by Peter Carey
THAT NIGHT I SLEPT with the window wide open but there was no freshness, only the warm and weary air of this unexpected century. Near morning I had a looping puzzle dream in which Cruickshank’s engine reproduced itself and it was my job to match and screw together the golden strands of DNA.
In the morning there was blood on my pillow, but Amanda’s scratch was not so very bad. In any case, I had been “cut a lot of slack,” and it would not be either gracious or politic for me to seek her dismissal. I would be an adult. I would no longer expect to be exempt from the rules. I would return my notebooks, although I would insist that their access be restricted. For even Crofty would understand that it would not be helpful for Amanda to enter the realms of Mysterium Tremendum. None of us needed creatures from outer space just now.
In the meantime I set all ten books neatly in the middle of the kitchen table. On top of this I placed a single sheet of paper addressed to Eric Croft. Why I did this is still unclear, perhaps some sort of premonition that I was never coming back, although that makes no sense—I was about to do nothing more drastic than visit Bowling Green Lane. I was born around the corner, after all.
Did I believe Thigpen’s workshop was still in Bowling Green Lane? I had a very clear picture of the deep high space all the way through to Northampton Road, the steel and brass leviathan gleaming beneath a dirty London sky.
It was very easy to reach on the underground. Lambeth North, Baker Street, Farringdon. Why not? What harm? What could be worse than what I had already discovered, that my childhood home had been turned into an X-rated video store?
As I left the house I discovered a strange car parked with its rusted nose angled steeply down from the footpath to my neighbours’ door. Of course the Upstairs were on holiday again, but this particular car, which had once been very upper-upper, was now very down and old and grey and chalky with a running board and corroded mud guards. I imagined I saw a body stretched across the back seat. Dead, I thought. Then the body moved, and that was worse. Then there were two, I was certain, moving like moles inside a blanket.
It would be embarrassing to call the police, so I double-locked my door and hurried away down Kennington Road. I thought, I should have written down the registration number.
Outside Lambeth North station the newspaper placards read: TIDE OF FEAR. There was a colour picture of the Gulf of Mexico, a dense black centre with a rim of rusty red surrounded by a coral blue.
The train pushed a wall of hot air before it. I boarded. The scratch on my face was noted, in that particularly British way which contains not a skerrick of sympathy. I changed to the Central Line. I arrived at Farringdon to discover it was disembowelled—temporary ramps and lanes and hoardings and lots more TIDE OF FEAR.
Outside, Farringdon Road was a construction site. Lorries, minivans, motorbikes and newspapers floating like gulls above a garbage dump.
I strode north, holding my breath. I turned right into Bowling Green Lane, past the pub (the Bowler) and now I was inside Henry Brandling’s puzzle. I felt my mobile phone vibrating against my hip and there was 40 Bowling Green Lane: FINSBURY BUSINESS CENTRE. Of course it was Clerkenwell not Finsbury but there it stood, built a century after Sumper visited the same address.
Who would have anticipated feeling so let down? I had spent so much time maintaining a rational sense of doubt that I had had no notion of how much I wanted the machine. I wanted Cruickshank and his silver ladies but Thigpen’s had been bombed, rebuilt, become decrepit in its turn. This was our inheritance: a vast dull postwar building with depressing offices for rent.
From Bowling Green Lane I called Security to ask if Amanda had swiped her card this morning.
She had not.
The trains were slow and stinking. It was almost two claustrophobic hours before I reached the Annexe where I discovered a large expensive envelope addressed to me in Amanda’s hand.
“Dear Miss Gehrig, I am awfully sorry. I am so ashamed. You are the person I admire most in all the world.”
Inside I found the little portrait she had made of me, excised neatly from its book. My first thought was, she knows I coveted it. My second was, she is inside the building.
I emailed Eric to say I was “reading at home.”
The tube was more infuriating than before. I did not arrive back at Lambeth North until after noon. The old grey car was gone. Nonetheless I double-locked the door behind me.
