C

i

Dr. Learmont, newly appointed general practitioner for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, rocks and jolts on the front seat of a trap as it descends the lightly sloping path of Versoie House. He has sore buttocks: the seat’s hard and uncushioned. His companion, Mr. Dean of Hudson and Dean Deliveries (Lydium and Environs Since 1868), doesn’t seem to feel any discomfort. His glazed eyes stare vaguely ahead; his leathery hands, reins woven through their fingers, hover just above his knees. The rattle of glass bottles and the fricative rasp of copper wire against more copper wire rise from the trap’s back and, mixing with the click and shuffle of the horse’s hooves on gravel, hang undisturbed about the still September air. Above the vehicle tall conifers rise straight and inert as columns. Higher, much further out, black birds whirr silently beneath a concave vault of sky.

Between the doctor’s legs are wedged a brown case and a black inhaling apparatus. In his hand he holds a yellow piece of paper. He’s scrutinising this, perplexed, as best he can. From time to time he glances up from it to peer through the curtain of conifers, which reveal, then quickly conceal again, glimpses of mown grass and rows of smaller trees with white fruit and green and red foliage. There’s movement around these: small limbs reaching, touching and separating in a semi-regular pattern, as though practising a butterfly or breaststroke.

The trap rolls through a hanging pall of wood smoke, then turns, clearing the conifers. Now Learmont can see that the limbs belong to children, four or five of them, playing some kind of game. They stand in a loose circle, raising their arms and patting their hands together. Their lips are moving, but no sound’s emerging from them. Occasionally a squawk of laughter ricochets around the orchard, but it’s hard to tell which child it’s coming from. Besides, the laughter doesn’t sound quite right. It sounds distorted, slightly warped-ventriloquised almost, as though piped in from somewhere else. None of the children seem to notice his arrival; none of them, in fact, seem to be aware of their own individual presence outside and beyond that of the moving circle, their separateness given over to its fleshy choreography of multiplied, entwining bodies.

Without jerking the reins or speaking to the horse, Mr. Dean pulls the trap to a halt. Beside it, to its right, a narrow, still stream lies in front of a tall garden wall over which, from the far side, ferns and wisteria are spilling. To the trap’s left, a veined set of rose-bush stems and branches, flowers gone, clings to another wall. The wood-smoke pall comes from beyond this. So, too, does an old man with a rake, emerging from a doorway in the wall to shunt a wheelbarrow across the gravel.

“Hello!” Learmont calls out to him. “Hello?”

The old man stops, sets down his wheelbarrow and looks back at Learmont.

“Can you tell me where to find the main house? The entrance?”

The old man gestures with his free hand: over there. Then, taking up the handle of his wheelbarrow once more, he shuffles past the trap towards the orchard. Learmont listens as his footsteps die away. Eventually he turns to Mr. Dean and says:

“Silent as a tomb.”

Mr. Dean shrugs. Dr. Learmont climbs down onto the gravel, shakes his legs and looks around. The old man seemed to be pointing beyond the overspilling garden wall. This, too, has a small doorway in it.

“Why don’t you wait here?” Learmont suggests to Mr. Dean. “I’ll go and find-” he holds his yellow paper up and scrutinises it again-“this Mr. Carrefax.”

Mr. Dean nods. Dr. Learmont takes his case and inhaler, steps onto a strip of grass and crosses a small wooden bridge above the moat-like stream. Then, lowering his head beneath wisteria that manage to brush it nonetheless, he walks through the doorway.

Inside the garden are chrysanthemums, irises, tulips and anemones, all stacked and tumbling over one another on both sides of a path of uneven mosaic paving stones. Learmont follows the path towards a passageway formed by hedges and a roof of trellis strung with poisonberries and some kind of wiry, light-brown vine whose strands lead off to what look like stables. As he nears the passageway, he can hear a buzzing sound. He stops and listens. It seems to be coming from the stables: an intermittent, mechanical buzz. Learmont thinks of going in and asking the people operating the machinery for more directions, but, reasoning that it might be running on its own, decides instead to continue following the path. This forks to the right and, after passing through a doorway in another wall, splits into a maze-pattern that unfolds across a lawn on whose far side stands another wall containing yet another doorway. Learmont strides across the lawn and steps through this third doorway, which deposits him onto the edge of the orchard he saw as he first arrived. The large, lightly sloping gravel path he descended with Mr. Dean is now on the orchard’s far side, half-hidden by the conifers; a smaller footpath, on which he’s now standing, lies perpendicular to this, between the garden’s outer wall and the orchard’s lower edge. The children are still there, wrapped up in their mute pantomime. Learmont runs his eye beyond them: the rows of small, white-fruited trees give over to an unkempt lawn that, after sixty yards or so, turns into a field on which the odd sheep grazes. The field rises to a ridge; a telegraph line runs across this, then falls down the far side, away from view.

Learmont glances at his paper once again, then turns to his left and follows the footpath along the garden’s outer wall-until he eventually finds, at the end of this, the house.

ii

He rings the bell, then steps back and looks up at the building. Its front is overgrown with ivy that has started to turn red. He rings the bell again, bringing his ear up to the door. This time someone’s heard it: he can hear footsteps approaching. A maid opens for him. She looks flustered: her hair is dishevelled, her sleeves rolled up and her hands and brow wet. A girl of three or four stands behind her, holding a towel. Both maid and girl look at Learmont’s case and inhaler.

“Delivery?” the maid asks.

“Well, I… yes,” he answers, holding up his paper. “I’ve come to-”

“A man appears from within the house and pushes his way past the maid and child.

“Zinc and selenium?” he barks out.

“That’s in the trap,” Learmont replies. “But I came with it to-”

“And acid? And the reels of copper?” the man interrupts. He’s portly and his voice is booming. He must be forty, forty-four. “Came to-what?”

“I came to deliver the baby.”

“Came to-ah, yes! Deliver: of course! Splendid! You can… Yes, let’s see… Maureen can show you where… You say the copper’s in the drive?”

“Beyond the…” Dr. Learmont tries to point back past the gardens, but he can’t remember which direction he’s just come from.

“And there’s a man there with it? Perhaps you could help us to-”

“Sir…” the maid says.

“Maureen-what?” the man replies. Maureen gasps at him exasperatedly. He stares at her for a few seconds and then slaps his thigh and tells her: “No, of course: you take the doctor to her. Is everything…?”

“Fine, sir,” Maureen informs him. “Thanks for your concern.”

“Splendid!” he booms. “Well, you just carry on. Maureen will see to it that you have everything you… Is that the telegram?”

He’s looking at Learmont’s yellow paper, his eyes glowing with excitement.

“I was a little confused…” Learmont begins, but the man grabs the paper off him and begins to read aloud:

“ ‘… expected next twenty-four hours’… good… ‘parturient in labour since last night…’ Excellent! ‘Parturient,’ each letter crystal clear!”

“We weren’t quite sure as to the provenance…”

“What-provenance? Hang on: what’s this? ‘Doctor refuested as soon as…’? ‘Refuested’? What’s that for a damn word?”

“Sir!” Maureen says.

“She’s heard much worse,” he barks. “ ‘Refuested’? I’ve been… That blasted key!”

“Sweet Jesus!” says Maureen. She turns to the child and takes the towel from her. Another woman appears from the hallway, carrying a tray of biscuits out towards the orchard and trailing in her wake a cat. “Go with Miss Hubbard,” Maureen tells the child.

“… F… Q…” the man mumbles, then, barking again: “Provenance?”

“We weren’t quite sure of the telegram’s provenance,” Learmont explains. “It didn’t originate in the post office down the road in Lydium, yet it seemed to come down the same line which-”

“Miss Hubbard,” the man says, “wait.”

The second woman pauses in the doorway. “Yes, Mr. Carrefax?” she asks.

“Miss Hubbard, I can’t hear the children speaking,” he tells her.

“They’re playing, Mr. Carrefax,” she replies.

“Are you sure they’re not signing?”

“I told them that’s not allowed. I think they-”

“What? Told them? Telling them won’t do it on its own! You have to make them speak. All the time!”

The child is reaching her arm up to the tray of biscuits. The cat is watching the child’s efforts closely, still and tense. Maureen takes Learmont’s sleeve and starts to pull him into the house.

“The provenance, good doctor, is right here!” Mr. Carrefax booms at him as he squeezes past. “F and Q notwithstanding. Disappointing. Fixable. The copper! In the drive, you say?”

“There’s a man waiting in a-”

“Splendid! Miss Hubbard, if I can’t hear them I’ll think they’re signing.”

“I’ll do what I can, Mr. Carrefax,” Miss Hubbard tells him.

“At all times!” he barks at her. “I want to hear them speak!”

He strides out with her, heading for the drive. The child follows the biscuits, and the cat follows the child. Maureen leads Dr. Learmont in the other direction, up the staircase. There’s a tapestry hanging above this, a silk weaving that depicts either this same staircase or one very similar to it. They cross the landing at the top and step into a room. A second tapestry hangs on the wall of this: another picture woven in silk, this time of an Oriental scene in which pony-tailed peasants reach up into trees full of the same white fruit as the ones in the orchard. Lower down the tapestry, beneath the trees, more peasants are unravelling dark balls. Beneath them, in the room itself, a woman lies supine on a bed. A bearing-down sheet has been tied around the mattress, but the woman isn’t clutching this. She’s lying back quite peacefully, although her thick brown hair is wet with sweat. A second maid sits beside her on a chair, holding her hand. The woman in the bed smiles vaguely at Learmont.

“Mrs. Carrefax?” he asks her.

She nods. Dr. Learmont sets down his canister and, opening his case across the bed, asks:

“How far apart are your contractions?”

“Three minutes,” she tells him. Her voice is soft and grainy. There’s something slightly unusual about it, something beyond fatigue, that Learmont can’t quite place: it’s not a foreign voice, but not quite native, either. He takes her blood pressure. As he removes the strap her body is seized by a new contraction. Her face scrunches, her mouth opens, but no scream or shout comes from it: just a low, barely perceptible growling. The contraction lasts for ten or fifteen seconds.

“Painful?” Learmont asks her when it’s over.

“It is as though I had been poisoned,” she replies. She turns her head away from him and gazes through the window at the sky.

“Have you been taking any painkillers?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer. He repeats the question.

“She has to see you speaking,” the bedside maid tells him.

“What?”

“She has to see your lips move, sir. She’s deaf.”

He leans over the bed and waves his hand in front of Mrs. Carrefax’s face; she turns her head towards him. He repeats his question once more. She seems to understand it, but just smiles vaguely back at him again.

“Small doses of laudanum, sir,” the bedside maid says.

“I prefer chloroform,” Learmont says.

Mrs. Carrefax’s eyes light up. Her soft, grainy, strange voice utters the word “Chlorodyne?”

“No, chloroform,” Learmont tells her, pronouncing the name clearly and emphatically. He takes a gauze mask from his case and, fixing this to the end of his inhaler’s tube, straps it round Mrs. Carrefax’s face. He opens a valve on the canister’s neck; a long, slow hissing seeps out as the gas makes its way along the canvas corridor towards her mouth and nose. The muscles in Mrs. Carrefax’s cheeks slacken; her pupils dilate. After half a minute Learmont closes the valve and unstraps the mask. A second contraction soon follows; again the woman’s body seizes up, but her face registers less pain. He refixes the mask, administers more chloroform and watches the silent features further slacken and dilate beneath their gag. When he removes it again, she begins to murmur:

“… un fleuve… un serpent d’eau noir…”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“It is like a fall of velvet,” she tells him. “Black velvet… covering a camera…”

“That’s the chloroform,” he says.

“… a camera,” she tells him, “looking in the dark… There is a river with a water snake, swimming towards me… More.” Her hand releases the bedside maid’s and gestures to the canister.

“I don’t want to knock you out completely,” Dr. Learmont says. “I’ll let you-”

“Sophie!” Maureen gasps. Learmont follows her eyes towards the doorway. The child is standing in it, watching. Maureen walks over and plants herself in front of her, blocking her view of the room. “You shouldn’t be here!” she scolds-then, softening, scoops her up into her arms and says: “We’ll go and help Frieda make the kenno.” As Learmont listens to her heavy footsteps descending the staircase, another contraction takes hold of Mrs. Carrefax. He takes from his case a bottle of carbolic acid and tells the bedside maid to go and fetch him olive oil.

“Olive oil, sir?” she repeats.

“Yes,” he answers, rolling up his sleeves. “Not long to wait now.”

But there is long to wait: all afternoon, and more. He leaves the room twice: once to stretch his legs in the hallway, from whose window he watches Mr. Carrefax and Mr. Dean carrying the coils of copper wire and crates of bottles through the walled-in garden to the stables; once to eat some sandwiches the maids have knocked up for him. He administers more chloroform and hears, above the hiss, the sound of Mr. Dean’s trap making its way up the gravel path, departing. The contractions continue; Mrs. Carrefax dips into and out of her twilight sleep. Dusk turns into evening, then night.

The final pushes come at half past two. The bedside maid holds Mrs. Carrefax’s shoulders, Mrs. Carrefax grips the bearing-down sheet and the baby’s head appears between her legs-or rather, half-appears behind a glistening film of plasma, a skin-membrane. Learmont has heard of this phenomenon but never witnessed it before: the baby has a caul. The amniotic bag envelops the entire head, a silky hood. As soon as the baby’s fully out, Learmont pinches this away from its skin and peels it upwards from the neck, removing it. He washes off the green-and-red mess covering the rest of the body, ties and cuts the cord, wraps the baby in a sheet and hands it to the mother.

“A boy,” he tells her. “Now we need to get your afterbirth out.”

He starts filling a syringe with epithemalodine. When it’s ready, he takes the baby back from her and places him in the maid’s hands. The baby starts to cry.

“This will sting a little,” Learmont says, tapping the air bubbles out. He straps the gauze mask to the mother’s face again and turns the chloroform back on, then shoots the epithemalodine into the folds of her vagina. Her body flinches; her back arches, then relaxes into the bed again. The placenta follows shortly afterwards. Learmont turns the valve off, looks down at the muffled woman and tells her:

“I’ll get rid of this-unless you want to bury it. Some people do. Some people even fry it up and eat it. And the caul is meant to be a sign of-”

But she cuts him short with a gesture of her hand towards the canister.

“It can’t hurt, I suppose,” he says. “We’ll give it a couple more minutes.” He turns the valve back on. Mrs. Carrefax’s eyes warm and widen. The baby stops crying. For a long while the room is silent but for the hiss of the chloroform and, quieter than this, the intermittent mechanical buzzing he heard earlier, floating in from outside, from the stables.

iii

At dawn he’s fed a breakfast of kippers, eggs and bread. When he’s finished Maureen tells him that Mr. Carrefax would like to see him.

“Where is he?” Learmont asks her.

She snorts and answers: “In his workshop, of course. Follow the house round to the left and you’ll find it, through a doorway in the garden wall.”

There’s dew on the grass and snakes of mist about the tree trunks in the orchard where the children were playing yesterday. Following the perimeter of the house as instructed, Learmont turns away from the orchard and, walking towards a part of the estate he didn’t cross on his way in, passes some kind of enclosed park. A gate is set in its tall wall, its columns topped with obelisk-shaped carvings. Behind the wall, taller, conker trees loom, their leaves all big and yellow. The park drops away as the ivy-coated house wall turns and leads him across a neat lawn held in by low walls, then onwards through a further wall of hedge onto a smaller, unmown lawn around whose far side lime trees stand. He picks a very quiet buzzing sound up as he moves across this, but it’s not the same as the buzzing he heard coming from the stables: this one seems less agitated, less electrical. He understands why as he comes to the lawn’s far side: beehives are set among the limes. He skirts these and passes through a second hedge-wall to emerge into a sub-section of garden in which a rectangular trough-pond sits absolutely still, covered in pea-green slime. At the far end of this sub-section, a door leads back into the walled-in garden he arrived through yesterday. He tries it, but it’s locked. He can hear a metallic snipping sound on the other side.

“Mr. Carrefax?” he calls.

The metallic snipping stops and Mr. Carrefax’s voice booms back:

“What? Who’s that?”

“The doctor,” Learmont calls back. “The baby’s fine and well.”

“Fine and-what? I’ve misplaced the key to this door, I’m afraid. You’ll have to come in through the far side. Follow the wall round.”

It’s not apparent how to do this: the wall’s so overgrown with ivy and with bushes extending outwards like buttresses that it’s hard to tell where it leads. Learmont detours away from it into a long avenue of conker trees behind which lies an apple orchard. The avenue takes him towards a set of smaller houses, but before he reaches these he picks the wall up again, emerging from still swirls of tangled hedge to turn and run beside the narrow, moat-like stream that he crossed yesterday; eventually it passes the same wooden bridge and presents to him, once he’s re-crossed this, the same small doorway. He’s come full circle. He bows his head again, steps back through the wisteria onto uneven mosaic paving and moves once more between the rows of stacked-up tulips and chrysanthemums.

The purple of the irises seems stronger, more intense that it did yesterday. The passageway formed by the hedges and trellis seems more closed-in, more laced-over. The wiry, light-brown vines that split from the poisonberries and run off towards the stables seem to have multiplied. When he arrives beneath them he sees that they’re not vines at all: they’re strands of copper wire, and more have been strung up since yesterday. The coils that came with him in Hudson and Dean’s trap are spilling unravelled from the stables’ entrances. Mr. Carrefax is standing over one with metal cutters, measuring a length.

“Hold this,” he tells Learmont, handing him one end.

Dr. Learmont obeys. Mr. Carrefax paces from the stable to a point on the trellis, paying out the length as he goes.

“Twelve feet, I’d say. Remember that. You hungry?”

“I’ve had eggs and kippers and-”

“Kippers and-what? Take kenno with me. There’s some groaning malt as well. Splendid stuff!”

He leads Learmont into one of the stables. Benches of machinery lie under shelves on which sit rows of instruments: telegraph tappers, telephone receivers, large phonograph machines with strips of paper hanging from them, wax cylinders, bottles, objects and instruments whose name and function he can only guess at. On a work table, among metal shavings, are a jug of dark brown liquid, two mugs and some cheesecake. Wiping his hands on a cloth whose surface looks no cleaner than they are, Mr. Carrefax cuts two slices of the cheesecake with a knife, hands one to the doctor, then pours out two mugs of malt.

“Breakfast, lunch, dinner-who knows? Haven’t slept all night,” he tells Learmont. “Your health, Doctor!”

The malt’s refreshing; the cheesecake is rich and sharp. The two men eat and drink in silence for a moment.

“I’ve fixed it,” Mr. Carrefax tells Dr. Learmont after a while.

“Fixed what?” Learmont asks.

“The F and Q firk-quirk, I mean. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d run the wire all the way from here up to the public lines uninterrupted.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Learmont says.

“Aha!” booms Mr. Carrefax. He places a firm hand on Learmont’s back and marches him out to the workshop’s entrance. “Look!” he says, pointing up at the trails of copper running over their heads to merge with the curling poisonberries on the trellis. “Where do you think they end?”

Learmont’s eyes follow the trellis to the wall and the locked door on whose far side he stood five minutes ago. Among the billowing mesh of ivy and bushes stands a kind of metal weathercock. The wires are wound around the base of this like serpents.

“They end there?” he asks.

“Aha!” booms Carrefax again. “Yes-and no! The wires end, but the signal jumps onwards! Five feet, for the moment. With this copper I’ll be able to increase it to ten-fifteen even. It’s been jumped further, mind you. That Italian is out on Salisbury Plain right now, with all his towers and masts and kites… He’s in with the Post Office, you see? Got all the funding. Always the way! A mentor-nod, wink here and there: probably a Freemason. The new birth will bear his name no doubt, when it comes. Boy or girl?”

“The baby? A boy.”

“Splendid! Splendid! Have some more malt and kenno. Came out smoothly? The girl had to be dragged out. Virtually needed toys set at the foot of the bed before she’d show.”

“It took a while, but he came calmly in the end. He had a caul.”

“Had a-what? A cold?”

“A caul. A veil around his head: a kind of web. It’s meant to bring good luck-especially to sailors.”

“Sailors? I tell you, Doctor: get this damn thing working and they won’t need luck. There’ll be a web around the world for them to send their signals down. You came with the delivery trap?”

“Yes. The telegraph company’s woman had taken both your messages, so she knew Hudson and Dean were sending a man down.”

“Splendid! You need transport back, though.”

“Lydium’s not far. I can walk there and take a train.”

“No need to walk!” booms Mr. Carrefax. “I’ll telegraph for a new trap to come and fetch you.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Dr. Learmont tells him. “The walk will clear my head.”

“Will clear your-what? I wouldn’t hear of it! Go back into the house. Rest while I jump your orders clear over the wall.”

Dr. Learmont obeys. He’s too tired not to. He walks back through the irises and chrysanthemums, across the narrow stream, along the avenue of conker trees. The black birds are still whirring high above them; Learmont can’t tell if they’ve multiplied or if it’s just his tiredness breaking the sky’s dome into slow-moving dots. Inside the house, he gathers his possessions back into his case. He can’t find the phials of epithemalodine or the codeine pills, but it’s not important: there are plenty more back in the surgery.

The baby’s feeding; its mother sits up in the bed, calm and contented, while the bedside maid combs her hair, unravelling it like the Chinese women pulling at their strange dark balls in the silk tapestry above them. Maureen stands at the foot of the bed; in front of her, enfolded in her arms, the girl watches her brother silently. They all watch silently: the room is silent but for the clicking lips of the sucking baby and the copper buzzing rising from the garden.

i

In the beginning,” says Simeon Carrefax, standing on a small raised podium in Schoolroom One, “-in the beginning, ladies and gentlemen, was the Word.”

His audience, a gaggle of the parents of prospective pupils at the Versoie Day School for the Deaf, sit squeezed into the schoolroom’s child-size chairs. Miss Hubbard stands behind them at the back of the room, her gaze darting nervously between Carrefax and a box full of small pieces of lead piping lying by her feet.

“The Word was with God,” Carrefax continues, “and the Word was God. Which is to say: speech is divine. Speech itself breathed the earth into being-and breathed life into it, that it in turn may breathe and speak. What, I ask you, are the rising and falling of its mountains and its valleys or the constant heaving of its seas but breath? What are the winds that rush and swirl around it, now one way, now another? What are the jets of steam that gush from geysers or the spray that issues from the blow-holes of whales? And which man who has stood beside the torrent of a waterfall or, pausing in a wood, has heard the whisper of the leaves, the chirp and clamour of the birds, can deny that he has heard earth speaking?”

His eyes sweep the room intently. As they fall on individual parents, the latter cast their own eyes to the floor, or fix them on a wall-mounted whiteboard behind Carrefax. Here, drawn in charcoal across cotton-backed ground glass, a diagram shows plates, hinges, corridors and levers locked together in an intricate formation that suggests an irrigation system or the mechanism of a crane.

“And we, ladies and gentlemen: do we not also move to the same gasping and exhaling rhythm? Is not our spirit, truly named, suspirio? Breathing, we live; speaking, we partake of the sublime. In our conversing each one with the other-listening, responding-we form our attachments: friendships, enmities and loves. It is through our participation in the realm of speech that we become moral, learn to respect the law, to understand another’s pain, and to expand and fortify our faculties through the great edifices of the arts and sciences: poetry, reason, argument, discourse. Speech is the method and the measure of our flowering into bloom. It is the currency and current of our congress in the world and all the crackling wonders of its institutions and exchanges.”

He pauses, and the parents grow aware of their own breathing, suddenly loud and ponderous in the quiet of the schoolroom. He draws his head and shoulders back and continues:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to call myself an oralist. I count among my intellectual forebears Deschamps, Heinicke, Gérando and the great Alexander Bell. The human body,” he says, turning half-round to tap his knuckles on the whiteboard’s glass, “is a mechanism. When its engine-room, the thorax, a bone-girt vault for heart and lungs whose very floor and walls are constantly in motion-when this chamber exerts pressure sufficient to force open the trap-door set into its ceiling and send air rushing outwards through the windpipe, sound ensues. It’s as simple as that. Children!” He turns to face a row of three boys and a girl who have been sitting quietly on the side of the podium, opens the palm of his right hand and raises it firmly. “Up!”

The children rise from their chairs. Like a conductor Carrefax holds his hands out and then shoves them forwards, quivering in the air in front of him-and all four children break into a chorus made up of a single word:

“Haaaaaaa.”

