The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  “But perhaps a little unstable?”

  “My understanding was that she’d been very good.”

  “Can you see my face? Can you see what she did? I do not want her in my studio again.”

  “Catherine, let me at least get a nurse to look at that. I will explain. It is not simple to fire someone these days.”

  “Oh Eric, dear Eric, what is she? What did you not tell me? Is she bipolar?”

  “Do we really need a clinical label for enthusiasm?”

  “This is not enthusiasm.”

  “Obsession then. My understanding was that she was a hundred per cent functional. Is that not so?”

  “No, she’s nuts.”

  “She’s upset about this oil spill, apparently.”

  “What!”

  “I said she is upset about this BP business.”

  “She’s upset. That’s it.”

  “Darling, do you read the newspapers? Do you watch television? There was a big feature in Slate. Do you read Slate? About the psychological damage caused by the oil spill. Her feelings are normal. She’s upset.”

  “Well so am I. Does that give me permission to assault you?”

  “I am only reporting what I know. There are hundreds of thousands of kids who spend their day watching the nightmare webcam of oil pouring into the gulf. It is an addiction. I understand she has been producing the most terrifying drawings. Really, they’d make you want to top yourself.”

  “Drawings of what?” I asked, thinking this was a slip-up.

  “Of course something must be done. It’s awful. She is clearly not herself. This is gross misconduct.”

  “Thank you. So she can be fired.”

  “If she is, as you suggest, unwell, we have, legally, what is called duty of care. So there is a procedure which is horribly ugly and time-consuming. We would have to produce two doctors to confirm she can’t work responsibly, and then—I don’t know—she may get it in her head that we’re discriminating against her.”

  “For being posh?”

  “For being posh if you like. Don’t joke about it. She could argue that we were pursuing a course of constructive dismissal.”

  The girl got in a fury because I refused to X-ray something, which was not her business or within her field of expertise, and now I was conspiring to dismiss her for being posh. Jesus help me, I thought, while Crofty, who was meant to be my friend, explained the procedure, trying to put me off because he didn’t want to lose a benefactor.

  “Do you have the patience for it, Catherine? Would you really do that to someone who was unwell?”

  There was the slight interrogative tilt of the head. “Oh,” I said. “You’re thinking about me?”

  “No, not at all. Not in the slightest.”

  “I have been unwell, that is what you mean?”

  “Let me make some tea.”

  “No, don’t run away. Why do you go running around, doing things behind my back?”

  “Darling, you haven’t always minded so very much before.”

  “You’re discussing recreational drugs?”

  He stood and shut the door and came back looking very serious indeed. I was chastened, as I should have been. “Sorry. What have I never minded about?”

  “Well, I have truthfully always imagined it was my talent, my gift to introduce my friends to each other. Not one I could ever use for my own happiness, I must say.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was rather frightened of where this was going.

  “You don’t remember, of course, who it was who put you to work with Matthew?”

  “No!”

  “But why are you upset? Would you rather I hadn’t?”

  “Please, please, don’t do this.”

  “Oh Cat, you were truly the most gorgeous elegant creature I ever saw, there was nothing about you that was not perfect, really.”

  “So you pushed me at a married man.”

  He spun on his chair and went to fiddle with his electric kettle. I was not sorry his back was to me.

  “He was so miserable, and so sad,” he said. “That awful woman with her sordid affairs. It was too horrible for such a lovely man.”

  “Did you really set me up? Did he know?”

  “His life was awful. You knew that of course. Everything about her was cruel. She still is cruel. The younger boy can deal with her very well. He’s comparatively safe.”

  I was staring out the window at the chestnut tree remembering Noah drinking scotch.

  “But the older one …”

  “Angus.”

  “Yes, Angus is put in the awful situation of being the man of the house.”

  “And you’re going to rescue him.”

  “He has to do that himself, of course.”

  “But you fixed him up with Amanda.”

  “Not really. They have a tennis court in Walberswick.”

  “Walberswick? Walberswick. So she’s practically my bloody neighbour. Thanks a lot.”

  He said nothing until he returned with his lapsang souchong. He had sliced a lemon somehow. “Catherine, will you please stop this? There is nothing wrong with making people happy.”

  “Might she be just a little schizophrenic?”

  “Have you seen her drawings?”

  “Of course I’ve seen her fucking drawings. She is doing them for me.”

  “Sorry. Quite right.”

  “Although when I asked her that very question, she said you had never seen them, and this is really what I don’t like about this set-up, Eric. Everyone is running around whispering behind my back. You push the boys at me, you send them to my house, at night, and then you get one of them to sleep with a mad girl who you’ve arranged to work for me. I feel a total fool.”

  Finally he had his own tea and although he now sat opposite, there was a greater separation.

  “Catherine, would you like to say that again, so you can hear yourself?”

  “You mean I’m ‘enthusiastic’ too? Do you know how horrible it is to have all these strangers know more about my life than I do? This is not kindness. It’s the opposite.”

  “So I’ve been cruel to you?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long pause while he placed his cup and saucer on his desk and then, very slowly, stood. I thought he was going to wheel the chair back to its usual place but he remained, grasping the wobbly back, looking out the window as he spoke.

