Mornings are taken up by lectures. Theodore Lyle, FRIBA., holds forth in the ground-floor seminar room on the influence of ancient Greece on the architecture of the Roman, mediaeval and-to cut a long list short-all subsequent periods:
“The modern tendency,” he declaims without notes, turning to face the students from plan drawings of the Parthenon and Hephaesteum into which sketches of peripteral and prostyle columns, metopes and triglyphs are inset, “is to consider these structures as ruins rather than as functioning buildings. The temples, as they present themselves to us today, stand stripped of their original stucco, colour and so on. What we lose is the effect of reflected light flowing over the smooth, coloured wall surfaces, across the bronze grills and balustrades, the gold, ivory and precious stones. I want you, when contemplating the incomplete edifices of the Attic and Hellenic periods, to turn back the clock and think of them as under construction, not beyond it…”
Fittingly, the refurbishment of the room in which these thoughts are being delivered is not yet complete. Window-sills stand upright in the corner, waiting to be affixed to the wall; cornicing smells of wet plaster, floorboards of fresh varnish: the school’s only just moved premises from Tufton Street. The canteen downstairs is still being painted. Students show off their command of building structures as they lunch in it:
“This sausage is like a fluteless column,” one says as he prods his toad-in-the-hole.
“Then my poached egg is a gilded saucer dome, rendered in bird’s-eye perspective,” says another, not to be outdone. “What have you got, Carrefax?”
Serge looks down at his plate: all he’s got is a roll and a slab of butter.
“A burial mound, with gravestone on the side,” he answers.
He never eats much for lunch. In the afternoons they’re meant to do site visits-cathedrals, schools, train-stations and the like, producing sketches-but he usually ducks out of these and slinks off towards the web of streets that lurk within the triangle formed by Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and the north edge of Leicester Square. He first stumbled across the area when he went to Mrs. Fox’s Café in Little Newport Street to meet a mechanic who’d offered to fix a minor problem with his father’s car (he’d brought up his trunks in it the week before; his father was to drive it back the following week). The man had procured a machine part at a knock-down price, and brought it to the café swathed in a sheet which he unwrapped as though it contained contraband, which it effectively did. Most of Mrs. Fox’s clientele seem to be criminals of one sort or another. They sit at tables nursing single coffees for hours on end, communicating with their fellow customers in nods and murmurs. Serge sometimes spends whole afternoons in here, drawing plan sketches of imaginary spaces. He likes the ambience: the sense of being in some kind of nether world whose air is rich with covert signals…
One day in Mrs. Fox’s, Serge finds himself in the corridor off the main tea-room, in the company of a woman of about his age. The corridor is narrow; Serge squeezes past her, tries the bathroom door, then realises that she, too, is waiting. He smiles at her as though to say as much, and she smiles back-and as she does, her nose wrinkles to execute a type of sniff he recognises all too well. It’s an energetic, forceful sniff, one that’s at odds with her full, healthy complexion and the absence from her face of any cold-like symptoms. His smile changes into a knowing and complicit one; hers does the same, the eyes above the curling lips illuminated in a way that, although he’s never seen another set of eyes lit up like that, is also instantly familiar to him.
“Lots of snow in London at this time of year,” she says.
It’s autumn-a warm one. Serge answers:
“Snow’s fun.”
A flushing sound emerges from the bathroom, followed by a thin man in a cap and waistcoat. In unison, Serge and the girl look down and press themselves against opposing walls to make way for him; when the man’s gone, she takes Serge by the sleeve and pulls him into the bathroom behind her. There’s an outer washroom in here (a pronaos area, it occurs to him, would be the technical term for it) and, half-separated from this by a stall, an inner toilet (cella). She takes a vanity case from a pocket in her skirt and, handing it to Serge, says:
“Do the business. I’ve got to pee.”
With that, she disappears into the stall. Carefully, Serge opens up the vanity case, taps a small bunch of the white powder it contains onto the counter beside the sink, and separates it out into two lines. A trickling sound comes from the toilet, strengthening into a steady, leisurely cascade.
“What do you do?” her voice calls out to him above it.
“I study architecture,” he calls back as he takes a banknote from his wallet and starts rolling it into a tube. “How about you?”
“Theatre.”
“You study it?”
“Study it? Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. It seems you can study anything these days.”
“Well, I don’t study. Understudy sometimes…”
“Understudy?”
“I’m an actress.”
The cascade dwindles to a trickle, then stops. There’s a rustling, the sound of fabric being hoisted, then a flushing; then she’s out again, inspecting the two lines he’s made. He hands her the banknote.
“After you.”
She takes it, pushes her hair from her face and bends over the counter to sniff the cocaine. She throws her head back, neck straining towards him, and hands back the note. After he’s snorted his line they stare at one another, flushed, in silence for a few seconds.
“Well,” she says.
“Well,” he repeats. There’s another pause, then he tells her: “I’ve got to pee as well.”
“Come join me for a coffee afterwards,” she says, heading for the corridor again.
He does. Her name is Audrey. She turns out to be almost exactly his age, born in ’98. She’s “currently appearing,” as she puts it, in a musical comedy called The Amazonians.
“It’s playing at the Empire,” she tells him, “just round the corner from here. I can get you a ticket if you’d like to see it.”
Serge accepts the offer. The following evening, he presents himself at the theatre’s box office and is handed an envelope on the front of which someone, perhaps Audrey, has misspelt his name so that it reads the way his father speaks it: “Surge.” Opening it, he finds an upper-circle ticket, and, after purchasing a programme from a liveried young lady on the staircase, takes his seat. The theatre’s pretty full. Most other people seem to have come in twos or threes: there’s the occasional conventional man-woman couple, but many more pairs and groups of women unaccompanied by men. They talk to one another loudly, smoking, laughing, exuding an air of masculinity. Serge flips through the programme. On the inside cover there’s an advertisement for Good Printing, proclaiming that the Finest House in London for Commercial Typesetting, Lithography and Account Books is the House of Henry Good and Son. Serge wonders if that’s their real name, or whether the father and son exist at all. Carrefax Cathode: his father never mentioned that plan again. Maybe Henry lost a child, too, in the war. Serge thinks of ink and ribbons, floating letter-blocks. On the next page the cast are listed: Serge runs his eye down the column, past the principal, then secondary parts, and on into the chorus. Finding Audrey’s name there, in the smallest print, makes him feel fond of her, more touched by her invitation than he would have been if she’d been one of the show’s stars. The next page carries a “historical note” about the production:
Far from simply being mythical creatures,
it explains,
Amazons are in fact figures of genuine historical record. Dwelling in Scythia, they were revered throughout the ancient world for their fierce, war-like character. Though their by-laws forbade marriage and, indeed, all other forms of congress with men, an annual excursion to the neighbouring all-male Gargarean clan furnished them with daughters enough to extend their line. Male children born of such trysts were variously returned to their fathers, put to death or sent out into the world to fend for themselves…