The sound is long, drawn out and without harmony or intonation. A few seconds into it several prospective parents shift in their small seats, adjusting their positions. The children’s eyes stare straight ahead, vacant, as though entranced, or taken over by a set of ghosts; their shoulders, drawn back as they launched into their utterance, slowly crumple and deflate as it fades out. Carrefax draws his hands back again, then once more shoves them quivering forwards and the children moan again:

“Haaaaaaa.”

The sound, the second time round, seems like a response, a weary, empty answer to a hollow question. Carrefax’s hands draw it out for as long as they can, all the while trembling from the effort. Eventually, though, the children’s voices start to shudder, then to break down into groans, which die away as the inarticulate spirits that have seized their bodies give up and relinquish them again.

“Children,” says Carrefax, turning his palms to face the podium’s boards, “down!”

The children sit back in their chairs. Carrefax points at them and announces:

“When these four children came to my school, each of them was held to be not only deaf but also mute. What? Yes, mute: doubly afflicted. And yet how erroneous the diagnosis! Are you, sir, considered mute due to your lack of proficiency in the Mandarin tongue? Or you, madam, because you never speak Estonian and, beyond that, remain entirely ignorant of the very existence of Quichua, the language of the remote Inca people of the Andean cordillera?”

He fixes two prospective parents with his gaze. They look slightly alarmed and shake their heads.

“Of course not! No human born with thorax, throat and mouth is incapable of speaking these or any other languages! Yet how would you come to speak a tongue that you had never been exposed to, tried on, tested? So is it for the deaf child with English. Speech is not a given: it must be wrung from him, wrenched out. The body’s motor must be set to work, its engine-parts aligned, fine-tuned to one another. Miss Hubbard.”

Blushing, Miss Hubbard crouches down beside her box and, picking up the short lengths of lead piping, starts distributing these around the room.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” Carrefax instructs the prospective parents, “press your lips firmly together and blow air between them.”

The prospective parents look at one another.

“Do it!” Carrefax commands. “Compress your lips, like so-hmmm-and blow air through them.”

He half-raises his hands in front of him again. Slowly, the prospective parents purse their lips, take deep breaths, then expel these through them like so many toddlers making farting sounds at table. As the sounds fill the room, the parents’ faces redden with the strain, or with embarrassment, or both.

“It is a far-from-pleasant sound, I think you’ll all agree,” announces Carrefax above the tuneless rasping. “A fly trapped in a glass sounds no less gracious. But now take the length of pipe you each have in your hand and, making once again your buzz, bring the tube firmly to your lips. Go on.”

The prospective parents obey. As each one presses the tube to their mouth, the flatulent rasps give over to clear, trumpet-like notes.

“Splendid!” booms Carrefax. “Now tighten your lips further.” The prospective parents do this and the notes rise in pitch. “Wonderful! Now you, sir, and you, madam, loosen yours two notches while the others hold them tight.” They comply; the high-pitched notes become offset by deeper ones. “Magnificent!” roars Carrefax. “We have a brass band here, no less! What symphonies we could compose! Miss Hubbard.”

Miss Hubbard moves around the classroom gathering the instruments back from their players.

“Were we to pay a visit to the finest opera singer,” Carrefax announces, “and, secreting ourselves among the curtains and décor of the opera house armed with a sword, rush out onto the stage right in the middle of her most enchanting aria to cut her head off in mid-song with one sharp, well-aimed blow-Splendid! Yes, what? Were we to do this, her headless neck, while air still rushed through it, would issue forth a sound just like your buzzing lips denuded of their pipes. Well, in the same way, deaf children… deaf children are like headless opera singers inasmuch as, inasmuch as…”

There’s a pause while he searches for his next words; then a clang as Miss Hubbard drops a length of lead pipe to the floor. Prospective parents turn to look at her. She curtsies to pick it up; Carrefax clears his throat and continues:

“Our job here is to restore to the deaf child the function of his pipes and all their stops: the larynx with its valves; the timbre-moulding pharynx; the pillar-supported palate which, depressed, hangs like a veil before the nares; and so on. Speech, like song, is but the mechanical result of certain adjustments of the vocal organs. If we explain to deaf children the correct adjustments of the organs they possess, they will speak. Timothy, Samuel and Felicity-” he points to three of his four protégés, opens his palm and resolutely raises it towards the ceiling-“up!”

The two boys and the girl rise once more. Carrefax conducts them with one hand this time, using it to sculpt precise shapes and positions in the air in front of him, repeating a sequence which is mirrored in the looping series of sounds that spill from the children in unison:

“Ah ee o ee, ah ee o ee, ah ee o ee…”

He lets the sequence run through several times, then brings it to a halt with a decapitating slice.

“Here, with the mere sinking and lifting of the palate, we already have the base for a range of words. Timothy.” He singles out a boy with freckles and, pinching his own ear between his fingers, draws from the boy the utterance:

“Ee-ah.”

“Splendid! Good lad!” he booms. Then, taking a piece of charcoal, he writes on the board the word area before pointing to the girl. “Felicity.”

Felicity pronounces the progression “aih-ree-ah.” Its second syllable is expelled with a heavy breath.

“Splendid again!” booms Carrefax. He turns back to the board, wipes out area and writes in its place eerie. “Samuel.”

The round, blond Samuel reads the word aloud. Again a heavy exhalation flushes out the “rie.” Carrefax nods at him contentedly, turns to his audience and tells them:

“Ear, area, eerie: the slightest command of our vocal apparatus opens up for us the wherewithal to indicate the body’s organs, to conceive of blocks of space, to name the southernmost of North America’s Great Lakes and to express the air of mystery that clouds our dreams. How much more of a blossoming of our verbal powers arises when we bring into play the tongue, which flicks against the palate’s ceiling like the brush of Michelangelo against the Sistine Chapel’s still-wet plaster, or the lips which frame the masterpieces crafted in our throats and mouths-and, in so doing, attract, as temples to the pilgrims of our eyes. How right is Romeo, upon his first meeting with Juliet, to shun her palmistry! Our lips communicate, not our hands. Watch this profoundly deaf child read mine-and listen as this supposedly mute child uses the full range of her own vocal apparatus to respond.” He turns to Felicity and, fixing her with an intense stare, says to her slowly: “Felicity, what part of England were you born in?”

There’s a pause, then Felicity replies: “Talesbury, Mr. Carrefax.” She pronounces the T and b of “Talesbury” with utter precision, but its vowels drag and stretch out, as though snagged on the consonants. The f and x of “Carrefax” hiss like a punctured football.

“Splendid! Now ask Timothy how many brothers he has.”

Felicity turns to the freckled boy and says, slowly and diligently:

“Timothy: how many brothers have you?”

Timothy eventually responds: “I have two brothers.” His voice is slightly deeper than hers; his final s resembles more a buzz than a hiss. His hands twitch slightly by his sides as he intones the words, then cling to the fabric of his shorts, as though tethering themselves down.

“Splendid! And now, Felicity and Timothy both: tell me, what poem have you been committing to heart of late?”

The children reply together but slightly off-kilter: “ ‘The Shepheardes Calender.’ ”

“Recite the first few stanzas for our friends here,” Carrefax instructs them. The children turn away from one another; Carrefax cues Felicity with a nod and she declaims:

Cuddie, for shame hold up thy heavy head,

And let us cast with what delight to chase,

And weary this long lingering Phoebus race.

Whilhom thou wont the shepherd’s lads to lead,

In rhymes, in riddles, and in bidding base…

She speaks slowly and deliberately; the words snag and stretch and drag and hiss again. Prospective parents lean forward in their undersize chairs, straining to catch the meaning of her phrases. These give the strange effect of coming from some other speaker lurking out of view-off to the podium’s side, or under it. A couple of prospective parents glance around the room, disoriented. When Felicity’s finished, Carrefax nods at Timothy and he begins:

Piers, I have pipéd erst so long with pain,

That all mine Oten reeds be rent and wore:

And my poor Muse hath spent her sparéd store,

Yet little good hath got, and much less gain.

Such pleasance makes the Grasshopper so poor,

And lie so laid, when Winter doth her strain…

His words, like Felicity’s, seem to issue not from him but rather to divert through him-as though his mouth, once it formed and held the correct shape for long enough, received a sound spirited in from another spot, some other area, eerie, ear.

ii

In a room to the side of this one, Schoolroom Two, Simeon’s son Serge spends what he has been told in passing, although only by the maid, is his second-and-a-half birthday playing with wooden blocks. He sits on a floor which, unlike the bare wooden floor of Schoolroom One, is muffled by a rug. Morning sunshine falls in a long beam through the bow-window, vaults the cosy recess seat that runs along the inside of the window’s curve and comfortably lands among the rug’s curling hairs; rising from these, it hovers in jars and bottles in which labelled toys-horses, cars, clowns and acrobats-are stashed. More labels, unattached to objects, spill from a low table to spread a debris of words across the floor.

The wooden blocks have geometric figures painted on them, like numbers on dice: squares, triangles, circles and other, more complex forms. On a single side of each block (the side that, were they dice, would bear the number six), several of these figures have been combined so as to form a picture-of a cyclist, a house, a hippopotamus or a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat, for instance. Serge has stacked the magician above the cyclist and, above that, a butcher who clutches a knife in one hand and a string of sausages in the other, holding them up for inspection much as the magician does his rabbit. The figures all appear in profile, flat; the landscape across which the cyclist rides, made up of rectangles and segments, is as shallow as the round wheels above which his trapezoid body sits-as though, even within the painted world of the block’s surface, he were no more than a cardboard cut-out posed in front of a piece of stage-scenery. Serge ponders the combination for a while, then, holding cyclist and magician in place, removes the butcher and replaces him with the large, round hippopotamus, who wallows, again in profile, in an elliptic pool of mud. Serge holds this new vertical line-up together while he contemplates it; then, deciding it’s satisfactory, he removes his hands from the stack. As soon as he does, it starts to wobble, the combined weight of hippo, mud, rabbit and magician proving too much for the beleaguered cyclist, who’s further let down by the soft, uneven surface underneath his wheels. As the blocks tumble, rhombi, trapezia and deltoids flash and disappear in a frantic progression, spreading out across the rug.

Serge looks up at the window, then at a whiteboard on whose surface more geometry is displayed: rows of round shapes with lines inside them have been drawn on it. The shapes modulate as they repeat, their curves narrowing or widening, their lines arcing and flexing as they process across the glass. Looking down again, Serge turns his attention to a toy soldier who’s been resting until now against his thigh. Picking the soldier up, he holds him to his face. The soldier’s eyes are neutral, gazing off into the middle distance; his mouth is set in a calm, still expression that contains the tiniest hint of a smile. Serge lays the soldier front-up on the rug, smoothing its hairs aside to form an enclave for the back to nestle in. The thick fibres thread and wrap around the soldier’s sides. Serge reaches for one of the wooden blocks and, lifting it up above the soldier, slams it down hard onto his face. The soldier’s legs and feet jolt upwards as the comparatively huge slab hits him. Serge draws the block back, then slams it down onto the soldier’s face again; then again, several times. When he’s done smashing him he holds the soldier up to inspect the damage. His eyes are unaffected, still vague and distant, but his mouth has been deformed, its plaster dented and chipped away. Serge scrapes at the ground-down surface with his thumbnail, lifting off more flakes of plaster. Then, to no one but himself since he’s alone, he says:

“Bodner.”

He sets the soldier down gently on the rug, propping him up in a sitting position against the wooden block that’s just mutilated him. Serge is reaching out towards another block when his attention is distracted by the hurried entrance of the family cat and, close on its tail, his older sister Sophie. Sophie is half running, half skipping, with clenched hands held out in front of her. Placing herself between the cat and the door, she thrusts her hands towards the cat and sings:

“Spitalfield! Oh, Spitalfield!”

The cat retreats beneath the recess seat. Sophie stoops low and creeps towards it, opening her palms to reveal four or five small white larval balls nestled warmly in them.

“Just try one, Spitalfield,” she purrs, holding the balls temptingly up to the cat’s face. The cat turns its head away, then, ducking beneath her hands, breaks cover and darts out of the room. Sophie lets out a sigh and, setting the larvae on the recess seat’s cushion, turns her attention to Serge. Scooping three or four of the wooden blocks up from the carpet, she starts laying them out in front of him. Then, kneeling behind them and pulling the front of her skirt forwards so that it covers the figures on their surface, she says: “If you can remember which one is which I’ll give you my pocket money. If not, forfeit.”

But Serge doesn’t want to play her game. He reaches between her legs, pushing through the pleated fabric. She grabs his wrist and pulls it out again. “Forfeit!” she cackles. “Take your trousers down.”

“No!” Serge snaps. But she’s stronger than him. She wraps her arm around him, pulls him to his feet and, still kneeling beside him, yanks his trousers down his legs. He wriggles as she pulls the pants beneath these down as well.

“Aha!” she shouts in triumph. “Now to telegraph the Admiralty.” Holding him in place, she begins tapping his little penis with her index finger. “ ‘Dear Sir: Please send reinforcements,’ tap-tap-tap. ‘Enemy quite outnumber us,’ tap-tap. ‘Are holding out but fear total submission if not soon relieved,’ tap-tip tap-tip.”

“Stop it!” Serge shouts.

“Why? I’ve seen Miss Hubbard do it. She did it with the man from Lydium. ‘Dear Man from Lydium,’ tap-tap, ‘please send more charcoal and wipers for our school class,’ tip-tip-tip. ‘Weather here fine but rain is forecast for tomorrow.’ Tippety-tap. See? You’re laughing.”

“No I’m not!” Serge shouts, straining to get away. Eventually he manages to break loose. Sophie half-heartedly grabs after him, but he pushes her hands away. Moving a safe distance from her, he pulls his pants and trousers up, then gathers the wooden blocks up in his cradled arm and shuffles through the door through which the cat’s just made its own escape.

Sophie watches him go, then shrugs, sits back and tilts her head to one side as she looks up at the whiteboard. As she runs her eyes along the rows of round, lined shapes, her mouth forms positions, holding each in place for several seconds before morphing to strike up the next one: her jaw lowering and lifting, cheeks tautening then slackening, fattening, rising to form pregnant mounds while her lips stretch back in terror or jut forwards to pucker into silent kisses.

iii

Out in the warm March sunlight, Serge totters with his blocks towards a wooden trolley. It’s a small trolley with a large handlebar at one end: it’s been his for a year now, ever since he started walking. He stoops over it and, loosening the cradle of his left arm, lets the blocks fall into it. Grabbing the handle with both hands, he starts pushing the trolley along the gravel footpath. To his right, women are moving among mulberry trees, climbing and descending ladders, carrying baskets to and from the spinning houses. One of them stops and waves at him but he ignores her, pushing on. To his left is the wall between the Mulberry Orchard and the Maze Garden; coming to the doorway in this, he steers his trolley through and pushes it into the corridor formed by the paving laid into the lawn. When the corridor forks, cutting at right angles in opposite directions, he chooses a branch and follows it until, after performing several more right-angled turns and forking twice more, it comes to a dead end. He doubles back to the last fork, advances down another branch and follows it until it, too, runs out-at which point he doubles two forks back and takes a new branch. There’s no need to stick to the paved section-the maze is wall-less, two-dimensional as the figures on the blocks, and the grass is short and wouldn’t slow his trolley down-but he continues working his way along the abruptly turning corridors, held by their pattern, until they deliver him back out, through the same doorway, to the footpath once more.

The same woman waves at him; again he ignores her and, pushing his trolley past the house’s main entrance, turns into the Low Lawn, crosses it and passes through the hedge into the Lime Garden. Leaving his trolley at the edge of this, he walks to its centre and pauses there. The lime trees are flowering; little white and yellow petals teeter on the ends of branches. The bees are active: Serge can see a blur of movement around the openings to their hives at the garden’s far end. He tilts his head to one side, then the other; then he slowly rotates his whole body above the spot on which he’s standing. The bees’ hum first grows and then recedes, changing pitch as his ears turn through the air. As trees, grass and hedge run together, the bees seem to relocate, and hum from a new spot within his head, their pitch and volume being modulated from inside him now, not outside. He rotates several more times, relishing the acoustic effect, its repetition.

Eventually he returns to his trolley, swings it round and pushes it back across the Low Lawn, steering it off the path after he rounds the house’s edge. A swathe has been mown through the longer grass, leading up to and through a large metal gate set in tall stone walls. The gate is open. Serge follows the swathe between the gate’s obelisk-topped supporting columns and enters the Crypt Park.

It’s darker in here. Tall hedges wall him in; the obelisks cast shadows on the ground. Trees and bushes sprout up willy-nilly, closing off most lines of view. Serge pushes onwards, following the mown swathe until, beside an empty bench, it suddenly gives out. He continues, but from here on in the going’s harder: grass-strands twine themselves around the trolley’s wheels; the blocks slide and jump across its floor. Serge rests beside a tree stump and, looking up, catches sight of his mother. She’s sitting on another bench, leaning her back against the Crypt. On the bench beside her a teapot, a cup, a jar of honey and a little phial are laid out.

Serge pushes his trolley over to the bench, pulls to a halt in front of it and leans into his mother’s knees. These give a little but not much. He looks up at her face: it’s staring at some point beyond the trees and bushes. He climbs onto the bench beside her and tugs at her shoulders. She looks down at him and her eyes look like honey, warm and murky. She smiles through him, at the ground, or something underneath it. Serge dips his finger in her honey jar, pulls it out again and sticks it in his mouth, rolling and smearing it around the inside of his cheeks. The bench’s surface has a sticky patch on it between the jar and the cup. A wasp has landed in this and is drawing off the syrup with its needle-like mandible. Its legs have broken through the honey’s surface; they tread slightly, trying to free themselves, but they’re already immersed; its mandible, meanwhile, continues drawing. Serge watches it for a while, then takes the phial and presses it down across the insect’s body, using its rim to slice apart the bridge where thorax meets abdomen. The wasp’s legs continue their treading and its mandible its drawing even after they’re no longer joined. Its thorax throbs, then stiffens and is still. Serge takes his trolley’s handle up again and pushes on.

Light dapples his shoulders as he passes beneath budding conker trees. Eventually he arrives at the stream that hems in the Crypt Park on the side furthest from the house. Beyond the stream, he can see sheep grazing on Arcady Field, diminishing in size as the field rises into Telegraph Hill. Serge gathers up the blocks and, cradling them once more in his left arm, edges towards the stream. He crouches down close to it and sees the slope of Telegraph Hill and the bright sky above it reflected in the water. He leans forward and catches sight of the top of his own head, his eyes, his nose and mouth. Then he takes a block from his left arm and places it gently on the surface of the water. The block floats. He prods it with his finger and it sinks, then bobs back to the surface again. Its upper face has a flat, in-profile football player on it. He prods it off-centre so as to spin it in the water; the block sinks and bobs, tumbling; when it comes to rest, a lone triangle is uppermost. Serge floats a second block, then a third. As he prods them they drift further from the bank. He leans out after them, so far that he can see his whole torso reflected in the water, right down to his knees, with the blue sky revolving above it like a turning lid…

And then he’s in, tumbling and turning like the blocks as water rushes up his nose and burns his throat. His hands push muddy slime and he bobs up again, his face back in the air, his legs beneath him. He grabs at the blocks but these spin and sink away from his splashing hands. He tries to breathe in but the passageway is blocked: it makes a kind of elongated gasp that turns into a splutter, then a gulping as his head goes under again. Beneath the surface of the stream, he opens his eyes. The water is bright and murky at the same time, like honey. Snake-like fronds wave and dance in its lit-up darkness; particles of mud hang between these, stirred up into canopies of blossom. The water’s right inside him; it’s not nasty anymore, just cold. And he’s no longer sinking: if anything, he’s been lifted up, by strong arms coiled round him, hugging him…

Then he’s being pushed, right in his chest, and spurts of stream are shooting from his mouth into the air before cascading back onto the muddy grass. He’s lying on the bank, and Maureen’s kneeling above him, pumping him. He vomits water, gasps, coughs, vomits more and gasps again; then, once he can breathe properly, just lies there quietly, breathing. Between him and the sky hangs Maureen’s face; it stares straight at him, sobbing. He stares back, perplexed: her mouth and eyes look funny from this angle. They’re red and fat. The eyes close and she shrieks; then she grabs him in her arms and holds him to her breast so tightly he can hardly breathe again. He slips out of her grasp, scrambles to his feet and wanders back towards his trolley-but she sweeps him up again before he reaches this and, trussing him up between her arm and waist, starts striding with him through the Crypt Park, back towards the gate.

“Incapable!” she sobs as they pass the Crypt. On the bench in front of it the teapot, cup and jar of honey have been left. “Incapable and arrogant! Can’t even bother to look after what they’re lucky enough to still have…”

She stops between the obelisk-topped columns of the Crypt Park ’s metal gate, sets him down on the grass and, holding him by the shoulders, kisses him on both cheeks. Serge squirms and tries to escape but she’s got him trapped.

“I’ll never let you from my sight again until you’re…” she begins, but her voice trails away. She kisses him once more, then sweeps him up into her arms again and strides decisively towards the house. Women look over at them from the Mulberry Orchard. Behind the women, shapes and pictures drift flat and unnoticed on the stream as it emerges from behind the Crypt Park ’s walls and oozes silently along its course.

i

Under the central staircase of the main house, the one above which the tapestry that shows a staircase hangs, there’s a photograph of Jacques Surin. It’s an early daguerreotype-one of the very first. If visitors enquire about it, either out of politeness or from genuine curiosity, they’re fed a tale that Versoie’s residents have heard so many times it’s taken on the aspect of a biblical fable involving plagues, exoduses, and long lines of “begot”s.

It goes something like this: When, in November 1796, Surin received from his recently deceased cousin-the baron de Saint-Surin, a resident of Lower Saxony whom he had never met but who, like him, was a second-generation réfugié-a chrysoprase ring, a round Dresden china box, a gold medal of Prince Henry of Prussia and a significant amount of money, he upped sticks from London and, acquiring a large plot of land in West Masedown, named it Versoie. He brought with him an entourage at once human, animal, vegetable and mechanical: spinners and dyers who had worked for him in Shoreditch, canaries whose chirping had drowned out the sounds of the machines but annoyed his English neighbours no less for that, worms and mulberry trees descended unadulteratedly from larvae and seeds smuggled out of La Rochelle one hundred and nine years earlier and a loom whose dis- and reassembly had presented a challenge no less daunting than that facing the architects of acropolises and mausoleums. To accommodate them all, Surin, who liked to style himself as a latter-day Noah despite the fact that all his offspring, and his offspring’s offspring, were female, built on the south-west corner of his new estate a complex of houses and workshops linked by doors, corridors and yards. It is into the outermost of these, the Hatching Room, that Surin’s several-times-great-grandson Serge, seven and sprightly, has just bounded from the garden.

Here, he finds two women kneeling over boxes. The boxes are small and shallow: the size of writing-table trays or vanity cases. Their lids have been removed, and the women are peering inside to watch moths laying eggs. The moths are females of the phylum Arthropoda: Bombyx mori. They have creamy white, scale-covered wings, the upper two of which are threaded with brownish patterns. Their bodies are hairy. They crawl slowly and groggily around each box’s paper-lined floor, stopping intermittently to let more tiny black baubles fall from their genital region. From their rudimentary mouthparts they dribble a gummy substance, which they smear onto the paper with their legs: as the eggs fall they stick to this, dotting the white with black. Scattered and sparse at first, the dots grow into small constellations, then whole galaxies made up of thousands of black stars. When these dark clusters have become so thick that they threaten to eclipse the space between them, the women pick the moths up one by one and, pinching their wings between their thumb and middle finger, deposit them inside another open box to continue their laying there. As the intermittent flow and drop of eggs from each individual moth dries up, the moth is picked up for a final time and cast onto the floor to die while a new moth is introduced into the box to begin laying in her place.

Serge was loud and panting when he cleared the threshold but, after adjusting both his pace and breathing to the room’s quiet, steady rhythm, is now standing still behind the kneeling women, watching them. Their faces, turned away from him and propped up on their forearms, are held just above the boxes, which makes the skirted waists that they present his way ride up into the air. The skirts’ fabric folds and pleats around their thighs but smoothly hugs their bottoms’ curves. Serge focuses on these, shifting his gaze from one woman’s haunches to the other’s. After a while he turns around and watches a third kneeling woman, bent over like the others but occupied instead with placing hatched larvae on a mat. This woman is facing him. Her arms are spread, her shoulders pulled back as she manoeuvres the slug-like creatures into place. She lays them out in rows, her hand returning to each row to neaten it the way a baker’s hand returns to rows of unbaked pastries on a tray. Each time she does this the top of her blouse falls half an inch or so, giving Serge a glimpse of breast. The larvae stir and wriggle slightly, their greyish-brown flesh soft and wrinkled, like the trunks of miniature elephants.

