Tom McCarthy - C

“What’s not?” Serge asks.

“Art! Tell me, Counterfax: what’s the first rule of landscape painting?”

“Carrefax.” Serge thinks back to his afternoon sessions with Clair, but draws a blank. “Don’t know.”

“Horizon!” Carlisle slaps the table. “Got to have a damn horizon if you’re going to paint a landscape! And what’s the first thing to disappear when some madman at your back is loopy-looping?”

“Horizon?” Serge ventures.

“Carvers, you’re a man of intellect. But you don’t understand the half of it, my friend! It’s not just the horizon that goes. Oh no. Look at this.” He moves three half-full wineglasses together. “Here are some clouds. And here,” he continues, dipping his finger in a wine-puddle and smearing it around the table top, “are the French fields with all their pretty patterned colours. When you look at them from here-” he pulls Serge’s head across to where his own was-“they run together. Which is cloud? Which land? Can you tell what part of the liquid’s in the glass and what’s on the table top?”

“Does it matter?” Serge asks.

“Course it bloody matters!” Carlisle shouts back. “How you going to paint something if you can’t even see what it is?” His voice goes hushed and urgent as he grasps a bottle and, moving it slowly above the three glasses, says: “A thundercloud passes over; a patch of woodland goes dark-or was it dark already? Who knows? And then, to make it worse, you suddenly come across a block of writing set bang in the middle of a clearing.”

“Popham strips,” Serge tells him. “It’s because the batteries can’t send back wireless signals: only rec-”

“I can’t paint words!” Carlisle ’s voice rises half an octave. “Painting’s painting, writing writing. Never the twain. It’s all wrong, aesthetically speaking: all the depth and texture of a summer countryside steamrollered into a flat page.”

“That’s what I like about it,” Serge says.

“I try not to look down,” Carlisle carries on, ignoring him as he drinks one of the clouds. “But looking up is just as bad! There’s no perspective in the sky, my friend. Some dot in front of you could be an EA swooping down to kill you, or a fly that’s landed on your nose, or for all I know the moon of Jupiter. You don’t have any measure to position yourself with…”

“Yes you do,” Serge tells him. “You’re connected to everything around you: all the streaks and puffs…”

“Ah, right: but how do you show those? The aircraft shell burst lasts a second-at its peak, I mean, the explosion itself, the bit I should be painting, seeing as I’m a War Artist and all that. A cloud is there forever-or at least for longer. What’s the honest thing to do, then? Give the shell the same substance as the cloud? How am I meant to paint time? How am I meant to paint anything?”

“Why not just paint it as you see it?” Serge asks.

“Can’t even do that,” Carlisle wails. “The stuff won’t stay still to be painted! Ground won’t stay still, air won’t stay still, nothing bloody stays still. Even the paint jumps from its bottles, gets all over me.”

“Maybe that’s the art,” Serge says. “I mean the action, all the mess…”

“Now, Carefors, you’re just talking rubbish,” Carlisle admonishes him in a disappointed tone. He drains another glass, then mutters bitterly: “It all comes from that show.”

“What show?” Serge asks.

“The bloody show!” Carlisle hisses. “Fry and his buddies. All this… this-” he gestures at the ceiling, or rather the sky, then at the cloud-glasses and field-puddle on the table top-“is just an extension of that.” He jabs a finger towards London. “Soon as the cork popped at the Grafton and the poison genie seeped out, this war was a foregone conclusion. Just a matter of time.”

Cécile slips into the room through a side-door and walks towards the exit. Serge catches her eye and she waits.

“Headquarters are complaining that my images aren’t photographic enough,” Carlisle ’s grumbling. “I tell them: ‘Well, take photographs.’ Jesus! Meanwhile, the officers in the mess want me to paint their caricatures. I studied under Tudor-Hart and I’m being asked to churn out caricatures!”

Serge rises from his seat and moves over to Cécile.

“You weren’t here in over a week,” she says.

“I was flying,” he tells her. “Can I see you?”

“Come to my place,” she says, slipping a key into his hand. “Wait for ten minutes, then follow.”

She leaves. Serge returns to the first room to drink with the 104th, then slips away and walks through a maze of unlit streets, past open windows through which he sees meagre suppers being laid out on cracked and termite-eaten tables. Cécile’s lock is well-oiled; her staircase is dark. He feels his way up it towards her room, which a paraffin lamp illuminates in dim, flickering patches; as Serge brushes past it, the room’s shadows elongate and wobble over the bare walls and floor. There’s not much there: most of the space is taken by a double bedstead whose black, shiny frame’s surmounted by brass knobs. A coverlet of coarse crotchet-work has been peeled and folded back on the side nearest the door. The one small window’s covered by a blind. In front of it a table stands; a mug on this has coffee dregs in; beside the mug, two empty eggshells sit in blue cups, flanked by wooden spoons.

“My breakfast from yesterday,” Cécile says.

“You eat two eggs every day?” he asks.

“No,” she replies, undressing. “Just one.”

They don’t talk much-not beforehand, at any rate. Serge turns Cécile away from him, towards the blind, and kneels behind her on the bed, running his hand up and down her back. Her sounds are feline: quiet wails that lose themselves among the shadows on the wall. Afterwards, she lies on her back beneath him and he scours her stomach.

“You’ve had something blasted away here,” he says, prodding a spot beside her belly button.

“It was a mole,” she tells him. “I burnt it off.”

“You can see that,” Serge says. “The scorch marks are still there.”

He looks across the floor beside the bed, and sees a book. He reaches down and picks it up: selected poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, in German.

“A friend left it for me last year,” she explains. “An officer.”

“A German officer?”

She shrugs. “They were here first.”

After she falls asleep, he reads it for a while, then sets it down and drifts off watching gnats hovering beneath the ceiling just beyond the bed’s foot. The gnats travel in straight lines towards each other, then separate, each gliding to the spot another occupied seconds ago, before repeating the procedure, again and again…

There are insects forming patterns outside Battery M as well-only these ones aren’t moving. Corps HQ issues a directive that observers should pay a visit to at least one of the batteries with which they work, in order to foment a better understanding between air- and ground-based ends of Artillery Ops. Packed off to M by Walpond-Skinner, Serge finds a cratered moonscape. Rising from its surface like the mast of an interplanetary Marconi station is a fifty-foot pylon held by four guide-ropes. Its copper-gauze earth mat sits across a sheet of hessian on which thousands of dead moths, bees, butterflies and dragonflies lie, their bodies forming contours, swirls and eddies against its surface.

“Poison gas,” the operator explains when he notices Serge looking at them. “The hessian keeps it out-enough to stop it killing us, but not enough to stop us all getting catarrhs.”

“Where’s the receiver?” Serge asks.

“Down here,” the man answers, holding up the sheet for Serge to duck beneath it through the entrance to a kind of burrow.