Tom McCarthy - C

“B. B-ee. B-b-b-b-b-ee. T. T-ee. T-t-t-t-t-ee. S-s-s-s-s, S-s-s-s-s. B-ee…”

The voices, those of Day School pupils (now alumni), manifest varying degrees of distortedness and atonality; the letters warp and morph as they progress. They gather certain rhythms, patterns of repetition or half-repetition, then, just when it seems that there’s a logic to their sequences, break and relinquish them again. Serge and Sophie fall into the habit of putting on these recordings each time they’re in the attic, a mechanical background chorus to their various antics up there. Sometimes they play, on a newer Berliner gramophone, not cylinders but discs: exhibition plates their father’s had printed to showcase his students’ ability to enunciate whole phrases or manage entire conversations. After setting the disc gently on its turntable and cranking the Berliner’s handle, they lead the needle down towards the narrow groove with the assiduousness of surgeons guiding knives back to incisions made on previous occasions, then return to their tasks while random dialogues (model exchanges between infant shopkeepers and customers or passengers and train guards) waft around them. Often, when a disc’s come to its end, they let it run on, playing and replaying the same stretch of silence-silence which in fact is anything but silent, bursting as it is with a crackle and snap that conjures up for Serge the image of Bodner’s deformed mouth opening and closing: many Bodners’ mouths, repeated side by side in rows that fill the attic’s air and extend out beyond its roof and walls. Sometimes, while Sophie’s busy copying plants, he props his head right up against the gramophone and watches the needle running through its trench, snagging and jumping constantly as though locked in constant hostile struggle with the furrow. The disc’s made of a thick black material.

“It’s shellac,” Sophie informs him when he asks her one overcast Monday. “Made from secretions of the lac bug.”

“The lack bug? What’s it lacking?”

“Lac, no k. I’ve got one of those in my lab as well. That’s Rainer’s voice.”

She’s right: the disc he’s come across this morning contains not phrases but a passage of verse which, spoken in a child’s unbroken voice, seems strangely fitting for its newfound auditorium:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again…

The speaker, Rainer, spent a year or so at Versoie: a half-German boy who lost his hearing, then his life, to a cancer that developed in his ear. Serge saw the cancer one day: it was bulbous, like a set of roots buckling the organ’s inner chamber, upsetting the delicate architecture of its whorls and plateaus from beneath the skin’s surface while a moss-like coat overgrew it from above. Serge moves his head round and looks down into the reproducing horn. Its brass has turned slightly green with time. The tube darkens as it narrows, then disappears into the sound box. Listening to Rainer, Serge thinks of entrances to caves and wells, of worm- and foxholes, rabbits’ burrows, and all things that lead into the earth.

Towards the middle of June, Simeon Carrefax’s old university associate Samuel Widsun pitches up, by car, from London. His arrival, in the middle of a rehearsal for this year’s Pageant, causes some commotion: few of Versoie’s residents, child or adult, have ever seen a motor car. Even before it’s turned off the road into the lightly sloping path that leads down past the Mulberry Lawn towards the house, the pupils have picked up the vibrations of its engines, choppy waves ruffling the ground they’re standing on. As it hauls into partial view through the conifers they run out and skip along beside it, almost tripping on the hems of their long robes. This year’s theme is Persephone: the Pageant is to represent her rapture by and marriage to Hades, and subsequent coronation as Queen of the Underworld.

“Better a Greek than a German!” Widsun quips heartily to Simeon when his host explains the set-up to him as strangely dressed pupils unpack his bags. “Can you believe we’re crowning another of those blasted cabbage-eaters?”

“That bastard Korn’s just pipped me on the phototelegraphic patent,” Carrefax replies.

“The children can lip-read that word as well as any other, sir,” Maureen warns Carrefax as she takes Widsun’s cap and gloves.

“We must have been working neck and neck the whole time, he and I. Another week and I’d have had the application in. I’ve a wealth of new projects to show you. A damn cornucopia!”

“And that one too,” adds Maureen.

“What, ‘cornucopia’?”

“No, the other one. You’ll turn out gangs of thugs: deaf thugs.”

“The Krauts are gearing up to let loose at us, make no mistake,” says Widsun. “Hey: watch out with that one!” he shouts at two Day School pupils dragging and bumping a heavy case across the gravel-boys who, facing away from him, remain oblivious to his concern. “It’s delicate,” he explains to Carrefax by way of compensation for being ignored by the boys. “A present for you and your family.”

The present’s a really good one: a Projecting Kinetoscope. On his first evening in Versoie, after supper, Widsun sets it up on the Mulberry Lawn and projects onto a bedsheet strung between two trees moving images of fire crews riding through the streets of London on their engines’ sideboards, then of clothes jumping from laundry baskets, snaking across the floor and throwing themselves into laundry machines which then start churning them around and washing them, all without any human interference. The whole household turns out to watch the spectacle. Mr. and Mrs. Carrefax recline in large armchairs; Miss Hubbard and Mr. Clair sit on wooden seats beside them; Serge and Sophie sprawl belly-down on the grass; Maureen and the other servants stand in a huddle to the side. Only Bodner’s absent: he glances in at the film’s outset but seems unimpressed, as though he’d seen it all before, and wanders off towards his garden. Widsun stands at the back, beside the projector, announcing each of the reels he threads between its cogs and sprockets.

“This one’s called Caught by Wireless,” he explains as the flickers steady to reveal a domestic setting that seems to involve a compromised wife and a not unreasonably suspicious husband. “And this one, a tribute to our hostess’s French ancestry: the artiste Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune.”

“It’s funny they have titles,” Mr. Clair says as a pockmarked and unhappy moon gets it in the eye from some misguided scientist’s rocket-ship. “Shouldn’t the children be in bed?”

“Fiddlesticks!” scoffs Carrefax. “It’s not every night they get to observe interplanetary transit.”

But every night they get to watch Kinetoscope projections. It becomes a ritual: as soon as supper’s over the bedsheet’s hauled up, chairs laid out and reel after reel fed into the mechanism. Serge carries the sounds of the celluloid strip running through its gate to bed with him, clicking and shuffling in his ears long after the machine’s been put to sleep, more real and present than the trickle of the stream or chirping grasshoppers. Each time Widsun racks up a new spool and starts running it, Serge feels a rush of anticipation run through the cogs and sprockets of his body; his mind merges with the bright bedsheet, lit up with the possibilities of what might dance across it in the next few seconds, its outrageous metamorphoses as moths’ and mosquitoes’ shadows on the screen turn into jumping hairs and speckles, then the first unsteady pictures, empty linen springing into artificial life.