C

i

Versoie seems smaller. Its proportions are the same: the surface area of the house’s side-wall in relation to that of the Maze Garden above which it rises, or the width of the maze’s paved path in relation to the garden’s lawn; the height of the Crypt Park’s obelisk-topped columns, or the sightline above these into the park itself afforded by the attic window-all these are correct. But, taken as a whole, they seem to have shrunk. The left-swerving passage from the house’s front door to the Low Lawn, then through the Lime Garden with its beehives and, beyond these, past the green slime-topped trough-pond towards the long, conker-tree-lined avenue that skirts the Apple Orchard as it heads towards the spinning sheds and Bodner’s garden-a passage each of whose sections used to comprise a world, expansive beyond comprehension, filled with organic density and volume, with the possibilities of what might take place in it, riven with enclaves and proclivities every one of which itself comprised a world within the world, on to infinity-now seems like a small, inconsequential circuit: a transceiver loop or well-worn route round a familiar parade ground. It’s as though, in Serge’s absence, the whole estate had, by some sleight of hand, been substituted by a model, one into which he’s now been reinserted, oversize, cumbersome and gauche…

Versoie seems smaller, and the world seems smaller, seems like a model of the world. It’s not just that the distance between, say, here and Lydium has shrunk (and done so almost exponentially thanks to the motor car his father’s purchased and now lets him drive whenever he feels like an outing), but, beyond that, that the inventory of potential experiences-situations in which he might find himself, conversations and interactions he might undergo-has dwindled so low that they could be itemised on a single sheet of paper. The exchanges he has in shops or in the post office, the movements and gestures these involve, seem so limited, so mapped out in advance, as to be predetermined-as though they’d already happened and were simply being re-enacted by two or more people who’d agreed to maintain the farcical pretence that this was something new and exciting. He’s taken to walking out on the charade halfway through: stepping into, for example, the cheese shop, responding to the usual questions about how his parents or the Day School pupils are, agreeing how nice it is to be back after serving his country so bravely, admitting that the weather isn’t quite doing what might be expected of it at this time of year, and so on-then, just as the shopkeeper shifts his stance above the rows of Lancashires and Stiltons and asks him what he’ll have, turning round and pushing the door open, leaving its ting! hanging in the air behind him with the ruptured conversation. He once did this on three premises in a row-neighbouring ones: newsagent, baker, fishmonger-not out of maliciousness but simply to identify and breach the boundary of each situation, one after the other, to let it form a box around him which he could then step out of…

The same restless impulse sees him whipping up and down between Versoie and London. He enrols at the Architectural Association, then gets it into his head that he should study engineering instead; visiting Imperial College to sign up for this, he changes his mind and decides to follow in his sister’s footsteps and join the natural science department; but, realising after a week that he has no aptitude for this discipline, he cools on the idea of being at Imperial at all and re-enrols at the AA. The restlessness, he comes to realise, is in truth an attempt to achieve its opposite: stasis. It’s as though if he moves about enough, the world will fall into place around him. He experiences this most viscerally when driving across Salisbury Plain. Summoning up with his right foot a roar of snarling teeth and whirring cylinders, feeling beneath his hips the force of however many horses surging forwards, he watches the hedgerows run together till they blur into a tunnel of green speed. As this streaks by and the horizon accelerates towards him, it seems that he himself has become still-and, in these moments, he feels the same sense of satisfaction that he used to in the nacelle of the Rumpitee or the cabin of the RE8: the sense of being a fixed point in a world of motion. Holding this point against the landscape with the wheel, he pushes back into the air that screeches along his cheeks the word fassen, although this modulates amidst the noise sometimes to become fast or faster. The air carries a smell of lime-not the fruit but quicklime: the plain’s been used as a giant burial ground for victims of the recent flu pandemic. The calcium oxide penetrates his nostrils and sinks deep into his lungs, making him feel alive and good.

It’s not just Masedown’s humans who’ve been struck down by disease: the mulberry trees at Versoie have caught an infection-something called Dieback. It takes the form of a fuzzy white mould, like the mould you get on stale bread, growing around the leaves and branches and extending out from these in wispy strands from tree to tree-as though the vegetation had, as Clair’s heroes advocated, taken control of the means of production and, cutting out the parasites both insectoid and human who exploited its resources, started weaving for itself. The effects of this insurrection are quite tangible: most of the silk-making staff have been laid off; the spinning sheds are empty. Only Bodner can be seen from day to day: a small, lone figure trudging around the Mulberry Lawn with a bucket into which he dips a brush, painting the trees with disinfectant.

Serge’s father has a theory about the cause of the disease: electric blighting.

“Under times of great stress or excitation,” he explains to Serge over a glass of port one afternoon in Sophie’s former lab, “the body emits an increased static charge. Police forces in America and France-” his finger points vaguely left to indicate the former place; his thumb jerks back over his shoulder for the latter-“are already making use of this phenomenon, measuring electric levels on the skin to ascertain when a suspect is lying.”

“How does that blight our trees?” Serge asks.

“Blight-what?” his father barks. “Ah! Well, these electrical disturbances, once created, outlive the moment of their generation. If they remain behind indefinitely, they’re detectable indefinitely, n’est-ce pas?”

“By what?”

“By what?” repeats his father. “Why, by detecting devices, of course. You of all people should know that!” He switches on one of the many radio sets lying on the shelves behind him. As it warms up, and familiar tweets and crackles start spilling from it, he turns the dial. The static gives over to music, then to static again, then to a voice reading what seem to be sports results. This is new, hearing voices over the receiver: started this year, first of the new decade. Nowadays when you trawl the ether you get loads of little stations sending fully formed, audible words out to who-knows-where: songs, personal messages, phrases whose nature and purpose Serge can’t work out but has spent hours listening to nonetheless, charmed by the sequences’ sounds, the images that they evoke, their modulating repetitions. The string of names and numbers gives over to old-fashioned Morse beeps, then once again to static. His father, still turning the dial clockwise, turns to Serge and asks: “What do you think most of that stuff is?”

“What do you mean?” asks Serge.

“What is it?” his father repeats.

“It’s messages,” Serge answers.

“From when?” his father shoots back at him.

“From all over.”

“I didn’t ask from where: I asked from when.”

“When? From now…”

“Aha!” guffaws his father. “That’s where you’re wrong-or, at least, not entirely right.” He leans towards Serge and, his tone changing, tells him: “Wireless waves don’t die away after the ether disturbance is produced: they linger, clogging up the air and causing interference. Half the static we’ve just waded through is formed by residues of old transmissions. They build up, and up, and up, the more we pump them out.”

“And that’s what’s blighting our trees?” Serge asks him, incredulous.

His father downs his port and, reaching behind his work table, pulls out a device in which a needle sits behind glass within a hand-sized box.

“What’s that?” asks Serge.

“An ammeter,” his father answers. “Come with me.”

Serge knocks his glass back hurriedly and follows his father out into the Mosaic Garden, where he holds the device out in front of him and, pointing to its face, announces:

“Low levels of static here. Just standard background discharge.”

Serge peers at the needle, resting between zero and five micro-amperes. His father strides on into the Maze Garden and, holding the ammeter in front of him again, declares:

“Increasing. Five to ten.”

He’s right: the needle’s started stirring. He strides on, through the Maze Garden ’s wall, across the gravel path and on towards the Mulberry Lawn, his upturned palm holding the instrument before his portly stomach all the while. Marching past Bodner, who ignores them as he daubs low-lying branches, he booms out triumphantly:

“Twenty to twenty-five!”

Serge peers around his forearm, and sees that the needle is, indeed, straining round to the dial’s right-hand side.

“That’s… I mean, how do you…?” he stutters.

His father beams a satisfied smile back at him.

“Pretty conclusive, isn’t it, my boy?”

“But… why here?” Serge asks. “My old mast was in the Mosaic Garden.”

“Oh, you’re being too literal,” his father scolds. “Things move around, accumulate in ways we can’t anticipate. Besides,” he continues, eyes still on the needle as he takes two paces forwards, “I’m not even claiming that it’s radio per se that we’re detecting here.”

“What else could it be?” Serge demands to know.

“I refer you back to what I said about the body and its discharges,” his father tells him. “If the ones emitted by the brain are anything like the wireless waves that wend their way around the earth, they’ll leave a trace for a considerable time after their creation.”

“But that doesn’t work,” Serge says. “Transmissions travel. They go somewhere else, and then they’re not here anymore.”

“Ah: you’re behind the times, my child.” His eyes move from the dial to Serge, bathing him in pity. His left hand starts rising and sinking at an angle, cutting diagonal peaks and troughs in the air. “Imagine a ball bouncing around a dome, and hardly losing any energy in doing so-bouncing around the inside of a sphere and ricocheting off the outer surface of a smaller, solid sphere inset within the larger sphere…”

Serge cast his mind back to the tennis court in Berchtesgaden. He tries to roll its asphalt flatness up into a tarry sphere, to coil the outlying landscape into a larger, hollow ring around it, and to bounce a tiny, yellow ball between the two, but finds the mental space through which the smaller orb should move filling up with crackling gorse and heather. His father’s explaining:

“Waves move around the globe, bouncing off the ionosphere. The ones that make their way through this-” his left hand, rather than angling down here, continues its upward rise until his arm’s extended at full stretch-“go on until they hit some object out in space, and-” now the hand falls-“bounce off that. They all bounce back eventually, or loop round: everything returns.” The hand starts looping as he carries on: “Now, if-if-the electric charges generated by our organisms move in the same way…”

“Then they can be detected later?” Serge completes his sentence in the interrogative.

“Why not?” his father answers. “In principle, it shouldn’t be any harder. If a measuring device is present at a scene of great mental stress-and at the right time in the cycle according to which the electrical disturbances created by the event pass by the spot again, then the whole scene might be replayed, albeit in decayed form…”

The hand-loops slow down, then stop, and the two men stand in silence for a while, the regular plash and scrape of Bodner’s paintbrush punctuating their thought. Then Serge says:

“If your theory is right, there’s no reason why one spot should be any better than another.”

“Why not?” his father asks.

“Because the ball bounces all around the space between the dome and sphere, hitting one place with as much force as it hits another. An event could replay elsewhere.”

“I never said I had the whole thing worked out,” his father harrumphs. “This is new research. Cutting edge. I’m corresponding with von Pohl about it on a weekly basis. He, like me, is of the opinion that it is these cycles of return that are responsible for lack of germination in certain ground areas. He’s already done extensive research on the subject. I, for my part, have suggested to him that the curious groups of three staccato signals that one commonly picks up amidst the interference on one’s receiver are none other than the echo of Marconi’s first three ‘S’ signals, transmitted on-”

“It’s true,” Serge interrupts. “There’s often three beeps in the background. But that doesn’t mean-”

“-on the twelfth of December, 1901,” his father concludes, adding: “If I’m right, the implications are enormous.”

He’s started walking away from the mulberry trees as he speaks. Serge follows him across the lawn and through the Crypt Park ’s gates. As he strides through the long grass, his father’s still holding the ammeter out in front of him.

