The Chemistry of Tears Part 10

"No. Just remove them very carefully. Keep all the newspaper they are wrapped in. Watch out for any doc.u.mentation at all, even a postage stamp."

"How will I arrange them? I mean, what is the principle of order?" I cannot talk.

I will not look at her. "I don't care. Any way you like."

My colossal lack of curiosity is completely inconceivable. In real life this would never happen, but even in the middle of my own personal rollercoaster ride, I do manage to keep some sort of eye on her. I realize she is ordering the components by size, smallest to largest. You little pickle, I think, you cheeky little thing.

"How is your day?" Delete.

"I hate everyone, not you, my sweet." Delete.

"I am a genius. Come and see what I have done."

The girl unpacks and cla.s.sifies. I slice away my heart. Delete, delete, delete. There may be a faster, less painful way to do this, but I doubt I would use it even if I could. It is a field of electric turbulence, bone-breaking updraughts, emails from his wife. Delete. I never asked him if he had s.e.x with her. I trusted him completely. Just the same I always sniffed his skin. Delete. There are emails to women I do not know. These I cannot help but open, and every time I am ashamed. Delete. I dig deeper and the Courtauld girl digs in the tea chests.

"Now are you up to this?" I ask her.

But I see she is listening to music on some device I cannot even see. On another day this would annoy me.

There are so many emails to his sons. I have to read them. I cannot delete them.

"Did your pills arrive?" he writes.

"You need a warm coat?"

"I'll pick you up at six. Set two alarms."

"Love Dad."

"Love."

"Love always."

Around noon I abandon Amanda Snyde "to have a smoke." When I return I have been crying. I also have a fresh flask of vodka in my perfect bag. My a.s.sistant is eating an egg sandwich and bent over what I later learn she calls a Frankenpod, having cobbled it together from abandoned pieces.

"You can eat with the others in the caff if you like."

"I'm sorry. I'm not very used to being around people."

"Surely you went to school."

She removes the single ear bud and I catch sight of a black billowing image on the screen.

"Actually my grandfather tutored me."

"Had he been a teacher?"

"He was a sort of soldier."

"You were in London?"

"Actually, in Suffolk."

I do not ask where in Suffolk. She might say Beccles or Southwold or Aldeburgh or Blythburgh, the litany of love names, private, ours. I would not have our private Suffolk stolen or polluted.

"But then at the Courtauld?"

"Then West Dean. I've become quite civilized, learned to use a key and so on."

Learned to use a key? Well, I am rather strange myself, for I cannot acknowledge the body parts of swan she has laid so carefully upon the bench. I am a highly specialized creature and I could have identified much of this jumble in my sleep. Even whilst reading heart-wrenching emails it is impossible not to see the tarnished silver, some pieces rather like napkin rings. I have noted the reflective backing plates which are made to fit below the gla.s.s rods and are a common convention in these automata. Their function is to make the "water" sparkly. These plates on the bench are in a most unsparkly condition. They really need to be covered with reflective silver leaf which can, of course, be removed in the future. I cannot deny the barrel of a music box, a very familiar object for a horologist. I do not wish to count but of course it has about a thousand pins. This Herr Sumper made, not for Henry Brandling but-this is very clear to me-for himself. Most of the pins are bra.s.s, but have sometimes been replaced by steel. I have no curiosity at all, but I cannot help knowing that many of the pins have been moved to new positions.

It is like leaving a child to walk alone on a busy high street, but I am near her, watching her with my peripheral eye. I wonder who her grandfather was or is? When posh people say "soldier" they mean a field marshal or a spy.

She continues to dig up the bones. I continue to burn my past.

In the midst of this Eric "pops in" wearing that ridiculous tight striped suit, all waist and wide shoulders. It is too hot for this costume. He stinks of the Ivy-the wine list, not the shepherd's pie.

I secretly watch to see how he will react to the Courtauld girl. He affects to not see or know her and that pretty much proves he has planted her. I wonder if the "soldier" is a trustee.

