The Chemistry of Tears

Henry & Catherine

I WAS A RICH MAN, Henry Brandling wrote and Catherine read, and therefore attracted the usual pests. And yet my past and present fears and agonies were nothing in comparison to those suffered by this poor German woman.

Catherine understood that Henry was referring to Frau Helga.

She and I, wrote Henry Brandling in 1854, both knew how a child could sing to your soul and twist your veins and fill you with continual dread and trepidation. I had seen her lay her hand upon Carl’s shoulder, cup her hand around his golden head. This was something M. Arnaud could not know.

What conceit, thought Catherine Gehrig, in London, 156 years later, off her face with rage and cognac. How truly pathetic, his pompous discrimination: the love for a child is better than the love for an adult. How could it be?

The poor dull blind posh fool had never guessed his reader would be a woman with no children. Please don’t tell me that I don’t know love, or that the love I know is of a minor kind. I am eviscerated by love.

I threw the book across the room. It flew into the kitchen, its acid paper pages shattering like dead leaves.

Let Matthew see what he has done to me.

After the catastrophe with the book, the only undamaged paper was a receipt in which Sumper was titled Monsieur Sumper. It recorded the purchase of a large amount of silver.

It was intolerable that these crooks should rob Henry in this way, but also it was offensive, if understandable, for Henry to go on with this nonsense about children. He did not quite say that parental love was superior to other loves, but it was clearly his assumption. Of course I wished him no unhappiness. I pitied him. But it is true, in general, that these child lovers make themselves deaf and blind to the likely conclusion of these relationships which so often end in heroin, suicides, boredom or estrangement. All those awful fights are waiting for them, when all the poor dears wanted was a perfect love.

When I saw men Matthew’s age and older, I hated them for being alive. Yet I had never expected we would live forever, the opposite. Each morning I was given Matthew I held him, contained him like a prayer, filled my lungs with him, his leg between my legs so I brushed him—what other word to use?—to be clearer would be vulgar—brushed him ever so gently and he would rest his nose just by my eye, just there, adjacent those intensely complicated factories, the tear glands, I love you, I love you, I love you every morning, every night.

I had seen my father die. When you have spent days in intensive care you do not easily forget how the body works and how it fails. Afterwards you easily imagine the oxygen-rich blood, the colour of the fluids which swim all around you, inside me, inside him. I had seen Matthew’s eyes narrow in passion, the beloved face, the tall rough tender body, the hard silkiness of him, I would have drunk him dry.

We both were conceited about our ecstatic pragmatism. We had no souls but we were in the moment, like an ocean wave, like animals we would have said, how perfect we were, we thought, glowing with our love. How unfair we had no souls.

Near Beccles, in the summer, with the silver early light playing off the insulation foil, he would want me from behind and then he would cup his hands around my stomach and I would think, he wants me to be pregnant.

He had his own children all safely tucked in boarding schools where he could write them love letters. Sometimes I lost weekends, when he brought them up to the stables to work with him, two precious days excised from my life. I loved him for how he loved them, but sometimes I would think they were spoiled brats. When the mathematical son complained he was bored by Beccles I was indignant, but very, very happy I could have my place again.

Perhaps, I thought, Matthew’s love for his sons was a superior love, sometimes. But there is no end to what I thought. For instance, I had dreams there was a woman’s body buried underneath the floor of the stables. In my dream I had murdered her and then forgotten.

I should never have thrown Henry Brandling’s notebook across the room. No one, not Matthew, particularly not Matthew, would believe me capable of it. No one would believe any conservator in any situation would ever do such a thing. It launched into the air, fluttering, beyond the reach of technical salvation, breaking apart even as it flew. It died in mid-air and when it hit the floor it became like the wings of so many moths and I cried, knowing what I had done, not as a conservator, but as a poor drunk woman in a rage with a decent man.

I found the vodka where I had hidden it from myself. It was probably after midnight, I thought. I wished I had cocaine. I would have liked to half destroy myself with rot and pleasure and as I drank the vodka I thought Herr Brandling has not bothered to explain the copper cables and I may never get to the end of them. But then I thought, Henry you are thick as a brick. Really, what an extraordinary man to come to a sawmill in the Black Forest and to describe COPPER CABLES like tent ropes, going from the roof into BOXES on the earth and not once (not so far) had he asked a soul what these cables were for.

