The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  How I missed my true self, the smell of the salty sulphurous cistern, the musty drying mops, the red-eyed child scraping his hobnailed boots beneath the breakfast table.

  Seated on the hard uncurtained bed I saw that any evidence of what and who I was had been scrupulously removed. The only sign of character was that of a maid who clearly had foibles which I had previously considered English. That is, she had artfully rearranged those small private objects I had left sitting on the dresser. Such altars were built at Low Hall continually. Indeed, it had been a matter of acute distress that both Maisie and Elsie had continually interfered with my wife’s own deliberate arrangement of the nursery. For instance (to take just one of twenty possible examples) the small brass lantern clock which had so soothed our daughter in her final stages—“Alice’s Clock,” so called. My wife preferred this small memento be positioned to left of centre of the mantel and, in her grief, she became quite fierce about what exactly was its place—just to the left of centre and then twisted on an angle so it could be seen clearly from the bed.

  Yet maids do not listen. And maids love to fiddle, and two maids are twice as bad as one for each in their turn (Maisie had been “sent packing” before Elsie had been engaged) would shift the clock to the centre of the mantel and line it up directly parallel with the wall. Elsie’s action left my wife with the choice of dismissing her or doing without the clock. All in all she thought it simpler to have the clock “go missing” with the result that poor Elsie, who was given to nervous conditions, spent her five years in our employ worrying about that “blessed clock” and having dark suspicions about which departing servant had been “the one.”

  I have left out all the other maids’ arrangements, the consequences of which finally spread well beyond the nursery. So when, in Karlsruhe, I finally comprehended that my cuff links, my compass, the enamelled miniature of my son, my pack of cards, my pens, sovereign case and all the little accoutrements of life, had been arranged as by a magpie, well, I was—from habit?—somewhat apprehensive. Oh Lord, I thought, there will be trouble now.

  In the very centre of my dresser, much in the manner of Nelson’s Column, stood my rolled-up plans, and around this obelisk these objects had become subjects paying homage. The plans themselves now bore the simplest of decoration, a royal blue thread which I was slow to realize served the purpose of attaching a small sheet of notepaper.

  I was loath to touch the composition, but how could I have no curiosity about the message there attached? Being the Two Friends champion at pick-up-sticks I had the steadiness required to slip it free. There, in a childish but not ungraceful hand, I read: Wir bauen die Ente.

  Why this should make the hair stand on my neck I could not say. Was I frightened of my wife or of the maid? I rushed to my dictionary and you might consider my feelings (in this city where everyone knew everything about me, where the most innocent action created hostility and suspicion), you might imagine my racing heart, when I learned that Ente = “duck.”

  Yet the dictionary was just a little thing, and I rushed off to seek a live translator who was, of course, alas, Frau Beck.

  She looked up, smiling, from her ledger, and I noted, for the first time, that despite her whole presence being like a dry and wrung-out cloth, her little brown eyes were soft and rather wary. I thought, you are a widow.

  “Who is Ente?”

  “Sir, it is a duck of course.”

  “What does it say about the duck, Frau Beck?”

  She placed the small note on her counter, dipped her pen and—all the while smiling—corrected the child’s handwriting.

  “Herr Brandling,” she said, “we will make your duck, of course. It will be ready in two hours.” Her misunderstanding was clear enough, but I did not wish to argue with her. So rather than further damage her opinion of me, I contracted to pay her for a duck I could not eat.

  “Now you must walk, Herr Brandling. You must be healthy. You are in Germany, you must exercise. In two hours you will dine again.”

  I would have interrogated her further, but the major-domo—an awful creature with a limp—chose that moment to begin an argument with the old woman who was mopping the front steps of the hotel. “Walk, Herr Brandling,” Frau Beck cried, rushing to the scene of the conflict. “You will be pleased.”

  I began my stroll with no particular plan, wandering the little streets as many visitors had done before me. I had no curiosity about anything except the meaning of this note. I rather feared it was belligerent.

