The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  I waited, swivelling on my chair, looking out the window at the trees.

  “No milk,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “Perfect,” I said, as he placed a very lovely (uncharacteristically restrained) Clarice Cliff cup and saucer on the desk beside me. “I had the most awful dusty tea for breakfast.”

  Why had I said that? Surely I wasn’t going to tell him I had spent the night in a room above a pub? Then it appears I was. Then I had.

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “I wanted to finish reading.”

  “Which pub?” His questioning gaze embarrassed me.

  “The Rose and Crown.”

  “The Youngs’ place with all the sofas in the bar? Up the road?”

  I thought, he can’t know that Matthew and I slept there for the first time, but men will tell each other the strangest things, so perhaps he did. I tried to sip my tea but the triangular deco handle, while very beautiful, was difficult to grasp when hot.

  “I was trying to get the notebooks finished. Actually, I still have one to go.”

  I could see the pity in his eyes. I thought, he will let me keep the book.

  “Well, I am not going to lock them up, my love. You can read them whenever you wish, in a lot nicer environment than the Rose and Crown.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I do think it would be wise to put them on restricted.”

  “You do, do you?” He laughed, rather indignantly I thought.

  “Eric, I put an awful lot of make-up on, but I do think the scratch still shows, don’t you?” I did not say, Amanda Snyde has been inside my house, although of course she had.

  “You mean I should put them on restricted so your assistant cannot read them too.”

  “I’m rather afraid they will set her off again.”

  I had misjudged him totally. He was incredulous.

  “My darling, of course they cannot be locked up. I couldn’t justify that to anyone. You know Miss Snyde is very sorry. There was a mess-up at Boots, apparently. It was not her fault at all. Now she has her pills again, she’s fine. She’s mortified by what happened.”

  I thought, she takes pills for her enthusiasm?

  “Eric, please, have you read these notebooks?”

  In other circumstances I would have enjoyed that impish smile. Now it scared me.

  “Keep reading. It gets better.” So saying he whisked all my notebooks from the room. I followed him, but I knew where he was going anyway. In future I would have to take that same staircase, at the top of which I would find myself at the mercy of the dry and secret little Annie Heller who had never liked me, and now would like me less. I had lost my private right to Henry Brandling. I would have to sign him out and sign him in.

  The lapsang souchong was still too hot. The solid triangular handle offered no purchase. The treasure was about to slip between my fingers.

  ANNIE HELLER WAS A tiny bad-tempered insect of a thing, not at all a scholar, with no technical expertise, with no legitimate institutional power except—she was the one who arranged for the manuscripts to be scanned. I suspected she was exceptionally nice to Crofty, for when he spoke of the empty Victorian sitting room behind her high librarian’s desk, he called it a “very pleasant place.” Why not? It must have been, for him. Even in winter, even in the silence, he was spared the animus the rest of us could feel, even when we had no visual contact with its source.

  Annie was unbelievably, habitually rude. Only at the Swinburne could she have kept her job.

  We all tried to suck up, and of course she despised us for it. Knowing this I still smiled at her when I came to talk about the Brandling Catalogue. I told her that her hair looked nice, which was far too big a lie. I asked, please, for a form to withdraw one of the manuscripts Mr. Croft had just given her.

  As usual she made me wait a long time for an answer. Finally she said she would do that the “very moment” they had been catalogued.

  I asked her when might that be.

  “Oh, not long—a day or two.”

  When she did look up I knew she was lying. I waited until she was more or less compelled to look at me.

  “Might I perhaps read it here, in the reading room?” I asked. It should not have even been a question. I was a senior conservator.

  “I’m afraid they are needed for cataloguing.”

  “I do not believe that Mr. Croft intended I be denied the material,” I said, thus somehow forcing her to return to pecking on her keyboard. Her task could not have been demanding for she was able to speak to me between keystrokes.

  “You know as well as I do, Miss Gehrig, Mr. Croft would not wish me to go against the rules.”

