Newton’s Niece

‘Christ, Seco. Supposing some of the kids have gone in. They’ll damage themselves, poor little sods. And I’ll get the sack. Were the windows open?’ In a mixture of altruism and self-interest I leapt up, swallowed the water and dashed back into the block. A speechless boy was on the point of entering the toilets.

‘No, no, no, no, no! You go to toilet – you die!’ said Seco, slitting his own throat with his forefinger and pointing to the door to emphasise the danger. A look of terror came over the boy’s face as he turned to flee in tears.

I pushed open the door. Thanks to the open window which had allowed me to be so mysteriously oppressed by the lorry, all was well, beyond a faint bleachy smell. A teenager with a palsy was struggling to coordinate himself at the urinal.

The Tower of Bedlam

Holding the yellow canister – my passport – against my grey overalls, I stood windily at a high spot. The hazy blue of the clear half of the sky was air-brushed on to space behind the stucco of the gallery frames: no glass in these slot-thin outer arches. I’d finished the climb and was standing facing a pointed door. It was the entrance to the Art Workshop.

A surprising location: to my amazement I’d been led to the very top of the tower at which I’d stared as I lay painfully on the grass beside the children’s block, waiting for my glass of water. The ascent had started by means of a grand staircase, intended mainly for show, clinging to the inside of the tower’s walls. This had quickly given way to a series of wooden flights which led up from stage to stage. I’d waited for Polly to catch up with me at each one, but had been too impatient to enjoy the vistas over the woodlands of Surrey. There was a layer, as it were, of industrial machinery, and what looked like storage tanks for the oil-fired heating system. Finally, punctuated by a few mysterious doors, there came a spiral in which one lost track of number before emerging high up at the open gallery. In this institution the entitlement to Art Therapy, if Polly’s geography was correct, was clearly dependent more on physical fitness than on psychiatric need.

‘There! In there!’ said Polly, recovering her puff and opening the door. She pointed through the arch at what could almost be described as a bower. I peered in, past the faded timetable of classes pinned to the oak. Who would have thought that this exalted place with its lightflood of ivory and its breezy hangings of unswept gossamer would be the place? I might have wandered about fruitlessly in the shrieking maze of corridors had it not been for Polly, whom I’d met in the dining-hall; as I had on my first day in the job, swimming towards me with her outstretched arms and big wet kisses, full of the Lord’s innocence, sighing into my ear: ‘You’re my only ‘eart, darlin’. My best ‘eart.’ Kiss. Squeeze. ‘Ooh you’re my ‘eart, sweet’eart. Look at you!’ Hug. Kiss. Bristle scratch. ‘One true love (deep breath, long aspiration) hhheart.’

Polly, in her maroon slippers, with her three gypsy teeth and black beard – I didn’t know the clinical name for her condition, no more worldly-wise than a toddler – was one of the ugliest and most spiritually open beings I’d ever met. She rejoiced my heart. And she’d taken me conspiratorially to this eyrie where they ‘do pain’in’. Only she wasn’t allowed to paint. “Cos I carn pain’ nothin!’ she happily stated of the foul prohibition. ‘Nothin. Aint no use me pain’in. Cos I cam pain’ nothin. Ar, you’re my true love ‘eart, aint you, darlin. Cam pain’ nothin, me. But you. Ar, you’re my …’ Kiss. ‘Pain’ me a pitcher, darlin.’

I stood in the arch with a certain apprehension. What was I doing after all? Why was I intrigued by the mention of a woman and her images – to the extent that I should have tangled with chlorine and then made this bizarre climb? I suspected a dissociation; had I run up here in an urge physically to separate myself from an accumulation of pain? Did I expect her to inform me; to ease the intensity through some sympathetic current? Was it hope? I’d seen her before in my duties, going about like other patients. ‘Ms Jay’ didn’t appear mad. Her face was urgent, yes, but her body looked as if she were cold – as if there would be no more summers for her, nor for the missing shape she appeared to cradle sometimes, down in the straggle of her long brown hair. Sometimes too in her ceaseless drift about the place, I’d seen her pause, her lips moving privately, while the twitch of a smile hovered about them – as if she were answering the whispers of a ghostly lover standing behind her. But she hadn’t touched any chords in me – not then. And my revelation down there in the toilets had spilled too much too soon. I was resisting it; who would not indeed? So it was that something at the back of my mind drove me on all day towards what ought perhaps to have been a gentler discovery. For the forgotten and the forbidden constantly seek to be brought to light. I ventured in.

