The Chemistry of Tears (17 page)

My laugh could not have been very pretty, but he did not seem to hear that either and he rose from his inspection looking both grim and guilty. As he left the room he slipped his LED into his trouser pocket.

When there was nothing remaining but his Blenheim Bouquet, I turned my attention to the Courtauld girl who was measuring a piece of track with her micrometer. With her thick fair hair held back by a Bakelite clip, there was nothing to hide the crimson glory of her neck.

I might have asked if her dear grandpa was a friend of Eric Croft’s, but there was no longer any need. You little spy, I thought. I was very frosty with her for the remainder of the day. When I left I did not say good night.

My fall in the bath had frightened me immensely but dusk found me as usual at the Kennington Road offy where dear soft-eyed Ahmad already had a bottle of cold Stoly waiting on his counter. Eric could ask, “Are you all right,” but Ahmad was the only man in London who had any idea of how much I was drinking. At least he did not know I had put the clocks inside the fridge. This was rather frightening. I had grown up with the sound of clocks and they had been a comfort to me, the whole orchestra of movements like the currents of the sea, an all-engulfing natural order. To refrigerate a clock was an extremely violent act, not one I could explain to anyone.

I crossed Kennington Road without being run over. Once inside I opened all the windows and lit lavender candles to destroy the stink. The vodka went in the freezer, then came out a moment later.

I sat on the sofa, a very plain Nelson day bed, a prime example of that rather Quakerish modernism which I have always adored. From there one could look up through the high back window and enjoy the silhouette of a chestnut tree, listen to the blackbirds quarrelling about their places, and watch the sky turn to ink, never quite black, always London’s suicidal engine burning in the night.

Against the wall beneath the windows was a low Bruno Mathsson bookshelf. On its normally bare surface I appeared—during my
adventures of the previous night—to have exhibited a blue wooden block. Why not? It was a very pretty colour. I clearly had fussed a great deal with the lighting, using the same tiny reading light Matthew had bought from the Conran Shop on Marylebone High Street. Now I fiddled with it until the facing surfaces of the memento were completely shadowless.

Then I sipped my vodka.

It glowed, my stolen jewel, deeply evasive, sad and melancholic, a study in blue but also something like a small boy’s slippers placed beneath his bed three thousand summer nights ago. Soon, but not immediately, my mind began to drift down Henry Brandling’s paths, narrow lines in the meadow where the grass was bent, broken yellow and bruised, fresh tracks that led to little hopping Carl the hare, clever clever Carl now dead as dead could be. Carl calcified and crumbled and the brain that had made and known the cube had vanished, less than a glow worm in the night, not even a dried cicada in a case. At this point, as I drained my glass, I heard the music of my clocks as I had heard them last night. The wind-up orchestra had always meant Clerkenwell, comfort, safety, peace. I had spent my entire life foolishly seduced by ticking clocks, never bothering to hear the horror underneath.

I sought Henry, Henry alive, good-hearted Henry. How essential was his company in this endless night. I read. He wrote.

T
HE PAGES OF SUMPER’S
notebook held a disgraceful mess of floating charts and lithographs depicting wheels of one sort or another. From this magpie’s nest he withdrew a densely annotated sheet which had suffered a chaos of amendments. He was eager to inform me it was a list of angels. Then, typically, he tucked it back into the nest and would permit no more discussion.

“Then why did you show it to me?”

He jutted his long chin towards the boy who was sitting quietly by the window working a piece of metal with a file.

“His name is there,” he said.

“He is an angel? I rather thought you were against that sort of guff.”

Had there been a seraph in Furtwangen, he would not, surely, have had such dirty nails and long peculiar fingers. Those digits were host to several warts and Carl had been taught that he would cure these “apostles” by rubbing them with rosemary. My own dear boy smelled of Pears soap all day long, but Carl was not less pleasing—an earthly aroma always preceded his arrival.

He was not an angel. He was possibly a clever boy with a beautifully shaped head. He made the figure of a leaping deer from wire. Allegedly he sold this to the packer. A similar object was supposedly
purchased by a Baron with a wasting disease and one had also gone to a beloved English boy with the same dangerous condition. Should Percy have brought me these gifts I would have treasured them, but in Carl’s case they were annoyances. His value to me was that he was the engine of the workshop. When he was absent, work slowed. Whenever he ran up the stairs, the tap of the hammer became faster and the whirr of the lathes accelerated.

Percy needed no gift but mine. When Carl presented his cube to me I flinched and would have left the room had not the mother grabbed my hand. My mind was in another country where the floor was wet and the air was filled with sulphur. While Sumper snatched, Frau Helga dragged my thumbnail across the varnished surface. It tripped a trigger. The lid flew open. Out popped an Englishman six inches tall.

With a face of hair, a pair of popping eyes, a top hat upon his large square head, this ridiculous figure was meant to represent myself, a man who had already lost one child to consumption. I didn’t require toys. I wanted only to be shown what I was paying for.

“I have a mind to go to the police,” I cried.

Sumper displayed nothing but exasperation, but Helga’s face was as crumpled as her son’s. “Herr Brandling, we have given you a gift.”

“You stole my plans.”

“No, Herr Brandling,” the boy said. His face was pale as death.

“We are following your orders,” said Frau Helga. “You have paid us.”

I was exceptionally pleased to have made them so afraid. “Quite so, Frau Helga, except Herr Sumper can provide no proof of anything. He tinkers. He teases. But all I see is my money as it disappears into his purse.”

Sumper pushed his huge face right into mine and pinched my cheek. I slapped his hand away and he laughed or grunted in surprise.

“If you were the Pope,” he hissed. “If you were the Jesus Christ himself, I would hide my work from you. I have to bring it to a stage where you understand what you are looking at.”

