Читать книгу Newton’s Niece - Derek Beaven - Страница 16

That Summer of 1699 a schism in the Royal Society led to informal scientific demonstrations taking place at our house. We set up a rival outfit. The true cause was my uncle’s hatred of Dr Hooke, whose vainglorious mediocrity, he said, lodged by the barb in the institution’s flesh, so that twist as it might it couldn’t shake the accursed old duffer off. What my uncle’s faction actually did in these evenings was not so much different from the authorised meetings.

‘What is it that you have there, Mr Van de Bemde?’

‘A pint of slugs, Mr Gregory.’

‘Are they live slugs, Mr Van de Bemde?’

‘Not at present, Sir.’

‘I’m afraid I must be going. My deepest apologies, Gregory, Newton, Gentlemen.’

‘Let the record show that at the time of Sir Christopher’s departure, the slugs were dead, but their juice is still applicable.’

‘So recorded.’

I showed Wren out and escaped to my own bedroom. I’d coped with the gassing of the hedgehog in the bell jar, and the nerve poison from Batavia. But the dog had been too much. I noted that my uncle hadn’t liked it either, but he’d let them carry on. Food for my dreams: the way the gentlemen sat round unmoved while it cried and twitched. And now the man with the slugs. I who plotted revenge had motive, but how had these creatures offended? Should the gentlemen not anatomise their enemy Hooke?

Yet these were enlightened, modern men. They’d rebuilt the country and the city out of a legacy of war, disease and chaos. They must have good reason. Gaps. Where were the gaps? What was it that would get behind such sober, influential folk as these Londoners?

In my commonplace book I made a note of the chemicals for the gassing, and of where they were kept. And of the Batavian extract.

My uncle had showed me his notebook written from both ends. He’d got its prodigious supply of paper from his stepfather Smith when he was a boy, and it had served his whole career. It showed how he’d started when he was a young student. He’d put: ‘Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis arnica Veritas.’ Then ‘Quaestiones Quae-dam Philosophicae’, which I rendered, having learned my Latin lessons, as: ‘Plato and Aristotle are beloved to me but I’d rather know the truth. Certain philosophical interrogations.’ And he’d gone on from there. Through motion and conies and optics, to God, the creation; even to the soul, and sleep, and dreams. His thought was free. I wrote therefore:

‘Certain questions of a young woman wishing to know the truth’ Then:

‘1) Jesus said, I come not to bring peace but a sword. Is this the razor of the anatomist?

2) Is God well pleased? Has He indeed come down again? Is that Him? Downstairs?’

Then, frightened, I shut the book so that no one should see it. But of course in my bedroom my confident self knew that no one could really be watching me. God was more remote to my mind – if He existed. I was as advanced as that! Beyond Locke even! Despite the terms of my Quaestiones.

I tried again:

‘3) If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. In this work I shall be free. Though I am in the world, I am not required to be of it. What is it to be free?

4) Is it a bold thing for a woman to devote herself to study and experiment? Is it an unattempted thing? Am I the first?

5) If motion in this age of progress and wonders is determined as my uncle has shown, how shall Christ intervene to bring comfort to the tormented? Are we but bodies ceaselessly continuing in our right lines? What forces are impressed on us? Hunger? Disease? Lust? Blows? Blades? Have we in us inherent forces? What is Love?

6) These lovers sport in the public eye. But in private, when there is no one to see, what is it they say and do? What feel?

7) Why will not my passion discharge? Is a woman’s body inferior to a man’s in this? Is a woman’s mind capable of discharge?

8) Why does my time hasten away, faster than my uncle’s clock, so that I am always afraid? Are these the last days?

9) Why am I so frightened of my words ….?

10) What forces have I reacted to, so that I should once have been’, and my pen hesitated, ‘of a lupine disposition?’

I shut the book. Not much for the start of a Principia, I thought. I felt I had done something shocking.

Having hidden these deliberations, I went out of my bedroom and walked to the end of the passage until I came directly in front of the steep back stairs, which continued their upward oak pathway to where the Pointers lived. This was the place from which I contacted them about household matters. We usually shouted up. I’d never yet intruded upon their flat, although nominally I had the right. They had an air of security.

I called quietly: ‘Mary! Pet!’ There was no answer. I called again, then hoisted my skirts and stepped up, hanging on to the rope and placing my little shoes sideways on the well worn, almost vertically raked flight. At the top I stared around in the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust. There were two doors in front of me, at right angles to one another, and an extension of the little landing space that led off to my left.

I knocked on one of the doors. No reply. I opened it cautiously. Darkness. And the other – dark too.

Down the whole flight of the back stairs, I searched for a spare light in the kitchen, from which the Pointer family was equally absent. They must have gone out on some family jaunt; I didn’t know what these London people might do at night. Perhaps he’d given them some expenses to blow. I sheltered my candle up again, right up to their privacy, and looked in for the second time. It flickered on a sparse, easy domesticity. There were the embers of a fire. Here was the parents’ bed, made, normal. There were the careful wife’s shelves of knick-knacks, a chest and a press. I noticed Tony’s gardening boots and galoshes; Mary’s stays and stockings drying over a horse. A covered chamber-pot. A washing bowl. Blue blinds drawn over the little casement. Pet’s child drawings on expensive birthday paper propped over the hearth.

