“Why did you want me to come out here?” he asks.
She’s silent for a while, then turns to him and says:
“I wanted to tell you something.”
“Tell me, then,” he tells her.
She stands in silence for what seems like an age-then, just when he’s about to turn away and give up in frustration, says:
“I’ve got a lover.”
Serge is overtaken by a sudden sense of vertigo-as though the surface of the path he’s standing on, and of the lawn and flower beds around it, had all turned to glass, affording him a glimpse into a subterranean world of which he’s been completely unaware till now although it has been right beneath his feet: a kind of human wasp-nest world with air-filled corridors and halls and hatching rooms. More to regain his bearings than for any other reason, he asks Sophie:
“Who is he?”
“He’s my instructor in-” she begins; then, cutting herself short, says: “He’s secret; it’s all secret. But he’s made me sensitive. He’s done stuff to me. I can see things that…”
“That what?”
“See things. What’s coming. When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments.”
“What bodies? Where?” asks Serge.
“In London, Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me. Look.”
She takes his hand and lays it on her stomach. Her skin, through the cotton of her thin white dress, is soft and pliant. Serge can feel a rumbling beneath it. She must feel it too, because she adds:
“It’s not the same as hunger.”
He takes his hand away again. He knows what lovers do: he’s seen photographs, in a magazine he found lying on a bench in Lydium. There was a woman kneeling on a sofa, in front of creased curtains, and a man standing beside her on a carpet, sliding down her dress with one hand while in the other he held his own huge fleshy mast, which rose from the open fly-gap in his trousers; the woman was looking at it, smiling in a fiery, complicit way, as though she belonged to that subterranean world as well, was intimate with its cells, its alveolae, and could look out at the normal world from inside, mocking and unobserved. Does Sophie kneel on sofas in front of curtains? Does her face have that look? Right now, she’s looking straight ahead of her, but her eyes have emptied-or, rather, seem in the process of being filled from somewhere else. She’s muttering:
“… when the bodies… and more bodies come, the parts… a bug massacre in Badsack, Juno Archipelago… above Buc, France: Pegonde-Reuters…”
She looks as though she were tuning into something-as though she had somehow turned herself into a receiver. Is that possible, Serge wonders-like Bodner’s spade, the house’s pipes? He’s read in Wireless World of a girl in America who picked up experimental stations on a filling in her tooth-but via insects and news headlines, flowers? The notion seems ridiculous. And yet some kind of transmission seems to be coursing through her body. As he watches her, her eyes grow brighter, which makes the sunken parts around them, their ridge-shadowed sockets, darken and become more cavernous.
“You really should sleep,” Serge tells her. “Why don’t we go back to-”
“He’s coming soon,” she interrupts him.
“Who?” Serge asks.
“Tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll come back.”
“Oh, Father. Day after tomorrow, yes. Why don’t-”
“Father!” she snorts. “He’s not your… It’s the other one. Monarch. Didn’t use paraphylectic.” She pauses, then continues: “He taught me the transpositions. Then he’ll slink into my dormitory, and wreak carnage.”
Serge feels a chill. The air is cold, but it’s not that that makes him shiver: it’s the sense that Sophie’s talking about things he’s simply not equipped to understand, an apprehension that gulfs as wide as frozen interstellar distances are opening within her words, expanding beyond measure the gap between her and him. He asks her:
“What dormitory? The one where you sleep in London?” She stays in a boarding house for young ladies in South Kensington, just opposite the Science Museum.
“No,” she answers. “That’s not where. I’ll have to kill him in me, or there’ll be more bodies: segments, on the battlefield.”
“You’re crazy,” Serge says. “I’m not listening to this rubbish. Go to bed, or I’ll wake up Maureen and she’ll haul you inside.”
Sophie looks at him bewilderedly, then around the garden. Dawn is breaking. Birds are singing in the bushes and the trees over the wall. A couple are hopping in the grass’s dew. To his surprise, she releases the iris stems, acquiesces with his order and walks slowly beside him to the house. When they arrive there, she goes to her room, he to his. He sleeps all day. He dreams of Sophie’s innards, her stuffing: of organs sensitised by passion while, on the outside, hinged limbs twitch and fletch and signal, current-galvanised, against creased backdrops, both inner and outer body shaken by transmissions. In his dream, the divan turns into a dissecting board; Sophie becomes a bird, cat or insect whose stomach has been opened; heart, gizzard and other nameless parts are spilling outwards in a long, unbroken tapestry, a silken shawl-and spilling up into the air, sticking to wires. He wakes up sticky himself, and ashamed.
“What kind of time is this?” Maureen asks him when he finally makes his way down to the kitchen. “And where’s your sister?”
“Still sleeping,” he tells her. “We were both up late.”
“The hours in this house have gone haywire,” Maureen tuts. “When Mr. Simeon gets back we’ll have proper dining times, with everybody present.”
Serge shrugs. He eats some bread and honey, then wanders up to Sophie’s room to see if she’s still sleeping. She’s not there. He heads back down the stairs and out across the maze towards the Mosaic Garden. The day’s calm; spring flowers are lolling open in the late-afternoon sunlight; others, budding, secrete their own sticky juice, attracting bees. As Serge approaches Sophie’s lab the smell of flowers gives over to another, sourer smell that reminds him at first of marzipan. The door’s open; when he steps inside, the smell becomes much stronger-stronger and more sharp, like apple brandy. Sophie’s sitting in a chair holding a glass in her hand, but the glass is lolling at an almost horizontal angle. Sophie’s hand is stiff; its middle finger points in the direction of the chart. Her eyes are open: it seems that she’s trying to show him something among the sprawling web-some new word, or figure, or associative line. It’s only as Serge turns his eyes up to it that he registers, like an after-impression, the flecks of brine that cover Sophie’s lips like bubbles blown by a departed insect.
iii
The funeral arrangements take some time. A quick burial was never on the cards: there are the autopsy and coroner’s report to be completed, as in any case of death by poisoning. Serge’s father busies himself with arrangements over the next week: distributing invitations, developing and printing programmes, discussing the contents of the buffet with Maureen and Frieda, consulting weather forecasts in the newspapers each day…
It’s to be held outdoors, same as the Pageants-but in the Crypt Park, not on the Mulberry Lawn. The vicar of St. Alfege’s is to say a few words, the Day School pupils are to perform a recitation and Sophie’s to be buried in the Crypt, or rather under it; there’s no more room at ground level. Carrefax has devised an elaborate construction whereby Sophie’s coffin will be lowered into the ground beside the Crypt, slid along rails into an enclave burrowed out beneath the edifice itself, then slightly raised so as to slot into its designated space between the bodies of two ancestors, with the communicating tunnel to be filled in once the manoeuvre’s completed. The excavations are installed two days before the funeral itself: supporting pillars with winch-levers on them for the lowering; a second, horizontally operating winch for the sliding, and a pump-lever contraption for the final hoist. By the time the workmen have finished, piles of dug-up earth line the edges of the trench, and the sound of hammering and tapping that’s filled the estate’s air falls silent, leaving only birdsong in its place.