The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  The Grieving Genius, said Sumper, walked the streets of London, all the while devising—completely in his head—a series of shapes that never existed on the earth before, and he saw how this three-dimensional cam would drive against that three-dimensional cam and how they would align on an axle. In comparison to this endeavour Vaucanson’s duck should be seen as exactly what it is—a machine to produce fake shit, excuse me.

  These shapes CAME TO MY MASTER, Sumper said. He received every part COMPLETELY IN HIS HEAD. He drew the part with astonishing precision. He then taught Thigpen how to see the plan, and how to make the wood pattern and how to cast it in bronze, or turn it on a lathe so that all these elements would finally give the illusion, as they turned, that they were like a molten cord, sinuously rotating on columns like the vertebrae of some creature from a distant star. These parts were made to tolerances of one half-thousandth of an inch and were designed so that it was impossible to make an error. When instructed to make an error the machine would jam.

  To do this Cruickshank required twenty-five thousand parts in an assemblage twelve foot high and eight foot deep and weighing many tons. With ten thousand parts he was almost half way there. Who could possibly conceive what order of being this was?

  HRH the Queen never once said that she found the notion hard to grasp. But as in knighthoods, battles, invasions, the gold standard and the transportation of assassins, there must be, not only the monarch, but thousands of sucking ignoramuses, said Sumper, men who have rights and territories and opinions, and these astronomers, for instance, astronomers in particular, could not imagine, because no human mind could possibly calculate how much a machine like this might cost. By the time Thigpen had spent thousands of pounds the bureaucrats had decided that they had a white elephant on their hands. No one, certainly not Cruickshank, could tell them when it would be complete.

  So, said Sumper, no sooner had I been transported to the REALMS OF GOLD, to that elevated position where I might help change the history of mankind, no sooner had I arrived in Soho Square, but the idiots at the palace declared they would no longer foot the bill.

  Germans, cried Sumper. Germans. That’s what I could not tolerate. Idiots, cretins, stuck up, stitched up, basically stupid people who could have paid for the Engine by melting down a crown or two.

  “You see, Henry? In this case you are exactly equal to Queen Victoria. You worry you are being cheated, no? She was just the same.”

  He laughed at me and put his hand upon my shoulder, and in what followed assumed a greater degree of intimacy than was his place to assume.

  “I was a young man,” he said, “but once I had been employed it was clear that I had become, in my happiness, the most unhealthy creature on this earth, a monk. In your own situation you will easily imagine the mad bordello of my dreams, which reflected everything but my actual situation, nightly holding a Genius to my chest. How I wished to still his raging soul, if you will forgive the expression.”

  With this gamey brothel talk, Henry Brandling, Christian gentleman, was provided all the reason needed to retire.

  Catherine

  IT HAD BEEN TANTALIZING to stare through a glass darkly, to see or intuit what had taken place in Furtwangen and Low Hall so long ago. Reading in this way did not require that you interrogate the unclear word. In fact you soon learned that what was initially confusing would never be clarified no matter how you stared and swore at it. One learned to live with fuzziness and ambiguity in a way one never would in life.

  Yet I was a horologist. I had to know how things fitted together. I could not possibly accept that Cruickshank was a superior being or that animals might have a higher mental life. It was not uninteresting in considering these “mysteries” to see quite startling similarities between the hulking bony Sumper and the pretty blonde Amanda. They had similar habits of mind, like a pair of academics who will always push the evidence to fit their theory. When Amanda and I first ran the engine and I saw the creepy lifelike movement of the neck—so relentless, calculating, sinuous, cold, silver, phallic—I was not immune to its effect. I was therefore all the more pleased she had never read about Herr Sumper’s Superior Beings.

  Of course the swan would “serve,” as Sumper had insisted, but I doubt he imagined it serving the museum for that was where it would end its days, at the Lowndes Square entrance, lifting the gold coins from the punters’ pockets as if by magnetic force. As to whether this income would ever be enough to replace the funds cut by the Tories, one does not need a calculator to know that was impossible.

  The swan will not be Lucifer or a transport system for a secret Christian cross but, rather, one of those installations that children are brought to visit, with which old men in split shoes form strange relationships.

  And there will be surprisingly expensive postcards, and posters and videos and catalogues with a scholarly essay from Mr. Croft and a more lowly practical one from myself, and then—why not?—Amanda’s most particular drawings. It will be very unusual for a first-year assistant to make a serious contribution to a major catalogue, but no matter what eyebrows are raised, there is no doubt that Amanda Snyde, who could not yet be called a scholar, had been producing astonishingly good drawings every day. God knows how the issue of ownership and copyright would be settled, for although she produced many of her sketches on Swinburne time she did not stop at five o’clock. Nor was there, page by page, any true division between her detailed conservator’s recording of silver collars, and more personal work: she produced a very thoughtful drawing of me at work which, if I hadn’t been afraid of seeming vain, I would have loved to buy.

  My assistant was not at all secretive with her sketchbook and I had, on three occasions, snooped. There were two items, very revealing of her state of mind, which were completely and utterly not my business, except I was her boss.

