The Chemistry of Tears

Catherine

I WAS VERY FRIGHTENED OF visiting the cemetery. But I would not abandon my beloved. I made the bed and threw my clothes in the wash. I swept the cornflakes off the floor and washed out the whisky glass. I cleared away the bottles and made myself a cup of tea. I sat back at my table. I found my Lorazepam and chewed one up. It was only eight o’clock so I thought, just for a little, I might spend some time with Henry Brandling. I turned the next page of the notebook and discovered a postcard of Karlsruhe held there by a rusty pin. There were also, between the next two pages, a few other bits of floating scrap, but the following sheets were all blank, each and every one. Only then, as my throat closed on itself, did I understand I had been relying on Henry to continue. Now I saw that he might not. For all I knew, the books inside the tea chest would be empty too.

I was finding clothes for work when I realized it was Saturday and there was no telephone call I could make, or story I could invent to get access to the studio.

“Weekend work in studios is not undertaken without an exceptional reason.”

So I ran a bath. I lay in the tepid water and looked at my poor scrawny unloved body with its seaweed hair. I cried. I shampooed and conditioned and cried again. Even inside the bathroom you could feel the heat wave, all the car engines and motorways to the horizon and beyond. I dried my hair. I had good hair, I had been told. I used Preparation H to reduce the inflammation of my puffy eyes.

I didn’t know where they had hidden Matthew, but then I called the cemetery and was almost brought undone by kindness. I had been so armoured. I had thought they would ask me was I “the wife” and prove it. But this young man was not like that at all. He had a lovely West Country way of talking, and he was patient while I found a pencil to write down the lot number and the directions. He said it was a very pretty part of the cemetery. He had walked there yesterday. It was really rather wooded, “a real refuge” in the heat.

I would still have put it off, but just after ten I realized that “upstairs” had returned and the former Speaker of the House had decided he would cut his lawn. The noise was awful. So I went.

I could get to Kensal Rise on the Bakerloo line. I have never liked the tube, but today seemed particularly unpleasant. Later I discovered it had been the hottest April day in forty years. It had been 117 degrees on the platform, but I did not know that and when I began to panic I felt the claustrophobia was my own fault. I thought, I must not give in to this.

At Marble Arch I fled, running up the escalators. I told myself I was getting flowers, but there were flowers at Kensal Rise and none at Marble Arch. Then I decided I would go by bus. Being too agitated to read the map, I got the bus to Westbourne Grove, because I knew that it passed the Harrow Road and the cemetery was up the Harrow Road.

I missed the stop at the Harrow Road and got off further up. I thought, I can take a break, and calm myself. Matthew was trapped beneath the earth, bloating cruelly, all his beauty turned into a factory, producing methane, carbon dioxide, rotten egg gas, ammonia. I was afraid of what I knew.

I could have walked to visit him in forty minutes, but I did not want to see the broken earth. I decided I would return when the grass had grown. So I turned my back on him and headed towards Notting Hill Gate. Matthew, I thought. Forgive me. You would never have left me alone like that. But of course that’s exactly what you did.

Englishmen with white skin and stout legs were parading in their shorts. Matthew was tall and slender. He had the most gorgeous legs. It was horribly humid and the sky was low and feathery and very very sad.

I was frightened to go home to my nothing. I was scared of the afternoon and the night ahead. So I decided I would make an attempt to talk myself into the Annexe. I finally got myself to Earl’s Court, but the Olympia shuttle had committed suicide. I walked north from there towards Olympia, not noticing how dark the sky was getting behind my back. In this way I stumbled into what estate agents call Brook Green.

And my man in the pleasant wooded shade of Kensal Rise was the finest of the fine, and I thought how he would have liked this—the little wine bar most of all. The shops looked very pretty in the golden light and I came into a very quiet street of grey and pastel houses and there was one shop, on the corner, and I thought, that looks nice, and as I got closer it was clear it was a very particular shop, and it had some very, very simple bags for which I now had a pressing need. It was closed. But then I saw there was a woman inside, and she turned on the lights as she walked towards me. She was a strange and honed-down thing, perhaps fifty, but terribly thin, and petite, with the sort of severe and interesting character one normally thinks of as French. Her hair was strong, grey, cut short, but quite expensively. She opened the door, frowning, as if she knew my darling was dead and I was a disgrace to even think of shopping.