I remember you, my Matty T. I remember making love with you. I remember your grey eyes, slitted at first then opening so wide, and the pink lovely tunnel of your mouth. You had not one single filling. My mouth was filled with black amalgam. I remember your cries pulsing inside my body. I remember you held me on the station at Waterloo while I sobbed and shouted. I remember you made me still and calm. I remember you left me in the taxi and I thought that I would die.

I forget you are dead. I forget Henry Brandling is dead. I sweep up his crumbling ashes in the clever little Oxo pan. I thought it so beautifully designed. What a banal life I have lived, being happy about a dust pan, never knowing that I would use it to sweep up Henry Brandling’s bones and ashes and dump them in the bin.

HERE IS ALL THAT remains of Frau Helga’s history as relayed to Henry Brandling, as arranged on my kitchen table in north Lambeth in April 2010.

Frau Helga had not been working at the inn two days when the priest (said) she could not stay under his roof any longer be(cause) she was a barmaid. But if the priest had any memory he would know he had not behaved exactly as he should. Accidentally she had scratched his face.

The mistress … let her sleep in the kitchen of the inn. The other barmaid was a divorced woman who had run away because her husband …

The other barmaid suggested to Frau Helga that they should live together at Sumper’s Mill which was abandoned.

The mill … wind blew all manner of machinery clanked … groaned … the other barmaid returned to her husband … alone … someone dragging furniture around the floor … Helga’s baby sleeping … an iron poker and go down the stairs … a man … dancing … falling down drunk.

She stayed hidden in shadow … she would have to kill him … throw the body in the river …

Give me the poker, the stranger said to her. Then he took the solid iron poker and bent it across his knee like a celery stick. He bent the iron bar and his face was red and he showed his big teeth in the middle of his beard. Do not be afraid he said.

That was all I, Catherine, could retrieve. I fell asleep at the table, awoken by a knocking on the door. I thought, Matthew. It’s how he came, not often, sometimes. I was terrified, stock-still and sweaty, mouth dust-dry, throat adhering. The blinds and window were open to the garden so anyone could see.

Then he—whoever—was in the area going through my recycling. I heard bottles clinking and was actually, incredibly, ashamed. I crawled on my knees into my bedroom and left the kitchen lights ablaze.

My sick leave was a horror. In the morning I knew I could not use it. I ate dry toast to cushion the painkillers and, having left the shameful jigsaw on the kitchen table, got myself to the tube where the claustrophobia tried to crawl back in. I thought, I cannot do this job. I thought, I have no choice.

At Security my physical destruction provoked bonhomie. I thought nothing but a shot of vodka is going to make me plausible.

I shared the lift with the tiny sporty lesbian from Ceramics—Heather, I think. She was so bright and filled with life. She had bicycled to work and I could see it took everything to stop her running on the spot.

“Bit rough?” she asked me.

I thought, she has such lovely perfect skin. She has no idea she is going to die.

“Did you fly through the volcano?”

If I had seen a newspaper I might have known there had been a vast eruption in Iceland, that the airlines of the world were grounded, but I did not need to read the Guardian to get the joke. She meant I was hungover. I had been slaughtered, legless, trolleyed, slashed, shedded, plastered, polluted, pissed. I thought, I do love my country’s relationship with alcohol. How would I ever exist in the United States? I suppose I would have grief counselling instead.

My ID card had no idea of my chemical condition. It opened two high-security doors as if I were completely sane and sober. My own studio, of course, was quite unlocked, unlockable.

I thought I will feel like this forever.

It was just on nine o’clock when I donned my rubber gloves and examined the first of the glass rods which it was absolutely not my job to clean.

There must be a procedures meeting before conservation or restoration could begin.

But I could not bear to talk to anyone.

I laid the glass rod on the bench and considered it awhile. These rods, also mentioned on the invoice to Herr Sumper, would simulate water. Then the duck would place its fake anus on a bed of these rotating rods, eating fish and shitting, or counterfeiting life in whatever way the bullying clockmaker had devised. Somewhere there must be a reflective plate to fit beneath the rods and this would help produce the general effect of water.

Perhaps it would be little Heather’s job to deal with the glass rods, but I really did not wish to talk to little Heather. Nor did I wish to dig deeper into the boxes and find God knows, perhaps the embalmed body of Percy Brandling with its jaw broken so it could appear “at peace.”

