C (6 page)

The speaker, Rainer, spent a year or so at Versoie: a half-German boy who lost his hearing, then his life, to a cancer that developed in his ear. Serge saw the cancer one day: it was bulbous, like a set of roots buckling the organ’s inner chamber, upsetting the delicate architecture of its whorls and plateaus from beneath the skin’s surface while a moss-like coat overgrew it from above. Serge moves his head round and looks down into the reproducing horn. Its brass has turned slightly green with time. The tube darkens as it narrows, then disappears into the sound box. Listening to Rainer, Serge thinks of entrances to caves and wells, of worm- and foxholes, rabbits’ burrows, and all things that lead into the earth.

ii

Towards the middle of June, Simeon Carrefax’s old university associate Samuel Widsun pitches up, by car, from London. His arrival, in the middle of a rehearsal for this year’s Pageant, causes some commotion: few of Versoie’s residents, child or adult, have ever seen a motor car. Even before it’s turned off the road into the lightly sloping path that leads down past the Mulberry Lawn towards the house, the pupils have picked up the vibrations of its engines, choppy waves ruffling the ground they’re standing on. As it hauls into partial view through the conifers they run out and skip along beside it, almost tripping on the hems of their long robes. This year’s theme is Persephone: the Pageant is to represent her rapture by and marriage to Hades, and subsequent coronation as Queen of the Underworld.

“Better a Greek than a German!” Widsun quips heartily to Simeon when his host explains the set-up to him as strangely dressed pupils unpack his bags. “Can you believe we’re crowning another of those blasted cabbage-eaters?”

“That bastard Korn’s just pipped me on the phototelegraphic patent,” Carrefax replies.

“The children can lip-read that word as well as any other, sir,” Maureen warns Carrefax as she takes Widsun’s cap and gloves.

“We must have been working neck and neck the whole time, he and I. Another week and I’d have had the application in. I’ve a wealth of new projects to show you. A damn cornucopia!”

“And that one too,” adds Maureen.

“What, ‘cornucopia’?”

“No, the other one. You’ll turn out gangs of thugs: deaf thugs.”

“The Krauts are gearing up to let loose at us, make no mistake,” says Widsun. “Hey: watch out with that one!” he shouts at two Day School pupils dragging and bumping a heavy case across the gravel—boys who, facing away from him, remain oblivious to his concern. “It’s delicate,” he explains to Carrefax by way of compensation for being ignored by the boys. “A present for you and your family.”

The present’s a really good one: a Projecting Kinetoscope. On his first evening in Versoie, after supper, Widsun sets it up on the Mulberry Lawn and projects onto a bedsheet strung between two trees moving images of fire crews riding through the streets of London on their engines’ sideboards, then of clothes jumping from laundry baskets, snaking across the floor and throwing themselves into laundry machines which then start churning them around and washing them, all without any human interference. The whole household turns out to watch the spectacle. Mr. and Mrs. Carrefax recline in large armchairs; Miss Hubbard and Mr. Clair sit on wooden seats beside them; Serge and Sophie sprawl belly-down on the grass; Maureen and the other servants stand in a huddle to the side. Only Bodner’s absent: he glances in at the film’s outset but seems unimpressed, as though he’d seen it all before, and wanders off towards his garden. Widsun stands at the back, beside the projector, announcing each of the reels he threads between its cogs and sprockets.

“This one’s called
Caught by Wireless,”
he explains as the flickers steady to reveal a domestic setting that seems to involve a compromised wife and a not unreasonably suspicious husband. “And this one, a tribute to our hostess’s French ancestry: the
artiste
Méliès’s
Voyage dans la Lune.”

“It’s funny they have titles,” Mr. Clair says as a pockmarked and unhappy moon gets it in the eye from some misguided scientist’s rocket-ship. “Shouldn’t the children be in bed?”

“Fiddlesticks!” scoffs Carrefax. “It’s not every night they get to observe interplanetary transit.”

