The Chemistry of Tears Part 16

"A friend of Dad's. He helped us think about the lease."

"This would be Mr. Croft?"

"He has been very nice to us."

"He registered the car in whose name?"

Neither of them seemed to know.

"We parked it outside."

"We washed it, but it rained."

"You are very sweet, but I can't drive." This was not really true.

"You could learn," said Angus. "It's surprisingly easy."

"I could teach you," Noah said. "I did an advanced driving course, skid pans, everything."

I could say nothing in response. I was too moved, too sad, too furious. My young protectors somehow saw I was about to cry. They quickly agreed they would keep the Mini somewhere safe for me and that we would meet to talk about the driving lessons. I signed the lease and gave them both a peppercorn and in minutes we were in the library where I was held in a musty smelly sort of rugger hug. Matthew, in their bones.

When they had gone I lay on my bed and thought about the breeze brushing our naked skin in the summer, the storms rocking us in winter, the German Sea gnawing at the bottom of the cliff.

AT THE ANNEXE, at this early hour, I delete you, my darling, my beloved, with your wide soft mouth against my neck. I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labour at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the gra.s.s amongst the bluebells. There on your secret triangle of land I would be your most submissive tenant, would lie beside you until rain, wind, storms raced, threaded like shoelaces through our missing eyes.

Such thoughts as these are mine, at the moment Amanda enters from her world where the Gulf of Mexico has become a lake of oil. Does she have a mythology or cosmology for this?

"h.e.l.lo," she says when she has dumped her backpack.

"h.e.l.lo," I say. Delete, I think.

Looking up, it is clear to me that she has a new lover. She has baggy indigo trousers and a sleeveless top like silverfish. Inside these loose coverings is a body so young as to make one weep. Her attention is on the swan. Please, please, I need no more fantastical nonsense. Please learn to see what is before you here and now.

She says, "What I am about to say is none of my business."

The hair rises on my neck. I delete a letter I have not even read.

"I only want to help."

I read, archive, spam, delete.

"It is so painful watching you," she says.

"It is just a swan, Amanda. A machine."

"Miss Gehrig, this does not have to take weeks. It could be done in minutes. You do not have to torture yourself like this."

She is offering me a small plastic object which, in my fear and rage, I mistake for a cigarette lighter. It has one of those crude non-words in white type on its side. A part emerges from the black sheath, steel, like lipstick.

"You just create a new folder for your email, archive it, and export the archive to a flash drive."

"What's a flash drive?"

"This." She sort of thrusts it at me, which I do not like at all.

"I could download it for you. In a second."

"I'm fine, thank you." She works for me, she reports to me, but even as I refuse her help she attempts to get around me.

"Amanda, what is it that you imagine I am up to?"

But she will not answer. "All I'm saying is-you don't have to spend hours and hours like this. It must be h.e.l.l."

"Who told you?"

But she is intent on controlling my computer.

"It was Mr. Croft who told you?"

Her doll-like eyes are wet with unwanted sympathy. At the same time her irises are very wide, like a creature living in the dark.

"Please, please let me just ..." And she has slid between me and the machine, typing as she speaks. "You can take it home and load it on your own computer. Is it a Mac?"

"No. It's a PC. So, obviously it will not work."

She looks over her shoulder, appraising me as if I am a dangerous beast, holding my eye all the while. Up close, she smells strangely musty. Then I see her fingernails are dirty.

"You know who these emails are from?" I ask her.

"They're loading now."

"Who told you, Amanda?"

"We both know who told me." She places the tiny object in my hands. She wraps my fingers around it. Some subtle shift of power has been effected.

"Miss Gehrig, he worries about you."

"No."

"All he can think about is that you be looked after."

"But we can't say who he actually is."

"No."

"Although we already have."

"The swan is terribly important to the museum, you know that. He has a frightful difficulty getting money as you know. He has to go around sucking up and being charming. How awful to have to beg from all those city yobs."

Thus I am taught to suck eggs by my child a.s.sistant. But what really stings is that the sweet, pretty, clever Courtauld girl has forcibly removed Matthew from my cache. She has made me hold him like ashes in a vial.

