The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

Instead the wilful little thing extracted a small plain cardboard cube from her rucksack. It might seem a simple matter to construct a cube, but this was very beautifully done, and when she set it before me I saw that it was immaculately clean. She would be a very good conservator when she learned to do what she was told.

  “Open it,” she demanded.

  “Why?” I asked crossly.

  “Please.”

  The cube was about three inches. “Yes, it’s empty. Now please go back to your bench. You have a job to do.”

  “Yes, open it out, flat.”

  Once more I found myself doing as she asked.

  “You see,” she said.

  “What?”

  “When a cube is unfolded,” she insisted, “it forms a six-part Cross. The Cube is Yahweh concealed. The Cross is Yahweh revealed. Isn’t that cool?”

  “No,” I said, and gave it back to her. “You have mystery all about you. You don’t need to invent it.”

  “Oh don’t be angry,” she said. “It’s not invented.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Please, Miss Gehrig. Isn’t it beautiful? I’m not being soppy. I’ve been reading about cubes. The Cube is ‘the Soul quarried from God.’ I’m thinking about our cube of course, and why it might be there.”

  “No, Amanda, stop it now. Really. Immediately. We are not here to invent stories about the hull. We are here to restore this extraordinary object. The real world is beautiful enough. When it is finished it will make your hair stand on end.”

  But she would not stop. “The three-dimensional Cube is the Holy Name of Yahweh expressed geometrically. You are religious. I’m sorry.”

  “I am not at all religious. You have never met anyone less religious. Now do your bloody work and stop breaking things.”

  But I had been too hard. Her eyes were not scary at all. Indeed it seemed that she was going to cry. That is why I really hate working with young females.

  “It is not your fault,” I said, “I’m what you would call a rationalist.”

  I took her sleeve and rolled her coat up. “Go,” I said, “be clever with the fish.”

  Her boy’s name was Gus. My boyfriend at the Courtauld had been Marcus. He was generally thought to be a kind of genius. I had not remembered him for years, but now, as I gently removed the built-up oil, I vividly recalled standing under the London plane trees while Marcus, who was terribly large and used his hands in a way I had thought “expressive,” continued to defend the notion that a person could absolutely combust spontaneously. I had begun listening to him with what I had imagined was affection, and as we came out into Portman Square that morning I was completely unaware of my own seething irritation.

  As I had burst out today, I burst out then. I really did not know I was about to say, “What twaddle.”

  Marcus was tall, but I was only an inch shorter in my flats and thus I was level with his very pretty eyes which now reacted like an oyster, I thought, and I was rather pleased with the cruelty in the simile, of an oyster feeling the squirt of lemon juice.

  “Twaddle?” he said, his mouth contracting unattractively. “For Christ’s sake, what sort of word is that?”

  Rather a posh word, I thought, and therefore familiar to you, no matter how much you deny it.

  “Twaddle.” He squinted, as if trying to look down at me when this was, no matter how he twisted his head, impossible.

  “Marcus, how do you imagine that might happen? A person just bursting into flame?”

  “What?” He was like a boy in the back row in a subject for which he had no aptitude.

  “It is haystacks that combust spontaneously.”

  “What bullshit, Cat.”

  I wondered if Marcus might possibly be thick. It had never occurred to me before, but he was still carrying that ridiculous book of Colin Wilson’s. It had been ancient and grotty-looking when he found it, as if a dog had peed on it, and he had brought it to bed, and used a paperweight to hold the pages flat at breakfast.

  It was titled The Occult and was full of old hippy nonsense, although I had not blamed him too severely at the start. He was not at all thick, very brainy in fact, but just as the garden in Kennington Road was later occupied by a family of foxes, London that year had suffered a second invasion of Colin Wilson, and our group lived inside a false nostalgic fog of marijuana where the most reliable atheists felt compelled to read aloud to you the Book of Ezekiel which was said to describe the distinctive actions of a flying saucer. It was complete tosh, but I lived in this time warp until, all at once, I had had enough of it.

