Tom McCarthy - C

At the beginning of November, Serge is summoned by the AA’s provost, Walter Burnet, ARSA. On his office walls hang photographs of previous years’ hockey teams (Burnet has been the school’s hockey coach for the last twenty years).

“Not one for sports, Carrefax?” he asks, following Serge’s gaze.

“Not so much, sir, no.”

“Good for the health, both physical and mental. Teaches team spirit. An architect’s only as good as the team he works with, and vice versa. We try to instil that principle right from the get-go here: collective site visits and the like. Can’t have our players slacking off…”

“I’ve been doing some independent research,” Serge says. “I find it easier to sketch when I’m alone.”

“You’ve got the drawings to show for it?”

“Yes, sir,” Serge replies. He saw this coming, and has gathered all the sketches idly dawdled in Mrs. Fox’s Café into a large dossier which he now hands the certified disciplinarian.

“What are these of?” Burnet asks.

“Well, they’re hybrids really. Plans for…”

“For what?”

Serge’s mind runs through the taxonomy of edifice-types, grabbing at terms. Laying hold of the one that seems most current, he tells Burnet:

“Memorials.”

“Ah!” Burnet says. “A worthy line of investigation. Do I take it you’ll be entering the competition to design the school’s own war memorial?”

“I hadn’t really thought of it, sir,” Serge shrugs.

“You should, Carrefax; you should. It’s a blind submission: there’s no reason why the likes of you can’t win.” He flips through a few more sketches, then asks: “Why are these all in plan view?”

“It’s my preferred projection.”

“So I see. As you’re no doubt aware, though, the syllabus for the first year requires you to become proficient in not only plan but also section, elevation and perspective. Which brings me to-”

“I haven’t quite begun to-” Serge begins, but Burnet cuts him off:

“Which brings me to the question of your course attendance record. I’m afraid Mr. Lynch has complained to me that he’s only seen you once in his drawing class all term.”

“I find perspective hard, sir,” Serge says.

“All the more reason to attend-that, and the fact that your continued membership of this institution demands it.”

Serge has nothing to say. Burnet returns the sketches to the dossier and hands this back to him. He looks at Serge in silence for a while; then his tone softens as he says:

“I know it’s difficult to readjust.”

“It just seems odd to draw things out into relief when they’re-”

“No, Carrefax, I don’t mean the perspective thing. I mean to life in Civvie Street. You’ve lived through war and all its horror, and-”

“But I liked the war,” Serge tells him.

Now it’s Burnet who’s stumped for words. His eyebrows wrinkle in concern as his eyes move from left to right over Serge’s features, as though trying to draw their flat inscrutability out into some kind of relief. Serge looks back at him, frankly, letting his face be scrutinised. There’s no reason to resist it: Burnet and his like will never disinter what’s buried there, will never elevate or train it; Serge hasn’t made himself available for his team, never will. Besides, he doesn’t buy the line, much peddled by the newspapers, that tens of thousands of men his age are wandering around with “shell shock.” He sees symptoms around London all the time: the deadened, unfocused eyes and slow, automatic gait characteristic of the NYDNs he’d see at the field hospital in Mirabel, or of the pilots and observers for whom Walpond-Skinner had to write AAF-3436 forms-but these are general. Billie Lee displays them, and he spent the war years overseeing his family’s business interests in Shanghai. Madame Z displays them, and she’s been running salons for as long as anyone can remember. Commuters trudging to work each morning display them as well, as do the pleasure-seekers shuffling around the West End. They can’t all have been at the front. The children outside Great Ormond Street display them. The dope fiends, especially, display them; the cocaine-sniffers too, when they’re not temporarily fired up with charges that will run down in minutes, leaving them more empty than before. It’s like a city of the living dead, only a few of whose denizens could proffer the excuse of having had shells constantly rattling their flesh and shaking their nerves. No, the shock’s source was there already: deeper, older, more embedded…

Serge decides to go and visit Mr. Clair, who’s working for the Fabian Society. He visits him at home, a flat in Islington.

