Читать книгу Newton’s Niece - Derek Beaven - Страница 15

While I finished growing up, he paid me visits. First, soon after the Incident, I had a letter of his to announce the programme:

‘Here,’ my mother’d said. ‘He sends an enclosed for you. You may count yourself pretty fortunate.

‘Events which I do not specify on paper, child, have led to great alterations in my life. You have known me but a short while, and in that while you have seen me only as the thing I was; which the world now acknowledges was not a nothing indeed but a seer of new worlds and a maker of new contrivances. Nevertheless there are reasons why I must change my state. Where I saw so clearly and for so many years into the meanings of my researches, I find now my vision is muddied; perspectives have shifted, faculties altered. I’m sure he expresses himself very courtly,’ put in my mother, ‘but most of his writing sets me at a loss. You will, perhaps, not understand what I find myself compelled to write - indeed, and to the point at last,’ she said. Then she continued making out the intricate shapes on the page, ‘to you here – suffice it to say, child, that I must go on in an entirely different way. Things are not what they were with me; I shall never find my former self again, I think. A parcel of books will arrive for you shortly by my direction. You are to read them. When I come I shall hope to find you perfect in them. I hope you keep up your duty to my sister your mother, and are of service to her in her bereavement. We are all in God’s hands, to whose mercy you may be assured you are commended by

your Unkle Is. Newton

‘There. He’s decided to make something of himself at last.’

He gave me books indeed. Many, many books. I read them. I was the second woman in his life. The first was his mother, whose death he had overseen, nursing her illness himself until the last – though whether from love, guilt or social obligation I never knew. Every other representative of my current gender he seemed to regard as an advanced example of upholstery. But I was indeed his Protégée; I was one of the two chosen people.

I knew it wasn’t love, on either of our parts, but a kind of double-tracking, which we both acknowledged without question. It puzzled me. I felt it must somehow serve us, though in a way that I was entirely unaware of. But then what was I to do with my beauty and my brain in darkest Northamptonshire? Marry? I had offers.

I hadn’t stayed in the clothes of the wolf-boy. My mother got over her fears. Having seen the advantages of a talking female as opposed to a snarling male, she weighed up the bigotry of the community against the sense of achievement she might get from putting one over on them; and chose to have it given out that she was sending me away North to distant cousins. These were good folk, she said, who were willing to harness her son’s unreclaimability to ceaseless heavy labour, in return for a social chance for their pretty daughter. She flattered herself in the comparison, for though we were Rectory we weren’t rich, and the locality must have conceived a grim impression of the fictitious North Country cousins. Nevertheless in due course mother and son travelled off on one of Trueman’s trailers, even though the affair was technically over; and a clever sleight of hand was achieved between two out-county inns, in time for mother and daughter to meet a return transport.

Of my father? My father lived six weeks after my return from Cambridge. It was some indeterminate disease that wasted the flesh of innocent clergymen and demanded to be flushed through with brandy. He died in delirium when the brandy ran out. He called us in as he lay dying, my brother and sister and myself. He blessed my brother, and kissed Margaret and me. He said he’d always been so proud of his two girls but poisoned worms and now woodlice were tunnelling in his legs. He screamed. Uncle Benjamin Smith, who was staying with us as he so often did, came running upstairs to see what was toward. His wig flapped as he flung into the bedchamber. But his haste was redundant; his brother-in-law had passed on.

Thus I was acknowledged, and was called Catherine Barton, and learned how to live among people.

‘You’ve read the Fermat? And the Wallis?’ he said.

‘It’s too hard, Uncle.’ I sat at a desk in our house. In front of me a rare copy of John Wallis’s Arithmetica Infinitorum, the Arithmetic of Infinites, lay open, on top of a specially made copy in my uncle’s hand of Fermat’s Varia Opera Mathematica. It said:

‘As n becomes indefinitely large, the ratio of the area under the curve to the square enclosing it approaches the limiting value of one third;’ he said. ‘I spoke to you about limits when I last came down, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘Well, then. Have you been idle?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then what do you find hard?’

‘It would help if it were in English,’ I said.

‘Ha! You must stick at your Latin. Without it you’re lost.’

‘Yes, Uncle. But why is it so important that I learn the mathematics? I don’t take naturally to it.’

‘Do you think I took naturally to it?’

‘You must have done. You find it all so straightforward. To me it’s infinitely crooked and tangled. Why does it matter?’

‘It matters because … because … because of the event that we never speak about, and which must not be spoken about – you understand that, girl, don’t you? It must not be mentioned. Ever. To anyone.’

‘Yes, Uncle. I understand that.’ I wondered which event he meant.