But every night they get to watch Kinetoscope projections. It becomes a ritual: as soon as supper’s over the bedsheet’s hauled up, chairs laid out and reel after reel fed into the mechanism. Serge carries the sounds of the celluloid strip running through its gate to bed with him, clicking and shuffling in his ears long after the machine’s been put to sleep, more real and present than the trickle of the stream or chirping grasshoppers. Each time Widsun racks up a new spool and starts running it, Serge feels a rush of anticipation run through the cogs and sprockets of his body; his mind merges with the bright bedsheet, lit up with the possibilities of what might dance across it in the next few seconds, its outrageous metamorphoses as moths’ and mosquitoes’ shadows on the screen turn into jumping hairs and speckles, then the first unsteady pictures, empty linen springing into artificial life.

Widsun stays at Versoie for more than a week. Each morning, over eggs and kippers, he peruses the
Times
’s personal notices.

“It’s amazing that these fools still think they’re safe conducting their illicit business in rail-fence cipher. Break it before my egg goes cold, what?”

“What are they saying?” asks Sophie.

“Hmm, let’s see. It’s a three-line rail-fence,
a, d, g … d-a-r-l …
Got it: ‘Darling Hepzibah’—Hepzibah? What kind of name is that?—‘Will meet you Reading Sunday 15.25 train Didcot–Reading.’ Reading you all right, you idiots.”

“Do you think they’re eloping?” Sophie says.

“Ladies don’t ask those kinds of questions,” Maureen tells her as she clears her plate. “Or drink three cups of coffee.”

“This one’s using atbash, at least,” Widsun continues.

“Tell me what he’s saying!” Sophie chirps, creaming her dark cup and sliding from her chair to wander over to his.

“
V
for
e
 …” Widsun mumbles. “
Q
as null-sign … Give me one tick …” Sophie leans on his broad shoulder, peering over him into the page as his pencil flicks between the encrypted text and a row of letters scrawled in hangman-style beneath it, adding, crossing out. “Righty-ho: ‘Rose. Smell of your bosom lingers on my clothes and spirit. Must meet again next week. Advise when Piers away using this channel.’ The saucy scoundrel! I’ve a mind to give him a reply.”

“Oh, let’s!” she squeals, patting her hands across his back. “You can teach me the code.”

“My delightful child, nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

He whisks her away to his room and they spend the whole morning there, poring over lines of Scytale, Caesar shift and Vigenère. Widsun hovers over her, his chin above her hair, correcting the odd letter here and there. Serge tries to join in, but the sequences, their transpositions and substitutions, are too convoluted for him to keep track of. After an hour he’s reduced to sitting at the escritoire in Widsun’s room and playing with Widsun’s personal seal and ink set, stamping the man’s signature across the sheets of headed government paper that he’s brought with him from London, and then, when these give out, his own forearm.

“Leave us alone,” says Sophie. “Go and do something else.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Serge snaps back. “And besides, Papa wouldn’t let you do this if he knew.”

It’s true. Carrefax hates the notion of codes, ciphers and encryption. “Goes against the whole principle of communication,” he harrumphs to Widsun over post-lunch brandy and cigars one afternoon.

“Secure communication,” Widsun replies, stabbing his cigar precisely as though plugging its lit point into some invisible telephone exchange socket in the library’s air.

“Secure—what? Secure from whom?”

“Your enemies.”

“Are hearing people deaf ones’ enemies?”

“Ah, yes,” taking a puff. “Your muted flock. In a way, that’s what I—”

“Muted no longer once they’ve been here for a stretch.”

Widsun mouths silent acknowledgment of this, blowing a smoke-ring from his lips. “You know I’m working for Room 40 now?”

“Room 40?”

“At the Ministry. Signals.”

“Ah: they got you, did they?
Consummatum est
, and
Homo fuge
branded on your body. I wondered what the secretive tone in your letters was about.”

“Carrefax, listen: things have changed since I was last here.”

