[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter

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Book: Read [Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter for Free Online
Authors: John Banville
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.
    I was astonished, of course, but there was too a
familiar shiver of fright and not wholly unpleasurable
disgust. It was like that moment in a childhood party
game when, hot and flustered, every nerve-end an eye,
you whip off the blindfold to find that the warm quarry
quivering in your clasped arms is not that little girl with
the dark curls and the interestingly tight bodice whose
name you did not quite hear, but a fat boy, or your
convulsed older sister, or just one of Auntie Hilda’s
mighty mottled arms. Or a middle-aged woman, emphatically
married, with middle-aged hands, and wrinkles around her eyes, and the faint beginnings of a
moustache, who had spoken no more than twenty
words to me and who looked at me as if I were, if not
transparent, then translucent at least. There it was, all ,
the same, sitting in bed with me, still in its party frock,
with an impudent smile: love.
    The secret pattern of the past

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