The Chemistry of Tears Read Free Page B

colleagues at the main museum would, by now, have dressed for the funeral. It was too early for them to leave so they would hover in their workrooms, surrounded by their lives, their personal knickknacks, photographs of their kids, lovers, holidays. My own workroomwould tell nothing about its former occupant: the pin board displayed a photograph of a tree in Southwold and an empty street in Beccles, the true meaning of both images being known only to us two. Us one.
    The walls of my old studio were cream and the lino was brown. The room contained me as if it were a lovely old chipped jug. My Olympia studio, in contrast, had polished concrete floors and the blinds were down because the view was so depressing. I thought of those nineteenth-century prisoners escorted to their cells with bags over their heads, locked up with their looms to work and work and never know where they were. In my case, it was the tea chests, not the loom.
    There was a brand-new Apple Mac on the bench. Gmail was working quite normally but the museum server, typically, was suffering from “Extreme Weather” once again.
    My head was furry and my chest thick, but I lined the tools up like a surgeon’s instruments upon my bench—pliers, cutters, piercing saw, files, broaches, hammer, anti-magnetic tweezers, brass and steel wire, taps and dies, pin vice, about twenty implements in all, every one tipped with an identifying spot of bright blue nail varnish. Matthew’s idea.
    What can we do? We must live our lives. I opened the first tea chest and found a dog’s dinner, everything wrapped in the
Daily Mail
on which I could make out the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral and the clouds of smoke on the yellow front page. So: it had been packed by amateurs, during the Blitz; evacuated from London to the safety of the country.
    I thought, please God let this “thing” not involve clothes or any sort of fabric. Apart from the nasty way it lifted its lip to show its teeth, it was the silk velvet I had most hated about the smoking monkey—faded and fragile, cracked and bruised. When the clockwork turned it was this faded shabbiness that made the undead thing so frightening.
    But really, truly, anyone who has ever observed a successful automaton,seen its uncanny lifelike movements, confronted its mechanical eyes, any human animal remembers that particular fear, that confusion about what is alive and what cannot be born. Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings.
    Neither I nor Matthew had time for souls. That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light.
    But now the light was gone. In one hour it would be suffocated in the earth. I dug into the rat’s nest of newspaper and came across a very plain tobacco tin. It was yellow, had a brown legend—“Sam’s Own Mixture”—and a picture of a dog who I assumed was Sam, a gorgeous Labrador, gazing adoringly upwards. I should have a dog. I would teach it to sleep on my bed and it would lick my eyes when I cried.
    I tipped the contents into a metal tray. That they were small brass screws would be obvious to anybody. The horologist’s eye saw more—for instance, most of them had been made before 1841. The later screws, about two hundred of them, had a Standard Whitworth thread with a set angle of 55 degrees. Could I really see those 55 degrees? Oh yes, even with tears in my eyes. I had learned to do that when I was ten years old, sitting beside my grandfather at his bench in Clerkenwell.
    So I immediately knew this “object” had been made in the middle of the nineteenth century when Whitworth thread became the official standard but many clockmakers continued to turn their own screws. These different types of threads told me that