Carrefax nods to the vicar, who coughs, then starts to speak:
“Friends,” he beams, “we come here not in despair but in gratitude: for the gift of these past seventeen years…”
A sob breaks loose from the main crowd of mourners. The vicar’s beam grows more pronounced and aggressive as he continues:
“… in gratitude also that the soul of Sophie Annabel Carrefax has been reclaimed-redeemed, as one redeems a ticket or an object given out on loan-and done so, I’m quite certain, with great joy, by he who crafted it in the first place. When we consider-”
“Him,” says Carrefax.
“I’m sorry?” asks the vicar.
“By him who crafted,” Carrefax corrects him.
“Him who crafted it, indeed,” the vicar says. He foists his beam about again before continuing: “When we consider that we all are here on loan, then we might come to see that those the earlier gathered back are perhaps those most valued. Think of the cherished objects you yourselves might once have lent…”
Serge stops listening after a few sentences. He can still hear the vicar’s words, of course, but they’re just sounds. His pick-up’s set beneath them, lower. He looks down, and sees among the grass a beetle pushing an earth-clump several times its size. The beetle’s trying to move this forwards, but the clump rolls back onto the beetle every time the latter shoves the former up the little incline in its path. Is it a Balkan beetle, Serge wonders? A bloody-nosed one? He looks at the flower and insect embossed on the coffin’s drape. The drape’s thin, and it fits the coffin loosely; sunlight, after passing through its fabric, bounces back up off the coffin’s copper handles to travel back up through it from the inside, making its white silk luminescent and its insect and flower dark, like silhouettes; they seem almost to move across the fabric’s surface, as though animated. The sunlight’s also spilling across the large earth-piles by the trench, blurring their edges; it looks as though tiny clumps have broken loose and are slightly levitating. The steel rails in the trench glint blue and silver. They seem to hum, like railway lines hum when a train’s approaching in the distance, just before you hear the train itself…
The sensation of humming, real or imagined, grows: Serge can sense vibrations spreading round the lawn. He feels them moving from the ground into his feet and up his legs, then onwards to his groin. They animate his own flesh, start it levitating. He can’t help it. He crosses his hands in front of his crotch and looks about him: everyone else is looking at the vicar, or the coffin-not at him. The vicar’s still beaming aggressively, talking of heaven. Looking around him, trousers bulging, Serge is filled with a sudden and certain awareness that there is no such place: there’s the coffin and the Crypt, the lawn, these conker trees above them, this fresh-smelling earth. One of the workmen’s scratching his nose. A fly’s buzzing around the vicar’s head. The vicar tries to ignore it, but it brushes his face, tickling his lips and making him half-blow, half-spit his next few words out. If the fly hatched on Arcady Field, it will have come from sheep-dung. Serge pictures minute dung-flecks being deposited on this man’s mouth, the even tinier bacteria inside them turning inwards from his lips, swimming against his phlegm through crashing rocks of teeth, past lashing tongue and gurgling epiglottis down towards his stomach…
The vicar’s words tail off. Serge’s father marshals the Day School pupils into place and they perform their recitation:
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame
Their great original proclaim…
Their pronunciation’s more distorted than it usually is in Pageants: they’ve had less time to rehearse, and are more nervous. “Spacious” and “spangled” are drawn out forever; “proclaim” becomes “co-caime.” The sky is blue and shining though: this much is true. Serge raises his head from the ground towards it. Birds are far away, which means high pressure: he should get good reception tonight. Another sob comes from one of Frieda’s girls; another mourner sniffles. The Day School pupils, voices dull, monotonous and out of synch, intone the second verse, describing evening shades, the moon and all the planets, which
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole…
Serge, mind still wandering, recalls a photo in the latest Wireless World showing the earth’s southernmost Marconi station, in the Chilean archipelago-four giant tethered pylons with row upon row of wires running between their peaks, cutting the air into grid squares which hovered above a tiny operator’s cabin. The operators had to spend up to six months at a time there, waiting for their relief. What truth might they be spreading to the pole? Telegrams, news, weather reports, cricket scores, the day’s closing prices…? A female mourner’s gazing at him, tearful, pitiful eyes trying to tell him that she understands his grief. He looks away. She can’t: he doesn’t feel any. He knows he’s meant to-but it’s not there, and that’s that. What he feels is discomfort: at his priapic condition and, beyond that, at a sense he has of things being unresolved or, more precisely, undivulged. The charts, the lines, the letter-clusters and the fragments Sophie was pronouncing as she wandered round the Mosaic Garden-and, beyond these, or perhaps behind them, the vague, hovering bodies and muffled signals he’s been half-seeing and -hearing at the dial’s far end, among those crashing and erupting discharges of meteoric events, galactic emanations: these, he’s more and more convinced, mean something and are issuing from somewhere, from a place he hasn’t managed to track down before the one person from whom he might have learnt the what, where, and why of it all elected to go incommunicado…
The pupils pause, then launch stumblingly into the final verse:
What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball;
What though no real voice or sound
Amid the radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice…
The voices run out to their furrows’ end, and trail off into silence. There’s a pause. Serge hears a motor car go by on the far side of Telegraph Hill, then looks again at the beetle, still carrying on its battle with the earth clump. His father issues an instruction to the two workmen, who transfer the draped coffin from its podium onto the platform suspended above the trench, then winch it down onto the rails. One of them steps over to the other winch-handle and starts cranking it; the coffin begins to slide towards the Crypt. Carrefax nips over to the column supporting the curtain-rail and flicks the switch on. As the coffin slides beneath the perpendicular bar above the trench, the drapes jerk into action, their long hems slipping from the higher ground to fall into the trench and, to the sound of an electric whirring, draw closed across the coffin as it passes through their axis. That’s what’s meant to happen, at least: in fact, one of the hems catches on the coffin and gets pulled backwards, sending the electric motor first into whining overdrive and then into suspension.
“Blast the thing!” says Carrefax. He switches the motor off, tugs at the curtain to unsnag the hem, then flicks the switch again. The coffin slides right through the curtain now, which falls back into place behind it.