[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter (5 page)

I didn’t like the way this was going, old boys together,
the booze and the blarney, the pissing into the
wind. In a minute we’d be swapping dirty stories. He
took back his drink, and stood and watched me, beetling
o’er his base. He had violence in him, he would never
let it out, but it was all the more unsettling that way,
clenched inside him like a fist.

“They’re here to stay, I suppose,” I said, and produced
a laugh that sounded like a stiff door opening. He
wasn’t listening.

“It’s not their fault,” he said, talking to himself.
“They have to live too, get what they can, fight, claw
their way. It’s not their fault if . . . ” He focused on me.
“Succubus! Know that word? It’s a grand word, I like
it.” To my horror he put an arm around my shoulder
and walked me off across the gravel into the field beyond
the chestnut tree. The hurley he still held dangled down
by my side. There were little tufts of vulpine fur on his
cheekbones and on the side of his neck behind his earlobe.
His breath was bad. “Did you see in the paper,”
he said, “that old woman who went to the Guards to
complain that the man next door was boring holes in
the wall and putting in gas to poison her? They gave
her a cup of tea and sent her home, and a week later she was found dead, holes in the bloody wall and the fellow
next door mad out of his mind, rubber tubes stuck in
the wall, a total lunatic.” He batted me gently with his
stick. “It goes to show, you should listen to people, eh?
What do you think?” He laughed. There was no humour
in it. Instead, a waft of woe came off him that made me
miss a step. What was he asking of me?—for he was
asking something. And then I noticed an odd fact. He
was hollow. I mean physically, he was, well, hollow.
Oh, he was built robustly enough, there was real flesh
under his tweeds, and bones, and balls, blood, the lot,
but inside I imagined just a greyish space with nothing
in it save that bit of anger, not a fist really, but just a
tensed configuration, like a three-dimensional diagram
of stress. Even on the surface too something was lacking,
an essential lustre. He seemed covered in a fine
fall of dust, like a stuffed bird in a bell jar. He had
not been like this when I came here. The discovery
was peculiarly gratifying. I had been a little afraid of
him before. We turned back to the house. The bottle,
half-empty, stood on the windowsill. I disengaged his
arm and filled us another shot. “There,” I said.
“Cheers. Ah.”

A station wagon, the back bristling with flushed
children, headed down the drive. At the gate it pulled
up with a shriek of brakes as a long sleek car swept in
from the road and without slowing advanced upon the
house. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Edward said: “The
Mittlers.” He retreated into the kitchen. The visitors were already at the front door, we heard their imperious
knock and then voices in the hall.

“I’ll be going,” I said.

“No you don’t.” He reached out a hand to grab
me, draining his glass at the same time. “Family, interesting,
come on, meet,” and with a hanged man’s grimace
thrust me before him down the hall.

They were in the drawing-room, a youngish
woman in grey and a fat man of fifty, and two pale little
girls, twins, with long blonde candle-curls and white
socks.

“This is Bunny,” Edward said, “my sister, and
Tom, Tom Mittler; Dolores, here, and Alice.”

One twin pointed a thumb at the other. “
She’s
Alice.”

Tom Mittler, fingering his cravat, nodded to me
and mumbled something, with a fat little laugh, and
then performed the curious trick of fading instantly on
the spot. His wife looked me up and down with cool
attention. Her skirt was severely cut, and the padded
shoulders of her jacket sloped upward, like a pair of trim
little wings. An impossible pillbox hat was pinned at an
angle to her tight yellow curls. It was hard to tell if her
outfit were the latest thing, but it gave her an antiquated
look that was oddly sinister. Her mouth was carefully
outlined with vermilion glaze, and looked as if a small
tropical insect had settled on her face. Her eyes were
blue, like Edward’s, but harder. “My name is Diana,”
she said. Edward laughed. She ignored him. “So you’re
the lodger?”

“I’m staying in the lodge, yes,” I said.

“Comfy there?” and that little red insect lifted its
wing-tips a fraction. She turned away. “Is there any chance
of a cup of tea, Charlotte? Or is it too much trouble?”

Charlotte, poised outside our little circle, suddenly
stirred herself. “Yes, yes, I’m sorry—”

“I’ll get it,” Ottilie said, and slouched out, making
a face at me as she went past.

