The Chemistry of Tears

There are so many emails to his sons. I have to read them. I cannot delete them.

“Did your pills arrive?” he writes.

“You need a warm coat?”

“I’ll pick you up at six. Set two alarms.”

“Love Dad.”

“Love.”

“Love always.”

Around noon I abandon Amanda Snyde “to have a smoke.” When I return I have been crying. I also have a fresh flask of vodka in my perfect bag. My assistant is eating an egg sandwich and bent over what I later learn she calls a Frankenpod, having cobbled it together from abandoned pieces.

“You can eat with the others in the caff if you like.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not very used to being around people.”

“Surely you went to school.”

She removes the single ear bud and I catch sight of a black billowing image on the screen.

“Actually my grandfather tutored me.”

“Had he been a teacher?”

“He was a sort of soldier.”

“You were in London?”

“Actually, in Suffolk.”

I do not ask where in Suffolk. She might say Beccles or Southwold or Aldeburgh or Blythburgh, the litany of love names, private, ours. I would not have our private Suffolk stolen or polluted.

“But then at the Courtauld?”

“Then West Dean. I’ve become quite civilized, learned to use a key and so on.”

Learned to use a key? Well, I am rather strange myself, for I cannot acknowledge the body parts of swan she has laid so carefully upon the bench. I am a highly specialized creature and I could have identified much of this jumble in my sleep. Even whilst reading heart-wrenching emails it is impossible not to see the tarnished silver, some pieces rather like napkin rings. I have noted the reflective backing plates which are made to fit below the glass rods and are a common convention in these automata. Their function is to make the “water” sparkly. These plates on the bench are in a most unsparkly condition. They really need to be covered with reflective silver leaf which can, of course, be removed in the future. I cannot deny the barrel of a music box, a very familiar object for a horologist. I do not wish to count but of course it has about a thousand pins. This Herr Sumper made, not for Henry Brandling but—this is very clear to me—for himself. Most of the pins are brass, but have sometimes been replaced by steel. I have no curiosity at all, but I cannot help knowing that many of the pins have been moved to new positions.

It is like leaving a child to walk alone on a busy high street, but I am near her, watching her with my peripheral eye. I wonder who her grandfather was or is? When posh people say “soldier” they mean a field marshal or a spy.

She continues to dig up the bones. I continue to burn my past.

In the midst of this Eric “pops in” wearing that ridiculous tight striped suit, all waist and wide shoulders. It is too hot for this costume. He stinks of the Ivy—the wine list, not the shepherd’s pie.

I secretly watch to see how he will react to the Courtauld girl. He affects to not see or know her and that pretty much proves he has planted her. I wonder if the “soldier” is a trustee.

Eric rushes around the room like a dog at the airport and then rushes out again.

A moment later I ask the girl, “Did he say ‘Toodle pip’?”

She giggles.

“Who says ‘Toodle pip’?”

“Bertie Wooster, I think.”

“You’re too young for Wooster.”

“Stephen Fry is Jeeves,” she says. “I saw him once, in the pub in Walberswick.”

Walberswick. Delete.

“Why do you think Mr. Croft says ‘Toodle pip’?”

She smiles.

Everyone thinks it is Americans who make themselves up, but it is we English who are the fantasists, not only Crofty either. There is a strange meld in Amanda Snyde’s voice when she says: “I think this is the neck of something.”

Poor Henry Brandling. He never got his duck. When I read the invoice I was rather pleased it was a swan but now, in the studio it has some other creepy quality—a life, a penis, the neck of a goose on Christmas Day. It is spooky, dirty, an unearthly blue-grey. The fine articulation of steel vertebrae could not be achieved anywhere in London in 2010.

She holds it out for me.

“No, put it down.”

For no good reason, I begin to cry.

“Oh dear,” she says, and through my blurry eyes I see the afternoon light catching her pretty face, her hope and hurt. She is too sane and generous for this room.

“Miss Gehrig.” And that is when I see, beneath the hair, she has an ugly plastic hearing aid, and I recognize her accent as belonging to a class of injury. This is why she uses just one ear bud.

“It’s all right,” I say, “I have lost a family member. That’s all it is. It’s nothing.”

“Are you all right?”

“Completely. Someone died. That’s all. It happens every day.”

“May I ask questions?”

“No, you may not.”

For the rest of the day I have her follow me around with a notebook while I dictate functions and allow her to allocate the numbers.

I make a rough sort of classification of the unpacked components—a beginning anyway, although we have not come to the main engine.

“Wear gloves,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, looking at me suddenly. “The parts leave a funny feeling on your skin.”

I think, she can see my pain in colour, poor girl, but I suppose she can deal with almost anything.

Catherine & Henry

TIME AND TIME AGAIN, in the early hours, I took refuge with Henry Brandling whose slightly mechanical handwriting served to cloak the strangeness of the events it described. His was, in the best and worst sense, an intriguing narrative. That is, one was often confused or frustrated by what had been omitted. The account was filled with violent and disconcerting “jump cuts.” One would imagine the author had returned to live at the sawmill and it was a shock to stumble into a sentence and realize he was sitting on a chair outside the inn. I imagined a rather Van Gogh sort of chair, but who would ever know?

Then here was Carl, materializing, and not even a whole body but a graze on his arm, or the mud on his boots. Henry clearly loved him, and was jealous of the boy’s attachment to Sumper who “filled the little fellow’s head with dangerous rot.” Such was the nature of Carl’s “toys,” Henry concluded that the only possible explanation was “they are made by the dreadful Sumper to tease me.” As a reader I far preferred the other possibility, that the child really was clever, that these were his inventions. He owned (or constructed?) a glass-plate camera and “wasted time” photographing tourists. No more was said of this, but then, on the line below, Carl appeared without warning, arranging voltaic cells at Brandling’s feet.

If voltaic cell meant a battery (and I confirmed it did) then it seemed anachronistic. But of course it wasn’t. One did not seek science fiction from Henry Brandling.

Carl, according to Henry’s account, laid the batteries on the road outside the inn and produced a dead mouse