In the other room, their parlour, there were chairs round a little table, and the sofa that Pet must sleep on was covered and turned back ready, with a pillow at the wall end. My eyes took in baskets, a coal scuttle and irons. Knives were on the table, and unwashed plates with the pieces of a loaf on them; a newspaper; a Bible; candlesticks; a rack of plates; a collection of unglazed jugs and metal ones. A corner held a pile of mending and a wig-stand on the floor with an old wig of my uncle’s on it, presumably awaiting some sort of repair. In the air there hung the odour of the folk I lived below: food and must and smoky body smell. I sensed my own separateness from this close, human place.

I picked up one of the knives and went back to the bedroom. Putting the candle carefully down on the press, I lay on the marital bed. My mind ran on the possibility of some alternative demonstration. That I should hoick my skirts up to my waist, spread my legs, and cut my wrists open perhaps, waiting to be found. I poked the point of the knife into the candlelit flesh of my left wrist, teasing up a peak of skin.

Was that a sound? I got up, alert, grabbed the light, then tiptoed back to the entrance of the parlour. No. No one was coming. Near the door I caught my hem and hurt my toe on a heavy cobbler’s last which stood on the boards. I noticed the ends of the wig trailing on to the floor. I stole the great drapy thing and took myself back down to my own room, suddenly powerfully aware that these lacy red appointments were nothing to do with Mary; that they must spring from my uncle’s design and from nowhere else. I had the flash that they were designed for me.

One morning I walked with Pet to Etta Bellamy’s house up further towards Hyde Park, where I was invited for tea. I had my suspicions that Etta was pregnant. I wondered who else there might be at the house, in case I should not be able to ask her. To my surprise there were lots of women there, a few of whom I knew. Etta was nowhere to be seen. I left Pet on the edge of the gathering with someone else who was a maid, then made my way toward the kitchen. A middle-aged fair woman called Margery came towards me carrying a tray of cakes.

‘Where’s Etta?’ I asked. ‘Hello Margery,’ getting my addresses in the wrong order.

‘You’re going in the right direction. Hello Kitty.’

It was a few steps down at the end of the passage into the kitchen. Etta and a number of other people were in the midst of the swelter, managing the supplies for the entertainment.

‘What is it?’ I whispered, getting near her free side and blotting her forehead with my pocket handkerchief.

‘You’ll see. Don’t ask all these people, either. I’ve left you in the dark. For a surprise. Nothing ever surprises you. I’m determined to.’

‘Are you pregnant?’ I asked. It was horribly bad manners. The question just came out. Sometimes I made these social gaffes. I can’t even remember if that word was current then. Probably I asked was she breeding, but it seems in memory the natural sort of language I would have blundered with.

‘Are you mad?’ she replied.

‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say now.’

‘It’s alright. Go up and wait in my saloon with all those other gossips.’

We drank expensive China tea from expensive little dishes. Etta played the society hostess, which is what she was. We rustled and fanned. We ate the cakes. I sat daringly on the floor as did one or two other younger girls. More status-conscious older women squeezed themselves on to the various seat levels. Pet and the ladies’ maids had to stand at the sides.

‘Now,’ said Etta. She opened an interior door. Through it, after a brief pause, walked a young girl whose skin was like fine leather, whose black hair hung in huge braids, and whose clothing was stiff, like leather too, in the form of coat and trousers covered with beadwork wildlife. ‘I introduce to you – Pawnee,’ said Etta. ‘She is an Indian Queen from Virginia, or thereabouts.’

‘Good day, ladies,’ said Pawnee, in impeccable English. ‘I hope the time of year finds you all well.’

Etta aimed a whisper at me. ‘Are you surprised?’

I was surprised.

‘A gap!’ laughed Etta.

‘A gap indeed,’ I said.

At my uncle’s house I said to Pawnee and Etta: ‘Do you know how when you are grown up the weeks and years seem to pass more rapidly than they did when you were a child?’

We were sitting in the back room looking out of the double doors at the sun on the goose-pecked grass between the honeysuckles in the yard.

‘I know what that is;’ said Pawnee. “The world is speeding up.’

‘Of course it isn’t.’ Etta contracted her nostrils; it exaggerated the fineness of her noble nose for a moment. ‘Why should it?’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘Well I hope it’s not, for my children’s sake.’

‘There. I was right,’ I said. ‘Rude but right. Sometimes when I know things I blurt them out. I can’t help it, it seems. But admit it, my dear.’

‘You are preoccupied,’ she replied. ‘Edmund is very skilful.’

‘What’s that? What is skilful?’ The other two both laughed.

Etta choked out: ‘Edmund is, Kit.’

And Pawnee added: ‘Let’s hope the world doesn’t speed up on him, then.’