“You must be hurried,” she said. I did not know she was talking about the storm.

She turned back into the shop where, looped casually over a locker-room hook, was the simplest bag I ever saw. The leather was black, and very soft and light. I put it over my shoulder and it disappeared beneath my arm as if it might dissolve. Inside there were two perfect pouches, one zippered, one not. Best of all, it was lined with a peacock sort of silk. This was the bag whose sole function was to steal Henry Brandling from the Annexe.

She was Italian, not French. She said it was a hundred pounds.

She said she was sorry, but would I mind paying cash? I had just enough.

She gave me the bag without wrapping it and then, firmly but politely, pushed me out the door.

There was an awful crack of thunder and a sizzling sort of noise. It was not yet raining, but the sky was black and bleeding like a Rothko. And then, from around the corner, there appeared a taxi, with a lovely yellow light. I was no sooner inside than the rain began, great fat splats like glycerin against the windscreen. I saw lightning hit the Natural History Museum, or that is what it looked like.

At Kennington Road, I should have run straight inside, but I had the cab drop me at the off-licence, what Matthew called the offy, where I put a bottle of cognac on my MasterCard. As I came outside everything was dark except for a weird yellow sheen across the houses. I thought the rain had let up—maybe it really had—but when I was half way across the road the hail arrived, lumps like hotel ice blocks, river stones, cruel, unforgiving pelting against my naked head and unprotected shoulders. I arrived in my kitchen, stinging sore, drenching wet. I watched the monstrous hail pile up across the garden. Why hast thou forsaken me?

HAIL AND HATE, ROARING like a train, the entire back garden stoned to death, crushed glass or ice now two inches thick. The geraniums were flat, the daphne devastated. God knows what had happened to my neighbour but he had abandoned his lawn mower in the middle of my view.

In the bathroom I examined my blooming injuries, but none of this took very long and soon my hair was dry and I sat in my dressing gown, at the kitchen table. Here I slid my Brandling books inside the new handbag. I paraded, and it was as I thought—the bag fitted so snugly between my arm and chest. I was so absorbed, so impatient to retrieve the notebooks that I might not have seen the peculiar mist lying above the field of ice. But I did look up. And the sun came out. And all the garden turned to gold sublime, unearthly and very strange.

For just that instant I felt wonder. For that moment I forgot my grief. I reached for my open laptop. As it slid towards me, I recognized the nature of my expectation—I had been about to tell Matthew.

I kiss your toes. Mark unread.

There was a new email from Crofty. He wrote, “I’ve fixed it.”

I thought, how can you fix anything? Then I understood, he had read my ill-mannered email and thought: I am without doubt a wretched stupid man. So he had discreetly, sweetly, secretly, removed the bloody tea chests and their contents from my studio.

He had done exactly what I had asked—taken my project from me. And he had paid overtime for weekend work. It was like a fairy story with a moral. Due to my own bad temper, all of Henry’s notebooks were now beyond my reach.

I opened the cognac and took a slug straight from the bottle. I found the Swinburne staff directory.

“Hello, is that Arthur?”

“Arthur’s just stepped out.”

“This is Miss Gehrig from upstairs in Horology, I’m working on 404.”

“You missed them, Miss Gehrig, by, I would say, thirteen minutes.”

“Did you get the hail?”

“Well to be exact, Miss, I would say Arthur must have got the hail. Shall I give him a message if he’s still alive?”

“Is Mr. Croft there?”

“He was here with Arthur for a good three hours. Then they stepped outside.”

“And now he’s at the Fox and Hounds?”

“Licking his wounds I would say.”

I had no doubt the men had spent the afternoon removing my tea chests. I would never have a chance to read the notebooks. I could not speak. I hung up. I phoned back and apologized for dropping the phone. I said I would see him on Monday.