He’s come here looking for his mother, carrying a message from his father: something about costumes for the chorus, for the Cronos, children, Saturn, Saturday. It can wait, though. Two more women step into the Hatching Room with baskets slung across their backs. When they set these on the floor the woman kneeling by the mat pulls from them handfuls of mulberry leaves which she starts tearing up and scattering onto the larvae. The silkworms recoil and contract as the leaves hit them, then expand again, their oral cavities opening as they close in on the leaf-shards. The woman covers the mat in a gauze sheet, then turns to a second mat across which larger larvae have been spread and scatters torn-up leaves over these too. The women who have just walked in pick up empty baskets from beside the two mats and walk back towards the Mulberry Orchard, weaving around Serge on their way out.

A kind of clicking sound pervades the air: a fidgety, unsatisfying, low-level chafe. It doesn’t seem to be the laying moths who are making it: it’s coming from the far side of the room, from a large pit. Serge walks over to this, kneels beside it and sees something he’s not paid much attention to on previous visits to this room. Walled in by wooden planks, scores of white moths are coupling. Some are crawling around, their antennae twitching as they seek out partners; some are bumping blindly into one another, wrestling a little before moving on; but most are slotted into other moths. The males crouch over the females, thorax stacked above thorax, wings resting over wings. Once joined, they frot around, vibrating, as though trying to unhook themselves again, or to travel somewhere in this new formation. Serge reaches in and prods a couple with his finger; the stack of legs and wings topples onto its side and separates, leaving each half to stagger around in circles before beginning the slow process of reassembly. Once they’ve managed this, Serge scoops them up into his palm and, raising his hand into the air, says:

“You can do it, Orville and Wilbur!”

He jerks his palm upwards, propelling them towards the ceiling, but they arc leadenly, fall straight down to the floor and separate again. He picks the male, or perhaps female, moth up and, pinching its thorax in the fingers of one hand, plucks first one and then the other of its wings off. He sets the denuded torso back inside the pit to stagger around as it did before while he holds the wings up for inspection. Their markings, seen from close up, look like anaemic reproductions of the ones on the mulberry leaves. Thin, brown skeins run in lines through softer white tissue-straight, parallel lines all leading to a jagged, perpendicular main skein like spokes joining a central axis, breaking the creamy white into compartments. The pattern reminds Serge of the stained-glass windows of St. Alfege’s in Lydium-only these windows are without colour, void of scenes or characters: a set of empty, white, elongated boxes. He holds one right up to his eye, a moth-wing monocle: the Hatching Room, its wooden beams and kneeling women all sink behind gauze. They look like a daguerreotype, pale and sepiad. Serge, seven and splenetic, thinks: this is how this scene would look in years from now, if someone were to see it printed onto photographic paper-anaemic, faded, halfway dead.

ii

A ghost’s heading towards him, looming white and large behind the veil. The ghost lacks decorum: far from being awash with ghoulish dread, its face wears an expression of bemused derision.

“You look stupid,” Sophie tells him.

Serge drops the wing and tells her:

“So do you.”

He’s got a point: she’s all togged up in long white silks. The strips hang awkwardly about her almost-adolescent body, pinned around her shoulders and ungathered at the waist.

“It’s not finished yet,” she says. “It’s got to have stars spilling from it. You’ll look worse. Papa says you have to hold a scythe. Where’s Mama?”

“Through here somewhere.” Serge jerks his head in the direction of the Hatching Room’s inner door. Sophie picks up her trailing hem and steps through it; he follows. They cross a small courtyard and enter the Rearing House. Trellises rise from floor to ceiling: bamboo frames that cut the room up into grids which, half-filled by cocoons, veil this room like the wing-prism veiled the other. Some of the cocoons are thick, barely translucent; others are fine and transparent: through their incomplete white carapaces Serge can see worms moving their heads in slow figures of eight inside, the repetitive movement pulsing through the thin shells like dark heartbeats. They pass through to the Reeling Yard, in which a woman tends a pot from which wispy smoke is rising.

“Master Serge, Miss Sophie.”

“Where’s our mama?” Sophie asks.

The woman prods at the cocoons that bob in the pot’s boiling water, dunking and turning them as though she were cooking gnocchi. “With a buyer,” she says. She bends down towards a bowl of cooler water and picks at a pre-cooked cocoon with a needle, pulling its loosened filament out and attaching it to the reeling wheel. The cocoon spins in the water as she turns the wheel, unravelling completely until only the withered black body of the chrysalis inside is left, to float on the surface for a few seconds before sinking to the bottom of the bowl.

“Maureen’s baby,” Sophie mumbles to Serge.

“What?” the woman asks.

“You have to kill them or they rip the thread when they come out.”

The woman frowns: she knows that’s not what Sophie said. She unhooks the newly reeled bobbin, gives it to Serge and tells him to carry it through to the Throwing Room. Here, he and Sophie find three women standing several feet apart, the first twisting individual threads together, the second paying out the combined organzine across the room, the third cutting it when it reaches a certain length. Serge rests his reel above a stack of other reels at the first woman’s feet; the woman glances at him and nods without breaking her rhythm. The children move through to the Dyeing Room, about whose air an acrid smell hangs, borne on vapour rising from a large cauldron over which an older woman hovers like a witch, pushing with a stick at the mass inside it, as though trying to drown a kitten. As the children pass, she sets her stick down, plunges her arms elbow-deep into the cauldron and pulls out a soaked, crimson bundle of silk threads which she swings red-dripping through the air and hoists up to hang from wooden poles.

“Yuk,” says Sophie, skirting the room’s edges to avoid the splashes bouncing to a regular rain-drumbeat off the floor. Another rhythmic noise mingles with this: the repetitive whirring and clanking of a machine in the next room, laced which the higher, shriller sound of birdsong. A third sound weaves its way into the mesh: footsteps, growing louder as they near the door the children have just come through. Bodner enters, holding a bucket full of crimson berries which he sets down beside the cauldron before continuing towards the Weaving Room. As they follow him through, Sophie reaches down to scoop up a small handful of the berries.

“Open wide,” she tells Serge, holding one above his mouth: “Medicine.”

He opens with an “Aaaaa”; she pops it in; he closes, chews. It’s bitter; the taste stays with him as he moves past the large loom that fills most of the room, its piston-levers shoving a huge comb through warp into which weft-silk is fed from a bobbin that unwinds jerkily at the loom’s edge. The comb’s teeth move again and again through the same stretch of warp, as though obsessively brushing and rebrushing the same clump of hair. Bobbin-side of it lies tight, finished fabric; piston-side, the weft’s strands run adjacent but unjoined, like the strings of some strange, tuneless piano. There’s music in the air, though, coming from canaries perched in hanging cages. Orange-brown or brown-grey, spangled by regular, symmetrical markings that run down their breast and back, they chirp and tweet shrilly and decisively in overlapping relay, as though issuing instructions to the loom, machine-code. The woman moves around the loom making sure that it complies with these instructions, lining up new bobbins, picking fluff from the woven fabric’s surface, checking that the loose parallel strands are evenly spaced out: a human go-between.

Serge and Sophie follow Bodner through to the Store Room. Finished silks lie in piles here, folded and pleated, leaning against walls as they rise halfway to the ceiling. Silk tapestries hang between these piles: large, patterned weavings. One shows, in red and gold against a background of black moiré, a throned king being handed a baby by his queen, or perhaps one of the palace servants, while courtiers whisper to one another in the background. Another, on the facing wall, depicts a woman holding what appears to be a lion’s head as she runs after a man who seems to be dressed as a woman, while shepherds and their very human-looking sheep gaze on smilingly. Others have ciphers in place of pictures: flowing, dancing signs that suggest Chinese or Indian script, or else some kind of musical notation. A woman moves around beneath these, selecting sample fabrics from the piles and carrying them towards Serge and Sophie’s mother, who’s seated on cushions. Her legs are folded away beneath a low table across which several samples have been laid out for inspection by a man who’s kneeling awkwardly on the table’s far side. Facing away from Serge, Sophie and Bodner, she’s unaware of their presence in the room.

“… two hundred yards of crêpe… two hundred of Jacquard… three hundred thrown singles…” the man reads from a notebook; “organzine and tram, two hundred and fifty…”

“Versoie originals,” she tells him.

“Naturally, Mrs. Carrefax,” he answers. “Finest around. If you produced five times as much we’d buy it just as fast.”

“Five times? You want five times more?” she asks him.

“I said if you made five times as much we’d buy it.”

“Why would I want to make five times as much?” she asks him.

“You’d make more money.”

She stares at him quizzically, not having understood his last phrase.

“Mo-ney.” He mouths the word slowly, raising his voice-then, realising that this second action makes no difference, drops it right down and continues: “And what with technology leaping forwards as it is, new century and all that, you might consider-”

“We have no need of more money here. We are not poor,” she tells him.

“Maybe so, maybe so. But your methods are somewhat antiquated, it must be admitted. The loom, for example, must be more than-”

“It is a Huguenot loom. Its craftsmanship has never been surpassed. Where else can you find silks like these?” Her arm sweeps round the room, past the piles and hanging tapestries-and as her eyes trail after it she catches sight of Bodner and the children, interlopers on this small business colloquium. Her face drops-though the look she gives them isn’t unkind. “The costumes,” she says wearily.

“Papa says because I’m Rhea I should have stars coming from mine,” Sophie tells her.

“Tears?”

“Stars,” Sophie repeats.

“Stars,” she repeats back. “And you, Serge?”

Serge. He always relishes the way she says his name: where his father gives it as an electrical “Surge” rounded by an abrupt j, her version takes the form of a light and lofty “Sairge” that tails off in a whispered shh.

“I’m Cronos. That’s Saturn. I need sheets around my head. But Papa says to tell you that he also must have streams of nectar which must be gold and eleven feet long. And the other children will be Curetes. These are shepherds, Mr. Clair says. And they must have clashing spears.”

“And Papa says to tell you Serge must have a scythe,” says Sophie.

“Nathaniel is Poseidon,” Serge adds, “and he must be disguised like a sheep so he can hide among the real sheep.”

“Tell your father to send Nathaniel and the other children to me in the morning to be measured. The sheep too if he wants-but in the morning.” As his mother speaks these words, her hands dance with one another, the fingers of one tripping along the palm of the other before rising to tap her chest. Bodner signs back. His twisted upper lip rises and falls slightly as he does this, as though he were slowly chewing something.

“He’s saying ‘poppies,’ ” Sophie says to Serge.

“You don’t know that,” Serge tells her.

“Yes I do.”

Their mother tells the buyer: “I must leave you now. My tea awaits.”

“A pleasure, as always, Mrs. Carrefax,” he tells her, rising to his feet. “And do think about what I…”

But she’s turned away from him; his words, redundant, shrivel in the air. She follows Bodner, who has left the room, passing her hand lightly over Serge’s hair as she brushes past him. Serge and Sophie stand abandoned by the doorway for a while, quiet, floor-gazing. Then Sophie chirps, more shrilly than the birds in the next room:

“Let’s do some chemistry!”

iii

They run out to the stables. As they cross the Maze and Mosaic gardens they can hear the Day School children chanting their lines in preparation for the Pageant:

Then streams ran milk, then streams ran wine, and yellow honey flowed

From each green tree whereon the rays of fiery Phoebus glowed…

The lines loop and repeat, obeying commands barked by their father’s voice, which occasionally comes in, succinct and loud, over the blurred and uncertain infant voices for one or two words before retreating into the background again. The chanting fades as they pass beneath the trellises, muffled by thick poisonberry bushes.

The workshop door, window impastoed with a film of grease and dust, is unlocked; Sophie pushes it creaking open. An array of instruments greets them, strewn across shelves and benches: manometric flame and typesetting machines, phonautographs, rheotomes, old hotel annunciators and telegraph station switches-most of them opened, disgorged, their inner wiring spilling tangled, trailing from one level to another. Sophie selects a low-lying table and, pushing her right arm from her long silk robe and moving it across the table in a slow, broad sweep, indiscriminately slides the objects from its surface to the floor. Serge, meanwhile, starts opening cupboards.

“Where’s the set?” he asks.

“Above the work table,” she tells him.

He clambers onto this and retrieves, from a glass-fronted cupboard on the wall, a large boxed chemistry set. His father gave it to him for his seventh birthday, but Sophie’s made it more hers than his. She grabs it keenly as he passes it down, and tells him:

“Get the book as well.”

His hand feels its way around the cupboard and pulls out a heavy hard-bound tome: The Boy’s Playbook of Science. She grabs this from him too. By the time he’s climbed back to the floor she’s opened the box’s lid and is flipping through the book, looking for an experiment to carry out. Her eyes dart from it to the glassed, coloured liquids with a kind of avarice. Serge kneels on a stool beside her, peering over her shoulder. Her hair smells fresh and alive amidst the workshop’s must.

“ Sulphur,” she says. “Yes, we’ve got that. Potash… yes. Nitre?” Her finger runs up and down the rows of bottle-stoppers as though playing a glockenspiel. Serge feels a chemical reaction in his stomach, a kind of effervescent coupling and expanding of juices and elements. “Right,” Sophie announces. “We’ll do this one. Read me the recipe. Page eighty-four.”

She thrusts the book at him and starts laying out tubes, bottles, retorts and a gas burner. The Playbook’s cover has a flowery pyramid embossed on it. Serge flips it open, flips past “Properties of Matter,” “Adhesive Attraction,” “Impenetrability,” arrives at “Chemistry.” Hermes or Mercurius Trismegistus, minister of Osiris… alchemy… chemical combination, one or more substances uniting and producing third or other body different in nature from… Page 84: To return to…

“ ‘To return to our first experiment with the gunpowder,’ ” he reads, “ ‘take sulphur, place some in an iron ladle, heat it over a-’ ”

“Iron ladle?” Sophie says. “We can use a cup.” She roots around the work table, tips a bunch of fuses from a metal cup and, after wiping its interior with her fingers, decants clear liquid into it from a bottle. A sharp smell burns Serge’s nose, inside the bridge. Wrinkling her own, Sophie sets the bottle down, sparks up the Bunsen burner and holds the cup over it. “What next?”

“ ‘… over a gas flame till it-’ ”

“I’m doing that already, stupid. Till it what?”

“ ‘-catches fire,’ ” Serge reads.

On cue, the cup starts burning. “Oh, wow!” says Sophie. The flames are blue, not orange; they make her eyes, already blue, glow bluer and her teeth flare bluey-white, like patterned marble.

“We’re meant to pour it into a bucket of water,” Serge says, “but the room should be blacked out.”

“Well, we’ll skip that,” Sophie tells him. “What’s next?”

Next is an experiment with sulphur and dissolved nitre; then one with sulphates of potash and baryta; then another with nitrate of baryta and metal potassium. Serge reads directions from the Playbook; Sophie executes them, her face running red, orange, grey and blue again as each compound lights, flares or fizzles. When they come to heat up charcoal Sophie blows into the cup and they watch sparks fly out, the powder turning from black to red, then fiery white, before falling back grey and ashen, consumed by its own heat. As Sophie prods the ashes, Serge feels the reaction in his stomach again: a liquid flaring eating his own insides.

“Pearl-ash next,” says Sophie. “Read out the next passage.”

“ ‘If some more nitre be heated in a ladle, and charcoal added,’ ” Serge begins, “ ‘a brilliant deflagration (deflagro) occurs, and the charcoal, instead of passing-’ ”

“It’s ‘day-flag-row,’ stupid, not ‘der-flower-grow,’ ” she says as she holds the new concoction over the Bunsen flame. “Carry on.”

“ ‘-instead of passing away in the air… passing, passing away as…’ ”

The queasiness is spreading to his head as his own stomach deflagrates, something sour and crimson blossoming, expanding. He looks up. Sophie’s staring at him, static. Her whole face seems to have slowed down-slowed down and expanded too. Her hair has expanded outwards from her head, rising to stand straight up in the air. His gaze follows it upwards and he sees instruments rise and hover above shelves. They do this incredibly slowly, as though willing themselves upwards, through excruciating effort, millimetre by millimetre. A window breaks, with the same slowness; he watches each of its glass fragments separate from the plane around it. There’s no crash or tinkle; there’s no sound at all. Serge tries to ask Sophie how she can make her hair stand up like that, but finds that his words, instead of travelling out into the air, push back into his mouth and on towards his stomach. Now sound and speed return, first as an after-rush of air, then, emerging from within this, a high-pitched hum that seems to have been going for some time but of which he’s only now become aware. Sophie’s still staring at him. Her hair’s tangled and her eyes are wild. A gasp comes from her mouth; then another, then a shriek of pleasure. She shouts something to him.

“What?” he shouts back. The hum’s filling his ears.

“Expl-” she begins-but he throws up right then, on the floor. His puke is red, laced with a briny, effervescent silver the same colour as potassium. Sophie looks at it, then back at him, then shrieks again, her shoulders shaking as the shrieks turn into sobbing laughs that judder her whole body.

Their father opines later that there must have been some contaminant in the cup to cause such a violent explosion. He ventures, further, that Serge and Sophie’s extreme proximity to the point of detonation kept them from harm: had they been standing three feet from it, the force of the expanding air would have been enough to kill, or at least seriously injure, them. He plots diagrams showing the explosion’s vectors through the room-table to work table, to shelf, to window-and tries for several days to ascertain the exact nature of the compound inadvertently concocted by his children. Serge and Sophie, for their part, spend weeks, then months, trying to reproduce the blast. They use means more intuitive than their father’s-mixing elements together at random, heating, cooling and remixing them-but have no more success than he did. All they ever get are small-fry phutts and phizzes, unsatisfying placebos.

i

Sophie and Serge are educated together. Their tutor, Mr. Clair, is shinily clean-shaven, with sharp features and an aquiline nose down which he peers through metal-framed glasses as he reads dictations, eyes zapping from his paper to the children.

“ ‘Amund-sen’s last ven-ture, through the Northwest Pass-age, yielded little joy. It is to be hoped, by those that value con-quest of the earth, that his current one, to the anti-po-dean regions, will prove for-tui-tous. For those whose daily tra-vels take them no fur-ther than the slums of Man-chester and Glas-gow, it will be of scant conse-quence. The forth-coming coro-nation, simi-larly, will do little to put bread on ta-bles of the poor.’ ”

Serge gets stuck on words like “antipodean” and “fortuitous,” and even ones like “tables.” He keeps switching letters round. It’s not deliberate, just something that he does. He sees letters streaming through the air, whole blocks of them, borne on currents occupying a zone beneath the threshold of the comprehensible, and tries to pluck and stick them to the page as best he can, but it’s an imprecise science: by the time he’s got a few pinned down, the others have floated on ahead or changed their meaning, and “Manchester” ’s “chest” has turned into an old oak coffer, the king’s “coronation” into a flower, a carnation. While Sophie scribbles neatly and assiduously, and always faultlessly, inscribing each word as it emerges from Mr. Clair’s mouth, Serge, bathing in the phrases’ afterglow, usually gives up after a few lines and just lets the words billow around him, losing himself in their shapes and patterns, bright and alive in front of Clair’s grey skin.

When Mr. Clair arrived at Versoie House, one of the first things he unpacked from his trunk, alongside volumes by the likes of Morris, Bastiat and Weber, was a painting, which he hung carefully on the wall of his small room. Under interrogation from Serge and Sophie, who spent so much time curiously perching on his bed and window-sill that Maureen had to come and turf them out, he admitted having painted it himself. It showed, he told them, Venice: the intersection of two canals, a mooring jetty being approached by a small boat. Painting’s a big thing for him; he’s made it a large part of their curriculum. Here too, though, Serge is wanting. He’s a steady brushman, and has a good feel for line and movement, but he just can’t do perspective: everything he paints is flat. Mr. Clair’s explained the principle of it to him, its history, and what he calls its “use-value”; he’s shown him its mechanics, how to scale figures and objects so as to make them appear distant, how to make lines converge towards a vanishing point set within or just beyond the picture’s border and so on. But Serge just can’t do it: his perceptual apparatuses refuse point-blank to be twisted into the requisite configuration. He sees things flat; he paints things flat. Objects, figures, landscapes: flat. Even when Clair sits him down in front of reproductions of Giottos, Constables and Vermeers and orders him to copy them, the scenes accordion down into two dimensions, sideways-facing characters stuck straight onto squashed backdrops. On Tuesday afternoons, the slot Clair’s assigned to landscape painting, the children invariably head up to the attic, and Serge paints the estate from above: its paths, corridors and avenues all laid out in plan view. Sophie, meanwhile, takes a leaf or branch with her and copies it in photographic detail.

Sophie’s so advanced in natural science that Mr. Clair makes no pretence of knowing anything she doesn’t, or even half of what she does. When the three of them collect pollen samples from around the Crypt Park or Mosaic Garden, Sophie whisks the jars off to her “lab,” the smaller stable workshop (ceiling-beams stained by a burn-mark that the years have faded but not wiped away) she’s now made her own and from which Serge is more or less excluded, and emerges two days later with drawings of magnified slides and diagrams showing varying rates of cross-pollination which she’s correlated with her analysis of the constituent mixture of this season’s honey. It is she, not Clair, who leads the trio on walks through Bodner’s Kitchen Garden. While the mute servant trundles around shunting wheelbarrows of dead stems to the compost corner, she reels off the names of plants:

“Portal Ruby, Jonker Van Tet, Symphony, Haphill, Royal Sovereign…”

“A tautologism,” Mr. Clair says. “All sovereigns are royal.”

“This one is Boskoop Giant,” Sophie continues. “And this, blackcurrant Ben Sarek.”

“And most of them are illegitimate.”

“Cherries: Stella, Morello. Pear: Doyenne du Comice. And here are apples: Charles Ross, Lord Lambourne, King of Pippin…”

“A cavalier named all our fruits. Come the new Commonwealth we’ll name them after tradesmen: cobblers, bakers-”

“Shh!” hisses Sophie. “Look.” She juts her finger at a stalk two or three inches from the ground, where a small spider clings almost vertically to its web. “A walnut orb-weaver,” she tells them. “And this,” she says, pointing at a tiny dark thing navigating its way over clumps of earth below the spider’s eyrie, “is a bloody-nosed beetle. It dribbles bright red fluid from its mouth…”

Behind them, a fountain more than dribbles as its centrepiece, a wrought-iron swan, gurgles and vomits as though it had over-gorged itself on the garden’s aristocratic fruit. Sophie leads them round this, towards the lilies. As they pass the enormous poppy bed she exchanges finger-signs with Bodner, who’s half-lost among the swollen, bulbous heads.

“Don’t ever let your father catch you doing that,” Clair warns her.

Sophie shrugs. “These lilies,” she continues lecturing them as they arrive beside swathes of deep maroon, “are Sun Gods. Here-” she digs her hand into the ground to scoop and scrape earth away from the bulb-“is the basal plate, this round pyramid thing. At the top, the flowers: three outer sepals and three inner petals.” As her fingers gently separate the flower-parts, Serge gazes at the earth wedged beneath their nails, stark half-moon hemispheres of dark against pale white. “Six anthers and a three-lobed stigma.” She caresses the stamen, running her fingers right up to the end where white pistils stick out like antennae. “These ones are seventh generation, from a single parent flower.”

“They can’t be from just one flower,” Clair says. “You need two to make baby flowers.”

“Not with lilies,” Sophie corrects him. “They can fertilise themselves. And then their offspring fertilise each other.”

“Endogamy,” tuts Clair. “Perversion of royal houses.”

“What’s mahogany?” asks Serge.

“You’re as bad as Mama,” Sophie tells him.

“No I’m not!” he snaps back. She flicks small flecks of earth at him.

“I think this conversation has gone far enough,” says Mr. Clair. “Back to the classroom.”

Their tutor’s not averse to games. He even schedules in a “ludic session” every week. Excitedly unwrapping a parcel which arrives from London via Lydium several months into his tenure, he presents to them the Realtor’s Game, in which contestants must move object-avatars (a car, a ship, a dog) round squares which represent the city of Chicago, amassing wealth and influence as they progress.

