C

by Mccarthy, Tom

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

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

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

  iii

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

  “Where is he?” Learmont asks her.

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

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

  “Mr. Carrefax?” he calls.

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

  “What? Who’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’ve had eggs and kippers and—”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Fixed what?” Learmont asks.

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

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

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

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

  “They end there?” he asks.

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

  “The baby? A boy.”

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

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

  “Had a—what? A cold?”

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

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

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

  “Splendid! You need transport back, though.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  i

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Haaaaaaa.”

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

  “Haaaaaaa.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The prospective parents look at one another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ah ee o ee, ah ee o ee, ah ee o ee …”

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

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

  “Ee-ah.”

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