‘Well I hope you do, for I’m wrecked if you say it. You don’t want to wreck me do you, Catherine?’

‘No, Uncle;’ I replied. Wreck him? How could I wreck him?

‘Well, then. You must learn this because I must be sure of you. Tcha! You must understand these things. I must share them with you. I must include you. Your mind must be formed according to these designs. It’s to protect you, Catherine. It will protect you from becoming idle, frivolous and wanton, as your sex are most likely to. It’s to protect you from Eve’s faults. I must have you with me. Do you understand? It is imperative.’

I sighed, and looked again at the Wallis: a sea of Latin with numbers and diagrams afloat on it. ‘Yes, Uncle. I understand.’

But in a few years money once again became a serious problem.

It was my mother’s suggestion in all innocence – if I can attach that word to her – that we apply to Uncle Isaac in London to see if I might be something domestic for him. She played into our hands. I was to be with him literally.

He paid for everything. I arrived one bitter March afternoon five years after my transformation, by the West Chester coach which ran up to the metropolis on Watling Street. He met me at the Three Cups Inn just outside Westminster and checked first of all that no one had tampered with my bundle and wickerwork hold-all, and my net bag with Nick Fatio’s gift-skull in it. Then he looked at me. ‘Well, Catherine;’ he said, ‘we recluses are both moved into the fashionable world, at last. What do you think of the great city?’ I’d never thought of myself as a recluse; I’d never voluntarily sought Northamptonshire. But perhaps he had a point, I thought to myself as I looked around me.

‘It’s more than I could have expected,’ I said. What comment could anyone pass who came upon that place for the first time from nowhere? I’d probably seen more people in the previous quarter of an hour than I had in the rest of my life. Cambridge was as nothing beside this. And I felt cold through and through. But I was pleased finally to be here, because it felt as though my destiny were being fulfilled. The last few years in the Midlands, during which I was learning to be human, and female, had brought me up against the tightness of village life – of life in general. The holiday of feeling light was soon over. The wolf self lay primed and potent at the back of my mind, half-known; half-impossible. He was excised from discourse; so how could he have existed? Yet I felt him in me. And how soon did the dealings I had as a female – at church, at market, in the network of visits, or just in casual conversations in the street – yes, the very language I swam in – imprint on my movement, my expression even, all the things I might not do, the places I might not go, and the feelings I might not have. They laced me tighter than my stays. And in this my mother was not, I think, my friend, as she purported to be, but the chief agent of my oppression. She liked having me to talk to around the house, she said; better, she claimed, than my sister. She could see her young self in me, she said. So we developed a mother – daughter relationship of sorts – a relationship grown out of the air, without soil. But in fact she policed me. I played my part, and didn’t know why I was so often on edge, or thrown down in spirits, since I supposed she must love me. She said it was my womb, and taught me how to bind it up with clouts by monthly necessity.

‘How does my womb imprison me?’ I asked. She told me it was the curse of Eve, and not to mention what was disgusting to God. Am I designed for no more than this? I thought.

At night, when my stays were off, when my sister, who lay next to me, was asleep, I tried the womb for whatever was the female equivalent of that sticky release which I sensed had so often soothed the wretched wolf-boy to sleep, and was part, somehow, of his conditioning. But although my own hands could experiment at will, and imaginary lusts could stir me and have me search my body’s secrets out, there was no end available. No inner softening. No rest. Arousal became its own prison; and there were times, whole seasons, which indeed grew longer as I grew older, when I held myself stricter than a nun to fend off the frustration of my own desires. And love? My thoughts were all alchemical, like the King and Queen in the river. I conjured Elizabeth, whose family had moved away. I conjured the love and nakedness of the worthy women of Bridgstock and their drowning husbands, who groped blindly at their breasts.

What then could I accomplish? I had the revenge constantly before me, and when I once dreamed, that, dressed again in my coat, I actually performed it with a garrotte, my spirits lifted and I became almost buoyed up for several days. I started to plan, and speculated on other methods. But rural routine soon stifled the fantasy, while my dreams returned to bad but vague; and being now female I was denied even the opportunities for slaughter which the men had. My father had shot birds, or followed hares with dogs. I disdained to wring the necks of farmyard chickens and had no quarrel with the smooth innocence of the ducks on our pond.

In spite of my uncle’s letters, his books and his educational visits, I lost belief sometimes that the hope of moving on could ever be fulfilled. Yet he must be instructing me to some purpose. I did study. I even worked at the mathematics, but without much cheer or success. Well, not in his terms. And I wondered how Christ might make me free, as Mr Witham, the curate, said He would when he stood behind me for my organ lesson, catching and releasing his breath. I felt moreover there was some other important matter I must prepare for. My destiny; my purpose. I mean beyond my purpose of revenge. I remembered my first conversation, and my uncle’s anguished uncertainty over Who it was that had set him up.