“R.R.: I own that. Fare, one hundred dollars!” Sophie gleefully announces as Serge’s near-destitute mutt pitches on her territory. She has a knack of snapping up prime squares, leaving Serge to mop up dregs of real estate: Rickety Row, Shab Street and the like-although he’s always keen to buy the Ting-a-Ling Telephone Company, despite its poor yield, sold on visions of humming wires and buzzing switchboards, of connections.

“Public transport should be gratis,” Clair announces as he lends Serge the hundred. “And that loan is interest free: I don’t need a pound of dog-flesh thrown into the bargain. I hope this game adequately impresses upon you the iniquities of capital.”

It doesn’t: they both love it. They play extra rounds during free sessions and at weekends. One warm early-summer morning they decide to play outside, but, finding the board won’t sit flat on the Mulberry Lawn’s grass and being so familiar with the layout of the grid that its actual presence before them has become unnecessary, they assign one of the estate’s landmarks to each of its squares-Crypt Park’s second bench for George Street, beehives for Soakum Lighting System and so on-and conduct their game by moving physically from one spot to another. To determine the number of places to advance on any go, they throw a handful of sycamore leaves up in the air and see how many fall within the circumference of a skipping-rope laid on the grass around the thrower’s body. As the outdoor version takes over from the original, additions creep into the rules, modifications: if two players find themselves in the Maze Garden at the same time, one may challenge the other to a “rolling duel” in which two tennis balls are rolled by hand along the maze path, the goal of each roller being to knock the other’s ball out of the maze, the winner subsequently commandeering from the loser a property of his or her (usually her) choice; or if a player finds him- or herself short of rent when lodged beside the beehives, he or she (usually he) may place his hand against a hive and hold it there, braving stings, for half a minute in lieu of making payment-a full minute if the rent’s above five hundred dollars. At first, games advance slowly as both players have to travel to their opponent’s game-location on each move, to check that the other doesn’t cheat when counting sycamore-leaf numbers. After a while, though, Serge has the idea of expanding the Ting-a-Ling Telephone Company out into real space, and they rig up, with the help of poles that feed them over garden walls and around hedges, a primitive web of strings and soup-can mouth- and earpieces through which they can communicate their positions and report the outcomes of each sycamore-throw, for some reason trusting each other to tell the truth when being overheard live. The network can’t cover the whole estate; they have to come to speaking-listening hubs that, in reality, are close enough to one another that they could simply shout. So as not to blow the fantasy of telecommunication, they conduct their business in hushed voices, almost whispers. After a few days they’re spending whole sessions not trudging from spot to spot but rather sitting at their tele-posts, quietly agreeing their positions and negotiating sub-clauses for each now-imaginary move…

The attic draws them back again and again. On rainy days they go to play the estate-wide version of The Realtor’s Game at its window, shunting their imaginary doubles from park to garden, avenue to path to lawn. While doing this, they fiddle with their father’s archive. He has stacks of old recordings: lamp-blackened glass phonautograph plates and rolls of paper bearing scratch marks laid down by voices moaning from deaf bodies before either of them was born; zinc master discs that, cut in the final years of the last century and the first few of this, appear to Serge like coins of some exotic currency gone out of circulation-miniature, round islands of arrested time. The surfaces of the zinc discs give off a faint smell of beeswax-beeswax overlaid with some sharp chemical. (“Chromic acid,” Sophie tells him when she sees him wrinkling his nose at one. “I’ve got a whole phial of it in my lab.”) The cylinders they find beside these are formed entirely of wax: solid brown columns of the stuff whose smooth, moulded surfaces have been defaced by networks of engravings-strange, meshed graffiti. Sophie and Serge can play these back, thanks to an old Edison phonograph they find gathering dust among them. Selecting recordings at random (some are in labeled cardboard tubes, others are loose and unmarked), they slide the cylinder onto its mandrel and wait for the sound to trickle out. Most of the cylinders contain sequences of letters, spoken out aloud, repeatedly:

“B. B-ee. B-b-b-b-b-ee. T. T-ee. T-t-t-t-t-ee. S-s-s-s-s, S-s-s-s-s. B-ee…”

The voices, those of Day School pupils (now alumni), manifest varying degrees of distortedness and atonality; the letters warp and morph as they progress. They gather certain rhythms, patterns of repetition or half-repetition, then, just when it seems that there’s a logic to their sequences, break and relinquish them again. Serge and Sophie fall into the habit of putting on these recordings each time they’re in the attic, a mechanical background chorus to their various antics up there. Sometimes they play, on a newer Berliner gramophone, not cylinders but discs: exhibition plates their father’s had printed to showcase his students’ ability to enunciate whole phrases or manage entire conversations. After setting the disc gently on its turntable and cranking the Berliner’s handle, they lead the needle down towards the narrow groove with the assiduousness of surgeons guiding knives back to incisions made on previous occasions, then return to their tasks while random dialogues (model exchanges between infant shopkeepers and customers or passengers and train guards) waft around them. Often, when a disc’s come to its end, they let it run on, playing and replaying the same stretch of silence-silence which in fact is anything but silent, bursting as it is with a crackle and snap that conjures up for Serge the image of Bodner’s deformed mouth opening and closing: many Bodners’ mouths, repeated side by side in rows that fill the attic’s air and extend out beyond its roof and walls. Sometimes, while Sophie’s busy copying plants, he props his head right up against the gramophone and watches the needle running through its trench, snagging and jumping constantly as though locked in constant hostile struggle with the furrow. The disc’s made of a thick black material.

“It’s shellac,” Sophie informs him when he asks her one overcast Monday. “Made from secretions of the lac bug.”

“The lack bug? What’s it lacking?”

“Lac, no k. I’ve got one of those in my lab as well. That’s Rainer’s voice.”

She’s right: the disc he’s come across this morning contains not phrases but a passage of verse which, spoken in a child’s unbroken voice, seems strangely fitting for its newfound auditorium:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again…

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-

But they start coughing too. The smoke’s blowing everywhere now, swirling around stage and audience. The chorus disappear beneath it; a solitary voice heroically chants from its depths the words

headlong fell

then gives up. People rise from their seats and head for safer, upwind ground; Miss Hubbard and her behind-sheet helpers abandon their post too, eyes streaming. Serge does the same. Only Sophie remains in position, completely unperturbed, beaming out at them from veils of smoke.

“We’ll have the interval here,” booms Carrefax.

Prevented by brimstone from reaching the trestle tables on the lawn to the house-side of the stage, the audience and players hover around stream-side, hemmed in by the water, cheeks wet with tears. Conversation is stifled: topics include the aesthetic merits and demerits of the telegraph line on the hill; the improvement in voice quality of the children year on year; ditto that of the staging; how Sophie has a bright future in armaments and explosives; the extent of Germany’s military ambitions; how tea would be nice if only they could get to it. The smoke dwindles, then peters out until the crucible sits on the grass innocuous and empty. Sophie removes it; Miss Hubbard and the players return and start moving props around; Carrefax orders the audience to retake their seats; they do so.

They find the stage transformed. Where Pergusa’s trees stood is a bed of upright reeds; beside these, two trellises covered with white asphodels. The round, cyan-coloured lake has given way to two rivers, one fiery red, one black, both undulating thanks to extras who’ve now donned shadowy robes. Two adamantine columns have appeared; between them, a winged Fury brandishes a whip above a dog two of whose three fierce papier-mâché heads loll about his shoulders. The audience make appreciative murmurs; Carrefax acknowledges these, turning back to grin one way then another.

“Hades’ realm, you see. That’s Phlegeton, and Styx.”

“Is this in the original?” asks Widsun.

“Poetic licence,” Carrefax replies. “The Versoie Folio variant. Malone. Music, Miss Hubbard!”

From behind the sheet jumps the now-familiar scratch and crackle of the gramophone, followed by loud music full of pomp. Borne on this music, Dis and Proserpine re-emerge arm in arm. Dis wears a tall arched crown with a border of what looks like genuine ermine; in his hand he holds a staff topped with a stuffed bird that Serge knows is real because he watched his sister gut and stuff it just two days ago. Proserpine wears a small diadem formed by a wreath of laced dried flowers. They advance slowly, ceremoniously, towards the audience; the extras fall into line behind them, Fury, dog, river-undulators and all, their collective gaze focused firmly on the middle of the front row. Drawing the whole train to a halt just inches from the audience, Proserpine slowly removes her diadem and places it on Mrs. Carrefax’s head. Then Dis removes his crown and places it on Widsun’s.

“No!” says Carrefax. “The crown goes on my head!”

But Dis isn’t looking at him and, consequently, can’t read his lips’ instructions. He shoves his bird-staff out to Widsun too; Widsun receives it, smiling.

“Why, thank you.”

“That was a mix-up.” Carrefax turns left and right to explain the mistake to those behind him. “Must’ve told them I’d be sitting on her other side. No matter: carry on!” he calls out, rolling his hands redundantly at the actors, who have turned round and are heading back towards the sheet. As they pass Sophie, she snaps her box shut, rises to her feet and strides off decisively towards the Maze Garden. The smoke’s caught up with her at last: as she brushes by Serge he notices her face is red and flushed.

The underworld disappears as suddenly as it appeared, whisked off by its own undulating shadows, who replace it with dull brown and grey silks around which they plant sticks strung with dried-out vines and rotten husks of corn. The chorus shuffle back out to explain that this agricultural blight is Ceres’ doing; Ceres/Amelia re-appears to confirm this by languidly waving her hand towards the barren earth.

“Her way of mourning,” Carrefax adds.

Cyan the nymph re-appears and tries to say something to Ceres, but seems unable to recite her lines: her mouth moves falteringly, emitting gurgles. The audience shuffle awkwardly, embarrassed for the girl-but the chorus reassure them that this is part of the act: Cyan has lost the powers of speech, and

mouth and tongue for utterance now would serve her turn no more.

Howbeit,

they continue,

a token manifest she gave for her to know

What was become of Proserpine. Her girdle she did show

Still hovering on her holy pool…

On cue, Cyan shows Ceres the girdle Proserpine let slip earlier, and the two girls nod conspiratorially at one another.

“Aha!” says Widsun to Carrefax, in an equally conspiratorial tone. “Mute signals serve their purpose after all!”

Carrefax snorts. On stage, a new character appears: the portly Ivan, sitting at a table sporting a long crude-wool beard. In front of him, on the table top, the extras have placed a mechanical object with turbine and handle.

“Zeus,” Carrefax announces proudly. “Now watch out for his thunderbolts…”

When Amelia approaches Ivan and informs him that she’s less than happy about their daughter’s ravishment by her own uncle, he responds by cranking the handle of his turbine round and round. The thing whirrs; the whirrs rise in pitch as the cylinder accelerates until, eventually, sparks fly from its end. The audience purr, impressed.

“Pretty good, no?” beams Carrefax.

The sparks have the effect of summoning back little round Giles, who’s kept his wings but traded his bow and quiver for a telegram boy’s cap.

“Isn’t that Cupid?” asks the second-or-third-row lady.

“No, he’s Hermes now,” Carrefax corrects her. “Zeus’s special envoy.”

The next few scenes are confusing. Their gist seems to be that Hermes has to run around carrying messages between Pluto and Ceres; but the content of these messages, although read out aloud by their recipients, is lost amid the whirring and cracking of the turbine, which Ivan continues cranking throughout, as though its sparks alone guaranteed the network’s operation. Serge slinks back behind the sheet in preparation for his scene, which involves him snitching on Proserpine by testifying that he saw her suck seven seeds from a pomegranate while sojourning in the underworld, an act which for some reason makes her ineligible for revivification. Despite his semi-villainous role, his entrance is greeted with “hurrah!”s-a tradition dating back as long as he can remember, the locals’ vicarious way of paying tribute to his father. The cheers continue as he snitches; they turn to boos as Ceres-becoming what the chorus describe as “wrought with anger,” despite the fact that Amelia seems as unwrought by his skulduggery as she’s been by everything else that’s happened over the last forty minutes-waves her hand vaguely at him and decrees that he be turned into an owl. Sympathetic cries accompany his head’s disappearance beneath the huge feathered mask, followed by applause as he flaps his arms to reveal intricately webbed sleeves.

The Pageant’s almost over now. Ascalaphus’s transformation heralds that of most of the other characters as Ceres goes on a bird-producing rampage. Harvesters, undulators, shadows are all rendered avian, disappearing like Serge beneath beaks and feathers. Some, robbed of speech, are condemned to be “sluggish, screeching”; others are allowed to retain human voices and ordered to take to the skies above the oceans,

of purpose that your thought

Might also to the seas be known…

Even the chorus who pronounce these lines are transformed into birds. Since there’s no one left to put their masks on, they transform each other, the last remaining one pulling the feathered head onto his own shoulders with the resigned look of the final participant in some mass suicide. The stage now full of birds, the same recording that started the whole Pageant off is now replayed from behind the screen, growing louder and louder until birdsong fills the whole lawn. Sophie’s meant to repeat her smoke-trick at this point, to produce clouds for all these newly generated birds to soar through, but she’s nowhere to be seen.

“Where is that blasted girl?” Carrefax barks. He scours the lawn eagle-eyed for a few moments, then booms out: “No matter: curtain call, everyone!”

The masked children can’t really see him, and continue soaring around, bumping into one another. A couple of them fall over. Carrefax steps out onto the stage to haul them into line. He pokes his head behind the sheet and the music stops abruptly. There’s silence for a moment; then the audience break into loud applause.

“Thank you, thank you!” shouts Carrefax above it. “Tea, coffee, light refreshments on the lawn. And if…”

But his sentence is lost amidst the bustle of people rising from seats, stretching limbs, straightening skirts and waistcoats. Parents make their way towards the sheet for reunions with their children. The volume of general chatter rises as people vie to outdo each other in their praise for the production, for Mrs. Carrefax’s costumes, for Miss Hubbard, Serge, the chorus, Maureen and Frieda’s sandwiches, the gramophone for providing such ambience, the skies for holding off. Carrefax works the crowd:

“The coronation scene? I thought that this year, of all years… What? The crown was meant for my head… No, quite funny really: honoured guest and all that… Perfectly safe: water and glycerine combination; she was going to make clouds, but I don’t think we could have withstood any more brimstone…”

Shadows grow longer. Children grow tired. They tug at parents’ sleeves, or sit beneath the trestle table unpicking cucumber slices from sandwiches’ entrails and mining seams of chocolate from the ruins of layered cakes. Cupid/Hermes dozes in a chair. Sophie remains as absent as Persephone. Eventually people slink off, their footsteps dwindling up the path’s gravel. Urns, tables and chairs are brought back in; the props are returned to the schoolrooms. Only flattened grass, the odd discarded feather or crushed flower, Sophie’s box of chemicals and the tautly strung-up sheet still bear witness to the fact that something has happened on the lawn when Serge comes out after dark to fetch his bird mask.

The wind’s died down by now; clouds hug the ground more closely, warming the night air. It’s quiet: the only sounds Serge hears are the slow oozing of the stream and a kind of rustling that he thinks at first must be a badger or hedgehog in the undergrowth beside it. It’s a rhythmic scratching, a rubbing chafe that carries on its back a higher sound, a squeak like the noise of an unoiled gate being opened and closed repeatedly. As Serge moves across the lawn he realises that the sound’s coming not from the undergrowth but from somewhere much closer. He looks around; although there’s no moon to light up the lawn a small glow is spilling from a lantern someone’s left behind the sheet. When he comes face-on to the sheet he sees what’s making the noise-or, rather, sees its shadow, cast on the sheet’s far side by the lantern so as to be visible from this side, like a film made up of only silhouettes. It’s some kind of moving thing made of articulated parts. One of the parts is horizontal, propped up on four stick legs like a low table; the other is vertical, slotted into the underside of the table’s rear end but rising above it, its spine wobbling as the whole contraption rocks back and forth. The thing pulses like a insect’s thorax, and with each pulse comes the rustle, scratch and chafe; with each pulse the horizontal, low part squeaks, and the vertical part now starts emitting a deep grunt, a gruff, hog-like snort. The grunts grow more intense as Serge comes closer to the sheet; the squeaks grow louder. The front part has a head; the back part too-Serge can make this out now, rising from broad shoulders. The thing’s rocking and wobbling faster and faster, squeaking and grunting more with every pulse.

Serge has started moving round to the sheet’s side so he can find out what the source of this strange shadow display is when a scream comes from some way behind him. He turns round. A second scream follows the first: the voice is Maureen’s, and it’s coming from the house. He runs back across the lawn towards it. The door’s open; in the hall, Maureen’s crouching down in front of Spitalfield, who’s lying immobile on the floorboards. Spitalfield is stiff: his legs are sticking straight out at an odd angle to the ground; his mouth is frozen in a gaping rictus; foam sits hard-set on its lips.

“The little bitch!” shrieks Maureen. “Where’s your sister?”

“I don’t know,” replies Serge. “Is he dead?”

He’s dead alright. Sophie, when she eventually emerges, denies having fed the poison to him deliberately.

“He must have sneaked into my lab,” she whines. “It’s not my fault.”

Maureen thinks otherwise. She tries to get her employer to punish his daughter, but Carrefax takes Sophie’s word on this one.

“We’re British, not Napoleonic. Innocent till proven guilty.”

Sophie assuages whatever guilt she might feel by deciding to accord Spitalfield proper funeral rites. To Maureen’s further horror she persuades her father to allow her to stuff the cat. This takes her two days of uninterrupted labour: Serge, perched on a chair in her lab’s corner, watches her empty out his stomach of its organs, guts and juices, then peel the skin back from the skull towards the spine and ribs. The innards, gathered in a bucket, exude a rancid, sour smell; Serge moves closer to Sophie to block it out by breathing in the odour of her hair.

“Now you’re distracting me,” she says. “Clear off.”

She calls him back, though, some hours later, to show him a trick of which she seems extremely proud. Sticking two electric wires into the cat’s left hind leg, she throws a switch on to complete the circuit-and the leg, galvanised by the current, twitches and then flexes, as though Spitalfield were trying to walk. She switches the current off, and the leg reverts to its rigid, straight position. She throws the switch again; again the leg twitches and flexes. As she animates the leg over and over again, she shakes with a laughter that’s sparked up afresh with each new quickening-as though she were also animated by the current, which was somehow running through her body too. Serge, watching the leg move with the angular stiffness of a clockwork mechanism, thinks of semaphore machines, their angles and positions, then of the strange, moving shapes he saw played out across the sheet. After a while, he starts to wonder if perhaps the morbid and hypnotic sequences being executed by the dead cat’s limb contain some kind of information-“contain” in the sense of enclosing, locking in, repeating in a code for which no key’s available, at least not to him…

On the third day after Spitalfield’s demise, Sophie emerges with the reconstituted cat mounted on a board and, gathering a small crowd in the Crypt Park, has them squeeze into the Crypt itself, whose door her father opens with a large, rusty key. Here, among cobwebs undisturbed for who knows how long and dust-residues whose origins must lie in the last century if not the one before that, she installs her trophy on top of a tomb whose upper surface is so strewn with dead insects that she has to clear a swathe for it with her sleeve.

“He’s the wrong shape,” says Serge.

He’s right: Spitalfield’s surface has gone corrugated, with stiff ripples running down his fur; his neck juts out aggressively, like a tiger’s or leopard’s; his face is dented and irregular, with unmatching marble eyes.

“Gives him more character,” their father says. “Good job! Any words?”

There’s a pause while they all wait for her to say something: Serge, their father, Bodner, Miss Hubbard and Mr. Clair. Widsun’s not with them anymore: he left the day after the Pageant. After a few seconds Sophie brushes her hands and replies:

“No. Let’s go.”

But after they’ve stepped out and locked the door behind them she seems to change her mind. She stops, turns to her father and, pointing to the Crypt, smiles as she asks:

“You know what this is now?”

“No,” he answers. “What?”

“A catacomb.”

“A cat a-what? ‘Catacomb’? Ah, yes,” says Carrefax, “a catacomb: that’s good. Very good.”

i

The static’s like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking, nor even a group thinking, collectively. It’s bigger than that, wider-and more direct. It’s like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush. Each night, when Serge drops in on it, it recoils with a wail, then rolls back in crackling waves that carry him away, all rudderless, until his finger, nudging at the dial, can get some traction on it all, some sort of leeway. The first stretches are angry, plaintive, sad-and always mute. It’s not until, hunched over the potentiometer among fraying cords and soldered wires, his controlled breathing an extension of the frequency of air he’s riding on, he gets the first quiet clicks that words start forming: first he jots down the signals as straight graphite lines, long ones and short ones, then, below these, he begins to transcribe curling letters, dim and grainy in the arc light of his desktop…

He’s got two masts set up. There’s a twenty-two-foot pine one topped with fifteen more feet of bamboo, all bolted to an oak-stump base half-buried in the Mosaic Garden. Tent pegs circle the stump round; steel guy wires, double-insulated, climb from these to tether the mast down. On the chimney of the main house, a pole three feet long reaches the same height as the bamboo. Between the masts are strung four eighteen-gage manganese copper wires threaded through oak-lath crosses. In Serge’s bedroom, there’s a boxed tuning coil containing twenty feet of silk-covered platinoid, shellacked and scraped. Two dials are mounted on the box’s lid: a large, clock-handed one dead in the centre and, to its right, a smaller disc made from ash-wood recessed at the back and dotted at the front by twenty little screws with turned-down heads set in a circle to form switch-studs. The detector’s brass with an adjusting knob of ebonite; the condenser’s Murdock; the crystal, Chilean gelina quartz, a Mighty Atom mail-ordered from Gamage of Holborn. For the telephone, he tried a normal household one but found it wasn’t any use unless he replaced the diaphragms, and moved on to a watch-receiver-pattern headset wound to a resistance of eight and a half thousand ohms. The transmitter itself is made of standard brass, a four-inch tapper arm keeping Serge’s finger a safe distance from the spark gap. The spark gap flashes blue each time he taps; it makes a spitting noise, so loud he’s had to build a silence box around the desk to isolate his little RX station from the sleeping household-or, as it becomes more obvious to him with every session, to maintain the little household’s fantasy of isolation from the vast sea of transmission roaring all around it.

Tonight, as on most nights, he starts out local, sweeping from two hundred and fifty to four hundred metres. It’s the usual traffic: CQ signals from experimental wireless stations in Masedown and Eliry, tapping out their call signs and then slipping into Q-code once another bug’s responded. They exchange signal quality reports, compare equipment, enquire about variations in the weather and degrees of atmospheric interference. The sequence QTC, which Serge, like any other Wireless World subscriber, knows means “Have you anything to transmit?”, is usually met with a short, negative burst before both questioner and responder move on to fish for other signals. Serge used to answer all CQs, noting each station’s details in his call-book; lately, though, he’s become more selective in the signals he’ll acknowledge, preferring to let the small-fry click away as background chatter, only picking up the pencil to transcribe the dots and dashes when their basic QRNs and QRAs unfold into longer sequences. This is happening right now: an RXer in Lydium who calls himself “Wireworm” is tapping out his thoughts about the Postmaster General’s plans to charge one guinea per station for all amateurs.

“… tht bedsteads n gas pipes cn b used as rcving aerials is well-kn0n I mslf hv dn this,” Wireworm’s boasting, “als0 I cn trn pian0 wire in2 tuning coil fashion dtctrs from wshing s0da n a needle mst I obtain lcnses 4 ths wll we gt inspctrs chcking r pots n pans 2 C tht they cnfrm 2 rgulatns I sgst cmpaign cvl ds0bdns agnst such impsitions…”

Transcribing his clicks, Serge senses that Wireworm’s not so young: no operator under twenty would bother to tap out the whole word “fashion.” The spacing’s a little awkward also: too studied, too self-conscious. Besides, most bugs can improvise equipment: he once made Bodner’s spade conduct a signal and the house’s pipes vibrate and resonate, sending Frieda running in panic from her bath…

Serge moves up to five hundred metres. Here are stronger, more decisive signals: coastal stations’ call signs, flung from towering masts. Poldhu’s transmitting its weather report; a few nudges away, Malin, Cleethorpes, Nordeich send out theirs. Liverpool’s exchanging messages with tugboats in the Mersey: Serge transcribes a rota of towing duties for tomorrow. Further out, the lightship Tongue’s reporting a derelict’s position: the coordinates click their way in to the Seaforth station, then flash out again, to be acknowledged by Marconi operators of commercial liners, one after the other. The ships’ names reel off in litany: Falaba, British Sun, Scania, Morea, Carmania, each name appendaged by its church: Cunard Line, Allen, Aberdeen Direct, Canadian Pacific Railway, Holland-America. The clicks peter out, and Serge glances at the clock: it’s half a minute before one. A few seconds later, Paris ’s call-sign comes on: FL for Eiffel. Serge taps his finger on the desktop to the rhythm of the huge tower’s stand-by clicks, then holds it still and erect for the silent lull that always comes just before the time-code. All the operators have gone silent: boats, coastal stations, bugs-all waiting, like him, for the quarter-second dots to set the air, the world, time itself back in motion as they chime the hour.