Eric rushes around the room like a dog at the airport and then rushes out again.

A moment later I ask the girl, "Did he say 'Toodle pip'?"

She giggles.

"Who says 'Toodle pip'?"

"Bertie Wooster, I think."

"You're too young for Wooster."

"Stephen Fry is Jeeves," she says. "I saw him once, in the pub in Walberswick."

Walberswick. Delete.

"Why do you think Mr. Croft says 'Toodle pip'?"

She smiles.

Everyone thinks it is Americans who make themselves up, but it is we English who are the fantasists, not only Crofty either. There is a strange meld in Amanda Snyde's voice when she says: "I think this is the neck of something."

Poor Henry Brandling. He never got his duck. When I read the invoice I was rather pleased it was a swan but now, in the studio it has some other creepy quality-a life, a p.e.n.i.s, the neck of a goose on Christmas Day. It is spooky, dirty, an unearthly blue-grey. The fine articulation of steel vertebrae could not be achieved anywhere in London in 2010.

She holds it out for me.

"No, put it down."

For no good reason, I begin to cry.

"Oh dear," she says, and through my blurry eyes I see the afternoon light catching her pretty face, her hope and hurt. She is too sane and generous for this room.

"Miss Gehrig." And that is when I see, beneath the hair, she has an ugly plastic hearing aid, and I recognize her accent as belonging to a cla.s.s of injury. This is why she uses just one ear bud.

"It's all right," I say, "I have lost a family member. That's all it is. It's nothing."

"Are you all right?"

"Completely. Someone died. That's all. It happens every day."

"May I ask questions?"

"No, you may not."

For the rest of the day I have her follow me around with a notebook while I dictate functions and allow her to allocate the numbers.

I make a rough sort of cla.s.sification of the unpacked components-a beginning anyway, although we have not come to the main engine.

"Wear gloves," I say.

"Yes," she says, looking at me suddenly. "The parts leave a funny feeling on your skin."

I think, she can see my pain in colour, poor girl, but I suppose she can deal with almost anything.

Catherine & Henry.

TIME AND TIME AGAIN, in the early hours, I took refuge with Henry Brandling whose slightly mechanical handwriting served to cloak the strangeness of the events it described. His was, in the best and worst sense, an intriguing narrative. That is, one was often confused or frustrated by what had been omitted. The account was filled with violent and disconcerting "jump cuts." One would imagine the author had returned to live at the sawmill and it was a shock to stumble into a sentence and realize he was sitting on a chair outside the inn. I imagined a rather Van Gogh sort of chair, but who would ever know?

Then here was Carl, materializing, and not even a whole body but a graze on his arm, or the mud on his boots. Henry clearly loved him, and was jealous of the boy's attachment to Sumper who "filled the little fellow's head with dangerous rot." Such was the nature of Carl's "toys," Henry concluded that the only possible explanation was "they are made by the dreadful Sumper to tease me." As a reader I far preferred the other possibility, that the child really was clever, that these were his inventions. He owned (or constructed?) a gla.s.s-plate camera and "wasted time" photographing tourists. No more was said of this, but then, on the line below, Carl appeared without warning, arranging voltaic cells at Brandling's feet.

If voltaic cell meant a battery (and I confirmed it did) then it seemed anachronistic. But of course it wasn't. One did not seek science fiction from Henry Brandling.

Carl, according to Henry's account, laid the batteries on the road outside the inn and produced a dead mouse which he proceeded to connect to cables. The mouse leapt into the air, its eyes bulging "in astonishment," its teeth bared to bite the unprotected neck.

Then "the Holy Child" "scampered" back across drying flax, his "instruments" inside his "sac."

Much more than a century later the reader in Kennington Road drank her vodka icy cold. She looked away from her lonely reflection in the black gla.s.s of the kitchen and found the fleeting image of the angelic trickster arriving at the inn with a tiny "engine." What did "engine" even mean in 1854? It is hard to visualize a motor with "one big wheel and one small" which "limps and hobbles" and goes "roaring down the road in a cloud of smoke."

