by Peter Carey
The stolen blue cube was sitting in the middle of the magazine table. Noah clearly followed my gaze. He was his father’s son. He picked up the cube.
“May I smoke?” he asked.
“Of course.”
He produced a pouch of tobacco, balanced Carl’s toy on one knee.
Poor boys I thought—their dear eyes, great dark pools of hurt, more like each other than like their father—low brows, a terrible silent mental concentration. On what I did not know. But they carried Matthew’s beauty, their sinew, bone, the square set of their shoulders, that same lovely nose.
“I’ll fetch an ashtray.”
I thought, when I give it to him I’ll take the cube away, I don’t know why, but by the time I returned he’d tucked it deep between his legs.
“We have never really met,” I said to his brother.
“No, not really.”
“But you are Angus?”
“Yes.”
“I’m the troubled child,” Noah said, and placed Carl’s cube back on the table. “I’m Noah. And you are Catherine Gehrig. I Googled you.”
Silence.
“Can I have a drink?” asked Noah.
I knew Matthew did not wish me to give him alcohol.
“Do you have any beer?”
“Just some red wine, and a little whisky.”
“Whisky,” he said, and held my gaze.
I looked to his older brother. He shook his head. “I’m the designated driver.”
When I first met his father, Noah had been in trouble for making a joke about a gay camel. He was just a little boy. He had thought it was funny, that a camel might be gay. The school had different opinions.
“Weird, huh?” I called as I poured the whisky in the kitchen. The “huh” sounding so old, so fake.
“What?”
I fetched a glass of water and delivered this together with the whisky. Angus was standing in front of the framed photograph of the stables.
“It’s strange, us three, here all together,” I said as the child drank his whisky straight. “I’m sorry if this is awful for you.”
“Did you like it there?” Angus asked, gazing at the photograph. He was being an adult, smelling like a teenage boy.
I stood beside him. “I don’t think you did.”
He produced his Frankenpod or Space Onion or whatever. “Have you ever Googled it? Would you like to see?”
Of course I did not wish to look. “All right,” I said.
Angus sat on the day bed, with me on his left side. We crouched over the gadget, not quite touching, and there it was, the stables seen from space, the line of cliff, the trees, the grey roof in the shade.
It was nighttime now in Suffolk, but the daylight image was no less disturbing for being captured in the past. The satellite had spied on us during the summer of the drought, the brown grass, the dying tree. I could make out the Norton Commando so the pair of us were there, alive together, unaware.
“We must have been inside,” I said, and then I was embarrassed to imagine what they thought: all that stinky sex. “Did you feel I stole your father from you?”
“Let’s face it,” Noah said. “You did.”
There was some unspoken current of conversation between them.
“No, it wasn’t you,” Angus said, but I must have existed everywhere around them.
Noah left the room and—don’t ask me why—I snatched Carl’s cube and sat it on the shelf behind me.
When he returned with the whisky bottle, he spoke directly to his older brother. “We were going to tell the truth. That’s what we agreed.”
My heart sank.
Noah’s mouth, like his father’s, was an instrument of infinite nuance. He was staring at the shelf above my head, and although he was almost certainly amused, I had no idea what he was thinking.
Then Angus removed the framed photograph from the wall. I have never liked people fiddling with my things but I forgot that when I saw how sad and grimy my walls had become.
“This is yours now,” Angus said.
I was so tense I thought he meant my photograph and I was outraged that he should have assumed the power to give me what was mine.
“Do you mean this?”
“The stables, yes. It’s yours.”
My heart did leap at that, but of course they were boys and they knew a great deal less than I did. Matthew and I had talked about his will. He had wished to maintain our secrets after death and if I had been hurt by that, it had not been for long.
“You’re very sweet. I wish it was.”
Noah picked up the whisky bottle and we all watched while it surrendered the last four drops.
“It is yours.” Noah had that slightly off-putting confidence young public schoolboys bring to the workplace. I wanted to say, I saw your father’s will, you brat. He signed it in 2006 and I can promise you that Catherine Gehrig does not even have a walk-on part.
“Dad couldn’t leave it to you, of course,” Angus said.
“No, of course not.” He was pushing all my buttons all at once. For thirteen years I had been made invisible by this family even while I was subsumed by them, their maths problems and their vomiting. I didn’t mind. I really didn’t mind.
“He left it to us.”
“Quite right,” I said, my bitterness a secret, even from myself.
“He could hardly write your name in his will.”
Well, he could, I thought, although I would never have asked him to. “It would have looked a little odd to your mother.” I smiled as best I could.
“We’ve talked about it, Noah and I. And as we are the new owners we have decided you shall have it as long as you live.”
There were too many emotions in the room, but the two young men were keeping themselves together, both of them with their big hands upon their knees.
“It’s called a peppercorn rent. We have brought the lease for you to sign. You pay one peppercorn a year, that’s it.”
“We brought the Mini here, to give to you.”
“Really? Did you do all this on your own?”