Heather should be grateful that I would wish to remove all the grease and oil that had seeped into the hollow centres of the rods. They would be a nightmare to clean, but I would happily do it for her. I would use thin brass rods with cotton-wool buds attached. And if the Swinburne procedures could, in all their Victorian wisdom, just cede me this, my pain might stop intensifying.

Before the glass cleaning began I would have to remove the brass collet at the end of each rod. The collet would fit into some as yet unseen mechanism which would rotate the rods. Successive generations of awful pragmatics had visited the site before me, depositing shellac, plaster of Paris, silicon, and each of these inappropriate substances would now require ingenuity, time and patience to remove.

Please let this be mine, I thought.

Please do not be sticklers.

I can do this job in solitude, until I am completely cured, or dead myself.

On this first glass rod someone had used black pitch much as amateurs nowadays use superglue—that is, they had slathered it on the glass then jammed it into the collet and held it while it set. The glass had been damaged by thermal shock. Because of these difficulties, the repaired rods would finally differ slightly from their original length—only a few millimetres’ difference is enough to make reinstalling them a tricky job.

I opened my email account. I read: RE PROCEDURES MEETING.

Delete.

I remained on my swivel chair and looked at the glass rod waiting for ten o’clock when I knew the offy would be open and I could buy a flask of vodka.

I was not worried about the drinking or the stolen notebooks, for both of which I could lose my job. Instead I fretted over a misdemeanour—I had decided to start work without a procedures meeting.

That is, I would make no request to the Head of Section. Instead I’d go to Glenn the Building Supervisor who would innocently give me welding rods and cotton tips.

I found Glenn in his lair and while he was “locating” the welding rods and the cotton tips I went to the offy where I heard that London was the driest capital city in the world. We were to have a desalination plant, it seemed. I expressed amazement. I slipped the bottle in my lovely bag and returned through Security.

By ten past ten I was examining all the dusty glass rods on my workbench. Surely my present dentist had first seen my mouth exactly in this way—the work of fifteen different mediocre technicians over the course of twenty years. I felt the vodka roar down my throat and heat my blood.

I thought, this was how my father felt, each day. This is why they packed me off to boarding school in High Wycombe. When he died we discovered the most ingenious little hiding places for his bottles, carefully crafted little coffins he had constructed when he was allegedly “fixing the wiring” under the floor, or in the ceiling, or the wall inside a storage cupboard. He was such a fastidious, patient man who did not deserve to be changing watch batteries and straps and I would have done anything to have him take my museum job, to use his unwearied enquiring mind to understand a mechanism. I must have tortured him by living the life he would have wanted for himself.

Sometimes he would go to talks at the Guildhall and drag home the lecturer to dinner—what a sad lonely soul he must have been. It would take so long for me to know that I, his daughter, was the Oedipal son.

The white spirits worked rather well on the pitch, and I was gently separating the brass collet from the first rod when Eric Croft entered.

I looked straight into his bloodshot eyes.

“For Christ’s sake, Catherine, please. Go home.”

“Opening my present, like you said.”

Did I slur? He was staring at me rather hard. “If you want to work, there has to be a bloody procedures meeting. What on earth are you trying to do to me?”

“My bronchitis is much better.”

“Catherine, old love, we both know you cannot do this without a meeting.”

There was another knock and the little lesbian opened the door with her elbow and entered, a coffee cup in each hand. Part of me was touched, the rest of me quite horrified.

“Sorry,” she said, but her eyes were on the glass rods and the solvents on my desk. I was in her territory without approval. She spilled her coffee in her rush to get away.

“OK,” I said, and reached to fetch the rod and place it back.

I am not exactly sure what happened next except that Crofty tried to prevent me dealing with the rod and as a result it slipped from my grip and hit the tiled floor vertically. It bounced. I saw it rise six inches and then I caught it in my hand.

We neither of us spoke.

I laid the rod inside the crate and slipped the collet into a plastic pouch and wrote “Collet #1” with a steady hand.

Eric picked up my handbag and gave it to me.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to take you home.”

I thought, Henry Brandling is in broken pieces. Eric must not see.

