“My darling, of course they cannot be locked up. I couldn’t justify that to anyone. You know Miss Snyde is very sorry. There was a mess-up at Boots, apparently. It was not her fault at all. Now she has her pills again, she’s fine. She’s mortified by what happened.”
I thought, she takes pills for her enthusiasm?
“Eric, please, have you read these notebooks?”
In other circumstances I would have enjoyed that impish smile. Now it scared me.
“Keep reading. It gets better.” So saying he whisked all my notebooks from the room. I followed him, but I knew where he was going anyway. In future I would have to take that same staircase, at the top of which I would find myself at the mercy of the dry and secret little Annie Heller who had never liked me, and now would like me less. I had lost my private right to Henry Brandling. I would have to sign him out and sign him in.
The lapsang souchong was still too hot. The solid triangular handle offered no purchase. The treasure was about to slip between my fingers.
ANNIE HELLER WAS A tiny bad-tempered insect of a thing, not at all a scholar, with no technical expertise, with no legitimate institutional power except—she was the one who arranged for the manuscripts to be scanned. I suspected she was exceptionally nice to Crofty, for when he spoke of the empty Victorian sitting room behind her high librarian’s desk, he called it a “very pleasant place.” Why not? It must have been, for him. Even in winter, even in the silence, he was spared the animus the rest of us could feel, even when we had no visual contact with its source.
Annie was unbelievably, habitually rude. Only at the Swinburne could she have kept her job.
We all tried to suck up, and of course she despised us for it. Knowing this I still smiled at her when I came to talk about the Brandling Catalogue. I told her that her hair looked nice, which was far too big a lie. I asked, please, for a form to withdraw one of the manuscripts Mr. Croft had just given her.
As usual she made me wait a long time for an answer. Finally she said she would do that the “very moment” they had been catalogued.
I asked her when might that be.
“Oh, not long—a day or two.”
When she did look up I knew she was lying. I waited until she was more or less compelled to look at me.
“Might I perhaps read it here, in the reading room?” I asked. It should not have even been a question. I was a senior conservator.
“I’m afraid they are needed for cataloguing.”
“I do not believe that Mr. Croft intended I be denied the material,” I said, thus somehow forcing her to return to pecking on her keyboard. Her task could not have been demanding for she was able to speak to me between keystrokes.
“You know as well as I do, Miss Gehrig, Mr. Croft would not wish me to go against the rules.”
“Perhaps you could ring him up?”
So then the keyboard was pushed aside. The head came up. The tiny wire spectacles were removed.
“Miss Gehrig, I do know what the Swinburne regulations are without speaking to Mr. Croft and, in any case, once the manuscripts have been catalogued they will go to be scanned, and then, if you wish, you can view them on your computer.”
“So it is definitely not possible for me to read one of them now?”
“Miss Gehrig, perhaps I don’t appear to be busy?”
“Even if there is an important fund-raising project that will now be delayed?”
“That is correct, yes.”
“Thank you, Miss Heller.”
“You are very welcome, Miss Gehrig. I don’t imagine it will be more than a week.”
I descended the stairs as quietly as I dared and travelled back to Olympia in the stinky bus. I was in a vile, vile mood, angry with myself for my own incompetence, angry I had lost Henry, furious with Crofty for not supporting me. When I found Amanda ensconced in my studio it seemed I had lost all the power I had ever had.
“Good morning Amanda,” I said.
“Miss Gehrig, I am so sorry,” she said, but I could not trust her. I would not engage her eyes.
“It’s past,” I said. “The swan is more important than either of us.”
She had been with Angus. He had dressed her. She wore a crumpled white shirt whose single button was sewn with bright red thread. She looked gorgeous, carrying the rumpled cotton the way only the very beautiful can do. She had a new sort of sexual confidence that made me feel dry and wizened.
By this time we had the mechanism assembled on a steel work bench, and the glass rods were all clean, laid on the bright new back plates, their end caps secured by a modern reversible adhesive. As soon as we wound the clockwork, the rods would slowly spin.
The track was in place and the little fish could be connected as soon as this morning, an operation as ultimately simple as hooking an earring in one’s lobe.
We were perhaps a month from the very end, but very close to a dress rehearsal for the nobs. Once the neck was clad with rings, once the beak was properly attached, we would do a run-through and then Crofty could show his benefactors the wonder. Of course he already knew exactly what he had. Even before its restoration he had foreseen the swan’s hypnotic, eerie being. I am certain that he had laid a more complicated set of bets than I could ever hope to know.
Would it really draw sufficient crowds to please the ministry? The minutes of the procedures meeting had hinted at this angle, but one could have put it much more bluntly—with this swan the mandarins of Lowndes Square had surrendered to the Tory government. They understood their obligation to be “more popular.”
In any case my assailant and I laboured day after day. As long as we kept our conversation to the job at hand, I did not fear her physically.
Yet I was unable to forget that savage, ignorant injury to Carl’s blue cube, and because of this I continued to stay at the Rose and Crown. This brought its own predictable stresses on both my MasterCard and my wardrobe.
I arrived at work one morning and found Amanda already at her computer. I would not have thought about it if she had not closed it down so quickly. A few minutes later, as luck would have it, Security called to say we had a parcel—the long chain synthetic, Dyneema, which I had ordered to replace the steel cable. I despatched Amanda to pick it up, and the moment she was out of the room I looked at her viewing history.
She had been Googling Furtwangen. She had found this in the notebooks in my flat. How much she had read was beyond the point. I was angry and frightened. My skin went cold and hard as leather.
By the time the spy had returned and placed the parcel on my desk, my world had become quite unreal. I picked up the scalpel with the dot of nail polish. Amanda stood very close, wearing Jo Malone, all in black today, with painted buttons.
Before the inner sheath of packaging was revealed, I turned to her, very conscious of the scalpel in my hand. She stepped back, exactly as I wished.
“Amanda, I checked your computer history.”
“I’ve not been looking at the webcam.”
“You were Googling Furtwangen. Why?”
Her face showed that infuriating expression which might be colloquially translated as “duh.” She said: “Obviously, I wanted to know where it was.”
I casually rested my hand on the bench, but I did not release my grip on the metal handle. “Why?”
“I think they made cuckoo clocks there.”
“Why are you interested in cuckoo clocks?”
If she was going to scratch again, it would be now. I was very foolish to hold the scalpel. I wished, now, too late, to put it down, but I was afraid of that as well. Then I saw, with relief, her eyes were tearing.
“Miss Gehrig, I am so sorry.”
I did not dare soften. “What are you sorry about, Amanda?”
“I know about the notebooks.”