“Too damn right they have! When you were last here I was beavering away at wireless, only to get pipped at the post. When was it? ’Ninety-seven? ’Ninety-eight? Best part of a year before the boy was born, at any rate.” He gestures vaguely at Serge, who’s sitting quietly in the corner holding the guillotine with which the men have allowed him to cut their cigars. “Now we’ve got seven RX stations in Masedown alone.”

“No, I mean that—”

“Happens every bloody time. You work on it, prepare its way into the world, then some other bastard sneaks into the nest and steals your egg.”

“Politically, old friend: I mean politically. There’ll be a war.”

“Be a—what? War? Nonsense! The more we can all chatter with one another, the less likely that sort of thing becomes.”

“If only that were true,” sighs Widsun dolefully. He sips his brandy, lets out a measured, spirit-heavy breath and continues: “We were hoping—my colleagues and I—we thought we might pick your brains about the sign language your pupils use when—”

“You’ve come to the wrong place, old chap! It’s banned here from day one. We teach them language here, not secrecy and silence.
That’s
what leads to wars!”

“I’ve seen old Bounder doing it …”

“Bounder?”

“Your gardener.”

“Oh, Bodner! Blast that fellow. My damn wife insists on keeping him around. He came with the estate; been with her since she was born. Special connection, you see, what with his mouth …”

“That kind of communication will become important when—”

“When I first came down here to teach her to speak I tried to get him to do it too—but he was having none of it, the stubborn ox.”

Serge, still fiddling with his guillotine, pictures Bodner’s mouth again: the undulating lips, the shrivelled trunk of tongue. He thinks of oxtongue, sliced and laid out on a plate. It makes him swallow, and his spit taste bitter.

Sophie prances into the library and straight up to Widsun.

“I’ve found seven of them!” she sings, thrusting a spread palm and two fingers from her other hand right up against his face.

“Seven of what?” her father asks.

“He puts messages in the papers every day, and I have to crack them and reply in the same code,” she announces in a voice that’s guilty and defiant at the same time.

Carrefax looks daggers at his guest.

“I’m training her up as a spy,” Widsun confesses. “Good mental exercise, you must admit, if nothing else …”

“I’ll be a double agent,” Sophie purrs, bunching up her hair, “a double-double agent. If I’m caught, I’ll poison myself before the enemy can make me spill the code. I’m even working on the potion. Before you leave—” to Widsun, this, snaking her arm along his broad shoulder again—“I’ll give you a whole bunch of different poisons to take back to your Ministry. And in two years, when all your other spies are dead, I’ll come and be the greatest spy of all. Oh: apples!”

“Apples—what?” her father asks her.

“From the garden; Bodner; don’t you worry; need the pips, Papa; pip-pip!”

And she’s off again. She spends the next few days scurrying between her lab and Widsun’s room, clutching pages filled with columns of letters, numbers and other, indeterminate ciphers scrawled and crossed out in her own hand, not to mention lighter pages hand-torn from the
Daily Sketch
and
Daily Herald
, from the
Globe, Manchester Guardian
and
Times
, the
Star
, the
Western Mail
and
Evening News
. Serge, no longer allowed into Widsun’s room with her, hears shrieks and squeals each time she finds or breaks a cipher, mixed with Widsun’s deep roars of approval. Occasionally she passes him in the corridor as she emerges with her hair messed up and ink spattered and smudged across her face.

iii

Pageant Day starts out unsettled. Clouds scud by swiftly; Carrefax monitors them anxiously, his head cranked back to watch them slide out from behind the house’s ivy-covered chimneys, elongating and unravelling as they drag patches of shade across the Mulberry Lawn—patches that wrinkle as they dip into the stream, then shorten as they make their way up Arcady Field, contracting right down to thin lines that slip away over the brim of Telegraph Hill. Staff and pupils lighten and darken as they move through these, hurrying from spinning sheds to schoolrooms, schoolrooms to Mulberry Lawn, house to spinning sheds and back again. The décor is being finished; women balance on the top rungs of stepladders, hanging leaf-tresses over wooden posts. In front of these, children lay out chairs in rows across the grass. Off to the side, Maureen and Frieda set up tea and coffee urns on trestle tables while their girls carry out plates laden with pyramids of cucumber and chopped-egg sandwiches, moving over lawn and gravel in an unbroken ant-like chain. Spitalfield slinks around among them, hoping for scraps. At the top of the lightly sloping path, Mr. Clair ties to the open gate a sign which bears, in both conventional and phonetic script, the text that most of Lydium’s tradesmen, clergy, civil servants, farmers, housewives, shopkeepers and misc. have already found slipped through their letter boxes in leaflet form during the past two weeks:

