Tom McCarthy - C

“I was,” Serge smiles. “But at the school it was different. They’d put eight or ten Morse buzzers in a room, and you’d have to learn the tone of each, and transcribe from first one and then another. It’s to train your ear. And we were told the principles of signalling from the air, like don’t send on a turn, or right over the ground station; or not to make the dots too short or dashes too long; or how you don’t need to send the number after the squadron letter-that kind of thing.”

The cork’s pop rises above the piano music and room’s murmur. A mouthful of wine is poured into Widsun’s glass. He holds it up towards the large, arched windows.

“How are your eyes?” he asks Serge while he’s doing this. “Still sharp as ever?”

“Oh,” says Serge, “they gave us wool balls full of different-coloured strands to pick out and unravel.”

“How’s your mother?” Widsun enquires, rolling the wine around the glass to check its legs.

“She’s busy,” Serge replies. “There’s lots of demand for silk these days.”

Widsun’s swilling the liquid round his mouth now, looking intrigued. Eventually the look goes; he swallows and nods at the waiter, who pours two glasses out and glides away again.

“Lots of demand for silk,” says Widsun. “Yes, indeed there is. Well, here’s to the demand for silk, and your good health.”

They clink glasses. Serge sits back again, but Widsun’s upper body stays above the table, leaning forward; it makes it look as though the arches and gilded ceiling of the room were being held up by his shoulders. Cigarette smoke curls round these as he murmurs:

“Error of the day…”

Serge is sent to Hythe. He’s lodged with five other cadets in the dormitory of a requisitioned school. From Romney Marsh, where they do four-mile runs along the Royal Military Canal, the rumble of the guns in Ypres can be picked up. He thought it was distant thunder the first time he heard it, but the sky was blue and cloudless.

“Fifteen-inch howitzers, I’d say,” their instructor smiles at them as they scour the heavens. “Carries nicely, dissent it? Now pick thet pace ap!”

The instructor’s name’s Lieutenant Langeveldt; he’s from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. One of his eyes, the right one, points slightly to the side, as though trained down a line of sight that, although different to that of his vision’s central axis, nonetheless complements it, like a corrector.

On Serge’s third day in the school he takes the cadets to the airfield and introduces them to the machines.

“A Maurice Farman Shorthorn,” he announces as mechanics wheel out from a hangar a large boxed kite made from odds and ends of wood bound together by bailing wire. Its two wings are held up, one above the other, by a flimsy set of vertical struts; in the space between them, a rectangular box five or six feet long seems to float unsupported as it protrudes forwards from the frame. Two makeshift chairs are lodged within the box which, like the wings, has canvas patches sewn around it; the rest of the fuselage is naked.

“Also known as a Rumpitee,” Lieutenant Langeveldt continues. “A monosoupape pusher, twin-seater. This part is the nacelle: that’s where you sit. This part behind it is the engine, with propeller mounted on it; here’s where the explosive mixture enters, through the skirt.”

“Is this one finished?” Serge asks.

“Finished as it’ll ever be, Carrefix. You can be first ap with me.”

He’s thrown a leather jacket, a soft helmet and some goggles. Tentatively, he grabs a vertical strut, climbs onto the lower wing and hoists himself up into the back seat.

“Not there,” snaps Langeveldt. “Thet’s my seat!”

“Why’s it called a Rumpitee?” Serge asks as he clambers over to the front.

“You’ll soon find out,” says Langeveldt. “You others, stend beck.”

The mechanic plants himself behind the nacelle and yanks at the propeller. Nothing happens. He pulls it down again, this time with both hands, and the engine catches. Black smoke fills the space between the wings. Serge coughs and turns to face the front. The engine noise increases, and the grass beneath the wheels starts rolling backwards as though a giant winch were pulling it away from under them. The faces of the other cadets are shaking-not just up and down with the bumping of the wheels over the grass’s surface, but also with the faster and more regular vibration of the engine, which shouts from behind Serge, in a mechanical voice amplified by the plane’s frame:

Rumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpitee…

The shaking faces swing away, as do the hangars and the woods behind them, the whole disc of ground revolving till the field’s main expanse lies in front of him. The rumpitees heighten their speed and tone, growing hysterical; the grass races away beneath him, so fast that its bumps disappear. The rumpitees smooth out too, merging together in a constant high-pitched whine-and then he’s up, his face slicing the air in two, a slit right down the middle of its fabric as it rushes past him. He looks down: as the landscape falls away, it flattens, voids itself of depth. Hills lose their height; roads lose their camber, bounce, the texture of their paving, and turn into marks across a map. The greens and browns of field and wood seem artificial and provisional, as though they’d just now fallen from the sky. Now the land’s surface starts to tip, its horizontal line rotating round the Farman’s nose as though the vegetation, soil and brick that formed it were all one big front propeller. Buildings, ditches, hedgerows turn and re-align themselves like parts of a machine, then shift and re-align themselves again as the line rotates back the other way, cogs and arms swivelling around an axis at whose centre Serge’s own head sits. He feels a tapping on his back, and turns round: Langeveldt, strangely outlandish now that his offset eyes have disappeared beneath goggles, is pointing to the right. Serge looks that way, and sees the town: the parallel rows of its terraces, the plan view of a St. Leonard robbed of elevation, steeple pushed down and compacted like a collapsed telescope. Beyond the town, the canal forms a dark line across the marsh; beyond that, the rim of shore is marked in white by waves that have become entirely static, as though no independent movement were permitted of the landscape anymore: all displacement and acceleration, all shifts and realignments must proceed from the machine…

The coast peels away now and the land tilts towards him, swinging from a hinge running perpendicular to him and his box, along the same line as the Farman’s wheel axle. It lifts up to meet him: a flat earth-plane rising to join a wooden rectangle held in a wiry frame set in a huge white-and-blue circle of sky. As it does, depth starts returning. Detail too: he can pick out the airfield, the hangars, the cluster of cadets. Then these things are right on him as they land with a bump and rumpitee across the grass back to the group, who wave and cheer.

“Your face is black!” they shout at him as he steps out of the nacelle and slides down off the lower wing.

“Tar in the explosive mixture,” Langeveldt says as he peels his helmet off. “How did you like it?”

“I liked it a lot,” Serge replies. “It was just right.”

“Just right?”

“Yes, sir: just how things should be.”

They fly on most days for the next month. Only when the clouds are too low or the air is plagued by thunderstorms do they stay earthbound. They’re shown how to ascend in gyres, stall, dive, pull out of spins, stand the machine on its tail and hang on the propeller, perform sideslips and Immelmann turns. The fallen landscape prints itself on Serge’s mind by dint of his repeated passage over it: its flattened progression of greens, browns and yellows, patches of light and shade; the layout of the town and of the marsh beyond it; the ribbon of the Hythe-to-Folkestone road; the thread of the Light Railway joining Dymchurch and St. Mary’s Bay, then running on across the Romney sands; the dots of the Gypsy encampment outside Dungeness. He likes to move these things around from his nacelle, take them apart and reassemble them like pieces of a jigsaw. When he loops, they disappear completely, the whole horizon sinking from the bottom of his gaze and everything becoming sky, then, after a pause in which time itself seems to be held in abeyance, the rim reappearing at his vision’s upper edge and sliding down his eyes like a decorated screen being lowered just in front of them…