The Chemistry of Tears Part 7

There must be a procedures meeting before conservation or restoration could begin.

But I could not bear to talk to anyone.

I laid the gla.s.s rod on the bench and considered it awhile. These rods, also mentioned on the invoice to Herr Sumper, would simulate water. Then the duck would place its fake a.n.u.s on a bed of these rotating rods, eating fish and s.h.i.tting, or counterfeiting life in whatever way the bullying clockmaker had devised. Somewhere there must be a reflective plate to fit beneath the rods and this would help produce the general effect of water.

Perhaps it would be little Heather's job to deal with the gla.s.s rods, but I really did not wish to talk to little Heather. Nor did I wish to dig deeper into the boxes and find G.o.d knows, perhaps the embalmed body of Percy Brandling with its jaw broken so it could appear "at peace."

Heather should be grateful that I would wish to remove all the grease and oil that had seeped into the hollow centres of the rods. They would be a nightmare to clean, but I would happily do it for her. I would use thin bra.s.s rods with cotton-wool buds attached. And if the Swinburne procedures could, in all their Victorian wisdom, just cede me this, my pain might stop intensifying.

Before the gla.s.s cleaning began I would have to remove the bra.s.s collet at the end of each rod. The collet would fit into some as yet unseen mechanism which would rotate the rods. Successive generations of awful pragmatics had visited the site before me, depositing sh.e.l.lac, plaster of Paris, silicon, and each of these inappropriate substances would now require ingenuity, time and patience to remove.

Please let this be mine, I thought.

Please do not be sticklers.

I can do this job in solitude, until I am completely cured, or dead myself.

On this first gla.s.s rod someone had used black pitch much as amateurs nowadays use superglue-that is, they had slathered it on the gla.s.s then jammed it into the collet and held it while it set. The gla.s.s had been damaged by thermal shock. Because of these difficulties, the repaired rods would finally differ slightly from their original length-only a few millimetres' difference is enough to make reinstalling them a tricky job.

I opened my email account. I read: RE PROCEDURES MEETING.

Delete.

I remained on my swivel chair and looked at the gla.s.s rod waiting for ten o'clock when I knew the offy would be open and I could buy a flask of vodka.

I was not worried about the drinking or the stolen notebooks, for both of which I could lose my job. Instead I fretted over a misdemeanour-I had decided to start work without a procedures meeting.

That is, I would make no request to the Head of Section. Instead I'd go to Glenn the Building Supervisor who would innocently give me welding rods and cotton tips.

I found Glenn in his lair and while he was "locating" the welding rods and the cotton tips I went to the offy where I heard that London was the driest capital city in the world. We were to have a desalination plant, it seemed. I expressed amazement. I slipped the bottle in my lovely bag and returned through Security.

By ten past ten I was examining all the dusty gla.s.s rods on my workbench. Surely my present dentist had first seen my mouth exactly in this way-the work of fifteen different mediocre technicians over the course of twenty years. I felt the vodka roar down my throat and heat my blood.

I thought, this was how my father felt, each day. This is why they packed me off to boarding school in High Wycombe. When he died we discovered the most ingenious little hiding places for his bottles, carefully crafted little coffins he had constructed when he was allegedly "fixing the wiring" under the floor, or in the ceiling, or the wall inside a storage cupboard. He was such a fastidious, patient man who did not deserve to be changing watch batteries and straps and I would have done anything to have him take my museum job, to use his unwearied enquiring mind to understand a mechanism. I must have tortured him by living the life he would have wanted for himself.

Sometimes he would go to talks at the Guildhall and drag home the lecturer to dinner-what a sad lonely soul he must have been. It would take so long for me to know that I, his daughter, was the Oedipal son.

The white spirits worked rather well on the pitch, and I was gently separating the bra.s.s collet from the first rod when Eric Croft entered.

I looked straight into his bloodshot eyes.

"For Christ's sake, Catherine, please. Go home."

"Opening my present, like you said."

Did I slur? He was staring at me rather hard. "If you want to work, there has to be a b.l.o.o.d.y procedures meeting. What on earth are you trying to do to me?"

"My bronchitis is much better."

"Catherine, old love, we both know you cannot do this without a meeting."

There was another knock and the little lesbian opened the door with her elbow and entered, a coffee cup in each hand. Part of me was touched, the rest of me quite horrified.

"Sorry," she said, but her eyes were on the gla.s.s rods and the solvents on my desk. I was in her territory without approval. She spilled her coffee in her rush to get away.

"OK," I said, and reached to fetch the rod and place it back.

I am not exactly sure what happened next except that Crofty tried to prevent me dealing with the rod and as a result it slipped from my grip and hit the tiled floor vertically. It bounced. I saw it rise six inches and then I caught it in my hand.

We neither of us spoke.

