Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven
lean dinners roll eyes at each other; I met folk who were engaged in intrigues; I heard salacious talk at times in passing; and there were the Sunday mornings when rhythmic gasps and creakings came from the top floor of our house as the Pointers enjoyed their lie-in. One week I met a woman who was famously in love. She came to the house on some Royal Society pretext. When her man appeared at last in the hallway she flung herself on him with an almost tangible rapture. Despite my own passionate compulsions, I was terrified. And sad. Love? What was it? Sex? How? There was a place, Pet told me, somewhere in London, where a woman did headstands in a booth so that the passing wits and gallants could attempt her with thrown coins. Why?
In May I saw a man forcing two boys into a coach by hitting them with a cane through the rents in their rags, and when I got home I was shaken and sick.
My uncle and I were manifest public virgins.
He took me to the theatre. By the close I believed not only the actors but the audience to be false. Again I tortured myself as to the meaning of this place.
‘These people, Uncle. What on earth is it they’re doing? How does it keep on going?’ I watched them. Daily they flooded along the streets about their various businesses; they lied, double-dealt and cheated; they apparently exchanged coinage, credit, and body fluids with very little prompting; they laughed, festered and grew old. They clung to life until they died. They appeared content with their orbits, eating, drinking, smoking and paying. Their story was private – I found no real way in, nor did I wish to; for I knew it was lacking in something, as I was myself. It was his city, his creation – as I was myself. Whither more naturally than here should we gravitate in our sadness? Commercial London. He was Warden of the Mint; Charles Montagu had fixed it for him, and all the universe had died.
Nevertheless I was also glad; for in this bleak description I recognised my own purpose, and began work on my Project. Which was to find the gaps in his.
I often thought about Nicholas. Perhaps he was somewhere in London even now. Perhaps he lay at night in some house in the streets I passed through every day, and was within reach, so that I had only to bend my intellect to his discovery in order to make all good. At such thoughts I felt my pretty lips lift away from my pretty teeth, found my pretty nails pressed against my own pretty cheeks.
‘Do you ever see Monsieur Nicholas, Uncle?’ I asked one afternoon when we were entertaining. His hand holding the new decanter shook momentarily so that some of the wine splashed over the side of Charles’s glass on to the oak table-top. It started to run down the imperceptible gradient of the wood towards Sir Christopher Wren’s lap. Henrietta Bellamy caught the little stream in time and headed it off until she could get hold of a napkin. Later Etta and I stood side by side at the mirror in the drawing-room to which we had gone while the men of science compared notes.
‘Etta. Is it easy to be married in London?’
‘Easy? What an odd thing. As easy as anywhere, Kit.’ She teased at a stray of hair behind her ear.
‘No. Being married. Is it an easy thing?’
‘Edmund is a jewel. I love him. He makes everything so easy, my dear. Positively delicious. Why is your hair always swept up, Kit? Don’t you wish for a change?’
In reply I took hold of her right-hand index finger and raised it to the centre of my brow, then just above, until it touched the concealed bump under the front wave I wore. She pushed at it of her own accord. I felt still the sharp pain whenever it was disturbed.
‘Ow!’
‘My dear. You’re deformed. I’ve found a flaw in your beauty.’ She bent to kiss my cheek.
‘Only a little deformed, Etta.’
‘I wonder if my hair would go in your style. On you it looks … stunning sometimes, Kit. Sometimes I think you have no conception of your looks.’
‘Am I a mess?’
‘No. Quite the contrary, dear. You’re always well turned out. It’s that I believe you know nothing of your effect on others. On men. On women, for that matter.’
‘No? What’s my effect?’ I dabbed at myself in the mirror again.
‘It’s useless my telling you. I can hear by your tone of voice. Your effect. You know. But you don’t know, do you?’
‘Etta. Did you see my uncle’s hand shake as I mentioned the name Nicholas?’
‘No. When was that?’ Delicately she re-applied a patch to her cheekbone.
‘When you had to mop up the wine.’
‘Oh. No, I didn’t notice. I was talking to Wren. He was just leaving. Should I have?’
That was something, Etta, that you know nothing of. It was a gap.’
‘A what?’
‘A gap. I see these moments. They are special. I call them gaps.’
Pawnee
That Summer of 1699 a schism in the Royal Society led to informal scientific demonstrations taking place at our house. We set up a rival outfit. The true cause was my uncle’s hatred of Dr Hooke, whose vainglorious mediocrity, he said, lodged by the barb in the institution’s flesh, so that twist as it might it couldn’t shake the accursed old duffer off. What my uncle’s faction actually did in these evenings was not so much different from the authorised meetings.
‘What is it that you have there, Mr Van de Bemde?’
‘A pint of slugs, Mr Gregory.’
‘Are they live slugs, Mr Van de Bemde?’
‘Not at present, Sir.’
‘I’m afraid I must be going. My deepest apologies, Gregory, Newton, Gentlemen.’
‘Let the record show that at the time of Sir Christopher’s departure, the slugs were dead, but their juice is still applicable.’
‘So recorded.’
I showed Wren out and escaped to my own bedroom. I’d coped with the gassing of the hedgehog in the bell jar, and the nerve poison from Batavia. But the dog had been too much. I noted that my uncle hadn’t liked it either, but he’d let them carry on. Food for my dreams: the way the gentlemen sat round unmoved while it cried and twitched. And now the man with the slugs. I who plotted revenge had motive, but how had these creatures offended? Should the gentlemen not anatomise their enemy Hooke?
Yet these were enlightened, modern men. They’d rebuilt the country and the city out of a legacy of war, disease and chaos. They must have good reason. Gaps. Where were the gaps? What was it that would get behind such sober, influential folk as these Londoners?
In my commonplace book I made a note of the chemicals for the gassing, and of where they were kept. And of the Batavian extract.
My uncle had showed me his notebook written from both ends. He’d got its prodigious supply of paper from his stepfather Smith when he was a boy, and it had served his whole career. It showed how he’d started when he was a young student. He’d put: ‘Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis arnica Veritas.’ Then ‘Quaestiones Quae-dam Philosophicae’, which I rendered, having learned my Latin lessons, as: ‘Plato and Aristotle are beloved to me but I’d rather know the truth. Certain philosophical interrogations.’ And he’d gone on from there. Through motion and conies and optics, to God, the creation; even to the soul, and sleep, and dreams. His thought was free. I wrote therefore:
‘Certain questions of a young woman wishing to know the truth’ Then:
‘1) Jesus said, I come not to bring peace but a sword. Is this the razor of the anatomist?
2) Is God well pleased? Has He indeed come down again? Is that Him? Downstairs?’
Then,