“Pepperdine, three hits. Biswick, two. Spurrier, three. Carrefix, five-on top of which you’ve taken out the Dover pier, which wasn’t on the list. What did you do thet for?”
“It looked nice,” Serge replies. “I wanted to photograph it.”
“It looked nice?”
“Yes, sir. I liked its shape.”
By mid-May they’re firing live rounds out of Lewis guns. The guns have Aldis sights, harmonised for deflection. Serge likes the way the reticules grid space up when he looks through them, but finds he can perform their main task on his own. The trick’s to point the gun not where the target is right now, but to discern its line of movement as it travels through your vision and to run that on into the space in front of it, shooting there instead. Serge develops a knack of splitting his gaze in two, locking the line with one eye while the other slides ahead, setting up camp in the spot at which a successful hit “happens” and thus bringing this event to pass. He experiences a strange sense of intermission each time he does this, as though he’d somehow inflated or hollowed out a stretch of time, found room to move around inside it. It occurs to him that perhaps doing this is what made Langeveldt’s eyes go off-kilter, and wonders if his own eyes look like the lieutenant’s when he shoots…
They do most of their target practice over water, peppering rafts moored just off the shoreline. Serge gets into the habit of firing in certain rhythms, ones that carry with them first words, then whole phrases, spoken in the boom and sent up his arm into his body by the recoil. His favourite consists of a first, short burst of six shots followed by a longer one of eight; each time he fires it out he hears a line that’s stuck in his head from the Versoie Pageant, from the year when Widsun visited:
of purpose that your thought
Might also to the seas be known…
The words fly from his gun into the sea, hammering and splintering its surface, etching themselves out across the rafts’ wood: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT… Later, they fire over land, swooping low to take out rabbits, foxes, badgers, hares and hedgehogs, then touching down to bag their sometimes still-quivering score. They gun down the odd farm animal as well, although it’s against regulations and draws complaints from irate farmers.
“Another accidental lamb-strike?” Langeveldt tuts as Serge and Stedman unload their bloodied tribute at his feet. “Thet’s the third this week. Take it over to the kitchen.”
The guns jam all the time. On days when there’s no flying to be had they’re made to take them apart and assemble them again-six, seven, eight times, all day long. The other cadets try to force the trigger sears and firing pins together, swearing when they won’t fit, but not Serge: he finds the process pleasing, an extension of the logic he’s developed from the Farman’s front seat. In the click and swivel of machinery being slotted together, moved around and realigned, its clockwork choreography, he relives, in miniature, the mechanical command of landscape and its boundaries that flight affords him, the mastery of hedgerows, fields and lanes, their shapes and volumes…
Sometimes, when he’s out free-flying, and especially when Stedman loops the loop, Serge experiences an exhilarating loosening of his stomach. As they level out one afternoon above some little village, he turns round and points down towards the ground.
“You want to land?” shouts Stedman. “What’s here?”
“I’ve got to shit,” Serge shouts back.
They bounce across the village cricket pitch. Serge slides down off the wing, lowers his trousers and relieves himself above the wicket, just short of a length on middle and off.
“What village is this anyway?” he asks as he strolls back towards Stedman, who’s stretching his legs beside the machine as he consults a map.
“Tenterden, I think,” Stedman answers. “Population six hundred and twenty-nine.”
“Six hundred and thirty now,” Serge tells him. “Let’s go.”
The next day they spot what looks like a small battle taking place on a square field below them, and descend to take a closer look. The combatants turn out to be girls playing lacrosse. The game stops as they pass above it, pink and white faces staring up at them through netted sticks. Stedman climbs two thousand feet and pulls the Farman up into a loop that levels out low, just above the playing field, sending sticks and faces scattering. He turns the plane around and lands more or less exactly on the centre circle.
“You could have killed one of my girls!” the whistle-necklaced mistress shouts at them as they pull off their helmets and goggles.
“Terribly sorry, madam,” Stedman smiles back. “Thing is, a part seems to have come loose and fallen off the engine just as we passed by.”
“Will you be able to fix it?” she asks him, softening.
“Depends. Some of these things just won’t fly without the requisite bits and bobs.”
“I think I saw it fall behind those bushes,” Serge says, shuffling off towards them.
When he strolls back a few minutes later, the girls are gathered round the machine, being treated to a lecture on aerodynamics.
“What does he do?” the tallest one asks Stedman as Serge sidles up to him.
“I observe,” says Serge, “and navigate. I make everything fit together.”
“No luck finding the whatsit?” Stedman asks.
Serge sadly shakes his head.
“I’ve worked out what it is,” Stedman announces. “A bolt’s come out in the skirt. It’s simple to fix, but will take a while. Be dark before we’re finished: we won’t be able to take off again until tomorrow. Perhaps we could use your phone to contact our headquarters, tell them not to worry…”
“But of course,” the mistress tells him, all smiles now. “We’ll put you up for the night.”
“Where will they sleep, miss?” a round-faced girl asks, fingering her net.
“They can sleep in the Bursar’s lodging; he’s away.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave our machine unattended,” Stedman tells her in a solemn voice. “We’ll sleep right out here with it. It’s not cold…”
“Well, at least let us bring you sandwiches and a flask.”
“Too kind, madam,” Stedman answers. “I’ll come in and fetch them myself.”
It’s the tall one and the round-faced one who sneak out to see them after dark: two distinctive silhouettes making their way across the field. Stedman and the round-faced one do it on the grass beneath the lower wing; Serge helps the tall one into the nacelle, where, wrapping her arms around the Lewis gun (whose safety catch, fortunately, is on), she bends forward and lets him wriggle off her pants from behind. They leave at dawn. Over the following two weeks, three more planes lose parts above the same spot.
In all his time at Hythe, Serge sees two accidents. The first one happens right in front of him: he and Stedman are waiting to take off when Quinnell and Kirk, who’ve gone up just ahead of them, stall, go into a spin and hurtle back down to the airfield, landing in the right place but the wrong direction, nose-first. Kirk is killed; Quinnell’s spine is broken and he’s carted off to hospital in Dover. Their machine stays in the field for several days; the cadets gather round it every morning after breakfast to stare in contemplation at the strange and useless geometry of its upended beams, the decorative wind vanes of its rudders.
“It looks like the Eiffel Tower,” says Serge. “The Eiffel Tower if one of its legs snapped off and it started tilting.”
“Or an oil well,” Payton counters; “a slant one: those bits that they build above the ground to mount the pumps in.”
The other accident he doesn’t see take place-only its aftermath. Beswick forgets to strap himself into his seat and falls out when his pilot loops the loop. He plunges three thousand feet and lands in a nearby field. A Beswick-shaped mark stays in the grass for weeks: head, torso, legs and outstretched arms.