CROFTY SPRINTED UP THE road to catch the cab and fetched it back, reverse gear whining. “Kennington Road,” he ordered.

I thought, you nosey parker, but he didn’t know the number so that was OK.

“Eric, were you a bit of an athlete?”

“In the service,” he said, and blushed.

“You weren’t really a sailor?”

He slapped at his wrist and held out, between thumb and forefinger, a dead mosquito.

“Asian tiger,” he said.

“What?”

“Asian tiger mosquito?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“I thought you always read the Guardian?”

“I can’t read anything,” I said which made me think again of Henry Brandling and the fact that I could not possibly let Eric see what I had inside my house. Of course, when we arrived at my door I was completely useless in my own defence.

“Eric. You must wait a moment.”

But he was already picking up my mail.

Amongst all the junk and Waitrose fliers there was a good-sized envelope which I snatched from him.

“Wait,” I said. “Stay here. Look at the books. Let me tidy up. Please.”

In the kitchen I set to shoving the bits of Brandling’s fractured exercise book inside the envelope. Dead dry fragments spun and spiralled to the floor.

“What on earth are you up to in there?”

Naturally he had come to spy on me. Fortunately my Mr. Upstairs was practising chip shots in the garden, and Crafty’s social antennae were always sensitive.

“That’s whatshisface.”

“Indeed.” I removed the cognac bottle from the table and slipped it beneath the sink.

“The Speaker of the House of Commons?”

“Retired,” I said and turned to see that, far from being distracted by the Great Man, Eric Croft had, without permission, opened my handbag and removed my vodka flask and stolen notebooks.

No word was said. No facial expression suggested anything. He gave me the notebooks without comment and I carried them into my bedroom. I returned to discover he had opened all the windows and was settled at my kitchen table, my gutted handbag abandoned on the chair beside him.

“You are very wilful, Catherine.”

“A little mad, sorry.”

“For God’s sake, don’t hover.” He slid a glass across the table. “Sit.”

I drank the vodka standing up.

“Poor Cat.”

I wished he would not call me Cat. I said: “I will not see a grief counsellor if that is what you’re thinking.” The vodka had a fierce hard solvent burn.

“Where did you ever hear of such a horrid thing?”

“Never mind.”

“The thing is, you see, we must placate the edifice.”

He meant the Swinburne, the great mechanical beast inside its Georgian cube on Lowndes Square, the wires, the trustees, the rules, the stairs, the secrets, Crowley’s Hole where someone hanged themselves, the entire jerry-built mandarin complex of rat runs which is a two-hundred-year-old building in twenty-first-century space. It was a very beautiful, quite astonishing, chaotic, awful thing. I fitted there as I would fit nowhere else on earth.

“I have no choice,” I said. “Where else could I ever be employable?”

“No,” he said, helping himself to another shot. “I have made this much harder on you than I intended. This project is upsetting. Life, death, all that sort of thing. Cat, I am very sorry.”

“Please don’t call me Cat.”

“Is that not your name?”

“There is only one person called me Cat.”

He lowered his lids. Perhaps he was simply holding his temper but he looked, suddenly, unexpectedly like a dreaming Buddha.

I sat, and received a second glass as my reward for my obedience. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s just unthinkable that this is happening to people every day.”

“It’s awful.”

“It’s banal I suppose.”

“I will take the bloody thing away. I am a complete fool.”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Very well,” said Eric.

“Don’t say ‘very well.’ It sounds like you are managing me.”

“Actually, old love, that is my job.”

“That’s what I mean. You’re going to send me to a shrink.”

“Jesus, Cat, I am not going to send you to an anything. Where did you get this nonsense from?”

“When my father died they made us have grief counselling. They would not let us out of the hospital without seeing this cretin from Social Services. They would not give us his clothes even.” I was crying now. I wished I wasn’t. “They tortured him, Eric. They played with him. We had to make them turn off their idiot machines.”

“Cat.”

“Please don’t.”

“Catherine,” he said. “I am sorry. He always called you Cat. To me.”

I immediately felt so sad I could hardly speak. “Did he?”

“To me, yes.”

I was so determined not to bawl, I suppose I glared at him.

“We are going to have a very small team,” he said. “We will have a procedures meeting you can tolerate.”

I had begun to snivel, but I did grasp what he was up to—finding a way for me to continue in employment.