“A friend of Dad’s. He helped us think about the lease.”
“This would be Mr. Croft?”
“He has been very nice to us.”
“He registered the car in whose name?”
Neither of them seemed to know.
“We parked it outside.”
“We washed it, but it rained.”
“You are very sweet, but I can’t drive.” This was not really true.
“You could learn,” said Angus. “It’s surprisingly easy.”
“I could teach you,” Noah said. “I did an advanced driving course, skid pans, everything.”
I could say nothing in response. I was too moved, too sad, too furious. My young protectors somehow saw I was about to cry. They quickly agreed they would keep the Mini somewhere safe for me and that we would meet to talk about the driving lessons. I signed the lease and gave them both a peppercorn and in minutes we were in the library where I was held in a musty smelly sort of rugger hug. Matthew, in their bones.
When they had gone I lay on my bed and thought about the breeze brushing our naked skin in the summer, the storms rocking us in winter, the German Sea gnawing at the bottom of the cliff.
AT THE ANNEXE, at this early hour, I delete you, my darling, my beloved, with your wide soft mouth against my neck. I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labour at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells. There on your secret triangle of land I would be your most submissive tenant, would lie beside you until rain, wind, storms raced, threaded like shoelaces through our missing eyes.
Such thoughts as these are mine, at the moment Amanda enters from her world where the Gulf of Mexico has become a lake of oil. Does she have a mythology or cosmology for this?
“Hello,” she says when she has dumped her backpack.
>
“Hello,” I say. Delete, I think.
Looking up, it is clear to me that she has a new lover. She has baggy indigo trousers and a sleeveless top like silverfish. Inside these loose coverings is a body so young as to make one weep. Her attention is on the swan. Please, please, I need no more fantastical nonsense. Please learn to see what is before you here and now.
She says, “What I am about to say is none of my business.”
The hair rises on my neck. I delete a letter I have not even read.
“I only want to help.”
I read, archive, spam, delete.
“It is so painful watching you,” she says.
“It is just a swan, Amanda. A machine.”
“Miss Gehrig, this does not have to take weeks. It could be done in minutes. You do not have to torture yourself like this.”
She is offering me a small plastic object which, in my fear and rage, I mistake for a cigarette lighter. It has one of those crude non-words in white type on its side. A part emerges from the black sheath, steel, like lipstick.
“You just create a new folder for your email, archive it, and export the archive to a flash drive.”
“What’s a flash drive?”
“This.” She sort of thrusts it at me, which I do not like at all.
“I could download it for you. In a second.”
“I’m fine, thank you.” She works for me, she reports to me, but even as I refuse her help she attempts to get around me.
“Amanda, what is it that you imagine I am up to?”
But she will not answer. “All I’m saying is—you don’t have to spend hours and hours like this. It must be hell.”
“Who told you?”
But she is intent on controlling my computer.
“It was Mr. Croft who told you?”
Her doll-like eyes are wet with unwanted sympathy. At the same time her irises are very wide, like a creature living in the dark.
“Please, please let me just …” And she has slid between me and the machine, typing as she speaks. “You can take it home and load it on your own computer. Is it a Mac?”
“No. It’s a PC. So, obviously it will not work.”
She looks over her shoulder, appraising me as if I am a dangerous beast, holding my eye all the while. Up close, she smells strangely musty. Then I see her fingernails are dirty.
“You know who these emails are from?” I ask her.
“They’re loading now.”
“Who told you, Amanda?”
“We both know who told me.” She places the tiny object in my hands. She wraps my fingers around it. Some subtle shift of power has been effected.
“Miss Gehrig, he worries about you.”
“No.”
“All he can think about is that you be looked after.”
“But we can’t say who he actually is.”
“No.”
“Although we already have.”
“The swan is terribly important to the museum, you know that. He has a frightful difficulty getting money as you know. He has to go around sucking up and being charming. How awful to have to beg from all those city yobs.”
Thus I am taught to suck eggs by my child assistant. But what really stings is that the sweet, pretty, clever Courtauld girl has forcibly removed Matthew from my cache. She has made me hold him like ashes in a vial.
Henry
SUMPER AND I DEPARTED the village with the heavy brass drum strapped between two poles. Such was the weight we were in a hurry to reach our destination, speeding through the fog across the square, down the lanes to the brook, across the footbridge to the fields, stumbling dangerously in furrows at whose furthest extent the sawmill awaited us. Now the leaves had fallen and nature was revealed, like an old man whose beard has been shaved off to show what cruel tricks time had played on him. Dear Pater.
Such was our speed and so uneven was the field that I feared Frau Helga, charging from the flank, would cause a spill. She passed me at a gallop and rounded on Herr Sumper while somehow trotting backwards, bravely waving letters in the air.
“On,” cried Sumper. “On.”
“No, it is from England.”
“On.”
I thought, Percy! But I was tied to Herr Sumper in every sense, so “on” I must and “on” I did, although together we almost ran the woman down.
