by Tom McCarthy
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 separ
ates 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, rauc
ously 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.