  “Catherine, I do think I have cut you an awful lot of slack. An incredible amount. But now we really must have the written material back inside the museum.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Darling, enough is enough. I can’t turn a blind eye to what you’re doing. I could be dismissed for it, and that would be a very, very simple thing to do. Out the door. Clean out the desk. Police escort, all that sort of thing.”

  “You’re punishing me. I’m sorry. Please don’t punish me. Let me keep the books at home.”

  “We’ve all been a little too enthusiastic. It’s time we put our house in order.”

  “We’re out of control?”

  “Just a wee bit.”

  “Did you really set me up with Matthew?”

  “You saved his life.” The window panes were clearly reflected in the saline nimbus of his eyes.

  “He saved my life.”

  “You transformed him. You were his life.”

  I could not help it any more. I began to blubber. Then I was the one who held out my arms. When I felt his penis hard against me I was shocked, but only for a moment. I thought, poor poor man, and then we both sat on our separate chairs. We found something in the Christie’s catalogue and then we became perfect “no ones,” all information deleted from our eyes.

  Catherine & Henry

  MY DARLING MATTHEW, I thought of you when the pizza box arrived. I remembered your very superior lamb chops marinated with garlic ginger chilli, cooked on your hibachi beneath the great surviving elm. Wild lettuce, radicchio, treviso, endive, pea leaves,
watercress, I kiss your toes.

  I gulped down the cardboard mess and read.

  Herr Sumper once more explained to me, wrote Henry Brandling, that M. Arnaud was a far better silversmith than a fairytale collector. Arnaud’s great misfortune, said Sumper mockingly, was to have been commissioned to make a vulgar salt cellar for a Baroness Ludwig Something. Now he scurried about the forest like a mouse, fearful that the Baroness would force him to be vulgar once again.

  Of course, said Sumper, everyone knows who Arnaud is and where he lives. The Baroness could have him brought to her within a week, but why would she bother?

  Sumper and I drank acid wine, wrote Henry.

  “The fool spends half of his income on buying fairy stories,” Sumper said. “I know he is talked of as an inventor, but there is no money in that sort of thing.”

  What sort of thing?

  “His washing-machine contraption is ridiculous. For Arnaud to show that thing to me is an offence. I, who have been on friendly terms with men of science and genius, must listen while he explains the washing machine to me, again and again, so I am now doomed to carry the parts in my head until I die. He has no clue of my Mechanical Memory which is equal to much greater tests than this. Thanks to this damned wood nymph, I have washing-machine parts rattling inside my head like nails.”

  It had been his personal ambition, Sumper continued without drawing breath, to retain all twenty-five thousand elements of Cruickshank’s Engine in his mind. This began on the day when he learned that the incomplete machine was abandoned at 40 Bowling Green Lane which had been visited by bailiffs who had padlocked its doors and pasted notices across its window.

  Some of the lathe men thought this was punishment for mocking God. “But the main culprit,” said Sumper, “was Queen Victoria.”

  Cruickshank still had hopes he could bring her back on board and for this reason the Master spent his evenings pasting newspaper reports of shipwrecks into a massive presentation folio.

  Sumper talked endlessly, Henry wrote, never ceasing, on and on, never more so, it seemed, than in a blizzard. The gutted Catherine Gehrig peered down through that frozen script.

  Why must I suffer, Henry Brandling had written, long ago. Am I not the patron?

  The machine’s great enemy was the Queen of England, but not her alone. The Astronomer Royal developed a hatred for the Engine. He did everything possible to poison the minds of the Queen and the Prince Consort.

  Confident that he would finally win the day, Cruickshank proceeded with his list of deaths at sea. You would need a heart of stone to not be persuaded by these names, so many children, babes in arms. So Sumper said. So Henry wrote, with what feeling none could know. At the same time, Cruickshank assumed nothing—he petitioned Her Majesty, asking, no matter what her decision on the funding of the Engine, if she would immediately decree that the marooned tons of steel and brass might be granted to him as a boon. This would enable him to sell shares and independently raise capital to ensure the completion of this life-saving machine.

  Then, because he could never wait for anyone even if they were a queen, he began immediately to seek investors, dictating many letters seeking capital. These should have been despatched immediately, but many hours were wasted correcting Sumper’s English. Yet this imperfection seemed no obstacle to their relationship. Indeed it was in this period he first became “my German.”

  Mr. Cruickshank was always kind, said Sumper. From him I learned the English language very well although, to be quite honest, his cook was also a very lively little teacher in more ways than one.

  When the butcher would no longer supply the household needs, the Genius had himself engaged by the directors of the Great British Railway Company with the express task of investigating some of the difficulties and dangers of this new mode of travel. He had that company supply him with a second-class carriage and he and Sumper removed all its internal parts. To the framework they then attached a long table, designed in such a way as to be entirely independent in its motions. At one end they fitted a “monumental” roll of paper which would, if unrolled, have stretched two thousand feet. As this paper was mechanically wound onto the second roller, several inking pens traced curves which measured, separately, force of traction, vertical shake of engine, and other things “you would not understand.” The pens gave exact indices relating to the safety and comfort of the passengers. The inking pens, for instance, measured the physical forces that might cause a carriage to roll.