An almost untouched relic of the Arts and Crafts era, it might have been used for an interior by Holman Hunt – the Virgin’s Studio, mawkish, but a distillation of the pure. There was an arrangement of old easels, tables and stools. Certain Victorian values were enshrined here. The discreetly barred larger windows which ran all round between the oriels at the corners had stained borders with emblems. One of them was open, unhasped and swinging slightly, the only moving thing. I could see through it dark cloud-heaps gathering over the western horizon. But the studio was unoccupied.

On newspaper on a cupboard top nearest us stood a collection of crude uglinesses in clay, left by sad hands lovingly to dry. I wandered past it, uncertain what to do. In the centre someone had been sitting very recently at the main table. Brushes stood in a jar of cloudy, greenish water, and the house on the paper, with its wonky perspective, had pools of colour still wet on its lawns. Beside it was laid out a photographic print, monochrome, enlarged, clearly the source material for the work: a big, old house, in front of which was a car and a tiny family almost lost in the graining. A plastic cup of coffee stood nearly full, steaming faintly.

‘Ar, nice,’ said Polly, picking up the painting so that the greens trailed in droplets down over the bright blobs and dabs that were herbaceous borders. She put her head on one side. ‘Ar, nice.’

Behind us, on the wall of the arched entrance, one corner and much of the space had been partitioned off and labelled ‘Do Not Enter When Light Is On’. The warning light was on; but the dark-room door wasn’t closed. Perhaps that was where she was. I put my head in. The tower’s windows had been faced off with boards; in the murk I made out a sink, a photographic enlarger, and, on the bench nearest us, a white porcelain tray in whose chemical a darkening image lay. Polly pushed by me and took the thing out, dripping.

‘Tha’s ’er, look. See! Tha’s ’er. Ar.’ It was a formal portrait. ‘See!’ said Polly, pointing with her finger into the overexposed emulsion. Half out of the door, I held one edge. The image, taken in happier times, restored her youth and confidence. That face … An excitement tugged at my heart from beyond the sudden rational grasp of who she was. For now I could place her at last: a woman from public life. Her name was Celia Jenner.

We hadn’t noticed that there rested on the corner of a desk a cigarette with an inch of ash beyond the burn. I laid down both the enlargement and my canister and made as if to put it out; the ash fell off as I picked it up. ‘Ms Jenner!’ I called, not quite sure what to do. Was there a toilet somewhere up here? Or down a stage, off the stairs perhaps?

‘Ms Jenner!’ I knew why the doctors had described her as a special case. It had been a heavy political story. She’d taken the rap for a financial scandal in her party, a homelessness project, had it been? A striking and distinguished academic, she’d moved into the public eye, and found herself manipulated. And then a breakdown; I remembered the papers now. The tabloids had claimed she couldn’t hack it, of course, but there must have been more to it. Much more, to put her in this state. And no private clinic – still a woman of principle.

Polly called as well: ‘Muzz! Muzz! Where you gone, Muzz?’

I looked again at the haunting photograph – so like. A pair of birds suddenly appeared in the room and proceeded to flap crazily against one of the barred windows: martins, with white fronts and thin tails. They had a frightful urgency. Polly grabbed on to me and the cigarette spun out of my hand on to a stack of loose artwork.

‘I don’ like birds!’ She clutched at my overalls. ‘I don’ like ’em!’ She screamed as one launched itself in our direction. ‘Aaaah! They’ll get in my ‘air.’ She pulled me across the room as protection. An easel toppled.

‘It’s alright, Polly. They’re as scared as you are. Just keep calm.’

But she was in no degree calm. ‘Get ’em away! Get ’em away! My ‘air!’ With one hand she covered her head; with the other she held very firmly to me and yanked me to the door. ‘Help! I don’ like ’em! Polly don’ like birds! Fuckin’ birds!’ She now had the one hand over her offending mouth and had started to cry with the extremity of her distress and guilt. But she still hung on.

