The Chemistry of Tears

It was then, high on grief and rage, I stole two of Henry Brandling’s exercise books. What would happen if I was caught? Burn me alive, I didn’t care. I tucked them inside my copy of Antiquarian Horology, and walked straight past Security and out into the London street which was now, in late April, hotter than Bangkok.

It is beyond argument that at the moment I unlocked my own front door, Matthew’s body was beginning to decay. Inside the flat it was awful, awful, hot and stuffy. Effluvium. Booze and cigarettes. I threw open the windows at the front and back. I sprayed Aveda lavender in every corner, lit a cigarette and stabbed it out, poured a glass of whisky and retched. I did not like red wine, but I uncorked a bottle of Matthew’s Bourgueil and smelled him. I closed the windows so no one would hear me cry.

I had owned, since my dear grandfather died, this basement flat. It was on Kennington Road, diagonally opposite the Imperial War Museum. I have heard north Lambeth called an “unlovable” corner of London, but I have always known myself blessed by the walled garden which, as the wealthy New Labour owners of “upstairs” were mostly in Ibiza, was often mine.

In the days when there was still a future the garden had been magical. As recently as last week we had lain in bed and watched a family of foxes frolicking in the backlit uncut grass.

“Look. Watch. Shush.”

The foxes were not exactly cute. Their earth stank and they brought fast-food wrappers and soaking Pampers onto the lawn. We knew we were meant to telephone “Bert in Putney” who would come and shoot them. Of course we disobeyed.

Now I read, slowly and carefully, giving all my attention to the evasive puzzle on the page. I could not doubt Henry Brandling’s real desire to keep his promise to his son. But he did not seem to have imagined what would happen when the duck was finally made. Did he really expect his wife to fall in love with him again? Or was he, without knowing it, building some mad monument to grief, a kind of clockwork Taj Mahal? Or was that me?

Henry Brandling did not seem hugely bright, but given that some of England’s most unpleasant men have Firsts from Oxford, I was not at all put off.

The more I read the more I drank, the more I drank the more I was moved by Henry Brandling. He, like my beloved, suffered for his children heart and soul. I began to imagine that he had anticipated me, that he had bequeathed these notebooks personally. I finished the scotch. I began to drink Bourgueil. The tea chests could go back to whatever dark hole Crofty had found them in, but before they left my studio I would remove each and every exercise book and bring them home and keep them in a place where they would be loved and understood. My sense of ownership was like that created by my first viewing of Fellini’s 8?. Then, like now, I believed I was the only person on earth who could understand the thing before my eyes.

Henry

I HAD ABANDONED PERCY. I could not hear him cry or even breathe. Thus I slept deeply, and woke slowly, feeling the backs of my calves move against the smooth cool sheets. What vile luxury. When, after breakfast, I returned to my room I was comforted to feel the usual pain return.

The strange German bed had been severely tucked in, eliminating the history of my body from its reckoning, and this effect was all the stronger as Karlsruhe itself seemed intent on excluding me. I had no purpose in Karlsruhe, no reason to be born at all.

How I missed my true self, the smell of the salty sulphurous cistern, the musty drying mops, the red-eyed child scraping his hobnailed boots beneath the breakfast table.

Seated on the hard uncurtained bed I saw that any evidence of what and who I was had been scrupulously removed. The only sign of character was that of a maid who clearly had foibles which I had previously considered English. That is, she had artfully rearranged those small private objects I had left sitting on the dresser. Such altars were built at Low Hall continually. Indeed, it had been a matter of acute distress that both Maisie and Elsie had continually interfered with my wife’s own deliberate arrangement of the nursery. For instance (to take just one of twenty possible examples) the small brass lantern clock which had so soothed our daughter in her final stages —“Alice’s Clock,” so called. My wife preferred this small memento be positioned to left of centre of the mantel and, in her grief, she became quite fierce about what exactly was its place—just to the left of centre and then twisted on an angle so it could be seen clearly from the bed.

Yet maids do not listen. And maids love to fiddle, and two maids are twice as bad as one for each in their turn (Maisie had been “sent packing” before Elsie had been engaged) would shift the clock to the centre of the mantel and line it up directly parallel with the wall. Elsie’s action left my wife with the choice of dismissing her or doing without the clock. All in all she thought it simpler to have the clock “go missing” with the result that poor Elsie, who was given to nervous conditions, spent her five years in our employ worrying about that “blessed clock” and having dark suspicions about which departing servant had been “the one.”

I have left out all the other maids’ arrangements, the consequences of which finally spread well beyond the nursery. So when, in Karlsruhe, I finally comprehended that my cuff links, my compass, the enamelled miniature of my son, my pack of cards, my pens, sovereign case and all the little accoutrements of life, had been arranged as by a magpie, well, I was—from habit?—somewhat apprehensive. Oh Lord, I thought, there will be trouble now.

In the very centre of my dresser, much in the manner of Nelson’s Column, stood my rolled-up plans, and around this obelisk these objects had become subjects paying homage. The plans themselves now bore the simplest of decoration, a royal blue thread which I was slow to realize served the purpose of attaching a small sheet of notepaper.

I was loath to touch the composition, but how could I have no curiosity about the message there attached? Being the Two Friends champion at pick-up-sticks I had the steadiness required to slip it free. There, in a childish but not ungraceful hand, I read: Wir bauen die Ente.

Why this should make the hair stand on my neck I could not say. Was I frightened of my wife or of the maid? I rushed to my dictionary and you might consider my feelings (in this city where everyone knew everything about me, where the most innocent action created hostility and suspicion), you might imagine my racing heart, when I learned that Ente = “duck.”

Yet the dictionary was just a little thing, and I rushed off to seek a live translator who was, of course, alas, Frau Beck.

She looked up, smiling, from her ledger, and I noted, for the first time, that despite her whole presence being like a dry and wrung-out cloth, her little brown eyes were soft and rather wary. I thought, you are a widow.

“Who is Ente?”

“Sir, it is a duck of course.”

“What does it say about the duck, Frau Beck?”

She placed the small note on her counter, dipped her pen and—all the while smiling—corrected the child’s handwriting.

“Herr Brandling,” she said, “we will make your duck, of course. It will be ready in two hours.” Her misunderstanding was clear enough, but I did not wish to argue with her. So rather than further damage her opinion of me, I contracted to pay her for a duck I could not eat.

“Now you must walk, Herr Brandling. You must be healthy. You are in Germany, you must exercise. In two hours you will dine again.”

I would have interrogated her further, but the major-domo—an awful creature with a limp—chose that moment to begin an argument with the old woman who was mopping the front steps of the hotel. “Walk, Herr Brandling,” Frau Beck cried, rushing to the scene of the conflict. “You will be pleased.”

I began my stroll with no particular plan, wandering the little streets as many visitors had done before me. I had no curiosity about anything except the meaning of this note. I rather feared it was belligerent.

There were just as many clockmakers’ shops along the streets as yesterday but I had no stomach for them, and so chose streets that took me out into the countryside or to the church which I believed I could not be blamed for entering. Then of course it was Catholic so I thought it best to leave.

The backstreets were not so different from a provincial English town where the shopkeepers chalk their wares on the door posts. So it was, by luck, I recognized a stationer’s where I managed to negotiate the purchase