and treatment had stripped him of, and to blot out everything else.
His father died before he was born. He was delivered, so my mother told me, a little bloody foetus that no one expected to come to life. They put it aside to be dealt with later. It lay, cold, and further out than the remotest galaxies for half an hour or more, which it might have experienced as longer than an ice age. At first, no one noticed it had started to move. Eventually the bundled mess in the corner turned into a baby, and they began with surprise to push pap into its mouth.
When little Isaac was no more than an infant, his mother, my grandmother, married Rector Smith, for financial security, on the condition that she left the child at Woolsthorpe. Rector Barnabas Smith, almost the squire, did not suffer the little children … Isaac was only allowed to make visits, brought over by his grandmother. Was this bar sufficient motivation for his whole later career? I doubt it. But I tell you this: as soon as he was old enough he tried to burn down their house.
He was an angry, isolated boy, though not a complete wolf; strong enough to suffer no fools and find few friends. He made models -windmills and other curious engines – from being inquisitive and much alone. He sought with miniatures the secrets of power and control. And when he was fourteen he forced himself to make friends with the girls at his lodgings in Grantham where he’d been sent to the Grammar School. But that didn’t last, since they were out for more, it seemed. Love and so on. So he became difficult and solitary again, because the womb sang of interstellar distances, rejection and all he could not speak of.
Then circumstances put money his way, together with a sponsor, so that by a train of associated events he arrived at Cambridge, and was as lonely and powerless as he’d always been. The great Alma Mater fornicated and drank and prayed and idled her way along, leaving him little, hurt and open again, unnoticed in this corner for a year. He survived, convincing himself that by austerities he might become pleasing to God.
God in his turn took several more months to be convinced by Isaac’s mortifications; then responded by thrusting in his way the submissive and equally lonely Wickens, who had a friend who owned a copy of Descartes’s Geometry. Reading Descartes, Uncle Isaac saw his chance to grapple something back in face of whatever it was that had happened to him. It was a great secret tool that could put power into his hands. A Language of Shapes.
When he came up to Cambridge, Mathematics was a nothing – it was all but forbidden, or at least irrelevant to the business of cramming the heads of the future incumbents of the Church of England, like my father, with thirty-nine articles. The prescribed education my uncle found tedious; he wouldn’t and couldn’t do it except to pass through the hoops which would keep him there – and offer the time and space for his secret vice: Mathematics. Mathematics as subversion; Mathematics as terrorist barrels under the House of the universe – or his stepfather’s house as it was to him when he was a boy. Why else would anyone bore themselves with the study of Mathematics unless there was a significant payoff – world-shaking power, revenge, and personal, Godlike, self-esteem?
But at first the Descartes horrified him. He could make nothing of it and went to bed in despair that he should be overcome by another’s words or diagrams. However, on the next day he went to it again and stayed up late by candlelight until he was four pages in. And so on. And this was his method, driven by day and by night and by an intensity of anxiety and desire, to give up all company or other solace in order to stabilise his sense of weakness, his cosmic helplessness, and the violence of his lust. It was this single-minded dedication, as I remember him admitting to someone much later, which was his character. ‘I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into the full and clear light.’ He forced himself, and was forced, to think on the matter in hand to the exclusion of all others. And so it was with all God’s and Mother Nature’s intimate secrets: her petticoat Light, her fluxional Change, her capacity to attract, her Mirror the Moon; and His eternal Motions.
By night … but by what right, you ask again, do I so assault Genius, that most treasured of latter-day concepts, which enables us to label other folk as lesser lights and use them accordingly in our monstrous schemes? Wasn’t he a Cambridge Professor at twenty-six or whenever? Listen. The Lucasian Professorship was equally a nothing. It’s true that he’d invented the calculus. He did this because his mathematics was entirely self-taught, and from only the most modern, analytical treatise of the times. So his thought was undamaged by any educational process. His boldness, arrogance and persistence paid off. Dr Barrow and Mr Babington slotted him into the Professorship. Dr Barrow, who was Lucasian Professor before my uncle, passed it across to him even as he stepped up the next rung of his own career ladder. It was a hobby-horse: they were the only two men in Cambridge who knew a surd from a tangent, anyway. Do you think students crammed the halls to hear the great ‘Dr Newton’ expounding the conic sections? Do you think they hung on his syllogisms as if he were a second Abelard? No one came. It was a purely financial arrangement, for which he must deliver a certain number of lectures. Every so often, then, Isaac read out some pages of his notes to the walls of a room and then went back to work. So they were able to pay him. But you see that he had then, and has always had since, shadowy backers in his doings, some human, some magical. And that is part of the mystery. But I know all this because I was there and saw what drove him.
Listen and I will tell this also before the Elixir is made. He had his eye on me.
I’ve indicated how I spent the time after the night of Fatio’s attack. The first morning I was more or less left to myself in the laboratory. My uncle worked. Elizabeth’s face appeared to me, at times weeping, at times blank, once terrible and mocking; so that I wrenched her beloved picture from my mental eye and returned to the material present. At one stage I tried to entice the cat to come within range so that I could torment him. Perhaps he picked up on my bouts of shuddering; because he seemed well aware of the intended violence, and stayed just out of range, purring and smiling. However, as I said, I was gradually evolving a mentality of revenge, which reduced my emotion at the time, and sent the image of the night into its own locker. To some degree. And this is a repression, which, as I look over my account, I realise is a precise term. For I repressed what I knew and had grasped, so that here I’m able to recover it, to remember it as a concept, and to set it down. But I also realise that at the time I knew in another way what it was that had made me feel so wolflike before, and why it was that, though I hated my rape and was tied, I had accepted it. This knowledge I cannot now recall, though I try and try, even stubbing my pen at the paper in my frustration. I’m only aware that then, that morning, I did have the key both to the inexpressible experiences that had formed me and to the repressible one which had begun to change me.
My uncle may have noticed something was different, for at midday he thawed a little and I was untied. He had brought pieces of bread and meat. He seemed to acknowledge that he had some duty of care towards me. I must be fed even if his life had become ashes. It dawned on me how I should act; I grew very submissive and helpful. I made noises about assisting him with the work. I tidied up some of the mess. I controlled my face and stroked the cat. So we passed the day, at the end of which he nearly smiled on me, and asked whether the cords were really necessary. I shook my head and looked sadly down.
On the next day, after a morning’s alchemical labour, we went out to a nearby house to buy a pint of soup in one of his cans. We’d become a social unit. My arms remained untied. I nodded to my acquaintance, Slack, the Porter, as if all were well.
Isaac went up to his chambers to prepare the soup, and left me, so great was his trust in my new demeanour, to mind the furnace in the laboratory and sand clean a few vessels, some for a new step in the work and some to eat the soup from. My mother would have imagined he’d done wonders with my devil. I saw to the fires, worked with energy and finished quickly.
And then I crossed the garden, climbed the stair to his chambers and padded in with the pair of scrubbed-out iron bowls, whose insides had curious patterns left