“Imagine,” he confides to Serge, lowering his voice as though they were being overheard, “just imagine: if every exciting or painful event in history has discharged waves of similar detectability into the ether-why, we could pick up the Battle of Hastings, or observe the distress of the assassinated Caesar, or the anguish of Saint Anthony during his great temptation. These things could still be happening, right now, around us.”

He pauses, and looks down at the ammeter before lowering his voice right to a whisper as he says:

“We could pick up the words, the very vowels and syllables, spoken on the cross… ”

His voice trails out in a hiss. Serge peers down at the needle once more: it’s veered way over to the right side of the dial, past forty. He looks up again, letting his gaze sweep the Crypt Park. As it does, he seems to detect a general static hovering round its grass and trees: a static through whose reaches, it strikes him for some reason, bounce the cries of all the men he’s killed-ranged guns on, strafed, pinpointed with photography, failed to protect from shark-bite, snagged from their cushioned downward drift and slammed into the earth. He closes his eyes for a moment, and sees, behind the static, an operator: a female one, sitting at some kind of switchboard shaped like an outlandish loom.

This ghostly operator’s face is mirrored in those of the Day School pupils. These have changed since he left for the war-grown older, been replaced-but seem strangely familiar, even the new ones. It works both ways: a sense of recognition seems to flicker over the faces when they meet his, as though their owners were somehow privy to what happened out in France and Germany, could hear it rebounding round the reaches of their deafness. Bodner too: in his immense indifference to almost everything around him there seems to lie a tacit understanding and acceptance of anything Serge might have undergone, as though he’d undergone it too. Perhaps this is because Bodner, unlike the shopkeepers, or Dr. Learmont, or each and every member of the stream of visitors who pass by Versoie, makes no demand to have Serge’s adventures recounted to or summarised for him. He chews his tongue-stump like he always used to, shunts wheelbarrows from one garden to another, makes tea for Serge’s mother, all just as before…

His mother’s aged. She looks depleted, like a silkworm that’s secreted all it can. Her eyes have sunk into their sockets; her cheeks have contracted around her jaw and cheekbones. Despite having no production line to oversee, she still spends long stretches of time inside her storeroom, itemising the few remaining silks, doodling designs for new ones to be made once the blight lifts, or sitting at her low table staring into space. Serge joins her there most afternoons: they now take tea together. When the weather’s nice they adjourn to one or other of the gardens and sit there in silence, untroubled by the bees and flies that hover around them, land on them, take off and land again quite nonchalantly, confident in the knowledge that they won’t be swatted off.

ii

Serge’s London flat is in Bloomsbury, on Rugby Street. It’s on the second floor, above a dairy shop. Each morning he’s awoken by the rattle of glass bottles and the tap of hooves, mingling with men’s voices as they rise through his dreams to break their surface like the tentacles of some primordial kraken. He stops off around the corner for his breakfast, in a Turkish café on Lamb’s Conduit Street: a syrupy, layered baklava. Sick children, let out of Great Ormond Street Hospital on parole, are wheeled by like the cripples were in Kloděbrady. Sometimes their parents or nurses stop and buy them pastries, which the children never seem to enjoy much. Their faces have the look of old people’s: disillusioned, sad, resigned. Sins of the fathers, Serge thinks as he watches them each day. Sucking walnut pieces from the gaps between his teeth, he strolls through Russell Square Gardens, trying to work out the logic governing the fountains’ spurting sequences (a task to which he sets his mind obsessively for as long as it takes to wander past them, but instantly forgets as soon as he’s left the square), then skirts the stone lion-guarded rear wall of the British Museum and, finally (and always anticlockwise), follows the fence-rails round the closed garden in Bedford Square until their long ellipse deposits him a few yards from the Architectural Association’s front door.

Mornings are taken up by lectures. Theodore Lyle, FRIBA., holds forth in the ground-floor seminar room on the influence of ancient Greece on the architecture of the Roman, mediaeval and-to cut a long list short-all subsequent periods:

“The modern tendency,” he declaims without notes, turning to face the students from plan drawings of the Parthenon and Hephaesteum into which sketches of peripteral and prostyle columns, metopes and triglyphs are inset, “is to consider these structures as ruins rather than as functioning buildings. The temples, as they present themselves to us today, stand stripped of their original stucco, colour and so on. What we lose is the effect of reflected light flowing over the smooth, coloured wall surfaces, across the bronze grills and balustrades, the gold, ivory and precious stones. I want you, when contemplating the incomplete edifices of the Attic and Hellenic periods, to turn back the clock and think of them as under construction, not beyond it…”

Fittingly, the refurbishment of the room in which these thoughts are being delivered is not yet complete. Window-sills stand upright in the corner, waiting to be affixed to the wall; cornicing smells of wet plaster, floorboards of fresh varnish: the school’s only just moved premises from Tufton Street. The canteen downstairs is still being painted. Students show off their command of building structures as they lunch in it:

“This sausage is like a fluteless column,” one says as he prods his toad-in-the-hole.

“Then my poached egg is a gilded saucer dome, rendered in bird’s-eye perspective,” says another, not to be outdone. “What have you got, Carrefax?”

Serge looks down at his plate: all he’s got is a roll and a slab of butter.

“A burial mound, with gravestone on the side,” he answers.

He never eats much for lunch. In the afternoons they’re meant to do site visits-cathedrals, schools, train-stations and the like, producing sketches-but he usually ducks out of these and slinks off towards the web of streets that lurk within the triangle formed by Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and the north edge of Leicester Square. He first stumbled across the area when he went to Mrs. Fox’s Café in Little Newport Street to meet a mechanic who’d offered to fix a minor problem with his father’s car (he’d brought up his trunks in it the week before; his father was to drive it back the following week). The man had procured a machine part at a knock-down price, and brought it to the café swathed in a sheet which he unwrapped as though it contained contraband, which it effectively did. Most of Mrs. Fox’s clientele seem to be criminals of one sort or another. They sit at tables nursing single coffees for hours on end, communicating with their fellow customers in nods and murmurs. Serge sometimes spends whole afternoons in here, drawing plan sketches of imaginary spaces. He likes the ambience: the sense of being in some kind of nether world whose air is rich with covert signals…

One day in Mrs. Fox’s, Serge finds himself in the corridor off the main tea-room, in the company of a woman of about his age. The corridor is narrow; Serge squeezes past her, tries the bathroom door, then realises that she, too, is waiting. He smiles at her as though to say as much, and she smiles back-and as she does, her nose wrinkles to execute a type of sniff he recognises all too well. It’s an energetic, forceful sniff, one that’s at odds with her full, healthy complexion and the absence from her face of any cold-like symptoms. His smile changes into a knowing and complicit one; hers does the same, the eyes above the curling lips illuminated in a way that, although he’s never seen another set of eyes lit up like that, is also instantly familiar to him.

“Lots of snow in London at this time of year,” she says.

It’s autumn-a warm one. Serge answers:

“Snow’s fun.”

A flushing sound emerges from the bathroom, followed by a thin man in a cap and waistcoat. In unison, Serge and the girl look down and press themselves against opposing walls to make way for him; when the man’s gone, she takes Serge by the sleeve and pulls him into the bathroom behind her. There’s an outer washroom in here (a pronaos area, it occurs to him, would be the technical term for it) and, half-separated from this by a stall, an inner toilet (cella). She takes a vanity case from a pocket in her skirt and, handing it to Serge, says:

“Do the business. I’ve got to pee.”

With that, she disappears into the stall. Carefully, Serge opens up the vanity case, taps a small bunch of the white powder it contains onto the counter beside the sink, and separates it out into two lines. A trickling sound comes from the toilet, strengthening into a steady, leisurely cascade.

“What do you do?” her voice calls out to him above it.

“I study architecture,” he calls back as he takes a banknote from his wallet and starts rolling it into a tube. “How about you?”

“Theatre.”

“You study it?”

“Study it? Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. It seems you can study anything these days.”

“Well, I don’t study. Understudy sometimes…”

“Understudy?”

“I’m an actress.”

The cascade dwindles to a trickle, then stops. There’s a rustling, the sound of fabric being hoisted, then a flushing; then she’s out again, inspecting the two lines he’s made. He hands her the banknote.

“After you.”

She takes it, pushes her hair from her face and bends over the counter to sniff the cocaine. She throws her head back, neck straining towards him, and hands back the note. After he’s snorted his line they stare at one another, flushed, in silence for a few seconds.

“Well,” she says.

“Well,” he repeats. There’s another pause, then he tells her: “I’ve got to pee as well.”

“Come join me for a coffee afterwards,” she says, heading for the corridor again.

He does. Her name is Audrey. She turns out to be almost exactly his age, born in ’98. She’s “currently appearing,” as she puts it, in a musical comedy called The Amazonians.

“It’s playing at the Empire,” she tells him, “just round the corner from here. I can get you a ticket if you’d like to see it.”

Serge accepts the offer. The following evening, he presents himself at the theatre’s box office and is handed an envelope on the front of which someone, perhaps Audrey, has misspelt his name so that it reads the way his father speaks it: “Surge.” Opening it, he finds an upper-circle ticket, and, after purchasing a programme from a liveried young lady on the staircase, takes his seat. The theatre’s pretty full. Most other people seem to have come in twos or threes: there’s the occasional conventional man-woman couple, but many more pairs and groups of women unaccompanied by men. They talk to one another loudly, smoking, laughing, exuding an air of masculinity. Serge flips through the programme. On the inside cover there’s an advertisement for Good Printing, proclaiming that the Finest House in London for Commercial Typesetting, Lithography and Account Books is the House of Henry Good and Son. Serge wonders if that’s their real name, or whether the father and son exist at all. Carrefax Cathode: his father never mentioned that plan again. Maybe Henry lost a child, too, in the war. Serge thinks of ink and ribbons, floating letter-blocks. On the next page the cast are listed: Serge runs his eye down the column, past the principal, then secondary parts, and on into the chorus. Finding Audrey’s name there, in the smallest print, makes him feel fond of her, more touched by her invitation than he would have been if she’d been one of the show’s stars. The next page carries a “historical note” about the production:

Far from simply being mythical creatures,

it explains,

Amazons are in fact figures of genuine historical record. Dwelling in Scythia, they were revered throughout the ancient world for their fierce, war-like character. Though their by-laws forbade marriage and, indeed, all other forms of congress with men, an annual excursion to the neighbouring all-male Gargarean clan furnished them with daughters enough to extend their line. Male children born of such trysts were variously returned to their fathers, put to death or sent out into the world to fend for themselves…

His reading’s interrupted by the dimming of the theatre’s lights. The band start playing; the curtains draw back to reveal a magnificent court in which all tasks-guarding the ruler, fanning the ruler, being the ruler-are carried out by women. The court burst into song, lauding their queen, Penthesilia, warning putative male English suitors that she’s not much of a one for Anglophilia, and would-be pretenders to her throne that a single blow from her can killya. Penthesilia introduces her sisters Antiope and Hyppolite, who sing a short, plaintive duet about every man they ever thought was half-alright turning out to be a dope. Penthesilia answers their complaint by summoning onto the stage a chorus of female soldiers holding bows and arrows, little-round-Giles-style. Audrey’s one of these. Thrusting their weapons aloft, they launch into a rousing anthem:

Oh, of Thracian and Spartan,

Of suits tweed or tartan,

We’ve all had our fill. (How much more can we kill?)

