The Chemistry of Tears (2 page)

The footpaths behind the exhibition centre were unnaturally hot and narrow. The lanes were looped and dog-legged. Lethal high-speed vans lifted the dust and distributed the fag ends up and down the street where the Annexe awaited. It was not a prison—a prison would have had a sign—but its high front gates were festooned with razor wire.

Many of the Swinburne’s conservators had spent a season in the Annexe, working on an object whose restoration could not be properly undertaken at the main museum. Some claimed to have enjoyed their stay, but how could I be severed from my Swinburne, my museum, my life where every stairway and lowly hallway, every flake of plaster, every molecule of acetone contained my love for Matthew and my evacuated heart?

Opposite the Annexe I found George’s Café with its doors wide open to the freakish heat.

You would think the author of
Balance of Payments: The Sing-song Trade with China in the Eighteenth Century
would be clearly distinguishable from the four sweaty policemen at the back booth, the drivers from Olympia, the postal workers from the West Kensington Delivery Office who, it seems, had been given permission to wear shorts. Not a good idea, but never mind. If the distinguished curator had not risen (awkwardly, for the plywood booths did not encourage large men to make this sort of motion) I might not have picked him out at all.

Crofty liked to say that he was a
perfect no one
. Yet although he was so opaquely estuary and his bone-crushing handshake had roots somewhere in the years of his birth, in the manly 1950s, he might turn up to drinks for the Minister for Arts where you, if you were lucky enough to be invited, might learn that he had been in Scotland hunting with Ellsworth (Sir Ellis Crispin to you) on the previous weekend. It appeared that I was now to be protected by this powerful man.

I saw his eyes—all the frightening sympathy. I fussed with my
umbrella and placed a notebook on the table, but he covered my hand with his own—it was large and dry and warm like something you would hatch eggs in.

“What a horror it all is,” he said.

“Tell me. Please, Eric. What happened?”

“Oh Christ,” he said. “Of course you do not know.”

I could not look at him. I rescued my hand and hid it in my lap.

“Heart attack, big one. So sorry. On the tube.”

The tube. I had seen the tube all night, the dark hot violence of it. I snatched the menu and ordered baked beans and two poached eggs. I could feel Eric watching me with his soft wet eyes. They were no help, no help at all. I rearranged my cutlery violently.

“They got him off at Notting Hill.”

I thought he was going to say that this was good, to die so close to home. He didn’t. But I could not bear the thought that they had taken him back to her.

And she, that great designer of marital “understanding,” would play the grieving widow. “I suppose it is Kensal Green, the funeral?” Just up the Harrow Road, I thought, so handy.

“Tomorrow actually.”

“No, Eric. That is totally impossible.”

“Tomorrow at three.” Now he could not look at me. “I don’t know what you wish to do.”

Of course, of course. They would all be there, his wife, his sons, his colleagues. I would be expected to go, but I could not. I would give everything away.

“No one gets buried that quickly,” I said. “She’s trying to hide something.” I thought, she wants him in the ground away from me.

“No, no, old love, nothing like that. Not even the awful Margaret is capable of that.”

“Have you ever tried to book a funeral? It took me two weeks to get my father buried.”

“In this case, they had a cancellation.”

“They what?”

“Had a cancellation.”

I don’t know who laughed first, maybe it was me because once I started it took a while to stop. “They had a cancellation? Someone decided not to die.”

“I don’t know, Catherine, perhaps they got a lower price from a different cemetery, but it is tomorrow at three o’clock.” He pushed a folded piece of paper across the table.

“What’s this?”

“A prescription for sleeping pills. We’ll look after you,” he said again.

“We?”

“No one will know.”

We sat quietly then, and a suffocating mass of food was placed in front of me. Eric had wisely ordered a single hardboiled egg.

I watched him crack its shell, peeling it away to reveal a soft and shiny membrane.

“What happens to his emails?” I asked, because I had been thinking about that all night as well. Our personal life was preserved on the Swinburne server in a windowless building in Shepherd’s Bush.

“It’s down,” he said.

“You mean down, or you mean deleted?”