I got her outside the door and tried to force her to let go, because I’d seen flames starting where the cigarette had fallen.

‘Don’ go back! There’s birds!’

‘There’s a fire, Polly.’ Everything, absolutely everything, had gone out of control. But in turn tears sprang up for me. I had the room. It wasn’t Victorian – no, earlier. I have to go in. A man in a full wig holds a stick. There is a child. Something unspeakable takes place. Eyes like the eyes of a monstrous owl are so close, so frightening. Here are coats with many buttons. Men have wide hats. My mother’s breasts are pushed up by the squeeze of a curious dress. It is a voiceless, horrible knowledge that somehow it all makes sense at last; but it is impossible.

I scrabbled with Polly’s wrists. Whenever I got one grip off she’d grab me again, with surprising strength. We wrestled for the doorway – I could hear the crackling sound inside. I must get in there to stamp it out. At the same time I knew that trace from the past was important. Both worlds fought for the freakish moment. Even up here in this unsullied haven I have brought my chaos and created a destruction. My ankle felt the splash of wet; the stone floor under us turned dark, and I saw the drips at the hem of Polly’s skirt. She wailed in embarrassment, but she didn’t let go. We twisted round in that outer gallery again. ‘Polly! Don’t you see? Polly!’

In a flash, there is a yard with horses; the copulation of dogs; the story of a wolf. Upstairs, in the house, there is a wig, a window, a coat with its full skirt hung on the chair, a woman’s dress waiting, pain which can’t be screamed. Hang on to something – it will end. It will be over before I die. Tied to their beds. Downstairs my mother plays the spinet. Outside, the grind of cartwheels and the thump of hoofs: inside, the peculiar breathing, panting, riding. And if I speak my mother will die. ‘Polly!’ I wrenched free and sprang into the room.

The Lull

There was a livid sky now. Driving the Ford back to Walton after I’d worked out my shift, I watched through the windscreen the heavy cumuli that had been building from the West ever since I came down from the tower. I’d said no word of my efforts with the fire; not to anybody. Polly was incoherent. I certainly hadn’t told Seco. I’d changed my overall and kept my distance, even when he tried to chaff me to good humour, and called me over to enjoy from our scullery the spectacle of the emergency services, and the chance to down tools. So, of course, he knew no more of my activities than the chlorine incident.

‘Eeeh, Jacob! Vieni qui! We sit down for a smoke, yes? You an’ me. No one’s bother us, eh? It’s OK. No more gas. No problems. Look at that lot – commotions, eh? Why don’t you just relax ever? You find the Art Room, yes?’

All seemed lost now under the quickening wind. I drove along by the Cowey Sale. Great bruising thunderheads massed above the ugly bridge, and darkened the meadows. The river was ruffled, yellow and purple.

I turned through the town and, reaching home, crunched on to the gravel patch where I was allowed to park. On a gust I smelled, like a dog, the hot drift of rain to come.

My quarters were close: a cupboard for a kitchen and two poky cabins so cramped in the roof space, with their sloping ceilings, that you couldn’t pass from one to the other without straddling the void of the top step. Now, as I bridged it after coming up the stairs, I felt again that today had taken it upon itself to peel me open. It was the most fraught day of my life as yet, and still it had not done with me, though the sirens and ‘commotions’ were past. I didn’t sense how completely the walls of my world were cracking; what leaks had appeared and what flood threatened. I put it down to stress, Seco and Saphir; fumes, images and blurred deeds. I rested against the Baby Belling for a moment and took a grip on the angle iron which supported the house’s cold-water tank.

But the smoke was still on my clothes. On what passed for the landing I tore them off and dumped them into a black bin-liner. Then I returned to the cooking space to wash in the sink.

Outside there came the first grumbling note of the storm. Far below, the front door banged. Mrs Dangerfield, my landlady, left for her rendezvous of the evening. My hands smoothing soap to soothe my forehead found bristles for eyebrows. They’d been scorched off. I felt upwards to my hair, searching the headache for a little tell-tale bump, but there was nothing. I dared not look in the glass for signs of charring in case I should seem a clown, a buffoon, a Grimaldi. Thus by increasing associations, signs and traces, the god of my past sharpened the edge each time before laying to his work at my hairline.