Frenchmen and Italians

From chariots and stallions

Have fallen before us. (They bore us! they bore us!)

Trojans, though cogent,

Don’t impress us. No, gent-

lemen, be you Gentile or Jew,

Whatever your qualities,

Your mores or polities,

We’ll get along fine without you.

For a girl today

Doesn’t have to say

“I do” as the church bell rings…

Who needs a man

When you’re an Amazonian?

We’re keeping abreast of things!

There are two more verses, each rounded off by the “abreast” refrain. An anachronistic newspaper vendor-girl then enters and announces the outbreak of another war, which the soldiers promptly set off to and win quite easily, bringing back harems of female prisoners whom they quickly convert to their Amazonian ways. Twenty or so minutes into the production, Serge is expecting a male hero to wash up on the Scythian shore and introduce a basic conflict into the prevailing orthodoxy, but no such event takes place: instead, the play runs through a gamut of light-hearted sketches in which aspects of contemporary London life-hailing a taxi, ordering in restaurants, navigating the new telephone-number system-are satirised through a thin Amazonian veil. He loses interest; when Audrey’s not on stage, he flips his way further through the programme, his eyes having by now become accustomed to the auditorium’s lighting. There’s an advertisement for Osram Lamps (“Brilliant, Economical, Lasting, Strong, Sold by All Leading Electricians, Ironmongers and Stores”), and one for War Seals. Initially, he misunderstands this second term and pictures a blubbery, black-metal object, a hybrid between sea-lion and submarine. On the next page there’s a notice advertising Aerial Joy Rides above the capital, taking off each day from Croydon Aerodrome. For a moment, Serge is transported back to Kloděbrady: standing with Lucia by the weir as the prehistoric aeroplane buzzes above them; then Kloděbrady’s ground-plan-the interlocking lines formed by its avenues, the circles of its mausoleums’ roofs, the inner and outer squares made by the castle walls and the meandering path leading from these to the river, past the boathouses and on towards the forest-morphs in his mind into a mesh of trench-grids, paths leading through scorched woods to ruined villages and vacant ground scarred by blast marks. He imagines taking a pleasure flight over a war-zone, looking down on all the killing from above; then, glancing again towards the stage on which another battle has commenced, reasons to himself that perhaps that’s just what he was doing in France day after day: watching it all from the upper circle, for his pleasure. Joy Rides: he recalls the way the seed fell from him that time, arcing over the plane’s tail…

He heads backstage after the show to look for Audrey, and finds her amidst a clutter of horse-heads, silhouette-outlines of vanquished cities, false restaurant interiors and two-dimensional cars.

“I was in a play with a car once,” Serge tells her as she pecks him on the cheek.

“You’ve acted?” she asks.

“Only as a child.”

“I bet you were as sweet as sugar,” she says. “Wait for me. I’ll take you to the Boulogne: the whole gang’s going there.”

The gang have a dining room to themselves, on the Boulogne ’s top floor. Serge hears them as soon as he and Audrey enter the restaurant: they’re singing the “abreast” song, raucously and a capella. As Audrey presents him to her fellow chorus-girls (the likes of Penthesilia, Hyppolite and Antiope seem to be dining elsewhere), they emit war-like whoops and whistles, then slide over to make room for them. Waiters bring out plates of chicken, lamb and fish, but these are merely nibbled at, passed around and played with as carafe after carafe of wine is knocked back. Pretty soon the table looks like one of The Amazonians’s battlefields, post-battle. Audrey’s friends drape their arms around each other’s shoulders, laugh and caress one another. Cigarette cases and purses change hands; trips to the bathroom are frequent.

“You come here every night after the show?” Serge asks.

“We start here, then move on to the 52,” Audrey tells him. “Here, go powder your nose.”

She hands him her vanity case; he heads off to the bathroom too. When he comes back the girls are getting ready to leave.

Just hailing a taxi

Is Amazonomachy!

several of them trill outside. They find cabs eventually, and ride the short distance to Gerrard Street. A small crowd is hovering around the door of number 52; they stride belligerently through this, are whisked en masse by the doorman down the club’s narrow staircase and ushered towards several of the dance floor’s tables, where they set up camp. The room has long, much-dented floorboards. At one end a stage rises roughly the same distance above the floor as Schoolroom One’s podium at Versoie. A jazz band is playing on this: four men-one Indian, one West Indian, two white-frenetically vibrating as they clasp their trumpets, saxophones and drum-sticks, as though these were wired straight into electric currents lurking beneath the wood. Behind them, on the wall, a moon winks out at the clientele; around the moon are planets: Saturn with its rings, red Mars, another one that could be any in the solar system or beyond; and, interspersed among the planets, cat-faces, leering like primitive masks. Trellises extend from each side of this scene and run down the club’s side-walls, trailing green foliage. Flowers are laid out on the surface of each table, in small glasses.

Champagne is ordered, and consumed. Some of the girls start dancing. They dance with one another: there are men in here, but not that many; at least half the couples on the floor are women. They vibrate like the musicians, their whole upper bodies shaking like the pilots’ used to after flights. Balloons float above them, bouncing off their heads and shoulders. Cocaine is sniffed at tables here, quite openly. After serving him up a snuff-sized pinch from the back of her hand, Audrey leans across to Serge and says:

“Let’s go to mine.”

They leave, and wander down to Piccadilly Circus. While Audrey hunts down a cab, Serge stares up at the giant electric advertising hoardings: hundreds and thousands of lightbulbs-brilliant, lasting, strong, pulsing back to life again and again as they scrawl the names of the Evening News, of Venus Pencils, Monaco and Glaxo out against the sky. The G of “Glaxo” has a swoosh beneath it, a huge paraph forming from left to right as though being written out in pen-strokes, like a signature, each bulb a drop of ink, then disappearing and re-forming. All the names fade into the black and reappear, signing themselves obsessively against oblivion. Only the tyre beneath the word “Firelli” stays illuminated constantly, its rim-circumference, spoke-radii and hub-centre anchoring the elevated and abstracted spectacle in some kind of earthly geometry. Beneath the hoardings cars stream by with their headlamps on, barges of light flowing in the darkness. One of them’s detached itself from the stream and pulled over.

“Marylebone,” Audrey tells the driver.

They start kissing in the taxi. They snort more cocaine. Audrey lets Serge slip down her dress’s shoulder; while he strokes her upper breast she runs her hand over his hardening crotch. Her flat, like his, is on the second floor. It’s strewn with stockings, blouses, camisoles. Clearing some space on a divan while she goes into the small kitchen to fetch two glasses of whiskey, Serge finds a song-sheet marked with pencil annotations; perusing it, he learns that, in the original draft of the “abreast” song, “of suits” was “in suits” and the line “Your mores or polities” was the vastly inferior “Your offers of jollities.” Beneath this sheet lies a flyer for a weekly spiritualist meeting taking place in Hoxton Hall. These papers and all other paraphernalia are swept to the floor as Audrey takes her place on the divan beside him, passing him his whiskey. They take one sip each, then continue where they left off in the taxi. She removes his clothes herself, firmly unbuckling his belt and yanking down his trousers. When they’re naked he tells her to turn round.

“Why?” she asks.

“I like it that way,” he replies.

Afterwards, as they lie on the divan, she makes quiet sniffing noises. Serge thinks it’s the cocaine at first, but realises, as the small, short sniffs continue, that it’s him she’s sniffing at, his chest.

“You smell like my brother,” she says.

“Is that good?” Serge asks.

“Yes,” she answers. “I always liked Michael’s smell.”

“You don’t anymore?”

“I doubt he smells as good these days,” she tells him. “He’s been dead for three years.”

“The war?” Serge asks.

“ Verdun,” she replies. “We’ve had contact since, though.”

“How?”

“Through séances.” Her finger draws a circle on his chest, as though sketching a group of sitters round a table. “He’s not always there-quite rarely actually. But it’s always good to go.”

“In Hoxton, right?”

“How do you know?”

“I’m psychic.”

She snorts derisively; her fingers clench into a fist and thump his chest. His own hand reaches down and, rustling through the below-divan debris, hoists into view the flyer.

“Oh, of course!” she giggles, her hand softening and stroking his chest better again. “I’ll take you sometime if you like. It’s really good.”

Serge thinks of his father’s theories about static residues, bouncing electric waves. He’s got the ammeter right here in London, in his flat: his father asked him to take readings at various spots around the city, a task he’s signally failed to carry out…

They try to sleep but can’t: the cocaine’s made them jittery. Audrey offers to go and get some veronal to help them come down from it, but Serge has a much better idea:

“Do you know where to find heroin?”

“Oh, Becky’s into that,” she says.

“Becky?”

“The one who chopped off the Sumerian warrior’s head. She was sitting across from you in the Boulogne.”

“You think she’s still up?”

“Only one way to find out.”

They take a taxi to Bayswater. Becky is up, but has no heroin. She knows where they can get some, though: a woman named Zinovia or Zamovia in Primrose Hill.

“She runs a kind of salon,” Becky tells them.

It’s mid-morning by the time they find themselves riding across town in yet another taxi. As they pass through the West End Audrey makes them stop so that she can pick up a pair of ballet shoes from Arthur Frank’s.

“You like them?” she asks, slipping the shoes on and straightening her feet against the driver’s partition as the cab pulls off again.

“Dr. Arbus buy them for you?” Becky half-sings. Audrey nods.

“Who’s Dr. Arbus?” Serge asks.

“Her mentor,” says Becky in a mock-stern voice.

“Protector,” adds Audrey, equally faux-solemnly.

“Instructor,” Becky elaborates, nodding slowly.

The two girls start laughing. Serge laughs too, although he doesn’t get the joke, and looks out of the window. Streets are growing leafier, houses bigger and smarter. They chug uphill for a while, then stop beside a house whose entrance is held up by light-blue columns (Ionic, Serge deduces as they wait between them for admission). A servant opens the door; Becky enters into an exchange with him whose phrases don’t make sense to either Serge or Audrey but result, like combination lock-dials rotating to their designated slots, one after the other, in a second door being opened and the three of them being led up a finely carpeted staircase into a living room with sensual curtains and hangings, low-shaded purple lights and an uncanny atmosphere of lassitude. People-some in dinner jackets, some in suits, and some in what look like elegant pyjamas-are strewn around this room like clothes at Audrey’s: draped across divans, curled up on rugs, slumped in lush armchairs.

“This is like the Mogul’s opium dream in Sunshine of the World,” whispers Audrey. “You know, Niziam-Ul-Gulah, or whatever he’s called, in the first act.”

“Niziam’s the Vizier,” Becky whispers back. “The Mogul’s called something else.”

“Isn’t that the lord who’s chasing Mabel?” Audrey says, nudging Becky. “You know, the political man. Lying on the sofa, with that girl you always see in the lounge of the Denmark Street Hotel.”

“I think maybe it-” Becky begins, before catching her breath and gasping: “Oh, look! It’s the chap who’s in that film we saw last week!”

She clasps both Serge and Audrey with excitement. Audrey squints piercingly towards the man in question, but is unable to confirm or deny Becky’s claim, as her view’s blocked by the approach of an ageing lady who floats towards them with an indolent, cat-like gait.

