Free [Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter by John Banville Page B

go on. I’m not a historian anymore.
    The first thing I noticed when I woke was that
Ottilie was gone. The bed was warm, the pillow still
damp from her tears. Then I heard the car, labouring
up the drive in first gear. I must have dropped back to
sleep for a moment, the voices raised in the distance
seemed part of a dream. Then I opened my eyes and lay
listening in the darkness, my heart pounding. The silence
had the quality of disaster: it was less a silence than
an aftermath. I went to the window. Lights were coming
on in the house, one after another, as if someone were running dementedly from switch to switch. I pulled on
trousers and a sweater. The night was pitch-black and
still, smelling of laurel and sodden earth. The grass tickled
my bare ankles. The car was slewed across the drive, like a damaged animal, its engine running. The front
door of the house stood open. There was no one to be
seen.
    I found Edward in the drawing-room. He was sitting
unconscious on the floor with his back against the
couch, his head lolling on a cushion, his hands resting
palm upward at his sides. A mandala of blood-streaked
vomit was splashed on the carpet between his splayed
legs. The crotch of his trousers was stained where he
had soiled himself. I stood and gaped at him, disgust
and triumph jostling in me for position. Triumph, oh
yes. Suddenly, through opposing doors, Charlotte and
Ottilie swept in, like mechanical figures in a clock tower.
They saw me and stopped. “I heard voices,” I said.
Charlotte blinked. She wore an old plaid dressing-gown.
Her feet were bare. Less Cranach now than El
Greco. We were quite still, all three, and then everyone
began to speak at once.
    “I couldn’t get through,” Ottilie said.
    Charlotte put a hand to her forehead. “What?”
    “There was no reply.”
    “Oh.”
    “We’ll have to—”
    “Did you ring the right—”
    “What?”
    In the hall a hand appeared on the stairs, a small
bare foot, an eye.
    “I’ll have to go into town,” Ottilie said. “Christ.”
She looked at me. Her face was still raw from weeping.
I turned away. I turned away. “Get back to bed, you!”
she cried, and the figure on the stairs vanished. She went
out, slamming the door, and in a moment we heard the
car depart. Gravel from the spinning tyres sprayed the
window. That wall, see, down there . Charlotte sighed.
“She’s gone for . . .” She thought a moment, frowning;
“. . . for the doctor.” She walked about the room as in
a dream, picking up things, holding them for a moment,
as if to verify something, and then putting them down
again. Edward belched, or perhaps it was a groan. She
paused, and stood motionless, listening; she did not look
at him. Then she went to the switch by the door and
carefully, as if it were an immensely complicated and
necessary operation, turned off the main lights. A lamp
on a low table by the couch was still burning. She
crossed the room and sat down on a high-backed chair,
facing the window. It all had the look of a ritual she had
performed many times before. Something, the lamplight
perhaps, the curious toylike look of things, the
helpless gestures meticulously performed, stirred an ancient
memory in me of another room, where, a small
boy, I had played with two girl cousins while above our
heads adult footsteps came and went, pacing out the
ceremony of someone’s dying.
    “Is it raining, I wonder,” Charlotte murmured. I think she had forgotten I was there. I went forward
softly and stood behind her. In the black window her
face was reflected. I looked down at the pale defenceless
parting of her hair; in the opening of her dressing-gown
I could see the gentle slope of a breast. How can I describe
to you that moment, in lamplight, at dead of
night, the smell of vomit mingled with the milky perfume
of her hair, and that gross thing sitting there, grotesque
and comic, like a murdered pavement artist, and
no world around us