I would have welcomed an anaesthetic: alcohol, pills – alas I had none; companionship, the soothe of rain even. A pulse of lightning split the view from my tiny kitchen look-out, touching my gaze cruelly with its intimacy, until the echoes of the discharge died away. Dry and still lay the broad garden and the twin apple trees that grew out of the halfway hedge. Behind that, through the little pathway, waited the untended vegetable patch; and right down by the far fence beside a rush of periwinkle, the shed with its overwinding of creeper almost audibly rotted. A lush, dank, heated, Summer garden, it lay unmoving, waiting for the storm.

The bedroom looked out over the same garden. On the wall there was a vestigial mantelpiece and the traces of a fireplace; while on the mantelpiece itself much to Mrs Dangerfield’s discomfiture sat my two skulls. I’d named them Entropy and Gravity, but I didn’t know how I’d come by them. Standing naked at the window, I felt they were conspiring behind my back. A tree of electricity welded roots to neighbouring Weybridge. Almost at once the ruptured air hammered at my eardrums and rattled the bedroom window. I felt myself shiver as I finished towelling myself dry.

The very verdure of the garden was alert, still, and charged to shudder up at the sky. I opened the window and smelled, in the humid air under the grey, an energy in each green tendril. There; that was the present, waiting to continue; but I would not bear it, and turned to my bed. Perhaps exhaustion might disconnect me.

Again the air roared over the room, the house and the town. Almost in synchrony, my past chopped at my head, and the ache flared. Excruciated, I turned on my side to where I could see from the bed my clothes lying not far away, in their open black plastic bag. I thought I could smell the waft of char. The two skulls grinned, and then appeared to listen, I fancied, for a new note: a tentative patter that quickly swelled to a drumming din against the tile and timber immediately above me. Outside, the sky was emptying at last as if it planned to wash us all away.

Sleep came suddenly, and then dreams, as if pain was the developing chemical of an entire holographic film; as if a surgeon entered the shatter of my brainpan and started rebuilding every structure brick by illuminated brick. I conceived in that enlightenment a meta-Byzantine edifice full of images beside which the asylum itself, with all its old painted nooks, its dusty corners, alcoves, recesses, curlicues, cusps and mouldings, was an inhibited matchbox. Memories like moths came to life, stirred from far off in the rain, and headed for my bedroom. They passed the glass of my window, aligning their molecules with the molecular spaces in the structure of the panes, and entered whole and flapping, as big as storm birds.

When I awoke from that torrential sleep I had the key to it all. Now I understood why it was it should have been blotted out; for who could have lived with all that? Either forget, or go mad. Yes, with the bucketing along of time there had been no rest; no place for drawing breath, to order, to transcribe and to persuade myself.

But now I determined through my tears to begin this ragged chronicle, describing nothing less than a bulging, three-hundred-year-old universe, full of the echoes and resoundings of all knowledge, of all time and space, of all the stories my unusual flesh was heir to.

For I knew why the two skulls were on my mantelpiece, and who was the guardian of the Elixir of Life which my Uncle Isaac made with my help and by accident after twenty years of crazy research in his laboratory in Trinity garden. And I believed I had the first hint of why I tried to find Celia Jenner, and how I acquired the name of Jacob, and who were the Hatted Hummers. And of whom Saphir the Indian reminded me, of the Batavian Thorn, of Inertia and its cure, of the melting of my heart, and of the horrible speeding up of time.

So I took to my other little garret room, the one at the front, in the morning after the four elements celebrated themselves. Outside my dormer window the great oak tree by the Hersham Road, full of its waking Summer beauty, stirred in the cleansed air. The little caterpillars on its leaves set to their task of covering my car in sticky blobs. The sky was rich with day. One sodium streetlamp was still on, red, and reminding of the night. I sat at my desk to begin the story, which you will not believe.

First Things

My mother brought me in. I was dressed well in cleverly designed restraining garments; my coat, for example, gave the illusion that I stood habitually with my arms folded. They were in fact secured by the sleeves. I was fourteen. There’d been a bloody civil war and a bloodless revolution. The mathematics of gravity had just been published, and the universe had been told that it was dead. I had no speech but I could sing. I sang to him. To my Uncle Isaac. Church songs and street songs, psalms and farm songs; the old revolutionary songs my Granduncle Ayskew said he’d learnt in the army, that I didn’t know the meaning of:

Let us with a gladsome mind Make away with all we find. Church and King will ay endure Till they take the common cure.

