C

by Mccarthy, Tom

  “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 i
n 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 a
dds:

  “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.