John Banville: The Newton Letter

It had needed no candle flame, it was already ashes. Why else had he turned to deciphering Genesis and dabbling in alchemy? Why else did he insist again and again that science had cost him too dearly, that, given his life to live over, he would have nothing to do with physics? It wasn’t modesty, no one could accuse him of that. The fire, or whatever the real conflagration was, had shown him something terrible and lovely, like flame itself. Nothing . The word reverberates. He broods on it as on some magic emblem whose other face is not to be seen and yet is emphatically there. For the nothing automatically signifies the everything. He does not know what to do, what to think. He no longer knows how to live.

There was no fiery revelation to account for my crisis of faith; there was not even what could properly be called a crisis. Only, I wasn’t working now. The month of June went by and I had not put pen to paper. But I was no longer worried — just the opposite. It was like the passing away of a stubborn illness. You don’t notice the gradual calming of the blood, the cleared head, the limbs’ new strength, you are aware only of waiting quietly, confidently, for life to start up again. You won’t believe me, I know: how could I drop seven years of work, just like that? Newton was my life, not these dull pale people in their tumbledown house in the hollow heart of the country. But I didn’t see it as this stark alternative: things take a definite and simple shape only in retrospect. At the time I had only a sense of lateral drift. My papers lay untouched on the table by the window, turning yellow in the sunlight, when my eye fell on them I felt impatience and a vague resentment; my real attention was elsewhere, suspended, ready to give itself with a glad cry to what was coming next.

What came was unexpected.

Consider: a day in June, birds, breezes, flying clouds, the smell of approaching rain. Lunchtime. In the kitchen the stove squats in a hot sulk after its labours, the air is dense with the smoke of burnt fat. A knock. I drag open the door, cursing silently. Ottilie is standing outside with the child unconscious in her arms.

He had fallen out of a tree. A cut on his forehead was bleeding. I took him from her. He was heavier than I expected, and limp as death, it seemed he might pour through my fingers into a pale puddle on the floor. I felt fright, and a curious faint disgust. I put him on an old horsehair sofa and he coughed and opened his eyes. At first there was only the whites, then the pupils slid down, like something awful coming down in a lift. His face was translucent marble, with violet shadows under the eyes. A large bruise was growing on his forehead; the blood had thickened to a kind of jelly. He struggled up. Ottilie sat back on her heels and sighed: “Faugh!”

I took him in my arms again and carried him to the house. We must have looked like an illustration from a Victorian novelette, marching forward across the swallow-swept lawn: had Ottilie her hands clasped to her breast? Michael turned his face resolutely away from me. On the steps he wriggled and made me put him down. Charlotte opened the door — and for a moment seemed about to step back hurriedly and shut it again. Ottilie said: “Oh he’s all right,” and glared at the child. I left them. My lunch had congealed into its own fat.

An hour later Ottilie came to the lodge again. Yes, yes, he was fine, nothing broken, the little brat. She apologised for bringing him to me: mine had been the nearest door. “I’m glad,” I said, not knowing quite what I meant. She shrugged. She had put on lipstick. “I got a fright,” she said. We stood awkwardly, looking at things, like people on a railway platform trying to think of how to say a definitive goodbye. The sunlight died in the window and it began to rain. A kind of bubble swelled suddenly in my breast and I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her. There was a fleck of dried blood on my wrist. Her lipstick tasted like something from childhood, plasticine, or penny sweets. When I stepped back she simply stood frowning, and moving her lips, as if trying to identify a mysteriously familiar taste.

“I think he dislikes me,” I said.

“What? No. He was embarrassed.”

“Do children get embarrassed?”

“Oh yes,” she said softly, and looked at me at last, “Oh yes.”

It’s strange to be offered, without conditions, a body you don’t really want. You feel the most unexpected things, tenderness of course, but impatience too, curiosity, a little contempt, and something else the only name for which I can find is sadness. When she took off her clothes it was as if she were not merely undressing, but performing a far more complex operation, turning herself inside out maybe, to display not breast and bum and blonde lap, but her very innards, the fragile lungs, mauve nest of intestines, the gleaming ivory of bone, and her heart, passionately labouring. I took her in my arms and felt the soft shock of being suddenly, utterly inhabited.

I was not prepared for her gentleness. At first it seemed almost a rebuff. We were so quiet I could hear the rain’s whispered exclamations at the window. In the city of the flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

We lay, damp and chill as stranded fish, until her fingers at the back of my neck gave three brisk taps and she sat up. I turned on my side and gazed in a kind of fond stupor at the two folds of flesh above her hip bone. She put on her trousers and her lumpy sweater and padded into the kitchen to make tea. Our stain on the sheet was the shape of a turtle. Grey gloom settled on my heart. I was dressed when she came back. We sat on the bed, in our own faintly ammoniac smell, and drank the strong tea from cracked mugs. The day darkened, the rain was settling in.

“I suppose you think I’m a right whore,” she said.

It was contingency from the start, and it stayed that way. Oh, no doubt I could work up a map of our separate journeys to that bed. There would be a little stylised tree on it and a tumbling Cupid, and an X in crimson ink marking a bloodstain, and pretty slanted blue lines indicating rain. But it would be misleading, it would look like the cartography of love. What can I say? I won’t deny her baroque blonde splendour touched me. I remember her hands on my neck, the violet depths of her eyes, her unexpectedly delicate pale feet, and her cries, the sudden panic of her coming, when she would clutch me to her, wet teeth bared and her eyelids fluttering, like one falling helplessly in a dream. But love?

She burrowed into my life at the lodge with stealthy determination. She brought prints clipped from glossy magazines and pinned them over the bed, film stars, Kneller’s portrait of Newton, the Primavera . Flowers began to sprout around me in jam jars and tin cans. A new teapot appeared, and two cups, of fine bone china, each with an identical crack. One day she arrived lugging an ancient radio that she had salvaged from the garage. She played with it for hours, gliding across the stations, mouth a little open, eyes fixed on nothing, while Hungarian disc jockeys or Scots trawlermen gabbled in her ear, and the day waned, and the little green light on the tuning panel advanced steadily into the encroaching darkness.