinding her teeth faintly. It’s not much of a picture, is it? But she’s in it, ineradicably, and I treasure it.