John Banville: The Newton Letter

I think more than sex, maybe even more than love, she wanted company. She talked. Sometimes I suspected she had got into bed with me so that she could talk. She laid bare the scandals of the neighbourhood: did I know the man in Pierce’s pub was sleeping with his own daughter? She recounted her dreams in elaborate detail; I was never in them. Though she told me a lot about the family I learned little. The mass of names and hazy dates numbed me. It was all like the stories in a history book, vivid and forgettable at once. Her dead parents were a favourite topic. In her fantasy they were a kind of Scott and Zelda, beautiful and doomed, hair blown back and white silk scarves whipping in the wind as they sailed blithely, laughing, down the slipstream of disaster. All I could do in return was tell her about Newton, show off my arcane learning. I even tried reading aloud to her bits of that old Galileo article of mine — she fell asleep. Of course we didn’t speak much. Our affair was conducted through the intermediary of these neutral things, a story, a memory, a dream.

I wondered if the house knew what was going on. The thought was obscurely exciting. The Sunday high teas became an institution, and although I was never comfortable, I confess I enjoyed the sexual freemasonry with its secret signs, the glances and the covert smiles, the way Ottilie’s stare would meet and mingle with mine across the table, so intensely that it seemed there must grow up a hologram picture of a pair of tiny lovers cavorting among the tea things.

Our love-making at first was curiously innocent. Her generosity was a kind of desperate abasing before the altar of passion. She could have no privacy, wanted none, there was no part of her body that would hide from me. Such relentless giving was flattering to begin with, and then oppressive. I took her for granted, of course, except when, exhausted, or bored, she forgot about me. Then, playing the radio, brooding by the stove, sitting on the floor picking her nose with dreamy concentration, she would break away from me and be suddenly strange and incomprehensible, as sometimes a word, one’s own name even, will briefly detach itself from its meaning and become a hole in the mesh of the world. She had moments too of self-assertion. Something would catch her attention and she would push me away absentmindedly as if I were furniture, and gaze off, with a loony little smile, over the brow of the hill, toward the tiny music of the carnival that only she could hear. Without warning she would punch me in the chest, hard, and laugh. One day she asked me if I had ever taken drugs. “I’m looking forward to dying,” she said thoughtfully; “they give you that kind of morphine cocktail.”

I laughed. “Where did you hear that?”

“It’s what they give people dying of cancer.” She shrugged. “Everybody knows that.”

I suppose I puzzled her, too. I would open my eyes and find her staring into the misted mirror of our kisses as if watching a fascinating crime being committed. Her hands explored me with the stealthy care of a blind man. Once, gliding my lips across her belly, I glanced up and caught her gazing down with tears in her eyes. This passionate scrutiny was too much for me, I would feel something within me wrapping itself in its dirty cloak and turning furtively away. I had not contracted to be known as she was trying to know me.

And for the first time in my life I began to feel my age. It sounds silly, I know. But things had been happening to me, and to the world, before she was born. The years in my life of her non-being struck me as an extraordinary fact, a sort of bravura trick played on me by time. I, whose passion is the past, was discovering in her what the past means. And not just the past. Before our affair — the word makes me wince — before it had properly begun I was contemplating the end of it. You’ll laugh, but I used to picture my deathbed: a hot still night, the lamp flickering and one moth bumping the bulb, and I, a wizened infant, remembering with magical clarity as the breath fails this moment in this bedroom at twilight, the breeze from the window, the sycamores, her heart beating under mine, and that bird calling in the distance from a lost, Oh utterly lost land.

“If this is not love,” she said once in that dark voice of hers, for a moment suddenly a real grown-up, “Jesus if this isn't love then what is!”

The truth is, it seemed hardly anything — I hear her hurt laugh — until, with tact, with deference, but immovably, another, a secret sharer, came to join our somehow, always, melancholy grapplings.

MICHAEL’S birthday was at the end of July, and there was a party. His guests were a dozen of his classmates from the village school. They were all of a type, small famished-looking creatures, runts of the litter, the girls spindle-legged and pigtailed, the boys watchful under cruel haircuts, their pale necks defenceless as a rabbit’s. Why had he picked them, were they his only friends in that school? He was a blond giant among them. While Charlotte set the table in the drawing-room for their tea, Ottilie led them in party games, waving her arms and shouting, like a conductor wielding an insane orchestra. Michael hung back, stiff and sullen.

I had gone up to the house with a present for him. I was given a glass of tepid beer and left in the kitchen. Edward appeared, brandishing a hurley stick. “We’ve lost a couple of the little beggars, haven‘t seen them, have you? Always the same, they go off and hide, and start dreaming and forget to come out.” He loitered, eyeing my glass. “You hiding too, eh? Good idea. Here, have a decent drink.” He removed my beer to the sink and brought out tumblers and a bottle of whiskey. “There. Cheers. Ah.”

We stood, like a couple of timid trolls, listening to the party noises coming down the hall. He leaned on the hurley stick, admiring his drink. “How are you getting on at the lodge,” he said, “all right? The roof needs doing — damn chilly spot in the winter, I can tell you.” Playing the squire today. He glanced sideways at me. “But you won’t be here in the winter, will you.”

I shrugged; guess again, fella.

“Getting fond of us, are you?” he said, almost coyly.

Now it was my turn to exercise the sideways glance.

“Peace,” I said, “and quiet: that kind of thing.”

A cloud shifted, and the shadow of the chestnut tree surged toward us across the tiled floor. I had taken him from the start for a boozer and an idler, a lukewarm sinner not man enough to be a monster: could it be a mask, behind which crouched a subtle dissembler, smiling and plotting? Impossible. But I didn’t like that look in his eye today. Had Ottilie been telling secrets?

“I lived there one time, you know,” he said.

“What — in the lodge?”

“Years ago. I used to manage the nurseries, when Lotte’s father was alive.”

So: a fortune hunter, by god! I could have laughed.

He poured us another drink, and we wandered outside into the gravelled yard. The hot day hummed. Above the distant wood a hawk was hunting.

Lotte.

“Still doing this book of yours?” he said. “Used to write a bit of poetry, myself.” Ah, humankind! It will never run out of surprises. “Gave it up, of course, like everything else.” He brooded a moment, frowning, and the blue of the Dardanelles bloomed briefly in his doomy eyes. I watched the hawk circling. What did I know? Maybe at the back of a drawer somewhere there was a sheaf of poems that unleashed would ravish the world. A merry notion; I played with it. He went into the kitchen and fetched the bottle. “Here,” handing it to me, “you do the honours. I’m not supposed to drink this stuff at all.” I poured two generous measures. The first sign of incipient drunkenness is that you begin to hear yourself breathing. He was watching me; the blue of his eyes had become sullied. He had a way, perhaps because of that big too-heavy head, of seeming to loom over one. “You’re not married, are you?” he said. “Best thing. Women, some of them. . ” He winced, and thrust his glass into my hand, and going to the chestnut tree began unceremoniously to piss against the trunk, gripping that white lumpy thing in his flies with the finger and thumb of a delicately arched hand, as if it were a violin bow he held. He stowed it away and took up his hurley stick. “Women,” he said again; “what do you think of them?”