  “Marcus you know very well people do not just burst into flames.”

  “Don’t get uptight.” As this was not the first time he had said these words, there was no reason for him to think that he was crossing any kind of line.

  He was a beautiful boy, with dark blue eyes and long lashes. He was tall and perhaps unfashionably broad-shouldered, and had appeared to me to have a not at all uneducated eye, and he was like a creature who should be forever celebrated in marble. Beauty to one side, he had appeared to me the most rational of young men. It was he who had patiently overcome my rather hysterical resistance to my studies of spectrographic analysis.

  “Why do people spontaneously combust?” I was smiling, but I was looking him directly in the eyes and I was aware of a dangerously intoxicating buzzing in my ears.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why would you believe such rot?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Catherine, don’t be a bore.”

  “But why do you think a person would just burst into flames?”

  “Why not?”

  Remembering this, years later, I judged myself prim and vain and self-important, but when Marcus Stanwood said “Why not?” I could not believe I had given my precious body to a man who would say such a thing.

  “It’s mumbo jumbo. It’s ridiculous.”

  “It cannot be explained,” he cried. “Jesus Christ rose from the fucking dead. People catch on fire and we don’t know why.”

  Then, to my complete astonishment, he turned on his heels, and walked across the square where he was lost in the shadows of the plane trees. I saw then, too late, he was breaking up with me. I hadn’t meant him to. It had not been my intention.

  It was soon after this that I gave up art school. I went to study horology in West Dean.

  Amanda Snyde and I worked in leaden silence until lunch, by which time she had still not figured out that the missing ornaments had probably been reeds. The sun had gone and the studio blinds had lost their luminosity.

  At exactly one o’clock she came and stood behind me.

  “Please,” she said, and put her hand lightly on my shoulder.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll eat myself in a moment.”

  “No, please. May I have a peek at the blue cube, if I keep my metaphysics to myself?”

  “Do you think you really need to?”

  “I thought about it all night. How it got there. What it means.”

  There really was no reasonable way I could stop her so I slid the LED torch across the desk. I could not have been more clear about how uninterested I was.

  “Miss Gehrig.”

  “I am working.”

  “Miss Gehrig.”

  I put the ring down with a sigh. “Yes, Amanda, what is it now?”

  “Someone has been at it,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” I said. “Show me.”

  “Look for yourself.”

  I took the flashlight from her and peered into a cavity which I already knew was empty of everything save a little borer dust. She was looking at me. I did not wish to look at her, but in that brief moment I found myself the subject of a rather impertinent enquiry.

  I fled on the pretext of informing Eric Croft.

  ————

  THERE WOULD BE NO discussion of blue cubes metaphorical, spiritual or physical. Indeed there would be little talk at all. I went to work with a pencil and pap
er, attempting to picture how the parts of the fish mechanism—the tracks on which the fish sat, mounts, levers, cam and rollers—might all work successfully together.

  It took me almost two days to realize it was the swan’s neck which must directly control the motion of the fish. This connection, as I had previously understood and then discounted, was achieved by a series of small levers. I had assumed that the fish would swim either clockwise or anticlockwise and I wasted a lot of mental effort deciding which of these it was. But of course the strange Herr Sumper had not been interested in anything this simple, which was why seven of the rollers were double-action rollers. The fish had been designed to swim in two directions. That is, there were two “teams”: four fish would swim clockwise, three anticlockwise. They would, as Amanda Snyde put it, when I finally allowed her an opportunity to speak, give the appearance of “sporting about.” So ingenious was this mechanism that when the automaton’s neck turned and the head lowered (when the “swan” appeared to dart at them) the fish would hastily retreat. When she grasped this, my assistant jumped in the air and I dared to like her once again.