Bunny looked around, bestowing her painted smile
on each of us in turn. “Well!” she said, “this is nice,” and
extracted from her hat its long steel pin. “But where’s
the birthday boy?”

“Hiding,” Edward murmured, and winked at me.

“Full of fun today,” his sister said. She looked at
the hurley stick still in his hand. “Are you coming from
a game, or going to one?”

He waggled the weapon at her playfully. “Game’s
just starting, old girl.”

“Haw!” Tom Mittler said, and vanished again instantly.

There was a small commotion as Ottilie brought
in the tea on a rickety trolley. Michael came after her,
solemnly bearing the teapot like a ciborium. At the sight
of him Bunny gave a little cry and the twins narrowed
their eyes and advanced; their father made a brief appearance
to hand him his present, a five-pound note in
a brown envelope. Bunny shrugged apologetically: “We
didn’t have time to shop. Ottilie, this is lovely. Cake
and all! Shall I be mother?” The visitors disposed themselves around the empty fireplace and ate with gusto,
while the tenants of the house hovered uncertainly, temporarily
dispossessed. Edward muttered something and
went out. Bunny watched the door closing behind him
and then turned eagerly to Charlotte. “How is he?” eyes
alight, dying to know, tell me tell me.

There was a moment’s silence.

“Oh,” Charlotte said, “not . . . I mean . . . all right,
you know.”

Bunny put down her cup and sat, a study in sorrow
and sympathy, shaking her head. “You poor thing; you
poor
thing.” She looked up at me. “I suppose you know
about . . . ?”

“
No
,” Charlotte said swiftly.

Bunny put a hand to her mouth. “Oops, sorry.”

Edward came back bearing the whiskey bottle.
“Here we are: now, who’s for a snort?” He paused,
catching something in the silence. Then he shrugged.
“Well I am,” he said, “for one. Tom: you? And I know
you
will.” He poured Mittler and me a measure each.
Tom Mittler said: “Thanky voo.” Edward lifted his
glass. “What will we drink to?”

“August the twenty-seventh,” Bunny said, quick
as a flash.

They turned blank looks on her. I remembered.

“Mountbatten?” I said. One of their dwindling
band of heroes, cruelly murdered. I was charmed: only
they
would dare to make a memorial of a drawing-room
tea party. “Terrible thing, terrible.”

I was soon disabused. She smiled her little smile at
me. “And don’t forget Warrenpoint: eighteen paras,
and
an earl, all on the one day.”

“Jesus, Bunny,” Edward said.

She was still looking at me, amused and glittering.
“Don’t mind him,” she said playfully, “he’s a West Brit,
self-made.
I
think we should name a street after it, like
the French do. The glorious twenty-seventh!”

I glanced at her husband, guzzling his tea. Someone
had said he was a solicitor. He had a good twenty years
on her. Feeling my eye on him he looked up, and
smoothed a freckled hand on his scant sandy hair and
said cheerfully: “She’s off?”

Bunny poured herself another cup of tea, smirking.

“It’s dead men you’re talking about,” Edward muttered,
with the sour weariness of one doing his duty by
an argument that he has long ago lost.

“There’s nothing wrong with this country,” Bunny
said, “that a lot more corpses like that won’t cure.” She
lifted her cup daintily. “Long live death! Is this your
own cake, Charlotte? Scrumptious.”

I realised, with the unnerving clarity that always
comes to me with the fifth drink, that if there were to
be a sixth I would be thoroughly drunk.

One of the twins suddenly yelped in pain.
“Mammy mammy he
pinched
me!”

Michael looked at us from under sullen eyebrows,
crouched on the carpet like a sprinter waiting for the off. Bunny laughed. “Well pinch him back!” The girl’s
face crumpled, oozing thick tears. Her sister watched
her with interest.

“Michael,” Edward rumbled, and showed him the
hurley stick. “Do you see this . . . ?”

Ottilie left to make more tea, and I followed her.
Outside the kitchen windows the chestnut tree murmured
softly in its green dreaming. The afternoon had
begun to wane.

“Quite a lady,” I said, “that Diana.”

Ottilie shrugged, watching the kettle. “Bitch,” she
said mildly. “She only comes here to . . . ”

“What?”

