“What are you looking at?” she snaps. “Go now; I’ve got to work.”
She works the next day, and the next night too, and the day after that. Serge starts to wonder when-or if-she ever sleeps. By the time he wanders down for breakfast late each morning, she’s already gone, a few scattered breadcrumbs and a buttered knife the only evidence of her having passed through the kitchen-those, and the eviscerated newspapers she leaves on the table after tearing from them headlines that, for whatever reason, catch her eye. With their father away at a conference on deaf education up in London (“His train will have passed yours,” Serge commented to Sophie’s pronounced indifference when she first arrived back) and Mr. Clair home on leave, they’ve got the run of the place. Maureen’s given up trying to stage meals in single sittings, and leaves out bread, meats, cheeses, pies and stews for them to help themselves to when they like. As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae…
Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera.
“Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.”
“Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays-then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.
Three or four nights after his first sighting of the white figure on the Mulberry Lawn, Serge sees it again. This time he sees her face: it is Sophie, most definitely. She glides past the Orchard like she did the other night, then disappears from view again. Serge shuts his RX station down, throws on a jumper and heads down the stairs and out of the front door. He catches up with her inside the Crypt Park, where she’s moving through the long grass slowly, hesitantly.
“Sophie,” he calls out as he approaches her from behind.
Sophie takes two more steps, then stops and slightly turns her head in his direction.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
She stays there with her head half-turned, as though preferring to sense him rather than face him-through the skin on her cheek, perhaps, or the small hairs on her neck. He repeats his question. After a while she answers:
“Looking for the Balkan beetle.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
“A type of flying insect, made by Pilcher,” she answers absently. Her eyes turn down, towards the grass-then sharpen, as though catching sight of something couched within it. “There are all these segments,” she murmurs. “Broken bodies.”
“Where?” asks Serge.
“Everywhere,” she replies. “When one antolie colony attacks another, they cut the victims up, and leave their limbs and torsos lying around the battlefield.”
“What’s an antolie colony?” asks Serge.
Slowly, her head turns fully away from him again, and she moves onwards through the long grass-ponderously, her exposed legs angling sharply at the knees, like an insect’s articulated limbs.
“You’ll catch cold,” he calls after her, then heads back to his radio set.
The next day, sure enough, she does look ill-although not colded: more ravaged, as though worn down by fatigue yet at the same time fired up by a manic sense of purpose. When Serge slinks into her lab, she’s scribbling away, furiously sketching the anatomy of flowers that, culled from Bodner’s garden, lie dissected on the desk in front of her.
“The ovaries,” she mumbles over her shoulder to him. “Here’s where the pollen grains and utricles get into them, into their cavity.”
He peers forwards, and sees where her scalpel has sliced through the corolla, pegged back its flesh and let the pistil stand out stiff and long. She scrapes the prostrate membrane, gathering its secreted essence on the blade’s side, then smears this onto a slide-plate. She looks up to the wall; Serge follows her eyes, and sees spelt out above the dissection table the word uterus. Above it, ripped from today’s Daily Herald, the headline “Young Turks Target Armenians.” Beside the printed text, Sophie has written, in brackets, Anatolia.
“ Anatolia,” Serge reads aloud. “Is that what you were-”
“Shh!” Sophie holds her hand up, and the two of them freeze for a few moments: she sitting with the scalpel in her hand, mouth open and ears pricked up as though listening for something; he standing behind her, head above her shoulder, breathing in the sleepless odour wafting from her hair and body. After a while she turns to him and says: “Come find me tonight.”
“Here?” Serge asks. “Or in the Crypt Park?”
She waves her hand across her giant diagram, as though to say “Wherever,” then signals for him to leave again.
That night, as he trawls through the ether, he pictures spiracles and stamen rising upwards, prodding at the sky like hungry aerials, and shellacked setae wound like tuning-coils around segmented abdomens. From time to time he looks out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sophie drifting silkily across the Mulberry Lawn, but never does. At three or so he makes his way towards her lab. It’s empty, and now smells of stale sandwiches, old lemonade and flower- and insect-secretions overlaid with the odour of the chemicals stored on the shelves’ jars. Serge half-recognises this last odour from the days when he and Sophie would mix compounds in this very room-but only half: these chemicals are more sophisticated, real ones, loaned from cupboards at Imperial, cases guarded by white-coated men who commune with Sophie in a language too complex for him to follow. They’d understand her chart, Serge thinks, looking at the wall whose web of lines and vectors has grown still larger and more complex since this afternoon: they’d look at it and know immediately what the letters meant, the links, all the associations…
He finds her outside, in the Mosaic Garden. She’s moving among the flowers, pacing from one spot to another, back again, then onwards to a third spot, a fourth one, as though following a strict set of instructions. As he comes near, she leaves the path and starts moving around the flower bed itself, her lower body lost among tall iris-stems, like some giant grasshopper.
“What are you doing?” Serge asks.
She motions to him to be quiet. He treads softly as he walks across to join her. She takes two steps forwards, then one back, then one to the side, then stops, her whole body tensed up. She seems, once more, to be listening out for something. With each hand clasped around an iris stem, she looks like a tethered radio mast.