Newton’s Niece

The Lull

There was a livid sky now. Driving the Ford back to Walton after I’d worked out my shift, I watched through the windscreen the heavy cumuli that had been building from the West ever since I came down from the tower. I’d said no word of my efforts with the fire; not to anybody. Polly was incoherent. I certainly hadn’t told Seco. I’d changed my overall and kept my distance, even when he tried to chaff me to good humour, and called me over to enjoy from our scullery the spectacle of the emergency services, and the chance to down tools. So, of course, he knew no more of my activities than the chlorine incident.

‘Eeeh, Jacob! Vieni qui! We sit down for a smoke, yes? You an’ me. No one’s bother us, eh? It’s OK. No more gas. No problems. Look at that lot – commotions, eh? Why don’t you just relax ever? You find the Art Room, yes?’

All seemed lost now under the quickening wind. I drove along by the Cowey Sale. Great bruising thunderheads massed above the ugly bridge, and darkened the meadows. The river was ruffled, yellow and purple.

I turned through the town and, reaching home, crunched on to the gravel patch where I was allowed to park. On a gust I smelled, like a dog, the hot drift of rain to come.

My quarters were close: a cupboard for a kitchen and two poky cabins so cramped in the roof space, with their sloping ceilings, that you couldn’t pass from one to the other without straddling the void of the top step. Now, as I bridged it after coming up the stairs, I felt again that today had taken it upon itself to peel me open. It was the most fraught day of my life as yet, and still it had not done with me, though the sirens and ‘commotions’ were past. I didn’t sense how completely the walls of my world were cracking; what leaks had appeared and what flood threatened. I put it down to stress, Seco and Saphir; fumes, images and blurred deeds. I rested against the Baby Belling for a moment and took a grip on the angle iron which supported the house’s cold-water tank.

But the smoke was still on my clothes. On what passed for the landing I tore them off and dumped them into a black bin-liner. Then I returned to the cooking space to wash in the sink.

Outside there came the first grumbling note of the storm. Far below, the front door banged. Mrs Dangerfield, my landlady, left for her rendezvous of the evening. My hands smoothing soap to soothe my forehead found bristles for eyebrows. They’d been scorched off. I felt upwards to my hair, searching the headache for a little tell-tale bump, but there was nothing. I dared not look in the glass for signs of charring in case I should seem a clown, a buffoon, a Grimaldi. Thus by increasing associations, signs and traces, the god of my past sharpened the edge each time before laying to his work at my hairline.

I would have welcomed an anaesthetic: alcohol, pills – alas I had none; companionship, the soothe of rain even. A pulse of lightning split the view from my tiny kitchen look-out, touching my gaze cruelly with its intimacy, until the echoes of the discharge died away. Dry and still lay the broad garden and the twin apple trees that grew out of the halfway hedge. Behind that, through the little pathway, waited the untended vegetable patch; and right down by the far fence beside a rush of periwinkle, the shed with its overwinding of creeper almost audibly rotted. A lush, dank, heated, Summer garden, it lay unmoving, waiting for the storm.

The bedroom looked out over the same garden. On the wall there was a vestigial mantelpiece and the traces of a fireplace; while on the mantelpiece itself much to Mrs Dangerfield’s discomfiture sat my two skulls. I’d named them Entropy and Gravity, but I didn’t know how I’d come by them. Standing naked at the window, I felt they were conspiring behind my back. A tree of electricity welded roots to neighbouring Weybridge. Almost at once the ruptured air hammered at my eardrums and rattled the bedroom window. I felt myself shiver as I finished towelling myself dry.

The very verdure of the garden was alert, still, and charged to shudder up at the sky. I opened the window and smelled, in the humid air under the grey, an energy in each green tendril. There; that was the present, waiting to continue; but I would not bear it, and turned to my bed. Perhaps exhaustion might disconnect me.

Again the air roared over the room, the house and the town. Almost in synchrony, my past chopped at my head, and the ache flared. Excruciated, I turned on my side to where I could see from the bed my clothes lying not far away, in their open black plastic bag. I thought I could smell the waft of char. The two skulls grinned, and then appeared to listen, I fancied, for a new note: a tentative patter that quickly swelled to a drumming din against the tile and timber immediately above me. Outside, the sky was emptying at last as if it planned to wash us all away.

Sleep came suddenly, and then dreams, as if pain was the developing chemical of an entire holographic film; as if a surgeon entered the shatter of my brainpan and started rebuilding every structure brick by illuminated brick. I conceived in that enlightenment a meta-Byzantine edifice full of images beside which the asylum itself, with all its old painted nooks, its dusty corners, alcoves, recesses, curlicues, cusps and mouldings, was an inhibited matchbox. Memories like moths came to life, stirred from far off in the rain, and headed for my bedroom. They passed the glass of my window, aligning their molecules with the molecular spaces in the structure of the panes, and entered whole and flapping, as big as storm birds.

When I awoke from that torrential sleep I had the key to it all. Now I understood why it was it should have been blotted out; for who could have lived with all that? Either forget, or go mad. Yes, with the bucketing along of time there had been no rest; no place for drawing breath, to order, to transcribe and to persuade myself.

But now I determined through my tears to begin this ragged chronicle, describing nothing less than a bulging, three-hundred-year-old universe, full of the echoes and resoundings of all knowledge, of all time and space, of all the stories my unusual flesh was heir to.