  “Perhaps you could ring him up?”

  So then the keyboard was pushed aside. The head came up. The tiny wire spectacles were removed.

  “Miss Gehrig, I do know what the Swinburne regulations are without speaking to Mr. Croft and, in any case, once the manuscripts have been catalogued they will go to be scanned, and then, if you wish, you can view them on your computer.”

  “So it is definitely not possible for me to read one of them now?”

  “Miss Gehrig, perhaps I don’t appear to be busy?”

  “Even if there is an important fund-raising project that will now be delayed?”

  “That is correct, yes.”

  “Thank you, Miss Heller.”

  “You are very welcome, Miss Gehrig. I don’t imagine it will be more than a week.”

  I descended the stairs as quietly as I dared and travelled back to Olympia in the stinky bus. I was in a vile, vile mood, angry with myself for my own incompetence, angry I had lost Henry, furious with Crofty for not supporting me. When I found Amanda ensconced in my studio it seemed I had lost all the power I had ever had.

  “Good morning Amanda,” I said.

  “Miss Gehrig, I am so sorry,” she said, but I could not trust her. I would not engage her eyes.

  “It’s past,” I said. “The swan is more important than either of us.”

  She had been with Angus. He had dressed her. She wore a crumpled white shirt whose single button was sewn with bright red thread. She looked gorgeous, carrying the rumpled cotton the way only the very beautiful can do. She had a new sort of sexual confidence that made me feel dry and wizened.

  By this time we had the mechanism assembled on a steel work bench, and the glass rods were all clean, laid on the bright new back plates, their end caps secured by a modern reversible adhesive. As soon as we wound the clockwork, the rods would slowly spin.

  The track was in place and the little fish could be connected as soon as this morning, an operation as ultimately simple as hooking an earring in one’s lobe.

  We were perhaps a month from the very end, but very close to a dress rehearsal for the nobs. Once the neck was clad with rings, once the beak was properly attached, we would do a run-through and then Crofty could show his benefactors the wonder. Of course he already knew exactly what he had. Even before its restoration he had foreseen the swan’s hypnotic, eerie being. I am certain that he had laid a more complicated set of bets than I could ever hope to know.

  Would it really draw sufficient crowds to please the ministry? The minutes of the procedures meeting had hinted at this angle, but one could have put it much more bluntly—with this swan the mandarins of Lowndes Square had surrendered to the Tory government. They understood their obligation to be “more popular.”

  In any case my assailant and I laboured day after day. As long as we kept our conversation to the job at hand, I did not fear her physically.

  Yet I was unable to forget that savage, ignorant injury to Carl’s blue cube, and because of this I continued to stay at the Rose and Crown. This brought its own predictable stresses on both my MasterCard and my wardrobe.

  I arrived at work one morning and found Amanda already at her computer. I would not have thought about it if she had not closed it down so quickly. A few minutes later, as luck would have it, Security called to say w
e had a parcel—the long chain synthetic, Dyneema, which I had ordered to replace the steel cable. I despatched Amanda to pick it up, and the moment she was out of the room I looked at her viewing history.

  She had been Googling Furtwangen. She had found this in the notebooks in my flat. How much she had read was beyond the point. I was angry and frightened. My skin went cold and hard as leather.

  By the time the spy had returned and placed the parcel on my desk, my world had become quite unreal. I picked up the scalpel with the dot of nail polish. Amanda stood very close, wearing Jo Malone, all in black today, with painted buttons.

  Before the inner sheath of packaging was revealed, I turned to her, very conscious of the scalpel in my hand. She stepped back, exactly as I wished.

  “Amanda, I checked your computer history.”

  “I’ve not been looking at the webcam.”

  “You were Googling Furtwangen. Why?”

  Her face showed that infuriating expression which might be colloquially translated as “duh.” She said: “Obviously, I wanted to know where it was.”

  I casually rested my hand on the bench, but I did not release my grip on the metal handle. “Why?”

