Isaac had mentioned in his letter that his mother was away for a few weeks, and this was perfectly acceptable to Daniel – all he knew of the mother was that she had abandoned Isaac when he'd been three years old, and gone to live with a rich new husband several miles away, leaving the toddler to be raised in this house by his grandmother. Daniel had noticed that there were some families (like the Waterhouses) skilled at presenting a handsome façade to the world, no matter what was really going on; it was all lies, of course, but at least it was a convenience to visitors. But there were other families where the emotional wounds of the participants never healed, never even closed up and scabbed over, and no one even bothered to cover them up – like certain ghastly effigies in Papist churches, with exposed bleeding hearts and gushing stigmata. Having dinner or even polite conversation with them was like sitting around the table participating in Hooke's dog experiment – everything you did or said was another squeeze of the bellows, and you could stare right in through the vacancies in the rib cage and see the organs helplessly responding, the heart twitching with its own macabre internal power of perpetual motion. Daniel suspected that the Newtons were one of those families, and he was glad Mother was absent. Their coat of arms was a proof, of Euclidean certainty, that he was right about this.