They sound, and then the headphones really come to life. The press digest goes out from Niton, Poldhu, Malin, Cadiz: Diario del Atlántico, Journal de l’Atlantique, Atlantic Daily News… “Madero and Suárez Shot in Mexico While Trying to Escape”… “Trade Pact Between”… “Entretien de”… “Shocking Domestic Tragedy in Bow”… “Il Fundatore”… “Husband Unable to Prevent”… The stories blur together: Serge sees a man clutching a kitchen knife chasing a politician across parched earth, past cacti and armadillos, while ambassadors wave papers around fugitive and pursuer, negotiating terms. “Grain Up Five, Lloyds Down Two”… “Australia All Out for Four Hundred and Twenty-one, England Sixty-two for Three in Reply”… Malin’s got ten private messages for Lusitania, seven for Campania, two for Olympic: request instructions how to proceed with… the honour of your company on the occasion of… weighing seven and a half pounds, a girl… The operators stay on after the Marconigrams have gone through, chatting to one another: Carrigan’s moved to President Lincoln, Borstable to Malwa; the Company Football Team drew two-all against the Evening Standard Eleven; old Allsop, wireless instructor at Marconi House, is getting married on the twenty-second… His tapper-finger firing up her spark gap… Short, then long… Olympic and Campania are playing a game of chess: K4 to Q7… K4 to K5… They always start K4… Serge transcribes for a while, then lays his pencil down and lets the sequences run through the space between his ears, sounding his skull: there’s a fluency to them, a rhythm that’s spontaneous, as though the clicks were somehow speaking on their own and didn’t need the detectors, keys or finger-twitching men who cling to them like afterthoughts…

He climbs to six hundred, and picks up ice reports sent out from whalers: FLOEBERG/GROWLER 51N 10′ 45.63″ lat 36W 12′ 39.37 long… FIELD ICE 59N 42′ 43.54″ lat 14W 45′ 56.25″ long… Compagnie de Télégraphie sans Fil reports occasional light snow off Friesland. Paris comes on again; again the cycle pauses and restarts. Then Bergen, Crookhaven, Tarifa, Malaga, Gibraltar. Serge pictures gardenias tucked behind girls’ ears, red dresses and the blood of bulls. He hears news forwarded, via Port Said and Rome, from Abyssinia, and sees an African girl strumming on some kind of mandolin, jet-black breasts glowing darkly through light silk. Suez is issuing warnings of Somali raiders further down the coast. More names process by: Isle of Perim, Zanzibar, Isle of Socotra, Persian Gulf. Parades of tents line themselves up for him: inside them, dancers serving sherbet; outside, camels saddled with rich carpets, deserts opening up beneath red skies. The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of year. He lets a fart slip from his buttocks, and waits for its vapour to reach his nostrils: it, too, carries signals, odour-messages from distant, unseen bowels. When it arrives, he slips the headphones off, opens the silence cabin’s door to let some air in and hears a goods train passing half a mile away. The pulsing of its carriage-joins above the steel rails carries to him cleanly. He looks down at his desk: the half-worn pencil, the light’s edge across the paper sheet, the tuning box, the tapper. These things-here, solid, tangible-are somehow made more present by the tinny sound still spilling from the headphones lying beside them. The sound’s present too, material: Serge sees its ripples snaking through the sky, pleats in its fabric, joins pulsing as they make their way down corridors of air and moisture, rock and metal, oak, pine and bamboo…

Above six hundred and fifty, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, Aurora Borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear. Serge spends the last half hour or so of each night up here among these pitches, nestling in their contours as his head nods towards the desktop and lights flash across the inside of his eyelids, pushing them outwards from the centre of his brain, so far out that the distance to their screen seems infinite: they seem to contain all distances, envelop space itself, curving around it like a patina, a mould…

Once, he picked up a CQD: a distress signal. It came from the Atlantic, two hundred or so miles off Greenland. The Pachitea, merchant vessel of the Peruvian Steamship Company, had hit an object-maybe whale, maybe iceberg-and was breaking up. The nearest vessel was another South American, Acania, but it was fifty miles away. Galway had picked the call up; so had Le Havre, Malin, Poldhu and just about every ship between Southampton and New York. Fifteen minutes after Serge had locked onto the signal half the radio bugs in Europe had tuned into it as well. The Admiralty put a message out instructing amateurs to stop blocking the air. Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath general interference: the atmospherics were atrocious that night. He listened to the whine and crackle, though, right through till morning-and heard, or thought he heard, among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them.

ii

One night, at about half past two, Serge looks out of his bedroom window and sees a white figure gliding over the Mulberry Lawn, skirting the Orchard’s border as it heads towards the Crypt Park’s gates. It looks like Sophie; he leans out further but the figure disappears from view before he can identify it. The experience startles him-not least because it plays out in the real and close-up space around the house an aspect of some scenes that he occasionally intuits but never quite pins down when riding the dial’s highest reaches: vague impressions of bodies hovering just beyond the threshold of the visible, and corresponding signals not quite separable from the noise around them-important ones, their recalcitrance all the more frustrating for that reason. He sees these things, and hears, or half-hears, them as well, quite frequently-usually as he’s straddling the wavelength-border between consciousness and sleep. This white figure tonight’s no somnolent vision, though: it’s a real person, of the size and shape of Sophie, and dressed the way she dresses when she goes to bed each night, to boot. The next day, he visits her in her lab and asks if she was wandering about in night-skirts last night.

“What’s it to you?” she asks. “Who said you could come in here?”

“Can I come in?” he asks.

Sophie shrugs, and turns back to her work desk. She’s stayed in this room pretty much non-stop since arriving back from London, where she’s been studying natural sciences at Imperial College for two terms now. In front of her, on the desk’s surface, microscope slides smeared with variously tinted substances fan out like card-hands; dotted around these, like tokens wagered by invisible opponents, or perhaps the miniature opponents themselves, are insects, dead ones: beetles, grasshoppers and dragonflies, rigid as the dog-avatar in the Realtor’s Game. Above these, pinned to the wall, are charts, diagrams and passages written in Sophie’s hand. She doesn’t seem to object as Serge leans over her and scans a couple of them:

I placed a specimen of the Helochara family inside a jar,

one reads,

and introduced into its cell a mixture of potassium and ether until it turned onto its back and appeared dead; however, when a little ammonium was sprinkled over it, it effected a complete recovery.

Another states:

Aphrophora spumaria entomb themselves within a frothy coat of viscid cells. The bubbles not only surround the insect and the stem upon which it rests, but flow in a continuous sheet between the ventral plates and abdomen.

Beside the text, an annotated sketch shows some kind of tick embedded in a mass of spawn-like foam. Serge runs his eyes across to one of the charts. Beneath the heading “Poisonous Qualities of” a complex set of lines-straight, curving and dotted-threads disparate Latin words and letter sequences together. To Serge’s mind, cluttered with RX traffic, the sequences appear like call-signs. It’s not just the compounds on the chart that make him think this way; Sophie has highlighted certain letters of the wall’s various texts, making them stand out by drawing over them in yellow, blue or purple crayon, as though tracing from one to the other a kind of continuum, a grander alphabetic sequence slowly emerging from the general eclectic mesh. Most intriguingly of all, a study of the Emperor moth, complete with illustration demonstrating the vibratory capacities of its antennae, carries the word, written in brackets in the margin, “Morse.”

“Morse?” asks Serge. “Do moths know that?”

“What?” she murmurs-then, following his eye towards the wall, scoffs: “No, stupid; no connection. Professor Morse, an entomologist from Nanterre, France.”

She doesn’t venture any more, and turns back to the slide in front of her. She seems preoccupied-full not of the eager energy with which she used to throw herself into their chemistry experiments, but with a more concerned and troubled set of mental compounds. She looks haggard, much older than she did six months ago; staring at her cheeks, Serge can see worry-lines snaking their way down from her eyes towards the corners of her mouth.

“What are you looking at?” she snaps. “Go now; I’ve got to work.”

She works the next day, and the next night too, and the day after that. Serge starts to wonder when-or if-she ever sleeps. By the time he wanders down for breakfast late each morning, she’s already gone, a few scattered breadcrumbs and a buttered knife the only evidence of her having passed through the kitchen-those, and the eviscerated newspapers she leaves on the table after tearing from them headlines that, for whatever reason, catch her eye. With their father away at a conference on deaf education up in London (“His train will have passed yours,” Serge commented to Sophie’s pronounced indifference when she first arrived back) and Mr. Clair home on leave, they’ve got the run of the place. Maureen’s given up trying to stage meals in single sittings, and leaves out bread, meats, cheeses, pies and stews for them to help themselves to when they like. As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae…

Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera.

“Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.”

“Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays-then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.

Three or four nights after his first sighting of the white figure on the Mulberry Lawn, Serge sees it again. This time he sees her face: it is Sophie, most definitely. She glides past the Orchard like she did the other night, then disappears from view again. Serge shuts his RX station down, throws on a jumper and heads down the stairs and out of the front door. He catches up with her inside the Crypt Park, where she’s moving through the long grass slowly, hesitantly.

“Sophie,” he calls out as he approaches her from behind.

Sophie takes two more steps, then stops and slightly turns her head in his direction.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

She stays there with her head half-turned, as though preferring to sense him rather than face him-through the skin on her cheek, perhaps, or the small hairs on her neck. He repeats his question. After a while she answers:

“Looking for the Balkan beetle.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“A type of flying insect, made by Pilcher,” she answers absently. Her eyes turn down, towards the grass-then sharpen, as though catching sight of something couched within it. “There are all these segments,” she murmurs. “Broken bodies.”

“Where?” asks Serge.

“Everywhere,” she replies. “When one antolie colony attacks another, they cut the victims up, and leave their limbs and torsos lying around the battlefield.”

“What’s an antolie colony?” asks Serge.

Slowly, her head turns fully away from him again, and she moves onwards through the long grass-ponderously, her exposed legs angling sharply at the knees, like an insect’s articulated limbs.

“You’ll catch cold,” he calls after her, then heads back to his radio set.

The next day, sure enough, she does look ill-although not colded: more ravaged, as though worn down by fatigue yet at the same time fired up by a manic sense of purpose. When Serge slinks into her lab, she’s scribbling away, furiously sketching the anatomy of flowers that, culled from Bodner’s garden, lie dissected on the desk in front of her.

“The ovaries,” she mumbles over her shoulder to him. “Here’s where the pollen grains and utricles get into them, into their cavity.”

He peers forwards, and sees where her scalpel has sliced through the corolla, pegged back its flesh and let the pistil stand out stiff and long. She scrapes the prostrate membrane, gathering its secreted essence on the blade’s side, then smears this onto a slide-plate. She looks up to the wall; Serge follows her eyes, and sees spelt out above the dissection table the word uterus. Above it, ripped from today’s Daily Herald, the headline “Young Turks Target Armenians.” Beside the printed text, Sophie has written, in brackets, Anatolia.

“ Anatolia,” Serge reads aloud. “Is that what you were-”

“Shh!” Sophie holds her hand up, and the two of them freeze for a few moments: she sitting with the scalpel in her hand, mouth open and ears pricked up as though listening for something; he standing behind her, head above her shoulder, breathing in the sleepless odour wafting from her hair and body. After a while she turns to him and says: “Come find me tonight.”

“Here?” Serge asks. “Or in the Crypt Park?”

She waves her hand across her giant diagram, as though to say “Wherever,” then signals for him to leave again.

That night, as he trawls through the ether, he pictures spiracles and stamen rising upwards, prodding at the sky like hungry aerials, and shellacked setae wound like tuning-coils around segmented abdomens. From time to time he looks out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sophie drifting silkily across the Mulberry Lawn, but never does. At three or so he makes his way towards her lab. It’s empty, and now smells of stale sandwiches, old lemonade and flower- and insect-secretions overlaid with the odour of the chemicals stored on the shelves’ jars. Serge half-recognises this last odour from the days when he and Sophie would mix compounds in this very room-but only half: these chemicals are more sophisticated, real ones, loaned from cupboards at Imperial, cases guarded by white-coated men who commune with Sophie in a language too complex for him to follow. They’d understand her chart, Serge thinks, looking at the wall whose web of lines and vectors has grown still larger and more complex since this afternoon: they’d look at it and know immediately what the letters meant, the links, all the associations…

He finds her outside, in the Mosaic Garden. She’s moving among the flowers, pacing from one spot to another, back again, then onwards to a third spot, a fourth one, as though following a strict set of instructions. As he comes near, she leaves the path and starts moving around the flower bed itself, her lower body lost among tall iris-stems, like some giant grasshopper.

“What are you doing?” Serge asks.

She motions to him to be quiet. He treads softly as he walks across to join her. She takes two steps forwards, then one back, then one to the side, then stops, her whole body tensed up. She seems, once more, to be listening out for something. With each hand clasped around an iris stem, she looks like a tethered radio mast.

“Why did you want me to come out here?” he asks.

She’s silent for a while, then turns to him and says:

“I wanted to tell you something.”

“Tell me, then,” he tells her.

She stands in silence for what seems like an age-then, just when he’s about to turn away and give up in frustration, says:

“I’ve got a lover.”

Serge is overtaken by a sudden sense of vertigo-as though the surface of the path he’s standing on, and of the lawn and flower beds around it, had all turned to glass, affording him a glimpse into a subterranean world of which he’s been completely unaware till now although it has been right beneath his feet: a kind of human wasp-nest world with air-filled corridors and halls and hatching rooms. More to regain his bearings than for any other reason, he asks Sophie:

“Who is he?”

“He’s my instructor in-” she begins; then, cutting herself short, says: “He’s secret; it’s all secret. But he’s made me sensitive. He’s done stuff to me. I can see things that…”

“That what?”

“See things. What’s coming. When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments.”

“What bodies? Where?” asks Serge.

“In London, Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me. Look.”

She takes his hand and lays it on her stomach. Her skin, through the cotton of her thin white dress, is soft and pliant. Serge can feel a rumbling beneath it. She must feel it too, because she adds:

“It’s not the same as hunger.”

He takes his hand away again. He knows what lovers do: he’s seen photographs, in a magazine he found lying on a bench in Lydium. There was a woman kneeling on a sofa, in front of creased curtains, and a man standing beside her on a carpet, sliding down her dress with one hand while in the other he held his own huge fleshy mast, which rose from the open fly-gap in his trousers; the woman was looking at it, smiling in a fiery, complicit way, as though she belonged to that subterranean world as well, was intimate with its cells, its alveolae, and could look out at the normal world from inside, mocking and unobserved. Does Sophie kneel on sofas in front of curtains? Does her face have that look? Right now, she’s looking straight ahead of her, but her eyes have emptied-or, rather, seem in the process of being filled from somewhere else. She’s muttering:

“… when the bodies… and more bodies come, the parts… a bug massacre in Badsack, Juno Archipelago… above Buc, France: Pegonde-Reuters…”

She looks as though she were tuning into something-as though she had somehow turned herself into a receiver. Is that possible, Serge wonders-like Bodner’s spade, the house’s pipes? He’s read in Wireless World of a girl in America who picked up experimental stations on a filling in her tooth-but via insects and news headlines, flowers? The notion seems ridiculous. And yet some kind of transmission seems to be coursing through her body. As he watches her, her eyes grow brighter, which makes the sunken parts around them, their ridge-shadowed sockets, darken and become more cavernous.

“You really should sleep,” Serge tells her. “Why don’t we go back to-”

“He’s coming soon,” she interrupts him.

“Who?” Serge asks.

“Tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll come back.”

“Oh, Father. Day after tomorrow, yes. Why don’t-”

“Father!” she snorts. “He’s not your… It’s the other one. Monarch. Didn’t use paraphylectic.” She pauses, then continues: “He taught me the transpositions. Then he’ll slink into my dormitory, and wreak carnage.”

Serge feels a chill. The air is cold, but it’s not that that makes him shiver: it’s the sense that Sophie’s talking about things he’s simply not equipped to understand, an apprehension that gulfs as wide as frozen interstellar distances are opening within her words, expanding beyond measure the gap between her and him. He asks her:

“What dormitory? The one where you sleep in London?” She stays in a boarding house for young ladies in South Kensington, just opposite the Science Museum.

“No,” she answers. “That’s not where. I’ll have to kill him in me, or there’ll be more bodies: segments, on the battlefield.”

“You’re crazy,” Serge says. “I’m not listening to this rubbish. Go to bed, or I’ll wake up Maureen and she’ll haul you inside.”

Sophie looks at him bewilderedly, then around the garden. Dawn is breaking. Birds are singing in the bushes and the trees over the wall. A couple are hopping in the grass’s dew. To his surprise, she releases the iris stems, acquiesces with his order and walks slowly beside him to the house. When they arrive there, she goes to her room, he to his. He sleeps all day. He dreams of Sophie’s innards, her stuffing: of organs sensitised by passion while, on the outside, hinged limbs twitch and fletch and signal, current-galvanised, against creased backdrops, both inner and outer body shaken by transmissions. In his dream, the divan turns into a dissecting board; Sophie becomes a bird, cat or insect whose stomach has been opened; heart, gizzard and other nameless parts are spilling outwards in a long, unbroken tapestry, a silken shawl-and spilling up into the air, sticking to wires. He wakes up sticky himself, and ashamed.

“What kind of time is this?” Maureen asks him when he finally makes his way down to the kitchen. “And where’s your sister?”

“Still sleeping,” he tells her. “We were both up late.”

“The hours in this house have gone haywire,” Maureen tuts. “When Mr. Simeon gets back we’ll have proper dining times, with everybody present.”

Serge shrugs. He eats some bread and honey, then wanders up to Sophie’s room to see if she’s still sleeping. She’s not there. He heads back down the stairs and out across the maze towards the Mosaic Garden. The day’s calm; spring flowers are lolling open in the late-afternoon sunlight; others, budding, secrete their own sticky juice, attracting bees. As Serge approaches Sophie’s lab the smell of flowers gives over to another, sourer smell that reminds him at first of marzipan. The door’s open; when he steps inside, the smell becomes much stronger-stronger and more sharp, like apple brandy. Sophie’s sitting in a chair holding a glass in her hand, but the glass is lolling at an almost horizontal angle. Sophie’s hand is stiff; its middle finger points in the direction of the chart. Her eyes are open: it seems that she’s trying to show him something among the sprawling web-some new word, or figure, or associative line. It’s only as Serge turns his eyes up to it that he registers, like an after-impression, the flecks of brine that cover Sophie’s lips like bubbles blown by a departed insect.

iii

The funeral arrangements take some time. A quick burial was never on the cards: there are the autopsy and coroner’s report to be completed, as in any case of death by poisoning. Serge’s father busies himself with arrangements over the next week: distributing invitations, developing and printing programmes, discussing the contents of the buffet with Maureen and Frieda, consulting weather forecasts in the newspapers each day…

It’s to be held outdoors, same as the Pageants-but in the Crypt Park, not on the Mulberry Lawn. The vicar of St. Alfege’s is to say a few words, the Day School pupils are to perform a recitation and Sophie’s to be buried in the Crypt, or rather under it; there’s no more room at ground level. Carrefax has devised an elaborate construction whereby Sophie’s coffin will be lowered into the ground beside the Crypt, slid along rails into an enclave burrowed out beneath the edifice itself, then slightly raised so as to slot into its designated space between the bodies of two ancestors, with the communicating tunnel to be filled in once the manoeuvre’s completed. The excavations are installed two days before the funeral itself: supporting pillars with winch-levers on them for the lowering; a second, horizontally operating winch for the sliding, and a pump-lever contraption for the final hoist. By the time the workmen have finished, piles of dug-up earth line the edges of the trench, and the sound of hammering and tapping that’s filled the estate’s air falls silent, leaving only birdsong in its place.

Dr. Learmont, general practitioner of long standing for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, comes in person to tell Serge’s father that the coroner has reached a verdict of accidental death. Carrefax concurs:

“The cyanide was right next to her lemonade glass. Easy to confuse the two. And then she’d been up all night, working on the compounds. Best female student Imperial has had since they admitted them, according to her tutors…”

Learmont looks at Serge; Serge looks at Learmont. The doctor’s kind face and brown leather case seem to multiply for him, vaguer and more mythical with each iteration, down a telescoping corridor of memories: of strep throat, measles, chickenpox and other, nameless illnesses that always, whatever their distinctive unattractive qualities, returned him to a pleasant and familiar zone of honey-and-lemon tea, boiled sweets and picture-books-a zone where Maureen plumped his pillow every hour, Sophie brought the Berliner down from the attic and played him records, Mr. Clair waived all table-learning or essay-writing deadlines and, whatever time it actually was, it always seemed to be the calm, drawn-out stretch of mid-afternoon. Repeating the gesture with which he used to reach towards him then, Learmont extends his arm now and taps Serge on the chin.

“You keeping fit?” he asks.

Serge nods.

“Be needing all you able-bodied young men soon,” the doctor says.

“Apropos of-what? Imperial, yes: I wanted to ask you…” Carrefax says to Learmont. Learmont raises his eyebrows; Carrefax continues: “As you’ll doubtless be aware, it’s not unknown for death to be misdiagnosed, which makes for a certain…”

“You think it might not have been accidental?” Learmont asks.

“Not-what? No, no: that’s not what I meant. I was referring to the rare-yet still, I believe, well-documented-instances in which a death is recorded, only for the so-called deceased to awake several days later and recover their full capacities.”

“I’m sorry to say that in this case we can entertain no hopes, not even the faintest, of-”

“Bells were used, in times less technologically advanced than ours, with cords running from within the coffin to miniature towers mounted on the tombstone, should the incumbent come around and wish to signal the fact to those in a position to liberate them-a vertical position, as it were…”

“But your daughter’s been… I mean, after the autopsy, there’s simply no way that-”

“Yes: splendid! So I was thinking that perhaps we could avail ourselves of more contemporary hardware. I’ve arranged for a tapper-key, donated from Serge’s arsenal of such equipment, to be placed beside her in the coffin, and will attach a small transmitting aerial to the Crypt’s roof, should she-”

“Which one of my keys?” Serge asks. “You never consulted me!”

“That way, she won’t need to rely on the circumstance, far from guaranteed, of someone happening to pass by the Crypt at precisely the moment she comes to and rings. The signal emitted will be weak, but strong enough to cover the estate, should, for example, Serge be experimenting with his wireless set, as I believe his wont is these days…”

Serge’s mother spends her time in the spinning houses, working on a shroud. Bodner plies her with tea: Serge sees him moving between his garden and the Weaving Room or Store Room virtually each time he looks in that direction from the attic window. He’s spending lots of time up in the attic these days. It’s the spot with which he most associates hours spent alone with Sophie. The cylinders and discs are still there. When he plays them now, her voice attaches itself, leech-like, to the ones recorded on them-tacitly, as though laid down in the wax and shellac underneath these voices, on a lower stratum: it flashes invisibly within their crackles, slithers through the hisses of their silence. He looks out over the flat, motionless landscape as he listens. The sheep never seem to move: they just stand still, bubbly flecks on Arcady Field’s face. The curving stream also seems completely still, arrested in a deathly rictus grin. Only the trees in the Crypt Park seem to have any movement in them: they contract and expand slowly, breathing out the sound of the Day School children practising their recitation:

Soon as the evening shades prevail

The moon takes up the wondrous tale,

And nightly to the listening earth

Repeats the story of her birth…

The looping, repeating lines mutate and distort so much that, even when the words come out correctly, they seem like a mispronounced version of something else, other sentences that are trying to worm their way up to the surface, make themselves heard. Kneeling on the window-sill three floors above them, Serge strains his ear to pick these buried phrases up, but gets just inarticulate murmurs. The estate’s layout, too, seems to be withholding something-some figure or associative line inscribed beneath its flattened geometry, camouflaged by lawns and walls and gardens…

The day of the funeral is warm and sunny. The mourners’ tread as they descend the gravel path is muffled, cautious. They gather, all in black, outside the Crypt Park’s gates, beneath the obelisk-topped columns, and make quietened small-talk with each other, glancing nervously around as they try to spot their host, hostess or Serge. After a while, Carrefax strides out of the house and greets them boisterously.

