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John Banville: The Newton Letter

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John Banville The Newton Letter

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A historian, trying to finish a long-overdue book on Isaac Newton, rent a cottage not far by train from Dublin for the summer. All he need, he thinks, is a few weeks of concentrated work. Why, he must unravel, did Newton break down in 1693? What possessed him to write that strange letter to his friend John Locke? But in the long seeping summer days, old sloth and present reality take over.

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Mostly of course such fears seemed ridiculous. There were even moments when the prospect of finishing the thing merged somehow with my new surroundings into a grand design. I recall one day when I was in, appropriately enough, the orchard. The sun was shining, the trees were in blossom. It would be a splendid book, fresh and clean as this bright scene before me. The academies would be stunned, you would be proud of me, and Cambridge would offer me a big job. I felt an extraordinary sense of purity, of tender innocence. Thus Newton himself must have stood one fine morning in his mother’s garden at Woolsthorpe, as the ripe apples dropped about his head. I turned, hearing a violent thrashing of small branches. Edward Lawless stepped sideways through a gap in the hedge, kicking a leg behind him to free a snagged trouser cuff. There was a leaf in his hair.

I had seen him about the place, but this was the first time we had met. His face was broad and pallid, his blue eyes close-set and restless. He was not a very big man, but he gave an impression of, how would I say, of volume. He had a thick short neck, and wide shoulders that rolled as he walked, as if he had constantly to deal with large soft obstacles in air. Standing beside him I could hear him breathing, like a man poised between one lumbering run and another. For all his rough bulk, though, there was in his eyes a look, preoccupied, faintly pained, like the look you see in those pearl and ink photographs of doomed Georgian poets. His flaxen hair, greying nicely at the temples, was a burnished helmet; I itched to reach out and remove the laurel leaf tangled in it. We stood together in the drenched grass, looking at the sky and trying to think of something to say. He commended the weather. He jingled change in his pocket. He coughed. There was a shout far off, and then from farther off an answering call. “Aha,” he said, relieved, “the rat men!” and plunged away through the gap in the hedge. A moment later his head appeared again, swinging above the grassy bank that bounded the orchard. Always I think of him like this, skulking behind hedges, or shambling across a far field, rueful and somehow angry, like a man with a hangover trying to remember last night’s crimes.

I walked back along the path under the apple trees and came out on the lawn, a cropped field really. Two figures in wellingtons and long black buttonless overcoats appeared around the side of the house. One had a long-handled brush over his shoulder, the other carried a red bucket. I stopped and watched them pass before me in the spring sunshine, and all at once I was assailed by an image of catastrophe, stricken things scurrying in circles, the riven pelts, the convulsions, the agonised eyes gazing into the empty sky or through the sky into the endlessness. I hurried off to the lodge, to my work. But the sense of harmony and purpose I had felt in the orchard was gone. I saw something move outside on the grass. I thought it was the blackbirds out foraging, for the lilacs were still. But it was a rat.

In fact, it wasn’t a rat. In fact in all my time at Ferns I never saw sign of a rat. It was only the idea.


Фото


The campus postman, an asthmatic Lapp, has just brought me a letter from Ottilie. Now I’m really found out. She says she got my address from you. Clio, Clio. . But I’m glad, I won’t deny it. Less in what she says than in the Lilliputian scrawl itself, aslant from corner to corner of the flimsy blue sheets, do I glimpse something of the real she, her unhandiness and impetuosity, her inviolable innocence. She wants me to lend her the fare to come and visit me! I can see us, staggering through the snowdrifts, ranting and weeping, embracing in our furs like lovelorn polar bears.

She came down to the lodge the day after I moved in, bringing me a bowl of brown eggs. She wore corduroy trousers and a shapeless homemade sweater. Her blonde hair was tied at the back with a rubber band. Pale eyebrows and pale blue eyes gave her a scrubbed look. With her hands thrust in her pockets she stood and smiled at me. Hers was the brave brightness of all big awkward girls.

“Grand eggs,” I said.

We considered them a moment in thoughtful silence.

“Charlotte rears them,” she said. “Hens, I mean.”

I went back to the box of books I had been unpacking. She hesitated, glancing about. The little square table by the window was strewn with my papers. Was I writing a book, or what? — as if such a thing were hardly defensible. I told her. “Newton,” she said, frowning. “The fellow that the apple fell on his head and he discovered gravity?”

She sat down.

She was twenty-four. Her father had been Charlotte Lawless’s brother. With his wife beside him one icy night when Ottilie was ten he had run his car into a wall—“that wall, see, down there”—and left the girl an orphan. She wanted to go to university. To study what? She shrugged. She just wanted to go to university. Her voice, incongruous coming out of that big frame, was light and vibrant as an oboe, a singer’s voice, and I pictured her, this large unlovely girl, standing in a preposterous gown before the tiered snowscape of an orchestra, her little fat hands clasped, pouring forth a storm of disconsolate song.

Where did I live in Dublin? Had I a flat? What was it like? “Why did you come down to this dump?” I told her, to finish my book, and then frowned at the papers curling gently in the sunlight on the table. Then I noticed how the sycamores were stirring faintly, almost surreptitiously in the bright air, like dancers practising steps in their heads, and something in me too pirouetted briefly, and yes, I said, yes, to finish my book. A shadow fell in the doorway. A tow-haired small boy stood there, with his hands at his back, watching us. His ancient gaze, out of a putto’s pale eyes, was unnerving. Ottilie sighed, and rose abruptly, and without another glance at me took the child’s hand and departed.


I WAS born down there, in the south, you knew that. The best memories I have of the place are of departures from it. I’m thinking of Christmas trips to Dublin when I was a child, boarding the train in the dark and watching through the mist of my breath on the window the frost-bound landscape assembling as the dawn came up. At a certain spot every time, I can see it still, day would at last achieve itself. The place was a river bend, where the train slowed down to cross a red metal bridge. Beyond the river a flat field ran to the edge of a wooded hill, and at the foot of the hill there was a house, not very big, solitary and square, with a steep roof. I would gaze at that silent house and wonder, in a hunger of curiosity, what lives were lived there. Who stacked that firewood, hung that holly wreath, left those tracks in the hoarfrost on the hill? I can’t express the odd aching pleasure of that moment. I knew, of course, that those hidden lives wouldn’t be much different from my own. But that was the point. It wasn’t the exotic I was after, but the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas.

Now I had another house to gaze at, and wonder about, with something of the same remote prurience. The lodge was like a sentry box. It stood, what, a hundred, two hundred yards from the house, yet I couldn’t look out my window without spotting some bit of business going on. The acoustics of the place too afforded an alarming intimacy. I could clearly hear the frequent cataclysms of the upstairs lavatory, and my day began with the pips for the morning news on the radio in Charlotte Lawless’s kitchen. Then I would see Charlotte herself, in wellingtons and an old cardigan, hauling out a bucket of feed to the henhouse. Next comes Ottilie, in a sleepy trance, with the child by the hand. He is off to school. He carries his satchel like a hunchback’s hump. Edward is last, I am at work before I spy him about his mysterious business. It all has the air of a pastoral mime, with the shepherd’s wife and the shepherd, and Cupid and the maid, and, scribbling within a crystal cave, myself, a haggard-eyed Damon.

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