“You have heard of Sir Albert Cruickshank.”
Catherine had not.
Sumper left the table. The angelic boy “quietly compared” the two lengths of chain, his and Sumper’s. He whispered to his mother. The mother removed Sumper’s chain from her son’s celestial hand. She returned the chain to its place in the clockmaker’s assembly tool. No sooner had she done so than the clockmaker returned with “a much-stained” book in his hand. He clipped Carl lightly across the back of the head and both of them burst out laughing.
Catherine read the title: Mysterium Tremendum.
“The author is Sir Albert Cruickshank,” Sumper told the fairytale collector. “He holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the inventor of the Cruickshank Engine.”
The fairytale collector affected to sigh, but the child looked expectantly towards the book, its Latin title inlaid with gold and glowing in the firelight. It was, Henry intuited, a familiar hymn or song.
“M. Arnaud,” said Herr Sumper, “Mysterium Tremendum was written at Cambridge University, and do not fret if you have not heard of that institution. It exists beyond your tiny world.
“ ‘I then begged of my guide,’ ” Sumper read from the volume, “ ‘that he provide a glimpse of those other higher intellectual beings and the modes of their thought and their enjoyments. These are creatures far superior to any idea your human imagination can conceive.’
“ ‘I was again in motion,’ ” (Herr Sumper stood), “ ‘I saw below me lakes and seas on the surface of which I beheld living beings which I cannot properly describe. They had systems for locomotion similar to those of the sea horse. They moved from place to place by six extremely thin membranes, which they used as wings. I saw numerous convolutions of tubes, more analogous to the trunk of the elephant than to anything else, occupying what I supposed to be the upper parts of the body. Here my astonishment became disgust. Such was the peculiar character of the organs.’ ”
Oh dear, Catherine thought, oh dearie dearie me. It was as if she had opened her front door to a Jehovah’s Witness. But the boy was totally at home. His red mouth was open. His hair “caught the candlelight” as he reached for his mother’s hand with his long thin fingers, “pale, plastic, bendy as the necks of birds.”
“You,” Sumper pointed to Henry Brandling, “are in the same state as a fly whose microscopic eye has been changed to one similar to a man’s.”
The boy cast on Henry Brandling “a beautiful and pitying smile.” And then he mouthed the words as Sumper read: “ ‘YOU ARE WHOLLY UNABLE TO ASSOCIATE WHAT YOU SEE WITH WHAT YOUR LIFE HAS TAUGHT YOU.’ ”
Catherine shivered. What to think of this? Had the great mechanic also been a mystic?
Sumper read: “ ‘Those beings who are before you now, who appear to you almost as imperfect as the lowly zoophytes, have a sphere of sensibility and intellect far superior to the inhabitants of this earth.’ ”
At the time it did not occur to me, not for a moment, that this was really written by a man of science. I had no idea how much Cruickshank owed to Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel. I did not think of the Royal Society but rather C. S. Lewis on an acid trip. And this from Sumper, whose work I trusted and admired all through my working day.
“You have no idea of where you are,” Sumper told Brandling. “You have no idea of what will happen here. In this very room,” he said, “you have been anointed as a courier, and you will play your role never knowing what you have done, or imagining you have been the brave agent in a history you will never read.”
Henry reported the “full furnace heat of madness” and then a fright that “mak’st my blood cold, and my hair to stare.”
Catherine reread: “ ‘Those beings who are before you now, who appear to you almost as imperfect as the lowly zoophytes, have a sphere of sensibility and intellect far superior to the inhabitants of this earth.’ ”
Catherine wants KayKay. I was spooked.
IT WAS NOT YET nine o’clock but Amanda Snyde was already at her correct work station, cleaning the rings as I had asked her to.
That was our “object”—not a smoking monkey but a gleaming phallus stripped to the bare metal, as if flayed.
To the smooth articulated neck we would soon attach the fusee chains, like nerves rising within the vertebrae. These dry chains ran over a series of rollers effecting the operation of the lower neck, upper neck, nodding of the head, movement of the fish inside the swan’s bill.
There were five chains, of varying thicknesses. The finest of these had 170 links which meant, according to Amanda Snyde who had counted them, an estimated seven hundred pieces riveted together. It normally required children and mothers—small hands, young eyes—to perform such delicate work.
We knew that the first of these chains would operate the lower bill, the preening, the eating of the fish. The second chain would operate the fish themselves. The third would make the swan’s head nod. The fourth would arch the neck and the fifth was linked to the middle of the neck and would, if we were correct, make the movement very graceful and lifelike.
Today would be the first of two “neck days,” but we did not begin assembly until I had my normal half hour with Matthew’s emails, which I referred to simply as “my housekeeping.” Amanda kept her distance and asked no questions which made me certain she had figured exactly what I was doing.
Now she was recording the structure and dimension of each fusee link, and I was alone with my beloved. What peculiar people we had been, he and I, rationalists but sensualists, always so proud and careful of our bodies, knowing our lives were finite, acting as if we were eternal. How sweetly he had written to me, and so often. We had not denied time as humans are supposed to. Swimming off Dunwich beach, we had been aware of our skin, our hearts, water, wind, the vast complex machine of earth, the pump of rain and evaporation and tide, timeless wind to twist the heath trees. Afterwards it would make me dizzy to be reminded that the blood from the cavernous spaces of the penis is returned by a series of vessels, some of which emerge in considerable numbers and converge on the dorsum of the organ to form the deep dorsal vein. Dear God, I thought, we lived for it but now I may never have sex again. I closed down the computer feeling desolate. I began to work again but I saw oil spilled across the lichen and heather, roe deer, rabbits, nightjars dripping, submarine robots crawling through the murk.
Then I thought, thank God for Amanda. This may not have been consistent of me, but on a good day she could be an extremely comforting assistant, one of those rare creatures who have the tweezers ready before you have to ask. Threading was slow and fiddly but a good assistant makes this like a highly disciplined duet, and if one is slow and careful one can expect, every hour or so, to have formed a new connection within the mechanism and experienced the huge pleasure that comes when one human co-operates with another. Yet as the day wore on, various unhappinesses, pale glistening things like liver flukes began to worm their way back into my mind. How I missed Matthew, with what ache.
At lunch I sent a grovelling email to Eric apologizing for last night’s outburst. I waited until the end of the day and when there was no reply I telephoned him.
“Croft.”
I took fright, and hung up. Then, in my agitation, I broke the finest chain and was the recipient of more sympathy than I desired. Amanda touched my wrist.