  There were just as many clockmakers’ shops along the streets as yesterday but I had no stomach for them, and so chose streets that took me out into the countryside or to the church which I believed I could not be blamed for entering. Then of course it was Catholic so I thought it best to leave.

  The backstreets were not so different from a provincial English town where the shopkeepers chalk their wares on the door posts. So it was, by luck, I recognized a stationer’s where I managed to negotiate the purchase of an envelope and a stamp (“Brief-marke”) which I understood to be of sufficient value to get a letter to my boy. In an empty beer garden, I found a single chair beneath a chestnut tree. I tore a page from my notebook and described for Percy the tiny merry-go-round. As my memory is rather good, I managed to fill both sides and then a third with a full account of all the little figures and their motions. I encouraged him to see this as a promising start. I was hopeful, I wrote, of more good news in the next letter. I was a liar, but what choice did I have? It was essential, even in my absence, that his magnetic agitation be maintained as much as possible.

  I returned to the inn with no appetite and Frau Beck led me immediately to a parlour adjacent the main dining room. This was panelled in dark wood and hung about with a number of fusty tapestries depicting what were said to be “Rumanian Hunters.” The windows being rather small, the light distinctly funereal, it required candles even in the middle of this sunny spring day. It was some time before I made out the considerable figure of a man seated in the corner.

  He addressed me in a deep voice, “Guten Tag.”

  He looked like a soldier, a major uncomfortable in his mufti.

  A waiter arrived, his head lowered in such a way that, had he been a dog, his ears would have been flattened on his head. I was by now in a panic about the duck which I attempted to cancel by ordering an omelette.

  “Of course,” he said. “Immédiatement.”

  “How do you enjoy Karlsruhe, Brandling?”

  Brandling? The hair rose on my neck. He was a large man, with a neck as wide as the gleaming head which he kept completely bald. His brows were black and heavy and clearly kept in shape with the same mad barbering he brought to his moustache.

  I thought, was it you who wrote the note? At the same time I thought, this is ridiculous.

  Two waiters arrived (Immédiatement, indeed) to present me with—no omelette, no beer—but a duck which had been prepared with fruit and cinnamon and other ghastly ingredients that would more properly be found in pudding.

  The stranger kept on at me, stretching his arm along the back of his banquette. He had nothing before him but a book in which he appeared to sketch. It occurred to me that, although his broad shoulders suggested a plebeian, he was a pretender to the role of artist. That is, he exhibited a sort of insolence not unlike various individuals who had dined at our table when Mr. Masini was finishing his first “portrait” of my wife.

  “Your meal is agreeable,” he demanded.

  I did not reply.

  “You are the bloke who went to Hartmann with your plans?”

  Bloke was I? Indeed. “I’m afraid I know no Hartmann.”

  “Hartmann the clockmaker,” he insisted, using English as if he had been wet-nursed by a cockney. “You spoke to him about your plans. You are Mr. Brandling, I believe?”

  “Am I?” I said. “Indeed.”

  “You scared the pants off Hartmann.” A cigar was ignited and in the flare I saw how his jacket strained against hi
s arms.

  “Herr Hartmann is not from here,” he said, “but if he was from Karlsruhe, what would it matter? The idiots have no idea of who they are. They spend their time trying to be Prussians. They are living in a dream,” he said.

  I was doing my best with the meal, that is, not very well at all.

  “Do you know what I am talking about?” the ruffian demanded.

  At home, I would have confidently become deaf and blind. In Karlsruhe I did not know the form.

  “They are living in a dream,” he insisted.

  So then, finally, I spoke to him. “I do not understand you, Sir.”

  “Then,” said he, rising as he spoke, “I think it is time for me to join you.”

  I was appalled to see the giant come towards me. My brother, doubtless, would have left the room. But I, Henry Brandling, sat like a great big English bunny, and permitted the “bloke” to deposit his leather book beside my meal. This ill-treated volume held, between its pages, countless numbers of other sheets, all of different sizes and colours. The whole was tied together with a leather thong.