Of all these "tricks and notions" Henry's chief concern was that they took precious time away from the manufacture of his duck.

To the grieving horologist, working daily at the Swinburne Annexe, it was very clear that, if Sumper had been a crook, he was also a highly advanced technician. It was difficult to name more than two of his contemporaries who might have devised and produced work at this sophisticated level. Presented with the obstacle of Sumper's size and personality, Henry was more naturally disposed to accept the Arnaud version in which the clockmaker was a violent brute.

Every morning I knew this was not true.

As for Arnaud himself, my (rather inspired) guess was that he was neither a spy nor a pedlar but an itinerant silversmith whose ident.i.ty was kept secret from the sponsor-to learn his true occupation would have warned Henry that a great deal more money would be extracted yet.

This was also consistent with the daily evidence in Studio #404 which revealed an exceptionally single-minded and wilful character. Sumper had clearly done whatever Sumper wished, and it was upsetting to read the word "duck" so often in the customer's ma.n.u.script and know that the undead creature had been, and always would be, a majestic swan-113 solid silver rings fitted in such a way as to make a long swan neck; each of these rings engraved with the pattern of swan feathers; everything photographed, measured, weighed, identified.

At my side, the Courtauld girl was immensely diligent, and she was certainly a whiz with Excel, a computer program that had always irritated me. Yet work went slowly. By myself I might have done eighty-six rings in a day and loaded and identified the JPEGs. Working with an a.s.sistant it took over two days.

I often imagined that Herr Sumper had foreseen that Amanda and I would grapple with his puzzle. He was certainly a lot more helpful to us than he had been to Henry Brandling, providing us with a.s.sembly instructions by stamping numerical coding on the rings.

"Is this damaged?" asked Amanda Snyde. "Is this a stress fracture?"

I was pleased she saw things, but although she was fresh and thirsty for knowledge, I was still looking for excuses to send her away-so I could read our emails. In truth, this was the reason our progress was so slow.

For instance, there were 122 silver leaves which would surround the automaton in a fringe or wreath. I had her take one of these leaves to Metals. There was a pretty boy down there, rather of her tribe, clean-cut and pink-cheeked who arrived each day in his father's too-big coat.

She returned to announce the swan had been made in France.

This was twaddle, but I was very pleased as it would require another errand.

"Alas," I said, "we happen to know it was made in Germany."

"How do we know that?" she asked, and of course I was not going to produce Henry's evidence.

"It has Minerva stamped on it," she insisted. "Doesn't that mean it was made in France?"

"Did the young man help you?"

"He seems very knowledgeable."

I smiled at her and caused her to blush. I was pleased she liked the Metals boy with his rather posh blue-and-red striped tie. Would a boy kiss a pretty girl with a hearing aid? What a stupid question. She was a beauty.

"Yes," I said, "but it was really made in Germany."

"How do we know?"

"I'll show you," and I showed her the little mark I had found. Nothing more than an A. In truth it could be anyone's.

"This is the mark of a silversmith named Arnaud," I said. "His name is Huguenot, but in fact he worked in Germany."

I should have been ashamed (even if I would later turn out to be precisely right).

"As for the Minerva, it has been stamped by the French a.s.say office in order for it to be sold in France. There was a Paris International Exhibition in 1870. It is possible the swan was displayed there. So this is the next project for you, Amanda. Are you familiar with the British Museum?"

Of course she was. She was a gem.

It did not yet occur to me that I would miss her, or that I would be actually waiting for her return on the following afternoon. She came in at around three, dressed for her weekend with her Burberry bag and her Liberty scarf. Why do those Sloaney girls dress like that, in those awful coloured tights?

"You're off for the weekend?" I asked when she had delivered her findings.

"My grandfather."