[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter Read Free Page B

that was the first time I had been inside the house. It
was dim, and faintly musty. There was a hurley stick
in the umbrella stand, and withered daffodils in a vase
on the hall table. In an alcove a clock feathered the silence
and let drop a single wobbly chime. Edward paused to
consult a pocket watch, frowning. In the fusty half-light
his face had the grey sheen of putty. He hiccupped softly.
    Dinner was in the big whitewashed kitchen at the
back of the house. I had expected a gaunt dining-room,
linen napkins with a faded initial, a bit of old silver
negligently laid. And it was hardly dinner, more a high
tea, with cold cuts and limp lettuce, and a bottle of salad
cream the colour of gruel. The tablecloth was plastic.
Charlotte and Ottilie were already halfway through their
meal. Charlotte looked in silence for a moment at my
midriff, and I knew at once I shouldn’t have come. Ottilie
set a place for me. The barred window looked out
on a vegetable garden, and then a field, and then the
blue haze of distant woods. Sunlight through the leaves
of a chestnut tree in the yard was a ceaseless shift and
flicker in the corner of my eye. Edward began to tell a
yarn he had heard in the village, but got muddled, and
sat staring blearily at his plate, breathing. Someone
coughed. Ottilie pursed her lips and began to whistle
silently. Charlotte with an abrupt spastic movement
turned to me and in a loud voice said:
    “Do you think we’ll give up neutrality?”
    “Give up . . . ?” The topic was in the papers. “Well,
I don’t know, I—”
    “Yes, tell us now,” Edward said, suddenly stirring
himself and thrusting his great bull head at me, “tell us
what you think, I’m very interested, we’re all very interested,
aren’t we all very interested? A man like you
would know all about these things.”
    “I think we’d be very—”
    “Down here of course we haven’t a clue. Crowd
of bog-trotters!” He grinned, snorting softly and pawing
the turf.
    “I think we’d be very unwise to give it up,” I said.
    “And what about that power station they want to
put up down there at Carnsore? Bloody bomb, blow us
all up, some clown with a hangover press the wrong
button, we won’t need the Russians. What?” He was
looking at Charlotte. She had not spoken. “Well what’s
wrong with being ordinary,” he said, “like any other
country, having an army and defending ourselves? Tell
me what’s wrong with that.” He pouted at us, a big
resentful baby.
    “What about Switzerland?” Ottilie said; she giggled.
    “Switzerland? Switzerland? Ha. Milkmen and chocolate
factories, and, what was it the fellow said, cuckoo
clocks.” He turned his red-rimmed gaze on me again.
“Too many damn neutrals,” he said darkly.
    Charlotte sighed, and looked up from her plate at
last.
    “Edward,” she said, without emphasis. He did not
take his eyes off me, but the light went out in his face, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him. “Not that
I give a damn anyway,” he muttered, and meekly took
up his spoon. So much for current affairs.
    I cursed myself for being there, and yet I was agog.
A trapdoor had been lifted briefly on dim thrashing
forms, and now it was shut again. I watched Edward
covertly. The sot. He had brought me here for an alibi
for his drinking, or to forestall recriminations. I saw the
whole thing now, of course: he was a waster, Charlotte
kept the place going, everything had been a mistake,
even the child. It all fitted, the rueful look and the glazed
eye, the skulking, the silences, the tension, that sense I
had been aware of from the beginning of being among
people facing away from me, intent on something I
couldn’t see. Even the child’s air of sullen autonomy
was explained. I looked at Charlotte’s fine head, her
slender neck, that hand resting by her plate. Leaf-shadow
stirred on the table like the shimmer of tears.
How could I let her know that I