Clarise let him finish, then slowly shook her head. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said.
Horowicz’s eyebrows lifted. When someone started complaining, people generally joined in, and the level of complaint would escalate. The sessions would go on for hours, becoming ever more self-righteous and extreme. But not tonight.
‘Think about happiness for a moment, Martin,’ Clarise said. ‘Can you remember being happy?’
Horowicz let out a snort, as though he found the question absurd.
There was a fundamental problem with happiness, Clarise went on, quite unperturbed. Happiness had a slippery, almost diaphanous quality. It gave nothing off, left nothing behind. Grief was different, though. Grief could be collected, exhibited. Grief could be remembered. And if we had proof that we’d been sad, she argued, then we also had proof that we’d been happy, since the one, more often than not, presupposed the other. In preserving grief, therefore, we were preserving happiness. The Museum of Tears stood for much more than its name might initially suggest. It wasn’t just to do with rows of identical glass bottles — though that, in itself, said a lot about equality, if you thought about it. It was to do with people trying to hold on to such happiness as they had known.
Her eyes returned to Horowicz, who was staring at the carpet. ‘But maybe you don’t know what that feels like,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ve never lost someone. In which case, though it sounds odd to say it, I’m sorry for you, I really am.’
‘I know what it feels like,’ he muttered.
Later, Clarise expanded on her thesis. She believed the museum was both a testament to individuality and a collective ode to the country in which we lived. We were all unique, she said, and yet we shared a common humanity, a common humour. I had never heard her so impassioned, so articulate.
‘And there’s also the little matter of immortality,’ she went on. ‘It’s hard to resist, the offer of immortality.’ She sent a sideways look at Horowicz, who reached for his beer and drank quickly. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, Martin, if you didn’t end up in there yourself one day.’
He shook his head savagely but unconvincingly.
‘I’m in there,’ Jack Starling said.
I watched Horowicz’s top lip curl. He would view Starling’s announcement as tantamount to a betrayal.
‘The night my still exploded,’ and Starling turned to Clarise, ‘remember? Half the outhouse went up with it. I shed a few tears over that, I can tell you.’
‘What, and you kept them?’ Horowicz’s voice was acidic with disbelief.
‘You know, you’re right,’ Starling said, still speaking to Clarise. ‘I can walk into that museum and look at my tears and it all comes back to me, that first batch of sloe gin I made, and the nights we had on it, those brilliant nights, and you know the really strange thing?’ He put down his glass so as to make the point more emphatically. ‘That little vial, it’s like a miniature. The vial’s the gin bottle, and my tears, they’re the gin. It’s like the whole thing’s there, the whole memory, only tiny.’
Smiling broadly, Clarise told him he had just summed it all up, everything she’d been talking about, then she turned to me and asked if I’d been to the museum yet. I shook my head.
‘You should go,’ she said.
A few days later I walked down into the town. The museum stood on a narrow street, directly opposite the public library. Looking at the staid red-brick façade and the antiquated ventilation units, I guessed that the building had once housed municipal offices — the council, maybe, or the gas board. A modest brass plaque had been bolted to the wall, just to the left of the double-doors: The Museum of Tears — Please ring for entry.
Although I had gone along with what Clarise had been saying that night, I hadn’t known what to expect from the museum, or even why I was there, really, but I found a stillness settling over me as I ventured into the first of the rooms. All these people reduced to a few ccs of salty water, as if a kind of essence had been wrung from each of them. Was Marco Rinaldi here? What about Boorman? I wandered dreamily from floor to floor. Apart from the museum guards, I had the vast place to myself.
The glass vials were arranged in three parallel rows at shoulder-height, and underneath each of them was a rectangle of white card indicating the donor’s name and date of birth (and, if necessary, death). In themselves, the vials had a somewhat medical aura. They reminded me of test-tubes and, by association, of hospitals and laboratories. In the manner of their presentation, though — the careful labelling, the fashionable austerity — I detected more than a hint of the art gallery. And yet the interior itself, its ambience, had something in common with a school — the grey-blue walls in need of redecoration, the dark, slightly greasy parquet floors. Research, creativity, nostalgia … In the end, the museum displayed characteristics of so many different kinds of institutions that I was no longer sure how to behave or what to think. There was something inherently awkward, or inchoate, perhaps, about the whole experience.
After half an hour I felt I had seen enough, and I walked back towards the stairs that led to the exit. I was passing through a perfectly innocuous room on the second floor when my eye happened to fall on a name I recognised. Micklewright. The air around me appeared to sag and then fold in on itself. I looked away from the wall and blinked two or three times, then I looked back again. The name was still there. In fact, the name was there twice: Micklewright, Sally, and then, right next to it, Micklewright, Philip.
My mother and father.
A trap-door opened in me somewhere and my heart dropped through it. My hand over my mouth, I sank on to the ottoman in the middle of the room.
My mother and father. My parents.
I had thought of them so seldom during the last twenty-seven years. Partly this had to do with survival. If I’d thought of them, I wouldn’t have been able to go on. I’d had no choice but to put them behind me, out of sight. Partly, also, it came down to the image I carried in my head of two people standing on a road in the middle of the night. Her bare feet, his sleepy face — rain slanting down … It was so timeless, so static. So complete. As the years went by, it had taken on an eternal unyielding quality, like a cenotaph, and it had been impossible for me to think around it, impossible for me to remember, or even imagine, anything that had happened before that moment. Then came my visit to the club, exposing the need in me, the ache — the hollowness that lay beneath a life so seemingly well ordered, even charmed. When I stepped through that pale-gold door, something had given in me. Fragments of another life had been released. There had not been much, and it had come so late, so very late, but it had altered me for ever. Everything I had built had been revealed for what it was — mere scaffolding. Everything would have to be remade.
I stood up again and went over to the wall. This time I noticed the dates beneath my parents’ names. They were both dead. I tilted my head to one side, as if I needed another angle on what I was being told. As if that might help me to comprehend. My father had died first. My mother had survived him by eight years. Neither of them had lived to a great age. My father had been fifty-nine, my mother sixty-three. Had they been melancholic all along, or had they been transferred at some point, as I had? What was their story? I had no way of knowing. Since the vials were exhibited in strict chronological order, the two belonging to my parents must have arrived at the museum simultaneously. It was quite conceivable then that they had been crying at the same time — possibly for the same reason — and that those were the tears they had chosen to collect. I wondered if they had been thinking of the boy they’d lost. I wondered if they’d ever forgiven him for turning away from them. Or perhaps they hadn’t even noticed. All they had understood, in their confusion, in their distress, was that their only son was being taken from them. Gazing at their remains, I felt instinctively that they hadn’t tried too hard to stay alive, that they had given up, in other words, and I couldn’t really say I blamed them.