“No, no, the whole museum system is down. Heat wave. Air conditioning failed, I’m told.”

“So it’s not deleted at all.”

“Listen to me Cat.”

I thought, Cat is not a word that can live in public air. It is a frail naked little thing, all raw and hurting. Please do not call me Cat.

“Tell me you didn’t write to each other on office email.”

“Yes we did, and I won’t have strangers reading them.”

“It will have been taken care of,” he said.

“How can you know that?”

This question seemed to offend him and his tone became more managerial. “Do you remember the scandal with Derek Peabody and
the papers he tried to sell to Yale? He came back to clear out his office and his email was already gone. Over.”

I never knew there was a scandal with Peabody. “So his email was deleted forever?”

“Of course,” he said. He did not blink.

“Eric, I don’t want anyone to access those emails, not I.T., not you, not his wife, not anyone.”

“Very well, Catherine, then I assure you that your wish has already been granted.”

I thought he was a liar. He thought I was a bitch.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who else knows?”

“About you and Matthew?” He paused, as if there were all sorts of different answers he might give. “No one.”

“I’m rather shocked
anyone
knows.” And then I saw I had hurt his feelings. “I’m sorry if that sounds offensive.”

“That’s all right. I’ve arranged for a little sick leave. You have been diagnosed with bronchitis if anybody asks. But I thought you might like to know that there is a future. Perhaps you should peek at the object that will be waiting for you when you finally come back to work.”

So he was
not
going to insist I go to the funeral. He should have, but he didn’t. His eyes had changed now and I was witness to some quite different emotion triggered by the “object,” which I assumed would be some ghastly Sing-song mechanism. Connoisseurs can be like that. Not even a colleague’s death could completely obliterate the pleasure of his “find.”

I was not particularly offended. If I was raging it was because I was excluded from the funeral, but of course I was far too unhinged to be at Kensal Rise. Why would I lower myself to stand with them? They didn’t know him. They didn’t know the first thing.

“Might we talk about it just a little later?” I said, and knew I had been rude. I was so sorry. I did not want to hurt him. I watched him unscrew the top of the clogged shaker and make a little pile of salt. In this he dipped his naked egg. “Of course,” he said, but he was slighted.

“It ‘surfaced’ somewhere?” I suggested.

In return for this tiny show of interest, he bestowed upon me a rather feline smile. So I was forgiven, but I was not nice.

I thought, while Matthew’s heart attack was crawling up his legs, Eric had been trawling in the museum’s old catalogues. He had found a treasure that none of the present curators knew about, something weird and ugly he could now make the subject of a book.

I wondered if the object catered to the obsession of some posh person, the hobby horse of a minister, a board member. I could have politely questioned him about it, but I really didn’t want to know. A clock is a clock, but a Sing-song can be a nightmare, involving glass, or ceramics or metal, or textiles. If that was so I would be forced to work with conservators from all those disciplines. I would not, could not, work with anyone. I would howl and weep and give myself away.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoping to cover all my offences. And they were offences, for he was being so extraordinarily kind.

We left the greasy spoon. There was a pristine red Mini Minor parked in front. It was not the Mini that I knew, but it looked just the same and I could feel Eric wished to talk of the coincidence. But I could not, I would not. I fled across the road, and entered the most secure museum facility in London.

Of course the chaps in Security had no interest in horology. They would rather be on their Harleys, screaming like mad bees around the North Circular. To my astonishment they knew who I was and displayed towards me an unexpected tenderness which made me mad with suspicion.

“Here you are darling, let me swipe that for you.”

As we moved through the first secure door I was still very shaken by the Mini. I could feel Eric’s meaty hand hovering about an inch behind my back. He meant only to comfort me, but I was a mad woman. The hand’s proximity was oppressive, worse than actual contact. I
swatted
at it, but there was no hand at all.

On the fourth floor I was permitted to swipe my own card. We entered the rather too cold windowless corridor, strip lights above, tiled walls, mostly white. I felt the hair of my neck lifting.

I had half a 0.5 mg Lorazepam in my purse but I could not find it—it had clearly become lodged with fluff along the seam.