MR. SIMEON CARREFAX
cordially invites you to the
VERSOIE DAY SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF’S
ANNUAL PAGEANT
on
Saturday June 25th
1911
AT
3
IN THE AFTERNOON
for
ENTERTAINMENT
and
CLASSICAL INSTRUCTION
,
suitable for all Classes

“Damn weather gods!” Carrefax snaps to Widsun. “Toying with us. Like wanton flies, in shambles—no, like wanton boys in sport. What was it … ?”

“ ‘As flies to wanton boys are—’ ” Widsun begins, but Carrefax cuts him off:

“I’m working on a patent for a way of using radio to sense the weather in advance. The waves travel through it, after all. Why aren’t you in your costume?”—this to Serge, who’s come to ask him something.

“I don’t put my mask on till later. But Miss Hubbard wants to know what volume to set the amplification to.”

“Amplification—what?”

“Who’s this one meant to be, then?” Widsun asks.

“Ascalaphus,” says Serge.

“He’s the witness, isn’t he? Sees her eating grapefruit or something …”

“Witness indeed,” Carrefax replies. “Pomegranate. Tell her to set it to medium and watch out for my signals. Go!”

Serge scuttles back to Schoolroom One, where discarded clothes are strewn across a floor stripped of all its chairs save one, in which his mother sits stitching last-minute pleats and scales and feathers into costumes, turning their placid wearers one way, then another. Miss Hubbard stands beside the window, running the chorus through their lines, conducting them in unison while simultaneously getting individual actors to recite their phrases, the resulting cacophony flustering her into mixing up the words herself.

“ ‘Near Enna walls—this damsel to—Pergusa is—’ No, start again. Where’s your owl head?” she asks Serge.

Serge points to a corner. The mask is staring at him with large golden eyes whose centres are pierced by holes, like gramophone discs.

“Father says to play it medium, and to watch for his—”

“Not now, Serge. Take the mask out to the Mulberry Lawn. Set it with the other props behind the sheet. Don’t stop! ‘Near Enna walls …’ ” She leads the chant again. Behind her, through the window, Serge catches a glimpse of Bodner pushing a wheelbarrow full of flowers and foliage towards the stage.

At two o’clock small specks of rain dot Maureen and Frieda’s tablecloth. It holds off, though: by quarter to three the air is blustery and slightly chill but dry. The path’s gravel crunches with arrivals; murmurs of greeting grow into a loud mesh of general chatter punctuated by clinks of cups on saucers and the odd peal of women’s laughter. At five to, Miss Hubbard leads the players from the schoolrooms to the Mulberry Lawn to “aahh!”s of appreciation and gasped “Oh, look!”s as parents recognise their disguised sons and daughters—exclamations which prompt her to throw her arms out in an attempt to shield the actors from being gazed upon before their time. She blushes as she bustles them behind the sheet which, strung between the same two trees as it was when serving as a screen for Widsun’s films, makes for a larger back-, or, rather, side-, stage area than the free-standing folding screens used in previous years’ Pageants.

