Two days after sitting the examination, Serge takes a real train down to London. He travels through winter fog made luminescent by a sun that won’t reveal itself. When he emerges from St. Pancras the fog’s lifted but the air’s still hazy; taxicabs leave knee-high smoke-clouds that drift slowly over pavements as he makes his way by foot through Bloomsbury towards St. James’s. A thin mist sits above the park; the roofs of Whitehall Court, black pyramids that join with domes and cupolas as they mount upwards, fuzz and blur in this like spires and bell-towers of some legendary castle. The War Office building is bathed in pale sunlight, but its deep-sunk windows cut dark shadow-sockets in the alabaster façade. Serge tells the soldier at the main door that he has an appointment.
“Who with?”
“Lieutenant General Widsun.”
The soldier looks him over for a second time, as though taken aback. He asks Serge’s name, then steps into a cabin and picks up a telephone, watching him through the glass while mouthing inaudible words. After half a minute he emerges and, pointing into a courtyard, says:
“This way, sir: up the staircase to room 615A.”
The building’s corridors have marble floors; Serge’s feet click as he moves across them. In one, twenty or so men his age fill forms out as they wait on benches; one of them shuffles over to make space for Serge-but he, shunning this gesture, clicks his way onwards, turns a corner, heads up a smaller staircase and enters a new corridor in which plush armchairs overhung by large plants offer themselves up to older men in clean-creased uniforms. The door of 615A leads to an inner waiting area; a secretary seats Serge here, beneath a portrait of a sly-looking Tudor or Elizabethan man holding a quill above a sheet of paper covered in black ciphers, slips through a second door, then slips back out again and tells him to go through.
Widsun’s office is large; his desk alone could have a model battlefield laid out on it. Behind it, framed by the grid-squares of a double-sash window, Widsun’s face beams at him from atop stiff folds of khaki.
“Serge, my boy!”
“Hello, sir.”
“Sir, nothing! Sit yourself down.”
Serge sits across the desk from him.
“My Kinetoscope enthusiast!” Widsun guffaws. “My feathered witness! Twice the size, at least! And handsome as a prince: the world’s fresh ornament, and only herald to the gaudy spring!”
Serge looks down at the desktop, towards a blotting pad and ink set. Instinctively, his hand reaches for the stamp, before pausing and retreating.
“You hungry?” Widsun asks.
“I suppose so,” Serge says.
On the way out, Widsun hands his secretary a sheet of paper and instructs her to CC it to three of his colleagues. While he slips on his jacket, Serge watches her line up three sheets of white paper with two black ones, alternating tones; the click and hammer of the keys against the five-deep stack starts up as they pass through the outer door and follows them along the corridor.
They lunch at the Criterion in Piccadilly. Widsun orders beef Chateaubriand for the two of them, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
“Your health’s fine now, I take it?” he enquires.
“Oh yes,” answers Serge. “They tested us for everything at SOMA: measles, polio, consumption…”
“SOMA: so you’ll be one of Boom Trenchard’s bird-men. Have they filled your head with sky and wind, then?”
“Well, we haven’t actually flown yet. It was mainly theory. We did mapwork, and learnt how to use compasses, correctors, stuff like that. And we learnt principles of gunnery: line, elevation, aiming points and mean points, all those things.”
“Ligne de foi: that’s all I remember. What you aim down, isn’t it? ‘Faith Line’: has a nice ring to it.”
“They didn’t mention that,” Serge tells him. “We were led more down the artillery side of things. They’d give us distances and ranges, and we’d have to calculate the angle of sight from the horizontal; then we’d have to set this off against the error of the day, and work out the trajectory and angle of descent and-”
“Error of the day?” asks Widsun.
“Oh, you know: atmospherics, wind speed…”
A pianist starts playing. The room is filling up. Waiters glide up and down the rows of tables as though slotted into grooves laid in the floor. Widsun holds Serge with his gaze and tells him, in a voice full of affection:
“I never had you down as a mathematician.”
“Oh, I don’t think of it as mathematics,” Serge replies. “I just see space: surfaces and lines… and the odd blind spot…”
A waiter turns up with their wine. Widsun inspects the label and nods approval; the man sets about opening the bottle. Widsun turns to Serge again and asks:
“What about wireless? I was informed some time ago that you were quite the little radio bug…”
“I was,” Serge smiles. “But at the school it was different. They’d put eight or ten Morse buzzers in a room, and you’d have to learn the tone of each, and transcribe from first one and then another. It’s to train your ear. And we were told the principles of signalling from the air, like don’t send on a turn, or right over the ground station; or not to make the dots too short or dashes too long; or how you don’t need to send the number after the squadron letter-that kind of thing.”
The cork’s pop rises above the piano music and room’s murmur. A mouthful of wine is poured into Widsun’s glass. He holds it up towards the large, arched windows.
“How are your eyes?” he asks Serge while he’s doing this. “Still sharp as ever?”
“Oh,” says Serge, “they gave us wool balls full of different-coloured strands to pick out and unravel.”
“How’s your mother?” Widsun enquires, rolling the wine around the glass to check its legs.
“She’s busy,” Serge replies. “There’s lots of demand for silk these days.”
Widsun’s swilling the liquid round his mouth now, looking intrigued. Eventually the look goes; he swallows and nods at the waiter, who pours two glasses out and glides away again.
“Lots of demand for silk,” says Widsun. “Yes, indeed there is. Well, here’s to the demand for silk, and your good health.”
They clink glasses. Serge sits back again, but Widsun’s upper body stays above the table, leaning forward; it makes it look as though the arches and gilded ceiling of the room were being held up by his shoulders. Cigarette smoke curls round these as he murmurs:
“Error of the day…”
ii
Serge is sent to Hythe. He’s lodged with five other cadets in the dormitory of a requisitioned school. From Romney Marsh, where they do four-mile runs along the Royal Military Canal, the rumble of the guns in Ypres can be picked up. He thought it was distant thunder the first time he heard it, but the sky was blue and cloudless.
“Fifteen-inch howitzers, I’d say,” their instructor smiles at them as they scour the heavens. “Carries nicely, dissent it? Now pick thet pace ap!”