“My angel,” the lady, whom Serge presumes to be their hostess, this Zarovia or Ferrovia, purrs as she gathers Becky’s hand between her own, smiling at her with a languid and matronly look. “So glad to see you.”

Her voice is husky, foreign: maybe Greek or Russian. Becky introduces Serge and Audrey to her; she takes their hands too. Her hands are limp and clammy; she reeks of perfume. Her eyes move from one of them to the other with a dull and heavy motion as she asks:

“What will my angels have? Pipe or syringe?”

The two girls turn to Serge, who answers:

“Syringe, definitely.”

Their hostess leads them to an enclave in which poufs lie in a circle round a Persian rug, sits them down, then floats away, returning shortly afterwards with three loaded syringes. Serge injects himself, then watches Zoroastria inject first Becky and then Audrey. By the time she’s got to Audrey he’s already under the drug’s spell; watching an air bubble rise through the liquid in the barrel as the madame taps it with her clammy finger, he feels himself rising too, shedding gravity like clothes, like curtains, hangings, tapestries…

Serge, Audrey and Becky visit the salon several times over the next few weeks. After a while Becky teaches them the password sequence so that they can go without her: it consists of the visitor enquiring whether there’ll be a piano recital today, and the servant (since Madame Z’s seems to be open round the clock, these keep rotating) asking whether they’ve come to hear the Chopin or the Liszt, to which the visitor must answer “Liszt.” There is a piano in the main room, as it happens; from time to time, one of the guests will play it for a while, but their recitals never get completed, any more than the intermittent conversations rippling about the place, which fade away almost as soon as they get going. Serge learns other passwords too: there’s one that works at Wooldridge and Co. chemist’s shop in Lisle Street, and another in a taxidermist’s store in Holborn; at a confectioner’s in Bond Street, by announcing himself favourable to liquorice, then purchasing either a flask of perfume or a box of sweetmeats, Serge is able to procure much more than he ostensibly requests; at an antique dealer’s out in Kensington, the code works the other way, one or other (sometimes both) of two Oriental objets d’art, calligraphic watercolours bearing (originally, at least, quite accidentally, Serge imagines) the likenesses of the Western letters C and H, appearing in the window to indicate the availability of various stock. He starts seeing all of London’s surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors’ stalls and sandwich boards, snatches of conversations heard in passing, the arrangements of flowers on window-sills or clothes on washing lines. He also comes to realise just how many of his fellow citizens are subject to the same vices as him. He picks up the telltale signals all over town: the sniffs, the slightly jaundiced skin, the hands jerky and limp by turns, eyes dull yet somehow restless too. Sometimes a look passes between him and a chance companion on the bus, or in a queue, or someone brushed past in a doorway, a look of mutual recognition of the type that members of a secret sect might give each other: Ah, you’re one of us…

The 52’s maître d’, Billie Lee, has that look in spades. He’s half-Chinese, and has a liquid, silken voice that lingers like Madame Z’s clammy hands do when she greets her guests. He has a lisp as well, which Serge always associates in his mind with the word “Liszt” in the salon’s entry-dialogue. His gait also strikes Serge as cat-like, although Serge knows he’s probably only thinking this because of all the cat-masks leering at him from the stage. The more drugs he takes, the more associatively his mind seems to work: the circulation of dancers over the long floorboards, interlocking bodies moving on collision courses towards other conjoined bodies, pausing to let them pass then advancing again, suggests for him the way that London’s cabs and busses pulse and flow, negotiating space; then aeroplanes circling and passing one another; gnats above a bed; orbiting planets. The bold, confident women sitting around tables, painted in stylised geometries of black, white and scarlet, the stark angles of their bare spines, stockinged legs and forearms that extend and retract triangular cocktail glasses or long, straight cigarette holders, summon up the image of new, shining engines, the sleek machinery of luxurious, expensive cars, their brazen pistons, rods and cylinders. Men-both in the 52 and Madame Z’s salon, and for that matter in most other places-seem diminished by comparison: retracted, meek, effeminate.

“Dear Szerge,” Lee susurrates at him one night, “you’re minusz your lovely Audrey this evening.”

“She’s meeting her guardian,” Serge tells him.

“Ah! The doctor.” A soft chuckle emanates from Lee’s mouth. “A fine man. Devoted to her.”

Serge shrugs. He still hasn’t worked out the nature of Audrey’s relationship with this Dr. Arbus. Lee half-gasps as he remembers something.

“Szerge!” he says. “You must bring all your Folies-Bergèrsz to the party that I’m organising down in Limehousze next week. It’s a zsecret party. Exclusive, but huge. It’ll be a blaszt…”

“Consider them brought,” Serge answers.

Audrey arrives soon afterwards, flush to the gills with money. She buys them both Champagne and smothers his cheek and neck in apologetic kisses. He turns from her wordlessly and watches the jazz band play. They look like machine parts too, extensions of their instruments, the stoppers, valves and tubes. Their bodies twitch and quiver with electric agitation. So do the bodies of the dancers. One girl, gyrating with another, lets a shriek out: it’s a shriek of joy that manages to carry on its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal. The music carries signals too: Serge’s eyes glaze over as he tunes into them. There are several, gathering within the noise only to lose their shape again and slip away. Dispersed, they rise up silently towards the winking moon and bounce off this to Mars and Saturn before travelling along the cat-masks’ whiskers and being granted structure and form once more by the trellis and the plants, which they cause to slightly tremble. When Serge closes his eyes, the signals become images: words and shapes being written out in light against a black void, then erased, then written out again, worlds being made and unmade…

At the beginning of November, Serge is summoned by the AA’s provost, Walter Burnet, ARSA. On his office walls hang photographs of previous years’ hockey teams (Burnet has been the school’s hockey coach for the last twenty years).

“Not one for sports, Carrefax?” he asks, following Serge’s gaze.

“Not so much, sir, no.”

“Good for the health, both physical and mental. Teaches team spirit. An architect’s only as good as the team he works with, and vice versa. We try to instil that principle right from the get-go here: collective site visits and the like. Can’t have our players slacking off…”

“I’ve been doing some independent research,” Serge says. “I find it easier to sketch when I’m alone.”

“You’ve got the drawings to show for it?”

“Yes, sir,” Serge replies. He saw this coming, and has gathered all the sketches idly dawdled in Mrs. Fox’s Café into a large dossier which he now hands the certified disciplinarian.

“What are these of?” Burnet asks.

“Well, they’re hybrids really. Plans for…”

“For what?”

Serge’s mind runs through the taxonomy of edifice-types, grabbing at terms. Laying hold of the one that seems most current, he tells Burnet:

“Memorials.”

“Ah!” Burnet says. “A worthy line of investigation. Do I take it you’ll be entering the competition to design the school’s own war memorial?”

“I hadn’t really thought of it, sir,” Serge shrugs.

“You should, Carrefax; you should. It’s a blind submission: there’s no reason why the likes of you can’t win.” He flips through a few more sketches, then asks: “Why are these all in plan view?”

“It’s my preferred projection.”

“So I see. As you’re no doubt aware, though, the syllabus for the first year requires you to become proficient in not only plan but also section, elevation and perspective. Which brings me to-”

“I haven’t quite begun to-” Serge begins, but Burnet cuts him off:

“Which brings me to the question of your course attendance record. I’m afraid Mr. Lynch has complained to me that he’s only seen you once in his drawing class all term.”

“I find perspective hard, sir,” Serge says.

“All the more reason to attend-that, and the fact that your continued membership of this institution demands it.”

Serge has nothing to say. Burnet returns the sketches to the dossier and hands this back to him. He looks at Serge in silence for a while; then his tone softens as he says:

“I know it’s difficult to readjust.”

“It just seems odd to draw things out into relief when they’re-”

“No, Carrefax, I don’t mean the perspective thing. I mean to life in Civvie Street. You’ve lived through war and all its horror, and-”

“But I liked the war,” Serge tells him.

Now it’s Burnet who’s stumped for words. His eyebrows wrinkle in concern as his eyes move from left to right over Serge’s features, as though trying to draw their flat inscrutability out into some kind of relief. Serge looks back at him, frankly, letting his face be scrutinised. There’s no reason to resist it: Burnet and his like will never disinter what’s buried there, will never elevate or train it; Serge hasn’t made himself available for his team, never will. Besides, he doesn’t buy the line, much peddled by the newspapers, that tens of thousands of men his age are wandering around with “shell shock.” He sees symptoms around London all the time: the deadened, unfocused eyes and slow, automatic gait characteristic of the NYDNs he’d see at the field hospital in Mirabel, or of the pilots and observers for whom Walpond-Skinner had to write AAF-3436 forms-but these are general. Billie Lee displays them, and he spent the war years overseeing his family’s business interests in Shanghai. Madame Z displays them, and she’s been running salons for as long as anyone can remember. Commuters trudging to work each morning display them as well, as do the pleasure-seekers shuffling around the West End. They can’t all have been at the front. The children outside Great Ormond Street display them. The dope fiends, especially, display them; the cocaine-sniffers too, when they’re not temporarily fired up with charges that will run down in minutes, leaving them more empty than before. It’s like a city of the living dead, only a few of whose denizens could proffer the excuse of having had shells constantly rattling their flesh and shaking their nerves. No, the shock’s source was there already: deeper, older, more embedded…

Serge decides to go and visit Mr. Clair, who’s working for the Fabian Society. He visits him at home, a flat in Islington.

“It’s not much,” Clair tells him. “I’ve only had it for a year or so.”

Clair looks older: thinner, more worn-and, beyond this, as though the anger at society’s condition that peppered his speech when he was Serge and Sophie’s tutor at Versoie were no longer coming from some abstract, intellectual font of righteous youthful rebelliousness but had been rubbed into him from outside, almost physically ingrained, leaving him bitter.

“Where were you before that?” Serge asks.

“Farming in Yorkshire. I was made to: conscientious objector. Forced to till the earth for refusing to participate in the conquest of it.”

“ ‘Advance thy empire,’ ” Serge says, smiling.

If Clair understands the reference he ignores it.

“Some of us were even put in prison. But we’ve brought changes about. In future no one will have to-”

“Where’s the one with the jetty in it?” Serge asks. He’s been looking at the paintings on the walls while Clair’s been speaking.

“Sorry?” Clair asks.

“When you lived with us, you had a painting of a boat pulling off from a jetty. There were two canals meeting each other, and the boat was pulling off. You told us that you’d painted it yourself.”

“I did lots of paintings in the old days,” Clair says.

“You know when you gave me and Sophie art lessons?” Serge asks.

“Yes,” Clair answers. “She always did plants, or insects. You did maps.”

“Exactly,” Serge says. “You were trying to teach us depth.”

“I didn’t do a very good job there,” Clair murmurs sadly.

“Can you remember what you told us? About how to do it, I mean…”

Clair ponders Serge’s question for a while, then says:

“I probably gave you basic principles of one-point or two-point perspective: picture plane, rectilinear scene, horizon line…”

“You’ve got to have one of those if you’re going to paint, right?” Serge asks.

