The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  Englishmen with white skin and stout legs were parading in their shorts. Matthew was tall and slender. He had the most gorgeous legs. It was horribly humid and the sky was low and feathery and very very sad.

  I was frightened to go home to my nothing. I was scared of the afternoon and the night ahead. So I decided I would make an attempt to talk myself into the Annexe. I finally got myself to Earl’s Court, but the Olympia shuttle had committed suicide. I walked north from there towards Olympia, not noticing how dark the sky was getting behind my back. In this way I stumbled into what estate agents call Brook Green.

  And my man in the pleasant wooded shade of Kensal Rise was the finest of the fine, and I thought how he would have liked this—the little wine bar most of all. The shops looked very pretty in the golden light and I came into a very quiet street of grey and pastel houses and there was one shop, on the corner, and I thought, that looks nice, and as I got closer it was clear it was a very particular shop, and it had some very, very simple bags for which I now had a pressing need. It was closed. But then I saw there was a woman inside, and she turned on the lights as she walked towards me. She was a strange and honed-down thing, perhaps fifty, but terribly thin, and petite, with the sort of severe and interesting character one normally thinks of as French. Her hair was strong, grey, cut short, but quite expensively. She opened the door, frowning, as if she knew my darling was dead and I was a disgrace to even think of shopping.

  “You must be hurried,” she said. I did not know she was talking about the storm.

  She turned back into the shop where, looped casually over a locker-room hook, was the simplest bag I ever saw. The leather was black, and very soft and light. I put it over my shoulder and it disappeared beneath my arm as if it might dissolve. Inside there were two perfect pouches, one zippered, one not. Best of all, it was lined with a peacock sort of silk. This was the bag whose sole function was to steal Henry Brandling from the Annexe.

  She was Italian, not French. She said it was a hundred pounds.

  She said she was sorry, but would I mind paying cash? I had just enough.

  She gave me the bag without wrapping it and then, firmly but politely, pushed me out the door.

  There was an awful crack of thunder and a sizzling sort of noise. It was not yet raining, but the sky was black and bleeding like a Rothko. And then, from around the corner, there appeared a taxi, with a lovely yellow light. I was no sooner inside than the rain began, great fat splats like glycerin against the windscreen. I saw lightning hit the Natural History Museum, or that is what it looked like.

  At Kennington Road, I should have run straight inside, but I had the cab drop me at the off-licence, what Matthew called the offy, where I put a bottle of cognac on my MasterCard. As I came outside everything was dark except for a weird yellow sheen across the houses. I thought the rain had let up—maybe it really had—but when I was half way across the road the hail arrived, lumps like hotel ice blocks, river stones, cruel, unforgiving pelting against my naked head and unprotected shoulders. I arrived in my kitchen, stinging sore, drenching wet. I watched the monstrous hail pile up across the garden. Why hast thou forsaken me?

  HAIL AND HATE, ROARING like a train, the entire back garden stoned to death, crushed glass or ice now two inches thick. The geraniums were flat, the daphne devastated. God knows what had happened to my neighbour but he had abandoned his lawn mower in the middle of my view.

  In the bathroom I examined my blooming injuries, but none of this took very long and soon my hair was dry and I sat in my dressing gown, at the kitchen table. Here I slid my Brandling books inside the new handbag. I paraded, and it was as I thought—the bag fitted so snugly between my arm and chest. I was so absorbed, so impatient to retrieve the notebooks that I might not have seen the peculiar mist lying above the field of ice. But I did look up. And the sun came out. And all the garden turned to gold sublime, unearthly and very strange.

  For just that instant I felt wonder. For that moment I forgot my grief. I reached for my open laptop. As it slid towards me, I recognized the nature of my expectation—I had been about to tell Matthew.

  I kiss your toes. Mark unread.

  There was a new email from Crofty. He wrote, “I’ve fixed it.”

  I thought, how can you fix anything? Then I understood, he had read my ill-mannered email and thought: I am without doubt a wretched stupid man. So he had discreetly, sweetly, secretly, removed the bloody tea chests and their contents from my studio.