So, yes; I was pleased to get to London.

His house was in Jermyn Street, a pleasant location as befitted a man of some distinction. It was made of sober London bricks, and, like much of the new London, was in the so-called Dutch style; the roof was tiled. It stood out dark against the setting sun. I was so glad of the fire in the first room. Heated wine. Supper. Like me he’d acquired some sort of social touch in the intervening years; the dishevelled projector had been laid to rest behind a fine suit of clothes and a regular wig. He showed me round.

The interior of the house was all done out in red: drapes, beds, sofas and seats. At the time I was amazed; with hindsight the phrase whorehouse taste leaps to mind. It was such a contrast with the rooms I’d come to know at Trinity – as if a child had been asked what colour it wanted most in the world, and been indulged. But the furniture was good – obviously; much more luxurious than anything I’d seen in the country. Better than the Smiths’ house, where Uncle Benjamin, Isaac’s stepbrother, was now squire. I unpacked in my room, hanging up my few outfits, and stuffing the wolf-boy’s breeches, coat and hat into a small chest. He’d got me a good bed with four posts. Here in my bedroom there was another decorative dimension: expensive frilly white lace. And the drapes? Red. All red. Was this really his choice?

If it was, then he’d been overfulfilled in another matter, as I learned in growing used to London. That was of gold: he commuted each day to the Mint at the Tower of London, where he saw to the coinage. He took me to see: vast furnaces, noise, bellows, the brilliance of liquid metals. A grand scale of activity beyond the conception of the most obsessive souffleur. I felt here he was in his element at last. Can you imagine the fruition to an alchemist of the ceaseless pourings and runnings, pressings, millings and stampings of purest gold and silver; the quiet beauty of the metals ever set off deliciously against the clamour and filth of their surroundings – for the place was driven on horse power and full of shit.

To be truthful, this was also my early impression of London itself, except for the great concourses and squares, and those were plagued with pigeons. I’d expected it all to be easy. But the city leaned on you with its unconcern, its hardness. No new season offered itself here. In the streets I was alone in a throng. I even missed that stifling camaraderie of the village women as I began to learn how to live in this callous jostle. It took me weeks before I could stomach the sheer concentration of people, with their dogs and their total household excretions. A smoky, smelly, muddy, milling, wintry place.

In the Jermyn Street house I was comfortable enough, though. I was indeed something domestic; I was his housekeeper by virtue of my sex. What else could I be?

A man and woman and their daughter lived on the top floor and did the cleaning and maintenance and some of the cooking for us, in return for their keep. Their name was Pointer; we called them by their Christian names, Tony, Mary and young Pet. I had nominal charge over them, but in practice they were entirely self-sufficient as to how things should be done for Mister Eye, as they called him. Having by now been introduced at one or two other houses less obsessively furnished, I framed a second hypothesis about our red frilly decor. Perhaps it was Mary’s uneducated taste. Perhaps she’d been given a free hand by my lofty uncle to set about making the place an elegant London address, without having any sense of elegant restraint.

While I was a newcomer, Mary and Pet fussed around me. ‘Oh, Mistress Catherine, you’ll ‘ave suitors by the dozen, you will. Look at her eyes, Pet, and that pretty mouth. You’ll have to look alive, Missy, as the sailors say, ‘cause the young men here are all up to the chances if they can, aren’t they, Pet? She knows! I know myself! But if you keep your wits about you, dear, you’ll be all in the clear and have no end of a following. Won’t she, Pet? Just you make sure they keep their hands out of your pocket. Such a pretty shape, my love. You don’t have to put up with anything you don’t want. Till you decide you do want it, that is. Eh, Pet?’ She nudged her daughter for the joke and then returned to me. She seemed to want to touch my hair and adjust my caps and my dress. And then she was full of advice on society seamstresses and milliners. Good ones, it turned out.

Pet, who had soft eyes but was rather plain, didn’t seem to resent her mother’s enthusiasm for my looks. They both giggled and sparked themselves up at the prospect of love opening a lively market outlet in the house.

