[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter by John Banville

 

    WORDS FAIL ME , Clio. How did you
track me down, did I leave bloodstains in the snow? I
won’t try to apologise. Instead, I want simply to explain,
so that we both might understand. Simply! I like that.
No, I’m not sick, I have not had a breakdown. I am,
you might say, I might say, in retirement from life.
Temporarily.
    I have abandoned my book. You’ll think me mad.
Seven years I gave to it—seven years! How can I make
you understand that such a project is now for me impossible,
when I don’t really understand it myself? Shall
I say, I’ve lost my faith in the primacy of text? Real
people keep getting in the way now, objects, landscapes
even. Everything ramifies. I think for example of the first time I went down to Ferns. From the train I looked
at the shy back-end of things, drainpipes and broken
windows, straggling gardens with their chorus lines of
laundry, a man bending to a spade. Out on Killiney bay
a white sail was tilted at an angle to the world, a white
cloud was slowly cruising the horizon. What has all this
to do with anything? Yet such remembered scraps seem
to me abounding in significance. They are at once commonplace
and unique, like clues at the scene of a crime.
But everything that day was still innocent as the blue
sky itself, so what do they prove? Perhaps just that: the
innocence of things, their non-complicity in our affairs.
All the same I’m convinced those drainpipes and that
cloud require me far more desperately than I do them.
You see my difficulty.
    I might have written to you last September, before
I fled, with some bland excuse. You would have understood,
certainly at least you would have sympathised.
But Clio, dear Cliona, you have been my teacher and
my friend, my inspiration, for too long, I couldn’t lie
to you. Which doesn’t mean I know what the truth is,
and how to tell it to you. I’m confused. I feel ridiculous
and melodramatic, and comically exposed. I have
shinned up to this high perch and can’t see how to get
down, and of the spectators below, some are embarrassed
and the rest are about to start laughing.
     

    I SHOULDN ’ T HAVE gone down
there. It was the name that attracted me. Fern House! I
expected—Oh, I expected all sorts of things. It turned
out to be a big gloomy pile with ivy and peeling walls
and a smashed fanlight over the door, the kind of place
where you picture a mad stepdaughter locked up in the
attic. There was an avenue of sycamores and then the
road falling away down the hill to the village. In the
distance I could see the smoke of the town, and beyond
that again a sliver of sea. I suppose, thinking about it,
that was much what I expected. To look at, anyway.
    Two women met me in the garden. One was large
and blonde, the other a tall girl with brown arms, wearing
a tattered straw sun hat. The blonde spoke: they had seen me coming. She pointed down the hill road. I assumed
she was the woman of the house, the girl in the
sun hat her sister perhaps. I pictured them, vigilantly
silent, watching me toiling toward them, and I felt for
some reason flattered. Then the girl took off her hat,
and she was not a girl, but a middle-aged woman. I had
got them nearly right, but the wrong way round. This
was Charlotte Lawless, and the big blonde girl was Ottilie,
her niece.
    The lodge, as they called it, stood on the roadside
at the end of the drive. Once there had been a wall and
a high pillared gate, but all that was long gone, the way
of other glories. The door screeched. A bedroom and a
parlour, a tiny squalid kitchen, a tinier bathroom. Ottilie
followed me amiably from room to room, her hands
stuck in the back pockets of her trousers. Mrs Lawless
waited in the front doorway. I opened the kitchen cupboard:
cracked mugs and mouse-shit. There was a train
back to town in an hour, I would make it if I hurried.
Mrs Lawless fingered the brim of her sun hat and considered
the sycamores. Of the three