[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter Read Online Free PDF

But things had been happening
to me, and to the world, before she was born. The years
in my life of her non-being struck me as an extraordinary
fact, a sort of bravura trick played on me by time. I,
whose passion is the past, was discovering in her what
the past means. And not just the past. Before our affair—the
word makes me wince—before it had properly begun
I was contemplating the end of it. You’ll laugh, but
I used to picture my deathbed: a hot still night, the lamp
flickering and one moth bumping the bulb, and I, a
wizened infant, remembering with magical clarity as the
breath fails this moment in this bedroom at twilight, the
breeze from the window, the sycamores, her heart beating
under mine, and that bird calling in the distance
from a lost, Oh utterly lost land.
    “If this is not love,” she said once in that dark voice
of hers, for a moment suddenly a real grown-up, “Jesus
if this isn't love then what is!”
    The truth is, it seemed hardly anything—I hear her
hurt laugh—until, with tact, with deference, but immovably,
another, a secret sharer, came to join our
somehow, always, melancholy grapplings.
     

    MICHAEL ’ S birthday was at the end of July,
and there was a party. His guests were a dozen of his
classmates from the village school. They were all of a
type, small famished-looking creatures, runts of the litter,
the girls spindle-legged and pigtailed, the boys
watchful under cruel haircuts, their pale necks defenceless
as a rabbit’s. Why had he picked them, were they
his only friends in that school? He was a blond giant
among them. While Charlotte set the table in the drawing-room for their tea, Ottilie led them in party games,
waving her arms and shouting, like a conductor wielding
an insane orchestra. Michael hung back, stiff and
sullen.
    I had gone up to the house with a present for him. I was given a glass of tepid beer and left in the
kitchen. Edward appeared, brandishing a hurley stick.
“We’ve lost a couple of the little beggars, haven‘t seen
them, have you? Always the same, they go off and
hide, and start dreaming and forget to come out.” He
loitered, eyeing my glass. “You hiding too, eh? Good
idea. Here, have a decent drink.” He removed my beer
to the sink and brought out tumblers and a bottle of
whiskey. “There. Cheers. Ah.”
    We stood, like a couple of timid trolls, listening to
the party noises coming down the hall. He leaned on
the hurley stick, admiring his drink. “How are you getting
on at the lodge,” he said, “all right? The roof needs
doing—damn chilly spot in the winter, I can tell you.”
Playing the squire today. He glanced sideways at me.
“But you won’t be here in the winter, will you.”
    I shrugged; guess again, fella.
    “Getting fond of us, are you?” he said, almost
coyly.
    Now it was my turn to exercise the sideways
glance.
    “Peace,” I said, “and quiet: that kind of thing.”
    A cloud shifted, and the shadow of the chestnut tree
surged toward us across the tiled floor. I had taken him
from the start for a boozer and an idler, a lukewarm
sinner not man enough to be a monster: could it be a
mask, behind which crouched a subtle dissembler, smiling
and plotting? Impossible. But I didn’t like that look
in his eye today. Had Ottilie been telling secrets?
    “I lived there one time, you know,” he said.
    “What—in the lodge?”
    “Years ago. I used to manage the nurseries, when
Lotte’s father was alive.”
    So: a fortune hunter, by god! I could have laughed.
    He poured us another drink, and we wandered outside
into the gravelled yard. The hot day hummed.
Above the distant wood a hawk was hunting.
    Lotte.
    “Still doing this book of yours?” he said. “Used to
write a bit of poetry, myself.” Ah, humankind! It will
never run out of surprises. “Gave it up, of course, like
everything else.” He brooded a moment, frowning, and
the blue of the Dardanelles bloomed briefly in his