The Chemistry of Tears (25 page)

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.

Thus they travelled from estate to estate, being welcomed by the Great and the Good in a surprising array of different circumstances. They particularly enjoyed the company of men of science who they met, by previous arrangement, in inns and cottages and, once, a muddy field.

From these latter conversations, Sumper claimed, he was able to visualize the finished Engine. He memorized it with a tolerance of one-thousandth of an inch, describing the pairs of spinning forms like spiral staircases slipping in and out between each other’s treads.

At the same time he characterized his own understanding as being not very much more elevated than that of the grocer’s clerks who will one day watch the swan’s neck, and glimpse in the movement something so unknowable and unearthly their brainless hair will stand on end.

He was by now completely mad, wrote Henry Brandling, and there was not a natural force to contain or check the growth of his mania. But who did “he” refer to? Cruickshank? Sumper?

It was certainly Sumper who reported Cruickshank’s supposed belief that there would be life on other planets.

I felt I must argue, wrote Henry, even if the battle were unequal.

Cruickshank’s view was allegedly also held by Sir Humphrey Lucas and Mr. Paul Arnold with whom they had shared a leg of mutton
in Henley. “It would be vain,” the great astronomer is reported to have told Herr Sumper personally, “to think that there was not, at that very minute, an entire people of a distant race, dying, in a corner of the sky.”

“Surely,” Sumper demanded of Brandling, “you cannot but agree.”

Henry wrote, I would not agree that men of science could say any such thing. Also, being an Anglican, I could not agree, and Sumper stormed out of the room. I thought, AT LEAST I CAN GO TO BED, but Sumper returned to shout that it would be “stupid and conceited” to not at least allow the possibility of superior life amongst the stars, but as stupidity and conceit were the most common human diseases he supposed that Anglicans must be infected by them too.

“I have met these Beings,” he said in a voice both loud and deep. “I have observed them close.”

Henry demanded he swear this on oath.

As Sumper would not do this it was clear to Henry that he had met no such beings at all. He said so.

Sumper replied: “Do you not know who I am? Do you not know you have been sent to me?”

This outburst was so wild and terrifying that, seeking safe harbour, Henry wrote, I drew him into the subject of Cruickshank’s final report to the Gt. Brit. R’way Co. Thus, finally, was calm restored, for Herr Sumper answered me directly and with such pride you would think that he, the servant, had composed the report himself. Seated once again, with his big calf resting on his rounded knee, Sumper recalled the three main recommendations in the most tedious detail but I was, by then, wrote Henry, so emotionally exhausted I did not care to hear them. When I was finally safe at home in Low Hall it would be gratifying to unearth them in old Simpson’s cupboard, where I was sure they were safely stored, tied up with a ribbon of whatever colour the pater’s chief clerk had judged correct for classification.

When Cruickshank and his German returned to London they found no boon from the Queen or her secretary. Instead, a Colonel Minns of the Brigade of Guards wrote to inform the Genius that Her
Majesty had made a gift of the Engine, not to him, but to the nation as a whole. The Admiralty then arrogantly asserted the inventor’s responsibility to transport said mechanism to a place so directed by Her Majesty’s servants, although they could never be induced to say exactly where that should be.

Mr. Cruickshank appeared to have been snookered, wrote Henry Brandling, and if this is true, he continued, it is not impossible that, for as long as I live, there will be eight tons of metals standing in the corner of a manufacturing endeavour situated at 40 Bowling Green Lane.

Of course Henry Brandling could not see me, but he expected to have a reader. I, Catherine Gehrig, was that reader. I had peered between the lines looking for codes and signs, staring into the blur of descending strokes where, in a sea of ambiguity, delusion, wonder, possibility, amongst all the murk and confusion, there was one solid physical piece of evidence that might have been made for me alone: Thigpen’s Clerkenwell workshop was around the corner from Gehrig and Son, my childhood home.

T
HAT NIGHT I SLEPT
with the window wide open but there was no freshness, only the warm and weary air of this unexpected century. Near morning I had a looping puzzle dream in which Cruickshank’s engine reproduced itself and it was my job to match and screw together the golden strands of DNA.

In the morning there was blood on my pillow, but Amanda’s scratch was not so very bad. In any case, I had been “cut a lot of slack,” and it would not be either gracious or politic for me to seek her dismissal. I would be an adult. I would no longer expect to be exempt from the rules. I would return my notebooks, although I would insist that their access be restricted. For even Crofty would understand that it would not be helpful for Amanda to enter the realms of
Mysterium Tremendum
. None of us needed creatures from outer space just now.

