[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter by John Banville Page B

the orchard. The sun was
shining, the trees were in blossom. It would be a splendid
book, fresh and clean as this bright scene before me.
The academies would be stunned, you would be proud
of me, and Cambridge would offer me a big job. I felt
an extraordinary sense of purity, of tender innocence.
Thus Newton himself must have stood one fine morning
in his mother’s garden at Woolsthorpe, as the ripe apples
dropped about his head. I turned, hearing a violent
thrashing of small branches. Edward Lawless stepped
sideways through a gap in the hedge, kicking a leg behind
him to free a snagged trouser cuff. There was a
leaf in his hair.
    I had seen him about the place, but this was the
first time we had met. His face was broad and pallid,
his blue eyes close-set and restless. He was not a very
big man, but he gave an impression of, how would I
say, of volume. He had a thick short neck, and wide
shoulders that rolled as he walked, as if he had constantly to deal with large soft obstacles in air. Standing beside
him I could hear him breathing, like a man poised between
one lumbering run and another. For all his rough
bulk, though, there was in his eyes a look, preoccupied,
faintly pained, like the look you see in those pearl and
ink photographs of doomed Georgian poets. His flaxen
hair, greying nicely at the temples, was a burnished
helmet; I itched to reach out and remove the laurel leaf
tangled in it. We stood together in the drenched grass,
looking at the sky and trying to think of something to
say. He commended the weather. He jingled change in
his pocket. He coughed. There was a shout far off, and
then from farther off an answering call. “Aha,” he said,
relieved, “the rat men!” and plunged away through the
gap in the hedge. A moment later his head appeared
again, swinging above the grassy bank that bounded the
orchard. Always I think of him like this, skulking behind
hedges, or shambling across a far field, rueful and somehow
angry, like a man with a hangover trying to remember
last night’s crimes.
    I walked back along the path under the apple trees
and came out on the lawn, a cropped field really. Two
figures in wellingtons and long black buttonless overcoats
appeared around the side of the house. One had a
long-handled brush over his shoulder, the other carried
a red bucket. I stopped and watched them pass before
me in the spring sunshine, and all at once I was assailed
by an image of catastrophe, stricken things scurrying in
circles, the riven pelts, the convulsions, the agonised eyes gazing into the empty sky or through the sky into
the endlessness. I hurried off to the lodge, to my work.
But the sense of harmony and purpose I had felt in the
orchard was gone. I saw something move outside on
the grass. I thought it was the blackbirds out foraging,
for the lilacs were still. But it was a rat.
    In fact, it wasn’t a rat. In fact in all my time at Ferns
I never saw sign of a rat. It was only the idea.

    The campus postman, an asthmatic Lapp, has just
brought me a letter from Ottilie. Now I’m really found
out. She says she got my address from you. Clio, Clio . . . But I’m glad, I won’t deny it. Less in what she says
than in the Lilliputian scrawl itself, aslant from corner
to corner of the flimsy blue sheets, do I glimpse something
of the real she, her unhandiness and impetuosity,
her inviolable innocence. She wants me to lend her the
fare to come and visit me! I can see us, staggering
through the snowdrifts, ranting and weeping, embracing
in our furs like lovelorn polar bears.
    She came down to the lodge the day after I moved
in, bringing me a bowl of brown eggs. She wore corduroy
trousers and a shapeless homemade sweater. Her
blonde hair was tied at the back with a rubber band.
Pale eyebrows and pale blue eyes gave her a scrubbed
look. With her hands thrust in her pockets she stood and smiled at me. Hers was the brave brightness of all
big awkward