I found Henry’s notebooks violated, scattered across the kitchen table. Beside them was the cube. It looked quite normal for a moment. Then I saw the sawdust and knew she had attacked that too. There was no electric drill in evidence but my clever assistant (who else could it have been?) had made a quarter-inch hole straight through the middle of Carl’s wonder. There had been no need. I could have told her. I could have taught her to weigh it in her hand and know that it was solid oak.
Catherine & Henry
THE YOUNG POLICEMAN SEARCHED for my intruder amongst the shameful fluff beneath my bed. He politely requested “access” to the garden where he indicated which shrubs should be grubbed or trimmed “for your own security.” I failed to tell him the garden was not mine.
At my front door he offered a business card and invited me to call him at any hour. He had a sweet young face, shy downcast eyes, and a tiny brass earring which I must surely have imagined. He would not look at me, but pointed to the browning tree directly opposite my flat—he said it was one of thirteen London plane trees bearing the name of an American astronaut, Neil Armstrong in this case, he who had once walked upon the moon.
I thanked him. He gave me another business card. As soon as he had gone, I packed a bag.
That night I moved to a room in a pub near the Annexe. It was such a sad and stupid choice, but the brewery had renovated since my previous stay. There was nothing left to smell or snuffle.
I hung up two light dresses, unpacked my block of cheddar, my knife, my corkscrew, and a bottle of wine. Ingest, I thought, digest, excrete, repeat.
I unwrapped the notebooks and sat in the unrelenting upright chair. I read. I read so deeply that the shouting in the bar did not annoy me. On the contrary—Frau Helga had told Herr Sumper that the owner of the inn had “been her friend.”
Henry reported Sumper saying this had never been true. He repeated that the landlady was a procuress, a cheat and a liar. She was also a Catholic, by which Sumper allegedly did not mean to speak badly of that faith but to make it clear that a very particular automaton Frau Helga had recently consigned to the inn-keeper’s hands would be highly offensive to almost every man who visited the inn, each of whom, Sumper told Henry, feared the Catholic hell and feasted on those Catholic tortures such as intestines wound out of martyrs’ stomachs and gathered onto reels like so much cotton thread.
Frau Helga was a strong woman, according to Sumper. He had reason to know this far better than Henry, “but even you, your Monkship, have seen her swing that scythe.” She had suffered much in her life, and in most respects, in Sumper’s opinion, had shown good judgement. Year after year, summer after summer she had managed to demonstrate good judgement completely without calculation. “But when you, Herr Brandling, could no longer supply the amounts of money we all depended on, she became so terrified of penury she lost her judgement.
“She stole my greatest treasure from me,” Sumper told Henry. “Please do not nod your head. I do not mean it was the most highly priced item I owned, only that it was more precious than any object I have ever made. She consigned this to the packer for local sale.”
The possibility that Frau Helga might someday steal this valued automaton had never been completely absent from Sumper’s mind, but who could have predicted she would sell it, not to Paris or London where at least it would find its market, but to the cursed woman best known for selling women’s bodies and cheating the local clockmakers of their labour?
“Herr Brandling, Henry, I had made that automaton for my master, the Genius. He had, by nature, what I would call a posit
ive personality, but when the Queen ignored his petition, when she then gave his Engine to the English Army, his spirit was destroyed.”
Sumper vowed he would produce a device to lighten the great man’s heart. He would make “the dear old bugger” laugh.
“For materials,” Sumper continued, “I used only gears and wheels such as are used by English clockmakers, but these I elevated by means of specially contrived axles and bevelled gears. There is no point in explaining it to you. For the general casing of the automaton I used sheet tin which I shaped around wooden forms of my own design. I purchased some red velvet. Three inches square. I manufactured a small wheel-driven bellows. Then a pipe in which a current of fast air could be twisted, warped, stopped, released in such a way as to produce a simulation of the human laugh. Henry,” he cried, “your Vaucanson would not have had the wit.”