‘My world is speeding up,’ I said. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Etta. My uncle’s fine bracket clock chimed the quarter.

“This is a prismatic sextant, Charles, in a new mode. I finished it last night. You’ll be impressed with the notion, I believe.’

‘Isaac, your ingenuity. It’s very fine.’

‘Take it. With my esteem. Oh, and make sure you show it to some-one when you call at the Admiralty. What a pity Cherry Russell’s no longer quite placed.’

‘Isaac. I’m overwhelmed.’

‘I’ll teach you to use it.’

‘You don’t subscribe to this Millennialist hysteria, then?’

‘It’s not according to my calculations,’ said my uncle seriously. ‘And if we are to adjust our calendar the false prophets will find themselves mightily confused.’ Charles laughed.

Round the fire in the back room on an evening when the red curtains were drawn and only a few candles were lit, I said to Pawnee: ‘I was once a boy. I was changed by my uncle into a girl.’

‘I was once a polecat,’ she said. ‘Were you ever anything else, Etta?’

Etta came back into the room, from which she’d been half out, putting on her mantle. ‘I must get home. Could you tell Tony I’m ready, Kit. Are you ready, Pawnee?’

‘It makes it difficult to know who you are,’ I said.

‘It’s not difficult for me,’ said Pawnee.

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘It’s very difficult for me.’

‘What do you mean, was I ever anything else? Tony!’ Etta leaned back out of the door and shouted up at the top flight. Tony!’

‘Etta was a bird,’ Pawnee said, thoughtfully. Her skirts rustled. She was dressed now in normal clothes; the native rig was just for the surprise. ‘A beautiful crow with dark shiny feathers. She flew high above the forest looking for babies and earrings, until there was a great fire, and the forest went away. Then she flew higher and higher. Edmund too was a crow. He found her in the tent of the sun; her wings were bleeding. Dark, dark blood. There were two drops. One was me and one was Kit.’

‘What’s so difficult for you, Kit?’ said Etta. ‘Are you talking about Charles Montagu?’

‘Everything,’ I said. ‘And my time is speeding up so much. So much.’

When they had gone I went in to join my uncle. He was occasionally drunk – ish. From the solitude of evenings when no one came.

‘What do you think of me, Catherine? Do you think I’m greatly changed?’

‘Greatly, Uncle.’

‘But not so greatly as you, eh, boy? I have maintained my gender.’

‘Have you, Uncle?’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Mean?’ A pause, during which he took another glass of the brown fluid he had in front of him.

‘D’you know what it is I do? What I did today, for example.’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘I found a series of mistakes in the accounts submitted to me by Mr Blackwall, my Superintendent of Works. I took luncheon. I interviewed a Person of Quality who thought he was interviewing me. And I saw to it that a notorious coiner was committed to be hanged. Catherine!’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘Well, do you hear me, or not?’

‘I hear you, Uncle.’

‘And you say nothing?’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘You have no comment at all.’

‘Am I not conformable? Do I displease you? What should I say?’

‘That I have nothing left of my former … frenzy?’

‘Your devil has left you, Uncle.’

A pause. ‘You speak mighty directly, when you speak at all, Catherine.’

Another pause. I could find no words that would fit him.

‘Don’t you find me strange, Kit? I leave the universe alone. I could wish I’d always left it alone.’

‘Don’t you find me strange, Uncle? Strange beyond belief?’

I wished he smoked, so that there might be a substance to these intervals.

‘What do you think of Charles, Kit?’

‘He’s a great man who is fabulously rich and runs the country almost. And he makes you feel cheerful with his visits. He is your friend.’

‘Do you think he looks handsome, Kit? Why don’t you sew or something of an evening? Etta Bellamy embroiders. Didn’t my sister teach you to sew?’

‘She tried, Uncle.’ His face eased into an uncertain smile.

‘Ah.’ Then again: ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Charles. Do you think he’s handsome?’

I’d lost the grip on my sex. I wondered if, being a little the worse for drink, he was going to make some appalling confession regarding his feelings, and to ask for my opinion – or my blessing.

‘Yes. He’s a good-looking man, in an unconventional way; although he’s smaller than you,’ I ventured carefully.

‘Well?’ he said, looking pointedly at me. I glanced down and smoothed my skirt. ‘Are you blushing, Kit?’

‘You needn’t confide in me, Uncle. Shall I make you some coffee?’

‘The Devil, Kit … I beg your pardon. But you don’t have to play the coy virgin with me.’

‘Isn’t that what I must play, Uncle?’ With the merest trace of an intention to wound.

‘Not if you’ll have him, Kit. I grant you he can’t consider marriage, even though he’s free now. Sadly. But he thinks a good deal of you.’

I felt dazed, as though I were a sycamore seed, newly fallen from the tree.

That night in my bedroom I realised the true significance of my uncle’s choice of décor. He wasn’t just the civil servant he claimed to be. He had a new project which had actively outstripped mine. He was way ahead of me. It was a whorehouse – a laboratory whorehouse – and I was the whore.