Here’s an Earl and here’s a Lord, Harlot’s hair and Spainish sword, Church and King will ay endure Till they take the common cure.

All who seek to heap up gain While men landless do remain They their profit shall endure When they take the common cure.

Let them think on Charlie’s axe Ere the next ungodly tax, For His mercies ay endure Taken with the common cure.

I piped, but my voice was breaking, and not just because of my age. My fit of rage was beginning to give way to the other emotion, hopelessness. Soon the restraint would hardly be needed and I could be sat in a corner without danger to myself or others. My mother used the fact that I could sing to shore up the lie she told herself that I was normal. She liked to give out that I was her young gentleman protector on the journey from Northamptonshire. And whenever she, flushed and carnal, came to Cambridge on one of her various negotiations, leaving me in my Uncle Isaac’s rational care, she would first stand me in the centre of that charred and reeking chamber and have me sing. Why was it that I sang? Somebody once referred to the vocal art as licensed screaming. The negotiation that Autumn, I think, was with a Mr Trueman.

My mother was very persuasive. I see her now with her strict coiffure and her distinguished features, which were only belied by a moistness she managed to secrete on her lips even as her Purity eyes engaged you. Ordinary men melted; my Uncle Isaac shuddered.

So many years ago. I said you would not believe. I hear my young voice again, knowing and unknowing. It is not the voice of a stripling hero of fiction. I lack the clear skin and bold dash of a handsome Johnny who within a year or two will escape the hangman and sail off to Virginia in search of a fortune. I have the feel and looks, beneath my mother’s grooming, of what I can only describe as a wolf. My teeth are too often exposed and there is a distinct howl to some of my high notes. The skin of my face is blotched from the various scratchings and attacks I have made on it. I register and understand what goes on around me but I do not take part, being racked with waves of rage and fear which make me pant, and occasionally growl. In my sullen phases I know I am collapsing inside. I can read well and write; for I may be uncontrollable, and inadmissible in society, but I am not stupid. Far from it: I have had enforced leisure for study, and my father is a clergyman. Now I remember it, he lies at home, dying, and my mother must be concealing her anxiety about income.

It was an Autumn of quiet red celebration. Low sun illuminated the Cambridge brick and stone so that it glowed brighter than the blue sky it cut into. That wonderful light struck inward at the casement, but I could not let myself feast on it.

My uncle, at fifty-one, claimed a total indifference to music or poetry in any form, but nevertheless made a point of shooting pained looks and drawing in his breath when any of my notes came out flawed. So the singing ritual pleased neither of us. He too was ‘in his fit’, and as she denied mine my mother over-acknowledged his, casting my music as a species of psychological bandage. She said it ‘eased him’ to hear my assortment of canticles and bawdry. She particularly toadied to him now that he was famous and no longer the other embarrassment of the family; and we were facing destitution.

Isaac’s dis-ease at the time was that he was laid low with an unusual melancholy. It was a bleak and restless frenzy. His bowels griped him and he went about a little stooped with his hands clutched across his belly, as if his body were feeling the loss of a child. But his look remained undemonstrative. As for the proof sheets of a special reprint of his Principia that Mr Halley sent, he could hardly bear to see their impressions. I grasped him intuitively, but could not articulate then what I can describe now – that he was at the mercy of what he had striven so hard to exclude from the whole universe: human feelings. He was experiencing a reaction equal and opposite to Monsieur Fatio de Duillier’s Platonic teasing – that sly, Swiss and mathematical little chienne. Mr Newton’s great brow was greatly knitted in a Type of stifled despair. Each icy orb promised to melt into a tear. But could not.

For politeness’ sake he thanked my mother shortly when I’d finished. Every time, after I’d performed, he’d refer to me as a young siren, and laugh cynically. I disliked his jokes; they were wounding. Then he begged leave to cast himself down in the little cluttered bedchamber. I recall my mother following him and fidgeting in its doorframe. It was a frame only, because Uncle Isaac had taken off all the interior doors, including what used to be Mr Wickens’s, to aid the supply of draught, and to ease all the coming and going.