“Wonderful that you could come! There’ll be refreshments afterwards. For now, we should proceed into the park. What? Splendid! Yes, no seating, I’m afraid. Where’s Miss Hubbard?”

As though taking her cue, Miss Hubbard emerges from the schoolrooms with seven or eight pupils in tow. She steers the children through the Crypt Park ’s gates behind Carrefax and the other mourners. Serge meanders in behind them. By the Crypt, the vicar’s waiting. So are Maureen, Frieda and their girls. Frieda and the girls are crying; Maureen’s got a stoic, grim expression on her face. The vicar has a consoling beam on his. He flashes it around, as though trying to attach it to the face of each arriving person. Beside him, mounted on a small wooden podium, is the coffin. It’s made of dark wood, with brass handles; from a small hole in its lid probably imperceptible to anyone but Serge and his father, a small wire spills and dangles down the side. On each side of the trench Carrefax has designed, a workman’s standing between piles of earth, holding a spade: they look like soldiers standing to attention as they line a dignitary’s route. The mechanical set-up has become even more complicated than it was last time Serge saw it: now, a new rail is supported in the air above the rail-lined furrow, cutting across it perpendicularly-a curtain rail, with black drapes pegged to it on hooks. A little metal switch-box is set into one of this rail’s supporting columns. Carrefax steps over to it and clicks the switch on, then off: the box gives a little moan, the rail’s pegs jerk and the drapes, one hanging on each side of the trench, hems bunched up on the ground, twitch briefly, then lie still again.

“Splendid!” says Carrefax. “All set to go. We’ll start with-”

He’s interrupted by a general rustling as all heads turn away from him towards the Crypt Park ’s gates. His wife is making a late entry between these, with a train of women. She’s holding something in front of her, cradling it in upturned hands. The train is moving in formation, like a set of rugby forwards: advancing in rows, arms locked together. Their faces are neutral and impassive, like statues’ faces. With long dresses covering their feet, they seem to glide above the lawn, as though mounted on their own rails made of air, invisible in the long grass. The other mourners watch their slow approach in silence; Carrefax, the vicar, Miss Hubbard and the Day School pupils watch them too. They glide towards the main group slowly but ineluctably, as though bearing down on them. Then, just as it seems they’re all going to collide with the posts beside the trench, they stop, as one body, a few yards from the coffin-all of them apart from Mrs. Carrefax, who proceeds onwards to the coffin and, placing on its lid the shroud that she’s been carrying in her arms, unfolds it until it covers the whole thing. It shows, in red and green silk on a white silk background, an insect feeding on a flower.

Carrefax nods to the vicar, who coughs, then starts to speak:

“Friends,” he beams, “we come here not in despair but in gratitude: for the gift of these past seventeen years…”

A sob breaks loose from the main crowd of mourners. The vicar’s beam grows more pronounced and aggressive as he continues:

“… in gratitude also that the soul of Sophie Annabel Carrefax has been reclaimed-redeemed, as one redeems a ticket or an object given out on loan-and done so, I’m quite certain, with great joy, by he who crafted it in the first place. When we consider-”

“Him,” says Carrefax.

“I’m sorry?” asks the vicar.

“By him who crafted,” Carrefax corrects him.

“Him who crafted it, indeed,” the vicar says. He foists his beam about again before continuing: “When we consider that we all are here on loan, then we might come to see that those the earlier gathered back are perhaps those most valued. Think of the cherished objects you yourselves might once have lent…”

Serge stops listening after a few sentences. He can still hear the vicar’s words, of course, but they’re just sounds. His pick-up’s set beneath them, lower. He looks down, and sees among the grass a beetle pushing an earth-clump several times its size. The beetle’s trying to move this forwards, but the clump rolls back onto the beetle every time the latter shoves the former up the little incline in its path. Is it a Balkan beetle, Serge wonders? A bloody-nosed one? He looks at the flower and insect embossed on the coffin’s drape. The drape’s thin, and it fits the coffin loosely; sunlight, after passing through its fabric, bounces back up off the coffin’s copper handles to travel back up through it from the inside, making its white silk luminescent and its insect and flower dark, like silhouettes; they seem almost to move across the fabric’s surface, as though animated. The sunlight’s also spilling across the large earth-piles by the trench, blurring their edges; it looks as though tiny clumps have broken loose and are slightly levitating. The steel rails in the trench glint blue and silver. They seem to hum, like railway lines hum when a train’s approaching in the distance, just before you hear the train itself…

The sensation of humming, real or imagined, grows: Serge can sense vibrations spreading round the lawn. He feels them moving from the ground into his feet and up his legs, then onwards to his groin. They animate his own flesh, start it levitating. He can’t help it. He crosses his hands in front of his crotch and looks about him: everyone else is looking at the vicar, or the coffin-not at him. The vicar’s still beaming aggressively, talking of heaven. Looking around him, trousers bulging, Serge is filled with a sudden and certain awareness that there is no such place: there’s the coffin and the Crypt, the lawn, these conker trees above them, this fresh-smelling earth. One of the workmen’s scratching his nose. A fly’s buzzing around the vicar’s head. The vicar tries to ignore it, but it brushes his face, tickling his lips and making him half-blow, half-spit his next few words out. If the fly hatched on Arcady Field, it will have come from sheep-dung. Serge pictures minute dung-flecks being deposited on this man’s mouth, the even tinier bacteria inside them turning inwards from his lips, swimming against his phlegm through crashing rocks of teeth, past lashing tongue and gurgling epiglottis down towards his stomach…

The vicar’s words tail off. Serge’s father marshals the Day School pupils into place and they perform their recitation:

The spacious firmament on high,

With all the blue ethereal sky,

And spangled heavens, a shining frame

Their great original proclaim…

Their pronunciation’s more distorted than it usually is in Pageants: they’ve had less time to rehearse, and are more nervous. “Spacious” and “spangled” are drawn out forever; “proclaim” becomes “co-caime.” The sky is blue and shining though: this much is true. Serge raises his head from the ground towards it. Birds are far away, which means high pressure: he should get good reception tonight. Another sob comes from one of Frieda’s girls; another mourner sniffles. The Day School pupils, voices dull, monotonous and out of synch, intone the second verse, describing evening shades, the moon and all the planets, which

Confirm the tidings as they roll,

And spread the truth from pole to pole…

Serge, mind still wandering, recalls a photo in the latest Wireless World showing the earth’s southernmost Marconi station, in the Chilean archipelago-four giant tethered pylons with row upon row of wires running between their peaks, cutting the air into grid squares which hovered above a tiny operator’s cabin. The operators had to spend up to six months at a time there, waiting for their relief. What truth might they be spreading to the pole? Telegrams, news, weather reports, cricket scores, the day’s closing prices…? A female mourner’s gazing at him, tearful, pitiful eyes trying to tell him that she understands his grief. He looks away. She can’t: he doesn’t feel any. He knows he’s meant to-but it’s not there, and that’s that. What he feels is discomfort: at his priapic condition and, beyond that, at a sense he has of things being unresolved or, more precisely, undivulged. The charts, the lines, the letter-clusters and the fragments Sophie was pronouncing as she wandered round the Mosaic Garden-and, beyond these, or perhaps behind them, the vague, hovering bodies and muffled signals he’s been half-seeing and -hearing at the dial’s far end, among those crashing and erupting discharges of meteoric events, galactic emanations: these, he’s more and more convinced, mean something and are issuing from somewhere, from a place he hasn’t managed to track down before the one person from whom he might have learnt the what, where, and why of it all elected to go incommunicado…

The pupils pause, then launch stumblingly into the final verse:

What though in solemn silence all

Move round the dark terrestrial ball;

What though no real voice or sound

Amid the radiant orbs be found?

In reason’s ear they all rejoice…

The voices run out to their furrows’ end, and trail off into silence. There’s a pause. Serge hears a motor car go by on the far side of Telegraph Hill, then looks again at the beetle, still carrying on its battle with the earth clump. His father issues an instruction to the two workmen, who transfer the draped coffin from its podium onto the platform suspended above the trench, then winch it down onto the rails. One of them steps over to the other winch-handle and starts cranking it; the coffin begins to slide towards the Crypt. Carrefax nips over to the column supporting the curtain-rail and flicks the switch on. As the coffin slides beneath the perpendicular bar above the trench, the drapes jerk into action, their long hems slipping from the higher ground to fall into the trench and, to the sound of an electric whirring, draw closed across the coffin as it passes through their axis. That’s what’s meant to happen, at least: in fact, one of the hems catches on the coffin and gets pulled backwards, sending the electric motor first into whining overdrive and then into suspension.

“Blast the thing!” says Carrefax. He switches the motor off, tugs at the curtain to unsnag the hem, then flicks the switch again. The coffin slides right through the curtain now, which falls back into place behind it.

“She’s gone!” sobs Frieda.

Her girls whimper agreement. Serge, still hard, can’t stop himself from smiling: the coffin’s not two feet from where it was before. If they moved round to the side they’d see it, dumb and wooden and unaltered. It strikes him that this whole event’s more amateurish than the Pageants-more contrived, more sloppy. The curtain’s just a curtain, and a badly designed one at that. His hands still covering his crotch, he runs his eyes beyond it, to the Crypt’s wall. Is that meant to be the edge, the portal to beyond, the vicar’s heaven? And its far wall, then: would “beyond” stop there? He runs his eye on further, to the grass behind the Crypt, moist and stringy and no different from the grass they’re standing on back here-then onwards, to the dung-filled, sloping field beyond the water, the telegraph line on the hill. He pictures the cars beyond that, then the boats, the towers, the stations, archipelagos…

The workmen have moved along the trench’s edge to operate the pump-lever contraption. As they hoist the coffin up into its slot inside the Crypt, Serge feels a heaviness enter his stomach, as though something foreign were being lodged there. It’s a pronounced, visceral sensation-strong enough to make him release one hand from his crotch and rub his midriff, in the manner of a pregnant woman. He closes his eyes in discomfort, and sees dark globes orbiting in seas of light. When he opens them again, the workmen have finished pumping and are standing back, rubbing their own hands. Several mourners are sobbing. Mr. Clair is weeping quietly. Not Serge: for him, this shoddy, whining spectacle has nothing to do with death, nothing to do with Sophie either. Both death and she are elsewhere: like a signal, dispersed.

i

Kloděbrady is a twenty-three-hour journey from Portsmouth; from Versoie, twenty-eight. Serge and Clair board first a train, then a boat, then another, grand train laid on by the International Sleeping Car Company and, finally, when this pulls up somewhere near Dresden, a series of smaller trains that carry them across borders of countries, time zones, principalities and semi-autonomous regions Serge has never even heard of. If the names sliding across the compartment’s window beside telegraph poles, red-roofed farmhouses and haystacks that seem to float ten feet above the ground seem vaguely familiar to him, this probably owes more to the fairy tales Maureen would tell him as a child than to anything he’s learnt from Clair of geography or history. He’s passed through zones of boredom and exhaustion too, emerged from them and started waking up now for the journey’s last leg. His senses, though out of kilter, are alert; the lethargy that’s hung above him like a pall for months seems to have lifted-not completely, but a little: lifted and lightened.

The train’s come to a stop. It’s not a station: they’re just waiting for a signal to change, or a point to switch, or an instruction to be shouted from the track-side in a foreign language. Serge stands up, pulls the top half of the window down, leans out and looks around. It’s the end of summer: bushes and trees beside the lines are overgrown and faded; dandelions and weeds stand a foot tall between the sleepers. A stone post has been painted black and yellow, in straight stripes. A small electric box clings to one of the rails, short legs clamped around it like the femurs of a tick while a longer, more tentacular protuberance drops from its underbelly to send currents through the earth. The countryside is flat. A mile or two away, a smokestack seems to rise straight from it. Nearer by, an earthworks plant groans as its stilted runways convey ballast before dropping it onto a growing mound. Other, fully grown mounds of the stuff stretch for hundreds of yards beside the railway line, strangely black against the blue sky and golden foliage.

“It’s the cysteine,” Clair says, noticing Serge looking at the mounds.

“Sistine? Like the chapel?”

“No, what makes it black: the chemical. Cysteine and sulphur, chloride, sodium, what have you. That’s what’s going to cure you.”

He tosses Serge a brochure from among the papers lying beside him on the bench-seat. The train’s almost empty; with the compartment to themselves, they’ve spread out. Serge lets the brochure land on his own bench-seat, then sits down again and picks it up. The front cover bears a drawing of an elegant lady strolling with a parasol along a boulevard lined with Greco-Roman buildings, a glass in her hand. Beneath this image’s border and slightly in front of it due to the perspective adopted by the brochure’s illustrator, a large red heart’s held aloft by a jet of water while a cherub, balancing above the heart on one foot, breaks across the border into the main picture to strew roses across the lady’s path. It’s that depth thing again: the technique Serge could never master in his drawing lessons. It’s not right: the cherub, occupying the same plane as the master image, couldn’t simultaneously be several feet in front of it, and therefore couldn’t strew the flowers from outside its frame-unless he’s reaching up from beneath a screen onto which the picture of the strolling lady’s being projected and, holding the flowers in front of the path, performing some clever optical trick. Above the lady’s parasol, shot through with black sunrays, are the words “Kloděbrady Baths.”

Serge flips through the brochure, past photographs of gentlemen and ladies very like the lady in the drawing strolling past domed mausoleums or posing in front of fountains, also with glasses in their hands. The accompanying text gives the town’s history, which seems to consist of a series of invasions, wars and squabbles over succession. One such squabble, dwelt on at some length by the brochure’s author, sees the heirs of a King Mstislav accusing the pretender to his throne, one Vladimir, of poisoning their father, only for it to turn out that he’d died of “corruption of the blood due to bad humour”-a cue for Vladimir, cleared of foul play, to decapitate his libellers. This Mstislav, or perhaps another, is mentioned a few paragraphs later, only now the humour has become a tumour: he (or his namesake) it was, the brochure says, who, “seeking for his way in the labyrinth of events and social problems” prior to his blood’s corruption, established Kloděbrady as a centre for “radical social oppinions”-laying the ground for the progressive reign of the man who, emerging eighty or so years later, would eventually become the town’s saint, Prince Jiři. Under Jiři, Serge starts reading out loud to Clair, society and culture flourished in the mid-fifteenth century, and the town “undoubtably attained the zenith of its import.”

“As your father would point out, it should be indubitably,” Clair says.

Their train’s pulled off again. A goods train passes them, heading in the other direction, its carriages laden with the same type of black ballast they were watching pile up in the earthworks.

“This is interesting,” Serge continues, flipping past more Mstislavs and Vladimirs into the nineteenth century. “The whole town burned down in 1805. When it was rebuilt, the Bavarian king and his Spanish wife brought in the water-diviner Baron Karl von Arnow, who discovered the spring in the grounds of their own castle.”

“How convenient,” snorts Clair. “A subterranean water-source that big would have been found under a peasant’s hut if Baron von Aristo had divined there.”

“No,” says Serge. “This engineer, Maxbrenner, had to lay pipes beneath the whole town, leading out from under the castle, in order to create the spa. He plumbed in pumps, and heaters, and all sorts of things. So now, it says here, ‘all visitors may divertise themselves imbibing of the restorative balm.’ Oh, look: here’s a list of what it’s got in it.”

His eye runs down a table in which cysteine breaks down into sulphur, which in turn subdivides into various chlorides, carbonates and sulphates: chloride of sodium, chloride of lithium, of potassium; chloride, sulphate and carbonate of magnesium; carbonate of lime; then, intriguingly, “free and easily liberated” types of carbonic acid. The heaviness inside Serge’s stomach that’s a constant presence for him these days makes itself felt as he reads the table. He flips the page and finds a photograph of Kloděbrady’s Grand Hotel, its terraces alive with water-swilling people, flags of all the states of Europe fluttering above them and, above these, the heart-and-cherub logo once again.

The logo’s waiting for them at the station, painted on the wood beside the town’s name, its heart blackened by grime. Porters load their bags onto a trolley and push this rattling up the main drag. There are the domed mausoleums, set among a park; there, too, the strollers, just like in the brochure, only not so many. There are nurses, chattering in groups of three or pushing wheelchaired cripples past kiosks selling trinkets and chemists’ shops above whose doors hang model scales with snakes coiled round them.

The Grand Hotel’s terraces are half-empty. Chairs are leaned up against tables. Only three flags are out today: they hang limp above two old men nodding on a bench behind newspapers. The porters hand Serge and Clair over to their counterparts in the hotel, who take them to their rooms. In his Serge finds, beside the bed, a season ticket to the baths, two bottles of sparkling but slightly murky-looking water and a book of writing paper with the heart-and-cherub logo on it-only now the heart itself is sprouting flowers, dishevelled ones that look like the dandelions and weeds along the train tracks, while four cherubs hovering beneath it struggle to hold it up. There’s also a menu of the therapies on offer, with a list of prices: inhalation, twenty-nine crowns; gas injection, twenty crowns and fifty; underwater massage, twenty-two; and so on. How much is a crown? Serge thinks of those covetous Mstislavs and Vladimirs again, of their corrupted blood and rolling heads.

Dinner’s at seven. The long dining room has a bar at one end behind which a white-coated waiter stands, hands on the counter, bottles rising up from staggered shelves like organ pipes behind him. On one wall, beneath curled-vine cornicing, a fresco shows, in Greco-Roman style, ladies and gentlemen in togas sipping water while divertising themselves in games of discus- and javelin-throwing over which a togaed judge presides. The room’s just under half-full. Serge and Clair are seated by a waiter at a small round table and served quail and boiled potatoes with a bottle of red wine.

“Drink it slowly,” Clair says. “It’s supposed to be good for digestion.”

Serge shrugs. The other diners glance their way occasionally while speaking a mish-mash of languages. Serge can pick out French, German and Spanish; Clair identifies Hungarian, Serbian and Russian on top of these. English is spoken as well, but, exchanged as a currency of convenience between people to whom it’s not native, sounds foreign too. After dinner, while they’re taking coffee in a lounge whose walls are lined with local wildlife specimens-otters, eels, pikes, water-rats and toads-stuffed behind slightly darkened glass, a German man comes up and, introducing himself to them as Herr Landmesser, asks them what they’re “in for.”

“It’s the boy,” says Clair. “Das Kind. Stomach complaints. Me, I’m as right as rain.”

“If you can say that, you are a lucky man,” Herr Landmesser answers with a deep, sardonic laugh. “Or happily ignorant. Which doctor will you see?”

“Dr. Filip,” answers Serge. “My first appointment is tomorrow morning.”

“My doctor also, Filip. Gout, for me.” Herr Landmesser points down at his foot. “For Filip, it is all the same: all moral.”

Serge begins to ask him what he means, but is cut off by the arrival in their group of a tallish, middle-aged lady.

“So young!” she says in a grainy voice as she looks at Serge. “I have a niece so young as you. You should meet her, when you would be in Rotterdam one day. Me, I have heart problems. How long will you stay here?”

“Three weeks, I think.” Serge looks at Clair to confirm this, but Clair seems too offended, or worried, by Herr Landmesser’s jibe to take part in the conversation.

“You missed-it was five days ago,” the Dutch woman continues, “the spectacle. Dressed as the sun, the people of the town and doctors, nurses: sun, and clouds, and weather. Very funny. You and my niece would much have liked it, both. More people were here then. Paní!”

She calls this last word after a waiter who’s just passed by with a coffee pot. He doesn’t hear her, so she sets out after him. Herr Landmesser, too, moves away from them towards some bookshelves. Clair and Serge sit for a little longer in depleted silence, then retire upstairs. Serge drifts off to the sound of running water not far from the hotel, a stream his mind makes flow again internally, recasting it as dark, with creatures moving slowly through it.

ii

He wakes up early, some time before Clair, takes a light breakfast, then wanders along the paths that join the small domed buildings to each other in the park. An orchestra is playing beside one, in a bandstand. As he approaches it he realises that the seated musicians are arranged in a heart shape; also that the mausoleums are in fact not mausoleums: they’re pavilions housing fountains. People stroll from one to the next, holding their glasses out beneath the jets until they’re full, then slowly sipping as they move on. A group of kaftaned Jews with beards and side-curls chat in Polish and Yiddish as they drink; two Russians talk to one another loudly, gargling and spitting between sentences. A French couple discuss the music:

“Mais c’est Debussy, n’est-ce pas?”

“Non, non: c’est Brahms…”

Serge doesn’t have a glass. He cups his hands and holds them out into the fountain. The water’s not particularly cold and, bizarrely, doesn’t feel particularly wet either. It’s got a kind of sooty feel to it. He draws his hands up to his face and looks at it: it’s cloudy, slightly dark, with bubbles in it. He takes a sip: it’s cloudy-tasting too, and a little bitter. A nurse wanders up and says something he doesn’t understand. He raises his shoulders and looks blankly back at her; she makes a drinking-from-glass gesture with her hand, and points towards a kiosk selling glasses of the same slightly opaque quality as the wildlife cases in the hotel’s lounge. Beside it, a signpost’s arrows bear four names, each painted in large capitals: MIR, MAXBRENNER, ZAMACEK, LETNA. None of them say GRAND HOTEL, but Serge manages to find his way back there by following the same drag he walked up with the porters yesterday, past the trinket-selling kiosks and the chemists’ with their scales and snakes.

He finds Clair waiting agitated for him on the terrace.

“Your appointment’s in five minutes. Hurry up!”

“I’m ready,” Serge shrugs back.

They head in the opposite direction from the fountains, past a statue of a crowned horseman and a large building up and down whose steps columns of nurses move, until they arrive at a smaller building. Here, beside the front door, is a plaque with the name FILIP and a string of letters on it. Inside, a receptionist directs them to a waiting room. Several other patients are sitting in this, most of them holding jars half-full of some sort of dark, silky material: they’re the same size as the ones Bodner stores the honey in at Versoie, with the same bronze screw-on lids. After a few minutes Serge’s name is called.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Clair asks.

“No,” answers Serge.

Dr. Filip is a small man with unkempt white hair and a stringy beard and whiskers. From behind thin, steel-rimmed spectacles, his eyes fix Serge with a disapproving look. Around him, tables, trays and treadmills are arrayed like the musical instruments of some outlandish orchestra. There are tubes and pumps and cylinders, and scales attached to handles that in turn trail wires towards black sub-boxes. Strangest of all is a large machine that takes up a whole bench. Its cogs and filaments conjoin parts that look like they belong to printing presses, breweries or miniature railways. In its central segment, a dome the same shape as the fountain-pavilions rises up, a spiral staircase carrying a copper cable from its apex down its side and on towards a fuse to which it’s soldered.

“Carrefax, with C, not K,” says Dr. Filip. “Sit down.”

Instinctively, Serge looks around the room for his father before realising that “Carrefax” means him and complying with Dr. Filip’s order.

“Notes from English doctor indicate chronic intestinal problems,” Dr. Filip continues. His voice is sharp, and seems to issue from the tiniest of apertures nestled among the whiskers. “Please to describe them.”

Serge sticks his hands beneath his thighs and shuffles in his chair. “It’s like a big ball in my stomach,” he says. “A big ball of dirt.”

“Why you say ‘dirt’?” asks Dr. Filip.

“Well, because it’s dark. It seems that way.”

“You having constipation?”

Serge nods, reddening.

“And lethargy?”

“Yes,” Serge says. “Very much.”

“Headache?”

“Also.”

“Please to lie on table.” Dr. Filip rises brusquely as he indicates a kind of folding slab that’s held up by a complex frame of interlocking metal legs. It looks a little like an ironing board divided into segments that, hinge-mounted, rise and fall abruptly. “First remove shoes and shirt.”

Serge slides his shirt and shoes off and climbs up onto the table. Dr. Filip pushes Serge’s shoulders down into its flannel-covered surface with cold hands which then move down to Serge’s stomach, which they tap, as though sounding a box or wall. Serge begins to speak but Dr. Filip cuts him off:

“Shh…”

He holds his hand over Serge’s midriff and, tapping it a few more times-gently, as though nudging a dial-lowers his head and listens.

“Not good,” he says after a while. “A blockage. Stagnant. You are having autointoxication. Skin is dark, eyes too. You seeing well, or not?”