  “I think they made cuckoo clocks there.”

  “Why are you interested in cuckoo clocks?”

  If she was going to scratch again, it would be now. I was very foolish to hold the scalpel. I wished, now, too late, to put it down, but I was afraid of that as well. Then I saw, with relief, her eyes were tearing.

  “Miss Gehrig, I am so sorry.”

  I did not dare soften. “What are you sorry about, Amanda?”

  “I know about the notebooks.”

  “Which notebooks?”

  “Henry Brandling.”

  “You mean you have seen them? How could you?”

  “I went to Miss Heller. She doesn’t leave until seven.”

  It was not until the next day that I had my moment with Miss Heller and Eric Croft and I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that this was true. And although this resulted in me being given full access to the reading room, I got no apology from Heller.

  “When people are nice to me, Miss Gehrig, I am always very nice to them. When people are rude and officious then I tend to be a stickler.”

  I sat ten feet behind her desk, reading Henry Brandling.

  Henry

  NOW THAT THE FURTWANGEN weather is so cold, the old sawmill by the river seems to suffer as much as we who dwell there—slates fracturing, nails wrenching themselves free, the whole cuckoo construction seeming to shiver in the winds which have begun to blow violently between the dark cliffs of the gorge. Frau Helga runs back and forth between her home and the inn (I assume it is the inn) driven by something, not clockwork, but a tight spring certainly, a locked action beyond any possibility of change. She returns to pack her trunk, each time the same, so carefully, folding her threadbare dresses as if they were ball gowns. Then—like a customs agent (that is, in a fury) Sumper unpacks, each time more violently. She runs to the inn. She returns. She weeps.

  Herr Sumper has suffered a black eye, the cause and occasion of which are mysteries to me.

  Frau Helga seems to be still in a financial negotiation with the owner of the inn. Is this about the swan? I do not know. I hear her conversation with Sumper very clearly. It is mechanically amplified by the chute leading to the workshop.

  “She has always looked out for me,” she says. “She will get a good price.”

  “She is a brothel-keeper,” Sumper says.

  I think, does she plan to spend this on the swan?

  She shouts at him in German, rapping her fist against a wall, a door, the floor for all I know. It is not impossible that she is lying prostrate at his feet.

  “You are free.” I hear him, even while the windows rattle in their sashes. He says, “Free as a fish in the sea.” He says that she may depart any moment she chooses and he will, as the man of honour she knows him to be, deliver Carl back to Karlsruhe as soon as the swan is made.

  Then wailing in German in her fright. The Lord knows what it means.

  He says the new draught horse is not for her use. He will pay for her to travel by coach.

  M. Arnaud is expected any hour to produce the beak. Will the brothel-keeper pay him? Is he paid already? I imagine him, standing alone in the middle of the forest, cloaked in black, half bird, half man. What child would not be frightened of that beak?

  The colossal automaton I so desperately summoned forth is assembled on a heavy cart in the so-called summer workshop in the freezing cold. I cannot pay for it. Sumper and the boy continue working around the inconvenience of the cart wheels.

  I will have my swan. I will take him home. The draught horse will be backed up the long low ramp. From here my machine shall be carried out into the light of day, like a saint in a procession.

  Sumper continues to call the lithe and buxom Frau Helga “The idiot woman.”

  Again and again, Frau Helga insists she had no choice as “Herr Brandling failed his obligation.”

  No one asks me for a shekel.

  Sumper, again and again: she has “sealed her own fate” by letting the Catholics see his “private business.”

  I now suspect the black eye is related to the automaton. They are wasting Percy’s time. Arguments take place in the river workshop and the summer workshop to which I am not privy. The discord continues around the dinner table, through the night, echoing in the gorge, as inescapable as the damp, as relentless as the river. We are all afraid, I warrant.

  I think of my English boy every minute. There is not the slightest attempt to shield the German boy from the adult opinions, and sometimes I suspect—because both of them continue, even when most unforgivably abusive, to speak in English—that the scenes are a sort of Punch and Judy enacted to deceive me or to blame me for the injury I have caused them all. But what can I do? My brother bought stocks in the Bank of Ohio.