Henry noted that Sumper’s tongue was “white as boiled tripe.”
Sumper said: “I made my automaton for the Genius, for him alone. I found him on his settee with his sad eyes engaged with nothing but the skirting board. Then I was able to place—just there—like this—my gift.”
It was, apparently, an eighteen-inch-tall likeness of Jesus Christ. It was made of bright tin, but the face had been painted. Hanging from the shoulders was an exceptional blue silk robe. “Once I had wound the key, my Jesus shot forward on his little wheels, turning first to left, then right, then pausing. You think you can see it Henry? But can you predict what will happen next? After the fifth such movement a hidden rod prevents the movement of a gear, arresting the whole mechanism in such a way that both of the Christ’s arms fly open. It is very funny. Anyone can see—Jesus is about to bless the room. But wait. See—the cloak is thrown wide, a great red heart is revealed and this immediately falls under the influence of short puffs of air. The heart is beating, the big red sacred heart. Henry, I wish you could have seen the figure because it appeared so wondrously pleased with its own performance. Its head moved down to see what it had done, and then up to the heavens as if to say, look—is this not a jolly show? And so with his head up and down, and his arms first apart, and then together, with the heart being rhythmically revealed and covered, the Christ began to spin like a top.”
Dear Lord forgive my Judas soul, Henry wrote, for I also smiled.
At this point, Sumper told me, the Genius began to laugh and he knew he could save him and therefore himself, for he would now do great things in the future of the world.
Next the holy figure began to wobble. Oh dear, what was happening, Jesus lost his balance and fell onto the floor. And the old man naturally imagined the design had failed and so he kneeled to raise it from the dead.
But at that very moment the Jesus began to roll back and forth laughing, and it was for this exact reason, Sumper told me, he had made the Son of Man. When the arms opened wide, the body was lifted, and then the body rolled, and revealed the sacred heart, and then, from his chest came a laugh the old man could not resist.
Herr Sumper was satanic, wrote Henry. I was afraid of his influence. Yet when he turned his wet eyes and slightly wobbly smile upon me, I was reminded, not of the devil, but of my wife’s face when first she held our Alice in her arms.
That, Sumper told Henry, was how he brought the Genius back to life. He had concocted a medicine that, if administered frequently enough, would effect a cure.
Cure, Henry underlined.
Endorphins, thought Catherine.
While Sumper had been busy with his Jesus Christ he had conceived a plan to present his employer’s “Ledger of Drowned Subjects” to Queen Victoria. This was stage two. It began immediately.
“You thought I lied about Prince Albert but my master saw my character. When the old man heard my plan he did not doubt that I was determined that the Queen would know the great purpose of the Engine and see how many of her subjects might be saved.”
The Genius correctly feared for Sumper. He was not reassured to learn that “my German” had been a visitor to Buckingham Palace on three previous occasions; two of them were moonlit nights. Sumper now revealed to him the vaulting pole he had constructed, ten parts to it, with metal sleeves. He drew him a rough plan of those portions of the palace where he would interview Her Majesty.
“The Genius said, They will deport you from England, at the very least.”
For Sumper, nothing could be worse than to be separated from Cruickshank, but he would not be ruled by fear. He had been “called.” He hoped his service might be long. But sitting inside 16 Soho Square he accepted that it might also be as brief as a butterfly’s existence.
“At that moment,” he said, “I beheld the reason for my life.”
In my room above the pub I, Catherine Gehrig, surfaced. It was about midnight and there was an argument in the street downstairs.
I could have paid attention to the place I lived in, but I had allowed myself to become a citizen of an imaginary world.
Henry wrote. Sumper spoke. He said, “I had met great men in England. They were of a sufficient size to comprehend their human smallness, and therefore to serve, in their turn, beings of impossible knowledge and magnitude. They were my examples.”
