[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter Read Free Page A

There are people
to whom you feel compelled to explain yourself. “I
got lost,” I said, “in the garden, believe it or not, and
then I saw you here, and . . .” She was still watching
me, hanging on my words; I wondered if she were perhaps
hard of hearing. The possibility was oddly touching.
Or was it simply that she wasn’t really listening?
Her face was empty of all save a sense of something
withheld. She made me think of someone standing on
tiptoe behind a glass barrier, every part of her, eyes,
lips, the gloves that she clutches, straining to become
the radiant smile that awaits the beloved’s arrival. She
was all potential. On the bench where she had been
working lay an open secateurs, and a cut plant with
purple flowers.
    We went among the tables, wading through a dead
and standing pool of air, and she explained her work,
naming the plants, the strains and hybrids, in a neutral
voice. Mostly it was plain commercial stuff, apple tree-lets, flower bulbs, vegetables, but there were some
strange things, with strange pale stalks, and violent blossoms,
and bearded fruit dangling among the glazed, still
leaves. Her father had started the business, and she had
taken it over when her brother was killed. “We still
trade as Grainger Nurseries.” I nodded dully. The heat,
the sombre hush, the contrast between the stillness here
and the windy tumult pressing against the glass all
around us, provoked in me a kind of excited apprehension,
as if I were being led, firmly, but with infinite tact,
into peril. Ranked colours thronged me round, crimson,
purples, and everywhere green and more green, glabrous
and rubbery and somehow ferocious. “In Holland,”
she said, “in the seventeenth century, a
nurseryman could sell a new strain of tulip for twenty
thousand pounds.” It had the flat sound of something
read into a recorder. She looked at me, her hands folded,
waiting for my comment. I smiled, and shook my head,
trying to look amazed. We reached the door. The summer
breeze seemed a hurricane after the silence within.
My shirt clung to my back. I shivered. We walked a
little way down a path under an arch of rhododendrons.
The tangled arthritic branches let in scant light, and there
was a smell of mossy rot reminiscent of the tang of damp
flesh. Then at once, unaccountably, we were at the rear
of the house. I was confused; the garden had surreptitiously
taken me in a circle. Charlotte murmured something,
and walked away. On the drive under the
sycamores I paused and looked back. The house was impassive, except where a curtain in an open upstairs
window waved frantically in the breeze. What did I
expect? Some revelation? A face watching me through
sky-reflecting glass, a voice calling my name? There was
nothing—but something had happened, all the same.

    The child’s name was Michael. I couldn’t fit him to the
Lawlesses. True, he was given, like Edward, to skulking.
I would come upon him in the lanes roundabout,
poking in the hedge and muttering to himself, or just
standing, with his hands behind him as if hiding something,
waiting for me to pass by. Sitting with a book
under a tree in the orchard one sunny afternoon, I looked
up to find him perched among the branches, studying
me. Another time, towards twilight, I spotted him on
the road, gazing off intently at something below the
brow of the hill where he stood. He had not heard me
behind him, and I paused, wondering what it was that
merited such rapt attention. Then with a pang I heard
it, rising through the stillness of evening, the tinny music
of a carnival in the village below.
    One evening Edward stopped at the lodge on his
way up from the village. He had the raw look of a man
lately dragged out of bed and thrust under a cold tap,
his eyes were red-rimmed, his hair lank. He hummed
and hawed, scuffing the gravel of the roadside, and then
abruptly said: “Come up and have a bite to eat.” I think