In the meantime I set all ten books neatly in the middle of the kitchen table. On top of this I placed a single sheet of paper addressed to Eric Croft. Why I did this is still unclear, perhaps some sort of premonition that I was never coming back, although that makes no sense—I was about to do nothing more drastic than visit Bowling Green Lane. I was born around the corner, after all.

Did I believe Thigpen’s workshop was still in Bowling Green Lane? I had a very clear picture of the deep high space all the way
through to Northampton Road, the steel and brass leviathan gleaming beneath a dirty London sky.

It was very easy to reach on the underground. Lambeth North, Baker Street, Farringdon. Why not? What harm? What could be worse than what I had already discovered, that my childhood home had been turned into an X-rated video store?

As I left the house I discovered a strange car parked with its rusted nose angled steeply down from the footpath to my neighbours’ door. Of course the Upstairs were on holiday again, but this particular car, which had once been very upper-upper, was now very down and old and grey and chalky with a running board and corroded mud guards. I imagined I saw a body stretched across the back seat. Dead, I thought. Then the body moved, and that was worse. Then there were two, I was certain, moving like moles inside a blanket.

It would be embarrassing to call the police, so I double-locked my door and hurried away down Kennington Road. I thought, I should have written down the registration number.

Outside Lambeth North station the newspaper placards read: TIDE OF FEAR. There was a colour picture of the Gulf of Mexico, a dense black centre with a rim of rusty red surrounded by a coral blue.

The train pushed a wall of hot air before it. I boarded. The scratch on my face was noted, in that particularly British way which contains not a skerrick of sympathy. I changed to the Central Line. I arrived at Farringdon to discover it was disembowelled—temporary ramps and lanes and hoardings and lots more TIDE OF FEAR.

Outside, Farringdon Road was a construction site. Lorries, minivans, motorbikes and newspapers floating like gulls above a garbage dump.

I strode north, holding my breath. I turned right into Bowling Green Lane, past the pub (the Bowler) and now I was inside Henry Brandling’s puzzle. I felt my mobile phone vibrating against my hip and there was 40 Bowling Green Lane: FINSBURY BUSINESS CENTRE. Of course it was Clerkenwell not Finsbury but there it stood, built a century after Sumper visited the same address.

Who would have anticipated feeling so let down? I had spent so much time maintaining a rational sense of doubt that I had had no notion of how much I wanted the machine. I wanted Cruickshank and his silver ladies but Thigpen’s had been bombed, rebuilt, become decrepit in its turn. This was our inheritance: a vast dull postwar building with depressing offices for rent.

From Bowling Green Lane I called Security to ask if Amanda had swiped her card this morning.

She had not.

The trains were slow and stinking. It was almost two claustrophobic hours before I reached the Annexe where I discovered a large expensive envelope addressed to me in Amanda’s hand.

“Dear Miss Gehrig, I am awfully sorry. I am so ashamed. You are the person I admire most in all the world.”

Inside I found the little portrait she had made of me, excised neatly from its book. My first thought was, she knows I coveted it. My second was, she is inside the building.

I emailed Eric to say I was “reading at home.”

The tube was more infuriating than before. I did not arrive back at Lambeth North until after noon. The old grey car was gone. Nonetheless I double-locked the door behind me.

I found Henry’s notebooks violated, scattered across the kitchen table. Beside them was the cube. It looked quite normal for a moment. Then I saw the sawdust and knew she had attacked that too. There was no electric drill in evidence but my clever assistant (who else could it have been?) had made a quarter-inch hole straight through the middle of Carl’s wonder. There had been no need. I could have told her. I could have taught her to weigh it in her hand and know that it was solid oak.

T
HE YOUNG POLICEMAN SEARCHED
for my intruder amongst the shameful fluff beneath my bed. He politely requested “access” to the garden where he indicated which shrubs should be grubbed or trimmed “for your own security.” I failed to tell him the garden was not mine.

At my front door he offered a business card and invited me to call him at any hour. He had a sweet young face, shy downcast eyes, and a tiny brass earring which I must surely have imagined. He would not look at me, but pointed to the browning tree directly opposite my flat—he said it was one of thirteen London plane trees bearing the name of an American astronaut, Neil Armstrong in this case, he who had once walked upon the moon.

I thanked him. He gave me another business card. As soon as he had gone, I packed a bag.

That night I moved to a room in a pub near the Annexe. It was such a sad and stupid choice, but the brewery had renovated since my previous stay. There was nothing left to smell or snuffle.

I hung up two light dresses, unpacked my block of cheddar, my knife, my corkscrew, and a bottle of wine. Ingest, I thought, digest, excrete, repeat.

I unwrapped the notebooks and sat in the unrelenting upright
chair. I read. I read so deeply that the shouting in the bar did not annoy me. On the contrary—Frau Helga had told Herr Sumper that the owner of the inn had “been her friend.”