The Chemistry of Tears

Catherine

ANNIE HELLER KICKED ME out at seven with the final pages still unread. I walked down the narrow Danish stairs, all golden at that time of day. Outside there was a warm wind lifting vagrant pamphlets in the air.

I arrived at the Annexe studio five minutes before lockdown, and there, in what we called the “Ikea box,” the swan’s beak was waiting amongst all those odd screws and washers, the mostly leftover pieces from our reassembly. Why I had treated it so offhandedly is a question for a psychiatrist. I had not even assigned it a catalogue number. M. Arnaud’s handiwork was exactly as I had last seen it, black as black, on a bed of cotton wool, inside a small cardboard box, with the word BEAK in magic marker on the lid.

Contrary to Henry’s account, nothing was written on the beak itself. I found this extremely, even excessively, disturbing, as if I had been lied to by a lover. Then I understood the obvious: Arnaud had inlaid the words in silver which would now be silver oxide, that is, the words would be black on black. I could have taken the mystery to the window. I could have used the raking lamp, but it was lockup time and I was agitated and frightened of being caught with my secret. So I wrapped the beak in Kleenex and popped it in an envelope and belted out of the building as if I was late for some grand, imaginary event.

It was a very strange evening, far too hot, with a strong dry wind that suggested Buckinghamshire had turned to desert. At Olympia, as at Lowndes Square, there were papers everywhere adrift, the Evening Standard wrapping itself with a nasty slap around the lamp post. AMERICA’S MESS NOT OURS. One could easily read it upside down.

There was an odd ammoniacal little pharmacy in a side street where I had already bought deodorant and shampoo. There was no cashier or shop girl, only the grey stooped little pharmacist who had a nasty cold. It was a shambles of cardboard boxes, electric fans and menstrual pads, and it took him a while to locate the cotton buds and methylated spirits.

“No bag,” I said, and tried to grab my purchases. But apparently a receipt must be written. When the old man spiked his yellow carbon copy I thought of my father, changing batteries, then upstairs to have a dram.

Finally I was in the street, and the Rose and Crown was just ahead, occupying its renovated corner with its blue tiles and bright green umbrellas and a surprising clustering of drinkers outside—English skin, sunburned half to death.

I attracted some attention which was a little bit OK. That is, one did not wish to be sexually invisible just yet. On the other hand there is something very nasty about a braying pack, and it was this sound that followed me up the stairs of the “Residence.”

I opened the window of my room and set up on the sill—it was quite wide enough to accommodate the meths bottle. I unpacked the cotton buds and laid them on a tissue. I sited the beak beside the buds. The rest was hardly brain surgery. Within three minutes the meths had revealed the silver inlay on the under-beak.

Then I understood why Henry had written “Dunce.”

Faced with Illud aspicis non vides I also was a dunce.

I sat on the slippery synthetic quilt and wondered who I could call on to translate. It was then, staring at those framed pink and pale blue prints one finds only in hotels, that I realized I really had no friends at all.

For years and years I had lived in the lazy conceited happy world of coupledom, something so deliciously contained by private language and its own sweet intolerances of everyone outside. I knew a lot of people, of course, and was habitually affectionate with many, but I had locked the door when Matthew died. I was a sudden spinster. My mother and father were dead. My sister would no longer talk to me.

Illud aspicis non vides.

In all those years of being a secret mistress, I had fancied myself at home with solitude but I had never once felt this stone weight of loneliness inside my throat. There was now no one to call but he whose kindness I had abused already.

When Crofty answered I heard music, something rather difficult, I thought, by which I meant—beyond my education.

“I’m sorry,” I said when he answered, but of course I was much relieved.

“Hang on.”

The music was turned down. He was slow in returning.

“I interrupted you. I’m sorry.”

“My darling,” he said, “there is nothing to interrupt.” I remembered that he had once been part of a couple too.

From my open window I could see two men support a very drunk young girl, a poor wobbly creature with silly shoes, plump legs, short skirt. Jesus help her. I could not watch.

“Where are you? Not still at that bloody pub?”

“It’s what they call Happy Hour.”

There was a pause. Crofty said, “Would you like me to come and sit with you?”

It would have been such a great relief. But of course I could not.

“How is your Latin?” I asked.

“Rusty.”

“But probably serviceable?”

“Possibly.”

“What does this mean: Illud aspicis non vides?”