An electric crackle whips the assembled crowd into attentiveness. It repeats, twice, then gives over to music that starts out loud but almost immediately drops in volume until it’s barely audible, then climbs back to the same level as the general conversation. Miss Hubbard peers out nervously from behind the sheet, scanning the crowd for Carrefax. He, meanwhile, ushers people to their seats. Once they’re all settled in, he raises his hands and stands before them on a grass stage across whose floor lie variously coloured strips of silk; the music stops abruptly and he says:

“Ladies and gentlemen: our classical cycle—
The Versoie Mysteries—
enters another phase, just as our human cycles do. Today’s story is Persephone’s—but is it not also our own? Are we not the stuff of dreams, such dreams as … aren’t we all—?”

Another crackle interrupts his speech. Electric birdsong spills through the sheet and fills the air. Carrefax waits for it to stop; it doesn’t; he creeps over to the chair that’s been kept for him in the audience’s front row. Beside him sits his wife; beside her, Widsun. Standing behind the sheet, Serge watches Miss Hubbard send onto the stage first the chorus, then, hot on their tails, the non-speaking extras. Not quite under her jurisdiction since she’s not his teacher, he creeps round to the sheet’s side and watches them take up their positions: the chorus in a line at stage left, the extras moving from stage left to right mock-hacking at the ground with cardboard pitchforks. Miss Hubbard then nudges into this scene the slightly older Amelia, who moves about it slowly carrying a large handful of poppies. On a cue from Serge’s father, the chorus begin chanting:

Dame Ceres first to break the earth with plough the manner found;
She first made corn and stover soft to grow upon the ground;
She first made laws …

Their eyes dart nervously from side to side. Their strange voices, imperfectly synchronised, are buffeted by the breeze; words blow and slip away. Carrefax conducts them from his seat, urging them to speak louder. Ceres/Amelia waves her hand vaguely in the direction of the pitchfork-wielding extras and they pull from their farmers’ robes golden confetti which they toss into the air; it billows up and flashes brightly, carrying far across the lawn. The audience “aahh!”s.

“Melissas,” Carrefax explains, to no one in particular. “Honey-silk harvest.”

“Dame Ceres looks like Mrs. Carrefax,” a random lady murmurs.

It’s true: Amelia’s hair is thick and brown. She has a languid look. Serge turns his head towards his mother, but his eye is caught by Widsun next to her, who’s making hand signs. He’s not using the vigorous language that his mother and Bodner sign in, but more surreptitious signals formed by simply opening and closing the fist that rests across his lap in bursts either long or short. His eyes are pointed at the stage, but his hand is facing Sophie, who’s kneeling six or seven yards away from him at her own post just off stage left, behind an array of phials and bottles lined up in a box (she gave up playing on-stage roles two years ago to take up the post of stage and special-effects manager), and using the same barely perceptible Morse to signal back at him.

Little round Giles is sent out from behind the sheet now, as a chubby Cupid whose bow-free hand is held firmly by his stage-mother Venus, in reality his older sister Charity. In a weird voice that seems to buzz, she starts charitably goading him, suggesting that while the powers on earth obey his “mighty hand” (chuckles from audience), he should expand his sphere of influence into the underworld and thus “advance thy empire.”

“That’s Bismarck talking to the Kaiser,” Widsun mumbles to Carrefax without breaking off his signals to his daughter.

Giles/Cupid takes a wooden, rubber-suction-pad-tipped arrow from a quiver slung across his shoulder; his sister/mother helps him place it in his bow and draw the string back. His hands fall away but hers have got the object firmly: with an elastic
pyongg
the arrow flies out, arcing above the Mulberry Lawn’s far edge and dropping out of sight among the undergrowth beside the stream.

“Now death itself’s infected by desire,” Carrefax explains.

There’s a pause. Performers and audience both look in the direction of the arrow, as though expecting something to emerge from where it fell. After a few seconds’ silence a sheep’s bleat carries to the lawn from Arcady Field. Everyone laughs.

“Let’s hope it didn’t hit one,” a man jokes, unnecessarily.