  He had done exactly what I had asked—taken my project from me. And he had paid overtime for weekend work. It was like a fairy story with a moral. Due to my own bad temper, all of Henry’s notebooks were now beyond my reach.

  I opened the cognac and took a slug straight from the bottle. I found the Swinburne staff directory.

  “Hello, is that Arthur?”

  “Arthur’s just stepped out.”

  “This is Miss Gehrig from upstairs in Horology, I’m working on 404.”

  “You missed them, Miss Gehrig, by, I would say, thirteen minutes.”

  “Did you get the hail?”

  “Well to be exact, Miss, I would say Arthur must have got the hail. Shall I give him a message if he’s still alive?”

  “Is Mr. Croft there?”

  “He was here with Arthur for a good three hours. Then they stepped outside.”

  “And now he’s at the Fox and Hounds?”

  “Licking his wounds I would say.”

  I had no doubt the men had spent the afternoon removing my tea chests. I would never have a chance to read the notebooks. I could not speak. I hung up. I phoned back and apologized for dropping the phone. I said I would see him on Monday.

  I did not think, the Head Curator of Horology has turned himself into a manual labourer on my account. I saw only that I had all of Sunday to suffer this new agony. Very well then, I must not wallow. I unlocked the French door and forced it open against the weight of ice. I climbed the three crunchy steps to the garden, and moved the ugly mower from my view.

  This served to put the smell of the oil and rubber on my hands. That is, the perfume of my nights in a little stables in a copse in Suffolk, not far from Beccles, in a snug loft bed above a Mini Minor we spent years restoring. That was Matthew’s place, his own. That is what our love smelled like—oil, rubber, the musty rutty smells of sex. I had spent the happiest nights of my life with my body washed by leafy shadows, headlights from a bend in the A12.

  When I sat in Kennington Road and smelled my oil and rubber hands, I was no longer thinking about Henry Brandling and his duck. The ice had melted. The air was moist. As the grassy breeze blew through my open kitchen window I recalled lying in bed in that little stables with the sweet Suffolk rain upon our fragile roof.

  ON MONDAY MORNING I rang the bell beside the Annexe gate and the turnstile pivoted at the centre of its ungiving heart. From that moment a camera held me.

  Reception was to my left and there was Arthur. I could not reasonably ask him where the tea chests had been stored.

  “Good morning Mr. Phelps.” He lifted his face and I saw the puffy boozer’s eyelids.

  “You were working on Saturday on my behalf. I am in your debt.”

  The old codger rubbed his foxy silver hair. “I would say that Mr. Croft has settled that, Miss Gehrig. He nearly killed me with his bleeding settlement, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”

  I swatted my ID card. A second turnstile. The camera observed me, but there was nothing in my bag except a pashmina, purse, and Lorazepam. I carried emptiness. Doors opened. Another camera recorded my progress. Doubtless there were thousands of my days repeated thus, interred digitally in limbo. I ascended two steps with nothing to look forward to, and swiped my card one final time.

  I opened my studio door to meet, not emptiness, but tea chests.

  I think I made a small cry. Perhaps it was recorded. A moment later the rat’s nest of Daily Mail opened up its crumpled innards, and there were Henry Brandling’s no
tebooks in their careful raffia string.

  At my bench, I found the first book completely filled with handwriting, every page. All the books, every one. In all that sharp sea of waving lines there was not one blank. Although I wanted all of them at once, I slid only four of them inside four ziplock bags and these I hid inside my handbag. Then I shifted the remainder to the high shelf above the fume cupboard where no one would ever think to look. There were precisely nine more instalments for me to read.

  Only as I hung my booty on the hook behind the door did I realize things were not at all as they had been on Friday night. In the left-hand corner of the room, nearest to the door and therefore behind my left shoulder when I first entered, was an iridescent grey tarpaulin thrown across some objects, the largest one of which stood about four foot high.

