Tom McCarthy - C

“What kind of time is this?” Maureen asks him when he finally makes his way down to the kitchen. “And where’s your sister?”

“Still sleeping,” he tells her. “We were both up late.”

“The hours in this house have gone haywire,” Maureen tuts. “When Mr. Simeon gets back we’ll have proper dining times, with everybody present.”

Serge shrugs. He eats some bread and honey, then wanders up to Sophie’s room to see if she’s still sleeping. She’s not there. He heads back down the stairs and out across the maze towards the Mosaic Garden. The day’s calm; spring flowers are lolling open in the late-afternoon sunlight; others, budding, secrete their own sticky juice, attracting bees. As Serge approaches Sophie’s lab the smell of flowers gives over to another, sourer smell that reminds him at first of marzipan. The door’s open; when he steps inside, the smell becomes much stronger-stronger and more sharp, like apple brandy. Sophie’s sitting in a chair holding a glass in her hand, but the glass is lolling at an almost horizontal angle. Sophie’s hand is stiff; its middle finger points in the direction of the chart. Her eyes are open: it seems that she’s trying to show him something among the sprawling web-some new word, or figure, or associative line. It’s only as Serge turns his eyes up to it that he registers, like an after-impression, the flecks of brine that cover Sophie’s lips like bubbles blown by a departed insect.

The funeral arrangements take some time. A quick burial was never on the cards: there are the autopsy and coroner’s report to be completed, as in any case of death by poisoning. Serge’s father busies himself with arrangements over the next week: distributing invitations, developing and printing programmes, discussing the contents of the buffet with Maureen and Frieda, consulting weather forecasts in the newspapers each day…

It’s to be held outdoors, same as the Pageants-but in the Crypt Park, not on the Mulberry Lawn. The vicar of St. Alfege’s is to say a few words, the Day School pupils are to perform a recitation and Sophie’s to be buried in the Crypt, or rather under it; there’s no more room at ground level. Carrefax has devised an elaborate construction whereby Sophie’s coffin will be lowered into the ground beside the Crypt, slid along rails into an enclave burrowed out beneath the edifice itself, then slightly raised so as to slot into its designated space between the bodies of two ancestors, with the communicating tunnel to be filled in once the manoeuvre’s completed. The excavations are installed two days before the funeral itself: supporting pillars with winch-levers on them for the lowering; a second, horizontally operating winch for the sliding, and a pump-lever contraption for the final hoist. By the time the workmen have finished, piles of dug-up earth line the edges of the trench, and the sound of hammering and tapping that’s filled the estate’s air falls silent, leaving only birdsong in its place.

Dr. Learmont, general practitioner of long standing for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, comes in person to tell Serge’s father that the coroner has reached a verdict of accidental death. Carrefax concurs:

“The cyanide was right next to her lemonade glass. Easy to confuse the two. And then she’d been up all night, working on the compounds. Best female student Imperial has had since they admitted them, according to her tutors…”

Learmont looks at Serge; Serge looks at Learmont. The doctor’s kind face and brown leather case seem to multiply for him, vaguer and more mythical with each iteration, down a telescoping corridor of memories: of strep throat, measles, chickenpox and other, nameless illnesses that always, whatever their distinctive unattractive qualities, returned him to a pleasant and familiar zone of honey-and-lemon tea, boiled sweets and picture-books-a zone where Maureen plumped his pillow every hour, Sophie brought the Berliner down from the attic and played him records, Mr. Clair waived all table-learning or essay-writing deadlines and, whatever time it actually was, it always seemed to be the calm, drawn-out stretch of mid-afternoon. Repeating the gesture with which he used to reach towards him then, Learmont extends his arm now and taps Serge on the chin.

“You keeping fit?” he asks.

Serge nods.

“Be needing all you able-bodied young men soon,” the doctor says.

“Apropos of-what? Imperial, yes: I wanted to ask you…” Carrefax says to Learmont. Learmont raises his eyebrows; Carrefax continues: “As you’ll doubtless be aware, it’s not unknown for death to be misdiagnosed, which makes for a certain…”

“You think it might not have been accidental?” Learmont asks.

“Not-what? No, no: that’s not what I meant. I was referring to the rare-yet still, I believe, well-documented-instances in which a death is recorded, only for the so-called deceased to awake several days later and recover their full capacities.”

“I’m sorry to say that in this case we can entertain no hopes, not even the faintest, of-”

“Bells were used, in times less technologically advanced than ours, with cords running from within the coffin to miniature towers mounted on the tombstone, should the incumbent come around and wish to signal the fact to those in a position to liberate them-a vertical position, as it were…”

“But your daughter’s been… I mean, after the autopsy, there’s simply no way that-”

“Yes: splendid! So I was thinking that perhaps we could avail ourselves of more contemporary hardware. I’ve arranged for a tapper-key, donated from Serge’s arsenal of such equipment, to be placed beside her in the coffin, and will attach a small transmitting aerial to the Crypt’s roof, should she-”

“Which one of my keys?” Serge asks. “You never consulted me!”

“That way, she won’t need to rely on the circumstance, far from guaranteed, of someone happening to pass by the Crypt at precisely the moment she comes to and rings. The signal emitted will be weak, but strong enough to cover the estate, should, for example, Serge be experimenting with his wireless set, as I believe his wont is these days…”

Serge’s mother spends her time in the spinning houses, working on a shroud. Bodner plies her with tea: Serge sees him moving between his garden and the Weaving Room or Store Room virtually each time he looks in that direction from the attic window. He’s spending lots of time up in the attic these days. It’s the spot with which he most associates hours spent alone with Sophie. The cylinders and discs are still there. When he plays them now, her voice attaches itself, leech-like, to the ones recorded on them-tacitly, as though laid down in the wax and shellac underneath these voices, on a lower stratum: it flashes invisibly within their crackles, slithers through the hisses of their silence. He looks out over the flat, motionless landscape as he listens. The sheep never seem to move: they just stand still, bubbly flecks on Arcady Field’s face. The curving stream also seems completely still, arrested in a deathly rictus grin. Only the trees in the Crypt Park seem to have any movement in them: they contract and expand slowly, breathing out the sound of the Day School children practising their recitation:

Soon as the evening shades prevail

The moon takes up the wondrous tale,

And nightly to the listening earth

Repeats the story of her birth…

The looping, repeating lines mutate and distort so much that, even when the words come out correctly, they seem like a mispronounced version of something else, other sentences that are trying to worm their way up to the surface, make themselves heard. Kneeling on the window-sill three floors above them, Serge strains his ear to pick these buried phrases up, but gets just inarticulate murmurs. The estate’s layout, too, seems to be withholding something-some figure or associative line inscribed beneath its flattened geometry, camouflaged by lawns and walls and gardens…