The 52’s maître d’, Billie Lee, has that look in spades. He’s half-Chinese, and has a liquid, silken voice that lingers like Madame Z’s clammy hands do when she greets her guests. He has a lisp as well, which Serge always associates in his mind with the word “Liszt” in the salon’s entry-dialogue. His gait also strikes Serge as cat-like, although Serge knows he’s probably only thinking this because of all the cat-masks leering at him from the stage. The more drugs he takes, the more associatively his mind seems to work: the circulation of dancers over the long floorboards, interlocking bodies moving on collision courses towards other conjoined bodies, pausing to let them pass then advancing again, suggests for him the way that London’s cabs and busses pulse and flow, negotiating space; then aeroplanes circling and passing one another; gnats above a bed; orbiting planets. The bold, confident women sitting around tables, painted in stylised geometries of black, white and scarlet, the stark angles of their bare spines, stockinged legs and forearms that extend and retract triangular cocktail glasses or long, straight cigarette holders, summon up the image of new, shining engines, the sleek machinery of luxurious, expensive cars, their brazen pistons, rods and cylinders. Men-both in the 52 and Madame Z’s salon, and for that matter in most other places-seem diminished by comparison: retracted, meek, effeminate.
“Dear Szerge,” Lee susurrates at him one night, “you’re minusz your lovely Audrey this evening.”
“She’s meeting her guardian,” Serge tells him.
“Ah! The doctor.” A soft chuckle emanates from Lee’s mouth. “A fine man. Devoted to her.”
Serge shrugs. He still hasn’t worked out the nature of Audrey’s relationship with this Dr. Arbus. Lee half-gasps as he remembers something.
“Szerge!” he says. “You must bring all your Folies-Bergèrsz to the party that I’m organising down in Limehousze next week. It’s a zsecret party. Exclusive, but huge. It’ll be a blaszt…”
“Consider them brought,” Serge answers.
Audrey arrives soon afterwards, flush to the gills with money. She buys them both Champagne and smothers his cheek and neck in apologetic kisses. He turns from her wordlessly and watches the jazz band play. They look like machine parts too, extensions of their instruments, the stoppers, valves and tubes. Their bodies twitch and quiver with electric agitation. So do the bodies of the dancers. One girl, gyrating with another, lets a shriek out: it’s a shriek of joy that manages to carry on its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal. The music carries signals too: Serge’s eyes glaze over as he tunes into them. There are several, gathering within the noise only to lose their shape again and slip away. Dispersed, they rise up silently towards the winking moon and bounce off this to Mars and Saturn before travelling along the cat-masks’ whiskers and being granted structure and form once more by the trellis and the plants, which they cause to slightly tremble. When Serge closes his eyes, the signals become images: words and shapes being written out in light against a black void, then erased, then written out again, worlds being made and unmade…
At the beginning of November, Serge is summoned by the AA’s provost, Walter Burnet, ARSA. On his office walls hang photographs of previous years’ hockey teams (Burnet has been the school’s hockey coach for the last twenty years).
“Not one for sports, Carrefax?” he asks, following Serge’s gaze.
“Not so much, sir, no.”
“Good for the health, both physical and mental. Teaches team spirit. An architect’s only as good as the team he works with, and vice versa. We try to instil that principle right from the get-go here: collective site visits and the like. Can’t have our players slacking off…”
“I’ve been doing some independent research,” Serge says. “I find it easier to sketch when I’m alone.”
“You’ve got the drawings to show for it?”
“Yes, sir,” Serge replies. He saw this coming, and has gathered all the sketches idly dawdled in Mrs. Fox’s Café into a large dossier which he now hands the certified disciplinarian.
“What are these of?” Burnet asks.
“Well, they’re hybrids really. Plans for…”
“For what?”
Serge’s mind runs through the taxonomy of edifice-types, grabbing at terms. Laying hold of the one that seems most current, he tells Burnet:
“Memorials.”
“Ah!” Burnet says. “A worthy line of investigation. Do I take it you’ll be entering the competition to design the school’s own war memorial?”
“I hadn’t really thought of it, sir,” Serge shrugs.
“You should, Carrefax; you should. It’s a blind submission: there’s no reason why the likes of you can’t win.” He flips through a few more sketches, then asks: “Why are these all in plan view?”
“It’s my preferred projection.”
“So I see. As you’re no doubt aware, though, the syllabus for the first year requires you to become proficient in not only plan but also section, elevation and perspective. Which brings me to-”
“I haven’t quite begun to-” Serge begins, but Burnet cuts him off:
“Which brings me to the question of your course attendance record. I’m afraid Mr. Lynch has complained to me that he’s only seen you once in his drawing class all term.”
“I find perspective hard, sir,” Serge says.
“All the more reason to attend-that, and the fact that your continued membership of this institution demands it.”
Serge has nothing to say. Burnet returns the sketches to the dossier and hands this back to him. He looks at Serge in silence for a while; then his tone softens as he says:
“I know it’s difficult to readjust.”
“It just seems odd to draw things out into relief when they’re-”
“No, Carrefax, I don’t mean the perspective thing. I mean to life in Civvie Street. You’ve lived through war and all its horror, and-”
“But I liked the war,” Serge tells him.
Now it’s Burnet who’s stumped for words. His eyebrows wrinkle in concern as his eyes move from left to right over Serge’s features, as though trying to draw their flat inscrutability out into some kind of relief. Serge looks back at him, frankly, letting his face be scrutinised. There’s no reason to resist it: Burnet and his like will never disinter what’s buried there, will never elevate or train it; Serge hasn’t made himself available for his team, never will. Besides, he doesn’t buy the line, much peddled by the newspapers, that tens of thousands of men his age are wandering around with “shell shock.” He sees symptoms around London all the time: the deadened, unfocused eyes and slow, automatic gait characteristic of the NYDNs he’d see at the field hospital in Mirabel, or of the pilots and observers for whom Walpond-Skinner had to write AAF-3436 forms-but these are general. Billie Lee displays them, and he spent the war years overseeing his family’s business interests in Shanghai. Madame Z displays them, and she’s been running salons for as long as anyone can remember. Commuters trudging to work each morning display them as well, as do the pleasure-seekers shuffling around the West End. They can’t all have been at the front. The children outside Great Ormond Street display them. The dope fiends, especially, display them; the cocaine-sniffers too, when they’re not temporarily fired up with charges that will run down in minutes, leaving them more empty than before. It’s like a city of the living dead, only a few of whose denizens could proffer the excuse of having had shells constantly rattling their flesh and shaking their nerves. No, the shock’s source was there already: deeper, older, more embedded…