“And that one too,” adds Maureen.
“What, ‘cornucopia’?”
“No, the other one. You’ll turn out gangs of thugs: deaf thugs.”
“The Krauts are gearing up to let loose at us, make no mistake,” says Widsun. “Hey: watch out with that one!” he shouts at two Day School pupils dragging and bumping a heavy case across the gravel-boys who, facing away from him, remain oblivious to his concern. “It’s delicate,” he explains to Carrefax by way of compensation for being ignored by the boys. “A present for you and your family.”
The present’s a really good one: a Projecting Kinetoscope. On his first evening in Versoie, after supper, Widsun sets it up on the Mulberry Lawn and projects onto a bedsheet strung between two trees moving images of fire crews riding through the streets of London on their engines’ sideboards, then of clothes jumping from laundry baskets, snaking across the floor and throwing themselves into laundry machines which then start churning them around and washing them, all without any human interference. The whole household turns out to watch the spectacle. Mr. and Mrs. Carrefax recline in large armchairs; Miss Hubbard and Mr. Clair sit on wooden seats beside them; Serge and Sophie sprawl belly-down on the grass; Maureen and the other servants stand in a huddle to the side. Only Bodner’s absent: he glances in at the film’s outset but seems unimpressed, as though he’d seen it all before, and wanders off towards his garden. Widsun stands at the back, beside the projector, announcing each of the reels he threads between its cogs and sprockets.
“This one’s called Caught by Wireless,” he explains as the flickers steady to reveal a domestic setting that seems to involve a compromised wife and a not unreasonably suspicious husband. “And this one, a tribute to our hostess’s French ancestry: the artiste Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune.”
“It’s funny they have titles,” Mr. Clair says as a pockmarked and unhappy moon gets it in the eye from some misguided scientist’s rocket-ship. “Shouldn’t the children be in bed?”
“Fiddlesticks!” scoffs Carrefax. “It’s not every night they get to observe interplanetary transit.”
But every night they get to watch Kinetoscope projections. It becomes a rituaclass="underline" as soon as supper’s over the bedsheet’s hauled up, chairs laid out and reel after reel fed into the mechanism. Serge carries the sounds of the celluloid strip running through its gate to bed with him, clicking and shuffling in his ears long after the machine’s been put to sleep, more real and present than the trickle of the stream or chirping grasshoppers. Each time Widsun racks up a new spool and starts running it, Serge feels a rush of anticipation run through the cogs and sprockets of his body; his mind merges with the bright bedsheet, lit up with the possibilities of what might dance across it in the next few seconds, its outrageous metamorphoses as moths’ and mosquitoes’ shadows on the screen turn into jumping hairs and speckles, then the first unsteady pictures, empty linen springing into artificial life.
Widsun stays at Versoie for more than a week. Each morning, over eggs and kippers, he peruses the Times’s personal notices.
“It’s amazing that these fools still think they’re safe conducting their illicit business in rail-fence cipher. Break it before my egg goes cold, what?”
“What are they saying?” asks Sophie.
“Hmm, let’s see. It’s a three-line rail-fence, a, d, g… d-a-r-l… Got it: ‘Darling Hepzibah’-Hepzibah? What kind of name is that?-‘Will meet you Reading Sunday 15.25 train Didcot-Reading.’ Reading you all right, you idiots.”
“Do you think they’re eloping?” Sophie says.
“Ladies don’t ask those kinds of questions,” Maureen tells her as she clears her plate. “Or drink three cups of coffee.”
“This one’s using atbash, at least,” Widsun continues.
“Tell me what he’s saying!” Sophie chirps, creaming her dark cup and sliding from her chair to wander over to his.
“V for e…” Widsun mumbles. “Q as null-sign… Give me one tick…” Sophie leans on his broad shoulder, peering over him into the page as his pencil flicks between the encrypted text and a row of letters scrawled in hangman-style beneath it, adding, crossing out. “Righty-ho: ‘Rose. Smell of your bosom lingers on my clothes and spirit. Must meet again next week. Advise when Piers away using this channel.’ The saucy scoundrel! I’ve a mind to give him a reply.”
“Oh, let’s!” she squeals, patting her hands across his back. “You can teach me the code.”
“My delightful child, nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
He whisks her away to his room and they spend the whole morning there, poring over lines of Scytale, Caesar shift and Vigenère. Widsun hovers over her, his chin above her hair, correcting the odd letter here and there. Serge tries to join in, but the sequences, their transpositions and substitutions, are too convoluted for him to keep track of. After an hour he’s reduced to sitting at the escritoire in Widsun’s room and playing with Widsun’s personal seal and ink set, stamping the man’s signature across the sheets of headed government paper that he’s brought with him from London, and then, when these give out, his own forearm.
“Leave us alone,” says Sophie. “Go and do something else.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” Serge snaps back. “And besides, Papa wouldn’t let you do this if he knew.”
It’s true. Carrefax hates the notion of codes, ciphers and encryption. “Goes against the whole principle of communication,” he harrumphs to Widsun over post-lunch brandy and cigars one afternoon.
“Secure communication,” Widsun replies, stabbing his cigar precisely as though plugging its lit point into some invisible telephone exchange socket in the library’s air.
“Secure-what? Secure from whom?”
“Your enemies.”
“Are hearing people deaf ones’ enemies?”
“Ah, yes,” taking a puff. “Your muted flock. In a way, that’s what I-”
“Muted no longer once they’ve been here for a stretch.”
Widsun mouths silent acknowledgment of this, blowing a smoke-ring from his lips. “You know I’m working for Room 40 now?”
“Room 40?”
“At the Ministry. Signals.”
“Ah: they got you, did they? Consummatum est, and Homo fuge branded on your body. I wondered what the secretive tone in your letters was about.”
“Carrefax, listen: things have changed since I was last here.”
“Too damn right they have! When you were last here I was beavering away at wireless, only to get pipped at the post. When was it? ’Ninety-seven? ’Ninety-eight? Best part of a year before the boy was born, at any rate.” He gestures vaguely at Serge, who’s sitting quietly in the corner holding the guillotine with which the men have allowed him to cut their cigars. “Now we’ve got seven RX stations in Masedown alone.”
“No, I mean that-”
“Happens every bloody time. You work on it, prepare its way into the world, then some other bastard sneaks into the nest and steals your egg.”
“Politically, old friend: I mean politically. There’ll be a war.”
“Be a-what? War? Nonsense! The more we can all chatter with one another, the less likely that sort of thing becomes.”
“If only that were true,” sighs Widsun dolefully. He sips his brandy, lets out a measured, spirit-heavy breath and continues: “We were hoping-my colleagues and I-we thought we might pick your brains about the sign language your pupils use when-”
“You’ve come to the wrong place, old chap! It’s banned here from day one. We teach them language here, not secrecy and silence. That’s what leads to wars!”
“I’ve seen old Bounder doing it…”
“Bounder?”
“Your gardener.”
“Oh, Bodner! Blast that fellow. My damn wife insists on keeping him around. He came with the estate; been with her since she was born. Special connection, you see, what with his mouth…”