The German had already mocked my God, Henry wrote, so I asked him coldly who these Superior Beings might be. Instead of answering he described how he wrapped the ledger of drowned souls in oilskin and strapped it to his back before departing Soho Square. Of his farewell that night, he reported no single word. He set off to the palace oblivious of the personal disaster which lay ahead.
About the alleged pole-vault, no more was said. Thank the Lord, wrote Henry who was clearly anxious about what he could believe.
Twenty lines later some evidence had caused the writer to change his mind. It was, in all likelihood, the star-shaped scar on Sumper’s abdomen which had earlier repulsed him. Now it appeared to him an honest injury suffered in a hare-brained vault across the palace wall.
If the clockmaker described his pain or injury, Henry made no note of it. But he no longer doubted that “the liar” had not only gained entry to the palace but had captured Prince Albert, not in a reception room or even a study, but reading in his bed. Impertinent, wrote Henry, adding that the greatest barrier between the populace and the Prince and Queen was the belief of the common people that it was completely and utterly impossible for anyone to gain access to their monarch.
The Prince Consort, having looked up from his book and stared directly at the place where Sumper stood, seems to have seen only what he expected. In this case it would appear to be an over-stuffed red chair.
It actually took “the most forceful tactic,” Henry reported, to get the attention of the Prince. Who could have imagined what it must have felt like to be in Herr Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’s shoes? Did he think that a poltergeist had seized his book and wrenched it from his hand? What did he expect might be contained in the oilskin parcel the bleeding phantom presently unwrapped upon his bed?
The ledger of deaths by drowning was apparently such a size that it must be shared between two readers, and what fear did the Prince feel to have the injured stranger lie beside him and demand HRH read aloud the notices pasted on every page?
“He was very cold and formal,” Sumper said, “until we reached a certain shipwreck where he recognized the name of a drowned passenger. He said it was his little niece. So when he began to weep, I naturally assumed this drowning was the source of his grief. To be frank, I was delighted. It made me hope I would enlist his support for the Engine. However, taking into account what happened next, it seems more likely that the coward was crying because he was afraid.”
This view was based on a brief conversation between the Prince and Queen Victoria who now appeared at the door in her nightgown. Speaking in German she asked Prince Albert to explain his bedfellow, although she used a rougher word.
“As we had been speaking that language,” Sumper told Henry, “the Prince surely realized I could understand his wife. He answered in French tel
ling her that I was about to murder him, at which news the Queen closed the door and went away.”
An “astonishingly long time” passed before Sumper heard the palace guard running in lock step. It was a great slamming performance they gave upon the marble floors. It was only then, when he was so roughly handled, that he seems to have accepted that his plan had failed.
Even there, apparently, he found reason for hope. That is, they called the Prince’s personal physician for him and when he was sewn together they accommodated him in a room in the palace, where “apart from the barred windows, the view was good.”
At that time Sumper had no idea of how his adventure might be read by the nation. Only later did he learn that the Royal Family thought it unwise to reveal that one more German had arrived at Buckingham Palace. There had been two previous assaults on Her Majesty, the first by the disgruntled Irishman who had fired a powder-filled pistol as the Queen’s carriage passed along Constitution Hill, and then an insane ex-Army officer who struck her with his cane, crushed her bonnet and (as Henry knew from his mother) bruised her arms and shoulders.
Both of these men were sent to New South Wales, but Sumper was not destined to be transported to a gold mine. At first he was well fed, and the English puddings increased his optimism, but early one morning two soldiers escorted him to a blind carriage and rode with him to a wharf somewhere west of London Bridge. Here he was locked in a brig aboard a German trawler and it was only then, at the moment of his banishment, when he was given back the ledger, that he accepted everything was lost.
Catherine
IN THE MORNING I returned all Henry’s surviving notebooks to Lowndes Square and Crofty, in taking delivery, bestowed on me the most lovely smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Would you like some tea?”
I was so relieved to be forgiven.
“Yes please,” I said. Surely he would permit me to keep the final volume one more day.