Henry.

SUMPER AND I DEPARTED the village with the heavy bra.s.s drum strapped between two poles. Such was the weight we were in a hurry to reach our destination, speeding through the fog across the square, down the lanes to the brook, across the footbridge to the fields, stumbling dangerously in furrows at whose furthest extent the sawmill awaited us. Now the leaves had fallen and nature was revealed, like an old man whose beard has been shaved off to show what cruel tricks time had played on him. Dear Pater.

Such was our speed and so uneven was the field that I feared Frau Helga, charging from the flank, would cause a spill. She pa.s.sed me at a gallop and rounded on Herr Sumper while somehow trotting backwards, bravely waving letters in the air.

"On," cried Sumper. "On."

"No, it is from England."

"On."

I thought, Percy! But I was tied to Herr Sumper in every sense, so "on" I must and "on" I did, although together we almost ran the woman down.

I thought, it is from Binns. My boy could not endure the wait. Dead and lonely and I did not kiss his lips. Then we reached the river path, and the Holy Child burst from the bushes with a savage yell. His eyes were bright, his cry too high. He shook a murdered rabbit before his mother's face before setting off ahead, gambolling and hobbling, shaking his keys in his left hand.

We sped onwards. Dear G.o.d, I am a mighty fool, please let him live. In the freezing summer workshop above the river, we laid our burden down.

I took the letter and saw my brother's hand.

"What news?" asked Helga.

Carl was also waiting, dripping rabbit blood onto his feet.

Thank G.o.d, thank Jesus, I will join you soon.

But no-my brother was set to delay me further. Two months previously, the spider wrote, he had been appointed my trustee and now possessed the power to decide, at his own discretion, what sums would be made available to me at whatever intervals he might deem appropriate, the snivelling little wretch.

He claimed our father had "lost his wits."

Of course it was not totally impossible that the paternal mind had collapsed at exactly the moment I walked out of the door, but my brother's a.s.sertion that our father was no longer "sensible" was what the pater would have called a "hoot." He had never been "sensible" in any way at all.

Red-nosed Douglas had had him declared Non compos mentis. That was Douglas, worse than Douglas. To quote: "What you do not sufficiently appreciate, Henry, is I am a man of business, and there is a great deal more to business than railway tracks."

He was not a man of any type at all, and what was cloaked by all his ghastly b.u.mph was that he had invested in the Bank of Ohio. I ask you: who had lost their wits? It was Doug the Thug who had placed Brandling and Sons in an "awkward situation." Now he regretted to advise me, as my trustee-imagine-that I might draw no more funds until the "panic in America" was sorted out.

Sumper turned his back. I could not see his face, only his shoulder, his green coat, his large white hand which he ran regretfully along the flat of the spring, as if it were his fresh-caught trout.

"Bad news, Herr Brandling?"

He took it well, Frau Helga less so. She ran weeping across the bridge to the house and Carl went hotfoot after her, dripping blood across the floor.

"Dig potatoes," Sumper called.

Then he turned to me, and without particular expression, made the following speech: "The trouble with the rich is that they rarely have the patience for great things."

I a.s.sumed he was finding fault with me. I apologized, as well I might, but he waved all that away. "When it is their own business," he said, "they know what to do."

"Who do you mean, Sir?"

"When they abandon their counting house or factory, when they must have a portrait painted, they turn into idiots. What a state they are in. They go to their club where they seek out other idiots for their opinion. 'I am having my portrait done,' they will say, 'and the fellow is using a lot of blue. What do you think? I'm worried about that d.a.m.ned blue.' "

So then I saw what he was saying and, for once, I totally agreed. It was intolerable that a fool like Douglas should play with life and death.

"They are in charge. It is their only skill. It is exactly the same with your Queen of England, German of course, and completely ignorant of where she is. It was she, Mrs. Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who disgraced England and my own country by cutting off the funding for the most extraordinary machine. That is the reason that I later came to visit Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace."

"I see," I said. I thought, he can only talk about himself.

"You do not look at all surprised?"

I did not look surprised because I did not believe him for a second. It was impossible in every way.

