She doesn’t speak during the ride. When they get back to Rugby Street, she stares straight ahead as he leads her up the staircase to his flat. Once inside, she throws herself onto his bed and starts to sob. He sits down beside her and places his hand on her back, but she shrugs it away. The sobs continue for a while, then ease off; her face stays turned away from him, though, buried in a pillow as she quietly weeps. Serge sits beside her for a long time, watching her back rise and fall. It seems bulkier, as though the weight lent by her body to the world of spirits, loaned out through the twin agencies of love and conviction, had been returned unclaimed. Her hair, too, looks heavier, greased by sadness. Her shirt and dress are crumpled. All of her is downward-sagging, solid, heavy. If mass and gravity have been added to her, something’s been stripped away as welclass="underline" despite her layers of clothes, she somehow looks more naked than she does even when undressed, as though a belief in which she’s clothed herself till now, a faith in her connectedness to a larger current, to a whole light and vibrant field of radiant transformation through which Michael might have resonated his way back to her, had been peeled off, returning her, denuded, to the world-this world, the only world, in which a table is just a table, paintings and photographs just images made of matter, kites on walls of playrooms unremembered and the dead dead.
Eventually, she falls asleep. Serge leaves the flat and walks the streets, still angry. He’s angry at Miss Dobai and her gang, at people for being credulous, at himself for his cruelty to Audrey. He gravitates, naturally, to the Triangle, spends some time in Mrs. Fox’s, then stops off at Wooldridge’s, then at the taxidermist’s. Needing a place to ingest his by-now-considerable haul, and not wanting to return home or retreat to some dingy toilet, he heads for the Holborn basement where his father’s car is garaged (he’s had the loan of it again for the last two weeks). Retrieving the key from an attendant whose uniform, it strikes him in passing, is very similar to that of the Empire ushers, he sits in the front seat and, in the dark and columned vault, injects and sniffs and sniffs and injects, more and more, to try to make the anger go away. It doesn’t: it bears down on him from all sides. He decides he’s got to make things move.
He starts the car up, leaves the garage and drives southwest, past Chelsea, Wandsworth, Wimbledon. Soon he’s not in London anymore. He doesn’t know where he is, or where he’s going, and he doesn’t care: what matters is to get things moving-get them moving so that he can get them still again, re-find the stasis in the motion. Green, blue and black run by; sometimes an angry shout weaves its way into the air’s tapestry, a klaxon whose tone dips and falls off as it passes. The colours run closer and closer to him; the tapestry becomes a screen, a fixed frame through which sky and landscape race, nearer and nearer all the time: soon it’s as though he were no longer merely watching the projected image but pressing right up against the surface of the screen itself. Into it even: somehow the space around him has become material. It’s not just wind whipping his face: the colours, having merged to brown, are on him, scraping right against his skin and pressing down into his mouth. There’s some kind of inversion going on too: the screen’s surface has rotated and is now above him. From it comes the sound of crashing metal. The noise travels down to meet him, as though from a more elevated world: it sounds like a big iron lid being closed on him. Then it goes quiet. He’s in some kind of nether region now: a mole, being stuffed like drawers and cupboards with an old, familiar substance.
“Earth again,” he murmurs, tasting it inside his mouth. Flakes of it jump out from between his lips as he begins to laugh. His laughter ricochets off the car’s floor, which, overturned and bent now, arches and folds about him like a metal tent or hangar. It’s a pleasant noise; reminds him of liturgical chants and whispers echoing around St. Alfege’s interior. Pinpricks of light pepper the structure’s roof.
“My own crypt,” he announces to whoever might be listening. There are people around: he can hear voices, muffled beyond the metal. They can hear him too: they’re saying so, saying he must be hurt, that the car should be lifted from above him.
“It won’t come off,” he tries to call back to them. “It’s my carapace.”
The words, instead of travelling cleanly and intelligibly to the bystanders, reverberate and distort inside his bunker. Outside it, there’s general arguing. A voice suggests a way to lift the chassis off him; another proposes a different way; more join in. There’s more arguing, then heaving, then creaking. The misshapen dome is prised away from him; as it comes loose, it affords him a glimpse of the crowd that has gathered round the ditch in which he’s lying; then, as a parting gesture, its edge catches his clothes and flips him from his back onto his front. A new argument starts up, about whether or not to turn him over again.
“Don’t,” Serge tries to tell them. “I’m conversing with an old friend.”
But his mouth’s too earth-filled for the words to come out. The turners win the argument; flipped onto his back once more, he lies incapacitated, staring at the sky.
“Doctor,” someone’s saying; then he’s somewhere else. It could be his flat, or Audrey’s, or Versoie, or the prison back at Hammelburg or Berchtesgaden. There are several doctors round him; then there’s just one, Learmont, and it turns out to be Versoie where he finds himself after all.
“You back with us?” Learmont says.
“Did I leave?” Serge asks.
“The way you’ve been mistreating yourself,” Learmont responds, “you’re lucky not to be in ten separate specimen jars. I’ve never seen…” Then his words trail off, and it’s dark and earthy again.
When Serge wakes up properly, Maureen is sitting at his bedside, watching over him. They’re chatting. It’s like that: they’re already chatting; he seems to have woken up in the middle of a conversation that’s been going on for quite some time. She’s telling him who’s doing what: marrying, leaving the area, being born or dying. The conversation lasts, has lasted, and continues to last for a long stretch, perhaps several weeks, during which time he becomes strong enough to leave his bed and walk around a little. Sometimes Maureen’s replaced at his bedside by his father, who’s telling him about his latest research, patents pending, business schemes. And sometimes it’s his mother, who’s sitting in silence, smiling. It doesn’t really make much difference. Serge consumes it all quite passively, as though watching a film-one in which he’s partly a minor character whose role requires little of him in the way of action, but mainly a viewer, located just beyond the frame. He likes this film, likes his immersion in it, its drawn-out timelessness that has no borders, no beginning and no end…
It doesn’t last forever, though: eventually he’s yanked back into time by the arrival, with his father, of a surprise visitor. Serge senses his presence in the room before he sees or hears him: it’s a familiar, regal presence, one that brings with it, or at least implies, lurking somewhere behind it, all the protocols and codes of an official world, a world of influence and power.
“Serge, my boy!” Widsun beams from an odd angle: tall and vertical.
“My own Dr. Arbus,” Serge replies. “How are the Whitehall Gods?”
“Recruiting,” Widsun says. “I’m working in Communications now, with special responsibilities for North Africa. Thought you might appreciate a short stint on our team in Egypt.”
“ Egypt?” Serge asks. “What have they got there?”
Part Four – Call
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