[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (9 page)

I listened to them fighting all evening long, doors slamming,
the radio switched full on and as suddenly silenced,
and Edward shouting between pauses in which
I pictured Charlotte in tears, her face a rain-washed
flower lifted imploringly to his. More than once I started
to go up to the house, with some wild idea of calling
him out, and then subsided helplessly, fists like caricatures
clenched before me. The rain stopped, and late
sunlight briefly filled the garden, and through the
drenched evening an incongruous blackbird began to
sing. I felt vaguely ill. A knot of nerves seethed in my
stomach. At last I heard the front door bang, and the
car bumped down the drive and sped towards town. I
drank a glass of brandy and put myself to bed. I was
still awake when there came a knock at the door. I leapt
up. But it was only Ottilie. She smiled in mock timidity.
“Am I allowed to come in?” I said nothing, and poured
her a brandy. She watched me, still smiling, and biting
her lip. “Listen I’m sorry,” she said, “about the other
day. It was a stupid—”

“Forget it. I’m sorry I hit you. There. Cheers.” I
sat on the sofa, pressing the glass to my still heaving stomach. I nodded in the direction of the house. “Fireworks.”

“He’s drunk,” she said. She was wandering about
aimlessly, looking at things, her hands thrust in her
pockets. “I had to get out. She’s just sitting there, doped
to the gills, doing the martyr as usual. It’s hard to have
sympathy all the time . . .” She looked at me: “You
know?”

The light was fading fast. She switched on a lamp,
but the bulb blew out immediately, fizzing. “Jesus,” she
said wearily. She sat down at the table and thrust a hand
into her hair.

“What’s going on,” I said, “are they going to sell
the place?”

“They’ll have to, I suppose. They’re not too happy
with old Prunty. He’ll get it, though, he’s rotten with
money.”

“What will you do, then?”

“I don’t know.” She chuckled, and said, in what
she called her gin-and-fog voice: “Why don’t you make
me an offer?—Oh don’t look so frightened, I’m joking.”
She rose and wandered into the bedroom. I could hear
the soft slitherings as she undressed. I went and stood
in the doorway. She was already in bed, sitting up and
staring before her in the lamplight, her hands clasped
on the blanket, like an effigy. She turned her face to me.
“Well?” Why was it that when she took off her clothes,
her face always looked more naked than the rest of her?

“He’s not much of a salesman,” I said.

“Edward? He was different, before.”

“Before what?”

She continued to gaze at me. I suppose I looked a
little strange, eyes slitted, jaw stuck out; suspicion, anger,
jealousy—jealousy!—itches I could not get at to
scratch. She said: “Why are you so interested, all of a
sudden?”

“I wondered what you thought of him. You never
mention him.”

“What do you want me to say? He’s sad, now.”

I got into bed beside her. That blackbird was still
singing, in the dark, pouring out its heedless heart. “I’ll
be leaving,” I said. She was quite still. I cleared my
throat. “I said, I’ll be leaving.”

She nodded. “When?”

“Soon. Tomorrow, the weekend, I don’t know.”
I was thinking of Charlotte. Leaving: it was unreal.

“That’s that, then.” Her face was a tear-stained
blur. I took her in my arms. She was hot and damp, as
if every pore were a tiny tear-duct. “I want to tell you,”
she said, after a time, “when you hit me that day and
walked out, I lay in their bed for ages making love to
myself and crying. I kept thinking you’d come back,
say you were sorry, get a cold cloth for my face. Stupid.”

I said: “Who is Michael’s father?”

She showed no surprise. She even laughed: was that
all I could say? “A fellow that used to work here,” she
said.

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What became of him?”

“He went away. So did the girl. And Charlotte
adopted the child. She couldn’t have any, herself.”

No.
No
.

“You’re lying.”

But she wasn’t really listening, her ear was turned
to the steady trickle of misery that had started up inside
her. She laid her forehead against my cheek. “You
know,” she said, “sometimes I think you don’t exist at
all, that you’re just a voice, a name—no, not even that,
just the voice, going on. Oh god. Oh no,” furious with
herself, yet powerless to stop the great wet sobs that
began to shake her, “Oh
no
,” and wailing she came apart
completely in my arms, grinding her face against mine,
her shoulders heaving. I was aghast, I was—no, simply
say, I was surprised, that’s worst of all. Behind her,
darkness stood at the window, silent, gently inquisitive.
She drew herself away from me, her face averted. “I’m
sorry,” she said, gasping, “I’m sorry, but I’ve never
given myself like this to anyone before, and it’s hard,”
and the sobs shook her, “it’s
hard.
”

“There there,” I said, like a fool, helplessly, “there
there.” I felt like one who has carelessly let something
drop, who realises too late, with the pieces smashed all
around him, how precious a thing it was, after all. A
flash of lightning lit the window, and the rain started
up again with a soft whoosh. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. The tears still flowed, as if there
would be no end, but she was no longer aware of them.
“I suppose you’re sick and tired of me,” she said, and
lay down, and turned on her side, and was suddenly
asleep, leaving me alone to nurse my shock and my cold
heart.

WE MUST
assume that Edward did go that night
into town, and not to the village, as was later to be
suggested. The evidence against the latter possibility is
twofold. First, there was the direction in which I had
heard him drive away. Had he been headed for the village,
the sound of the car would have faded quickly as
it dropped below the brow of the hill; instead of which,
it was audible for a considerable time, a fact consistent
with the motor travelling westward, along the main
road, the slope of which is much less pronounced than
that of the hill road, leading to the village. Second, there
is the quite considerable amount of drink which, it
would later be obvious, he had consumed. At that stage
the publicans of the village, both in the hotel, and in the public houses with which the place is generously endowed,
knew better than to serve him the endless double
whiskeys which he would demand.