  He shouted in German at the waiter, demanding what turned out to be an ashtray. When that wish was satisfied he turned his attention to my meal. No question of consulting me. I should have pulled his nose for him but I sat like a dressmaker’s dummy and permitted him to use the handle of the butter knife to deftly, one might say surgically, separate out the elements in the sauce, and with each of these excisions he asked a question, not of me, but of the servant. Finally he ordered it removed, or at least that seemed a consequence of what he said.

  “Next we will have cognac,” he announced.

  I thought, perhaps he is a mayor, an ill-mannered farmer risen through the ranks. I thought, Good luck with your cognac old chap.

  “Why do you smile, comrade?”

  “They serve only beer.”

  He smiled, but not offensively. “Comrade, they are living in a dream.”

  I shrugged. “When it comes to cognac, might I say the same to you.”

  Now he was opposite me, there was no doubt that his tailor had done a poor job accommodating him. However that tight jacket had a pocket for everything, one specifically, it seemed, to fit a deck of cards.

  He dealt one card, face down. “Do you know what this is?” he demanded. Was he smiling in the shadow of that large moustache?

  Clearly I had fallen into company with a card sharp, but I would not be the easy victim my friends all feared. “If you expect me to turn it over, you are quite mistaken.”

  “No.” He tapped the verso. “It is this I show you. This is the dream you are living in the middle of.”

  For the first time I looked into his eyes. They were a very dark brown and one could almost call them black. I was not afraid of him, but he was certainly a beast both fierce and strange. “This is a picture of Karlsruhe,” I said.

  “In English that would mean Karl’s Rest. You see that of course. But what you cannot see is the Karl who dreamed Karlsruhe. That is, Karl III Wilhelm, Markgraf von Baden-Durlach. He fell asleep and had a dream, and what he dreamed is what you see on the back of this card. So what do you observe?”

  “Clearly it is in the form of a circle.”

  “Clearly, Mr. Brandling. A wheel in fact.”

  I thought again, how in the devil does he know my name? From the awful jumble of his leather book he plucked an ill-used sheet, a kind of catalogue, of clockwork wheels and gears.

  “You are not a clockmaker,” I said—the hands upon the table were too large to decently tie boot laces.

  “Why on earth did you speak to that idiot Hartmann? You come to the home of the wheel, and you talk to that dull bourgeois little shopkeeper. Do you not know where on earth you are?”

  I thought, perhaps they all address each other in this tone.

  “You want a cuckoo clock.” He almost sneered.

  “No,” I said but he was insisting I consider an engraving of clock wheels, all the time staring with that senseless excitement you see in the eyes of people who have lost their wits. He had a theory, I understood. If you were from Karlsruhe you had spokes and metal rims.

  “Have you ever seen a running machine?”

  “A machine that runs?” (My goodness, I thought, that would be really something.)

  “For God’s sake, drink, no of course not. If such a machine were to be invented, where would the most propitious place be?”

  “You will say that it is Karlsruhe.”

  “Here,” he cried, plucking one more item from his collection, and offering it with his enormous hand—a card like the ones manufacturers sometimes slip inside their tins of pipe tobacco. “Study it,” he commanded. “You spend too much money on your tailor and not enough on books.”

  It was a coloured engraving of a fellow with a two-wheeled contraption.

  “This is Herr Drais of Karlsruhe.” He tapped the fellow’s head with fingernails as square and dirty as a gardener’s.

  I said, “Why are you showing me this?”

  “It is named after him. It is a Drais.”

  “Why are you showing me this damned Drais?”

  “So you will not die of duck,” he said, and threw back his head and roared with laughter. I shoved his papers back at him, but he had one more to give.

  “And what is this?” I demanded.

  “How should I know everything?”

  “Then why should you give it to me?”

  “In trust.”

  “In trust for what?”

  “If I have your plans,” he said, “it is only fair that you have mine.”

