[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter by John Banville

Author:John Banville [Banville, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In moments like that you can feel memory gathering its material, beady-eyed and voracious, like a demented photographer. I don’t mean the big scenes, the sunsets and car crashes, I mean the creased black-and-white snaps taken in a bad light, with a lop-sided horizon and that smudged thumb-print in the foreground. Such are the pictures of Charlotte, in my mind. In the best of them she is not present at all, someone jogged my elbow, or the film was faulty. Or perhaps she was present and has withdrawn, with a pained smile. Only her glow remains. Here is an empty chair in rain-light, cut flowers on a workbench, an open window with lightning flickering distantly in the dark. Her absence throbs in these views more powerfully, more poignantly than any presence.

When I search for the words to describe her I can’t find them. Such words don’t exist. They would need to be no more than forms of intent, balanced on the brink of saying, another version of silence. Every mention I make of her is a failure. Even when I say just her name it sounds like an exaggeration. When I write it down it seems impossibly swollen, as if my pen had slipped eight or nine redundant letters into it. Her physical presence itself seemed overdone, a clumsy representation of the essential she. That essence was only to be glimpsed obliquely, on the outer edge of vision, an image always there and always fleeting, like the afterglow of a bright light on the retina.

If she was never entirely present for me in the flesh, how could I make her to be there for me in the lodge, at night, in the fields on my solitary rambles? I must concentrate on things impassioned by her passing. Anything would do, her sun hat, a pair of muddied wellingtons standing splay-footed at the back door. The very ordinariness of these mementoes was what made them precious. That, and the fact that they were wholly mine. Even she would not know their secret significance. Two little heart-shaped polished patches rubbed on the inner sides of those wellingtons by her slightly knock-kneed walk. The subtle web of light and shade that played over her face through the slack straw of the brim of her hat. Who would notice such things, that did not fix on her with the close-up lens of love?

Love. That word. I seem to hear quotation marks around it, as if it were the title of something, a stilted sonnet, say, by a silver poet. Is it possible to love someone of whom one has so little? For through the mist now and then I glimpsed, however fleetingly, the fact that what I had of her was hardly enough to bear a great weight of passion. Perhaps call it concentration, then, the concentration of the painter intent on drawing the living image out of the potential of mere paint. I would make her incarnate. By the force of my unwavering, meticulous attention she would rise on her scallop shell through the waves and be.

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