  The most fanciful of these was a very careful three-dimensional architectural rendering of the structure of the morbid hull, that awful tomb in which Carl’s cube crossed the Styx. I had forbidden her to fuss with it, so I was annoyed to see she had been drawing it for hours on end. She had rendered the arched beams and the cladding on each side, also carefully indicated the bituminous sealant while, at the same time, not hiding the cavity beneath.

  And of course Amanda would not leave things in the simple concrete world. She had drawn, meticulously, with fine cross-hatching, an extraordinary number of fanciful objects secreted within the wooden skins. But why should I be angry? Did I wish to make imagination criminal? The objects made me think of provisions for the afterlife, those pots of grain and fruit one might see inside a pharaoh’s tomb, but there was nothing to tell me how they should be interpreted, and in any case she was a very fine assistant.

  I was returning the book to the bench when the door swung open and I performed what was, I hoped, a convincing reversal. That is, I affected to pick up what I had not yet set down.

  “Amanda,” I said, “have you talked to Mr. Croft about your drawings?”

  She placed her lunch bag beside the book. “Oh no, of course not.” She was colouring, not necessarily with pleasure.

  “Could you photocopy a series of them for me? Whatever ones you like best. I’m thinking of the catalogue.”

  Her eyes were suspicious but as she flicked through the pages I knew that her vanity would save me yet.

  I laid my hand on her wrist to stop her flicking past the drawing of the secret compartments. One could feel her physical resistance.

  “Its soul, perhaps?” I asked of the tiny manufactured things. “What are they, Amanda?”

  “Secrets,” she said, and turned two or three pages to a highly erotic, weirdly particular, rather Japanese drawing of the swan.

  She raised a cheeky eyebrow, but she was less certain now and slightly pinker.

  “I don’t like him,” she said.

  “You’ve done a lovely job.”

  “He’s up to something, don’t you think?”

  We had reached the stage,
you would imagine, when someone could have reasonably suspected she was ill, but I would never like to be that someone.

  “You think it’s strange too, the blue cube?”

  “Not strange,” I said, “but rather touching.” Of course she did not know Carl, so my comment could make no sense to her.

  “Miss Gehrig, do you find yourself wondering what else there might possibly be secreted in the hull?”

  “Dust,” I said, “a nail, a brass screw, sawdust.”

  She gave her head a little angry shake.

  “Don’t you even think about it?”

  “No.”

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “Now come on. We really have a deadline.”

  “Do you know, we could predict the probability of there being more blue cubes. Mathematically.”

  “No, Amanda, I don’t think so.”

  “Did you study maths?”

  “Amanda, that’s enough.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Gehrig, but if you were a mathematician I do believe you’d answer yes. I’d like you to talk to my friend. He is a sort of mathematical genius. Can I get a pass for him, Miss Gehrig? Please. There can’t be any harm.”

  I am a socialist. It makes me feel uneasy to judge someone who does not know her place. Amanda did not know her place, but I failed to point this out to her. I signed the application for the pass and left it to her to fill out the rest of it.

  The peculiar thing was, when she mentioned this friend, I immediately thought of Angus. Then, because that was so impossible I did not consider it for another moment. Was my “not knowing” a little too deliberate? Was I actually hoping it was him? I cannot say, but when Matthew’s eldest son appeared in my office wearing those long narrow-waisted pleated trousers I was, although completely shocked, uncertain of any single emotion. Perhaps “extreme panic” would cover everything.

  The young man appeared most uncomfortable, but this was likely produced by the expression on my face, or the very cold way I spoke to Amanda.

  “Did you know Angus’s father had worked at the Swinburne?” I demanded.

  “It wasn’t here. It was at Lowndes Square.”

  “How do you and Angus know each other?”

  “Oh, in Suffolk.”

  I was invaded, violated. Suffolk was our place, Matthew’s, mine, woven with our life and breath, Southwold, Walberswick, Dunwich, even Norwich, were the secret fabric of the secret life we lived alone. How dare she drag this poor beautiful boy into territory he knew was freighted with his father’s life.

  No doubt I looked ugly and displeased. Something made them go so very still.

  “Where in Suffolk, Amanda?”

  But I did not want to hear, no more than you would wish to see the bed where your lover had betrayed your trust.

  “Miss Gehrig, I don’t think it’s fair that you control who we know.”

  I laughed or gasped depending on the point of view. But I did not want a row with Angus. I wanted him to like me in the end.

  “So, of course, it’s you,” I said to him. “The maths genius.”

  “I’ll do my best.” He was nervous, fiddling with his hand-painted buttons. I thought, ah, Amanda made the buttons.

  “If you show me the thing,” he said.

  Clearly she had shown him a drawing for he was looking at the hull as he spoke. “So,” he said, “I know there is a given volume divided into regions of a certain size. I know how big the blue cubes are. You are asking me can I mathematically predict the likelihood of there being more blue cubes?”

  “Who knows what’s there? It might not be blue cubes,” Amanda said. “It might be totally anachronistic.”

  I felt an awful chill.