  “He is a child,” Frau Helga says. Of Carl.

  He is a strange one—his intent dark eyes flicking from one he loves to one he worships. I cannot be held responsible for the damage done to him.

  His mother ladles out the potatoes which she mashes so brutally but which, with the addition of salt and butter, make the most delicious meal I have ever known. She serves furiously—splat!—and her nostrils contract in passion. There is an angry burn like a knife blade along her lower arm.

  “I need Carl to finish,” Sumper says. I think, where will the money come from? Blood floods the boy’s face. With his bright wide eyes and his wheaten hair he might be a choir boy in our village church.

  The thick man’s appetite is never gratified, his thirst never slaked. He drinks, he eats, he makes the law. “When the boy is finished here, he will return to the city of the wheel and do what he is born to do.”

  How could I have not understood his strangeness the first day at the inn—the map of Karlsruhe, the Baron with the Drais? Frau Helga says now that his mind is broken and she hates him, but later I hear them thumping in the night, dragging at each other like wild creatures, snorting and panting like the partners of a crime. Dare I admit—I would sell my soul for less.

  In the morning I am shaken awake. Sumper has shaved, smooth as rock, and gleaming. His eyes are pebbles in a stream.

  What he wishes me to understand, before the day’s work begins, is that all this is exactly as Albert Cruickshank had foretold.

  He lays his hand against my cheek. Who would not shrink from him? He repeats that Cruickshank had predicted my arrival in Germany and my particular role in Sumper’s life. My eyes are stuck with sleep but his are clear, without the tiniest ripple of doubt.

  This is one more lie. I have everything recorded exactly, as he told it—he has not seen Cruickshank since he set out for Buckingham Palace on that rainy night. At that time there was no talk of me. How could there be? Then he was deported and finally returned to Furtwangen from which place he despatched the ledger of drowned pe
ople to his former master. He received in return the blasphemous automaton with a “charming note” which indicated Sumper might now need the laughter more than Cruickshank.

  If there had been some “prophecy” I would have noted it, just as I have noted all the other symptoms.

  But Sumper, as from the start, is slippery as a Rhine fish. “I cannot tell you everything that ever occurred.” He opens the shutters, raises the windows to admit the howling wind. “No, I am not relating what Cruickshank WROTE to me but rather what HE SAID. Please pay attention to what I am telling you. When I left for Buckingham Palace the Genius already saw what my fate would be. I imagined I would save the Engine, but he knew the truth. At the moment, when I shook his hand, he said do not despair, another Englishman will come along. Only later did his words come back to me. I might lose him, but another Englishman would come along.”

  I rise and stand with my back to the window to keep the storm at bay. He pushes himself towards me, eyes too close, too insistent.

  He says: “Do you not remember how I sat waiting for you in Frau Beck’s inn? You did not know it yet, but I already had your foolish plans.”

  “Herr Sumper,” I say, “this is not sensible. Mr. Cruickshank never knew me, nor could he know my circumstances, or the character of my wife, or the sickness of my son, or the artists overrunning our home. To speak in his own language, Mr. Cruickshank had insufficient data.”

  “Henry, you have not the least idea of what that great brain thought. How could you?”

  I am two inches taller but when I look into those jet black eyes I am but a snivelling beast. I pray that he will release me soon.

  It is clear now that Frau Helga has let the villagers see the laughing Jesus. It is my fault that she sold it, but is the price enough for my own purpose? Certainly I saw Frau Helga counting money in the stable. I saw the fair down on her arms. Once I dreamed I might kiss her. Long ago.

  I was at the stream washing, naked, teetering on razor shale which can amputate your toes. When Sumper touched my shoulder I jumped in fright. My private parts shrivelled like gizzards in a stockpot. He was armoured in his leather apron, a beak in his hand, but I did not know that then.