Love? Love? The city had love on its lips; it pressed the word into the currency of every encounter; it worked at love. But it was compulsion – as mechanical as the Mint, and as sweated. What was it that kept these people at it, toiling and moiling, breeding and hoping? And they were compelled to wear their love, as it were, on the outside. I was amazed at the openness, the show. I had never, except in the interchange between my mother and Mr Trueman in their farewells at Cambridge, seen love acted. Here I saw the rich kissing or preening in St James’s Park. It was thought nothing that powdered men who found me walking there in company they knew should slip a hand across my bosom, even as they looked into my violent eyes and left me alone. As the Spring hastened on and the weather warmed up, whores sat out at the street alehouses with a crescent of painted nipple showing above the basque, sipping their cans and talking with tradesmen; and smart gentlewomen shopping near the Abbey aped something of their style. Men walked with their arms round their wives, or mistresses. I saw other people whom I met at my uncle’s lean dinners roll eyes at each other; I met folk who were engaged in intrigues; I heard salacious talk at times in passing; and there were the Sunday mornings when rhythmic gasps and creakings came from the top floor of our house as the Pointers enjoyed their lie-in. One week I met a woman who was famously in love. She came to the house on some Royal Society pretext. When her man appeared at last in the hallway she flung herself on him with an almost tangible rapture. Despite my own passionate compulsions, I was terrified. And sad. Love? What was it? Sex? How? There was a place, Pet told me, somewhere in London, where a woman did headstands in a booth so that the passing wits and gallants could attempt her with thrown coins. Why?

In May I saw a man forcing two boys into a coach by hitting them with a cane through the rents in their rags, and when I got home I was shaken and sick.

My uncle and I were manifest public virgins.

He took me to the theatre. By the close I believed not only the actors but the audience to be false. Again I tortured myself as to the meaning of this place.

‘These people, Uncle. What on earth is it they’re doing? How does it keep on going?’ I watched them. Daily they flooded along the streets about their various businesses; they lied, double-dealt and cheated; they apparently exchanged coinage, credit, and body fluids with very little prompting; they laughed, festered and grew old. They clung to life until they died. They appeared content with their orbits, eating, drinking, smoking and paying. Their story was private – I found no real way in, nor did I wish to; for I knew it was lacking in something, as I was myself. It was his city, his creation – as I was myself. Whither more naturally than here should we gravitate in our sadness? Commercial London. He was Warden of the Mint; Charles Montagu had fixed it for him, and all the universe had died.

Nevertheless I was also glad; for in this bleak description I recognised my own purpose, and began work on my Project. Which was to find the gaps in his.

I often thought about Nicholas. Perhaps he was somewhere in London even now. Perhaps he lay at night in some house in the streets I passed through every day, and was within reach, so that I had only to bend my intellect to his discovery in order to make all good. At such thoughts I felt my pretty lips lift away from my pretty teeth, found my pretty nails pressed against my own pretty cheeks.

‘Do you ever see Monsieur Nicholas, Uncle?’ I asked one afternoon when we were entertaining. His hand holding the new decanter shook momentarily so that some of the wine splashed over the side of Charles’s glass on to the oak table-top. It started to run down the imperceptible gradient of the wood towards Sir Christopher Wren’s lap. Henrietta Bellamy caught the little stream in time and headed it off until she could get hold of a napkin. Later Etta and I stood side by side at the mirror in the drawing-room to which we had gone while the men of science compared notes.

‘Etta. Is it easy to be married in London?’

‘Easy? What an odd thing. As easy as anywhere, Kit.’ She teased at a stray of hair behind her ear.

‘No. Being married. Is it an easy thing?’

‘Edmund is a jewel. I love him. He makes everything so easy, my dear. Positively delicious. Why is your hair always swept up, Kit? Don’t you wish for a change?’

In reply I took hold of her right-hand index finger and raised it to the centre of my brow, then just above, until it touched the concealed bump under the front wave I wore. She pushed at it of her own accord. I felt still the sharp pain whenever it was disturbed.

‘Ow!’

‘My dear. You’re deformed. I’ve found a flaw in your beauty.’ She bent to kiss my cheek.

‘Only a little deformed, Etta.’

‘I wonder if my hair would go in your style. On you it looks … stunning sometimes, Kit. Sometimes I think you have no conception of your looks.’

‘Am I a mess?’

‘No. Quite the contrary, dear. You’re always well turned out. It’s that I believe you know nothing of your effect on others. On men. On women, for that matter.’

‘No? What’s my effect?’ I dabbed at myself in the mirror again.

‘It’s useless my telling you. I can hear by your tone of voice. Your effect. You know. But you don’t know, do you?’

‘Etta. Did you see my uncle’s hand shake as I mentioned the name Nicholas?’

‘No. When was that?’ Delicately she re-applied a patch to her cheekbone.

‘When you had to mop up the wine.’

‘Oh. No, I didn’t notice. I was talking to Wren. He was just leaving. Should I have?’

That was something, Etta, that you know nothing of. It was a gap.’

‘A what?’

‘A gap. I see these moments. They are special. I call them gaps.’