“Never mind. To gloat. You heard her with Charlotte:
you poor thing
.” She made a simpering face. “Make
you sick.”

The kettle, like a little lunatic bird, began to whistle
shrilly.

“He’s not that bad,” I said, “is he, Edward?”

She did not answer. We returned to the drawing-room.
A dreamy sort of silence had settled there. They
sat, staring at nothing, enchanted figures in a fairy tale.
Bunny glanced at us as we came in and a flicker of
interest lit her hard little eyes. She would be good at
ferreting out secrets. I moved away from Ottilie.

“You’re quite at home, I see,” Bunny said.

“People are kind,” I answered, and tried to laugh.
My legs were not working properly. Bunny lifted a
quizzical eyebrow. “That’s true,” she said. She was thinking. I lost interest in her. Edward knocked the
bottle against my glass. His face was ashen. His breath
hit me, a warm brown cloud. I looked at Charlotte, the
only dark among all these fair. She sat, back arched and
shoulders erect, slim arms extended across her lap, her
pale hands clasped, a gazelle. Poor thing. My heart wobbled.
The bruised light of late afternoon conjured other
days, their texture felt but they themselves unremembered.
I seemed about to weep. Edward cracked his
fingers and sat down to the scarred upright piano. He
played atrociously, swaying his shoulders and crooning.
Bunny tried to speak over the noise but no one listened.
Michael sat in the middle of the floor, playing sternly
with the toy car I had given him. I took Ottilie’s hands
in mine. She stared at me, beginning to laugh. We
danced, stately as a pair of tipsy duchesses, round and
round the faded carpet. Bunny fairly ogled us. His repertory
exhausted, Edward rose and led Charlotte protesting
to the piano. She fingered the keys in silence for
a moment and then began hesitantly to play. It was a
tiny delicate music, it seemed to come from a long way
off, from inside something, and I imagined a music box,
set in motion by a chance breeze, a slammed door,
launching into solitary song in its forgotten spot in the
corner of an attic. I stopped to watch her, the dark glossy
head, the pale neck, and those hands that now, instead
of Ottilie’s, seemed to be in mine. Light of evening, the
tall windows—Oh, a gazelle! Ottilie moved away from
me, and knelt beside Michael. The toy car had fallen over drunkenly on its side, whirring. He narrowed his
eyes. He had been trying all this time to break it. Edward
took up the mangled thing and examined it, turning it
in his thick fingers with a bleared brutish lentor. I looked
at the three of them, Ottilie, the child, the ashen-faced
man, and something stirred, an echo out of some old
brown painting. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They receded
slowly, slowly, as if drawn away on a piece of concealed
stage machinery. And then all faded, Bunny, her fat
husband, their brats, the chairs, the scattered cups, all,
until only Charlotte and I were left, in this moment at
the end of a past that now was utterly revised. I hiccupped
softly. On the piano lid there was an empty
glass, a paper party hat, a browning apple core. These
are the things we remember. And I remember also, with
Ottilie that night moaning in my arms, feeling for the
first time the presence of another, and I heard that tiny
music again, and shivered at the ghostly touch of pale
fingers on my face.

“What’s wrong,” Ottilie said, “what is it?”

“Nothing,” I answered, “nothing, nothing.”

For how should I tell her that she was no longer
the woman I was holding in my arms?

Next morning along with the hangover came inevitably
the slow burn of alarm. Had I said anything, let slip
some elaborate gesture? Had I made a fool of myself? I recalled Bunny smirking, the tip of her little nose
twitching, but that had been when I was still with
Ottilie. Even so sharp an eye surely would not have
spotted my solitary brief debauch by the piano? And
later, in the dark, there had been no one to see me,
save Ottilie, and she did not see things like that. Like
what? In every drunkenness there comes that moment
of madness and euphoria when all our accumulated
knowledge of life and the world and ourselves seems
a laughable misapprehension, and we realise suddenly
that we are a genius, or fatally ill, or in love. The fact
is obvious, simple, beyond doubt: why have we not
seen it before? Then we sober up and everything evaporates,
and we are again what we are, a frail, feckless,
ridiculous figure with a headache. But in vain I lay in
bed that morning waiting for reality to readjust itself.
The fact would not go away: I was in love with Charlotte
Lawless.