The extras have ditched their pitchforks behind the screen-sheet and returned carrying posts strung with twigs and foliage; they plant these in a semi-circle, then, unfolding a round, green silk lying at their feet, create the semblance of a pond. Sophie creeps in to give the pond some shape, smoothing its edges into place before slinking back to her post. The chorus chant:

Near Enna walls there stands a lake; Pergusa is the name
.
Caïster heareth not more songs of swans than doth the same
.
A wood environs every side the water round about
And with his leaves as with a veil doth keep the sun-heat out
.

“I’d rather he let it in,” says the same man mock-shivering, emboldened by, or perhaps trying to make amends for, his last interjection.

“How does a wood shade ‘as without fail’?” asks Widsun.

“No: ‘with a veil,’ ” Carrefax tells him. “The leaves are like a veil.”

Now it’s the heroine’s turn to enter. Bethany, a year younger than Serge, emerges from behind the sheet and glides around the stage gathering flowers from beneath other silks. The chorus continue:

While in this garden Proserpine was taking her pastime
In gathering either violets blue or lilies white as lime
,
And while of maidenly desire she filled her maund and lap
,
Endeavouring to outgather …

“Proserpine?” asks a lady in the second or third row.

“Persephone: her Latin name,” explains Carrefax.

Sophie’s hidden so many flowers among the silks that Bethany’s filled maund, lap and both underarms and is basically pretty outgathered.

“Should’ve kept Bodger’s wheelbarrow at hand,” Widsun says to Carrefax.

“Dis is about to enter in his chariot,” Carrefax warns him, turning towards the second-or-third-row lady as he adds: “That’s Pluto. Hades.”

The chorus, echoing Carrefax in more metered language, announce Dis’s imminent arrival. But no Dis arrives. Tense whispers leak out from behind the sheet. The audience shuffles.

“That’s the problem with chariots,” Widsun comments to the gathering at large. “You have to crank the buggers up for ages.”

Sophie giggles, then disappears behind the sheet to see what’s happening. A few seconds later Dis is drawn out onto the lawn by human horses in a chariot whose gramophone-disc wheels and wooden pistons float above the ground as though borne on cushions of air.

“Dis must be the fellow!” Widsun announces.

Sophie squeals with laughter. Dis drives his chariot past Bethany/Proserpine and wraps his arm around her waist. She throws her flowers away, lets slip an elastic girdle she’s wearing and climbs on board, taking care to step over the pistons.

“Not all that reluctant,” another random lady, or perhaps the previous one, ventures.

Dis drives Proserpine around the stage two or three times until they come to a new silk-lake that, with a little help, emerges from the floor. This one’s bright blue and made of strips that, shaken from both ends by extras, give a passable impression of rippling water. A nymph surfaces from among these; the chorus explain that this is Cyan, and that her lake is an agglomeration of other bodies of water known as

… the Palick pools, the which from broken ground do boil
And smell of brimstone very rank …

This is Sophie’s cue to uncork one of the test tubes lying at her feet and pour its contents into a large conical flask resting beside it. Almost immediately, vapour fills the flask and oozes from its neck into the air, where the breeze catches it and paints a thin trail above the grass. Sophie picks the flask up and runs to the far side of the stage so as to be upwind of the audience. The vapour threads its way among them; it’s rank all right. They start to cough; handkerchiefs and gloves come up to noses. Gasps of “Poo!” and “Christ!” waft from the chairs. But Sophie’s not done yet. She scurries back to her effects box, uncorks another phial and pours another batch of liquid into a large crucible. Smoke pours from this. Carrying it to the centre of the stage, she sets it down in the middle of Cyan’s lake. It billows and gushes smoke, as though it had a fake bottom and concealed below it, underneath the lawn, were a whole factory of stoves and ovens. Dis, Proserpine, Cyan and the lake-rippling extras screw their eyes and wave their arms, overwhelmed. The chorus wince and stare on in alarm.

“Carry on!” shouts Carrefax. “ ‘The ground …’ ”

The ground straight yielded to his stroke and made him way to hell,
And down the open gap both—

Two or three of the chorus break off, coughing. The others pause, then try to continue:

… down the open gap both horse and chariot—