Читать книгу Newton’s Niece - Derek Beaven - Страница 14

A blurred rectangle of sky. By degrees it assembled itself into its panes of glass, held in the lattice of their joinery: the casement window of my uncle’s chamber. The moth window. And I lay on a horsehair couch, hardly conscious of anything else; adrift, in fact, on the impulselessness of my body. The window filled my whole attention. Pale clouds, crinkled here and there through irregularities in the glass, were tinged by a weak, filtered sunshine.

A face next to me. It was my uncle’s. He looked reverential, somehow, and worried. A sense of dusk. A pewter vessel with a spout that jutted towards me was raised in his hand near my face.

‘Do not try to move. This is to drink.’ I sipped from the spout. It was something slightly bitter but warming, some herbal concoction. Of course I did try to move. I lifted my head.

‘I can lift my head,’ I said, in a high tone of absolute amazement. And what I meant to be amazed by was not the movement but the voice. I had spoken. How strange and different my body felt, before sleep overcame me again.

A doctor in a wide coat – a full man with a full wig. But not the man.

My mother. The window. The doctor said of me: ‘She is out of danger in my opinion. Of course there will be a need for rest, and I suggest a … change of lodging? Not equipped for … young woman … impressionable age. Family of course. Still … ’ And he was gone.

I levered myself up on the couch and found myself wrapped in a rush of linen which laced at the front. I wondered if I had died. ‘Mother.’ My voice came out again with that breathy high sound. She looked at me. I don’t know what there was in her face. Distance? Discomfort? Dislike?

‘Aye, it’s my child alright,’ I heard her say, ‘but bewitched or unbewitched I don’t know.’ My uncle came into view. ‘What am I to do, Isaac? What am I to say? I came up from Robert’s rectory with a manchild, though I grant you a knotted one, and now must take him back in skirts.’ She looked at him and then at me. ‘What am I to do? A girl! It’s a miracle, but a damned one. A cranky one, Isaac, and I can’t take it in.’ She began to breathe too quickly and sat herself down on one of his bleak chairs, while he hovered behind her, wearing his wig for protection, perhaps, but uncertain whether to touch her shoulders by way of comfort. ‘I can’t take it in. Should I cry and praise the Lord. Should I throw my arms about him … her, and weep on … her bosom.’ I saw her wince as if with disgust. ‘It’s too much, Isaac. You’ve gone too far. Too far. How can this be God’s work?’ And she did begin to snivel, and to shake a bit. ‘What shall I tell people? Robert? Family? People in Bridgstock? Oh, I shall be hanged, Brother. Do you realise? It’s me they’ll hang. Godfearing folk like they. They won’t like this. They’ll find a way. Or drowning! I shall be drowned!’

My uncle turned to the window as if to escape this imminent flood of disaster. On the window-ledge, I noticed there now stood a human skull.

‘My dear Madam;’ he said, trying for a mode of address which would cover the deep awkwardness he felt in the presence of female feeling. ‘Sister Barton,’ he said. ‘Hannah. Need anyone know?’

She stopped her cramped crying and looked up, licking her lips. Two tears left their traces down her cheeks. Then she looked at me. ‘Can you hear me, child?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ came out my little breathy voice. ‘Yes. I can hear you, Mother.’

‘You’ve changed, boy. Or been changed. Do you know that?’

‘Yes, Mother. I can speak, God be praised.’

‘Now don’t give me any of that. Get up. Get up and look at yourself, boy’ But she recollected herself: ‘That is, I’m sorry, if you can indeed get up, child. I would steady you, but I … I … would rather you tried on your own.’

How different I felt, swivelling my legs in their linen until I could place my feet on the floor. How curiously released. My uncle ostentatiously kept himself turned away, and coughed slightly to inform us of his propriety. Nick was not about.

I pushed down with my left hand on to the head of the couch. Yes, I could stand for a moment or two. All different. The same. Yet all different. Loose, soft.

I had escaped, I thought.

You will not understand me when I say this. You will especially not understand me if you are a woman. There is surely no woman alive today who is not aware that in all the authorities women’s condition is generally held to be more exploited than that of men. Now. And worse in the past. But in my particular set of circumstances – unusual, I grant – and among those with whom I lived, I believed that to be suddenly female was to be suddenly delivered from, I hazard, unwelcome attentions.

And so it was that, having been miraculously changed by the projection experiment, I entered on a phase of life which seemed to promise better things. Yes, I began my new season.

