Even the chorus who pronounce these lines are transformed into birds. Since there’s no one left to put their masks on, they transform each other, the last remaining one pulling the feathered head onto his own shoulders with the resigned look of the final participant in some mass suicide. The stage now full of birds, the same recording that started the whole Pageant off is now replayed from behind the screen, growing louder and louder until birdsong fills the whole lawn. Sophie’s meant to repeat her smoke-trick at this point, to produce clouds for all these newly generated birds to soar through, but she’s nowhere to be seen.
“Where is that blasted girl?” Carrefax barks. He scours the lawn eagle-eyed for a few moments, then booms out: “No matter: curtain call, everyone!”
The masked children can’t really see him, and continue soaring around, bumping into one another. A couple of them fall over. Carrefax steps out onto the stage to haul them into line. He pokes his head behind the sheet and the music stops abruptly. There’s silence for a moment; then the audience break into loud applause.
“Thank you, thank you!” shouts Carrefax above it. “Tea, coffee, light refreshments on the lawn. And if…”
But his sentence is lost amidst the bustle of people rising from seats, stretching limbs, straightening skirts and waistcoats. Parents make their way towards the sheet for reunions with their children. The volume of general chatter rises as people vie to outdo each other in their praise for the production, for Mrs. Carrefax’s costumes, for Miss Hubbard, Serge, the chorus, Maureen and Frieda’s sandwiches, the gramophone for providing such ambience, the skies for holding off. Carrefax works the crowd:
“The coronation scene? I thought that this year, of all years… What? The crown was meant for my head… No, quite funny really: honoured guest and all that… Perfectly safe: water and glycerine combination; she was going to make clouds, but I don’t think we could have withstood any more brimstone…”
Shadows grow longer. Children grow tired. They tug at parents’ sleeves, or sit beneath the trestle table unpicking cucumber slices from sandwiches’ entrails and mining seams of chocolate from the ruins of layered cakes. Cupid/Hermes dozes in a chair. Sophie remains as absent as Persephone. Eventually people slink off, their footsteps dwindling up the path’s gravel. Urns, tables and chairs are brought back in; the props are returned to the schoolrooms. Only flattened grass, the odd discarded feather or crushed flower, Sophie’s box of chemicals and the tautly strung-up sheet still bear witness to the fact that something has happened on the lawn when Serge comes out after dark to fetch his bird mask.
The wind’s died down by now; clouds hug the ground more closely, warming the night air. It’s quiet: the only sounds Serge hears are the slow oozing of the stream and a kind of rustling that he thinks at first must be a badger or hedgehog in the undergrowth beside it. It’s a rhythmic scratching, a rubbing chafe that carries on its back a higher sound, a squeak like the noise of an unoiled gate being opened and closed repeatedly. As Serge moves across the lawn he realises that the sound’s coming not from the undergrowth but from somewhere much closer. He looks around; although there’s no moon to light up the lawn a small glow is spilling from a lantern someone’s left behind the sheet. When he comes face-on to the sheet he sees what’s making the noise-or, rather, sees its shadow, cast on the sheet’s far side by the lantern so as to be visible from this side, like a film made up of only silhouettes. It’s some kind of moving thing made of articulated parts. One of the parts is horizontal, propped up on four stick legs like a low table; the other is vertical, slotted into the underside of the table’s rear end but rising above it, its spine wobbling as the whole contraption rocks back and forth. The thing pulses like a insect’s thorax, and with each pulse comes the rustle, scratch and chafe; with each pulse the horizontal, low part squeaks, and the vertical part now starts emitting a deep grunt, a gruff, hog-like snort. The grunts grow more intense as Serge comes closer to the sheet; the squeaks grow louder. The front part has a head; the back part too-Serge can make this out now, rising from broad shoulders. The thing’s rocking and wobbling faster and faster, squeaking and grunting more with every pulse.
Serge has started moving round to the sheet’s side so he can find out what the source of this strange shadow display is when a scream comes from some way behind him. He turns round. A second scream follows the first: the voice is Maureen’s, and it’s coming from the house. He runs back across the lawn towards it. The door’s open; in the hall, Maureen’s crouching down in front of Spitalfield, who’s lying immobile on the floorboards. Spitalfield is stiff: his legs are sticking straight out at an odd angle to the ground; his mouth is frozen in a gaping rictus; foam sits hard-set on its lips.
“The little bitch!” shrieks Maureen. “Where’s your sister?”
“I don’t know,” replies Serge. “Is he dead?”
He’s dead alright. Sophie, when she eventually emerges, denies having fed the poison to him deliberately.
“He must have sneaked into my lab,” she whines. “It’s not my fault.”
Maureen thinks otherwise. She tries to get her employer to punish his daughter, but Carrefax takes Sophie’s word on this one.
“We’re British, not Napoleonic. Innocent till proven guilty.”
Sophie assuages whatever guilt she might feel by deciding to accord Spitalfield proper funeral rites. To Maureen’s further horror she persuades her father to allow her to stuff the cat. This takes her two days of uninterrupted labour: Serge, perched on a chair in her lab’s corner, watches her empty out his stomach of its organs, guts and juices, then peel the skin back from the skull towards the spine and ribs. The innards, gathered in a bucket, exude a rancid, sour smell; Serge moves closer to Sophie to block it out by breathing in the odour of her hair.
“Now you’re distracting me,” she says. “Clear off.”
She calls him back, though, some hours later, to show him a trick of which she seems extremely proud. Sticking two electric wires into the cat’s left hind leg, she throws a switch on to complete the circuit-and the leg, galvanised by the current, twitches and then flexes, as though Spitalfield were trying to walk. She switches the current off, and the leg reverts to its rigid, straight position. She throws the switch again; again the leg twitches and flexes. As she animates the leg over and over again, she shakes with a laughter that’s sparked up afresh with each new quickening-as though she were also animated by the current, which was somehow running through her body too. Serge, watching the leg move with the angular stiffness of a clockwork mechanism, thinks of semaphore machines, their angles and positions, then of the strange, moving shapes he saw played out across the sheet. After a while, he starts to wonder if perhaps the morbid and hypnotic sequences being executed by the dead cat’s limb contain some kind of information-“contain” in the sense of enclosing, locking in, repeating in a code for which no key’s available, at least not to him…
On the third day after Spitalfield’s demise, Sophie emerges with the reconstituted cat mounted on a board and, gathering a small crowd in the Crypt Park, has them squeeze into the Crypt itself, whose door her father opens with a large, rusty key. Here, among cobwebs undisturbed for who knows how long and dust-residues whose origins must lie in the last century if not the one before that, she installs her trophy on top of a tomb whose upper surface is so strewn with dead insects that she has to clear a swathe for it with her sleeve.
“He’s the wrong shape,” says Serge.
He’s right: Spitalfield’s surface has gone corrugated, with stiff ripples running down his fur; his neck juts out aggressively, like a tiger’s or leopard’s; his face is dented and irregular, with unmatching marble eyes.