I am not exactly sure what happened next except that Crofty tried to prevent me dealing with the rod and as a result it slipped from my grip and hit the tiled floor vertically. It bounced. I saw it rise six inches and then I caught it in my hand.
We neither of us spoke.
I laid the rod inside the crate and slipped the collet into a plastic pouch and wrote “Collet #1” with a steady hand.
Eric picked up my handbag and gave it to me.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to take you home.”
I thought, Henry Brandling is in broken pieces. Eric must not see.
CROFTY SPRINTED UP THE road to catch the cab and fetched it back, reverse gear whining. “Kennington Road,” he ordered.
I thought, you nosey parker, but he didn’t know the number so that was OK.
“Eric, were you a bit of an athlete?”
“In the service,” he said, and blushed.
“You weren’t really a sailor?”
He slapped at his wrist and held out, between thumb and forefinger, a dead mosquito.
“Asian tiger,” he said.
“What?”
“Asian tiger mosquito?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I thought you always read the
“I can’t read anything,” I said which made me think again of Henry Brandling and the fact that I could not possibly let Eric see what I had inside my house. Of course, when we arrived at my door I was completely useless in my own defence.
“Eric. You must wait a moment.”
But he was already picking up my mail.
Amongst all the junk and Waitrose fliers there was a good-sized envelope which I snatched from him.
“Wait,” I said. “Stay here. Look at the books. Let me tidy up. Please.”
In the kitchen I set to shoving the bits of Brandling’s fractured exercise book inside the envelope. Dead dry fragments spun and spiralled to the floor.
“What on earth are you up to in there?”
Naturally he had come to spy on me. Fortunately my Mr. Upstairs was practising chip shots in the garden, and Crafty’s social antennae were always sensitive.
“That’s whatshisface.”
“Indeed.” I removed the cognac bottle from the table and slipped it beneath the sink.
“The Speaker of the House of Commons?”
“Retired,” I said and turned to see that, far from being distracted by the Great Man, Eric Croft had, without permission, opened my handbag and removed my vodka flask and stolen notebooks.
No word was said. No facial expression suggested anything. He gave me the notebooks without comment and I carried them into my bedroom. I returned to discover he had opened all the windows and was settled at my kitchen table, my gutted handbag abandoned on the chair beside him.
“You are very wilful, Catherine.”
“A little mad, sorry.”
“For God’s sake, don’t hover.” He slid a glass across the table. “Sit.”
I drank the vodka standing up.
“Poor Cat.”
I wished he would not call me Cat. I said: “I will not see a grief counsellor if that is what you’re thinking.” The vodka had a fierce hard solvent burn.
“Where did you ever hear of such a horrid thing?”
“Never mind.”
“The thing is, you see, we must placate the edifice.”
He meant the Swinburne, the great mechanical beast inside its Georgian cube on Lowndes Square, the wires, the trustees, the rules, the stairs, the secrets, Crowley’s Hole where someone hanged themselves, the entire jerry-built mandarin complex of rat runs which is a two-hundred-year-old building in twenty-first-century space. It was a very beautiful, quite astonishing, chaotic, awful thing. I fitted there as I would fit nowhere else on earth.
“I have no choice,” I said. “Where else could I ever be employable?”
“No,” he said, helping himself to another shot. “I have made this much harder on you than I intended. This project is upsetting. Life, death, all that sort of thing. Cat, I am very sorry.”
“Please don’t call me Cat.”
“Is that not your name?”
“There is only one person called me Cat.”
He lowered his lids. Perhaps he was simply holding his temper but he looked, suddenly, unexpectedly like a dreaming Buddha.
I sat, and received a second glass as my reward for my obedience. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s just unthinkable that this is happening to people every day.”
“It’s awful.”
“It’s banal I suppose.”
“I will take the bloody thing away. I am a complete fool.”
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Very well,” said Eric.
“Don’t say ‘very well.’ It sounds like you are managing me.”
“Actually, old love, that is my job.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re going to send me to a shrink.”
“Jesus, Cat, I am not going to send you to an anything. Where did you get this nonsense from?”
“When my father died they made us have grief counselling. They would not let us out of the hospital without seeing this cretin from Social Services. They would not give us his clothes even.” I was crying now. I wished I wasn’t. “They tortured him, Eric. They played with him. We had to make them turn off their idiot machines.”
“Cat.”
“Please don’t.”
“Catherine,” he said. “I am sorry. He always called you Cat. To me.”
I immediately felt so sad I could hardly speak. “Did he?”
“To me, yes.”
I was so determined not to bawl, I suppose I glared at him.
“We are going to have a very small team,” he said. “We will have a procedures meeting you can tolerate.”
I had begun to snivel, but I did grasp what he was up to—finding a way for me to continue in employment.
“Ceramics are all Margaret’s friends. I can’t bear it.”
“Hilary isn’t.”
“Heather. The little lesbian.”
“She has a perfectly lovely little baby.”
“Spilled her coffee, that one?”
“Will she be acceptable? Catherine, you really must have mercy on me. Please.”
But I wished to punish him. I could not tolerate him being alive.
“We all miss him, old love. Not like you do. But he was my friend for thirty years.”
“Yes, I know. He loved you. I’m sorry.”