That evening I wrote to Percy concerning what I referred to as "our secret." I promised that in spite of his uncle and his mother's "difficulties" I would return as promised and that if he would only eat his grains and be a brave boy with his hydrotherapy, I would soon make him completely well.

If that was a risk, I did not see it. My blood was up and I would keep my word.

HERR SUMPER SAYS HE first mistook the Genius, Albert Cruickshank, for a common tramp, and was mightily offended that this beggar was permitted to walk freely through the door from Bowling Green Lane. The visitor's trouser cuffs dragged on the machine-room floor. His grey hair was long and stringy. His jaw was clenched, his mouth set straight. The author of Mysterium Tremendum (for it was he) carried beneath his arm a rectangular board which Sumper a.s.sumed to be one of those complaining placards which he had seen mad people display outside the English parliament.

The visitor was allowed to wander freely, "like a Hindoo Cow," between the lathes and presses of that enormous industrial cathedral. Not a drill slowed, not a canvas belt was shifted from its drive, certainly no worker prevented the intruder from approaching, along an aisle of lathes, the place where an altar might be expected in a church. But never was Christian altar built to the scale of that enormous engine. Sumper compared it variously to an elephant, a locomotive, a series of vertical columns of circular discs, all these so contradictory that a chap was left with-what?-a notion of a very large mechanism, yes, but one that was somehow spectral, golden, intricate as clockwork. I knew my clockmaker was in the habit of lying (about Prince Albert most recently) but such were his powers of persuasion that I had no difficulty in picturing how the interlinking parts of steel and bra.s.s caught the light, much like, surely, the gold frames on the high walls of my family's home could contain the flame of a single candle set on a table fifteen feet below. I found myself wishing I could have seen the wonder too.

During his first week at Thigpen & Co., despite the demands of his pre-set lathe (which he boasted he had mastered while complaining of its danger), Sumper seems to have been a most effective spy.

The draughting tables had been set to one side of the altar, and here, in the place where the choir stalls would normally be, he had glimpsed the large stooped Thigpen and his senior mechanics poring over plans.

He learned that only the firm's most respected tradesmen served the engine and that there were still ten thousand more individual parts to be produced. Not one of these ten thousand could be commenced until a very detailed drawing had been made, and as each new drawing was examined, great discussions (and some fierce arguments) took place. He was able to make me see this in a rather comic way, as if the engine was an Idol and the men were its demonic votaries.

"They thought they were all great fellows," Sumper told me, "but not one of them, not even Thigpen, knew that the machine was at imminent risk of being broken down and sold for sc.r.a.p."

Of course he couldn't have known it either. He knew less than anyone and had been astonished to see the tramp shake Herr Thigpen's hand and to realize that the "placard" was a draughtsman's folio from which drawings were extracted, reverently, one by one.

An Englishman would likely have deduced that the old man was the designer of the machine, and probably rather grand, but Sumper had a.s.sumed the tramp was selling stolen goods.

So it is to be a foreigner.

For Sumper in England, the situation seems worse than mine in Germany-the English workers were allegedly angry he had agreed to man the pre-set lathe. He may (or may not) have been physically attacked outside his own boarding house. He may (or may not) have made cat's meat of them as he claimed. He was a boastful bragging man but it would fit his character for him to be bewitched by the sight of the dignitaries who visited the draughting table-"wigs of ivory," he said, "coats like jewels."

His own work was possibly boring, requiring "less brain than a cuckoo clock." As a result of that inattention which is the constant companion of tedium, he twice came close to amputation, and it was after the second of these near misses-just when he knew he must find another job-that the factory whistle blew three times. Thank G.o.d, he thought, but the day was not over yet.

There were always a great number of trolleys and steel tables trundling across the dark slate floor, and it was one of these that the men, walking in disorderly procession, like cows at milking time, now followed deeper into the factory.

They were preceded by that grey-haired giant, their master. When he had his mechanics gathered about him, old Thigpen removed a dust cloth from the trolley and there revealed a bra.s.s and steel device. He spoke. Sumper's translation was that the device was "the seed of the great idea we serve." This is consistent with what follows.