“Where is the beak?” he asked and I realized he was slightly squiffy.

“You know where the beak is,” I said. “And I would be astonished if you had not read it.”

“Do you know, my dear,” he said, and it was clear to me that he was topping up his glass. “Do you know, I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic. You know what I mean? Every curator finally learns that the mysteries are the point.”

“Please don’t tease me.”

“No, I am serious. Why do we always wish to remove ambiguity?”

I thought, why do you always want to polish silver half to death?

“Without ambiguity you have Agatha Christie, a sort of aesthetic whodunnit. But look at any Rothko. You can look and look but you never get past the vacillations and ambiguities of colour, and form, and surface. This is so much ahead of the ‘analytical clarities’ of your Josef Albers.”

“He is not my Albers.”

“He was Matthew’s Albers.”

“He was, yes.”

There was another pause.

“This is my project,” I said. “You gave it to me.”

“Indeed I did. I hope I was not too meddlesome?”

“Eric, I lost everything I lived for. You gave me this. If it is a mystery, that’s fine with me. But you gave it to me.”

“Yes, dear girl, I did.”

“Then why give it to her?” I hadn’t meant to say that, but I had. The swan was mine. Henry was mine.

Eric gave himself a splash. “What do you mean?” he asked wetly.

“This is mine.”

“Indeed,” he said, “but what is ‘it’ exactly?”

“The Latin.”

“So you wish to know how it translates?”

“Yes I do.”

“You want to know what it says?”

“Yes.”

“Illud aspicis non vides. It means, You cannot see what you can see.”

“Oh shut up,” I cried.

“It means, You cannot see what you can see.”

“No,” I said. “No it doesn’t.”

“Sweet Cat,” he said. “Call me whenever you wish.”

The phone went dead.

The marrow of my bones was filled with hurt, envy, rage that this mad rich girl was stealing everything from me, including Angus, that is, the carrier of that same spiralled mechanism that made my beloved’s upper lip, that wry funny taut muscle in the shadow of his famous nose.

You cannot see what you can see, said Sumper. What a load of rubbish.

WHEN I WAS AWOKEN it did not occur to me that such an enormous noise might be made by rain. But rain it was, the most unimaginable torrent cascading off the roof and falling, backlit, like Victoria Falls, deep and blue.

I had told Eric to shut up.

There was a sort of banging on the wall outside. Was it a hurricane? Should I shelter in the bathroom?

I saw the shadow of a ladder, waving, slamming against the wall. I thought they will break the glass and I have no slippers to protect my feet. Then there was a very wide white man in shorts, crawling up against the weight of water, his body flat against my glass. I saw his belly button and the black hair on his skin, as if some creature of the unconscious was breaking through the membrane of a dream. I could hear thunder through the rain. I sat holding my sheets across my breasts.

The water roared. I thought, I am totally alone in some hellish place; of all the people on the earth, Eric Croft has been the kindest, the most forbearing, bending when he had no requirement to bend, giving without expecting thanks.

Shut up, I had said.

The world will end like everything must. I think the ladder fell off the roof. The rain kept pouring. Men were shouting. There was nothing I could do that was not ridiculous.

There were now flashing yellow lights in the streets. Then another ladder. Men in bright blue waterproofs climbed past my window. Who in London wore blue waterproofs? I did not know the stigmata of disaster.

At two o’clock I was alone at my window, observing the empty flooded street. Next morning I departed, with a light soft bag of clothes on one shoulder and my handbag underneath my arm. My clothes were no longer clean, and if I selected a white linen shirt it was only because I knew I could use hydrogen peroxide to remove the sweat stains once I was at work.

A greater olfactory challenge was presented outside the pub where I found surface water rushing down the road. Basements had been flooded. The drains in the street were bubbling with very nasty-smelling water.

The old pharmacist had his doors open and I caught a glimpse of him, standing on a high and dangerous ladder. He had thrown sodden cardboard boxes into the street and from them rose what was, I suppose, sulphur dioxide, although there was ammonia as on the day before, and I was forcibly reminded of all those rich sulphur compounds that accompany human decay. I thought of the bacteria, fungi, the protozoa, the way our bodies attack themselves when we die. I did not like this idea, not at all. I preferred to think of us as something dry and crumbly, with no relation to the moisture-laden sheen of our decay.