However, his going to town—to coin a phrase—will not account for the considerable lapse of time between
closing time (11:30 p.m., summer hours) and his
return to Ferns at approximately 2:30 a.m. As to what
occurred in those “lost” hours, we can only speculate.
Did he meet a friend (did he
have
any friends?) to whose
house they might have repaired? The town does not
boast a bawdy-house,
^*
therefore that possibility can be
eliminated. The quayfront then, the parked car, its lights
aglow, the radio humming forlornly to itself, and from
within the darkened windscreen the stark suicidal stare?
Could he have sat there, alone, for some three hours?
Perhaps he slept. One would wish him that blessing.

I can’t go on. I’m not a historian anymore.

The first thing I noticed when I woke was that
Ottilie was gone. The bed was warm, the pillow still
damp from her tears. Then I heard the car, labouring
up the drive in first gear. I must have dropped back to
sleep for a moment, the voices raised in the distance
seemed part of a dream. Then I opened my eyes and lay
listening in the darkness, my heart pounding. The silence
had the quality of disaster: it was less a silence than
an aftermath. I went to the window. Lights were coming
on in the house, one after another, as if someone were running dementedly from switch to switch. I pulled on
trousers and a sweater. The night was pitch-black and
still, smelling of laurel and sodden earth. The grass tickled
my bare ankles. The car was slewed across the drive, like a damaged animal, its engine running. The front
door of the house stood open. There was no one to be
seen.

I found Edward in the drawing-room. He was sitting
unconscious on the floor with his back against the
couch, his head lolling on a cushion, his hands resting
palm upward at his sides. A mandala of blood-streaked
vomit was splashed on the carpet between his splayed
legs. The crotch of his trousers was stained where he
had soiled himself. I stood and gaped at him, disgust
and triumph jostling in me for position. Triumph, oh
yes. Suddenly, through opposing doors, Charlotte and
Ottilie swept in, like mechanical figures in a clock tower.
They saw me and stopped. “I heard voices,” I said.
Charlotte blinked. She wore an old plaid dressing-gown.
Her feet were bare. Less Cranach now than El
Greco. We were quite still, all three, and then everyone
began to speak at once.

“I couldn’t get through,” Ottilie said.

Charlotte put a hand to her forehead. “What?”

“There was no reply.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll have to—”

“Did you ring the right—”

“What?”

In the hall a hand appeared on the stairs, a small
bare foot, an eye.

“I’ll have to go into town,” Ottilie said. “Christ.”
She looked at me. Her face was still raw from weeping.
I turned away. I turned away. “Get back to bed, you!”
she cried, and the figure on the stairs vanished. She went
out, slamming the door, and in a moment we heard the
car depart. Gravel from the spinning tyres sprayed the
window.
That wall, see, down there
. Charlotte sighed.
“She’s gone for . . .” She thought a moment, frowning;
“. . . for the doctor.” She walked about the room as in
a dream, picking up things, holding them for a moment,
as if to verify something, and then putting them down
again. Edward belched, or perhaps it was a groan. She
paused, and stood motionless, listening; she did not look
at him. Then she went to the switch by the door and
carefully, as if it were an immensely complicated and
necessary operation, turned off the main lights. A lamp
on a low table by the couch was still burning. She
crossed the room and sat down on a high-backed chair,
facing the window. It all had the look of a ritual she had
performed many times before. Something, the lamplight
perhaps, the curious toylike look of things, the
helpless gestures meticulously performed, stirred an ancient
memory in me of another room, where, a small
boy, I had played with two girl cousins while above our
heads adult footsteps came and went, pacing out the
ceremony of someone’s dying.

“Is it raining, I wonder,” Charlotte murmured. I think she had forgotten I was there. I went forward
softly and stood behind her. In the black window her
face was reflected. I looked down at the pale defenceless
parting of her hair; in the opening of her dressing-gown
I could see the gentle slope of a breast. How can I describe
to you that moment, in lamplight, at dead of
night, the smell of vomit mingled with the milky perfume
of her hair, and that gross thing sitting there, grotesque
and comic, like a murdered pavement artist, and
no world around us anymore, only the vast darkness,
stretching away. Everything was possible, everything
was allowed, as in a mad dream. I could feel her warmth
against my thighs. I looked at her reflection in the glass;
my face must be there too, for her.

“Mrs Lawless,” I said, “this can’t go on, you can’t
be expected to put up with this.” My voice was thick,
a kind of fat whine. Tell her something, tell her a fact,
a fragment from the big world, a coloured stone, a bit
of clouded green glass. Young men of the Ipo tribe in
the Amazon basin pledge themselves with the nail parings
of their ancestors. Oh god. The first little flames
of panic were nibbling at me. “Listen,” I said, “listen
I’ll give you my address, my phone number, so that if
ever you want . . . if ever you need . . .” I put my hands
on her shoulders, and a hot shock zipped along my
nerves, as if it were not cloth, flesh and bone I were
holding, but the terminals of her very being, and “Charlotte,”
I whispered, “Oh Charlotte!” and there was a
lump thick as a heart in my throat, and tears in my eyes, and the Ipo drums began to beat, and all over the rain
forest lurid birds with yellow beaks and little bright
black eyes were screeching.

She stirred, and turned up her face to me, blinking. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I wasn’t listening. What did you
say?”

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?”