except for a weird yellow sheen across the houses. I thought the rain had let up—maybe it really had—but when I was half way across the road the hail arrived, lumps like hotel ice blocks, river stones, cruel, unforgiving pelting against my naked head and unprotected shoulders. I arrived in my kitchen, stinging sore, drenching wet. I watched the monstrous hail pile up across the garden. Why hast thou forsaken me?
HAIL AND HATE, ROARING like a train, the entire back garden stoned to death, crushed glass or ice now two inches thick. The geraniums were flat, the daphne devastated. God knows what had happened to my neighbour but he had abandoned his lawn mower in the middle of my view.
In the bathroom I examined my blooming injuries, but none of this took very long and soon my hair was dry and I sat in my dressing gown, at the kitchen table. Here I slid my Brandling books inside the new handbag. I paraded, and it was as I thought—the bag fitted so snugly between my arm and chest. I was so absorbed, so impatient to retrieve the notebooks that I might not have seen the peculiar mist lying above the field of ice. But I did look up. And the sun came out. And all the garden turned to gold sublime, unearthly and very strange.
For just that instant I felt wonder. For that moment I forgot my grief. I reached for my open laptop. As it slid towards me, I recognized the nature of my expectation—I had been about to tell Matthew.
I kiss your toes. Mark unread.
There was a new email from Crofty. He wrote, “I’ve fixed it.”
I thought, how can you fix anything? Then I understood, he had read my ill-mannered email and thought: I am without doubt a wretched stupid man. So he had discreetly, sweetly, secretly, removed the bloody tea chests and their contents from my studio.
He had done exactly what I had asked—taken my project from me. And he had paid overtime for weekend work. It was like a fairy story with a moral. Due to my own bad temper, all of Henry’s notebooks were now beyond my reach.
I opened the cognac and took a slug straight from the bottle. I found the Swinburne staff directory.
“Hello, is that Arthur?”
“Arthur’s just stepped out.”
“This is Miss Gehrig from upstairs in Horology, I’m working on 404.”
“You missed them, Miss Gehrig, by, I would say, thirteen minutes.”
“Did you get the hail?”
“Well to be exact, Miss, I would say Arthur must have got the hail. Shall I give him a message if he’s still alive?”
“Is Mr. Croft there?”
“He was here with Arthur for a good three hours. Then they stepped outside.”
“And now he’s at the Fox and Hounds?”
“Licking his wounds I would say.”
I had no doubt the men had spent the afternoon removing my tea chests. I would never have a chance to read the notebooks. I could not speak. I hung up. I phoned back and apologized for dropping the phone. I said I would see him on Monday.
I did not think, the Head Curator of Horology has turned himself into a manual labourer on my account. I saw only that I had all of Sunday to suffer this new agony. Very well then, I must not wallow. I unlocked the French door and forced it open against the weight of ice. I climbed the three crunchy steps to the garden, and moved the ugly mower from my view.
This served to put the smell of the oil and rubber on my hands. That is, the perfume of my nights in a little stables in a copse in Suffolk, not far from Beccles, in a snug loft bed above a Mini Minor we spent years restoring. That was Matthew’s place, his own. That is what our love smelled like—oil, rubber, the musty rutty smells of sex. I had spent the happiest nights of my life with my body washed by leafy shadows, headlights from a bend in the A12.
When I sat in Kennington Road and smelled my oil and rubber hands, I was no longer thinking about Henry Brandling and his duck. The ice had melted. The air was moist. As the grassy breeze blew through my open kitchen window I recalled lying in bed in that little stables with the sweet Suffolk rain upon our fragile roof.
ON MONDAY MORNING I rang the bell beside the Annexe gate and the turnstile pivoted at the centre of its ungiving heart. From that moment a camera held me.
Reception was to my left and there was Arthur. I could not reasonably ask him where the tea chests had been stored.
“Good morning Mr. Phelps.” He lifted his face and I saw the puffy boozer’s eyelids.
“You were working on Saturday on my behalf. I am in your debt.”
The old codger rubbed his foxy silver hair. “I would say that Mr. Croft has settled that, Miss Gehrig. He nearly killed me with his bleeding settlement, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”
I swatted my ID card. A second turnstile. The camera observed me, but there was nothing in my bag except a pashmina, purse, and Lorazepam. I carried emptiness. Doors opened. Another camera recorded my progress. Doubtless there were thousands of my days repeated thus, interred digitally in limbo. I ascended two steps with nothing to look forward to, and swiped my card one final time.
I opened my studio door to meet, not emptiness, but tea chests.
I think I made a small cry. Perhaps it was recorded. A moment later the rat’s nest of
At my bench, I found the first book completely filled with handwriting, every page. All the books, every one. In all that sharp sea of waving lines there was not one blank. Although I wanted all of them at once, I slid only four of them inside four ziplock bags and these I hid inside my handbag. Then I shifted the remainder to the high shelf above the fume cupboard where no one would ever think to look. There were precisely nine more instalments for me to read.
Only as I hung my booty on the hook behind the door did I realize things were not at all as they had been on Friday night. In the left-hand corner of the room, nearest to the door and therefore behind my left shoulder when I first entered, was an iridescent grey tarpaulin thrown across some objects, the largest one of which stood about four foot high.
I thought of a beached sting ray, some undead thing washed ashore in
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Bronchitis
Sorry. Diagnosis confirmed.
A very short time later I was signing out downstairs.
“You’re shivering,” Arthur said.
I hurried through the turnstile with my booty tight beneath my arm. I thought, Henry Brandling, what happened to you? How much money did they steal?
Henry
