The attic draws them back again and again. On rainy days they go to play the estate-wide version of The Realtor’s Game at its window, shunting their imaginary doubles from park to garden, avenue to path to lawn. While doing this, they fiddle with their father’s archive. He has stacks of old recordings: lamp-blackened glass phonautograph plates and rolls of paper bearing scratch marks laid down by voices moaning from deaf bodies before either of them was born; zinc master discs that, cut in the final years of the last century and the first few of this, appear to Serge like coins of some exotic currency gone out of circulation-miniature, round islands of arrested time. The surfaces of the zinc discs give off a faint smell of beeswax-beeswax overlaid with some sharp chemical. (“Chromic acid,” Sophie tells him when she sees him wrinkling his nose at one. “I’ve got a whole phial of it in my lab.”) The cylinders they find beside these are formed entirely of wax: solid brown columns of the stuff whose smooth, moulded surfaces have been defaced by networks of engravings-strange, meshed graffiti. Sophie and Serge can play these back, thanks to an old Edison phonograph they find gathering dust among them. Selecting recordings at random (some are in labeled cardboard tubes, others are loose and unmarked), they slide the cylinder onto its mandrel and wait for the sound to trickle out. Most of the cylinders contain sequences of letters, spoken out aloud, repeatedly:
“B. B-ee. B-b-b-b-b-ee. T. T-ee. T-t-t-t-t-ee. S-s-s-s-s, S-s-s-s-s. B-ee…”
The voices, those of Day School pupils (now alumni), manifest varying degrees of distortedness and atonality; the letters warp and morph as they progress. They gather certain rhythms, patterns of repetition or half-repetition, then, just when it seems that there’s a logic to their sequences, break and relinquish them again. Serge and Sophie fall into the habit of putting on these recordings each time they’re in the attic, a mechanical background chorus to their various antics up there. Sometimes they play, on a newer Berliner gramophone, not cylinders but discs: exhibition plates their father’s had printed to showcase his students’ ability to enunciate whole phrases or manage entire conversations. After setting the disc gently on its turntable and cranking the Berliner’s handle, they lead the needle down towards the narrow groove with the assiduousness of surgeons guiding knives back to incisions made on previous occasions, then return to their tasks while random dialogues (model exchanges between infant shopkeepers and customers or passengers and train guards) waft around them. Often, when a disc’s come to its end, they let it run on, playing and replaying the same stretch of silence-silence which in fact is anything but silent, bursting as it is with a crackle and snap that conjures up for Serge the image of Bodner’s deformed mouth opening and closing: many Bodners’ mouths, repeated side by side in rows that fill the attic’s air and extend out beyond its roof and walls. Sometimes, while Sophie’s busy copying plants, he props his head right up against the gramophone and watches the needle running through its trench, snagging and jumping constantly as though locked in constant hostile struggle with the furrow. The disc’s made of a thick black material.
“It’s shellac,” Sophie informs him when he asks her one overcast Monday. “Made from secretions of the lac bug.”
“The lack bug? What’s it lacking?”
“Lac, no k. I’ve got one of those in my lab as well. That’s Rainer’s voice.”
She’s right: the disc he’s come across this morning contains not phrases but a passage of verse which, spoken in a child’s unbroken voice, seems strangely fitting for its newfound auditorium:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again…
The speaker, Rainer, spent a year or so at Versoie: a half-German boy who lost his hearing, then his life, to a cancer that developed in his ear. Serge saw the cancer one day: it was bulbous, like a set of roots buckling the organ’s inner chamber, upsetting the delicate architecture of its whorls and plateaus from beneath the skin’s surface while a moss-like coat overgrew it from above. Serge moves his head round and looks down into the reproducing horn. Its brass has turned slightly green with time. The tube darkens as it narrows, then disappears into the sound box. Listening to Rainer, Serge thinks of entrances to caves and wells, of worm- and foxholes, rabbits’ burrows, and all things that lead into the earth.
ii
Towards the middle of June, Simeon Carrefax’s old university associate Samuel Widsun pitches up, by car, from London. His arrival, in the middle of a rehearsal for this year’s Pageant, causes some commotion: few of Versoie’s residents, child or adult, have ever seen a motor car. Even before it’s turned off the road into the lightly sloping path that leads down past the Mulberry Lawn towards the house, the pupils have picked up the vibrations of its engines, choppy waves ruffling the ground they’re standing on. As it hauls into partial view through the conifers they run out and skip along beside it, almost tripping on the hems of their long robes. This year’s theme is Persephone: the Pageant is to represent her rapture by and marriage to Hades, and subsequent coronation as Queen of the Underworld.
“Better a Greek than a German!” Widsun quips heartily to Simeon when his host explains the set-up to him as strangely dressed pupils unpack his bags. “Can you believe we’re crowning another of those blasted cabbage-eaters?”
“That bastard Korn’s just pipped me on the phototelegraphic patent,” Carrefax replies.
“The children can lip-read that word as well as any other, sir,” Maureen warns Carrefax as she takes Widsun’s cap and gloves.
“We must have been working neck and neck the whole time, he and I. Another week and I’d have had the application in. I’ve a wealth of new projects to show you. A damn cornucopia!”