Security inspected my dirty laundry, bastards. Later, in the fume cupboard I removed my shirt, applied the hydrogen peroxide and finished the job with a hairdryer. Done. Fresh, not really.

Amanda had not logged off. Her big screen was filled with spewing spill and a chain of protesting voices. Were they children or adults? Dessgirl, Mankind40, Miss Katz, Ardiva, Clozaril—who would know? To read their comments was to live inside a howl. Was this Amanda’s underworld?

Clorazil wrote, Who made the machine that kills the ocean? Whose interest did that serve? Not humans, that’s for sure. Ardiva believed that flames were coming out together with the oil. Sheread2 conjectured that there was a volcano involved. Much is not being told to us, she wrote. Mankind40 thought we should just nuke it shut. Below, the lowest circle, the voices of the damned continued. I didn’t know it had affected me. I didn’t even know that all this saline was washing down my cheeks, but when Amanda’s arms came around me, hugging from behind, I began to cry in earnest. There was no point in disguising it.

“Miss Gehrig, I’m so sorry.”

I accepted her clean white handkerchief. I blew my snotty nose and went to my computer to generate the work orders for a busy day.

OF COURSE THE PR people have been “psyched” about our project all along and I have driven them nuts with my postponements and delays. Yes, they must have the website ready, but they are museum people too, and surely they must know that completion always takes longer than one expects or, to be more honest, longer than Publicity anticipates.

Finally we agree to announce the swan in two stages, one public, one more private. The restoration does not need to be totally complete before we show it to the “loots and suits” as Eric quaintly calls them.

I have been required to sign off a “safe date” with the publicity director and the prickly website manager, but when the day arrives it is not safe at all. Later, on the morning of the appointed day, the music box refuses to stop playing when the swan’s cycle of performance is at an end.

“Does it matter, darling? Think seriously.”

We have not yet had a full rehearsal, which is cutting it finer than either of us would have ever dreamed.

“We will fix it,” I tell Eric. “I am only telling you in case.”

“In case what?”

“I will have it done in half an hour.”

Ninety-five minutes later I call back to say it’s done. I have made Eric unnecessarily anxious but he does not protest or complain. He asks if I can be finished, not finished-finished, by the end of the day. He will cancel now if I tell him to, but clearly he cannot bear the thought of it.

“Don’t cancel.”

“You are certain darling?”

“Yes, really.”

“If you need more time I’ll deal with Publicity.”

By half past three everyone can see that my calculation is correct—we have our creature set up on a large grey steel mobile cart, which we can spin around as needs dictate. The mechanism is still exposed. Above this the reflecting plate is in place, the glass rods, the ring of silver foliage, the silver body and the articulated neck on which the silver rings lock neat and tight and gleaming.

At four o’clock the poor darling cannot stay at Lowndes Square any longer, and there he is in his crepe-soled shoes, shaven to the bone, gleaming with Penhaligon’s, in that tight pinstripe suit straight out of Beckmann. In fact, the suit gives him a morally ambiguous appearance, and one meets him rather as you meet the men in Beckmann, uncertainly.

“No beak?” He peers into the clockwork, staring hard at the pinned music drum.

“Would you have rather we hid the clockwork?”

“No, no. Far better like this.” But he is clearly tense.

“I could have had Harold build a plywood case. We’ve still got two hours.”

He stares at me. I imagine he is considering it and am sorry I made the suggestion.

“Where is the beak, Catherine?”

Last week I would have been insulted by this. Today I smile. “Don’t worry about the beak, look at the movement.”

Amanda is wearing a strange white lab coat for the occasion. With her blonde hair pulled back and a pair of spectacles she gives off a fabulously Teutonic air.

“Miss Snyde,” I say, “would you wind the mechanism?”

“Yes Miss Gehrig.”

After all our horrors, we are actually having a nice time.

“You do have the beak?” Eric says.

“Wait.” I take his arm. “Watch.”

Of course he will love it. He is crinkling up his Sing-song eyes already.

I am the conservator, but I grant my assistant the privilege of winding the mechanism for our first proper run-through. When I nod, she releases the pin. As the neck begins its first quite complicated sequence, the Brahms melody accompanies the curious predatory twisting.

“Stop.”

“No,” cries Eric. “No, no, Catherine, please.”

“Did you see that?” I ask Amanda, although of course the old Sing-song has seen it too.

“In the first sequence, yes.”