“To tell you the truth,” says Clair, “painting’s not really my bag these days. My interests have moved on to the artisanal side of things. I like the work of craftsmen, the aesthetic of the labourer. It seems less disingenuous, more honest…”

He stares out of the window, his face earnest but joyless. Looking at it, Serge sees reflected there a vision of the future-the collective future, or a version of it, at least: a fairer, saner, soberer one that leaves him cold.

Billie Lee’s party is the next day. Serge, Audrey, Becky and the other Amazons ride in a long procession of taxis along the Embankment, past Tower Bridge and into the East End. They pass a market that’s still going at this late hour: Jews, Poles, Russians, Turks and others bustle around in the smoky glare of naphtha flames exchanging nondescript bundles of fresh produce, fabric or electrical equipment, haggling with each other in a dozen languages.

“We could be in Smyrna,” Serge says, which prompts the girls in the cab to sing, in unison:

That Smyrna -Myrina

Enchants all who’ve seen her…

Both people and lights grow sparser as the cortege moves down Cable Street. Dark, empty roads run off this towards Shadwell and Stepney. After Limehouse Canal the street lamps give out entirely; only moonlight reflecting off the muddy creek illuminates their passage through the night. The lead taxi pauses, then turns down the narrowest of alleyways and draws to a halt beside a warehouse from whose small side-door a pool of yellow light is spilling. Other cabs are pulled up outside. Serge and the Amazons disembark and make their way through the door. Much to their consternation, they’re relieved of one pound each, then led along a dusty corridor and up a rickety staircase towards a large internal doorway from beyond which the familiar sounds of jazz are streaming. Passing through this, they emerge into a vast industrial space, a storage room or assembly hall, that’s been transformed into a setting as fantastic as an emperor’s opium-dream or some exotic film. The room’s pillars, coiled about with red-grape-heavy vines, tower above the room like columns of a bacchanalian temple. Crane-hooks around the walls are similarly vine-decked, as are gantries hanging from the ceiling. On a platform raised much higher than the 52’s stage, between fixed machine-parts, an expanded jazz band is playing double-time, as though possessed by the deity that’s being invoked by the outlandish décor. Above them, like the god himself, Billie Lee stands looking down from a raised walkway, resplendent in a blue overcoat with a luxurious fur collar.

“For once, we’re underdressed,” Audrey shouts at the other girls.

It’s true: most of the women here are wearing chiffon dresses trimmed with lace and crêpe-de-chine tea gowns; the men, like some of those he saw in Madame Z’s salon, seem got up for a pyjama party too. Waiters wearing laurel wreaths are gliding around with trays of Champagne. Serge, Audrey and the Amazons down a few glasses; then the girls skip off to join the crowd of dancers on the floor beneath the stage.

“Dr. Arbus is here,” he hears one of them say to Audrey as they slink away.

Serge looks around, wondering which reveller he might be. The dancers are mostly women. He can make out Amazonian segments interspersed among the limbs and faces: bare shoulders turning and vibrating, hands pulling vanity cases from purses (they’re so adept at sniffing cocaine that they don’t need to stop moving in order to do it). Serge has his own medicine, procured from the objet d’art-displaying antique dealer this afternoon, an H day. He retires into what seems to be a small electricity cabin and doses himself up. When he emerges, all the dancers are moving like the actors in a film that he and Audrey saw played at the wrong speed by a novice projectionist a week or so ago: slowly, their frenetic twists and shudders broken down to gestures that ooze into one another at a pace so languorous it’s almost static. Skirts draw together and apart like clouds merging and separating over the course of a whole afternoon; eye contact between partners takes as long to establish as trunk-call connections, and is taken leave of lingeringly, sadly; wisps of smoke turn solid as they extend from cigarettes to coil like lace round limbs and clothing. Viewed like this, the scene looks more melancholic than celebratory or jubilant. Even two women who are kissing each other passionately seem caught up in the grip of a slow desperation: their mouths suck at one another, as though struggling to draw oxygen out of the lungs beyond them; one of their hands is grappling at the other’s breast as though clutching at a fixed object to prevent a fall. As the breast breaks free of its clothing, the hand slips and its owner emits a shriek that takes an age to reach him and stays with him for even longer, drowning out the music: a slow, drawn-out version of a shriek he’s heard before…

Serge finds himself, much later, standing on a fire escape that overlooks the Thames. Audrey is nowhere to be seen. There’s someone with him, though: another male reveller who’s expounding to Serge his theory that jazz and morphine compliment each other: something to do with frequency and synchronising, how the waves of the brain need to be brought into step with those of the music, Africa and America, ancient and modern, something, something…

“Words on the cross…” Serge tries to murmur, but discovers that his own words won’t emerge from him. In any case, his interlocutor seems to have vanished, if he was ever there at all. A dull metallic pressure on his knee causes Serge to realise that he’s lying, not standing, on the fire escape. He looks down at the river. The tide’s out; the exposed mud is deep and black. “Maybe it’ll be like this, when it comes,” he finds himself saying to nobody, not knowing what he means.

iii

In mid-November, Audrey repeats her offer to take Serge to one of her Hoxton Hall spiritualist meetings. Serge accepts. They set out from his flat, and take a bus along Clerkenwell Road and Old Street.

“What’s that?” she asks, feeling an object in his jacket pocket prod her as they press together: it’s rush hour and the bus is crowded.

“Leveller,” he says. “A surveying instrument. I was meant to drop it off at home.”

He shifts his position so it doesn’t prod her anymore. As he does the object digs into his ribs in reproach for the lie: it’s not a leveller but an ammeter, his father’s one, smuggled along to take a surreptitious reading, gauge the “spirit level” as it were…

“Last week we had the relatives of two people in the room pop up,” Audrey tells him as they walk up Hoxton Street together.

“What, jump out of a box and stroll around?” Serge asks.

“No, of course not,” she scoffs at him. “They get channelled through the medium: their voices. Through her, and the control too. You’ll see.”

There are people milling around outside the hall, watched over by two sentinel lamps that protrude from the building’s white façade. As Serge and Audrey make their half-shilling contributions at a table in the vestibule, they’re each handed a couple of leaflets. They pass into the main room, a homely little place with rather shabby chairs scattered around, all facing a small stage fringed with plush red curtains. In the middle of the stage a table sits. It’s a round table with a single, thick stem-leg holding its top up: a dining table, of the type you generally get in middle-class homes. A single chair is drawn up at the table, facing the audience from behind it. Several yards to the table and chair’s left, at what Audrey would call “stage right,” a second chair sits facing the same way. Between the two chairs, mounted on an easel, is a blackboard. To the table’s right (stage left), a second, smaller desk has a chair placed in front of it, facing back inwards towards the big round table. This chair alone is occupied, by a thin, mousey woman who sits, pencil poised, above a notepad resting on the surface of the desk.

“Is that the medium?” Serge asks.

“No,” Audrey tells him. “She’s a secretary or something like that. She takes notes throughout the session, for a scientific organisation who research this kind of thing.”

They head towards two seats near the hall’s rear, drape their coats over the back of these and sit down. Other people drift in slowly. Some of them are clearly ingénues like Serge: on entering the room, they pause and stare around, wondering what they’re meant to do, before falteringly making their way to vacant seats. Others are habitués: they stride in confidently, looking left and right to see which of the other regulars are here. Serge glances at the topmost leaflet of the little handout sheaf he’s holding. It contains a short biography of Miss Ann Flannery Dobai, their hostess medium. Born of humble immigrant stock in Baltimore, this account informs him, she and her five siblings spent their childhood following their father, a railway worker, from city to city. It was in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that her gift was discovered, quite by chance, in 1884:

On meeting with a group of music hall performers, the adolescent Ann entered a trance and listed, quite accurately, the names of each of their maternal grandfathers. Shortly thereafter, she began performing apports and materialisations throughout the American Midwest. As news of her psychic powers crossed the Atlantic, she was invited to the capitals of Europe, and granted private audiences to the Austrian Emperor, the Italian King, and numerous heads of state. Finding herself persecuted by malicious sceptics on her homecoming, she resolved to once more offer her gift to the more open-minded peoples of the Old World…

The two sheets beneath this one have hymns printed on them.

“What are these for?” Serge asks Audrey.

“To vibrate the air,” she says. She nods hello to a gentleman in a fedora seated a few yards in front of them. “He’s always here,” she tells Serge.

A door at the room’s far end opens and a man strides through it and onto the stage, pausing beside the stage-right chair. A hush descends on the audience as he addresses them.

“Ladies and gentlemen-and, above all, friends,” he announces, “Miss Dobai will commence her sitting in a moment.” His accent is English, not American. Sweeping the hall with his gaze, he continues: “I see a number of familiar faces among us-but for those of you here for the first time, I shall briefly outline the extraordinary procedure we are about to undergo together. Miss Dobai will initially, with your help, attempt to make contact with a control and to channel the ensuing communication by means of her vocal cords. Once contact has been established, you are welcome to put questions to the control: it is to you, after all, that he or she may wish to speak.”

He pauses, and lets his gaze alight on individual people, impressing this possibility upon them, then adds:

“This procedure is, as you might appreciate, quite strenuous, demanding huge reserves on physical and mental energy on Miss Dobai’s part.”

“ ‘Procedure,’ ” Serge mumbles to Audrey. “Makes it sound like an operation.”

“Don’t be flippant,” she hisses back at him. The man on the stage continues:

“Once her vocal cords have been exhausted, Miss Dobai will request of the control that its communication be continued by means of the table-tilting method.”

“What’s that?” Serge asks Audrey.

“You’ll see,” she says.

“Miss Dobai,” the master of ceremonies tells them, “will join us presently, but she has let it be known that she’d like us to sing the first of the two hymns that you were handed on your way in, ‘Abide with Me.’ ”

There’s a general rustling of paper, and the audience launch into the hymn. The tightness of the singing falls off as the side-door opens once more and a woman glides through it, passes the master of ceremonies and assumes her seat behind the table. Miss Dobai is middle-aged; her blouse, red like the curtains on each side of her, is décolleté; her cheeks are rouged; her hair is got up in a bun. Serge stops singing and pictures train-yards, circus wagons and European palaces, flickering in the air around her. When the hymn ends, she clasps her hands together; the master of ceremonies makes the same gesture, holding his conjoined hands out towards the audience in instructive illustration; people around the room start shyly turning to their left and right, linking hands with their neighbours.

“It’s to form a circuit,” Audrey whispers to Serge.

Miss Dobai gestures to her master of ceremonies, who announces:

“Miss Dobai has let it be known that she’d like you to join in singing the second of the hymns you’ve all been given, ‘Now Thank We All Our God.’ ”

Easier said than done: the congregation’s hands are bound. Breaking the circuit briefly, they balance the hymn-sheets on their knees or the chair next to them, then reconnect their hands and launch into song once more. Halfway through the first verse, the master of ceremonies takes his own seat. Miss Dobai sits impassive at her table, staring vaguely in front of her. She remains impassive through the second verse; during the third, though, a strange metamorphosis overtakes her. It starts with a few light hiccups, which grow heavier, making her chest and shoulders heave until the hiccups have turned into sobs that rattle her whole upper body. Her eyes roll up in their sockets, red-veined balls of fish-white. One by one, the congregation break off singing, captivated by the medium’s contortions. In the silence, her rapid, gasping breathing can be clearly heard: the gasps are deep, and growing deeper. As they deepen they slow down and even out, until they sound more like the long, yawning groans of an awakening male slumberer.

