“It was not uncommon,” Eric said.
“You got this from where?”
My visitor laid his hand flat against my back. “It’s rather awful isn’t it?”
Only then did I understand—the child in the man’s arms was the product of a Victorian mortician’s art.
“This is bullshit,” I said.
“Cat, Cat, what on earth is the matter?”
He reached out his hand towards me, and suddenly he appeared not kind or crinkly, not impish at all. I thought, why are you trying to destroy me?
“Cat.”
“Never call me Cat. Not ever.”
“Catherine.”
“Go, go.” I dragged out his coat and threw it at him. He reached for the blue block. I snatched it back.
Hours after he left I discovered the date on the verso and finally realized that this was not Percy but his sister Alice whose name the grieving Henry Brandling had mentioned in connection with a clock.
I BEGAN TO READ the newspapers again. I learned that the Americans have made a robot to teach autistic children. In many respects it is superior to a human being. That is, being a robot, it never becomes emotionally exhausted; it never loses patience; tears and rage do not press its buttons.
The robot is called KayKay. I am not sure why. It does not attempt to hide its wiring and other innards. The report said that children swarmed it when it first appeared at a “facility” in Austin, Texas. At the end of the first day, a boy with Asperger’s syndrome yanked its arms off.
The journalist seemed a little too happy about the arm-yanking, but the company said it was a “learning curve.” By the next public exposure, which was reported in the
Catherine wants KayKay.
KayKay would move on wheels, tracking Catherine throughout the flat, approaching indirectly and never entering “personal space.” KayKay would say “Uh huh” (an encouraging sound in American) when Catherine drew near. When Catherine moved away, KayKay would say “Aw” (American for disappointment).
Eric Croft must have wearied of my tears and rage, I thought. Who would blame him? Who would not prefer the company of normal people?
I sat at the kitchen table, peering into the wavering field of marks left by Henry Brandling’s pen. When I was above it, looking down into the lines, I could see flickering candles, the deep shadows of the “not here.” The distance was immense but I saw Henry’s sad dark eyes watch the other inhabitants of the room at the sawmill in Furtwangen—four or five of them—assembling tiny links of chain.
As yet Henry Brandling had no clue how the chain would serve the swan.
Catherine, on the other hand, had touched the chain, had tightened it, compelled it to move the skeletal neck of the swan on the fourth floor of the Swinburne Annexe.
In the firelight Henry Brandling’s eyes were unsettled and afraid. He had lost one child already. How the minutes must be, each one an agony.
Each of the Germans had a small assembly tool, not much more than a support system for a single groove into which the tiny component parts of chain were fitted so the rivet could be slipped into place and hammered home. The boy was fastest but Sumper, with his huge hands, was the most astonishing to behold. He was covertly competing with the child.
As so often, Henry could do nothing but watch. He did this with a terrible intensity that bore no relationship to the nature of manufacture being enacted. He crouched on a three-legged stool by the dying fire.
Might Henry Brandling have anticipated Catherine?
He anticipated someone would watch him through the wormhole, that was clear. He wrote for that person. He thought constantly of the moment when that chain would animate a swan that he stubbornly referred to as “my duck.”
I thought, he is lying, but not to me.
On Kennington Road the car tyres were hissing. The oxidized lines once made by Henry Brandling’s pen evoked weeds waving under water. The fairytale collector and the silversmith slowly melded together. They were the same person as I had already guessed. If Henry was not lying to me, then to whom was he lying? To God? I returned to Furtwangen and turned the page.
Sumper spat a hissing glob into the fire. “Listen to me more carefully,” he said to the fairytale collector. “It is the nature of science,” he said, “that what is true is always unacceptable to people.”
And of course I, Catherine, agreed with him. Which of us would not?
“I’ll tell you a story that is true,” the fairytale collector offered.
The child looked at Sumper imploringly. Even so his little warty fingers “never paused.” He was like a bird feeding, constantly pecking at a bowl of chain links.
The fairytale collector administered a light tap with a delicate black hammer. “On the exactly true date of 15 April 1614, a murder was committed in the old part of Salzwedel just off the street leading to St. Ann’s Convent.”
Carl screwed up his eyes.
The fairytale collector had no mercy. He described how the murderer’s hands were cut off and how he was tortured with red-hot pincers and dragged to the place of execution and placed on the wheel upside down. It was “miraculous” and horrible, according to the fairytale collector, to see how the hand with which he had committed this terrible deed continued to bleed for three days on the wheel.
“Why am I trapped here?” cried Sumper who did not seem to be aware of the child’s distress. “How could this happen to me, forced to listen to this chaff?”
For that he had Catherine’s sympathy. He was worthy of a better conversation. She had a better dialogue with him every day at work.
I was there close by him, by the four of them as they assembled the fusee chain, or four fusee chains. I saw them grow at an extraordinary rate, click, clack, tap, so swiftly. There was a long period with no word spoken, and the spiky sentences, brimful of awful anxious feeling, stretched on across the page. Finally it was Sumper who addressed the “awful little weasel.”
“You have heard of Sir Albert Cruickshank.”
Catherine had not.
Sumper left the table. The angelic boy “quietly compared” the two lengths of chain, his and Sumper’s. He whispered to his mother. The mother removed Sumper’s chain from her son’s celestial hand. She returned the chain to its place in the clockmaker’s assembly tool. No sooner had she done so than the clockmaker returned with “a much-stained” book in his hand. He clipped Carl lightly across the back of the head and both of them burst out laughing.
Catherine read the title:
“The author is Sir Albert Cruickshank,” Sumper told the fairytale collector. “He holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the inventor of the Cruickshank Engine.”
The fairytale collector affected to sigh, but the child looked expectantly towards the book, its Latin title inlaid with gold and glowing in the firelight. It was, Henry intuited, a familiar hymn or song.
“M. Arnaud,” said Herr Sumper, “
“ ‘I then begged of my guide,’ ” Sumper read from the volume, “ ‘that he provide a glimpse of those other higher intellectual beings and the modes of their thought and their enjoyments. These are creatures far superior to any idea your human imagination can conceive.’
“ ‘I was again in motion,’ ” (Herr Sumper stood), “ ‘I saw below me lakes and seas on the surface of which I beheld living beings which I cannot properly describe. They had systems for locomotion similar to those of the sea horse. They moved from place to place by six extremely thin membranes, which they used as wings. I saw numerous convolutions of tubes, more analogous to the trunk of the elephant than to anything else, occupying what I supposed to be the upper parts of the body. Here my astonishment became disgust. Such was the peculiar