We play the first sequence again and there is no doubt there is an irritating shudder in the movement. Before the neck rings were fitted this somehow did not show, but now it destroys an effect which must be creepily sinuous, sensuous.

“We have time,” I say.

“No,” says Eric. “Leave the bloody thing alone.”

He thinks this is a risk but he is wrong.

The caterers and publicists arrive together. I send Amanda to deal with them. Eric holds my arm. “Don’t punish me like this.”

“You know it’s just old museum wax. It will be perfect.”

“You’re not going to take the bloody rings off.”

“Yes, I am.”

Eric watches for a moment but then he walks away.

Amanda is perfect, or her meds are perfect. She returns to my side and we remove the rings together, and I am so proud of us, the choreography.

It takes approximately thirty minutes to remove the wax, and it is during this long quiet period I hear Eric in exasperated conversation with the publicist, a strange Colman Getty boy with a towering plume of hair.

When we finish, exactly twenty-eight minutes later, I discover Eric is watching me.

“Now, the beak.”

“Yes,” he says without excitement.

I unhook my thief’s bag from its hook behind the door. In clear sight, I produce the beak, remove the Kleenex, and, using the two brass Whitworth screws Amanda places in the dry cup of my hand, attach it to the clean steel nub of the undead.

It is 5:55 p.m. when I go to wash my hands, and only when I return does Eric divulge the news that Publicity aborted the mission half an hour ago.

The canapés are very nice. One bottle of Veuve is already open so we have no choice but drink to our success.

THE DAY DID COME. The studio was flooded with morning light which, being filtered through the blinds and reflected from the opposite wall, contained the very slightest wash of gold. Our object could not have looked more precious. We hid it beneath a muslin cloth, praying that the light would last.

It was half past eight when the “loots and suits” began to arrive for the unveiling, and perhaps it was a tribute to the Conservative’s sense of business that everyone was assembled when the Minister of Arts, he of the boyish polished face, arrived at exactly 8:45 a.m.

As was usual at the Swinburne, no one introduced anybody properly, so Amanda and I were left alone and unexplained. My assistant had gone Sloaney for the occasion but I did not, not even for a moment, see her as more tame.

Eric was very jolly and extremely charming, sprinkling his learning about like holy water and shifting from individual conversation to his general address without missing a beat. He was rather like the swan himself, the way he paused to watch his prey. They became little girls in their communion dresses, these heartless men with polished Eton cheeks.

Crofty gave me no public credit for my work, and I was disappointed but not at all surprised. When it came time for me to wind the mechanism, this lot would think I was some sort of quiz-show hostess.

Then Crofty turned to the minister and I was rather taken aback to see him relieve the great man of his cup and saucer. Then, gesturing towards the swan he said, “I rather thought you might like to do the honours, Sir.”

This was not his boon to grant. Only the conservator should touch or “work” the object.

With the crank in his hand, the minister was left to look useless and confused. Meanwhile Eric, in a great flourish, removed the drop sheet and produced the hum of admiration we so desired.

The swan was Zeus. The border of silver leaves was spectacular in that morning light.

The minister approached with the crank.

I thought, dear God, he does not know where to put it, and then I realized—I was dealing with Crofty and all this had been briefed and planned. The minister was not miffed. He was very pleased. To fit the crank he must give a sort of bob. “Your Highness,” he joked, and everybody laughed too much. To Crofty he said: “How many turns?”

“Three,” Eric replied.

It was a number that meant nothing. He made it up.

As the boy from Eton wound the easy mechanism, I could smell the sweet light mineral oil. When he withdrew the crank the glass rods rotated, catching the reflected light. He smiled around the room but why would we look at him? The Brahms had begun, and the suits were all bewitched. Henry, your silver swan was beautiful and pitiless as it turned its head to the left, towards the minister, then to the right towards the man from the Guardian, and then it set to preen and clean its back. No one moved or spoke. Every eerie movement was smooth as a living thing, a snake, an eel, a swan of course. We stood in awe and, no matter how many hundred hours we had worked on it, this swan was never, not for a moment, familiar, but uncanny, sinuous, lithe, supple, winding, graceful. As it twisted to look into one’s eyes, its own stayed darkest ebony until, at that point when the sun caught the black wood, they blazed. It had no sense of touch. It had no brain. It was as glorious as God.

The fish were “sporting.” The swan bent its snakelike neck, then darted, and every single human held its breath.