Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven

arrangement.’

      When he had sat the man down he bundled me into my sleeping space and tied the tapes that crossed my arms again. He would have made me stay there out of sight but that the other man appeared in the doorway and started asking questions and opening a conversation. My uncle explained that I was dumb. ‘He is … distempered. His mother gets exhausted with him. There is a need for … unusual measures.’ But he did bring me to sit near, if not with them, in the main chamber by the furnace.

      I had been sometimes stared at and mocked if I went into the streets, but next to my Uncle Isaac my looks must have achieved a slight advantage. He never dressed up or received company – he rarely washed, combed his hair or lurched as far as his wig, so preoccupied was he with the race against matter and, currently I guessed, the impossible disorder Fatio had already caused to his carefully cauterised feelings. Fatio had striking, somewhat petite features, a fashionable get-up, and unusual manners which I took to be French. In my experience no other like this had ever appeared in his chamber – such a young man of mode. I had never seen one. Behind my mask of exclusion from everything I gawped; while Isaac hastily and apologetically cleaned his face at the bowl, changed his coat from the one which was all burnt and spangled from molten metal, and made an attempt with a periwig.

      Acknowledging myself half-animal I was very responsive to atmosphere. I picked up the ghastly tension in the air between the two men, although they preserved a brittle politesse, seeing that I occupied the third comer of a triangle. I was not exactly a public to their privacy, but I was, as far as they knew, sentient. As a result they were more open than they might have been in front of another, but yet cautious, and embarrassed. And still Fatio seemed to want to include me in the meeting. I felt there was some final passage of feeling, some quod erat demonstrandum, that one man wanted to engage in, but could not because of me; and some teasing defence or private cruelty that the other could better engage in because of me. So everything in the room felt more mad and distraught than ever.

      He had brought no servant. Since Uncle rarely troubled the company in Hall at that time, they made a meal of some sort with what my mother had left and other scraps of food they could find. Isaac wouldn’t untie my hands but fed me pieces and a little wine. The other man joined in, laughing, and pressing the food against my lips when I already had a mouthful, to provoke me and see me snap. Nicholas Fatio drank the most wine. He’d been away, he said, since their former break, which had left him so desolated, he claimed. He’d taken a second tour, and had also visited his mother in Switzerland. He was now recovered and had called in for good fellowship, and to show there were no hard feelings. And to learn of the progress of the Great Work, to which he reminded my uncle he had contributed so much in former months.

      As he came to feel the effects of the wine, and because my uncle seemed to have become almost as incapable of speech as I was, he began to grow rhapsodic – to fill the painful vacuum in the room. The tour was a great cure for the distempered soul. He recommended it to us both in his curious English. He was casual about it all – a much travelled man. But although I might have flown at him and bitten him had I been untied, or have scratched at my own ears to drown out the sound, I could not but listen and be overcome by the descriptions he made with his words. They threatened and compelled me as much as the stories I’d heard as a little boy when the children were eaten in the forest. From the camera obscura of my mind I saw, through his words, and through his memory, the exotic, damned, Papist lands to the South; the vineyards of Provence standing in the baking Summer heat, the enchanted white-walled cities and palaces; the pitiless Alps where the air bit and purified the lungs, and where wild mountaineers used women as currency; and then Italy herself, where no surface went unpainted, and where fornication was an Art. Seeing me half-snarling but listening, Monsieur Fatio engaged his wit. I believe I was the earpiece of a powerful Amplification. For me the Duomi were pressed all over with gold leaf; for me the cloves of European garlic opened like culinary sunflowers, ravishing the imagination of my brutalised taste with new and magic meals; for me the floating wonder of Venice reflected itself and its smell in the clouds.

      A College servant knocked. We were all silent as he lugged in a box of logs. It was well after dark. He cleared some utensils and left. My uncle pressed Nicholas to stay the night. He accepted. But where was he to sleep, seeing that Monsieur Newton already had company? Isaac offered immediately to turf me out of my room: ‘He can sleep on the floor.’ Fatio experienced an access of nicety concerning the prior rights of family over friends: ‘But no. It is not to be dreamed of, Maître.’

      Uncle made a sort of gasp and offered his own room. Monsieur pursued him with a knowing eyebrow. Uncle became uncannily silent.

      ‘No, no. Pas du tout.’ Nicholas would couch himself on his cloak between the Desk of Opticks and the Athanor of Alkhimia.

      Take my bed, man. For God’s sake.’

      ‘Pray, Maître, do not trouble yourself. I would not dream … Why, there is no man in all Europe whom …’ and into fragments of French or Latin, or whatever, as was his fashion of compliment. And so, heavy with implications, they played out their game of offer and refusal, until Nick Fatio won, as he was bound to do, being the more calculating of two mathematicians.

      Therefore, after some geometrical discussion which I was not equipped to follow, we all retired at more or less the same time, with the newcomer promised to stretch out by the furnace in the main chamber on the horsehair-stuffed seat, after he’d taken some more wine. My uncle found the night cords my mother had left and bound my wrists to the two head-posts of the spare bed, which was the configuration in which I had slept on my back for as long as I could remember.

      

      Some chiming clock of the city and a pressure against my mouth woke me at about two. I opened my eyes to the almost pitch-blackness of an abominable assault. A male smell under my nose. Faint pallor of linen suggesting the presence of a part-clothed torso. His voice above me whispering in a foreign language. Fear mapped me to the bed. Something automatic made me try to scream but I had no voice, only a poor rasping in the throat. And my mouth had opened, which was the worst thing it could have done. Invasion; the thing stuffed back and forth in my head; the taste; the revolting sensation of being gagged at the very back of the palate, while held down by superior force. But for some reason I couldn’t bite, and the violation continued, against my will but beyond my control. Why couldn’t I bite? I felt waves of panic. My breath was knotted into my grimace, my neck locked rigid. I was sure I should die. Until I found myself at last panting through my squashed nostrils, like the choked dog in the farmyard. But it wasn’t enough. The torso was all over my face. Not enough air to survive on. The fight for air. I would not survive. Could not. All my chest and throat contorted in the effort, the drag for air. A point of black pain expanded in a rush towards me, until it enveloped me totally.

      Then I was out of myself and looking down from the ceiling in the small-hours murk which only a window’s faint moon-and-starlight illuminated, at a larger person over a smaller one’s head; whose hair was held down by a fist, and whose trunk thrashed between tied cords. I saw my knees rear up and catch him so that he grunted, withdrew and tried to wrestle me over on to my front. Great heaves of longed-for breath filled those lungs. In such dark, however, he clearly hadn’t grasped the fact about my strung wrists; my body wouldn’t turn. I watched myself twist and hurt. Then he gave that up and returned to the mouth, penetrating it and jerking on his violent weight. Why did I, that sufferer below me, comply? I watched the asphyxiation build up once more. I watched my renewed thrash.

      Maybe a minute. He shuddered and came off. And again I saw the desperate lungs permitted at last to inflate themselves in relief.

      I remember having a discarnate idea which seemed, incredibly, to exist everywhere around us both. I would sing. I would.

      I did. And that was what now in fact filled the room with a powerful and almost tangible vibration:

       Let us with a gladsome mind

      I felt myself, as I returned to my body, swallow the stuff that was in my mouth. It was a reflex. And now I felt what I had only watched a moment ago – the great gulps of air rushing down