  Then we had our usual visitor and my assistant took her micrometer away into a corner. Crofty had never quite got the hang of the Blenheim Bouquet Aftershave which was now gleaming from a recent application. This aftershave cost “twenty-five quid a pop”—it always gave him a rather sharp-toothed sort of glee to tell me this, but this morning he was odd and querulous. I expected this bad mood would evaporate the moment he understood my sketch.

  “What’s this?” he demanded, referring to the bruise on my forearm.

  “What an extraordinary question,” I said. “What sort of man asks a woman about her bruises?”

  “Are you all right?” he insisted, all lemony, right in my face.

  I did not like what “all right” was code for.

  “I slipped in the shower, is that sufficient information?”

  “How did you slip?”

  “I slipped … in … the … shower … Eric.” Amanda seemed to be staring at her Frankenpod. Her pretty neck was pale and still.

  I had no exact idea how I got my bruise, except I had been completely trolleyed. When I woke next morning I found my shower curtain all pulled down. I had only the vaguest memory of the fall, but it appeared that I had also emptied a vodka bottle and placed three wind-up clocks inside the fridge.

  “You should get one of those rubber mats.”

  “Quite,” I said.

  He was still not paying attention to my drawing.

  “Don’t you want to see what we’ve worked out?” I said. “It’s rather splendid.”

  “Of course. I’ll drop in later in the afternoon. I’m just on my way to the dentist.” At this Amanda Snyde looked sharply up and Eric said, “Good morning.”

  “Hello Mr. Croft,” she said, and returned immediately to her work.

  “Are you in pain?” I asked Eric.

  But his eyes were darting amongst the pieces on the workbench, as if he was trying to memorize them for a parlour game. “What?” he asked but had no interest in an answer.

  I watched as he sniffed around the bench, examining the silver neck rings but not really looking at anything professionally.

  “Just popped in. I’ll be off.” It was only then, on his way to the door, that he appeared to notice the dry rot although his “noticing” was completely bogus—the injury to the hull was not even visible from where he stood, and the strange twisting of his neck did not help his pantomime.

  “I’ll have George look at that next week,” I said.

  “Yes, George,” he said, but the cheeky bugger had brought an LED of his own and now he stooped to scowl into the cavity.

  My laugh could not have been very pretty, but he did not seem to hear that either and he rose from his inspection looking both grim and guilty. As he left the room he slipped his LED into his trouser pocket.

  When there was nothing remaining but his Blenheim Bouquet, I turned my attention to the Courtauld girl who was measuring a piece of track with her micrometer. With her thick fair hair held back by a Bakelite clip, there was nothing to hide the crimson glory of her neck.

  I might have asked if her dear grandpa was a friend of Eric Croft’s, but there was no longer any need. You little spy, I thought. I was very frosty with her for the remainder of the day. When I left I did not say good night.

  My fall in the bath had frightened me immensely but dusk found me as usual at the Kennington Road offy where dear soft-eyed Ahmad already had a bottle of cold Stoly waiting on his counter. Eric could ask, “Are you all right,” but Ahmad was the only man in London who had any idea of how much I was drinking. At least he did not know I had put the clocks inside the fridge. This was rather frightening. I had grown up with the sound of clocks and they had been a comfort to me, the whole orchestra of movements like the currents of the sea, an all-engulfing natural order. To refrigerate a clock was an extremely violent act, not one I could explain to anyone.

  I crossed Kennington Road without being run over. Once inside I opened all the windows and lit lavender candles to destroy the stink. The vodka went in the freezer, then came out a moment later.

  I sat on the sofa, a very plain Nelson day bed, a prime example of that rather Quakerish modernism which I have always adored. From there one could look up through the high back window and enjoy the silhouette of a chestnut tree, listen to the blackbirds quarrelling about their places, and watch the sky turn to ink, never quite black, always London’s suicidal engine burning in the night.

  Against the wall beneath the windows was a low Bruno Mathsson bookshelf. On its normally bare surface I appeared—during my adventures of the previous night—to have exhibited a blue wooden block. Why not? It was a very pretty colour. I clearly had fussed a great deal with the lighting, using the same tiny reading light Matthew had bought from the Conran Shop on Marylebone High Street. Now I fiddled with it until the facing surfaces of the memento were completely shadowless.