“Not,” Serge says. “I mean no. It’s kind of…”

“How is?” Dr. Filip asks, impatient.

“Furry.”

“What is meant?”

“Furry, like fur. The hair of animals. Small hairs. It’s like…”

His voice trails off. It’s hard to describe. Fur’s not quite right. It’s more like tiny filaments. The closest thing he could liken it to is one of his mother’s silks-the really fine, dark ones-held right up to his eyeballs and stretched out in front of them, making the world gauzed: dark-gauzed, covered in fleck-film. It’s been like this for months. When it started, he’d try to blink a hole in it, or wipe it away, peel the veil back; but that only ingrained it further, lodging it beneath the surface of the eyes themselves. He tried washing them, but this just made the filament-mesh run and stain, gauzing everything he saw before he’d even looked at it.

Dr. Filip says: “Please to provide a sample.”

“Sample of what?” Serge asks.

“Stool,” Dr. Filip answers. His cold hands pull Serge’s shoulders upright and turn them towards a low chair with a hole in its seat and a kidney-shaped tray beneath it.

“I can’t,” Serge says.

“Not to be embarrassed,” Dr. Filip sneers disdainfully.

“It’s not that,” Serge explains, reddening again. “I mean I can’t. It doesn’t want to…”

“You speak of what it wants?” Dr. Filip’s stringy eyebrows climb up towards his hairline, and his glasses ride up with them. “So: I am arranging enema for you this afternoon. Also,” he continues, turning to his desk and picking up a pen, “I am giving you diet from which not to digress. Lactose: soured milk and cereal. And fruit. No meat. You give this to hotel kitchen; they will administer.” He hands Serge two cards. “And you will follow hydrotherapy course. Here is schedule.” He slides from a drawer a sheet of paper and, reaching behind him, pulls from a shelf a honey jar, then passes both these to Serge. “Please to go now. Return tomorrow afternoon at four. Also drink constantly the water: from the fountains, with your eating, at all times. Every opportunity, you drink.”

Serge walks back to the hotel holding the jar, wondering what he’s meant to do with it. He tries to hand it in with his menu card, but the maître d’ returns it to him, instructing him to take it to his next appointment, which turns out to be in the building that he saw the nurses entering and leaving. The nurse Serge sees, in a room sharp from disinfectant, makes him lower his trousers and pants and bend across another segmented table whose lower end is ramped down to the ground; then she inserts a rubber tube in him and turns a tap on. As the warmish water enters and then leaves him, carrying no more than a small fragment of whatever’s in him out with it, the fabric of the veil that’s darkening his vision seems to expand and open slightly, making the objects in the room stand out more sharply: the taps and tubes, the tiled gutter running by the walls, the door’s handle and the nurse’s shoulders as she bends towards the gutter to retrieve the sample.

“You have bottle?” she asks.

“Bottle?” Serge says. “No. Should I?”

“Doctor has give you one, I think…”

The honey jar. “I didn’t realise that was meant for…”

“I use another,” she says. “Show me card.”

He shows it to her. She copies his name and number onto a small piece of paper and hands the card back to him. “Next time, bring.”

“Next time?”

She looks back at him without replying. Her look’s not unkind, just knowing and indulgent, like Maureen’s back at Versoie.

The sharpness brought on by the enema stays with him for a while: the air around the park as he walks back through it seems brighter, clearer and less flecked. The feeling lasts for an hour or so; then the gauze contracts and thickens again, veiling the world back up. As he heads to his bedroom after a dinner of soured milk and what looks like horse-food, he passes the stuffed otters, eels and pikes, and realises that he should have compared his vision, when describing it to Dr. Filip, to the glass of their cases: it has the same clouded quality, the same fine-filamented graininess as everything he sees. The glass of the bottled water in his room as well: when he picks one of the bottles up, it’s like holding a miniature and concentrated version of the world-his world at least. The bottle’s got the heart-and-cherub logo on its label and, beneath that, a patent number. Serge pops its top and pours the water out: it, too, is cloudy, darkened, sooty. As he lies in bed, its bitter taste lingers in his mouth despite two vigorous brushings…

The hydrotherapy begins the next morning. After a fruit and yoghurt breakfast and a wander round the Mir fountain with a glass purchased from the kiosk by the signpost, he visits the complex in which hydrotherapy is offered. It’s the Maxbrenner building, built, like the Letna one in which he got his enema yesterday, around the spring whose name it bears. Serge presents his card at the front desk, and is ushered on towards the building’s innards. A musty smell fills its corridors; the air itself is moist and sulphurous. Opening the door of the room he’s been directed to, he’s attacked by vapour which invades his nostrils and half-scalds his lips. Inside, against a wall, are rows of cabinets, large escritoires with hinged covers, like the one that Widsun did his correspondence at when he was visiting Versoie. Some of these are open; others, closed, contain men, locked inside them with only their heads protruding from the top like unsprung jack-in-boxes. Other men’s heads jut out horizontally from blankets wrapped tightly round their bodies as they lie on benches, steaming. They look like insects, like pupating larvae lifted from boiling water. Tubes loll and snake around the room, running from cabinet to cabinet and bench to bench, forming a vapour-gushing mesh in which the human chrysalises all sit, lie or swoon.

A nurse takes Serge’s card and leads him first to a changing booth, then, towel-loined, to a cabinet inside which she seats him, clamping its door shut around his neck. Steam swirls around his enclosed limbs and torso, making them wet and dry at the same time, immersing him without immersing him in anything. Drops form on his forehead and run down his face. It’s sweat and sulphur mixed together: licking it from his lips since he can’t use his constrained hands to wipe it off, Serge tastes the bitter sootiness again. He spends what seems like hours inside the cabinet. To pass the time, he thinks of the ink set next to Widsun’s headed government paper: how he’d dip the signature-seal in the ink and stamp the man’s name out across his forearm while Sophie sat at the desk learning all those cipher sequences. When he’s finally released he sees that the sweat that’s poured from him is dirty, a blue-black, as though he were full of ink.

He’s sent through to an adjoining room to be massaged. The nurse who performs this is only two or three years older than him, short and dark-haired. Her hands make circular passes around his navel, the ball of the hand pressing down into his abdomen before descending in spiralling ovals towards his pelvis; then they move up and down his sides, slapping and sawing. Her body, as she bends above him, seems a funny shape. Her skin is ruddy; her arms and chest give off the same musty, sulphurous smell that pervades the corridors, as though her flesh had imbibed it and turned each of her pores into mini-fountains. When she finishes the massage and straightens up, Serge realises that the unusual shape of her body wasn’t just due to her position as she bent, stroking and kneading, over him: her back is slightly crooked.

“Finish now. Same again tomorrow,” she says. Her voice is low and earthy. She has a glazed look, not quite in the present, as though she were staring through him, or around him, at something that was there before he came and will be there after he leaves.

Serge is meant to have a class with Clair after lunch, but he’s too exhausted. He sleeps till almost four, then makes his way over to Dr. Filip’s. In the waiting room he picks up the Lazensky Soutek, which, as far as he can make out, is a kind of local Bathing Times. It’s amateurish, badly printed onto thick, rough paper. On its front page is a grainy image showing some kind of spectacle taking place, with girls on a stage holding up cut-out suns. That’s what Serge assumes the objects are: they’re sun-shaped but, due to the saturation in the printed photograph, much darker than the girls who hold them. Is that what the Dutch woman was talking about? Do they do Pageants here, just like at Versoie? There’s a text beneath the image, but Serge doesn’t understand it. He looks up from the paper. The other patients are resting their sample-filled jars across their knees, or on the seat beside them. His is waiting for him in Dr. Filip’s office: the doctor’s holding it up, turning it around and inspecting it when he walks in.

“Not good; very much not good,” Dr. Filip says disapprovingly. “Please to look.”

He hands the jar to Serge. On its outside is a label bearing the handwriting of the nurse who hydro-mined him for its contents. The matter inside is solid, liquorice-black, with an undulating surface in whose folds and creases small reserves of dark red moisture have collected.

“Blood,” says Dr. Filip, pointing. “You have cachectic condition: encumbrances in bowel causing autointoxication. Ptomaines, toxins, pathogens all enter bloodstream. Look how dark it is.”

“You mean the blood?” Serge asks. “Or…”

“Both,” snaps Dr. Filip. “And if not treated, more. You have a poison factory in you that secretes to arteries, liver, kidneys and beyond. To brain too, when we don’t prevent.”

“What’s causing it?” Serge asks.

“Morbid matter!” Dr. Filip’s thin voice pipes from his small mouth. “Bad stuff. If I am speaking several hundred years ago I call it chole, bile-black bile: mela chole. Now, I can call it epigastritis, alimentary toxemia, intestinal putrefaction, or six or seven other names-but these do not explain what causes it. It needs a host to nurture it, and you are willing. Yesterday you spoke to me of what it wants, which means you serve its needs, make them your own. This we must change.”

“How?” Serge asks.

Dr. Filip’s whiskers rustle as his lips curl in a wry smile. “I cannot tell you this,” he says. “You must discover. I can prescribe treatment and diet, monitor symptoms. The rest is for you.” He slips a sheet of paper from his drawer and starts to write. “Take this to chemist,” he tells Serge. “The pills, one time each day-not more: too many all at once will kill you. And drink the water, always, all day long. If abdomen distends a little, not to worry. Like your own Lord poet Tennyson has said of faith: ‘Let it grow.’ ” His eyes glow slightly, like thin filaments, registering satisfaction at the quip he’s just made. Then their grey-metallic colour returns as he tells Serge: “Please to go now.”

iii

Serge settles into a routine. Each morning he wanders through the park and sips from the Mir fountain to the sound of the orchestra’s music, then heads on to Letna for a water-and-paraffin-oil enema, then to his hydrotherapy and massage session with the musty-smelling, crook-backed nurse. The lightening effect produced by the enema stays with him through the massage and on until just after lunch, when the veil thickens again and he sleeps for an hour. In the afternoons he has his lessons (Clair’s intent on teaching him German these days, deeming him old enough to start reading Marx) and takes walks around the town. He dines with Clair each evening, then spends an hour or so reading or playing games in the parlour: dominoes or bridge if in a group of four or five, or, if alone with Clair, chess. At first Clair always wins, but after a week Serge finds in the hotel’s library a book about the game and, learning the numbers and letters used to denote pieces and positions, starts applying the manoeuvres, familiar to him from nights of transcription, that the Marconi operators would tap across the sea to one another; now he wins each time. Whenever in his room, he drinks the bottles that are left for him every morning, with the heart-and-cherub logo and the patent number on their labels; each night he falls asleep with sulphur and soot on his tongue.

Serge gets to know the other patients staying in the hotel. They’re always kind to him: as the youngest one, he’s treated like a type of mascot. Besides Herr Landmesser and the Dutch woman, Tuithof, there’s a Frenchman, Monsieur Bulteau, who takes pleasure in explaining how each person’s diet acts on their metabolism, trotting out the names of chemicals, compounds and gastric juices; a Russian, Pan Suchyx, who reads sheet music in a deep armchair each evening, humming the odd snatch out to himself as though pondering a proposition or a line of argument; an Austrian banker named Kleinholz who keeps whipping from his waistcoat pocket a notebook full of columns of what Serge assumes are ledgers or accounts, and annotating these with a pen he keeps attached to it; and a score of vague Hungarians, Swedes, Serbs and Italians who nod and smile at Serge each time they pass him beside the stuffed animals or on the staircase. Nationality seems less of a defining label here than type of illness: the K4-to-X move of most long-serving inmates when they meet a fresh one is to enquire not where the new arrival’s from but rather what he or she’s got wrong with them, and patients subsequently tend to gravitate towards those with the same complaint. There are the arthritics and their outriders, people with sciatica and neuritis, who of an evening gather round a puzzle table, their stiff fingers prodding and poking the pieces into position; then there’s the skin-disease gang, the eczematics and psoriasistics, who generally loiter in the hotel’s interior courtyard (an area the other patients unkindly refer to as “the Leper Colony”); then the ones with urinary-tract infection, arterial spasm, hypertension, renal calculus, functional and organic diseases of the heart or chronic diseases of the liver-in short, what Serge and Clair call “the picklers,” people who’ve come here to douse their organs in the water in the hope of cure. They’re usually Dr. Filip’s patients. You can spot his patients all around Kloděbrady by the sample jars they carry about with them like passports. Serge wonders, as he waits outside the doctor’s office, where the samples all end up. Do they get filed in some huge archive? Or stored in a cellar, laid down in comb-shaped cubby-holes like a thick-set honey made from bees fed only on black flowers? There must be so much of it, enough matter to rival the mounds of cysteine rising from Kloděbrady’s outskirts and the countryside around it and constantly being loaded onto trains, carted away who knows where…

M. Bulteau has a theory about the cysteine, which he expounds one morning in the drawing room:

“For gunpowder, n’est-ce pas? Explosion: pow!” His hands fly apart in an explosive gesture. “The Prussians take it to their arsenales, prepare for war.”

“Ganz lächerlich!” a German lady mutters as she sips her coffee. Kleinholz, notebook out, starts annotating figures with more rigour. Herr Landmesser declares:

“The earth belongs to Prussia from long time ago, so she may use it as she wishes.”

“How does it belong to Prussia?” Clair asks.

“The whole region is Germanic, from way back,” Herr Landmesser explains. “This Jiři in the statue, patron saint, is just new, Christian name for old Germanic god.”

“What god would that be?” a Hungarian demands to know.

“Jirud. He was a prince expulsed from kingdom after he became diseased, and wandered as a swineherd. When he saw his pigs rolling in earth here, and their diseases ended, he did same and was himself cured. Then founded new kingdom here, and conquered back old one too. He was father of Volsung, who is father of Sigmund, father of Siegfried.”

“But,” says Serge, “no one knew about the healing powers of Kloděbrady until Baron von Arnow found the water under the castle and Maxbrenner plumbed it through the town.”

“You have eaten modern version of story like a good boy taking medicine,” Herr Landmesser informs him with a patronising glance.

“This is Prussian arrogance typique!” M. Bulteau almost shouts, his hands still gunpowdering apart. “They think all Europe ’s theirs, and make these stupid mythes to justify their avarice for land and power.”

“Mossieu!” The German lady slams her coffee down, red-faced. “You are not polite.”

“She’s right: you should apologise,” Herr Landmesser tells M. Bulteau.

“I shall not!” M. Bulteau answers.

The argument rumbles on throughout the day, with the German delegation demanding in increasingly aggressive terms an apology from the lone Frenchman, while Hungarians, Serbs and Italians first take sides then splinter into smaller groups who’ve found subsidiary grievances with one another. Only Pan Suchyx remains neutral, although not unaffected, humming first one melody and then another, contrary-sounding one to himself, as though weighing and counter-weighing the claims of each. People argue in Dr. Filip’s waiting room; their raised voices draw the doctor out to sternly tell all parties to desist, his white coat at this point, for Serge, resembling the toga of the Greco-Roman judge in the hotel’s dining-room fresco.

“Same problem in their heads as in your body,” he tuts as he prods Serge’s abdomen back in his office, ear lowered as it tunes into his intestines again. “Blood of Europe poisoned and cachectic; ptomaines and pathogens in system. Now the black bile is everywhere: the mela chole. All have clouded vision, just like you.”

Discussions, hostile or otherwise, become less common as the hotel’s population dwindles in late August. Each day the porters’ suitcase-laden trolleys clank and trundle down the main drag from the hotel to the station, not the other way. The orchestra by the Mir fountain reduces its appearances to two a week, and even then is made up of fewer musicians than before, its heart shape retained but shrunk, the music now competing with the sound of workmen’s hammers banging at stone and plaster as they renovate the mausoleums. Sections of the fountain complex are switched off, drained and repaired. Serge spends whole mornings following the piping’s layout, fascinated by the bare mechanics of it all: the joins and junctions where the network splits, the small electric pumps beside the pipes, the insulated wires threaded through these. The habit catches: he starts looking at the ground all day whatever part of town he’s in, inspecting the cracks that run through it like skeins, its dark and viscous colouration, or the discarded stubs of bath season tickets and medicine labels ground into it and broken down until they seem as old and organic as earth itself.

iv

At the beginning of September, an arrival creates a small eddy in the flow of leavers from the town. She turns up in the Grand Hotel’s lobby with a large round hatbox, a mink stole, a folded parasol of the same light blue as the hatbox, a black handbag and a flotilla of smaller bags and boxes. As porters duck and tack around her, she stands static as a lighthouse in a busy harbour, leaving her older chaperone to issue instructions and distribute tips.

Serge is heading out of the hotel towards the Mir, and half-stops when he sees her. She’s about his age-perhaps a year or two older, like the crook-backed nurse. She looks at him quizzically when his passage through the lobby falters, which makes him look back quizzically at her, as though he knew her, or perhaps were supposed to perform some task for her that’s slipped his mind-which makes her stare back too, bemused. She seems to understand the situation sooner than he does-to understand there is no situation-and releases his gaze with a confident, if mannered, kind of smile.

He sees her next that afternoon, in the town’s museum. The museum’s in the castle; Serge didn’t even know of its existence until Mevr. Tuithof gushed about it over dinner last night. When he buys a half-crown ticket at its entrance, the old lady in the ticket-booth comes round to his side of the window and leads him towards an ancient sub-Berliner in the main gallery.

“Deutsch? Franzözisch?” she asks, smiling up at him.

“English,” he replies.

“Ah!” She seems a little shocked, and scurries back to her booth, returning with a record that she lowers to the turntable with shaky hands. Stooping slightly, she leads the pickup’s arm across, then down. She turns to Serge now, and makes to say something-but, lacking the English words to do so, merely points to her ear: listen. Serge listens. A deep, male, English voice comes crackling through the speaking horn:

“Of all the towns in Central Europe,” it informs him, “few have had a history so steeped in violence as Kloděbrady.” As though to illustrate its point, a scream-perhaps a child’s, perhaps a woman’s-interrupts the monologue. “Here it was,” the deep, male voice continues after the scream fades out, “that the child-prince of Kutna Hora was beheaded at the order of the Hauptmann of Olbec; here it was that Vincenzo and Rosnata, the sons of Mstislav, were killed by Vladimir after their own father’s demise.”

Serge nods at the old lady knowingly:

“The tumour-humour thing,” he says.

She smiles back at him anxiously, then beats a slow retreat towards her booth. The deep, male voice continues telling him of wars and purges, plagues and fires. He looks around the gallery: its vitrines, made from the same murky glass as the pike-and-otter cases in the hotel, hold illuminated manuscripts depicting scenes of battle and execution. Larger images of similar events hang on the walls. A tapestry of roughly the same size as the one above the staircase at Versoie shows some kind of torture taking place: an unhappy-looking character’s being carried by two soldiers up a ladder leading to the rim of a huge vat from which steam rises, while a courtier-type points to the vat malevolently. Serge wanders over and inspects the scene more closely. The courtier has the same sharp, narrow features as Dr. Filip. Maybe Dr. Filip’s just the latest incarnation of a character as old as this town itself, Serge thinks to himself-a figure who reappears in era after era, like Dr. Learmont’s face repeating through the sickbed afternoons of his childhood, but on a larger scale, one to be measured not in the memories of a single life but over centuries. The borders of the tapestry are embellished with insects. Serge turns away from it and feels his veiled vision darkening further, and feels too the dark matter in his stomach tightening, solidifying. The deep voice on the gramophone is talking about the region’s landscape:

“… already crossed by an extremely important long-distance trading route linking the centre of the country to the Kodsko region and Silesia inking the centre of the country to the Kodsko region and Silesia inking the centre of the country to the Kod…”

The record’s stuck. Serge turns and makes to walk back to the gramophone so he can release the needle, but sees that he’s been beaten to it: a woman, not the ticket-lady, is lifting the arm up and sliding it above the record’s surface before lowering it back again, allowing the monologue to advance:

“… for the transportation of the mineral-rich earth of the surrounding countryside, which remains a valuable resource to this day. At the beginning of the thirteenth century…”

The woman turns around now, and he sees it’s the new arrival. She’s changed since this morning, and now wears an emerald-green knotted cloche hat and a sea-blue shawl.

“My stumbling porter,” she says. “What’s your name?”

He tells her.

“Serge like ‘sedge,’ or ‘urge’?” she asks.

“Just like I said it,” he replies. “What are you called?”

“Lucia,” she answers. “It’s Italian.”

“You don’t sound Italian,” he tells her.

“It’s my mother,” says Lucia. “She’s from Genoa. My father’s English. ‘Serge’ sounds French.”

“It is. My mother also: her family.”

“You have brothers and sisters?”

“No,” he says. “I had a sister, but not anymore. What are you here for?”

“Here? To see the museum,” she says.

“No, I mean here in Kloděbrady.”

“Oh, anaemia,” she tells him, rolling her eyes up like a naughty schoolgirl. “My blood’s too light or something. How about you?”

“The opposite: too dark.”

Lucia giggles. “How perfect. Shall we visit the gallery?”

They walk through the large hall beneath tapestries and past illuminations, while the gramophone’s account of wars against the Turks, Hungarians and Czechs, of infanticide, betrayal and sedition, echoes at them from the room’s high walls. The words soften and run together as they step into the cellar, in which rotting boat-fragments, the charcoaled skeletons of old canoes, are laid out among sepulchres whose stone reliefs level accounts between aggressors and their victims by giving the faces of both the same worn-down, characterless quality. When they come up to the main gallery again, the voice is telling them how Mstislav tried to buck the murderous local trend by developing and implementing pacifist strategies.

“He was the one with radical oppinions,” says Serge. “I read about this earlier. He lay the groundwork for Prince Jiři to… Listen…”

“… for the reign of Prince Jiři,” the deep voice says as though completing, or rephrasing, Serge’s sentence, “who submitted to the royal courts of Europe, under the title of The General Peaceful Organisations, a blueprint for universal peace.”

“Well, well,” Lucia says, nodding at him wide-eyed and amused. “Impressive.”

Serge holds up his finger like the ticket-lady did a while ago; they listen as the voice continues:

“Although not immediately adopted, Jiri’s vision is now blossoming among all nations, and amicable trade has replaced warfare as a means of competition.”

“Has it?” Lucia asks, more to the voice than to Serge. “That’s nice.”

The record’s ended now; the gramophone’s speaking horn hisses. For a moment, Serge is back in the attic at Versoie, looking out over the rainy garden, shunting ghosts around its grid-squares. The ticket-lady’s shuffling over to retrieve the disc, smiling at them exaggeratedly as they pass her on their way to the exit. As she’s returning the pickup to its cradle, she must clumsily allow her shaky hand to drop the needle back onto the disc’s surface: the child’s or woman’s scream erupts once more, following Serge and Lucia out into the courtyard.

The heart-logo’s embedded in the castle’s masonry; it hovers above them as they head beneath an arch, only this time it’s held up not by cherubs but on strands which protrude from its underside like fleshy tentacles, giving it an octopus- or jellyfish-like look. They pass out of the courtyard towards the town’s river, where, beside a boathouse, rowers are lowering their not-yet-charcoaled canoes from a jetty while swimmers in trunks and bathing caps splash friends in paddle boats. A bridge crosses this; Serge and Lucia walk to its middle, then pause and, leaning on the rail, look down over a large double-decker pleasure boat that’s waiting for a lock to open. On the boat’s stern is painted its name, Jiři.

“How did your sister die?” Lucia asks. They haven’t spoken for a while: just walked and watched the river. Looking at the swirls emerging from beneath the boat’s hull, Serge replies:

“She drowned.”

The lock door opens; bubbles rise up from the churning water; the pleasure boat moves on; so do Lucia and Serge. After a few more yards the bridge turns into a weir. Sluice-gates beneath it channel and filter the water; above it, at intervals, gate-houses rise like watchtowers. Beyond these, a generating station runs from the weir to the solid ground on the river’s far side. Through its mesh windows, Serge can see turbines grinding and whirring, their wheels and belts resembling the strange machine in Dr. Filip’s office. The building’s electric moan hangs in the air and merges with another hum that comes from somewhere else-from higher, growing in volume and aggression like the buzz of a malignant insect. Serge looks up and sees an aeroplane flying low above the river. Lucia grabs his shoulder as it passes over them.

“Look!” she shouts, all excited. “Look at that!”

“It’s taking people on an aerial tour of the town and countryside,” Serge says. “They do it two or so times each week, when the weather’s good.”