  “You do not have my plans,” I said. “And do not call me Brandling.”

  In return he folded his arms across his broad chest and revealed the white clean line of his teeth beneath his big moustache.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I have an appointment.”

  “Then you must go.”

  He made no attempt to say farewell, but sat there very placidly poking his great big nose into his strong drink. A few moments later, having found my way along the dark and twisting corridor to my room, I discovered my plans were missing.

  I beheld the likeness of my poor dear boy, the sloe eyes, the residual sadness, and knew it was a crime to have left him. I rushed back down the stairs. I had a mind to take the butter knife and stab the scoundrel in his staring eyes. But of course you can see already what had happened. As usual I was the last one to understand. Yes, I found the parlour now deserted, no sign of what had happened, nothing but two empty cognac glasses and, beneath the table, a single playing card.

  I was never an adventurer. I was not suited to adventures. If I were really a True Friend I would have stayed at home.

  Catherine

  I WAS VERY FRIGHTENED OF visiting the cemetery. But I would not abandon my beloved. I made the bed and threw my clothes in the wash. I swept the cornflakes off the floor and washed out the whisky glass. I cleared away the bottles and made myself a cup of tea. I sat back at my table. I found my Lorazepam and chewed one up. It was only eight o’clock so I thought, just for a little, I might spend some time with Henry Brandling. I turned the next page of the notebook and discovered a postcard of Karlsruhe held there by a rusty pin. There were also, between the next two pages, a few other bits of floating scrap, but the following sheets were all blank, each and every one. Only then, as my throat closed on itself, did I understand I had been relying on Henry to continue. Now I saw that he might not. For all I knew, the books inside the tea chest would be empty too.

  I was finding clothes for work when I realized it was Saturday and there was no telephone call I could make, or story I could invent to get access to the studio.

  “Weekend work in studios is not undertaken without an exceptional reason.”

  So I ran a bath. I lay in the tepid water and looked at my poor scrawny unloved body with its seaweed hair. I cried. I shampooed and conditioned and cried again. Even inside the bathroom you could feel the heat wave,
all the car engines and motorways to the horizon and beyond. I dried my hair. I had good hair, I had been told. I used Preparation H to reduce the inflammation of my puffy eyes.

  I didn’t know where they had hidden Matthew, but then I called the cemetery and was almost brought undone by kindness. I had been so armoured. I had thought they would ask me was I “the wife” and prove it. But this young man was not like that at all. He had a lovely West Country way of talking, and he was patient while I found a pencil to write down the lot number and the directions. He said it was a very pretty part of the cemetery. He had walked there yesterday. It was really rather wooded, “a real refuge” in the heat.

  I would still have put it off, but just after ten I realized that “upstairs” had returned and the former Speaker of the House had decided he would cut his lawn. The noise was awful. So I went.

  I could get to Kensal Rise on the Bakerloo line. I have never liked the tube, but today seemed particularly unpleasant. Later I discovered it had been the hottest April day in forty years. It had been 117 degrees on the platform, but I did not know that and when I began to panic I felt the claustrophobia was my own fault. I thought, I must not give in to this.

  At Marble Arch I fled, running up the escalators. I told myself I was getting flowers, but there were flowers at Kensal Rise and none at Marble Arch. Then I decided I would go by bus. Being too agitated to read the map, I got the bus to Westbourne Grove, because I knew that it passed the Harrow Road and the cemetery was up the Harrow Road.

  I missed the stop at the Harrow Road and got off further up. I thought, I can take a break, and calm myself. Matthew was trapped beneath the earth, bloating cruelly, all his beauty turned into a factory, producing methane, carbon dioxide, rotten egg gas, ammonia. I was afraid of what I knew.

  I could have walked to visit him in forty minutes, but I did not want to see the broken earth. I decided I would return when the grass had grown. So I turned my back on him and headed towards Notting Hill Gate. Matthew, I thought. Forgive me. You would never have left me alone like that. But of course that’s exactly what you did.