Peter Carey - The Chemistry of Tears

“Its soul, perhaps?” I asked of the tiny manufactured things. “What are they, Amanda?”

“Secrets,” she said, and turned two or three pages to a highly erotic, weirdly particular, rather Japanese drawing of the swan.

She raised a cheeky eyebrow, but she was less certain now and slightly pinker.

“I don’t like him,” she said.

“You’ve done a lovely job.”

“He’s up to something, don’t you think?”

We had reached the stage, you would imagine, when someone could have reasonably suspected she was ill, but I would never like to be that someone.

“You think it’s strange too, the blue cube?”

“Not strange,” I said, “but rather touching.” Of course she did not know Carl, so my comment could make no sense to her.

“Miss Gehrig, do you find yourself wondering what else there might possibly be secreted in the hull?”

“Dust,” I said, “a nail, a brass screw, sawdust.”

She gave her head a little angry shake.

“Don’t you even think about it?”

“No.”

“Shouldn’t you?”

“No,” I said. “Now come on. We really have a deadline.”

“Do you know, we could predict the probability of there being more blue cubes. Mathematically.”

“No, Amanda, I don’t think so.”

“Did you study maths?”

“Amanda, that’s enough.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Gehrig, but if you were a mathematician I do believe you’d answer yes. I’d like you to talk to my friend. He is a sort of mathematical genius. Can I get a pass for him, Miss Gehrig? Please. There can’t be any harm.”

I am a socialist. It makes me feel uneasy to judge someone who does not know her place. Amanda did not know her place, but I failed to point this out to her. I signed the application for the pass and left it to her to fill out the rest of it.

The peculiar thing was, when she mentioned this friend, I immediately thought of Angus. Then, because that was so impossible I did not consider it for another moment. Was my “not knowing” a little too deliberate? Was I actually hoping it was him? I cannot say, but when Matthew’s eldest son appeared in my office wearing those long narrow-waisted pleated trousers I was, although completely shocked, uncertain of any single emotion. Perhaps “extreme panic” would cover everything.

The young man appeared most uncomfortable, but this was likely produced by the expression on my face, or the very cold way I spoke to Amanda.

“Did you know Angus’s father had worked at the Swinburne?” I demanded.

“It wasn’t here. It was at Lowndes Square.”

“How do you and Angus know each other?”

“Oh, in Suffolk.”

I was invaded, violated. Suffolk was our place, Matthew’s, mine, woven with our life and breath, Southwold, Walberswick, Dunwich, even Norwich, were the secret fabric of the secret life we lived alone. How dare she drag this poor beautiful boy into territory he knew was freighted with his father’s life.

No doubt I looked ugly and displeased. Something made them go so very still.

“Where in Suffolk, Amanda?”

But I did not want to hear, no more than you would wish to see the bed where your lover had betrayed your trust.

“Miss Gehrig, I don’t think it’s fair that you control who we know.”

I laughed or gasped depending on the point of view. But I did not want a row with Angus. I wanted him to like me in the end.

“So, of course, it’s you,” I said to him. “The maths genius.”

“I’ll do my best.” He was nervous, fiddling with his hand-painted buttons. I thought, ah, Amanda made the buttons.

“If you show me the thing,” he said.

Clearly she had shown him a drawing for he was looking at the hull as he spoke. “So,” he said, “I know there is a given volume divided into regions of a certain size. I know how big the blue cubes are. You are asking me can I mathematically predict the likelihood of there being more blue cubes?”

“Who knows what’s there? It might not be blue cubes,” Amanda said. “It might be totally anachronistic.”

I felt an awful chill.

If Angus was alarmed, he certainly did not show it. In any case, she was pretty enough to turn a young man deaf and blind. “If the cubes are placed randomly,” he insisted, “then the probability of finding one will be just the size of the region divided by the size of the object.”

“Not just cubes.” She was now very bossy. “Who knows where they hid things? If we knew that we would simply drill a hole.”

She nodded at me, as if affirming that she meant it.

“I can’t predict the unpredictable,” the boy said.

“You told me you could.”

“Let me give you a parallel to what you’re asking—walking along the footpath, you encounter a paper bag. It has a pencil inside. You see another paper bag nearby. What’s the likelihood that there’s a pencil in it? The answer is, I have no clue. I know that there might be one, but that’s all I know.”

“Well,” she said, “there is certainly more than one. Otherwise it makes no sense.”

“Amanda.”

“Miss Gehrig, of course there are many parts inside. It is central to the issue of the swan.”

“What is the issue of the swan?” I asked, the hair rising on my neck.

“Amanda,” said Angus. He held her hand but she shook it off.

“You lied to me,” she said.

The poor boy had no idea of what was happening. “So there are objects secreted inside the double skin?” he said.

“You know there are. I told you.”

“Well you just X-ray it,” he said. “Who needs maths?”

“That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not at all impossible,” Angus said. “Museums have X-rays. If there’s something inside you will see it.”

Amanda turned to me, her eyebrows pressing down fiercely on her eyes. “Is this true?” she demanded. “Is this another lie?”

It is not mad to be obsessive, I told myself.

“Darlings,” I said, although I would not usually use such a word, “let me just alert you to the fact that Britain has just had an election. As a result, our budgets are cut to the bone. At the same time, we are involved in a very complicated, very demanding restoration of an automaton. It took a three-hour meeting to approve the replacement of one small fish. There will be no X-rays, none, not ever.”

“Please, Miss Gehrig,” Amanda said, beseechingly, and then—quite suddenly—she understood I would not budge.

It was then she scratched my face.

MY INJURY WOULD NOT need stitches, but I was very angry and when I had trouble with ID at Lowndes Square, I went completely nuts.

Up the damn haunted staircase, and all around me were Matthew’s molecules, oxygen that had caressed the clean pink lining of his lungs. I saw no one I knew, or perhaps they saw me coming.

A podiatrist once said to me, when people hear you walking they’ll think you’re angry, and there was surely something incensed about my walk, the ink blue of my swirling skirt; and me, as always, too heavy on the heels. Did I have an appointment? No I did not, but there he was, Crofty, in the centre of his rat’s nest—books and papers and catalogues and cards and hardly a thing of beauty to contemplate unless it was hidden in that wooden crate with straw stuffing spilling across the rug. It was a very fine-looking office just the same, wide rattling Georgian sashes, marble fireplace, and the courtyard as sweet and silent as a nunnery, deep in chestnut shade.

“What on earth has happened to you?” he said and there was such tenderness and sadness in his mouth that when he held out his arms I thought of Max Beckmann in his dinner suit, lonely, haunted, kind.

“That girl has to go,” I said.