The Chemistry of Tears

been embroidered from cuff to elbow. She saw me looking.

“Boy,” she said, meaning the embroidery was a name. She rolled up her sleeve to hide it.

“Gus,” she said, colouring. I suddenly thought how lovely it had been to be an art student, to be so young. I myself had arrived at Goldsmiths College imagining I might make paintings which would give me peace of mind. I discovered sex instead. Now I mourned my young girl’s skin. It was sad and sweet to imagine this little creature sleeping with her face nestled in her young man’s neck.

“I have been thinking all night about the cube,” she said.

“Well now you have some fish to think about instead.”

“Miss Gehrig, can I show you something?”

“I would rather you did the fish.”

Instead the wilful little thing extracted a small plain cardboard cube from her rucksack. It might seem a simple matter to construct a cube, but this was very beautifully done, and when she set it before me I saw that it was immaculately clean. She would be a very good conservator when she learned to do what she was told.

“Open it,” she demanded.

“Why?” I asked crossly.

“Please.”

The cube was about three inches. “Yes, it’s empty. Now please go back to your bench. You have a job to do.”

“Yes, open it out, flat.”

Once more I found myself doing as she asked.

“You see,” she said.

“What?”

“When a cube is unfolded,” she insisted, “it forms a six-part Cross. The Cube is Yahweh concealed. The Cross is Yahweh revealed. Isn’t that cool?”

“No,” I said, and gave it back to her. “You have mystery all about you. You don’t need to invent it.”

“Oh don’t be angry,” she said. “It’s not invented.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Please, Miss Gehrig. Isn’t it beautiful? I’m not being soppy. I’ve been reading about cubes. The Cube is ‘the Soul quarried from God.’ I’m thinking about our cube of course, and why it might be there.”

“No, Amanda, stop it now. Really. Immediately. We are not here to invent stories about the hull. We are here to restore this extraordinary object. The real world is beautiful enough. When it is finished it will make your hair stand on end.”

But she would not stop. “The three-dimensional Cube is the Holy Name of Yahweh expressed geometrically. You are religious. I’m sorry.”

“I am not at all religious. You have never met anyone less religious. Now do your bloody work and stop breaking things.”

But I had been too hard. Her eyes were not scary at all. Indeed it seemed that she was going to cry. That is why I really hate working with young females.

“It is not your fault,” I said, “I’m what you would call a rationalist.”

I took her sleeve and rolled her coat up. “Go,” I said, “be clever with the fish.”

Her boy’s name was Gus. My boyfriend at the Courtauld had been Marcus. He was generally thought to be a kind of genius. I had not remembered him for years, but now, as I gently removed the built-up oil, I vividly recalled standing under the London plane trees while Marcus, who was terribly large and used his hands in a way I had thought “expressive,” continued to defend the notion that a person could absolutely combust spontaneously. I had begun listening to him with what I had imagined was affection, and as we came out into Portman Square that morning I was completely unaware of my own seething irritation.

As I had burst out today, I burst out then. I really did not know I was about to say, “What twaddle.”

Marcus was tall, but I was only an inch shorter in my flats and thus I was level with his very pretty eyes which now reacted like an oyster, I thought, and I was rather pleased with the cruelty in the simile, of an oyster feeling the squirt of lemon juice.

“Twaddle?” he said, his mouth contracting unattractively. “For Christ’s sake, what sort of word is that?”

Rather a posh word, I thought, and therefore familiar to you, no matter how much you deny it.

“Twaddle.” He squinted, as if trying to look down at me when this was, no matter how he twisted his head, impossible.

“Marcus, how do you imagine that might happen? A person just bursting into flame?”

“What?” He was like a boy in the back row in a subject for which he had no aptitude.

“It is haystacks that combust spontaneously.”

“What bullshit, Cat.”

I wondered if Marcus might possibly be thick. It had never occurred to me before, but he was still carrying that ridiculous book of Colin Wilson’s. It had been ancient and grotty-looking when he found it, as if a dog had peed on it, and he had brought it to bed, and used a paperweight to hold the pages flat at breakfast.

It was titled The Occult and was full of old hippy nonsense, although I had not blamed him too severely at the start. He was not at all thick, very brainy in fact, but just as the garden in Kennington Road was later occupied by a family of foxes, London that year had suffered a second invasion of Colin Wilson, and our group lived inside a false nostalgic fog of marijuana where the most reliable atheists felt compelled to read aloud to you the Book of Ezekiel which was said to describe the distinctive actions of a flying saucer. It was complete tosh, but I lived in this time warp until, all at once, I had had enough of it.

“Marcus you know very well people do not just burst into flames.”

“Don’t get uptight.” As this was not the first time he had said these words, there was no reason for him to think that he was crossing any kind of line.

He was a beautiful boy, with dark blue eyes and long lashes. He was tall and perhaps unfashionably broad- shouldered, and had appeared to me to have a not at all uneducated eye, and he was like a creature who should be forever celebrated in marble. Beauty to one side, he had appeared to me the most rational of young men. It was he who had patiently overcome my rather hysterical resistance to my studies of spectrographic analysis.

“Why do people spontaneously combust?” I was smiling, but I was looking him directly in the eyes and I was aware of a dangerously intoxicating buzzing in my ears.

“I don’t know.”

“Then why would you believe such rot?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Catherine, don’t be a bore.”

“But why do you think a person would just burst into flames?”

“Why not?”

Remembering this, years later, I judged myself prim and vain and self-important, but when Marcus Stanwood said “Why not?” I could not believe I had given my precious body to a man who would say such a thing.

“It’s mumbo jumbo. It’s ridiculous.”

“It cannot be explained,” he cried. “Jesus Christ rose from the fucking dead. People catch on fire and we don’t know why.”

Then, to my complete astonishment, he turned on his heels, and walked across the square where he was lost in the shadows of the plane trees. I saw then, too late, he was breaking up with me. I hadn’t meant him to. It had not been my intention.

It was soon after this that I gave up art school. I went to study horology in West Dean.

Amanda Snyde and I worked in leaden silence until lunch, by which time she had still not figured out that the missing ornaments had probably been reeds. The sun had gone and the studio blinds had lost their luminosity.

At exactly one o’clock she came and stood behind me.

“Please,” she said, and put her hand lightly on my shoulder.

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll eat myself in a moment.”

“No, please. May I have a peek at the blue cube, if I keep my metaphysics to myself?”

“Do you think you really need to?”

“I thought about it all night. How it got there. What it means.”

There really was no reasonable way I could stop her so I slid the LED torch across the desk. I could not have