  Then I sipped my vodka.

  It glowed, my stolen jewel, deeply evasive, sad and melancholic, a study in blue but also something like a small boy’s slippers placed beneath his bed three thousand summer nights ago. Soon, but not immediately, my mind began to drift down Henry Brandling’s paths, narrow lines in the meadow where the grass was bent, broken yellow and bruised, fresh tracks that led to little hopping Carl the hare, clever clever Carl now dead as dead could be. Carl calcified and crumbled and the brain that had made and known the cube had vanished, less than a glow worm in the night, not even a dried cicada in a case. At this point, as I drained my glass, I heard the music of my clocks as I had heard them last night. The wind-up orchestra had always meant Clerkenwell, comfort, safety, peace. I had spent my entire life foolishly seduced by ticking clocks, never bothering to hear the horror underneath.

  I sought Henry, Henry alive, good-hearted Henry. How essential was his company in this endless night. I read. He wrote.

  Henry

  THE PAGES OF SUMPER’S notebook held a disgraceful mess of floating charts and lithographs depicting wheels of one sort or another. From this magpie’s nest he withdrew a densely annotated sheet which had suffered a chaos of amendments. He was eager to inform me it was a list of angels. Then, typically, he tucked it back into the nest and would permit no more discussion.

  “Then why did you show it to me?”

  He jutted his long chin towards the boy who was sitting quietly by the window working a piece of metal with a file.

  “His name is there,” he said.

  “He is an angel? I rather thought you were against that sort of guff.”

  Had there been a seraph in Furtwangen, he would not, surely, have had such dirty nails and long peculiar fingers. Those digits were host to several warts and Carl had been taught that he would cure these “apostles” by rubbing them with rosemary. My own dear boy smelled of Pears soap all day long, but Carl was not less pleasing—an earthly aroma always preceded his arri
val.

  He was not an angel. He was possibly a clever boy with a beautifully shaped head. He made the figure of a leaping deer from wire. Allegedly he sold this to the packer. A similar object was supposedly purchased by a Baron with a wasting disease and one had also gone to a beloved English boy with the same dangerous condition. Should Percy have brought me these gifts I would have treasured them, but in Carl’s case they were annoyances. His value to me was that he was the engine of the workshop. When he was absent, work slowed. Whenever he ran up the stairs, the tap of the hammer became faster and the whirr of the lathes accelerated.

  Percy needed no gift but mine. When Carl presented his cube to me I flinched and would have left the room had not the mother grabbed my hand. My mind was in another country where the floor was wet and the air was filled with sulphur. While Sumper snatched, Frau Helga dragged my thumbnail across the varnished surface. It tripped a trigger. The lid flew open. Out popped an Englishman six inches tall.

  With a face of hair, a pair of popping eyes, a top hat upon his large square head, this ridiculous figure was meant to represent myself, a man who had already lost one child to consumption. I didn’t require toys. I wanted only to be shown what I was paying for.

  “I have a mind to go to the police,” I cried.

  Sumper displayed nothing but exasperation, but Helga’s face was as crumpled as her son’s. “Herr Brandling, we have given you a gift.”

  “You stole my plans.”

  “No, Herr Brandling,” the boy said. His face was pale as death.

  “We are following your orders,” said Frau Helga. “You have paid us.”

  I was exceptionally pleased to have made them so afraid. “Quite so, Frau Helga, except Herr Sumper can provide no proof of anything. He tinkers. He teases. But all I see is my money as it disappears into his purse.”

  Sumper pushed his huge face right into mine and pinched my cheek. I slapped his hand away and he laughed or grunted in surprise.

  “If you were the Pope,” he hissed. “If you were the Jesus Christ himself, I would hide my work from you. I have to bring it to a stage where you understand what you are looking at.”