character of the organs.’ ”
Oh dear, Catherine thought, oh dearie dearie me. It was as if she had opened her front door to a Jehovah’s Witness. But the boy was totally at home. His red mouth was open. His hair “caught the candlelight” as he reached for his mother’s hand with his long thin fingers, “pale, plastic, bendy as the necks of birds.”
“You,” Sumper pointed to Henry Brandling, “are in the same state as a fly whose microscopic eye has been changed to one similar to a man’s.”
The boy cast on Henry Brandling “a beautiful and pitying smile.” And then he mouthed the words as Sumper read: “ ‘YOU ARE WHOLLY UNABLE TO ASSOCIATE WHAT YOU SEE WITH WHAT YOUR LIFE HAS TAUGHT YOU.’ ”
Catherine shivered. What to think of this? Had the great mechanic also been a mystic?
Sumper read: “ ‘Those beings who are before you now, who appear to you almost as imperfect as the lowly zoophytes, have a sphere of sensibility and intellect far superior to the inhabitants of this earth.’ ”
At the time it did not occur to me, not for a moment, that this was really written by a man of science. I had no idea how much Cruickshank owed to Humphry Davy’s
“You have no idea of where you are,” Sumper told Brandling. “You have no idea of what will happen here. In this very room,” he said, “you have been anointed as a courier, and you will play your role never knowing what you have done, or imagining you have been the brave agent in a history you will never read.”
Henry reported the “full furnace heat of madness” and then a fright that “mak’st my blood cold, and my hair to stare.”
Catherine reread: “ ‘Those beings who are before you now, who appear to you almost as imperfect as the lowly zoophytes, have a sphere of sensibility and intellect far superior to the inhabitants of this earth.’ ”
Catherine wants KayKay. I was spooked.
IT WAS NOT YET nine o’clock but Amanda Snyde was already at her correct work station, cleaning the rings as I had asked her to.
That was our “object”—not a smoking monkey but a gleaming phallus stripped to the bare metal, as if flayed.
To the smooth articulated neck we would soon attach the fusee chains, like nerves rising within the vertebrae. These dry chains ran over a series of rollers effecting the operation of the lower neck, upper neck, nodding of the head, movement of the fish inside the swan’s bill.
There were five chains, of varying thicknesses. The finest of these had 170 links which meant, according to Amanda Snyde who had counted them, an estimated seven hundred pieces riveted together. It normally required children and mothers—small hands, young eyes—to perform such delicate work.
We knew that the first of these chains would operate the lower bill, the preening, the eating of the fish. The second chain would operate the fish themselves. The third would make the swan’s head nod. The fourth would arch the neck and the fifth was linked to the middle of the neck and would, if we were correct, make the movement very graceful and lifelike.
Today would be the first of two “neck days,” but we did not begin assembly until I had my normal half hour with Matthew’s emails, which I referred to simply as “my housekeeping.” Amanda kept her distance and asked no questions which made me certain she had figured exactly what I was doing.
Now she was recording the structure and dimension of each fusee link, and I was alone with my beloved. What peculiar people we had been, he and I, rationalists but sensualists, always so proud and careful of our bodies, knowing our lives were finite, acting as if we were eternal. How sweetly he had written to me, and so often. We had not denied time as humans are supposed to. Swimming off Dunwich beach, we had been aware of our skin, our hearts, water, wind, the vast complex machine of earth, the pump of rain and evaporation and tide, timeless wind to twist the heath trees. Afterwards it would make me dizzy to be reminded that the blood from the cavernous spaces of the penis is returned by a series of vessels, some of which emerge in considerable numbers and converge on the dorsum of the organ to form the deep dorsal vein. Dear God, I thought, we lived for it but now I may never have sex again. I closed down the computer feeling desolate. I began to work again but I saw oil spilled across the lichen and heather, roe deer, rabbits, nightjars dripping, submarine robots crawling through the murk.
Then I thought, thank God for Amanda. This may not have been consistent of me, but on a good day she could be an extremely comforting assistant, one of those rare creatures who have the tweezers ready before you have to ask. Threading was slow and fiddly but a good assistant makes this like a highly disciplined duet, and if one is slow and careful one can expect, every hour or so, to have formed a new connection within the mechanism and experienced the huge pleasure that comes when one human co-operates with another. Yet as the day wore on, various unhappinesses, pale glistening things like liver flukes began to worm their way back into my mind. How I missed Matthew, with what ache.
At lunch I sent a grovelling email to Eric apologizing for last night’s outburst. I waited until the end of the day and when there was no reply I telephoned him.
“Croft.”
I took fright, and hung up. Then, in my agitation, I broke the finest chain and was the recipient of more sympathy than I desired. Amanda touched my wrist.
She said, “Does it spook you?”
She meant the swan, not Crofty.
“Of course not.”
“It is incorrect to think of the devil as ugly,” she said.
I thought, why do you need to spin these dreams from darkness? Why can you not appreciate the mechanical marvel before your very eyes?
“Amanda dear, we are fixing a machine.”
“Yes but Lucifer is very beautiful.”
Her gaze was too direct.
“It’s Lucifer,” she said, “in Ezekiel.
“Well,” I said, “I think that’s it for today.”
“You’re in a rush.”
Yes, yes, I really was.
THE ENTRANCE TO MY flat was a high library, much narrower than the thirty-nine inches legally stipulated for London passageways. The shelves were pale soft coachwood which was silky to touch. Every shelf was illuminated by low-temperature lights. On the floor was an old Tabriz rug which looked a lot better than it really was.
It was a jewel box, and I always adjusted the lights so my visitor would get the full effect. By “my visitor,” I mean Matthew. I had rarely admitted anybody else. In the case of Eric, it would be necessary, if one was to be polite, to step outside in order to admit him.
When the door bell rang that night, I opened the door to discover, not Eric, but ghosts and mirrors of my lovely man, his two sons, dark-eyed in the rain.
The older boy wore his trousers as Matthew did—pleated, narrow-waisted. St. Vincent de Paul most likely, but super-elegant. This was the mathematician, Angus. He had his father’s hair, exactly, the big nose, the full- lipped humorous mouth.
“Come in,” I said, and stepped outside. They backed away like frightened horses.
The young one was the taller, Noah. In photographs he had also been the prettier but now he had a fuzzy beard and his hair was raging, tufted, hacked at with nail scissors I would say.
“Please go in.” My hands were trembling.
“We’re sorry,” said Angus. He had hand-painted the buttons on his shirt. In this light they looked like Indian miniatures.
“Well, I refuse to have you standing in the rain.”
Noah looked accusingly at his brother.
