C

by Mccarthy, Tom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Dame Ceres first to break the earth with plough the manner found;

  She first made corn and stover soft to grow upon the ground;

  She first made laws …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Near Enna walls there stands a lake; Pergusa is the name.

  Caïster heareth not more songs of swans than doth the same.

  A wood environs every side the water round about

  And with his leaves as with a veil doth keep the sun-heat out.

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

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

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

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

  While in this garden Proserpine was taking her pastime

  In gathering either violets blue or lilies white as lime,

  And while of maidenly desire she filled her maund and lap,

  Endeavouring to outgather …

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

  “Persephone: her Latin name,” explains Carrefax.
>
  Sophie’s hidden so many flowers among the silks that Bethany’s filled maund, lap and both underarms and is basically pretty outgathered.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Dis must be the fellow!” Widsun announces.

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

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

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

  … the Palick pools, the which from broken ground do boil

  And smell of brimstone very rank …

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

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

  The ground straight yielded to his stroke and made him way to hell,

  And down the open gap both—

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

  … down the open gap both horse and chariot—

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

  headlong fell

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

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

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

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

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

  “Is this in the original?” asks Widsun.

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

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

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

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

  “Why, thank you.”

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

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

  “Her way of mourning,” Carrefax adds.

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

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

  Howbeit,

  they continue,

  a token manifest she gave for her to know

  What was become of Proserpine. Her girdle she did show

  Still hovering on her holy pool …

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

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

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

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

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

  “Pretty good, no?” beams Carrefax.

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

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

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

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