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.