“Oh, Miss Gehrig.”
“Well?”
“It is a cube,” she said at last. “A one-inch cube. It is cornflower blue. I am good with colour,” she said rather fiercely. “I’ll check the Pantone number but I’m sure it’s cornflower blue.”
I did not think, not for a second, of the effect this would have on her. I thought only of Carl’s blue block, his clever trick. It took my breath away to find him buried in the hull.
I DELETED, FOREVER, THE celestial light through the pine forest behind Walberswick, the heath at Dunwich in full flower, a very tanned Matthew, that lovely English shyness in his smile, one hand in his pocket, his eyes hidden in the shadow of his brow. I deleted his white shirt, his baggy slacks, the surviving elm he leaned against. Dear Matty T. He was one of those physically graceful dishevelled beauties my country does produce so very well. Delete.
I also deleted JPEGs of Bungay and Walberswick and Aldeburgh and Dunwich, the melancholy concrete bomb shelter behind the stables.
Amanda entered, charging at me. I hid my business and I admired her hair clip, velvet-covered, very 1960s.
She, in turn, admired my silk pants. I would have expected her Sloaney aesthetic would have made her blind to such things as are produced in the rue du Pré aux Clercs, so I was rather pleased.
I then took her to the far end of the studio, right up against the washroom, furthest from the damaged hull. It was too late, of course, but I did not know that yet.
Here I had laid out the little silver fish which the swan would “eat” when it was finally mobile. The fish would “swim” along a track. I gave her time to discover something of what she had been given—the tamped punch marks on the tails, for instance. Her Moleskine was produced. Notes were made. I then left her to make a survey of the track, a task she quickly understood. I did not spoil it by telling her that there were only seven fish, although the pin holes indicated that there had been twelve further ornaments. I left this as a gift.
I set to work on the silver rings, removing a century of built-up oil. I had hardly begun when she abandoned her post.
I thought, what now? But she was at her rucksack, pulling out a dustcoat on one sleeve of which a word had been embroidered from cuff to elbow. She saw me looking.
“Boy,” she said, meaning the embroidery was a name. She rolled up her sleeve to hide it.
“Gus,” she said, colouring. I suddenly thought how lovely it had been to be an art student, to be so young. I myself had arrived at Goldsmiths College imagining I might make paintings which would give me peace of mind. I discovered sex instead. Now I mourned my young girl’s skin. It was sad and sweet to imagine this little creature sleeping with her face nestled in her young man’s neck.
“I have been thinking all night about the cube,” she said.
“Well now you have some fish to think about instead.”
“Miss Gehrig, can I show you something?”
“I would rather you did the fish.”
Instead the wilful little thing extracted a small plain cardboard cube from her rucksack. It might seem a simple matter to construct a cube, but this was very beautifully done, and when she set it before me I saw that it was immaculately clean. She would be a very good conservator when she learned to do what she was told.
“Open it,” she demanded.
“Why?” I asked crossly.
“Please.”
The cube was about three inches. “Yes, it’s empty. Now please go back to your bench. You have a job to do.”
“Yes, open it out, flat.”
Once more I found myself doing as she asked.
“You see,” she said.
“What?”
“When a cube is unfolded,” she insisted, “it forms a six-part Cross. The Cube is Yahweh concealed. The Cross is Yahweh revealed. Isn’t that cool?”
“No,” I said, and gave it back to her. “You have mystery all about you. You don’t need to invent it.”
“Oh don’t be angry,” she said. “It’s not invented.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Please, Miss Gehrig. Isn’t it beautiful? I’m not being soppy. I’ve been reading about cubes. The Cube is ‘the Soul quarried from God.’ I’m thinking about our cube of course, and why it might be there.”
“No, Amanda, stop it now. Really. Immediately. We are not here to invent stories about the hull. We are here to restore this extraordinary object. The real world is beautiful enough. When it is finished it will make your hair stand on end.”
But she would not stop. “The three-dimensional Cube is the Holy Name of Yahweh expressed geometrically. You are religious. I’m sorry.”
“I am not at all religious. You have never met anyone less religious. Now do your bloody work and stop breaking things.”
But I had been too hard. Her eyes were not scary at all. Indeed it seemed that she was going to cry. That is why I really hate working with young females.
“It is not your fault,” I said, “I’m what you would call a rationalist.”
I took her sleeve and rolled her coat up. “Go,” I said, “be clever with the fish.”
Her boy’s name was Gus. My boyfriend at the Courtauld had been Marcus. He was generally thought to be a kind of genius. I had not remembered him for years, but now, as I gently removed the built-up oil, I vividly recalled standing under the London plane trees while Marcus, who was terribly large and used his hands in a way I had thought “expressive,” continued to defend the notion that a person could absolutely combust spontaneously. I had begun listening to him with what I had imagined was affection, and as we came out into Portman Square that morning I was completely unaware of my own seething irritation.
As I had burst out today, I burst out then. I really did not know I was about to say, “What twaddle.”
Marcus was tall, but I was only an inch shorter in my flats and thus I was level with his very pretty eyes which now reacted like an oyster, I thought, and I was rather pleased with the cruelty in the simile, of an oyster feeling the squirt of lemon juice.
“Twaddle?” he said, his mouth contracting unattractively. “For Christ’s sake, what sort of word is that?”
Rather a posh word, I thought, and therefore familiar to you, no matter how much you deny it.
“Twaddle.” He squinted, as if trying to look down at me when this was, no matter how he twisted his head, impossible.
“Marcus, how do you imagine that might happen? A person just bursting into flame?”
“What?” He was like a boy in the back row in a subject for which he had no aptitude.
“It is haystacks that combust spontaneously.”
“What bullshit, Cat.”
I wondered if Marcus might possibly be thick. It had never occurred to me before, but he was still carrying that ridiculous book of Colin Wilson’s. It had been ancient and grotty-looking when he found it, as if a dog had peed on it, and he had brought it to bed, and used a paperweight to hold the pages flat at breakfast.
It was titled The Occult and was full of old hippy nonsense, although I had not blamed him too severely at the start. He was not at all thick, very brainy in fact, but just as the garden in Kennington Road was later occupied by a family of foxes, London that year had suffered a second invasion of Colin Wilson, and our group lived inside a false nostalgic fog of marijuana where the most reliable atheists felt compelled to read aloud to you the Book of Ezekiel which was said to describe the distinctive actions of a flying saucer. It was complete tosh, but I lived in this time warp until, all at once, I had had enough of it.
“Marcus you know very well people do not just burst into flames.”