Somehow, perhaps, it’s our musculature which holds memories. By a change of my outward flesh the record of my darkest past was switched off, suspended. It was a blank. As blank a sheet as the linen I wore. Well, blankish – bearing only the painful trace of the week of the projection. Thus I began life as a female. There only remained a shadowy knowledge of the rape – of someone I no longer quite was – and a plan of revenge. Enough to bear, but too little to render me a wolf-girl. So the awkwardnesses were all gone, the stiffness and cramps in the legs, the heavy entrapment of my heart within its ribcage, the wily animality of my neck. This particularly I noticed: my head ached, but seemed to float above my shoulders without effort of mine. It was liberating to my thoughts and feelings. I was light. I felt cleaner. Innocent.

Then I sat down again, being still weak from the shock of the explosion in the laboratory. I had no recollection of how I was borne from there to here, nor of how long I’d taken to recover and ‘develop’ into my new shape. I had no knowledge of whether my uncle saw the experiment as a success – whether this had been the intended outcome, or some incredible catastrophe. I could vaguely remember a blinding flash.

I put my hand to my head, as one does just on to the hairline above the brow, because, with the dull ache throughout, this seemed to be the place to smooth it out. I disturbed an itch, and found a small bump, as if from a blow right to the centre, midway between hairline and crown. The itch was the remains of a scab on the bump. Its pieces flipped down in front of my eyes as I scratched; one landed on my nose. The bump was hard and painful to the touch, but in spite of this there was a compulsion to poke at it as I worried the scab – until I felt drowsy again and organised myself to lie back.

As I did so there was a knock at the outer door, which was opened without pause for reply. I heard my uncle’s voice: ‘Charles. How glad I am to see you. Come in.’

‘Returning to London. Today, Isaac. I shall see you soon? Madam,’ he acknowledged my mother.

Isaac made a hesitating sound in his throat. ‘Going back already? It seems you have only just arrived.’

‘This politicking,’ Charles laughed. ‘It takes up all a man’s time. And to make a final survey of your tender patient’s condition.’ He came into my view, the man in the garden on whose wide dark hat the first few drops had spattered as on the opium poppies. Hatless now, not tall; urbane and smiling, dressed soberly in very good cloth, he moved between me and the window. As I looked back at him I felt the burning embarrassment of the piece of scab sticking to my nose, and dashed it away with my hand.

‘Her eyes are open. There’s hope;’ he said. ‘Your servant, Madam,’ to me. My gaze stretched in astonishment. He looked searchingly back before turning his attention once again to my uncle. Very searchingly. To Isaac, he said: ‘You’ll be most welcome, my dear fellow. I look for you earnestly.’

‘You have thought of me? Of my situation?’ said my uncle. ‘As I described it to you?’

‘Of course I have, Isaac’

‘I’m doubly indebted.’

‘As I to you. London.’

‘It may answer after all,’ said Uncle Isaac. ‘But in what capacity?’

‘I am a man of influence,’ he smiled. Tiredness overcame me. I lost interest and drifted off.

At my next waking I found myself dressed in clothes I recalled all too clearly, including the restraint coat. My heart dumped into the pit of my stomach with a terrible sensation – as if one has not escaped a nightmare by waking after all. My escape had been the dream.

But no. As I came to myself more and more I realised that the painful wolf self had remained transmuted, and that I was still light – merely wrapped in my former style. There were no mirrors – apart from those little optical pieces he had. What was I – to look at? I pressed at the fronts of my coat – soft bubs under the tough, lined, wool facings. Their slight tenderness to the pressure was mine. I stuck my hand between the legs of my breeches, then into my pocket, then round from behind. Then my mother came into the room. I put my hand up to my small, smooth face.

My mother did treat me differently. She was in awe of me. But the plan was, as my uncle had said, to continue to pass me off as the boy she arrived with. Until when, she wanted to know. How long could such a deception be sustained? Surely things would come to light. She was in fear for her life. Isaac told my mother that he would apply himself to the matter with his best attention.

I held my first real conversation. It was with my uncle, after mother went out to see about our journey. Neither of us knew how to begin. I decided it should be me. ‘I have no need to sing, Uncle,’ I said, looking up from the bowl in which I was dipping my bread.

‘What shall we call you?’ he replied. ‘Or more particularly, what shall I call you, since when you return home your conditions of life are to appear unchanged?’

‘Am I to see you again, then, Uncle?’

‘I think you must. I am much shaken, boy, I … I mean … I … You see I cannot name you. I am shaken all to pieces. Every certainty has evaporated, exploded rather. I saw … nothing. Well, indeed I saw a great marvel. I saw the heavens open and … I saw what I had been waiting for. I was jolted back to the edge of the roof despite my precautions. The very air broke apart. Charles held me. He saved my life I believe. The voice of it … Ah my guts chum over now when I think of it.’