For I knew why the two skulls were on my mantelpiece, and who was the guardian of the Elixir of Life which my Uncle Isaac made with my help and by accident after twenty years of crazy research in his laboratory in Trinity garden. And I believed I had the first hint of why I tried to find Celia Jenner, and how I acquired the name of Jacob, and who were the Hatted Hummers. And of whom Saphir the Indian reminded me, of the Batavian Thorn, of Inertia and its cure, of the melting of my heart, and of the horrible speeding up of time.

So I took to my other little garret room, the one at the front, in the morning after the four elements celebrated themselves. Outside my dormer window the great oak tree by the Hersham Road, full of its waking Summer beauty, stirred in the cleansed air. The little caterpillars on its leaves set to their task of covering my car in sticky blobs. The sky was rich with day. One sodium streetlamp was still on, red, and reminding of the night. I sat at my desk to begin the story, which you will not believe.

First Things

My mother brought me in. I was dressed well in cleverly designed restraining garments; my coat, for example, gave the illusion that I stood habitually with my arms folded. They were in fact secured by the sleeves. I was fourteen. There’d been a bloody civil war and a bloodless revolution. The mathematics of gravity had just been published, and the universe had been told that it was dead. I had no speech but I could sing. I sang to him. To my Uncle Isaac. Church songs and street songs, psalms and farm songs; the old revolutionary songs my Granduncle Ayskew said he’d learnt in the army, that I didn’t know the meaning of:

Let us with a gladsome mind Make away with all we find. Church and King will ay endure Till they take the common cure.

Here’s an Earl and here’s a Lord, Harlot’s hair and Spainish sword, Church and King will ay endure Till they take the common cure.

All who seek to heap up gain While men landless do remain They their profit shall endure When they take the common cure.

Let them think on Charlie’s axe Ere the next ungodly tax, For His mercies ay endure Taken with the common cure.

I piped, but my voice was breaking, and not just because of my age. My fit of rage was beginning to give way to the other emotion, hopelessness. Soon the restraint would hardly be needed and I could be sat in a corner without danger to myself or others. My mother used the fact that I could sing to shore up the lie she told herself that I was normal. She liked to give out that I was her young gentleman protector on the journey from Northamptonshire. And whenever she, flushed and carnal, came to Cambridge on one of her various negotiations, leaving me in my Uncle Isaac’s rational care, she would first stand me in the centre of that charred and reeking chamber and have me sing. Why was it that I sang? Somebody once referred to the vocal art as licensed screaming. The negotiation that Autumn, I think, was with a Mr Trueman.

My mother was very persuasive. I see her now with her strict coiffure and her distinguished features, which were only belied by a moistness she managed to secrete on her lips even as her Purity eyes engaged you. Ordinary men melted; my Uncle Isaac shuddered.

So many years ago. I said you would not believe. I hear my young voice again, knowing and unknowing. It is not the voice of a stripling hero of fiction. I lack the clear skin and bold dash of a handsome Johnny who within a year or two will escape the hangman and sail off to Virginia in search of a fortune. I have the feel and looks, beneath my mother’s grooming, of what I can only describe as a wolf. My teeth are too often exposed and there is a distinct howl to some of my high notes. The skin of my face is blotched from the various scratchings and attacks I have made on it. I register and understand what goes on around me but I do not take part, being racked with waves of rage and fear which make me pant, and occasionally growl. In my sullen phases I know I am collapsing inside. I can read well and write; for I may be uncontrollable, and inadmissible in society, but I am not stupid. Far from it: I have had enforced leisure for study, and my father is a clergyman. Now I remember it, he lies at home, dying, and my mother must be concealing her anxiety about income.

It was an Autumn of quiet red celebration. Low sun illuminated the Cambridge brick and stone so that it glowed brighter than the blue sky it cut into. That wonderful light struck inward at the casement, but I could not let myself feast on it.

My uncle, at fifty-one, claimed a total indifference to music or poetry in any form, but nevertheless made a point of shooting pained looks and drawing in his breath when any of my notes came out flawed. So the singing ritual pleased neither of us. He too was ‘in his fit’, and as she denied mine my mother over-acknowledged his, casting my music as a species of psychological bandage. She said it ‘eased him’ to hear my assortment of canticles and bawdry. She particularly toadied to him now that he was famous and no longer the other embarrassment of the family; and we were facing destitution.

Isaac’s dis-ease at the time was that he was laid low with an unusual melancholy. It was a bleak and restless frenzy. His bowels griped him and he went about a little stooped with his hands clutched across his belly, as if his body were feeling the loss of a child. But his look remained undemonstrative. As for the proof sheets of a special reprint of his Principia that Mr Halley sent, he could hardly bear to see their impressions. I grasped him intuitively, but could not articulate then what I can describe now – that he was at the mercy of what he had striven so hard to exclude from the whole universe: human feelings. He was experiencing a reaction equal and opposite to Monsieur Fatio de Duillier’s Platonic teasing – that sly, Swiss and mathematical little chienne. Mr Newton’s great brow was greatly knitted in a Type of stifled despair. Each icy orb promised to melt into a tear. But could not.

For politeness’ sake he thanked my mother shortly when I’d finished. Every time, after I’d performed, he’d refer to me as a young siren, and laugh cynically. I disliked his jokes; they were wounding. Then he begged leave to cast himself down in the little cluttered bedchamber. I recall my mother following him and fidgeting in its doorframe. It was a frame only, because Uncle Isaac had taken off all the interior doors, including what used to be Mr Wickens’s, to aid the supply of draught, and to ease all the coming and going.