I did not think, the Head Curator of Horology has turned himself into a manual labourer on my account. I saw only that I had all of Sunday to suffer this new agony. Very well then, I must not wallow. I unlocked the French door and forced it open against the weight of ice. I climbed the three crunchy steps to the garden, and moved the ugly mower from my view.

This served to put the smell of the oil and rubber on my hands. That is, the perfume of my nights in a little stables in a copse in Suffolk, not far from Beccles, in a snug loft bed above a Mini Minor we spent years restoring. That was Matthew’s place, his own. That is what our love smelled like—oil, rubber, the musty rutty smells of sex. I had spent the happiest nights of my life with my body washed by leafy shadows, headlights from a bend in the A12.

When I sat in Kennington Road and smelled my oil and rubber hands, I was no longer thinking about Henry Brandling and his duck. The ice had melted. The air was moist. As the grassy breeze blew through my open kitchen window I recalled lying in bed in that little stables with the sweet Suffolk rain upon our fragile roof.

ON MONDAY MORNING I rang the bell beside the Annexe gate and the turnstile pivoted at the centre of its ungiving heart. From that moment a camera held me.

Reception was to my left and there was Arthur. I could not reasonably ask him where the tea chests had been stored.

“Good morning Mr. Phelps.” He lifted his face and I saw the puffy boozer’s eyelids.

“You were working on Saturday on my behalf. I am in your debt.”

The old codger rubbed his foxy silver hair. “I would say that Mr. Croft has settled that, Miss Gehrig. He nearly killed me with his bleeding settlement, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”

I swatted my ID card. A second turnstile. The camera observed me, but there was nothing in my bag except a pashmina, purse, and Lorazepam. I carried emptiness. Doors opened. Another camera recorded my progress. Doubtless there were thousands of my days repeated thus, interred digitally in limbo. I ascended two steps with nothing to look forward to, and swiped my card one final time.

I opened my studio door to meet, not emptiness, but tea chests.

I think I made a small cry. Perhaps it was recorded. A moment later the rat’s nest of Daily Mail opened up its crumpled innards, and there were Henry Brandling’s notebooks in their careful raffia string.

At my bench, I found the first book completely filled with handwriting, every page. All the books, every one. In all that sharp sea of waving lines there was not one blank. Although I wanted all of them at once, I slid only four of them inside four ziplock bags and these I hid inside my handbag. Then I shifted the remainder to the high shelf above the fume cupboard where no one would ever think to look. There were precisely nine more instalments for me to read.

Only as I hung my booty on the hook behind the door did I realize things were not at all as they had been on Friday night. In the left-hand corner of the room, nearest to the door and therefore behind my left shoulder when I first entered, was an iridescent grey tarpaulin thrown across some objects, the largest one of which stood about four foot high.

I thought of a beached sting ray, some undead thing washed ashore in La Dolce Vita. When the rational brain woke up, I understood what must lie beneath the tarp—an upper and a lower cylinder driven by a weight, thirty levers that could be connected with different parts of the duck’s skeletal system to make it drink, et cetera, à la Riskin. This was not going to be a smoking monkey, that was clear when I took away the shroud. If, a moment later, I was replacing it, it was not because of the ingenious mechanism, but because of a wooden object placed beside it. Even that was nothing, of course, nothing at all. It was just a sort of wooden hull that had probably once contained the mechanism, but I was in a waking nightmare and the brain reported a failed cremation, a burned roast dinner, a black and formless fear. Professionally I understood the pitch-black underside, but what I saw was the shell of a huge bivalve, crusty, flaking, disinterred from tar. I smelled napalm, creosote, burned pig, death.

TO: e.croft@swi.ac.uk

FROM: c.gehrig@swi.ac.uk

SUBJECT: Bronchitis

Sorry. Diagnosis confirmed.

A very short time later I was signing out downstairs.

“You’re shivering,” Arthur said.

I hurried through the turnstile with my booty tight beneath my arm. I thought, Henry Brandling, what happened to you? How much money did they steal?