He paused. ‘Listen. For my sins I am known about the world – O wretchedness of publication, a vile prostitution to the public gaze – as the man who captured God’s language, who understood His workings, His secret movements. My Principia explains everything … except the matter of the metals, the Chymistry, to which I also sensed myself close, so close. But now all that has … gone up in smoke, quite literally. I understand nothing. Nothing. Because of you.’

‘How because of me?’

‘It is a question of who we are. I … Yes, I am resolved. I see we are bound together. I will tell you things I have told to no man. And because of your changed condition you are still no man to hear it, I suppose. Well, it became clear to me as I grew into my Cambridge self that I had been specially chosen, specially marked out. It would be a fool who did not recognise this. You understand me?’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘Do you not know what I have done?’

‘You have turned me into a woman.’

‘No, no, boy … woman. I mean what I have achieved. In the world of Art, Philosophy and Mathematics.’

‘No, Uncle. I can read, but I have only read my Daddy’s Church books, and what I could occasionally steal from Grandad Smith’s shelves, and from Ayskew’s library room.’

‘Like myself as a child.’

‘And the books in your laboratory, but only the pictures, not the language. I know nothing of the world of anything.’

‘Then I’m wasting my words. But I want to inform you – why, I don’t know. Why I should feel compelled to speak to you of myself and my Art, I do not know, I say. It is like an instruction; whose origin, as always, could be either from above or … below.’ He brought his fist down on the table, suddenly, and his face became anguished. ‘Shall I never be free of this ambiguity, this mockery of all I do? You were a monster, and are now a miracle. You’re an escape from reasonable law. To make you rational I should have to claim myself as the Christ, the only miracle-worker, which would be an abominable blasphemy in the light of what I see now. Damn you! You return us all to the abyss, the abyss of superstition. My project is thus in ruins and you are a walking fairy tale. Surely you see this. You cannot be so blank and recondite as you appear. What is it that you are? Amphisbaena. Ha! No. So I tell you once again that God, or someone else too horrible to mention, spoke to me in my ceaseless labours of the wretched Principia. I published, and he has proceeded to destroy me ever after. For what? For my Hubris? For my heart? You tell me, tell me what should I do. I can’t. Boy! Whatever you are! Female thing! Tell me!’ He became suddenly very agitated, but I was not frightened of him.

‘I don’t know what it is you wish me to say, Uncle.’

‘No. I shall teach you. I shall visit. It will be safe: I am unlike most men. You will be my Protégée. I shall tell you … what it is that has ruined me. And between us we shall survive this terrible event.’

‘On the window-ledge. That skull.’ The clay-coloured relic grinned at the room.

‘It’s a gift from … Mr Nicholas. It’s for you.’

We, my mother and I, left Cambridge on one of Mr Trueman’s carrier vehicles, which happened to be going West. She marked my face like a beard shadow with burnt cork, to mar my new beauty. Further to preserve appearances my mother tied my arms by their secret tapes, which was a zaniness, because the whole purpose of the secret tapes was to keep up the illusion that I was normal while travelling. I suppose it made her feel she had some control, particularly when Mr Trueman was there in the depot shed while the wagon was loading and they were saying their farewells. I saw them embracing and touching behind the angle in the wall where the counter ran, his hand thrust into the folds of her skirt.

Then we were bumping out of the city of my transformation at the slow pace of horses, moving off into the dung-smelling countryside. My mother sat up with the driver. Wearing a black hat I sat at the back with my legs dangling over the tailboard. My gift-skull hung from my neck in a net bag which bumped and rolled on my lap.

It was a bright day after the morning mist had cleared – one of Summer’s last throws. The St Neots road ran in lurching ruts while we curved between hedges, or struck across great reaches of stubbled fields, or plodded through villages. Other folk went about their sunlit business without sign of emotion, but the sight of ragged children playing and fighting round a pond triggered me to tears. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. And my tears ran and ran, not with the choking of sobs, but with a kind of permanent rinsing, so that I looked out over leaking elms, smudgy churches, and swimmers. I had the sense that at the back of my mind the other life was being catalogued; we might say now like an expanding video of lewd cartoons, played in another room, from which odd snatches and ungraspable flashes reached me. Or you might say they leaked through to me, because they made me cry even as I didn’t apprehend them. They were assembling and sorting themselves, I think. Their only bright clarity was in their summation: my resolve to destroy Monsieur Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, which had been a turning-point, if you recall the decision I made to out-think them all. And I knew that I was able to be still, and to wait.

So where, I ask now, had the wolf-boy’s cramps and twists gone to? Where were his snarls? Perhaps he was in hell. He had been displaced into another frame of being to await his time; but I think I also knew then that he could touch my thoughts, and that only by his aid should I make good my revenges.

‘Well. What with your uncle’s contribution and my endeavours we’re out of the wood for the time being, as far as money goes,’ said my mother. ‘Thanks be to God.’