  If Angus was alarmed, he certainly did not show it. In any case, she was pretty enough to turn a young man deaf and blind. “If the cubes are placed randomly,” he insisted, “then the probability of finding one will be just the size of the region divided by the size of the object.”

  “Not just cubes.” She was now very bossy. “Who knows where they hid things? If we knew that we would simply drill a hole.”

  She nodded at me, as if affirming that she meant it.

  “I can’t predict the unpredictable,” the boy said.

  “You told me you could.”

  “Let me give you a parallel to what you’re asking—walking along the footpath, you encounter a paper bag. It has a pencil inside. You see another paper bag nearby. What’s the likelihood that there’s a pencil in it? The answer is, I have no clue. I know that there might be one, but that’s all I know.”

  “Well,” she said, “there is certainly more than one. Otherwise it makes no sense.”

  “Amanda.”

  “Miss Gehrig, of course there are many parts inside. It is central to the issue of the swan.”

  “What is the issue of the swan?” I asked, the hair rising on my neck.

  “Amanda,” said Angus. He held her hand but she shook it off.

  “You lied to me,” she said.

  The poor boy had no idea of what was happening. “So there are objects secreted inside the double skin?” he said.

  “You know there are. I told you.”

  “Well you just X-ray it,” he said. “Who needs maths?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not at all impossible,” Angus said. “Museums have X-rays. If there’s something inside you will see it.”

  Amanda turned to me, her eyebrows pressing down fiercely on her eyes. “Is this true?” she demanded. “Is this another lie?”

  It is not mad to be obsessive, I told myself.

  “Darlings,” I said, although I would not usually use such a word, “let me just alert you to the fact that Britain has just had an election. As a result, our budgets are cut to the bone. At the same time, we are involved in a very complicated, very demanding restoration of an automaton. It took a three-hour meeting to approve the replacement of one small fish. There will be no X-rays, none, not ever.”

  “Please, Miss Gehrig,” Amanda said, beseechingly, and then—quite suddenly—she understood I would not budge.

  It was then she scratched my face.

  MY INJURY WOULD NOT need stitches, but I was very angry and when I had trouble with ID at Lowndes Square, I went completely nuts.

  Up the damn haunted staircase, and all around me were Matthew’s molecules, oxygen that had caressed the clean pink lining of his lungs. I saw no one I knew, or perhaps they saw me coming.

  A podiatrist once said to me, when people hear you walking they’ll think you’re angry, and there was surely something incensed about my walk, the ink blue of my swirling skirt; and me, as always, too heavy on the heels. Did I have an appointment? No I did not, but there he was, Crofty, in the centre of his rat’s nest—books and papers and catalogues and cards and hardly a thing of beauty to contemplate unless it was hidden in that wooden crate with straw stuffing spilling across the rug. It was a very fine-looking office just the same, wide rattling Georgian sashes, marble fireplace, and the courtyard as sweet and silent as a nunnery, deep in chestnut shade.

  “What on earth has happened to you?” he said and there was such tenderness and sadness in his mouth that when he held out his arms I thought of Max Beckmann in his dinner suit, lonely, haunted, kind.

  “That girl has to go,” I said.

  “Dear Jesus,” he said. His tenderness was all-engulfing. I had the sudden sense of a secret life. “Did she attack you?”

  I would not let him touch my face.

  “Take a tissue anyway,” he said.

  “Get rid of her,” I said.

  There was an armchair filled with bubble wrap. He cleared it for me and I sat. He wheeled the chair from behind his desk so we were almost knee to knee.

  I said: “You put people together like you run a bloody stud farm.”

  For a second he revealed that slightly dangerous Crofty air, as if he was considering which card to play. He offered tissu
es once again. I was rather pleased to discover how much blood there was.

  “Catherine, what on earth do you mean?”

  “You have been an awful meddler.”

  I thought, he will make tea now.

  “Have I, really?” He folded his arms and I saw the Rolex peek from beneath his cuff like a mark of corporate corruption. “I’m sorry you think that, Catherine.”

  “Amanda is the granddaughter of your friend. Lichfield, yes? Lord.”

  “That was the photographer, darling. Gerald is actually a baron.” He stood. “Hang on a second.”

  He disappeared and I thought, now he will make his bloody tea. It will be lapsang souchong and he will ask do I mind not having milk. But when he returned it was with elastoplasts and cotton wool and various dark bottles. He made a mess pouring alcohol onto a swab. He intended to clean me up, but I took charge.

  “Might sting.”

  Of course it stung. “In any case,” I said, “Amanda Snyde is the granddaughter of your friend.”

  “Not a friend exactly.”

  “A board member then.”

  “A collector, darling. Quite a different beast.”

  I permitted him to accept the bloody swab. I took a fresh gauze in return.

  “But still you engineered it?”

  “Catherine, I’m terribly sorry this has happened. Of course it is unpardonable, but it does our cause no harm when collectors feel connected to the museum. And besides, she is exceptional. You saw her transcripts. The Courtauld people raved about her. There was a three-page letter from West Dean. She’s clearly brilliant.”