Tom McCarthy: C

“A boy,” he tells her. “Now we need to get your afterbirth out.”

He starts filling a syringe with epithemalodine. When it’s ready, he takes the baby back from her and places him in the maid’s hands. The baby starts to cry.

“This will sting a little,” Learmont says, tapping the air bubbles out. He straps the gauze mask to the mother’s face again and turns the chloroform back on, then shoots the epithemalodine into the folds of her vagina. Her body flinches; her back arches, then relaxes into the bed again. The placenta follows shortly afterwards. Learmont turns the valve off, looks down at the muffled woman and tells her:

“I’ll get rid of this-unless you want to bury it. Some people do. Some people even fry it up and eat it. And the caul is meant to be a sign of-”

But she cuts him short with a gesture of her hand towards the canister.

“It can’t hurt, I suppose,” he says. “We’ll give it a couple more minutes.” He turns the valve back on. Mrs. Carrefax’s eyes warm and widen. The baby stops crying. For a long while the room is silent but for the hiss of the chloroform and, quieter than this, the intermittent mechanical buzzing he heard earlier, floating in from outside, from the stables.

At dawn he’s fed a breakfast of kippers, eggs and bread. When he’s finished Maureen tells him that Mr. Carrefax would like to see him.

“Where is he?” Learmont asks her.

She snorts and answers: “In his workshop, of course. Follow the house round to the left and you’ll find it, through a doorway in the garden wall.”

There’s dew on the grass and snakes of mist about the tree trunks in the orchard where the children were playing yesterday. Following the perimeter of the house as instructed, Learmont turns away from the orchard and, walking towards a part of the estate he didn’t cross on his way in, passes some kind of enclosed park. A gate is set in its tall wall, its columns topped with obelisk-shaped carvings. Behind the wall, taller, conker trees loom, their leaves all big and yellow. The park drops away as the ivy-coated house wall turns and leads him across a neat lawn held in by low walls, then onwards through a further wall of hedge onto a smaller, unmown lawn around whose far side lime trees stand. He picks a very quiet buzzing sound up as he moves across this, but it’s not the same as the buzzing he heard coming from the stables: this one seems less agitated, less electrical. He understands why as he comes to the lawn’s far side: beehives are set among the limes. He skirts these and passes through a second hedge-wall to emerge into a sub-section of garden in which a rectangular trough-pond sits absolutely still, covered in pea-green slime. At the far end of this sub-section, a door leads back into the walled-in garden he arrived through yesterday. He tries it, but it’s locked. He can hear a metallic snipping sound on the other side.

“Mr. Carrefax?” he calls.

The metallic snipping stops and Mr. Carrefax’s voice booms back:

“What? Who’s that?”

“The doctor,” Learmont calls back. “The baby’s fine and well.”

“Fine and-what? I’ve misplaced the key to this door, I’m afraid. You’ll have to come in through the far side. Follow the wall round.”

It’s not apparent how to do this: the wall’s so overgrown with ivy and with bushes extending outwards like buttresses that it’s hard to tell where it leads. Learmont detours away from it into a long avenue of conker trees behind which lies an apple orchard. The avenue takes him towards a set of smaller houses, but before he reaches these he picks the wall up again, emerging from still swirls of tangled hedge to turn and run beside the narrow, moat-like stream that he crossed yesterday; eventually it passes the same wooden bridge and presents to him, once he’s re-crossed this, the same small doorway. He’s come full circle. He bows his head again, steps back through the wisteria onto uneven mosaic paving and moves once more between the rows of stacked-up tulips and chrysanthemums.

The purple of the irises seems stronger, more intense that it did yesterday. The passageway formed by the hedges and trellis seems more closed-in, more laced-over. The wiry, light-brown vines that split from the poisonberries and run off towards the stables seem to have multiplied. When he arrives beneath them he sees that they’re not vines at all: they’re strands of copper wire, and more have been strung up since yesterday. The coils that came with him in Hudson and Dean’s trap are spilling unravelled from the stables’ entrances. Mr. Carrefax is standing over one with metal cutters, measuring a length.

“Hold this,” he tells Learmont, handing him one end.

Dr. Learmont obeys. Mr. Carrefax paces from the stable to a point on the trellis, paying out the length as he goes.

“Twelve feet, I’d say. Remember that. You hungry?”

“I’ve had eggs and kippers and-”

“Kippers and-what? Take kenno with me. There’s some groaning malt as well. Splendid stuff!”

He leads Learmont into one of the stables. Benches of machinery lie under shelves on which sit rows of instruments: telegraph tappers, telephone receivers, large phonograph machines with strips of paper hanging from them, wax cylinders, bottles, objects and instruments whose name and function he can only guess at. On a work table, among metal shavings, are a jug of dark brown liquid, two mugs and some cheesecake. Wiping his hands on a cloth whose surface looks no cleaner than they are, Mr. Carrefax cuts two slices of the cheesecake with a knife, hands one to the doctor, then pours out two mugs of malt.

“Breakfast, lunch, dinner-who knows? Haven’t slept all night,” he tells Learmont. “Your health, Doctor!”

The malt’s refreshing; the cheesecake is rich and sharp. The two men eat and drink in silence for a moment.

“I’ve fixed it,” Mr. Carrefax tells Dr. Learmont after a while.

“Fixed what?” Learmont asks.

“The F and Q firk-quirk, I mean. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d run the wire all the way from here up to the public lines uninterrupted.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Learmont says.

“Aha!” booms Mr. Carrefax. He places a firm hand on Learmont’s back and marches him out to the workshop’s entrance. “Look!” he says, pointing up at the trails of copper running over their heads to merge with the curling poisonberries on the trellis. “Where do you think they end?”

Learmont’s eyes follow the trellis to the wall and the locked door on whose far side he stood five minutes ago. Among the billowing mesh of ivy and bushes stands a kind of metal weathercock. The wires are wound around the base of this like serpents.

“They end there?” he asks.

“Aha!” booms Carrefax again. “Yes-and no! The wires end, but the signal jumps onwards! Five feet, for the moment. With this copper I’ll be able to increase it to ten-fifteen even. It’s been jumped further, mind you. That Italian is out on Salisbury Plain right now, with all his towers and masts and kites… He’s in with the Post Office, you see? Got all the funding. Always the way! A mentor-nod, wink here and there: probably a Freemason. The new birth will bear his name no doubt, when it comes. Boy or girl?”

“The baby? A boy.”

“Splendid! Splendid! Have some more malt and kenno. Came out smoothly? The girl had to be dragged out. Virtually needed toys set at the foot of the bed before she’d show.”

“It took a while, but he came calmly in the end. He had a caul.”

“Had a-what? A cold?”

“A caul. A veil around his head: a kind of web. It’s meant to bring good luck-especially to sailors.”

“Sailors? I tell you, Doctor: get this damn thing working and they won’t need luck. There’ll be a web around the world for them to send their signals down. You came with the delivery trap?”