“Ceramics are all Margaret’s friends. I can’t bear it.”

“Hilary isn’t.”

“Heather. The little lesbian.”

“She has a perfectly lovely little baby.”

“Spilled her coffee, that one?”

“Will she be acceptable? Catherine, you really must have mercy on me. Please.”

But I wished to punish him. I could not tolerate him being alive.

“We all miss him, old love. Not like you do. But he was my friend for thirty years.”

“Yes, I know. He loved you. I’m sorry.”

“No, no. Forgive me.”

Sorry, sorry, sorry—how British we were. I thought he was fetching a handkerchief from his pocket, but then I saw it was a small glassine bag filled with white powder.

Of course I was an adult. I knew exactly what it was, but it was giving me an unsafe feeling to watch him tap it up and down. “What’s that?”

“Painkiller.” He spilled a small pile onto the table top, slightly yellow and rather crystalline.

I don’t know him at all, I thought, not really the tiniest bit.

“That was rather risky wasn’t it?” I said.

“Compared to what?” He produced his wallet and found a Barclaycard with which to chop the powder fine. I thought, he means compared to stealing notebooks.

“Jesus, Eric. Stop it.”

But he had no intention of stopping anything. “You know, Catherine,” he said, and he was once again the dreaming Buddha but busy with his chop, chop, chop. “You know when himself wanted a little toot, he would never talk to a dealer.” He smiled directly at me. “No one would ever think of Matthew as a nervous chap, but he was very antsy about drug dealers.”

“You were our drug pimp?”

“Let’s say, every time you had a recreational experience, someone else took care of the low-life aspects.”

He set aside a very small amount of powder, what is called a “bump” by those who know. I thought, I’ll say “no” of course. He took a ten-pound note from his wallet, rolled it up, and hoovered.

“What about me?”

“Very well then, just a little.”

The former speaker of the House was still chipping so I lowered a blind. Then I applied the ten-pound note and felt the cocaine whoosh itself around my nasal cavities and then that lovely medicinal drip down the back of the throat.

“So,” he said, and he was at it with his Barclaycard again. “Here is how I propose we deal with the edifice.”

“OK,” I said when he had finished whatever it was he said.

“OK?”

“Thank you Eric. I’ve been a cow. I’m sorry. Can I have a little more, please Eric?”

He smiled at me, but I must have appeared absolutely wretched with my sunken blackened eyes.

“Do you know why I wanted to meet you in the greasy spoon?”

“The greasy spoon particularly?”

“I had driven the Mini there to give you. Not the easiest thing to do in the circumstances, given it had to be registered first. Did you know when applying to register a rebuilt Mini one must declare whether one’s fucking chassis or monocoque body has been replaced or modified in any way? That took my own mind off things. Anyway I had it parked in front of the greasy spoon. I told you, but you refused to see it.”

“You should have said.”

He helped himself to a big fat line and edged another line towards me. “You saw it.”

“I would have recognized it.”

“He wanted you to have it. Himself.”

It could not possibly be true, but I wanted to believe it just as all stupid people want to believe in what they want.

It was weeks and weeks before I understood Eric had gone up to Beccles and basically stolen our car, but for now I took another line and instructed him to put the remainder well away from me.

“Where is it now, the Mini?”

“I’ll bring it round for you.”

“That’s awfully sweet, but I could not bear to see it.”

“Later.”

“Yes, later.”

“Everything passes,” he said. “You will not feel like this forever.”

But I would. I had no doubt.

He was at my cupboards then and I knew he was searching for aluminium foil in order to leave a “little toot” for me. I snatched my handbag and put it on the floor. He returned to his chair and placed his gift before me. He held my gaze and his eyes were rather moist.

“Catherine, I have to go to an awful meeting with Sir Necktwist, if you know who I mean. We are going to compare our admittance numbers with the bloody Tate. Do you know the Ministry of Arts has to subsidize the Swinburne twenty-three quid for every punter through the door? The Tate need only five, I hate them.”

He gave a funny little smile, all contorted and wrung out and I remembered what he had suffered when his wife ran away. I kissed him on his rough broad cheek.

“I’m OK,” I said. “I’m sorry I forgot you loved him too.”

He rather crumpled then, poor Eric, not for long. When he left, I immediately went to the bedroom and began to read.