I thought, it is from Binns. My boy could not endure the wait. Dead and lonely and I did not kiss his lips. Then we reached the river path, and the Holy Child burst from the bushes with a savage yell. His eyes were bright, his cry too high. He shook a murdered rabbit before his mother’s face before setting off ahead, gambolling and hobbling, shaking his keys in his left hand.
We sped onwards. Dear God, I am a mighty fool, please let him live. In the freezing summer workshop above the river, we laid our burden down.
I took the letter and saw my brother’s hand.
“What news?” asked Helga.
Carl was also waiting, dripping rabbit blood onto his feet.
Thank God, thank Jesus, I will join you soon.
But no—my brother was set to delay me further. Two months previously, the spider wrote, he had been appointed my trustee and now possessed the power to decide, at his own discretion, what sums would be made available to me at whatever intervals he might deem appropriate, the snivelling little wretch.
He claimed our father had “lost his wits.”
Of course it was not totally impossible that the paternal mind had collapsed at exactly the moment I walked out of the door, but my brother’s assertion that our father was no longer “sensible” was what the pater would have called a “hoot.” He had never been “sensible” in any way at all.
Red-nosed Douglas had had him declared Non compos mentis. That was Douglas, worse than Douglas. To quote: “What you do not sufficiently appreciate, Henry, is I am a man of business, and there is a great deal more to business than railway tracks.”
He was not a man of any type at all, and what was cloaked by all his ghastly bumph was that he had invested in the Bank of Ohio. I ask you: who had lost their wits? It was Doug the Thug who had placed Brandling and Sons in an “awkward situation.” Now he regretted to advise me, as my trustee—imagine—that I might draw no more funds until the “panic in America” was sorted out.
Sumper turned his back. I could not see his face, only his shoulder, his green coat, his large white hand which he ran regretfully along the flat of the spring, as if it were his fresh-caught trout.
“Bad news, Herr Brandling?”
He took it well, Frau Helga less so. She ran weeping across the bridge to the house and Carl went hotfoot after her, dripping blood across the floor.
“Dig potatoes,” Sumper called.
Then he turned to me, and without particular expression, made the following speech: “The trouble with the rich is that they rarely have the patience for great things.”
I assumed he was finding fault with me. I apologized, as well I might, but he waved all that away. “When it is their own business,” he said, “they know what to do.”
“Who do you mean, Sir?”
“When they abandon their counting house or factory, when they must have a portrait painted, they turn into idiots. What a state they are in. They go to their club where they seek out other idiots for their opinion. ‘I am having my portrait done,’ they will say, ‘and the fellow is using a lot of blue. What do you think? I’m worried about that damned blue.’ ”
So then I saw what he was saying and, for once, I totally agreed. It was intolerable that a fool like Douglas should play with life and death.
“They are in charge. It is their only skill. It is exactly the same with your Queen of England, German of course, and completely ignorant of where she is. It was she, Mrs. Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who disgraced England and my own country by cutting off the funding for the most extraordinary machine. That is the reason that I later came to visit Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace.”
“I see,” I said. I thought, he can only talk about himself.
“You do not look at all surprised?”
I did not look surprised because I did not believe him for a second. It was impossible in every way.
That evening I wrote to Percy concerning what I referred to as “our secret.” I promised that in spite of his uncle and his mother’s “difficulties” I would return as promised and that if he would only eat his grains and be a brave boy with his hydrotherapy, I would soon make him completely well.
If that was a risk, I did not see it. My blood was up and I would keep my word.
HERR SUMPER SAYS HE first mistook the Genius, Albert Cruickshank, for a common tramp, and was mightily offended that this beggar was permitted to walk freely through the door from Bowling Green Lane. The visitor’s trouser cuffs dragged on the machine-room floor. His grey hair was long and stringy. His jaw was clenched, his mouth set straight. The author of Mysterium Tremendum (for it was he) carried beneath his arm a rectangular board which Sumper assumed to be one of those complaining placards which he had seen mad people display outside the English parliament.
The visitor was allowed to wander freely, “like a Hindoo Cow,” between the lathes and presses of that enormous industrial cathedral. Not a drill slowed, not a canvas belt was shifted from its drive, certainly no worker prevented the intruder from approaching, along an aisle of lathes, the place where an altar might be expected in a church. But never was Christian altar built to the scale of that enormous engine. Sumper compared it variously to an elephant, a locomotive, a series of vertical columns of circular discs, all these so contradictory that a chap was left with—what?—a notion of a very large mechanism, yes, but one that was somehow spectral, golden, intricate as clockwork. I knew my clockmaker was in the habit of lying (about Prince Albert most recently) but such were his powers of persuasion that I had no difficulty in picturing how the interlinking parts of steel and brass caught the light, much like, surely, the gold frames on the high walls of my family’s home could contain the flame of a single candle set on a table fifteen feet below. I found myself wishing I could have seen the wonder too.