I laid the rod inside the crate and slipped the collet into a plastic pouch and wrote "Collet #1" with a steady hand.

Eric picked up my handbag and gave it to me.

"Come on," he said. "I'm going to take you home."

I thought, Henry Brandling is in broken pieces. Eric must not see.

CROFTY SPRINTED UP THE road to catch the cab and fetched it back, reverse gear whining. "Kennington Road," he ordered.

I thought, you nosey parker, but he didn't know the number so that was OK.

"Eric, were you a bit of an athlete?"

"In the service," he said, and blushed.

"You weren't really a sailor?"

He slapped at his wrist and held out, between thumb and forefinger, a dead mosquito.

"Asian tiger," he said.

"What?"

"Asian tiger mosquito?"

"I have no idea what you are talking about."

"I thought you always read the Guardian?"

"I can't read anything," I said which made me think again of Henry Brandling and the fact that I could not possibly let Eric see what I had inside my house. Of course, when we arrived at my door I was completely useless in my own defence.

"Eric. You must wait a moment."

But he was already picking up my mail.

Amongst all the junk and Waitrose fliers there was a good-sized envelope which I s.n.a.t.c.hed from him.

"Wait," I said. "Stay here. Look at the books. Let me tidy up. Please."

In the kitchen I set to shoving the bits of Brandling's fractured exercise book inside the envelope. Dead dry fragments spun and spiralled to the floor.

"What on earth are you up to in there?"

Naturally he had come to spy on me. Fortunately my Mr. Upstairs was practising chip shots in the garden, and Crafty's social antennae were always sensitive.

"That's whatshisface."

"Indeed." I removed the cognac bottle from the table and slipped it beneath the sink.

"The Speaker of the House of Commons?"

"Retired," I said and turned to see that, far from being distracted by the Great Man, Eric Croft had, without permission, opened my handbag and removed my vodka flask and stolen notebooks.

No word was said. No facial expression suggested anything. He gave me the notebooks without comment and I carried them into my bedroom. I returned to discover he had opened all the windows and was settled at my kitchen table, my gutted handbag abandoned on the chair beside him.

"You are very wilful, Catherine."

"A little mad, sorry."

"For G.o.d's sake, don't hover." He slid a gla.s.s across the table. "Sit."

I drank the vodka standing up.

"Poor Cat."

I wished he would not call me Cat. I said: "I will not see a grief counsellor if that is what you're thinking." The vodka had a fierce hard solvent burn.

"Where did you ever hear of such a horrid thing?"

"Never mind."

"The thing is, you see, we must placate the edifice."

He meant the Swinburne, the great mechanical beast inside its Georgian cube on Lowndes Square, the wires, the trustees, the rules, the stairs, the secrets, Crowley's Hole where someone hanged themselves, the entire jerry-built mandarin complex of rat runs which is a two-hundred-year-old building in twenty-first-century s.p.a.ce. It was a very beautiful, quite astonishing, chaotic, awful thing. I fitted there as I would fit nowhere else on earth.

"I have no choice," I said. "Where else could I ever be employable?"

"No," he said, helping himself to another shot. "I have made this much harder on you than I intended. This project is upsetting. Life, death, all that sort of thing. Cat, I am very sorry."

"Please don't call me Cat."

"Is that not your name?"

"There is only one person called me Cat."

He lowered his lids. Perhaps he was simply holding his temper but he looked, suddenly, unexpectedly like a dreaming Buddha.

I sat, and received a second gla.s.s as my reward for my obedience. "I'm sorry," he said.

"It's just unthinkable that this is happening to people every day."

"It's awful."

"It's ba.n.a.l I suppose."

"I will take the b.l.o.o.d.y thing away. I am a complete fool."

"No," I said.

"No?"

"No."

"Very well," said Eric.

"Don't say 'very well.' It sounds like you are managing me."

"Actually, old love, that is my job."

"That's what I mean. You're going to send me to a shrink."

"Jesus, Cat, I am not going to send you to an anything. Where did you get this nonsense from?"

"When my father died they made us have grief counselling. They would not let us out of the hospital without seeing this cretin from Social Services. They would not give us his clothes even." I was crying now. I wished I wasn't. "They tortured him, Eric. They played with him. We had to make them turn off their idiot machines."

"Cat."

"Please don't."

"Catherine," he said. "I am sorry. He always called you Cat. To me."

I immediately felt so sad I could hardly speak. "Did he?"

"To me, yes."

I was so determined not to bawl, I suppose I glared at him.

"We are going to have a very small team," he said. "We will have a procedures meeting you can tolerate."

I had begun to snivel, but I did grasp what he was up to-finding a way for me to continue in employment.

"Ceramics are all Margaret's friends. I can't bear it."

"Hilary isn't."

"Heather. The little lesbian."