“Is someone there?” the mousey secretary asks.

The voice groans once more in annoyed response. Then Miss Dobai’s jaws clank into action as the male speaker who’s inhabiting them pronounces a word:

“Morris.”

“Is that Morris?” asks the secretary. “Can you confirm that for us?”

“Yes,” growls the voice, breaking into coughs that shake Miss Dobai’s frame again. “Deeds aren’t right.”

The secretary scribbles in her notepad. “Which deeds, Morris?” she asks. “You weren’t clear about that last time.”

“Property deeds. Cam, Camber, Camley. I was going to transfer before I…”

“I heard ‘ Cam -something,’ ” the secretary says after a pause. “Is it a place?”

“Swindled me out of… affidavit…” Morris’s voice continues, ignoring her question. The words lapse back into groans, which shorten, rising in pitch until they’re more like Amazonian war-whoops. These whoops, having attained their plateau, mutate back into words again, contracting Miss Dobai’s cheeks as they hurtle from her mouth: “Woo yeh-yeh! Comanche Chief here! Yeh-yeh! Kill land-swindler good and proper. Get his scalp. Woo yeh-yeh!”

“Who’s this now?” the secretary calls out.

“Comanche Chief, yeh-yeh!” this new, excited voice informs her. “I scalp white man good and proper. In past; now, no enemies where we are. White and red all friends. Yeh-yeh!”

“Where are you, Chief?” the secretary asks.

“High prairies,” the Chief answers. “Not American but other place. Ancestors of all men here: white, red, yellow…”

Miss Dobai’s cheeks contract still further as a sound of rushing wind runs through her lips. The wind’s sound changes, growing lispy, then separates out into crackling stops and starts. These, too, rise in pitch, till it’s no longer a man’s but a woman’s voice that’s coming from her. The corners of her mouth curl upwards as the sound’s pitch rises higher still and childlike giggles burst into the room.

“Is this Miss Sunshine?” calls the secretary. “Tilda?”

A huge, grotesque smile contorts Miss Dobai’s face as a small child’s voice emerges:

“Not a little Indian girl. No. I’m not. I got long blond curls and big blue eyes, and Billy Parton says I got a snub nose.”

“Can you confirm your name?” the secretary asks.

“Firm… soft…” the little voice giggles again as it replies. “Miss Scarlet calls me Sunshine. Because my hair. My brothers called me Tilly, like the plough.”

“She’s often here,” Audrey whispers to Serge.

“The mother said,” the voice continues, “that she got to wear her bonnet and give answers, or she won’t. But if she does, then she’ll have sweets.”

Miss Dobai claps her hands together rapidly. The secretary scribbles more. The master of ceremonies opens his hands to the audience, inviting their participation. Someone near the front shouts out:

“Is there anyone else with you, Tilly?”

Miss Dobai, eyes still vacant, rotates her head slowly to first one side then another. Two-thirds of the way through its rightwards turn it stops, and Tilly’s voice gasps:

“Oh! The temper boy.”

“Was that ‘temper’?” asks the secretary.

“Temper, tempra, temper-ture,” says Tilly. “Mercury rising. He’s telling Tilly it’s a P.”

A woman to the hall’s left stands up; so do a couple to the right.

“Peter?” asks the solitary woman.

“Tilly hears him say it’s P, then A.”

The solitary woman sits down. Not the couple, though: they’re clasping one another more and more tightly as Tilly continues:

“P, then A; then there’s another one, then L…”

“Paul!” the wife says, her voice breaking. Her husband asks, in a more authoritative tone:

“Paul, is that you?”

Miss Dobai’s head turns a little more, trying to locate either the man who asked the question or the girl who’s answering it, or both. Tilly’s voice comes from it once more, saying:

“Died of influ-, influ-, influ-ence. Paul said it’s very hot. And wet. But now he’s happy again. Hello, Daddy; hello, Mummy. You were always good to me.”

The voice has altered halfway though this last speech: it’s still a child’s, but seems more serious than Tilly’s.

“If this is Paul,” the husband says, “then tell me: do you remember, in the playroom, the big object? The one with the tail?”

“Oh, toy,” Paul’s voice answers. “Yes, indeed. A rocking horse.”

“Well, that was at the nursery school,” the husband says. “But I meant at our house. The object pinned to the wall, with the tail…”

“A bird,” Paul says. There’s a pause, then he adds: “Not a real bird. One made of fabric. With a tail… and string… long string to fly.”

The wife, sobbing, has sunk back to her chair.

“Kite bird,” Paul says triumphantly. “Pinned to the wall. You got it for my birthday.”

Now the husband starts to cry as well. Audrey looks at Serge as if to say “See?” Returning her gaze, he feels a hot and cold rush moving through his veins. Paul’s voice, still issuing from Miss Dobai’s mouth, says:

“You’re having a painting done. Of me.”

“Yes!” chokes the husband through his tears. “Can you see it?”

“Oh yes. I like it. I can see it, and I’m beginning to see from it as it goes on. And it makes Matilda smile, just like the photo. How I like the soldiers in a row, like toast and egg!”

The voice is slipping back into giggly mode. The secretary, scribbling furiously, asks:

“Is it Tilly again? Are you seeing a painting or a photo?”

Again Miss Dobai’s head slowly rotates, getting its bearings on her interlocutors. The grotesque smile returns to her face as Tilly says:

“Two rows of soldiers. Like in school, when the man came with the velvet and the bird. The front ones are sitting, and the back ones are standing.”

Several people have stood up around the hall.

“What regiment are they from?” someone shouts out.

“ ’Jiment?” Tilly’s voice repeats. “The writing has an E in it. And an I, and an L… ”

“Is it the Leicester Rifles?” someone else asks.

“Oh, they’ve left their rifles to the side,” Tilly giggles. “One of them has got a stick, though: in the back row, one, two, three from the left. But he’s not the one who plays with her. It’s the other one, in the front, the raifle boy.”

“What did you call him?” asks the secretary.

“He told her that a part was gone, and he was choking for a bit, then getting better. He was frightened, like when it’s dark; then he passed over, and was comfortable again.”

Two men call out, almost simultaneously:

“What’s his name? What’s he called?”

Miss Dobai raises her hand from the table’s surface and traces in the air an M. Beside Serge, Audrey tenses up. Miss Dobai’s hand then air-draws O. Audrey slackens again, disappointed. The next letter’s R; then S. The hand pauses for a while.

“ Mors: means ‘dies’ in French, doesn’t it?” someone behind Serge mumbles.

“Is that right?” Audrey whispers in his ear.

Serge, veins still tingling, shakes his head. “Dies” is meurt. Mors is “bit.” He thinks of the birds in the woods after he was shot down: the grey, fleshy crumbs they all had in their beaks. Miss Dobai’s hand twitches back into action and traces an E.

“Was he a telegraphist?” someone calls out.

His question goes unanswered as the hand sketches two more letters, an N and a T

“Tilly,” the secretary says, “I’ve got MORSENT. Do you mean that more men were sent to rescue him, when he was choking?”

Her last few words are drowned out by the gasps of another couple, two of the people who stood up when Miss Dobai first started talking about photos.

“It’s us!” they shout. “Morsent’s our name. The photograph arrived last week!”

Tilly’s voice breaks out of Miss Dobai’s mouth again:

“Photo-graph, that’s it. He’s in the front row, in front of the stick-man: Raifle.”

“Oh, Matthew: it’s our Ralph!” the woman shrills, hugging her husband. She pronounces it “Rafe.” “It’s true: there’s a man with a walking stick behind him in the photo!” she adds, for the enlightenment of others in the audience. Addressing herself first to Miss Dobai, then, shifting her aim slightly, to the air above her, she continues: “Ralph! Are you okay now?”

“Oh, Raifle’s happy as a boy can be,” Tilly responds. “He has a house, all built of bricks, and there are trees and flowers, and the ground is solid, not all mud. He’s met a girl.”

“A girl?” the mother asks. “What girl?”

“Ralph wasn’t very polite to her when he first came over,” Tilly says, giggling. “He didn’t expect a grown-up sister here. He asked me: am I a little brother, or is she my little sister? She calls me her big brother, but she’s like little sister. What’s that, Yafe? You can’t have two. Now Tilly doesn’t understand.”

“Can you ask him-” the father now assumes the role of questioner-“if he’s still missing any parts?”

Miss Dobai’s head bobs around a little, as though looking Ralph up and down. “Has he got legs and a head?” Tilly asks, answering almost immediately: “Oh yessie-yes! And ears, and eyelashes and eyebrows, all just like before; mouth and tongue too. It all got rear, rear, sembled.”

“And his house?” the father pursues his line of enquiry. “If it’s built of bricks, then what are the bricks built of?”

“Emma,” Tilly begins. “Emma…”

“Is there someone else with you?” the secretary interjects.

“Emma-nations,” Tilly finishes the word with difficulty. “Raifle says things rise up, atoms rising, and consol, consolidate when they get up here. We collect them, and make them solid again. There’s always something rising from your plane; when it comes through the aether, other qualities gather round each atom, and our people manor-factor solid things from it.”

A man to the hall’s left stands up now:

“I have a question,” he says. “If you need the atoms of living things to reconstitute them, why do those things not disappear from our world?”

“Oh, your world sheds bulk,” Tilly responds. “You’re losing weight right now, so that I and the others may borrow it in order to become present to you.”

People in the audience look down at their bodies. Serge raises his back, to see if it feels lighter. Oddly enough, it does. Tilly continues:

“And think of all the things that die, and decay: they’re not lost. They may form dust or manure for a while, but that gives off an essence or a gas, which ascends in the form of what you call a ‘smell.’ All dead things have a smell. That’s what we use to produce duplicates of the forms they had before they were a smell. So decayed flowers make new flowers; rotting wool makes tweeds; dung makes food…”

Throughout this little lecture Tilly’s register and tone have both become elevated, like so many atoms, gathering scientific gravitas. She catches herself now and, giggling once more, says:

“Yes, all right, Yafe: Tilly will go back now. Table-talkie can take over. She’ll have sweets, because she did, and she said she could if she did.”

The static hissing rushes through Miss Dobai’s lips again; then the lids slide down over her rolled-up eyeballs, and she slumps back in her chair and stays there, seemingly unconscious. The audience remain completely still, waiting to see what will happen next. It’s the master of ceremonies who makes the first move. Rising from his own chair, he addresses them:

“My friends, these channellings have quite exhausted Miss Dobai. Nonetheless, her comatose state indicates that she is still receiving. With your help, we shall, as the control suggested, move on to the table-tilting method.”

He strides across the stage towards the large round table, behind which Miss Dobai sits collapsed and, laying his hand upon its surface, continues:

“First, to dispel any suspicions that the table is mechanically controlled, I would request that a member of the audience, a gentleman rather than lady, step onto the stage and help me lift it.”

There’s a pause; then a man near the front rises from his chair, mounts the stage and, grabbing the table top’s rim while the master of ceremonies clasps the thick stem-leg, helps him raise the whole thing from the floor. The two of them then walk the table round the stage.

