The Chemistry of Tears

Catherine & Henry

TIME AND TIME AGAIN, in the early hours, I took refuge with Henry Brandling whose slightly mechanical handwriting served to cloak the strangeness of the events it described. His was, in the best and worst sense, an intriguing narrative. That is, one was often confused or frustrated by what had been omitted. The account was filled with violent and disconcerting “jump cuts.” One would imagine the author had returned to live at the sawmill and it was a shock to stumble into a sentence and realize he was sitting on a chair outside the inn. I imagined a rather Van Gogh sort of chair, but who would ever know?

Then here was Carl, materializing, and not even a whole body but a graze on his arm, or the mud on his boots. Henry clearly loved him, and was jealous of the boy’s attachment to Sumper who “filled the little fellow’s head with dangerous rot.” Such was the nature of Carl’s “toys,” Henry concluded that the only possible explanation was “they are made by the dreadful Sumper to tease me.” As a reader I far preferred the other possibility, that the child really was clever, that these were his inventions. He owned (or constructed?) a glass-plate camera and “wasted time” photographing tourists. No more was said of this, but then, on the line below, Carl appeared without warning, arranging voltaic cells at Brandling’s feet.

If voltaic cell meant a battery (and I confirmed it did) then it seemed anachronistic. But of course it wasn’t. One did not seek science fiction from Henry Brandling.

Carl, according to Henry’s account, laid the batteries on the road outside the inn and produced a dead mouse which he proceeded to connect to cables. The mouse leapt into the air, its eyes bulging “in astonishment,” its teeth bared to bite the unprotected neck.

Then “the Holy Child” “scampered” back across drying flax, his “instruments” inside his “sac.”

Much more than a century later the reader in Kennington Road drank her vodka icy cold. She looked away from her lonely reflection in the black glass of the kitchen and found the fleeting image of the angelic trickster arriving at the inn with a tiny “engine.” What did “engine” even mean in 1854? It is hard to visualize a motor with “one big wheel and one small” which “limps and hobbles” and goes “roaring down the road in a cloud of smoke.”

Of all these “tricks and notions” Henry’s chief concern was that they took precious time away from the manufacture of his duck.

To the grieving horologist, working daily at the Swinburne Annexe, it was very clear that, if Sumper had been a crook, he was also a highly advanced technician. It was difficult to name more than two of his contemporaries who might have devised and produced work at this sophisticated level. Presented with the obstacle of Sumper’s size and personality, Henry was more naturally disposed to accept the Arnaud version in which the clockmaker was a violent brute.

Every morning I knew this was not true.

As for Arnaud himself, my (rather inspired) guess was that he was neither a spy nor a pedlar but an itinerant silversmith whose identity was kept secret from the sponsor—to learn his true occupation would have warned Henry that a great deal more money would be extracted yet.

This was also consistent with the daily evidence in Studio #404 which revealed an exceptionally single-minded and wilful character. Sumper had clearly done whatever Sumper wished, and it was upsetting to read the word “duck” so often in the customer’s manuscript and know that the undead creature had been, and always would be, a majestic swan—113 solid silver rings fitted in such a way as to make a long swan neck; each of these rings engraved with the pattern of swan feathers; everything photographed, measured, weighed, identified.

At my side, the Courtauld girl was immensely diligent, and she was certainly a whiz with Excel, a computer program that had always irritated me. Yet work went slowly. By myself I might have done eighty-six rings in a day and loaded and identified the JPEGs. Working with an assistant it took over two days.

I often imagined that Herr Sumper had foreseen that Amanda and I would grapple with his puzzle. He was certainly a lot more helpful to us than he had been to Henry Brandling, providing us with assembly instructions by stamping numerical coding on the rings.

“Is this damaged?” asked Amanda Snyde. “Is this a stress fracture?”

I was pleased she saw things, but although she was fresh and thirsty for knowledge, I was still looking for excuses to send her away—so I could read our emails. In truth, this was the reason our progress was so slow.

For instance, there were 122 silver leaves which would surround the automaton in a fringe or wreath. I had her take one of these leaves to Metals. There was a pretty boy down there, rather of her tribe, clean-cut and pink-cheeked who arrived each day in his father’s too-big coat.

She returned to announce the swan had been made in France.

This was twaddle, but I was very pleased as it would require another errand.

“Alas,” I said, “we happen to know it was made in Germany.”

“How do we know that?” she asked, and of course I was not going to produce Henry’s evidence.

“It has Minerva stamped on it,” she insisted. “Doesn’t that mean it was made in France?”

“Did the young man help you?”

“He seems very knowledgeable.”

I smiled at her and caused her to blush. I was pleased she liked the Metals boy with his rather posh blue-and-red striped tie. Would a boy kiss a pretty girl with a hearing aid? What a stupid question. She was a beauty.

“Yes,” I said, “but it was really made in Germany.”

“How do we know?”

“I’ll show you,” and I showed her the little mark I had found. Nothing more than an A. In truth it could be anyone’s.

“This is the mark of a silversmith named Arnaud,” I said. “His name is Huguenot, but in fact he worked in Germany.”

I should have been ashamed (even if I would later turn out to be precisely right).

“As for the Minerva, it has been stamped by the French assay office in order for it to be sold in France. There was a Paris International Exhibition in 1870. It is possible the swan was displayed there. So this is the next project for you, Amanda. Are you familiar with the British Museum?”

Of course she was. She was a gem.

It did not yet occur to me that I would miss her, or that I would be actually waiting for her return on the following afternoon. She came in at around three, dressed for her weekend with her Burberry bag and her Liberty scarf. Why do those Sloaney girls dress like that, in those awful coloured tights?

“You’re off for the weekend?” I asked when she had delivered her findings.

“My grandfather.”

“That’s nice.”

“I love him. I know that sounds rather odd, but I do.” She rather glared at me. “Do you have a place in the country?”

I had been deleting JPEGs of the green at Southwold. I did not laugh or even smile, just shook my head.

“I’m sorry about your friend.”

At first I was grateful for her intuition, and then, immediately, certain that she knew far more about me than she should.