“It’s not much,” Clair tells him. “I’ve only had it for a year or so.”

Clair looks older: thinner, more worn-and, beyond this, as though the anger at society’s condition that peppered his speech when he was Serge and Sophie’s tutor at Versoie were no longer coming from some abstract, intellectual font of righteous youthful rebelliousness but had been rubbed into him from outside, almost physically ingrained, leaving him bitter.

“Where were you before that?” Serge asks.

“Farming in Yorkshire. I was made to: conscientious objector. Forced to till the earth for refusing to participate in the conquest of it.”

“ ‘Advance thy empire,’ ” Serge says, smiling.

If Clair understands the reference he ignores it.

“Some of us were even put in prison. But we’ve brought changes about. In future no one will have to-”

“Where’s the one with the jetty in it?” Serge asks. He’s been looking at the paintings on the walls while Clair’s been speaking.

“Sorry?” Clair asks.

“When you lived with us, you had a painting of a boat pulling off from a jetty. There were two canals meeting each other, and the boat was pulling off. You told us that you’d painted it yourself.”

“I did lots of paintings in the old days,” Clair says.

“You know when you gave me and Sophie art lessons?” Serge asks.

“Yes,” Clair answers. “She always did plants, or insects. You did maps.”

“Exactly,” Serge says. “You were trying to teach us depth.”

“I didn’t do a very good job there,” Clair murmurs sadly.

“Can you remember what you told us? About how to do it, I mean…”

Clair ponders Serge’s question for a while, then says:

“I probably gave you basic principles of one-point or two-point perspective: picture plane, rectilinear scene, horizon line…”

“You’ve got to have one of those if you’re going to paint, right?” Serge asks.

“To tell you the truth,” says Clair, “painting’s not really my bag these days. My interests have moved on to the artisanal side of things. I like the work of craftsmen, the aesthetic of the labourer. It seems less disingenuous, more honest…”

He stares out of the window, his face earnest but joyless. Looking at it, Serge sees reflected there a vision of the future-the collective future, or a version of it, at least: a fairer, saner, soberer one that leaves him cold.

Billie Lee’s party is the next day. Serge, Audrey, Becky and the other Amazons ride in a long procession of taxis along the Embankment, past Tower Bridge and into the East End. They pass a market that’s still going at this late hour: Jews, Poles, Russians, Turks and others bustle around in the smoky glare of naphtha flames exchanging nondescript bundles of fresh produce, fabric or electrical equipment, haggling with each other in a dozen languages.

“We could be in Smyrna,” Serge says, which prompts the girls in the cab to sing, in unison:

That Smyrna -Myrina

Enchants all who’ve seen her…

Both people and lights grow sparser as the cortege moves down Cable Street. Dark, empty roads run off this towards Shadwell and Stepney. After Limehouse Canal the street lamps give out entirely; only moonlight reflecting off the muddy creek illuminates their passage through the night. The lead taxi pauses, then turns down the narrowest of alleyways and draws to a halt beside a warehouse from whose small side-door a pool of yellow light is spilling. Other cabs are pulled up outside. Serge and the Amazons disembark and make their way through the door. Much to their consternation, they’re relieved of one pound each, then led along a dusty corridor and up a rickety staircase towards a large internal doorway from beyond which the familiar sounds of jazz are streaming. Passing through this, they emerge into a vast industrial space, a storage room or assembly hall, that’s been transformed into a setting as fantastic as an emperor’s opium-dream or some exotic film. The room’s pillars, coiled about with red-grape-heavy vines, tower above the room like columns of a bacchanalian temple. Crane-hooks around the walls are similarly vine-decked, as are gantries hanging from the ceiling. On a platform raised much higher than the 52’s stage, between fixed machine-parts, an expanded jazz band is playing double-time, as though possessed by the deity that’s being invoked by the outlandish décor. Above them, like the god himself, Billie Lee stands looking down from a raised walkway, resplendent in a blue overcoat with a luxurious fur collar.