Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven

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