Dr. Learmont, general practitioner of long standing for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, comes in person to tell Serge’s father that the coroner has reached a verdict of accidental death. Carrefax concurs:
“The cyanide was right next to her lemonade glass. Easy to confuse the two. And then she’d been up all night, working on the compounds. Best female student Imperial has had since they admitted them, according to her tutors…”
Learmont looks at Serge; Serge looks at Learmont. The doctor’s kind face and brown leather case seem to multiply for him, vaguer and more mythical with each iteration, down a telescoping corridor of memories: of strep throat, measles, chickenpox and other, nameless illnesses that always, whatever their distinctive unattractive qualities, returned him to a pleasant and familiar zone of honey-and-lemon tea, boiled sweets and picture-books-a zone where Maureen plumped his pillow every hour, Sophie brought the Berliner down from the attic and played him records, Mr. Clair waived all table-learning or essay-writing deadlines and, whatever time it actually was, it always seemed to be the calm, drawn-out stretch of mid-afternoon. Repeating the gesture with which he used to reach towards him then, Learmont extends his arm now and taps Serge on the chin.
“You keeping fit?” he asks.
Serge nods.
“Be needing all you able-bodied young men soon,” the doctor says.
“Apropos of-what? Imperial, yes: I wanted to ask you…” Carrefax says to Learmont. Learmont raises his eyebrows; Carrefax continues: “As you’ll doubtless be aware, it’s not unknown for death to be misdiagnosed, which makes for a certain…”
“You think it might not have been accidental?” Learmont asks.
“Not-what? No, no: that’s not what I meant. I was referring to the rare-yet still, I believe, well-documented-instances in which a death is recorded, only for the so-called deceased to awake several days later and recover their full capacities.”
“I’m sorry to say that in this case we can entertain no hopes, not even the faintest, of-”
“Bells were used, in times less technologically advanced than ours, with cords running from within the coffin to miniature towers mounted on the tombstone, should the incumbent come around and wish to signal the fact to those in a position to liberate them-a vertical position, as it were…”
“But your daughter’s been… I mean, after the autopsy, there’s simply no way that-”
“Yes: splendid! So I was thinking that perhaps we could avail ourselves of more contemporary hardware. I’ve arranged for a tapper-key, donated from Serge’s arsenal of such equipment, to be placed beside her in the coffin, and will attach a small transmitting aerial to the Crypt’s roof, should she-”
“Which one of my keys?” Serge asks. “You never consulted me!”
“That way, she won’t need to rely on the circumstance, far from guaranteed, of someone happening to pass by the Crypt at precisely the moment she comes to and rings. The signal emitted will be weak, but strong enough to cover the estate, should, for example, Serge be experimenting with his wireless set, as I believe his wont is these days…”
Serge’s mother spends her time in the spinning houses, working on a shroud. Bodner plies her with tea: Serge sees him moving between his garden and the Weaving Room or Store Room virtually each time he looks in that direction from the attic window. He’s spending lots of time up in the attic these days. It’s the spot with which he most associates hours spent alone with Sophie. The cylinders and discs are still there. When he plays them now, her voice attaches itself, leech-like, to the ones recorded on them-tacitly, as though laid down in the wax and shellac underneath these voices, on a lower stratum: it flashes invisibly within their crackles, slithers through the hisses of their silence. He looks out over the flat, motionless landscape as he listens. The sheep never seem to move: they just stand still, bubbly flecks on Arcady Field’s face. The curving stream also seems completely still, arrested in a deathly rictus grin. Only the trees in the Crypt Park seem to have any movement in them: they contract and expand slowly, breathing out the sound of the Day School children practising their recitation:
Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth…
The looping, repeating lines mutate and distort so much that, even when the words come out correctly, they seem like a mispronounced version of something else, other sentences that are trying to worm their way up to the surface, make themselves heard. Kneeling on the window-sill three floors above them, Serge strains his ear to pick these buried phrases up, but gets just inarticulate murmurs. The estate’s layout, too, seems to be withholding something-some figure or associative line inscribed beneath its flattened geometry, camouflaged by lawns and walls and gardens…
The day of the funeral is warm and sunny. The mourners’ tread as they descend the gravel path is muffled, cautious. They gather, all in black, outside the Crypt Park’s gates, beneath the obelisk-topped columns, and make quietened small-talk with each other, glancing nervously around as they try to spot their host, hostess or Serge. After a while, Carrefax strides out of the house and greets them boisterously.
“Wonderful that you could come! There’ll be refreshments afterwards. For now, we should proceed into the park. What? Splendid! Yes, no seating, I’m afraid. Where’s Miss Hubbard?”
As though taking her cue, Miss Hubbard emerges from the schoolrooms with seven or eight pupils in tow. She steers the children through the Crypt Park ’s gates behind Carrefax and the other mourners. Serge meanders in behind them. By the Crypt, the vicar’s waiting. So are Maureen, Frieda and their girls. Frieda and the girls are crying; Maureen’s got a stoic, grim expression on her face. The vicar has a consoling beam on his. He flashes it around, as though trying to attach it to the face of each arriving person. Beside him, mounted on a small wooden podium, is the coffin. It’s made of dark wood, with brass handles; from a small hole in its lid probably imperceptible to anyone but Serge and his father, a small wire spills and dangles down the side. On each side of the trench Carrefax has designed, a workman’s standing between piles of earth, holding a spade: they look like soldiers standing to attention as they line a dignitary’s route. The mechanical set-up has become even more complicated than it was last time Serge saw it: now, a new rail is supported in the air above the rail-lined furrow, cutting across it perpendicularly-a curtain rail, with black drapes pegged to it on hooks. A little metal switch-box is set into one of this rail’s supporting columns. Carrefax steps over to it and clicks the switch on, then off: the box gives a little moan, the rail’s pegs jerk and the drapes, one hanging on each side of the trench, hems bunched up on the ground, twitch briefly, then lie still again.
“Splendid!” says Carrefax. “All set to go. We’ll start with-”
He’s interrupted by a general rustling as all heads turn away from him towards the Crypt Park ’s gates. His wife is making a late entry between these, with a train of women. She’s holding something in front of her, cradling it in upturned hands. The train is moving in formation, like a set of rugby forwards: advancing in rows, arms locked together. Their faces are neutral and impassive, like statues’ faces. With long dresses covering their feet, they seem to glide above the lawn, as though mounted on their own rails made of air, invisible in the long grass. The other mourners watch their slow approach in silence; Carrefax, the vicar, Miss Hubbard and the Day School pupils watch them too. They glide towards the main group slowly but ineluctably, as though bearing down on them. Then, just as it seems they’re all going to collide with the posts beside the trench, they stop, as one body, a few yards from the coffin-all of them apart from Mrs. Carrefax, who proceeds onwards to the coffin and, placing on its lid the shroud that she’s been carrying in her arms, unfolds it until it covers the whole thing. It shows, in red and green silk on a white silk background, an insect feeding on a flower.