“Have you flown on it?” she asks.

“No.” Clair suggested it one day but he declined, for the simple reason that he didn’t believe that all his weight could possibly get airborne. He knew it could, of course, knew that the laws of physics would allow the machine to bear him on its wings and propeller up into the sky-but psychologically… In his mind the morbid matter Dr. Filip spoke of has taken on proportions far, far larger than his stomach could ever accommodate, and expanded to become a landscape, a whole territory: the land itself, and then the murky, gauzy air above it, the dark waters flowing beneath this… How could all that be elevated? His abdomen’s swollen since he arrived here. Dr. Filip said that this was good-that it was the pure, air-filled water that was swelling it, that purity, like faith, would grow. But something else is growing inside Serge. He feels its heaviness. He sees its heaviness everywhere: in the scales hanging above the doors of chemists’ shops, the snakes that curl around them, weighing them down, in the cysteine-rich ballast being crane-hoisted onto groaning trains, or in the hearts that jets and cherubs strain to hold up against dragging weeds and tentacles. He’s taken to colouring the hearts black in idle moments in his room: on the stationery beside his bed or on the labels of the mineral-water bottles…

He sees Lucia often. They take walks together on most afternoons. Both Clair and Lucia’s chaperone, the fifty-odd-year-old Miss Larkham, seem to think their company is good for one another. Lucia likes his, certainly: each time she laughs she fixes his eyes with hers, aquamarine and pale, holding them for longer each time. After a few days she starts punching him lightly on the arm whenever she makes a light-hearted comment, or grabbing his shoulder like she did when the aeroplane flew overhead and leaving her hand there, letting him support her as though she were about to lose her balance even though the patch of ground they’re on is straight and flat. He senses that she’d let him return the gesture if he felt like it, and hold her as closely or tightly as he liked, kiss her, do whatever he pleased…

But he’s not sure that he wants to. For all Lucia’s levity and brightness, he prefers the company of his crook-backed masseuse. Her name’s Tania, he found out the third or fourth time she massaged him. He likes the way her hands circle around his stomach, the aggression of the palm’s ball pressing down into his flesh and muscles, the spiralling descent that follows, then the way she slaps and saws his sides. He likes her ruddy skin and musty, sulphurous odour; as she bends above him he inhales it deeply, as though breathing in, through her, the sulphurous fumes gushing straight from the springs. Walks with Lucia are enjoyable and pass the time, but sessions with Tania fill him with anticipation, so much so that he finds himself growing impatient for the next morning’s one each afternoon, losing the signal of whatever Lucia’s talking to him about as his mind tunes forwards to the mustiness, the pressing and descent…

He and Tania talk little. Once he asks her how she came to be a masseuse and she tells him that she contracted polio as a child, and came to Kloděbrady because her family wanted her to benefit from the healing powers of the local earth. They weren’t wealthy enough to keep her here as a patient, so she became a chambermaid’s assistant; then, when she was thirteen, started training at the Letna. Despite working in hydrotherapy, she’s adamant that it’s the earth and not the water here that’s special.

“You’re like Jirud, then,” Serge tells her as she pounds him.

“Who he?” she asks.

“He came here with pigs, and the earth cured them-or at any rate that’s what Herr Landmesser says. Is he one of yours?”

“I do not know either Jirud or Landmesser,” Tania tells him. “But the earth here is good. Without it, I would have much pain. You turn over now.”

As he turns, her distended shoulder looms above him. He likes her crippled body, the illness inside it. Like her smell, it seems to convey something else-something gurgling upwards from below, running through her as though she were a conduit, a set of pipes. Her glazed look too: the way her eyes seem almost oblivious to what’s in front of them, fixing instead on something other than the immediate field of vision, deeper and more perennial…

Does his health improve? Not really. Its progress certainly isn’t to the satisfaction of the old judge and torturer. He sees Dr. Filip once a week and, lying on his back while the detector-whiskers twitch and bristle and the tapper-arm hovers above his abdomen, is lectured on his failings as a patient.

“So: appears your body is responding to the treatment only so it then can re-intoxify,” the doctor’s sharp voice scolds.

“What’s re-intoxifying it?” Serge asks.

“What? There is no what. It re-intoxifies itself.”

“With what then?” Serge tries.

“Not with either. Your illness is not a thing; it is a process. A rhythm. Toxins are secreted around body, organs become accustomed and, perverted by custom, addicted. So when toxins are gone, organs ask for more. More ptomaines, please! More pathogens! And body makes more. The rhythm is repeating, on and on. It will repeat until you-I mean your will, your mind-tell it to stop.”

“How do I tell it that?” Serge asks.

Dr. Filip stops tapping; his thin eyes lock on Serge’s from behind their steel-rimmed spectacles. “Tell me,” he says; “you like it here?”

Serge shrugs. “It’s fine.”

“You like the rhythm of your days? The enemas, the hydrotherapy, the walks…”

“It’s rather pleasant,” Serge tells him.

The thin eyes glint metallically. “See? You find it pleasant-and I think you find the rhythm of your illness pleasant too. It pleases you to feast on the mela chole, on the morbid matter, and to feast on it repeatedly, again, again, again, like it was lovely meat-lovely, black, rotten meat. And so the rotten meat pollutes your soul.”

“But if I like it here,” Serge counters, “and follow what’s prescribed, doesn’t that mean I’m accepting of the treatment rather than resistant to it?”

Dr. Filip turns from him and fiddles with his instruments. His small, tight back seems tense with thinking. After a while he answers:

“Things mutate. That is the way of nature-of good nature: things pass through on their way to somewhere else, and both they and the things they pass through are thereby transformed. You following me?”

“I suppose so,” Serge says hesitantly.

“You, though,” the doctor continues, “have got blockage. Jam, block, stuck. Instead of transformation, only repetition. Need to free what’s blocking, break whole rhythm of intoxication-then good transformation can resume and things will pass through you and make you open up. You still are only adolescent: still have much transformation to perform. Blockage must be broken, then body and soul both will open up, like flowers.”

Still lying on the segmented table, Serge sees in his mind’s eye cocooned men, trapped in escritoires or trussed up in sweat-filled blankets, pulsing in figures of eight as they mutate into resin-oozing, black silk-larvae that will never become moths. From the recesses of his stomach, as though from a box, he hears again a child’s or woman’s scream.

“Out now,” says Dr. Filip. “Go and start transforming.”

In mid-September there’s a religious festival. Clair thinks it’s the Exaltation of the Cross; Miss Larkham thinks it’s the Nativity of the Theotokos; Serge doesn’t care what it is; Lucia finds it all very amusing. She and Serge shadow the procession as it emerges from the doors of the town’s church and makes its way towards the castle, after which it heads down to first the Letna, then the Maxbrenner buildings, pausing to perform a ceremony on the steps of each. It then moves past the rows of chemists’ shops, the statue of Prince Jiři and the kiosks lining the main drag, each one of which it blesses too; then, finally, across the lawns of the fountain park, where it takes in all the mausoleums before ending up beside the Mir. At its head a priest, holding aloft a cross, intones liturgical script, while sub-priests and altar boys murmur assent. The orchestra, heart shape abandoned, follow behind, intermittently striking up tunes that sound rather funereal, breaking these off, then striking them up again, reprising the same passages. The townspeople who move along its route with Lucia and Serge join in at regular intervals, reciting short phrases in their own, non-liturgical language.

“What do you think they’re saying?” asks Lucia, holding Serge’s arm.

“ ‘O holy water, please keep bringing us rich foreigners so that we may take their money,’ ” Serge answers.

Lucia flings her head back in a peal of laughter and throws both her arms around his neck. A couple of townspeople turn round and cast them disapproving glances. A hush spreads through the crowd as the priest dips his cross into the Mir; then all heads bow as he holds it submerged beneath the water. He keeps it there for a long time. Watching him, Serge remembers what Herr Landmesser said about the old, Germanic origins of the town’s myths. As ancient and obscure words waft over the devoted, cowered crowd, it strikes him that Herr Landmesser was probably right-and strikes him too that all the water that’s gushed through the Mir since its inception would never purify him, wash his dark bile away, because the water’s dark as well. It’s bubbled up from earth so black that no blessing could ever lighten it, been filtered through the charcoaled wrecks of boats and tumour-ridden bones of murdered ancestors, through stool-archives and other sedimented layers of morbid matter. Serge turns his veiled gaze away from the priest-and as he does, sees Tania looking back at him with old, glazed eyes.

v

By late September only Serge and Clair, Lucia and Miss Larkham and a gaggle of full-time patients who’ve resigned themselves to the knowledge that they’ll never leave the place alive remain in the Grand Hotel. The poles outside stand flagless; the terrace, cleared of tables, collects leaves. Inside, the dining room is being redecorated: a large sheet hangs over the Greco-Roman judge and athletes of the fresco; the white-coated waiter manning the bar beneath it doubles to serve the four or five tables at which guests still sit. Beside the Mir the orchestra no longer plays; the floor of its bandstand, like a horizontal version of the fresco, is covered in sheets as workmen repaint the trellised ironwork of its rails and columns. Wandering out to the fountain every morning, Serge feels like an interloper, someone who’s found his way, like the rose-strewing cherub in the drawing on the brochure, into a picture to which he doesn’t rightly belong. The townspeople, who earlier were so attentive to the visitors, accommodating to the point that their lives, their daily movements and activities, revolved around them, now seem to orbit their own, obscure suns, ones that Serge can’t quite discern. The concierge and maître d’, as often as not out of uniform, chat to one another across the reception desk even when guests are waiting; men with ladders assume right-of-way in corridors and streets alike, leaving visitors to skirt and squeeze around them: this is their town now…

The general relaxation of formalities makes itself felt in Serge’s sessions with Tania. There’s nothing tangible that’s changed: she still wears the same coat and presses, slaps and saws in the same places-but her hands move over him more casually now. Each session seems like a weekend one, as though they’d both just popped in to an empty office before slipping off on an excursion. One morning, Serge asks her what she’s doing later; when she answers “I do nothing” he suggests they take a boat-ride on the Jiři together.

“Pleasure boat finished now,” she answers. “Not tourists enough.”

“Well then, we’ll hire a paddle boat,” Serge answers. “Want to come?”

Without pausing her rubbing she replies: “What time?”

“Six o’clock,” Serge says. “Make that five. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier these days.”

The boathouse by the lock turns out to be closed. He wonders what to do with Tania while he waits for her in front of it. He waits until five-thirty, then five forty-five, then six. At quarter-past he spots Lucia wandering alone beneath the castle. She hasn’t seen him yet; he nips across the bridge until he’s out of sight but still able to watch for Tania’s arrival. He sits there for another hour or so, looking at bubble-clusters moving from the weir’s sluice-gates to the water’s edge. Free and easily liberated, the brochure said; too many all at once will kill you, Dr. Filip warned. Behind him the generating station’s turbines clank and moan. Beyond it, just before the path gives over to fields, there’s a small substation: an urn-like building from which wires emerge and lead to poles, then wind round rubber spindles fixed to horizontal arms on these and split out into smaller wires, like organzine combining, only backwards, each separated strand then disappearing inside a metal casket that’s half-buried in the ground. Between the substation and the main one, vines emerge from the same ground-three rows of them, attached by strings to nursery posts that they’ve outgrown. Serge walks up to the knitted fence around the substation and, resting his fingers in its weave, looks at the vines more closely. They have fruit on them: dark-red grapes bursting with ripeness. He lets his eye run onwards, to the fields. Beyond these there’s a wood, already darkening in the dusk. Perhaps he could take Tania there, he thinks, if she turns up…

She doesn’t. The next day, as she massages him, he asks her why.

“Boathouse closed,” she says. “Other nurse tell me.”

“Well, we could have gone for a walk,” Serge says.

“Where?” she asks.

“In the woods, for example. They look nice. Why don’t we do that this evening?”

“Six o’clock again?” she asks. “Turn over now.”

“Five,” he says as her shoulder looms above him. “On the far side of the weir, by the power station.”

“Power?” she asks, sawing his back.

“Yes. You know: electricity.” He makes a moaning noise and wheels his arms around beside his waist.

“I understand,” she says, pushing them down again. “I come.”

She stands him up again. As he waits by the substation he watches soldiers practising manoeuvres in the fields. They run a few feet forwards and lie down, pointing their dummy-rifles at the wood, then jump up and run a few feet further before throwing themselves at the earth again, advancing in stops and starts towards some imaginary enemy within the trees. Serge thinks of what M. Bulteau said about the Prussian arsenals, of what he called their avarice for land and power. Widsun thought the same. Advance thy empire, Venus said to little round Giles. The deep, male voice on the record said that Jiři’s peace-blueprint was flowering among all nations. He remembers the way Lucia smiled at that, then, longing for Tania’s musty smell, turns back towards the weir to look for her, and sees that a door in the generating station is opening. A man walks out and says something to him. “I’m sorry…” Serge shrugs.

“Deutsch?”

“No: English.”

“Oh! You English!” The man’s face lights up. He’s fifty-ish, well-built, with thick grey hair and bronzed, sinewy arms that look like the vines in the patch he’s just stepped out into. “English good people!”

“Thank you,” Serge says to him. “Are these vines yours?”

“Vine? Kystenvine, special of region. You like vine?”

“They look nice,” Serge answers.

“I get for you,” the man says, then turns and heads back to the generating station. He emerges a few moments later with a bottle.

“Here: Geschenk for good English!” he says, pushing it through the mesh with his strong, wood-dark arm. “Electro-vine. You take!”

The bottle’s made from the same murky glass as everything else around here. Its contents are so dark that at first Serge thinks the man has handed him some bottled local earth; but when he takes it through the fence he realises there’s liquid in it. As he turns it in his hands the liquid runs inside, its silky, deep-red filaments stirring and catching the light until they seem to glow.

“It’s wine?” he asks the man. “From these vines?”

“Da-ja-how say? Yes! Kystenvine: we make here, only few bottles, for us. Electro-vine for good electro-men!”

He lets out a deep, hearty laugh, then disappears into the generating station once more. Serge thinks of taking the wine to the field’s edge and drinking it as he watches the soldiers train, but realises that he doesn’t have a corkscrew. Returning to the hotel, he slips the bottle beneath his shirt so Clair won’t see it.

In his room, a letter’s waiting for him. It’s from his father.

Dear Son,

he reads,

I trust the water’s to your liking. As you’ll doubtless be aware (or perhaps not, bathed as you are in splendid isolation), the Pontic seas of politics are flowing with compulsive course to the Propontic and the Hellesport. Should a retiring ebb not be felt soon, I fear we’ll have to curtail your stay among the Nix and bring you home, lest Vernichtung lay down a barrier preventing your return. Await instructions.

On another note: I have been experimenting greatly of late with Crookes Tubes, in the manner of Lenard, and feel-with great excitement and not a little trepidation-that I am close to submitting a patent for approval by the great and austere offices of our-his-majesty’s government. Without going into too great detail, and not unaware that in times such as these the intimacy of one’s communications cannot be assured-a fact which does not make me any less loath to engage in the dark, cryptographic art to which your godfather some time ago sold himself corps et biens as the saying goes-What? Yes, what I have in mind involves not only the projection by means electronic of images across a screen-a task which, after all, the kinematograph performs more than adequately-but their transmission across long distances, by wires or, indeed, wirelessly, just as sound is wirelessly dispatched at present. There is no reason this could not be done: indeed, successes have already been claimed by others in the passing of static images via radio-you of all people will be privy to that fact-but my ambition is much higher: to transmit moving pictures over distance, such that life in all its full, vibrant immediacy may be relayed without any delay. Yes, you read that right: what I’m inventing is no less than a remote, instant kinematoscope!

Why do I tell you this? you ask. Because I intend, filius meus, or rather fili mi (I hope, dear boy, that Clair is not letting your Latin rust, nor any other branch of the great tree of learning up whose trunk you are climbing, like the squirrel in the Norwegian-no, the Finnish-is it Kalevalla, or Kavelavela or-anyway)-I intend, once my patent is granted, to incorporate: that is, to set up commercially. What do you think of Carrefax Cathode for a name? More to the point, what would you think of becoming, if not immediately a partner, then at least, and, if required, by legal proxy till you turn eighteen, a signatory to the incorporated body? I have been pondering the question of an identificatory visual motif, or logo if you will, and feel that a photograph of your late sister would complement, nay complete, the family nature of our undertaking. The love of technology shared by the three of us has always been a font of pleasure-of the greatest pleasure-for me; and I see no reason why your sister’s death should interrupt this interfamilial communion, far less call a halt to it. When Bell’s brother, with whom the great man had spent so many hours working towards the telephone’s invention, passed away, this merely spurred Bell on to create a machine sensitive enough to enter into discourse with him should the existence of an afterlife turn out to be not merely a metaphysical presupposition but a physical fact too. No contact was made-but did the brother not still play a part in the invention? Should his contribution be forgotten? So it is with Sophie, I believe. When future generations watch images, borne by fiery electric particles, dancing on their walls, relayed thither from distant lands, should it not…

Serge sets the letter down. He had a fluoroscopy session one day, quite early in his stay in Kloděbrady, when Dr. Filip wanted to ascertain the extent of the encumbrance in his bowels. In a windowless room buried deep in the entrails of the Maxbrenner building, he stood between a lead-lined X-ray box and an empty wooden frame that Dr. Filip shifted slightly up and down on its supporting post until it was positioned just in front of Serge’s midriff. The doctor then slid a screen into the frame’s groove and, stepping away from Serge, switched the room’s lights off and the contraption on. There was a whirring, then a flash, a smell of calcium tungstate; and then a glowing pool collected in the air just on the far side of the screen, as though Serge’s stomach were seeping light.

“Please not to move,” the doctor’s voice instructed him from the darkness as Serge tried to crane his head forwards to see the light-source. “I can show you with mirror.”

A scraping came from beneath the voice, then the sound of something being lifted from the floor-then there it was, reflected back at him: the inside of his belly, etched in blocks and lines of black against the fluoroscope screen’s sickly calcium-white, suspended in a void that detached it from anything and everything. Organs, tubes and bones quivered and oscillated against each other awkwardly, like animals-reptiles, molluscs, nether-dwelling creatures-who, crammed together in a space too small for them, bristle with aggression towards one another yet understand, through some vermicular, primordial instinct, that the survival of each depends on that of its unwanted neighbours. Both Serge and Dr. Filip watched the scene in silence for quite some time. Serge’s stomach, and not the vacuum in which it was held, was the living, moving part of this new film that was being projected and viewed in the instant of its creation-and yet, rendered negative and ghostly by the rays, it seemed to Serge more dead than all the meat inside it. Lying back now on the bed trying to picture his father’s putative invention, he sees skinless bodies moving through empty space: hundreds of them, stretching, bending and gesturing, like the dancing skeletons of folklore and travelling carnival displays. “Carrefax Cathode”: whatever vibrant immediacy this might possess, all Serge can see is death-death broadcast out of Poldhu, Malin, Cleethorpes, flung across the seas, pulsed out on the hour from Paris, relayed from mast to mast and station to station, from Abyssinia to Suez to Crookhaven and on to homes in Europe and across the world. Can death be patented? He reaches for the mineral-water bottle by his bed and, holding it up to his face, rotates it so the seven-digit number on its label ticker-tapes past his eyes…

“Why didn’t you turn up this time?” he asks as Tania presses her balled palms into his abdomen the next morning.

“I have thing to do,” she answers.

“I met a man who gave me wine,” he tells her.

“Cystenwine?” she asks him.

“That’s what he called it, more or less.”

“Is very good.”

“We could drink it together,” he says, “if you come this evening.”

“Okay,” she says, “I come.”

To his surprise, she does. They meet on the weir and stroll over to the far bank, past the generating station. Serge can see figures moving around inside, but can’t tell if his vine-limbed benefactor is among them. He and Tania pass the substation and head into the fields. The soldiers are all gone; the whole landscape seems empty-even the train pulled up beside the earth-mounds a quarter of a mile or so away has been abandoned, its driver probably drinking with the shovellers and soldiers, the bandstand-painters and dining-hall decorators in one of the town’s inns. Serge has the Kystenwein on him; he also has a corkscrew borrowed from the hotel’s kitchen. He looks at Tania, wondering if he should break the bottle out right now. She doesn’t seem impatient for it. Her eyes, dimmer than usual in the dusk, stare vaguely ahead, towards the woods. A path leads into these; they follow it. After a while the woods end temporarily and a strip, too narrow for a field, runs between them and the next block of woods.

“Against fire,” Tania tells him-the first words she’s spoken since they started walking.

“What’s one disaster more or less, in this town?” Serge murmurs.

She doesn’t respond. To their right, in the fire-break’s middle, there’s an indentation: a kind of mini-quarry where the ground’s been hollowed out. Its black-soiled surfaces curve in a way suggestive of soft chairs.

“Why don’t we sit there?” Serge asks.

Tania shrugs. They enter the indentation and sit down, leaning back against its edges. Serge pulls the corkscrew from his pocket and opens the bottle.

“I didn’t bring any glasses, I’m afraid,” he tells her.

Tania takes the bottle from his hands and drinks from it, throwing her head back. The liquid casts a deep-red glow across her neck. She hands it back to him. He brings it to his lips-and tastes on its rim the warm, bitter residue of Tania’s spit. The wine itself he doesn’t taste till further back, down in his throat: it’s bitter too, in a rich, dirty way.

“It’s different from the one I had on my first evening here,” he says. “My tutor said that it was good for my digestion, but Dr. Filip’s only letting me drink-”

“Why you come alone with teacher?” Tania interrupts him. “Why not parents too?”

“They have things to do, like you.”

“Take care of brothers and sisters?”

“No,” Serge replies. “I don’t have those. I had a sister, but no more.”

“She died?” asks Tania. Serge nods. “How?”

Serge ponders the question for a while, then answers:

“She fell from a height and hit the ground.”

Tania reaches for the bottle and drinks again. When she’s done, he drinks too. The wine’s making him warm; he feels the silky hotness moving outwards from his stomach, to his arms, his legs, his head. Tania takes the bottle again and drinks once more, this time taking long, deep gulps. He does the same. Some of the wine’s escaped from the side of Tania’s mouth; it runs down her chin and dribbles onto her blouse. Serge reaches out his hand and spreads the wet film from her chin around her cheek. She doesn’t stop him, or react in any way. Her eyes, glazed as always, stare through him at the black earth. He brings his mouth up to her face and licks the wine from it. Her neck, beside his ear, emits a low, guttural sound, of the same character and pitch as low-frequency radio waves. He can smell the musty odour rising from her body-from its corners, enclaves, holes. He tugs at her blouse and, meeting no resistance, pulls it off completely, then does the same to her skirt and underclothes.

“Turn around,” he says. “I want to see your back.”

She turns. There it is, right under his face: the crook, rising beneath her shoulder like a ridge with valleys running down its side, flesh-rills held up by bones under the skin. He touches it, then runs his fingers up and down the rills. Still kneeling behind her, he pulls his own clothes off and, holding his penis in his right hand, feeds it under and inside her from behind while clasping her back’s crook in his left hand. The guttural sounds in her neck increase in volume; the musty smell grows stronger, sharper. Serge shuts his eyes and, for some reason, sees the ruddy, marble eyes of the stuffed Spitalfield, the corrugated surface of his hairy skin. He opens them again and, looking straight down, sees the earth rising between Tania’s fingers where her hands push into it. He runs his own hand down her back, so hard the nails puncture its surface, and moves inside her violently, like he’s seen animals and insects do it. Her thighs push back at him, pulling him further in. He closes his eyes again and feels a burning growing in his stomach.

“Poisonberry,” he says, barely audibly.

The word hovers in a small gas-cloud of breath over Tania’s skin before spreading outwards, dissipating. The burning’s spreading outwards too, just like the wine; it’s spreading beyond his body, moving out to fill the hollow, and beyond that too, across the fire-break to the woods on either side. A scream, or the echo of a scream, erupts from neither him nor Tania but, it seems, the night itself; and with it comes a tearing sound, as though a fabric were being ripped. Serge opens his eyes now, and finds that the gauzy crêpe that’s furred his vision for so long is gone-completely gone, like a burst bubble or disintegrated membrane. The surfaces of ground and woods and clouds are gone too, fallen away like screens, encumbrances that blocked his vision, leaving the hollow-not of the indentation but of space itself: an endless space in which he can now see with piercing clarity. What he sees is darkness, but he sees it.