  The fool, wrote Henry Brandling.

  The fool did not know that the pater was a director of that company, and would have been the one personally responsible for Cruickshank’s commission. However, wrote Henry, I was very interested to learn how the scoundrels had used the Brandling generosity. By keeping mum about the family connection, I easily learned that the two rascals were transported from one part of the country to another free of charge. Admittedly this was extremely dangerous for it was always necessary to attach their laboratory to a public train and there were various tactics—and these I admit I did not always understand, wrote Henry—which involved disconnecting from the main train and shooting into a siding. Red ball top pocket, Henry thought. In all cases the pocket or siding had been selected well in advance. Indeed it was so well anticipated that Herr Sumper was, in one instance, required to write to a Lady Lovelace that Mr. Cruickshank and “my German” should be arriving at a siding 23A being three miles east of the Inn at Minehead and as the topographical map indicated level fields, the pair of them might expect to meet Lady Lovelace’s carriage in the middle of the afternoon.

  Thus they travelled from estate to estate, being welcomed by the Great and the Good in a surprising array of different circumstances. They particularly enjoyed the company of men of science who they met, by previous arrangement, in inns and cottages and, once, a muddy field.

  From these latter conversations, Sumper claimed, he was able to visualize the finished Engine. He memorized it with a tolerance of one-thousandth of an inch, describing the pairs of spinning forms like spiral staircases slipping in and out between each other’s treads.

  At the same time he characterized his own understanding as being not very much more elevated than that of the grocer’s clerks who will one day watch the swan’s neck, and glimpse in the movement something so unknowable and unearthly their brainless hair will stand on end.

  He was by now completely mad, wrote Henry Brandling, and there was not a natural force to contain or check the growth of his mania. But who did “he” refer to? Cruickshank? Sumper?

  It was certainly Sumper who reported Cruickshank’s supposed belief that there would be life on other planets.

  I felt I must argue, wrote Henry, even if the battle were unequal.

  Cruickshank’s view was allegedly also held by Sir Humphrey Lucas and Mr. Paul Arnold with whom they had shared a leg of mutton in Henley. “It would be vain,” the great astronomer is reported to have told Herr Sumper personally, “to think that there was not, at that very minute, an entire people of a distant race, dying, in a corner of the sky.”

  “Surely,” Sumper demanded of Brandling, “you cannot but agree.”

  Henry wrote, I would not agree that men of science could say any such thing. Also, being an Anglican, I could not agree, and Sumper stormed out of the room. I thought, AT LEAST I CAN GO TO BED, but Sumper returned to shout that it would be “stupid and conceited” to not at least allow the possibility of superior life amongst the stars, but as stupidity and conceit were the most common human diseases he supposed that Anglicans must be infected by them too.

  “I have met these Beings,” he said in a voice both loud and deep. “I have observed them close.”

  Henry demanded he swear this on oath.

  As Sumper would not do this it was clear to Henry that he had met no such beings at all. He said so.

  Sumper replied: “Do you not know who I am? Do you not know you have been sent to me?”

  This outburst was so wild and te
rrifying that, seeking safe harbour, Henry wrote, I drew him into the subject of Cruickshank’s final report to the Gt. Brit. R’way Co. Thus, finally, was calm restored, for Herr Sumper answered me directly and with such pride you would think that he, the servant, had composed the report himself. Seated once again, with his big calf resting on his rounded knee, Sumper recalled the three main recommendations in the most tedious detail but I was, by then, wrote Henry, so emotionally exhausted I did not care to hear them. When I was finally safe at home in Low Hall it would be gratifying to unearth them in old Simpson’s cupboard, where I was sure they were safely stored, tied up with a ribbon of whatever colour the pater’s chief clerk had judged correct for classification.

  When Cruickshank and his German returned to London they found no boon from the Queen or her secretary. Instead, a Colonel Minns of the Brigade of Guards wrote to inform the Genius that Her Majesty had made a gift of the Engine, not to him, but to the nation as a whole. The Admiralty then arrogantly asserted the inventor’s responsibility to transport said mechanism to a place so directed by Her Majesty’s servants, although they could never be induced to say exactly where that should be.

  Mr. Cruickshank appeared to have been snookered, wrote Henry Brandling, and if this is true, he continued, it is not impossible that, for as long as I live, there will be eight tons of metals standing in the corner of a manufacturing endeavour situated at 40 Bowling Green Lane.

  Of course Henry Brandling could not see me, but he expected to have a reader. I, Catherine Gehrig, was that reader. I had peered between the lines looking for codes and signs, staring into the blur of descending strokes where, in a sea of ambiguity, delusion, wonder, possibility, amongst all the murk and confusion, there was one solid physical piece of evidence that might have been made for me alone: Thigpen’s Clerkenwell workshop was around the corner from Gehrig and Son, my childhood home.

  Catherine