Peter Carey - The Chemistry of Tears

“Catherine, would you like to say that again, so you can hear yourself?”

“You mean I’m ‘enthusiastic’ too? Do you know how horrible it is to have all these strangers know more about my life than I do? This is not kindness. It’s the opposite.”

“So I’ve been cruel to you?”

“Yes.”

There was a long pause while he placed his cup and saucer on his desk and then, very slowly, stood. I thought he was going to wheel the chair back to its usual place but he remained, grasping the wobbly back, looking out the window as he spoke.

“Catherine, I do think I have cut you an awful lot of slack. An incredible amount. But now we really must have the written material back inside the museum.”

“You’re joking.”

“Darling, enough is enough. I can’t turn a blind eye to what you’re doing. I could be dismissed for it, and that would be a very, very simple thing to do. Out the door. Clean out the desk. Police escort, all that sort of thing.”

“You’re punishing me. I’m sorry. Please don’t punish me. Let me keep the books at home.”

“We’ve all been a little too enthusiastic. It’s time we put our house in order.”

“We’re out of control?”

“Just a wee bit.”

“Did you really set me up with Matthew?”

“You saved his life.” The window panes were clearly reflected in the saline nimbus of his eyes.

“He saved my life.”

“You transformed him. You were his life.”

I could not help it any more. I began to blubber. Then I was the one who held out my arms. When I felt his penis hard against me I was shocked, but only for a moment. I thought, poor poor man, and then we both sat on our separate chairs. We found something in the Christie’s catalogue and then we became perfect “no ones,” all information deleted from our eyes.

MY DARLING MATTHEW, I thought of you when the pizza box arrived. I remembered your very superior lamb chops marinated with garlic ginger chilli, cooked on your hibachi beneath the great surviving elm. Wild lettuce, radicchio, treviso, endive, pea leaves, watercress, I kiss your toes.

I gulped down the cardboard mess and read.

Herr Sumper once more explained to me, wrote Henry Brandling, that M. Arnaud was a far better silversmith than a fairytale collector. Arnaud’s great misfortune, said Sumper mockingly, was to have been commissioned to make a vulgar salt cellar for a Baroness Ludwig Something. Now he scurried about the forest like a mouse, fearful that the Baroness would force him to be vulgar once again.

Of course, said Sumper, everyone knows who Arnaud is and where he lives. The Baroness could have him brought to her within a week, but why would she bother?

Sumper and I drank acid wine, wrote Henry.

“The fool spends half of his income on buying fairy stories,” Sumper said. “I know he is talked of as an inventor, but there is no money in that sort of thing.”

What sort of thing?

“His washing-machine contraption is ridiculous. For Arnaud to show that thing to me is an offence. I, who have been on friendly terms with men of science and genius, must listen while he explains the washing machine to me, again and again, so I am now doomed to carry the parts in my head until I die. He has no clue of my Mechanical Memory which is equal to much greater tests than this. Thanks to this damned wood nymph, I have washing-machine parts rattling inside my head like nails.”

It had been his personal ambition, Sumper continued without drawing breath, to retain all twenty-five thousand elements of Cruickshank’s Engine in his mind. This began on the day when he learned that the incomplete machine was abandoned at 40 Bowling Green Lane which had been visited by bailiffs who had padlocked its doors and pasted notices across its window.

Some of the lathe men thought this was punishment for mocking God. “But the main culprit,” said Sumper, “was Queen Victoria.”

Cruickshank still had hopes he could bring her back on board and for this reason the Master spent his evenings pasting newspaper reports of shipwrecks into a massive presentation folio.

Sumper talked endlessly, Henry wrote, never ceasing, on and on, never more so, it seemed, than in a blizzard. The gutted Catherine Gehrig peered down through that frozen script.

Why must I suffer, Henry Brandling had written, long ago. Am I not the patron?

The machine’s great enemy was the Queen of England, but not her alone. The Astronomer Royal developed a hatred for the Engine. He did everything possible to poison the minds of the Queen and the Prince Consort.

Confident that he would finally win the day, Cruickshank proceeded with his list of deaths at sea. You would need a heart of stone to not be persuaded by these names, so many children, babes in arms. So Sumper said. So Henry wrote, with what feeling none could know. At the same time, Cruickshank assumed nothing—he petitioned Her Majesty, asking, no matter what her decision on the funding of the Engine, if she would immediately decree that the marooned tons of steel and brass might be granted to him as a boon. This would enable him to sell shares and independently raise capital to ensure the completion of this life-saving machine.

Then, because he could never wait for anyone even if they were a queen, he began immediately to seek investors, dictating many letters seeking capital. These should have been despatched immediately, but many hours were wasted correcting Sumper’s English. Yet this imperfection seemed no obstacle to their relationship. Indeed it was in this period he first became “my German.”

Mr. Cruickshank was always kind, said Sumper. From him I learned the English language very well although, to be quite honest, his cook was also a very lively little teacher in more ways than one.

When the butcher would no longer supply the household needs, the Genius had himself engaged by the directors of the Great British Railway Company with the express task of investigating some of the difficulties and dangers of this new mode of travel. He had that company supply him with a second-class carriage and he and Sumper removed all its internal parts. To the framework they then attached a long table, designed in such a way as to be entirely independent in its motions. At one end they fitted a “monumental” roll of paper which would, if unrolled, have stretched two thousand feet. As this paper was mechanically wound onto the second roller, several inking pens traced curves which measured, separately, force of traction, vertical shake of engine, and other things “you would not understand.” The pens gave exact indices relating to the safety and comfort of the passengers. The inking pens, for instance, measured the physical forces that might cause a carriage to roll.

The fool, wrote Henry Brandling.

The fool did not know that the pater was a director of that company, and would have been the one personally responsible for Cruickshank’s commission. However, wrote Henry, I was very interested to learn how the scoundrels had used the Brandling generosity. By keeping mum about the family connection, I easily learned that the two rascals were transported from one part of the country to another free of charge. Admittedly this was extremely dangerous for it was always necessary to attach their laboratory to a public train and there were various tactics—and these I admit I did not always understand, wrote Henry—which involved disconnecting from the main train and shooting into a siding. Red ball top pocket, Henry thought. In all cases the pocket or siding had been selected well in advance. Indeed it was so well anticipated that Herr Sumper was, in one instance, required to write to a Lady Lovelace that Mr. Cruickshank and “my German” should be arriving at a siding 23A being three miles east of the Inn at Minehead and as the topographical map indicated level fields, the pair of them might expect to meet Lady Lovelace’s carriage in the middle of the afternoon.