table, the sun had long since disappeared behind the hills. Edward realized then that he had not been able to say the one thing that had struck him as important, the very reason he’d spoken up: both of Mary’s absences were not for her sisters’ weddings but for their funerals.
The Love boys’ private tutor was a thin, melancholy, feverish young man who spent his days writing fiery missives to the woman who had left him for a young man who was not just rich but – supreme outrage – horribly handsome. For the most part then, Edward and his brothers were left to themselves, their teacher content to set before them volumes from the manor’s library or his own collection, paper, and pens, and to give them someperfunctory instructions. After that, with his bulging forehead resting on his fine and trembling fingers, he began to search for an adjective to rhyme with
cruel
.
Thus Edward learned Greek and Latin almost on his own, deciphering the original text of the
Iliad
side by side with the Latin version by Lorenzo Valla and the English translation made by William Cowper. Later, he took a certain pleasure in the plays of Seneca until the day his brother Philip informed him that nothing in those works had really occurred.
Accustomed to finding in books a kind of harmony that too often the world seemed to lack, Edward first thought that his brother was joking. Going back to his reading however, he couldn’t drive doubt from his mind. What if Achilles and Ulysses had never existed? If Phaedra and Hippolytus were merely chimeras?
“Sir?” he asked faintly.
The slender, pale young man, surprised, lifted his eyes from the page he’d been hunched over all morning.
“What is it, Edward?”
“Sir,
Phaedra
is true though, isn’t it?”
A blush coloured the tutor’s cheeks. He imagined for an instant the fascinating and fertile discussions he’d dreamed of when accepting the position – Oh, how his life had changed since then! Oh, the cruelty! – on the nature of truth and lies and about the uneasy positionbetween them occupied by literature, even Greek literature. That thought was driven away at once, however, by the image of his beloved in another man’s arms, and he gave up on exploring the subject more deeply for the benefit of the young pupil staring at him, round eyes filled with worried expectation, while his older brother, sitting a little farther away, was having a quiet laugh.
“No, Edward, it’s not true,” he replied bluntly.
“But …” the boy started to say.
“It’s not true,” the teacher hammered out his words. “I’ll have you know that just because words are said or even written, it doesn’t mean they’re true.” Then, in a tone of voice he’d have used to reprimand a particularly insolent pupil: “Let that be a lesson to you, young man.” Then he began to search for an adjective that rhymed with
treacherous
.
Edward, sheepish, closed Seneca and never opened it again. As of that day he limited himself to books of algebra, arithmetic, and trigonometry, which he was certain could not lie to him.
Edward was awkward and ill-at-ease around other children and adults: the latter regarded him with the brief and superficial attention paid to a phenomenon such as a potato that resembled a human face, or a strongman on display at a fair, the former banned him systematicallyfrom their games with the visceral instinct peculiar to all young animals that allows them immediately to distinguish the one in a crowd who is different from the others. He was, however, absolutely at home in the land of mathematics. The quiet purity of numbers, their reassuring predictability, their sensible and sober elegance combined with the infinite possibilities they gradually revealed – like a horizon line that seems very close but moves away when one approaches it – everything that formed the very essence of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic occupied and kept his mind alive, offering him at once a
The Love boys’ private tutor was a thin, melancholy, feverish young man who spent his days writing fiery missives to the woman who had left him for a young man who was not just rich but – supreme outrage – horribly handsome. For the most part then, Edward and his brothers were left to themselves, their teacher content to set before them volumes from the manor’s library or his own collection, paper, and pens, and to give them someperfunctory instructions. After that, with his bulging forehead resting on his fine and trembling fingers, he began to search for an adjective to rhyme with
cruel
.
Thus Edward learned Greek and Latin almost on his own, deciphering the original text of the
Iliad
side by side with the Latin version by Lorenzo Valla and the English translation made by William Cowper. Later, he took a certain pleasure in the plays of Seneca until the day his brother Philip informed him that nothing in those works had really occurred.
Accustomed to finding in books a kind of harmony that too often the world seemed to lack, Edward first thought that his brother was joking. Going back to his reading however, he couldn’t drive doubt from his mind. What if Achilles and Ulysses had never existed? If Phaedra and Hippolytus were merely chimeras?
“Sir?” he asked faintly.
The slender, pale young man, surprised, lifted his eyes from the page he’d been hunched over all morning.
“What is it, Edward?”
“Sir,
Phaedra
is true though, isn’t it?”
A blush coloured the tutor’s cheeks. He imagined for an instant the fascinating and fertile discussions he’d dreamed of when accepting the position – Oh, how his life had changed since then! Oh, the cruelty! – on the nature of truth and lies and about the uneasy positionbetween them occupied by literature, even Greek literature. That thought was driven away at once, however, by the image of his beloved in another man’s arms, and he gave up on exploring the subject more deeply for the benefit of the young pupil staring at him, round eyes filled with worried expectation, while his older brother, sitting a little farther away, was having a quiet laugh.
“No, Edward, it’s not true,” he replied bluntly.
“But …” the boy started to say.
“It’s not true,” the teacher hammered out his words. “I’ll have you know that just because words are said or even written, it doesn’t mean they’re true.” Then, in a tone of voice he’d have used to reprimand a particularly insolent pupil: “Let that be a lesson to you, young man.” Then he began to search for an adjective that rhymed with
treacherous
.
Edward, sheepish, closed Seneca and never opened it again. As of that day he limited himself to books of algebra, arithmetic, and trigonometry, which he was certain could not lie to him.
Edward was awkward and ill-at-ease around other children and adults: the latter regarded him with the brief and superficial attention paid to a phenomenon such as a potato that resembled a human face, or a strongman on display at a fair, the former banned him systematicallyfrom their games with the visceral instinct peculiar to all young animals that allows them immediately to distinguish the one in a crowd who is different from the others. He was, however, absolutely at home in the land of mathematics. The quiet purity of numbers, their reassuring predictability, their sensible and sober elegance combined with the infinite possibilities they gradually revealed – like a horizon line that seems very close but moves away when one approaches it – everything that formed the very essence of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic occupied and kept his mind alive, offering him at once a
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