“As you can see,” the master of ceremonies says to the audience, his voice a little strained by the exertion, “no strings or wires or any other mechanism connect this object to a point from which lever or switch might influence its movement.”

He motions to his volunteer to set the table down again, in its original spot. When they’ve done this, but before the volunteer has left the stage, he tells him: “Stay here, sir, if you will-just here, beside the blackboard.” He positions him accordingly, between the table and his own spot at stage right, in front of the easel-mounted board, before continuing: “And if a second volunteer would be so kind as to make him- or herself available…”

Two people rise from chairs: one male, one female.

“We will use the lady,” the master of ceremonies says. “Your task, madam,” he continues as he leads her by the hand onto the stage and places her beside the secretary, “will be to call out, slowly and clearly, all the letters of the alphabet, in the correct sequence. Should the table respond at any point during your recitation, you shall pause; the gentleman shall mark down the letter you’ve just called out; then you shall recommence pronouncing all the letters, beginning once more with A. Have I made the procedure clear to both of you?”

Both gentleman and lady nod. The master of ceremonies moves back to his spot at stage right, casts a glance across the now quite populated stage-the blackboard-staffing gentleman with chalk in hand, the soporific medium behind her table, the mousey secretary at her desk and the nervous lady standing beside her-and, satisfied, instructs the lady to begin. Blushing, she calls out:

“A, B, C, D, E, F, G…”

Serge shifts his gaze back and forth between the table and Miss Dobai. Both seem perfectly inanimate. The nervous lady moves on through the alphabet’s middle stretch:

“L, M, N, O, P, Q…”

Still nothing’s happening. When she pronounces Y though, the table top dips-unmistakeably, a clear forward tilt towards the audience, who gasp in amazement.

“Mark it down,” the master of ceremonies instructs the man at the blackboard. He does so, drawing a Y in its upper left corner. The table top tilts back until it’s even again.

“How can it do that?” Serge asks. The tingling in his blood is growing stronger. It’s not a sensation he’s experienced before; nor is it pleasant: it’s a bad type of tingling, as though he’d been injected with a mixture that was somehow not quite right.

“Shh!” Audrey whispers back. “Just watch.”

The nervous lady composes herself and starts again:

“A, B, C, D, E…”

This time it tilts at O. Then U. After five minutes the blackboard is displaying the sequence YOURLOVEBRIDETYPEKILL. Then, as the alphabet loops round two more times, the table stays quite still.

“We have ‘YOUR LOVE BRIDE TYPE KILL,’ ” the secretary says, speaking directly to the table. “Is that message correct?”

The master of ceremonies nods at the nervous woman, who recommences calling out the letters. Again, the table tilts at Y, then O, then U, and spells out the same sequence as before-until it gets to the E of ‘BRIDE’: this it replaces with a G; then the E comes, followed by S, the tilts continuing until the blackboard bears the more intelligible phrase YOURLOVEBRIDGESTHEGAP.

“ ‘YOUR LOVE BRIDGES THE GAP’ is what we’ve got now,” calls the secretary. “Is that what you meant? Perhaps you could give one tilt for yes, or two for no.”

The table tilts once. The secretary asks:

“With whom are we conversing now? Is it still Tilly?”

Two tilts provide a negative response. On the master of ceremony’s cue, the nervous lady embarks on another set of alphabetic recitations, which coax from the table the word SCIENTIST.

“What type of scientist are you?” the man who asked the question about atoms calls out.

ALL, answers the table. CHEMISTSPHYSICISTS.

The blackboard’s pretty full now. Casting an inquisitive glance at the secretary, who nods at him that she’s got it all down, the transcriber picks the duster up and wipes it clean. As the letters of the alphabet are paraded by aloud again and again, a new sequence is written out on it:

FINEAETHERIALMATTERVIBRATES.

The top half of the board is wiped again as the message continues:

WEHAVEINSTRUMENTSPICKUPVIBRATIONS…

The tilting and transcribing take a long time, but all the people in the hall are rapt by it. The very voice in which the alphabet’s letters are called out seems electrified by the possibility that it will, at any point, prompt a new tilt.

… SYNTHESISENEWMASS, the table continues.

“Who makes these instruments?” the atom-man calls back.

INVENTORS, the table answers. ENGINEERSSS.

The alphabet runs round three more times, each time stopping at S. In the gap between each nervously enunciated letter, Serge can hear his heart beating. He can feel it too: it’s fast, making his chest throb against his shirt. As it does, he grows aware once more of the object hidden in his inner jacket pocket: the ammeter. He looks around the hall: everyone else, Audrey included, has their eyes glued to the table and the blackboard. Slipping his hand beneath the lapel and pushing the jacket’s breast out, he eases the instrument up until its face is visible to him. The needle’s at zero. He’s about to let the thing fall back into the pocket once more when it leaps right up to twenty and hangs there, suspended, for three or four seconds before dropping, just as suddenly, back to zero.

“A, B, C…” the nervous lady’s voice intones. As it pauses on N, the needle again leaps to twenty. Serge looks up, and realises that the table’s tilted forwards. As it straightens, he looks back down and sees the needle drop, again, to zero.

“A, B, C…” the letters start again. Once more, the needle leaps as they are stopped, at T, by a new table-tilt; once more it falls back as the table’s upper surface straightens and the lady’s voice restarts. Serge looks around the hall again, scrutinising each member of the audience intensely. While their heads are all pointed the same way, one of their bodies’ postures stands out. It’s the man in the fedora a few yards in front of him: his shoulders are tensed in a different way from all the others. His elbow’s different too: it’s twitching just before each table-tilt, each needle-jump. Running his eye along the forearm, to the point where the hand disappears into its own jacket, Serge sees why: the fingers are manipulating something secreted within this just like the ammeter’s secreted in his own.

“Wireless control!” he says, almost inaudibly.

“What?” Audrey asks him.

“Nothing,” he whispers back. He knows immediately how they’re doing it: he read about it in The Broadcaster a month ago. A small transmitter sends a signal to an even smaller receiver that, in turn, activates a mechanism in the object to be acted on: the technique has been used in music halls to play pianos without pianists, or make model airships fly around above the stalls and dock unaided in their moorings on the stage. The article’s author speculated that it could be developed to make guns fire remotely, or have sirens sound, or even to command an entire warship, bypassing the need for sailors. The table’s still tilting, spelling out the sequence DECAYEDSUNLIGHTRECONSTITUTED…

“Is the sunlight bright, or dark?” the atom-man is asking.

LOVERAYSNOCOLOUR, the table’s answering. ANDWHEN…

Serge’s pulse is still racing, but now it’s with fury. He wonders if he should jump up and denounce the sham. How many people in the room are in on it? The secretary? The transcriber? Atom-man? He looks at Ralph’s parents, then Paul’s: they’re hanging on the table’s every tilt, the blackboard’s every slowly transcribed word. So is Audrey; so is everyone apart from him. The isolation makes his heart beat even faster, so fast that he starts to worry that he’ll have a heart attack and die: he spends the next ten minutes, while the letters flow, halt and restart, trying to calm himself down. He talks to himself internally, telling himself that “pass over” would be the correct spiritualist terminology for “die,” which sends a nervous laugh up from his chest into his throat which he then has to stifle. By the time he’s coaxed both mind and body back to a safe state, the table’s stopped tilting and the session is being wrapped up by the master of ceremonies, who, after thanking all “collaborators” in the séance, helps Miss Dobai from her chair and supports her as she falteringly walks across the stage and disappears through the side-door from which she first entered.

Outside, Audrey is buoyant:

“Did you feel the weight come off you?” she asks, skipping back down Hoxton Street.

“I did, in fact,” Serge answers, honestly.

“I felt mine going straight to Michael,” she says. “I could tell he wasn’t far away when Tilly was talking with Ralph.”

“Can I come with you again next week?” Serge asks.

“Of course you can!” she answers. She kisses him on both cheeks, then buries her face in his neck and sniffs it lovingly.

He spends the week making a remote controller. It’s not difficult: he mounts a small ignition coil on a baseboard, adds an accumulator, two antennae, a switch and a telegraph key. He estimates the amount of power that Fedora’s controller has, and gives himself more. As a result, the mechanism’s too big to fit in his jacket pocket: after a little experimentation, he manages to bind it to the inside lining in such a way that the fingers of his right hand can manipulate the key without him needing to see it. The next Thursday, he and Audrey ride the bus along Clerkenwell Road again. He stands two feet from her, sideways-turned and slightly stiff.

About half of the audience from last week have returned; the rest are new. Paul’s parents are here; Ralph’s aren’t, though.

“You’d think they’d come back, after what happened last time,” Serge says.

“I thought I’d want to after Michael spoke to me,” Audrey tells him. “But you don’t need to communicate with them all the time, any more than when they were alive. Just knowing someone’s fine is enough-that, and the odd ‘hello’ now and then…”

The atom-man is here too; so’s the secretary, poised above her notebook. So, of course, is Fedora. He nods to Audrey like he did last week, including Serge within the gesture this time. Serge sends a big smile back at him, trying not to look too hard at the bulge on his chest but finding his eyes wandering towards it all the same, hoping he’s guessed the level right: accumulator can’t be more than four volts, surely…

The master of ceremonies gives the same spiel as last week. The same hymns are sung. The same sequence of hiccups, sobs and heaving rattles Miss Dobai’s frame, then modulates into the deep and plaintive tones of Morris, who grumbles about codicils and proxy signatures. The Comanche Chief’s on holiday today: his place is taken by a South Pacific fisherman who drowned diving for abalone and now drifts through balmy waters in a place where all seas meet. Tilly’s on fine form, though, giggling as she mediates between another infantryman and his parents, then a submariner and his brother (there’s a nautical theme to the evening). This second spirit accurately describes the contents of a box of his effects received by the brother just a week ago, even naming the sorting office whose stamp the package bore. Serge realises, as the brother gasps his confirmation of the objects and the name, that the network of Miss Dobai’s collaborators extends far beyond this hall: she must have postmen working for her, nurses, undertakers, clerks in the Bureau of Records, domestic servants, painters and photographers or their assistants, people scouring newspapers like Sophie and Widsun used to, tabulating death notices, auction listings, engagement and marriage announcements and who knows what else. His hand keeps slipping beneath his jacket, feeling the circuit-board lurking beneath it, his own secret network-then withdrawing, lest it attract attention: it’s not time, not yet…

When Miss Dobai slumps back in her chair, exhausted by her vocal mediation, her master of ceremonies busies himself setting up the table-tilting phase of the séance. A different gentleman comes forward to help him demonstrate the table’s lack of external attachments and to staff the blackboard, and a different lady volunteers to call the letters out. They’re not part of the sham after all, Serge reasons: why should they be? As long as Fedora does his job, only Miss Dobai and her master of ceremonies need be in on it. Serge wonders if it’s Miss Dobai who calls the shots, or this other man. Perhaps there is no Miss Dobai, Baltimore immigrant, frequenter of trains and boats and courts: perhaps the woman on the stage in front of them’s a Londoner, from no further afield than Hackney or Mile End, picked up in some bar where washed-up cabaret performers drink and trained to do the voices, all the sobs and hiccups. Maybe neither she nor he’s behind it all, but someone else entirely, a “control” not even in the room but sitting back at home counting the proceeds of this remote manipulation of human automata. Serge slips his hand back underneath his jacket as the lady starts calling the letters out. He lets the first few sequences be dictated by Fedora: WEHEARWHENTHEYCRY is scrawled across the blackboard after a while.