  I thought of a beached sting ray, some undead thing washed ashore in La Dolce Vita. When the rational brain woke up, I understood what must lie beneath the tarp—an upper and a lower cylinder driven by a weight, thirty levers that could be connected with different parts of the duck’s skeletal system to make it drink, et cetera, à la Riskin. This was not going to be a smoking monkey, that was clear when I took away the shroud. If, a moment later, I was replacing it, it was not because of the ingenious mechanism, but because of a wooden object placed beside it. Even that was nothing, of course, nothing at all. It was just a sort of wooden hull that had probably once contained the mechanism, but I was in a waking nightmare and the brain reported a failed cremation, a burned roast dinner, a black and formless fear. Professionally I understood the pitch-black underside, but what I saw was the shell of a huge bivalve, crusty, flaking, disinterred from tar. I smelled napalm, creosote, burned pig, death.

  TO: e.croft@swi.ac.uk

  FROM: c.gehrig@swi.ac.uk

  SUBJECT: Bronchitis

  Sorry. Diagnosis confirmed.

  A very short time later I was signing out downstairs.

  “You’re shivering,” Arthur said.

  I hurried through the turnstile with my booty tight beneath my arm. I thought, Henry Brandling, what happened to you? How much money did they steal?

  Henry

  ALTHOUGH FIRMLY INTERROGATED, Frau Beck affected to have no memory of the man in the parlour.

  “If Herr Brandling means the Englishman, that gentleman has settled his account. That is all I know.”

  “I am the Englishman.”

  “Yes Herr Brandling,” said Frau Beck (rhymes with peck, a pecking little person). “Mr. Brandling you are also an Englishman. But that Englishman.” She held apart her wiry little arms to indicate the scoundrel’s shoulders. “He paid.”

  Clearly I had been duped by a confidence man of the type that preys on travellers. I slammed my hand down on the counter and this displeased Frau Beck.

  “He was a German,” I said.

  “No, an Englishman.”

  I was eviscerated. I had abandoned my son for what? A playing card?

  “What of the maid?” I asked.

  The maid? What maid? Etc. Was Frau Beck a member of the gang?

  “The maid of my room.”

  “The maid of your room,” Frau Beck said, as if mocking my English grammar. “The maid of your room has departed.”

  “Clearly,” I cried, seeking her behind her lenses. “Clearly, these criminals do not work alone.”

  “Herr Brandling, it is the springtime. The maid goes to her family in the Schwarzwald. It is to be expected. Each year the same.”

  “She has taken my plans to the Black Forest!”

  “Herr Brandling, we know this is not possible.”

  “It is so, Frau Beck, believe me.”

  “And these plans, were they the same plans you showed Herr Hartmann?”

  “They are my plans. I have no others.”

  Dipping her pen in her ink well, Frau Beck dismissed me.

  At home I would have sent a man to summon the police, and they would have frightened all the servants (as they did both times my wife lost her wedding ring).

  I informed Frau Beck I was going to my room to write a complaint. I doubt she knew what I meant, and how could I know myself? What would I write? In English? To whom would I address my charges? No, I must bite my tongue. I had no recourse but to order new plans, and of course the firm’s draughtsmen would copy the London Illustrated News again, although my brother would make it clear to them that “Mr. Henry’s” request was even less welcome than the first.

  And yet, was not my little boy himself the most important family enterprise? He was a Brandling, which is also the name of a salmon before it has gone to the sea, a parr, a pink, a smolt, a smelt, a sprag, or brandling. My brother must be made to see that Percy was our future. He had none of his own.

  I returned to my eyrie and lay upon my bed. How long I slept I have no idea. I was roused by a mousey skittering as someone attempted to slide paper beneath my door. I was on my feet in a trice.

  I surprised the maid’s son kneeling, envelope in hand, blue eyes wide with fright. I caught him by his long white wrist and hauled the limpy creature into the room. I felt his magnetic life surge as it shook my arm, jolting, kicking like a hare or rabbit in a trap. I booted the door shut as I shackled his other wrist as well—if he had lice eggs under his fingernails they would not find a home beneath my skin.