Eric swung open a door and we frightened a very small bespectacled woman at a sewing machine.

The next door, the correct door, remained jammed shut until it swung back on its hinges and crashed against the wall. I was immobile, as was the whole brutal concrete structure of the Annexe. Horologists do not like alien vibrations, so it would be thought that this was a “good” place for me to be. I felt intensely claustrophobic.

There were three high studio windows suffused with morning light. I knew too much to raise the blinds.

There were eight tea chests and four long narrow wooden boxes stacked against the wall below the blinds.

Was I the first conservator on earth who did not wish to open up a box?

Instead I opened a door. My studio had its own washroom. Ensuite, as they say. The look on my protector’s face told me I was meant to be pleased by this. I found a dustcoat and wrapped myself inside it.

When I came back, there was Eric, and the tea chests. I was suddenly certain it was some awful tribe of clockwork monkeys blowing smoke. Sir Kenneth Claringbold had a horrendous collection of automata, clockwork Chinamen and singing girlies of all sorts. In fact my first assignment at the Swinburne had been his gift to the museum: a monkey.

That particular monkey had had a certain elegance, except for the way it drew back its lips to smile, but for a person raised on the austere rational elegance of clockwork it was creepy beyond belief. I got headaches and asthma. Finally, in order to complete the restoration, I had to cover its head with a paper bag.

Later there was a smoking Chinaman who was not quite so horrid,
but there was always, in any circumstance, something extremely disturbing about these counterfeits of life and I sniffed around my new studio more and more irritated that this was what Eric had chosen to console me with—eight tea chests were much more than you needed to contain a clock.

“Aren’t you going to see what it is?”

I imagined that I detected some secret in Eric’s mouth, a movement below the fringe of moustache.

“Are there textiles involved?” I demanded.

“Why don’t you look at your presents?”

He was talking to Catherine Gehrig who he had known so very well, for years and years. He had seen me in very stressful (dangerous, in museum terms) circumstances and I had never given him cause to see me as anything other than calm and rational. He liked that I never seemed to raise a sweat. Eric, by contrast, loved big emotions, grotesque effects, Sing-songs, the Opera. Whenever he found fault with me it was for being too cautious.

So dear Eric had no idea that the present beneficiary of his kindness had become a whirring, mad machine, like that sculpture by Jean Tinguely built to destroy itself.

He wanted me to inspect his gift to me. He did not know it would blow me wide apart.

“Eric, please. I can’t.”

Then, I saw the blood rising from his collar. He was cross with me. How could he be?

And then in the stinging focus of his gaze I understood that he had pulled a lot of strings, had pissed off a lot of people in order to get the backstreet girl set up where her emotions would not show. He was looking after me for Matthew, but for the museum as well.

“Eric, I’m sorry. Truly I am.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you have to go through Security if you want to smoke. You are still smoking?”

“Just tell me it’s not a monkey,” I said.

Tears were welling in my eyes. I thought, you dear moron, please just go.

“Oh Lord,” he said. “This is all awful.”

“You’ve been very sweet,” I said. “You really have.” For a second his whole face crumbled but then, thank God, he pulled himself together.

The door closed and he was gone.

IN THE MIDDLE OF
the night I lost Matthew’s hat and got in a mad panic, stripping the bed, knocking over the reading light until I found what I had lost. I took a pill and had a scotch. I ate some toast. I switched on the computer and the museum email was functioning again.

“I kiss your toes.”

An insane fear of my employers prevented me replying. I filed: “unread.”

I wrapped myself up in his shirt and took his hat and went to bed and snuffled it. I love you. Where are you?

Then it was the morning, and he was dead. The server was down again. Matthew was completely gone forever. His poor body was lying somewhere in this stinking heat. No, in a refrigerator with a label on his toe. Or perhaps he was already trapped inside a coffin. The funeral was at three o’clock.

I had sick leave and sleeping tablets but I would go mad alone—no church, no family, no one to tell the truth, nothing but the Swinburne which I had stupidly made my life. By noon I was back inside the claustrophobic underground. Three trains later, I surfaced at Olympia with unwashed hair. There was a yellow misty haze.