“How do you hear?” the secretary asks, addressing herself to the table as before.

Fedora’s halfway through spelling out RESONANCE, or maybe RESONATIONS, when Serge intervenes. He flips the switch on in his pocket and, tapping the key to join the circuit, cuts in after the A, just as the lady calls out H. It works: the table tilts; the blackboard-staffing gentleman writes down an H. In front of Serge, Fedora’s shoulders lock up. He looks around, confused. Serge makes the table tilt again at I, then S. He manages one more letter, a T; then, as he waits for U to come round, Fedora, elbow twitching, cuts in again and tilts on E. Serge takes the next round with an R.

“I’ve got ‘RESONAHISTER,’ ” the secretary reads. “It’s not a word.”

On a cue from the master of ceremonies, the lady volunteer goes back to A. Fedora’s taken his hand out of his jacket now, and is trying to attract the master of ceremonies’ attention, but to no avail. Serge has a clear run at the next eleven letters, and dictates the sequence DOBAIISFRAU.

“That’s German for ‘Mrs.,’ ” someone near him murmurs.

D, he adds.

Now Fedora has got the master of ceremonies’ attention: the latter stares at him wide-eyed and apoplectic, urging him to get his act together. He, though, is in no state to do this: Serge can see, even from behind, that he’s panicking. His head’s turning from side to side; his hand is nowhere near his jacket.

“I’ve got ‘DOBAI IS FRAUD,’ ” the secretary says, taken aback. “Who’s saying this? Where are you?”

UPMISSDOBAISCUNT, Serge dictates. So intent is the master of ceremonies on communicating with Fedora that he doesn’t pay attention to the letters being called out. By the time he glances at the board again, the last message has been supplemented by the sequence “AUDREYITSMESERGE.”

“I think we should curtail this session,” announces the master of ceremonies. “Miss Dobai is clearly…”

But he’s lost control of the procedure. Defiantly, the lady volunteer raises her voice above him and continues calling out the letters. As Audrey stares at him open-mouthed, Serge moves in for the kill:

TABLECONTROLLEDBYMANINFEDORA.

The room falls silent as the letter-calling stops. All eyes shift to Fedora, who, as though it made a difference, slides from his head the item in question before making swiftly for the door. Two sturdier men than him detain him there; in what passes for an ensuing struggle, his remote controller falls from his jacket to the floor.

“Two-volt,” Serge comments. “I could have gone lower.”

On the stage, Miss Dobai snaps out of her lethargy, rises and strides towards the side-door through which the master of ceremonies has already exited. Two more men try to cut her off but they’re too late: they throw their weight at the door, then, realising it opens into the room, pull it towards them and rush through it after the duo. Others have stormed the stage: they push past the secretary, who sits at her desk dazed, pencil still in hand, and throw themselves upon the table, tearing at it vehemently, as though the piece of furniture had wilfully deceived them. Next to Serge, a woman’s screaming. It could be Paul’s mother, but it’s hard to tell: the whole place is in uproar, women shrieking and men shouting, running around, grabbing hold of other men whom they suspect of being in on the act. Fistfights are breaking out. Steering between them, Serge wanders to the front of the hall; as the stage empties, its occupants rushing after some poor, innocent detainee who’s managed to pull himself loose and make a dash for the main exit, he climbs the steps and walks up to the table. It’s been snapped in two, its upper surface ripped clean from the stem-or, rather, not quite cleanly: both parts have splintered where they’ve been separated. Nestling among the splinters on the base are the cogs of a small, automatic hinge; beside the hinge, glued to the inside of the hollow leg, a receiver with decoherer and coherer, relay, circuit battery and two antennae more or less identical to the ones lightly scratching Serge’s side. Serge bends down and inspects the shattered contraption from close up. The table’s real enough, at least. Its wood is old, and beginning to rot. A small insect, some kind of wood louse, is crawling out of it, crossing the wires of the receiver’s circuit-board as it heads up towards the opening that’s miraculously appeared, like a new heaven, in the space above it. The insect’s body is dark and wet, like oil or ink. Serge watches it ooze upwards for a while, then turns and walks away.

Scuffles continue outside the hall. People are running up and down Hoxton Street, chasing or being chased or, in some cases, both. Locals who weren’t at the meeting in the first place have been caught up in the mêlée. Audrey is standing in the middle of the road, looking as catatonic as Miss Dobai did before her sudden exit. Serge takes her by the arm and leads her down to Old Street, where he hails a taxi.

She doesn’t speak during the ride. When they get back to Rugby Street, she stares straight ahead as he leads her up the staircase to his flat. Once inside, she throws herself onto his bed and starts to sob. He sits down beside her and places his hand on her back, but she shrugs it away. The sobs continue for a while, then ease off; her face stays turned away from him, though, buried in a pillow as she quietly weeps. Serge sits beside her for a long time, watching her back rise and fall. It seems bulkier, as though the weight lent by her body to the world of spirits, loaned out through the twin agencies of love and conviction, had been returned unclaimed. Her hair, too, looks heavier, greased by sadness. Her shirt and dress are crumpled. All of her is downward-sagging, solid, heavy. If mass and gravity have been added to her, something’s been stripped away as well: despite her layers of clothes, she somehow looks more naked than she does even when undressed, as though a belief in which she’s clothed herself till now, a faith in her connectedness to a larger current, to a whole light and vibrant field of radiant transformation through which Michael might have resonated his way back to her, had been peeled off, returning her, denuded, to the world-this world, the only world, in which a table is just a table, paintings and photographs just images made of matter, kites on walls of playrooms unremembered and the dead dead.

Eventually, she falls asleep. Serge leaves the flat and walks the streets, still angry. He’s angry at Miss Dobai and her gang, at people for being credulous, at himself for his cruelty to Audrey. He gravitates, naturally, to the Triangle, spends some time in Mrs. Fox’s, then stops off at Wooldridge’s, then at the taxidermist’s. Needing a place to ingest his by-now-considerable haul, and not wanting to return home or retreat to some dingy toilet, he heads for the Holborn basement where his father’s car is garaged (he’s had the loan of it again for the last two weeks). Retrieving the key from an attendant whose uniform, it strikes him in passing, is very similar to that of the Empire ushers, he sits in the front seat and, in the dark and columned vault, injects and sniffs and sniffs and injects, more and more, to try to make the anger go away. It doesn’t: it bears down on him from all sides. He decides he’s got to make things move.

He starts the car up, leaves the garage and drives southwest, past Chelsea, Wandsworth, Wimbledon. Soon he’s not in London anymore. He doesn’t know where he is, or where he’s going, and he doesn’t care: what matters is to get things moving-get them moving so that he can get them still again, re-find the stasis in the motion. Green, blue and black run by; sometimes an angry shout weaves its way into the air’s tapestry, a klaxon whose tone dips and falls off as it passes. The colours run closer and closer to him; the tapestry becomes a screen, a fixed frame through which sky and landscape race, nearer and nearer all the time: soon it’s as though he were no longer merely watching the projected image but pressing right up against the surface of the screen itself. Into it even: somehow the space around him has become material. It’s not just wind whipping his face: the colours, having merged to brown, are on him, scraping right against his skin and pressing down into his mouth. There’s some kind of inversion going on too: the screen’s surface has rotated and is now above him. From it comes the sound of crashing metal. The noise travels down to meet him, as though from a more elevated world: it sounds like a big iron lid being closed on him. Then it goes quiet. He’s in some kind of nether region now: a mole, being stuffed like drawers and cupboards with an old, familiar substance.

“Earth again,” he murmurs, tasting it inside his mouth. Flakes of it jump out from between his lips as he begins to laugh. His laughter ricochets off the car’s floor, which, overturned and bent now, arches and folds about him like a metal tent or hangar. It’s a pleasant noise; reminds him of liturgical chants and whispers echoing around St. Alfege’s interior. Pinpricks of light pepper the structure’s roof.

“My own crypt,” he announces to whoever might be listening. There are people around: he can hear voices, muffled beyond the metal. They can hear him too: they’re saying so, saying he must be hurt, that the car should be lifted from above him.

“It won’t come off,” he tries to call back to them. “It’s my carapace.”

The words, instead of travelling cleanly and intelligibly to the bystanders, reverberate and distort inside his bunker. Outside it, there’s general arguing. A voice suggests a way to lift the chassis off him; another proposes a different way; more join in. There’s more arguing, then heaving, then creaking. The misshapen dome is prised away from him; as it comes loose, it affords him a glimpse of the crowd that has gathered round the ditch in which he’s lying; then, as a parting gesture, its edge catches his clothes and flips him from his back onto his front. A new argument starts up, about whether or not to turn him over again.

“Don’t,” Serge tries to tell them. “I’m conversing with an old friend.”

But his mouth’s too earth-filled for the words to come out. The turners win the argument; flipped onto his back once more, he lies incapacitated, staring at the sky.

“Doctor,” someone’s saying; then he’s somewhere else. It could be his flat, or Audrey’s, or Versoie, or the prison back at Hammelburg or Berchtesgaden. There are several doctors round him; then there’s just one, Learmont, and it turns out to be Versoie where he finds himself after all.

“You back with us?” Learmont says.

“Did I leave?” Serge asks.

“The way you’ve been mistreating yourself,” Learmont responds, “you’re lucky not to be in ten separate specimen jars. I’ve never seen…” Then his words trail off, and it’s dark and earthy again.

When Serge wakes up properly, Maureen is sitting at his bedside, watching over him. They’re chatting. It’s like that: they’re already chatting; he seems to have woken up in the middle of a conversation that’s been going on for quite some time. She’s telling him who’s doing what: marrying, leaving the area, being born or dying. The conversation lasts, has lasted, and continues to last for a long stretch, perhaps several weeks, during which time he becomes strong enough to leave his bed and walk around a little. Sometimes Maureen’s replaced at his bedside by his father, who’s telling him about his latest research, patents pending, business schemes. And sometimes it’s his mother, who’s sitting in silence, smiling. It doesn’t really make much difference. Serge consumes it all quite passively, as though watching a film-one in which he’s partly a minor character whose role requires little of him in the way of action, but mainly a viewer, located just beyond the frame. He likes this film, likes his immersion in it, its drawn-out timelessness that has no borders, no beginning and no end…

It doesn’t last forever, though: eventually he’s yanked back into time by the arrival, with his father, of a surprise visitor. Serge senses his presence in the room before he sees or hears him: it’s a familiar, regal presence, one that brings with it, or at least implies, lurking somewhere behind it, all the protocols and codes of an official world, a world of influence and power.

“Serge, my boy!” Widsun beams from an odd angle: tall and vertical.

“My own Dr. Arbus,” Serge replies. “How are the Whitehall Gods?”

“Recruiting,” Widsun says. “I’m working in Communications now, with special responsibilities for North Africa. Thought you might appreciate a short stint on our team in Egypt.”

“ Egypt?” Serge asks. “What have they got there?”