  Trapped—my little criminal, in the middle of the white-washed room, shaking, crying, crumpled letter in his hand. Then it was knock knock knock and rattling on the handle and here was the accomplice, “The maid of the room,” a red kerchief around her wheaten hair. This second party required no dragging. Indeed she rushed to embrace her offspring. There, by the foot of the peculiarly austere bed which she had so recently made herself, she kissed his crown and glared at me. I was a brute. The boy pressed himself hard against his mother and regarded me with fear and hatred, his fierce eyes revealing a will much stronger than my own. I wanted him to like me even so, this tiny enemy.

  The mother I had earlier thought to be quite pretty, but now I saw, in that wide and delicate mouth, the knowledge that all happiness was conditional. Her complexion was as fine as an English woman’s but her thief’s hands were used and hard.

  “Give me back my plans,” I said.

  She showed the perfect understanding of the guilty.

  “Sir, your plans are safe,” she said, and the quality of her English was not of the natural order. That is, she was revealing herself to be a maid so dangerously well educated that, apart from the eccentric Binns, no one of my acquaintance would have employed her.

  I said: “They will be safe when they are with their lawful owner.”

  She dared to contradict me.

  Said she, “They must not be allowed to remain in Karlsruhe.”

  I fear I may have snorted.

  “It is better the plans go to where they can be understood.”

  Her craven manner had slipped from her. I thought, yes, I am correct, a gang.

  “And where might my plans be understood?”

  “In Furtwangen.”

  Who had ever heard of such a comic place?

  “But even Furtwangen is filled with mediocrities.”

  I would have grilled her on the sources of her strong opinions had not the child slyly produced a number of small brightly painted wooden blocks, and then—from where?—a length of thick steel wire perhaps a quarter of an inch in diameter. I watched in silence, while he swiftly assembled an ingenious bowed bridge along which his red and yellow blocks were made to slide and hop, all under the power of their invisible or magical engines.

  It was a delightful contrivance. What lovesick father would not be charmed by such a child?

  The boy had a voice like a little bell. When he spoke he was so tuneful that I did not immediately understand he spoke my tongue.

  “He has made it for your son,” his mother said. “You will send it to England and your son will play with this while he waits for his father to return.”

  How do they
know I have a son?

  “It is very kind,” I said at last, “but your son does not need to buy toys for mine.” They had seen Percy’s likeness. That was it.

  “He does not purchase,” she said, cupping the back of his head with her hand. “He makes. In the night.” How she loved him—she was alight with it—but given the dexterity of the manufacturer and the ingeniousness of the invention, I had to make clear my scepticism.

  “You wrong him,” she said, all respect now vanished. “He made it. He cut himself and he will be punished for his carelessness.”

  He was clearly a very serious boy and he wore a white bandage on his forearm. Indeed his unwavering gaze defeated me and I retreated to the contents of the envelope, a very calligraphic English—“Herr Brandling, we will make the duck. A coach we have prepared to take you to the clockmaker.”

  “There is no cost to you,” the woman said hurriedly. “We will take you to Furtwangen and there your duck will be constructed as you wish.”

  What could I do but laugh at her?

  “Why would I lie to you, Sir? You would put me in prison if I cheated you. I would be ruined. Please, Sir, do come. You cannot have a fine machine constructed by a common shopkeeper.”

  “How could one manufacture such a thing without a shop?”

  “You will meet him. He is Herr Sumper.”

  “It is Mr. Sumper has robbed me?”

  “No, he is gone to Furtwangen to await you.”

  Since my first day at Harrow my trusting nature has been a source of amusement, and it is curious to me that these judgements have inevitably been passed by those who are untrustworthy—why be so boastful about your own appalling character?

  But consider a moment. Would you, in my place, have refused to go with the thieves? Then what injury you would have caused your son. What an extraordinary journey you would have missed, one such as many have trouble crediting, and the very first stage of it, south along the Rhine, was both aesthetic and pacific. That is, I gave charge of my life to a child and his mother, and permitted myself—a rather dull chap really—to be transported, nay, elevated into the Black Forest which I had previously known only from the Brothers Cruel, as my mater called them. A great deal of my journey—which I experienced alone inside the coach while my little gang sat on top, often singing at the tops of their voices—was rather lonely but so much more peaceful than the previous two years during which I had dreaded the appearance of blood stains on the nursery pillow.