John Banville: The Newton Letter

Dinner was in the big whitewashed kitchen at the back of the house. I had expected a gaunt dining-room, linen napkins with a faded initial, a bit of old silver negligently laid. And it was hardly dinner, more a high tea, with cold cuts and limp lettuce, and a bottle of salad cream the colour of gruel. The tablecloth was plastic. Charlotte and Ottilie were already halfway through their meal. Charlotte looked in silence for a moment at my midriff, and I knew at once I shouldn’t have come. Ottilie set a place for me. The barred window looked out on a vegetable garden, and then a field, and then the blue haze of distant woods. Sunlight through the leaves of a chestnut tree in the yard was a ceaseless shift and flicker in the corner of my eye. Edward began to tell a yarn he had heard in the village, but got muddled, and sat staring blearily at his plate, breathing. Someone coughed. Ottilie pursed her lips and began to whistle silently. Charlotte with an abrupt spastic movement turned to me and in a loud voice said:

“Do you think we’ll give up neutrality?”

“Give up. .?” The topic was in the papers. “Well, I don’t know, I—”

“Yes, tell us now,” Edward said, suddenly stirring himself and thrusting his great bull head at me, “tell us what you think, I’m very interested, we’re all very interested, aren’t we all very interested? A man like you would know all about these things.”

“I think we’d be very—”

“Down here of course we haven’t a clue. Crowd of bog-trotters!” He grinned, snorting softly and pawing the turf.

“I think we’d be very unwise to give it up,” I said.

“And what about that power station they want to put up down there at Carnsore? Bloody bomb, blow us all up, some clown with a hangover press the wrong button, we won’t need the Russians. What?” He was looking at Charlotte. She had not spoken. “Well what’s wrong with being ordinary,” he said, “like any other country, having an army and defending ourselves? Tell me what’s wrong with that.” He pouted at us, a big resentful baby.

“What about Switzerland?” Ottilie said; she giggled.

“Switzerland? Switzerland? Ha. Milkmen and chocolate factories, and, what was it the fellow said, cuckoo clocks.” He turned his red-rimmed gaze on me again. “Too many damn neutrals,” he said darkly.

Charlotte sighed, and looked up from her plate at last.

“Edward,” she said, without emphasis. He did not take his eyes off me, but the light went out in his face, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him. “Not that I give a damn anyway,” he muttered, and meekly took up his spoon. So much for current affairs.

I cursed myself for being there, and yet I was agog. A trapdoor had been lifted briefly on dim thrashing forms, and now it was shut again. I watched Edward covertly. The sot. He had brought me here for an alibi for his drinking, or to forestall recriminations. I saw the whole thing now, of course: he was a waster, Charlotte kept the place going, everything had been a mistake, even the child. It all fitted, the rueful look and the glazed eye, the skulking, the silences, the tension, that sense I had been aware of from the beginning of being among people facing away from me, intent on something I couldn’t see. Even the child’s air of sullen autonomy was explained. I looked at Charlotte’s fine head, her slender neck, that hand resting by her plate. Leaf-shadow stirred on the table like the shimmer of tears. How could I let her know that I understood everything? The child came in, wrapped in a white bath-towel. His hair was wet, plastered darkly on his skull. When he saw me he drew back, then stepped forward, frowning, a robed and kiss-curled miniature Caesar. Charlotte held out her hand and he went to her. Ottilie winked at him. Edward wore a crooked leer, as if a smile aimed at the centre of his face had landed just wide of the target. Michael mumbled goodnight and departed, shutting the door with both hands on the knob. I turned to Charlotte eagerly. “Your son,” I said, in a voice that fairly throbbed, “your son is very. . ” and then floundered, hearing I suppose the tiny tinkle of a warning bell. There was a silence. Charlotte blushed. Suddenly I felt depressed, and. . prissy, that’s the word. What did I know, that gave me the right to judge them? I shouldn’t be here at all. I ate a leaf of lettuce, at my back that great rooted blossomer, before me the insistent enigma of other people. I would stay out of their way, keep to the lodge — return to Dublin even. But I knew I wouldn’t. Some large lesson seemed laid out here for me.

Ottilie came with me out on the step. She said nothing, but smiled, at once amused and apologetic. And then, I don’t know why, the idea came to me. Michael wasn’t their child: he was, of course, hers.

THANKS for the latest Popov, it arrived today. Very sly you are, Cliona — but a library of Popovs would not goad me into publishing. I met him once, an awful little man with ferret eyes and a greasy suit. Reminded me of an embalmer. Which, come to think of it, is apt. I like his disclaimer: Before the phenomenon of Isaac Newton, the historian, like Freud when he came to contemplate Leonardo, can only shake his head and retire with as much good grace as he can muster . Then out come the syringe and the formalin. That is what I was doing too, embalming old N.’s big corpse, only I did have the grace to pop off before the deathshead grin was properly fixed.

Newton was the greatest genius that science has produced . Well, who would deny it? He was still in his twenties when he cracked the code of the world’s working. Single-handed he invented science: before him it had all been wizardry and sweaty dreams and brilliant blundering. You may say, as Newton himself said, that he saw so far I because he had the shoulders of giants to stand on: but you might as well say that without his mother and father he would not have been born, which is true all right, but what does it signify? Anyway, when he defined the gravity laws he swept away that whole world of giants and other hobgoblins. Oh yes, you can see, can’t you, the outline of what my book would have been, a celebration of action, of the scientist as hero, a gleeful acceptance of Pandora’s fearful disclosures, wishy-washy medievalism kicked out and the age of reason restored. But would you believe that all this, this Popovian Newton-as-the-greatest-scientist-the-world-has-known, now makes me feel slightly sick? Not that I think any of it untrue, in the sense that it is fact. It’s just that another kind of truth has come to seem to me more urgent, although, for the mind, it is nothing compared to the lofty verities of science.

Newton himself, I believe, saw something of the matter in that strange summer of 1693. You know the story, of how his little dog Diamond overturned a candle in his rooms at Cambridge one early morning, and started a fire which destroyed a bundle of his papers, and how the loss deranged his mind. All rubbish, of course, even the dog is a fiction, yet I find myself imagining him, a fifty-year-old public man, standing aghast in the midst of the smoke and the flying smuts with the singed pug pressed in his arms. The joke is, it’s not the loss of the precious papers that will drive him temporarily crazy, but the simple fact that it doesn’t matter . It might be his life’s work gone, the Principia itself, the Opticks , the whole bang lot, and still it wouldn’t mean a thing. Tears spring from his eyes, the dog licks them off his chin. A colleague comes running, shirt-tails out. The great man is pulled into the corridor, white with shock and stumping like a peg-leg. Someone beats out the flames. Someone else asks what has been lost. Newton’s mouth opens and a word like a stone falls out: Nothing . He notices details, early morning light through a window, his rescuer’s one unshod foot and yellow toenails, the velvet blackness of burnt paper. He smiles. His fellows look at one another.