Peter Carey - The Chemistry of Tears

The Grieving Genius, said Sumper, walked the streets of London, all the while devising—completely in his head—a series of shapes that never existed on the earth before, and he saw how this three-dimensional cam would drive against that three-dimensional cam and how they would align on an axle. In comparison to this endeavour Vaucanson’s duck should be seen as exactly what it is—a machine to produce fake shit, excuse me.

These shapes CAME TO MY MASTER, Sumper said. He received every part COMPLETELY IN HIS HEAD. He drew the part with astonishing precision. He then taught Thigpen how to see the plan, and how to make the wood pattern and how to cast it in bronze, or turn it on a lathe so that all these elements would finally give the illusion, as they turned, that they were like a molten cord, sinuously rotating on columns like the vertebrae of some creature from a distant star. These parts were made to tolerances of one half-thousandth of an inch and were designed so that it was impossible to make an error. When instructed to make an error the machine would jam.

To do this Cruickshank required twenty-five thousand parts in an assemblage twelve foot high and eight foot deep and weighing many tons. With ten thousand parts he was almost half way there. Who could possibly conceive what order of being this was?

HRH the Queen never once said that she found the notion hard to grasp. But as in knighthoods, battles, invasions, the gold standard and the transportation of assassins, there must be, not only the monarch, but thousands of sucking ignoramuses, said Sumper, men who have rights and territories and opinions, and these astronomers, for instance, astronomers in particular, could not imagine, because no human mind could possibly calculate how much a machine like this might cost. By the time Thigpen had spent thousands of pounds the bureaucrats had decided that they had a white elephant on their hands. No one, certainly not Cruickshank, could tell them when it would be complete.

So, said Sumper, no sooner had I been transported to the REALMS OF GOLD, to that elevated position where I might help change the history of mankind, no sooner had I arrived in Soho Square, but the idiots at the palace declared they would no longer foot the bill.

Germans, cried Sumper. Germans. That’s what I could not tolerate. Idiots, cretins, stuck up, stitched up, basically stupid people who could have paid for the Engine by melting down a crown or two.

“You see, Henry? In this case you are exactly equal to Queen Victoria. You worry you are being cheated, no? She was just the same.”

He laughed at me and put his hand upon my shoulder, and in what followed assumed a greater degree of intimacy than was his place to assume.

“I was a young man,” he said, “but once I had been employed it was clear that I had become, in my happiness, the most unhealthy creature on this earth, a monk. In your own situation you will easily imagine the mad bordello of my dreams, which reflected everything but my actual situation, nightly holding a Genius to my chest. How I wished to still his raging soul, if you will forgive the expression.”

With this gamey brothel talk, Henry Brandling, Christian gentleman, was provided all the reason needed to retire.

IT HAD BEEN TANTALIZING to stare through a glass darkly, to see or intuit what had taken place in Furtwangen and Low Hall so long ago. Reading in this way did not require that you interrogate the unclear word. In fact you soon learned that what was initially confusing would never be clarified no matter how you stared and swore at it. One learned to live with fuzziness and ambiguity in a way one never would in life.

Yet I was a horologist. I had to know how things fitted together. I could not possibly accept that Cruickshank was a superior being or that animals might have a higher mental life. It was not uninteresting in considering these “mysteries” to see quite startling similarities between the hulking bony Sumper and the pretty blonde Amanda. They had similar habits of mind, like a pair of academics who will always push the evidence to fit their theory. When Amanda and I first ran the engine and I saw the creepy lifelike movement of the neck—so relentless, calculating, sinuous, cold, silver, phallic—I was not immune to its effect. I was therefore all the more pleased she had never read about Herr Sumper’s Superior Beings.

Of course the swan would “serve,” as Sumper had insisted, but I doubt he imagined it serving the museum for that was where it would end its days, at the Lowndes Square entrance, lifting the gold coins from the punters’ pockets as if by magnetic force. As to whether this income would ever be enough to replace the funds cut by the Tories, one does not need a calculator to know that was impossible.

The swan will not be Lucifer or a transport system for a secret Christian cross but, rather, one of those installations that children are brought to visit, with which old men in split shoes form strange relationships.

And there will be surprisingly expensive postcards, and posters and videos and catalogues with a scholarly essay from Mr. Croft and a more lowly practical one from myself, and then—why not?—Amanda’s most particular drawings. It will be very unusual for a first-year assistant to make a serious contribution to a major catalogue, but no matter what eyebrows are raised, there is no doubt that Amanda Snyde, who could not yet be called a scholar, had been producing astonishingly good drawings every day. God knows how the issue of ownership and copyright would be settled, for although she produced many of her sketches on Swinburne time she did not stop at five o’clock. Nor was there, page by page, any true division between her detailed conservator’s recording of silver collars, and more personal work: she produced a very thoughtful drawing of me at work which, if I hadn’t been afraid of seeming vain, I would have loved to buy.

My assistant was not at all secretive with her sketchbook and I had, on three occasions, snooped. There were two items, very revealing of her state of mind, which were completely and utterly not my business, except I was her boss.

The most fanciful of these was a very careful three-dimensional architectural rendering of the structure of the morbid hull, that awful tomb in which Carl’s cube crossed the Styx. I had forbidden her to fuss with it, so I was annoyed to see she had been drawing it for hours on end. She had rendered the arched beams and the cladding on each side, also carefully indicated the bituminous sealant while, at the same time, not hiding the cavity beneath.

And of course Amanda would not leave things in the simple concrete world. She had drawn, meticulously, with fine cross-hatching, an extraordinary number of fanciful objects secreted within the wooden skins. But why should I be angry? Did I wish to make imagination criminal? The objects made me think of provisions for the afterlife, those pots of grain and fruit one might see inside a pharaoh’s tomb, but there was nothing to tell me how they should be interpreted, and in any case she was a very fine assistant.

I was returning the book to the bench when the door swung open and I performed what was, I hoped, a convincing reversal. That is, I affected to pick up what I had not yet set down.

“Amanda,” I said, “have you talked to Mr. Croft about your drawings?”

She placed her lunch bag beside the book. “Oh no, of course not.” She was colouring, not necessarily with pleasure.

“Could you photocopy a series of them for me? Whatever ones you like best. I’m thinking of the catalogue.”

Her eyes were suspicious but as she flicked through the pages I knew that her vanity would save me yet.

I laid my hand on her wrist to stop her flicking past the drawing of the secret compartments. One could feel her physical resistance.