“It is very simple, Herr Sumper—if you cannot prove satisfactory progress.”

Perhaps Sumper made a sign to Helga. If so I did not see it. In any case it was she who now announced: “You will be shown.”

I followed them, not up the stairs, but out and into the dark cold air of the mill. Here, in a summer workshop previously unknown to me, I was shown a heavy workbench, freshly built above the shadowed stream. In front of the bench were three trestles. Atop the trestles was a barrel-vaulted structure, the hull of a small rowing boat, but too short and beetled to properly serve that purpose.

Around this folly the four of us all gathered.

“What on earth is this?”

Sumper dared to shrug. “It is as I said, you will not understand.”

“Did my plan ask for a boat?”

“Did I give you one?”

“Then what in God’s name is it?”

“You have a pond,” said the ridiculous Sumper. “This is designed so the water of your pond will wash across the gunnels and then run along this groove so this whole floating structure will be invisible below the water. Here your duck will appear to swim, eating fish which will endeavour to escape their fate.”

Dear God, my boy lay in his bed, his cheeks pale, his blood sucked by vampyres every hour.

“Ducks do not eat fish.”

Sumper sighed and bowed his head and placed his thumb and forefinger so as to support his naked brow. “Mergansers eat little else. But that is not the point.”

“I do not have a pond,” I cried. I thought, I have a boy, a dear child I cannot lose.

“You have
something
. A pond, a tank. You are an English gentleman. Am I correct?” And now he was smiling like a magician in a circus and I could not admit to the sulphurous cistern in the nursery.

I said, “Vaucanson’s duck ate grain.”

Perhaps he saw my deep distress for when he spoke his voice was
kinder. “In every respect you have the truth,” he said. “Only in one way is there an error. Ask me, Herr Brandling, ask me what is the error? I will tell you—I am not Vaucanson,” he laughed, patting my back as if to give me comfort. “Ask me what is London?”

“I am sure you will tell me.”

“Yes, London is the jewel of heaven,” Herr Sumper said to me, his voice now soft as velvet. “Of this I had no idea. When I left Furtwangen I did not seek a noble fate. I fled my destiny, which was to become a patricide. Walk with me,” he said, passing me his handkerchief. “I am not Vaucanson. Thank Jesus we have agreed on that.”

Dear Percy, forgive me.

PARADOXICALLY, AS A RESULT
of our two conflicts, a greater intimacy was established between us, and we developed the habit of walking together in the melancholy dusk. That he had little curiosity about my own life, I truly did not mind. Frankly I preferred that. Also his talk was hardly boring. For instance, it was on one such walk, on the edge of a ravine, that he revealed that he had planned to murder his father, by causing a tree to crash onto his bed. Alas (his word) a pulley jammed and the tree fell on the wrong room. This, he realized now, was the first truly original machine he had devised. It was in this peculiar way that he spoke to me, showing no remorse, but a detached admiration for his own genius.

As it was a genius that I required I dared not judge him.

When he failed to murder his parents—for of course they would both have died if the plan had succeeded—he jumped aboard the raft of logs and danced away. “I had no clue that I was floating towards another constellation.”

In the gloom a German goat was doddering up a bare and rocky hill. “Has not my entire life been a wonder?” he said.

He admitted a “typical peasant prejudice” against the English until
he met an English woman in Avignon and followed her to London. And when she showed him what his valley had hidden from him, he could have sent a flood and washed all the Schwarzwald into the sea.

I could hear the plaintive bleat of the goat. I could see no more than the palest chalk mark of the road.

But Sumper, Sumper was in London, already in the future of the world. Miracles surrounded him, he told me so. Did I have any idea what a barometer was? Had I seen a hot-air balloon? No one in Furtwangen had ever seen a balloon, he said. If he had floated over them, they would not have seen him. They were like the savages in New South Wales who did not even see the English ships, because they did not know that such things existed.

Had it ever occurred to me, he wished to know, that I too might suffer from this blindness? What if I walked along this road and it was suddenly illuminated by blazing sea horses? Would I be able to see what I judged impossible?

In the distance Frau Helga rang her bell for dinner. This caused Sumper to say he would not make false digestive systems. He was not a cheat. He tried to persuade me to touch his own stomach where he said he had a scar caused by an incision through which he had received direct Instruction.

I pretended to misunderstand him and he was forced to hurry after me towards the ringing bell.

FORTUNATELY WE DID NOT
return to the subject of the scar that night, but when the meal was over and Carl and Frau Helga had retired, he produced what I took to be a joint of meat wrapped in a cloth, perhaps a leg of goat, a bone to give a dog.

I was writing. He sat without invitation and threw onto my page a little silver leaf. I admired it with some trepidation, hoping it was nothing to do with me.

“Perhaps this is more pleasing,” he said, slowly unwrapping the
large object he had kept resting on his lap. It was not a bone at all, but five gleaming steel sections, articulated at their junctions.

“Neck,” he said. “For your boy.”

But this was not the neck of any duck. I’m afraid I rather panicked.

“Please, my patron”—he ensnared my hand—“you must be happy. You must celebrate your good fortune.”

For myself I could have cried.

“Think, Sir,” he purred, “how unlikely it is that you would wander into a second-rate hotel in Karlsruhe, and end up with this?”

“But this is not a duck.”

I could not shame him. He made a snakelike dance with his arm and hand, extraordinarily sinuous, and deft, moving down to pick up the salt shaker and then, with a fast flick, letting it slip down his sleeve. In the face of his own fraudulence and theft he stood triumphant.

“The neck is too long,” I insisted. “You must agree.”

First came the deep coarse laughter and then a curious bright-eyed solemnity.