The woman frowns: she knows that’s not what Sophie said. She unhooks the newly reeled bobbin, gives it to Serge and tells him to carry it through to the Throwing Room. Here, he and Sophie find three women standing several feet apart, the first twisting individual threads together, the second paying out the combined organzine across the room, the third cutting it when it reaches a certain length. Serge rests his reel above a stack of other reels at the first woman’s feet; the woman glances at him and nods without breaking her rhythm. The children move through to the Dyeing Room, about whose air an acrid smell hangs, borne on vapour rising from a large cauldron over which an older woman hovers like a witch, pushing with a stick at the mass inside it, as though trying to drown a kitten. As the children pass, she sets her stick down, plunges her arms elbow-deep into the cauldron and pulls out a soaked, crimson bundle of silk threads which she swings red-dripping through the air and hoists up to hang from wooden poles.
“Yuk,” says Sophie, skirting the room’s edges to avoid the splashes bouncing to a regular rain-drumbeat off the floor. Another rhythmic noise mingles with this: the repetitive whirring and clanking of a machine in the next room, laced which the higher, shriller sound of birdsong. A third sound weaves its way into the mesh: footsteps, growing louder as they near the door the children have just come through. Bodner enters, holding a bucket full of crimson berries which he sets down beside the cauldron before continuing towards the Weaving Room. As they follow him through, Sophie reaches down to scoop up a small handful of the berries.
“Open wide,” she tells Serge, holding one above his mouth: “Medicine.”
He opens with an “Aaaaa”; she pops it in; he closes, chews. It’s bitter; the taste stays with him as he moves past the large loom that fills most of the room, its piston-levers shoving a huge comb through warp into which weft-silk is fed from a bobbin that unwinds jerkily at the loom’s edge. The comb’s teeth move again and again through the same stretch of warp, as though obsessively brushing and rebrushing the same clump of hair. Bobbin-side of it lies tight, finished fabric; piston-side, the weft’s strands run adjacent but unjoined, like the strings of some strange, tuneless piano. There’s music in the air, though, coming from canaries perched in hanging cages. Orange-brown or brown-grey, spangled by regular, symmetrical markings that run down their breast and back, they chirp and tweet shrilly and decisively in overlapping relay, as though issuing instructions to the loom, machine-code. The woman moves around the loom making sure that it complies with these instructions, lining up new bobbins, picking fluff from the woven fabric’s surface, checking that the loose parallel strands are evenly spaced out: a human go-between.
Serge and Sophie follow Bodner through to the Store Room. Finished silks lie in piles here, folded and pleated, leaning against walls as they rise halfway to the ceiling. Silk tapestries hang between these piles: large, patterned weavings. One shows, in red and gold against a background of black moiré, a throned king being handed a baby by his queen, or perhaps one of the palace servants, while courtiers whisper to one another in the background. Another, on the facing wall, depicts a woman holding what appears to be a lion’s head as she runs after a man who seems to be dressed as a woman, while shepherds and their very human-looking sheep gaze on smilingly. Others have ciphers in place of pictures: flowing, dancing signs that suggest Chinese or Indian script, or else some kind of musical notation. A woman moves around beneath these, selecting sample fabrics from the piles and carrying them towards Serge and Sophie’s mother, who’s seated on cushions. Her legs are folded away beneath a low table across which several samples have been laid out for inspection by a man who’s kneeling awkwardly on the table’s far side. Facing away from Serge, Sophie and Bodner, she’s unaware of their presence in the room.
“… two hundred yards of crêpe… two hundred of Jacquard… three hundred thrown singles…” the man reads from a notebook; “organzine and tram, two hundred and fifty…”
“Versoie originals,” she tells him.
“Naturally, Mrs. Carrefax,” he answers. “Finest around. If you produced five times as much we’d buy it just as fast.”
“Five times? You want five times more?” she asks him.
“I said if you made five times as much we’d buy it.”
“Why would I want to make five times as much?” she asks him.
“You’d make more money.”
She stares at him quizzically, not having understood his last phrase.
“Mo-ney.” He mouths the word slowly, raising his voice-then, realising that this second action makes no difference, drops it right down and continues: “And what with technology leaping forwards as it is, new century and all that, you might consider-”
“We have no need of more money here. We are not poor,” she tells him.
“Maybe so, maybe so. But your methods are somewhat antiquated, it must be admitted. The loom, for example, must be more than-”
“It is a Huguenot loom. Its craftsmanship has never been surpassed. Where else can you find silks like these?” Her arm sweeps round the room, past the piles and hanging tapestries-and as her eyes trail after it she catches sight of Bodner and the children, interlopers on this small business colloquium. Her face drops-though the look she gives them isn’t unkind. “The costumes,” she says wearily.
“Papa says because I’m Rhea I should have stars coming from mine,” Sophie tells her.
“Tears?”
“Stars,” Sophie repeats.
“Stars,” she repeats back. “And you, Serge?”
Serge. He always relishes the way she says his name: where his father gives it as an electrical “Surge” rounded by an abrupt j, her version takes the form of a light and lofty “Sairge” that tails off in a whispered shh.
“I’m Cronos. That’s Saturn. I need sheets around my head. But Papa says to tell you that he also must have streams of nectar which must be gold and eleven feet long. And the other children will be Curetes. These are shepherds, Mr. Clair says. And they must have clashing spears.”
“And Papa says to tell you Serge must have a scythe,” says Sophie.
“Nathaniel is Poseidon,” Serge adds, “and he must be disguised like a sheep so he can hide among the real sheep.”
“Tell your father to send Nathaniel and the other children to me in the morning to be measured. The sheep too if he wants-but in the morning.” As his mother speaks these words, her hands dance with one another, the fingers of one tripping along the palm of the other before rising to tap her chest. Bodner signs back. His twisted upper lip rises and falls slightly as he does this, as though he were slowly chewing something.
“He’s saying ‘poppies,’ ” Sophie says to Serge.
“You don’t know that,” Serge tells her.
“Yes I do.”
Their mother tells the buyer: “I must leave you now. My tea awaits.”
“A pleasure, as always, Mrs. Carrefax,” he tells her, rising to his feet. “And do think about what I…”
But she’s turned away from him; his words, redundant, shrivel in the air. She follows Bodner, who has left the room, passing her hand lightly over Serge’s hair as she brushes past him. Serge and Sophie stand abandoned by the doorway for a while, quiet, floor-gazing. Then Sophie chirps, more shrilly than the birds in the next room:
“Let’s do some chemistry!”
iii
They run out to the stables. As they cross the Maze and Mosaic gardens they can hear the Day School children chanting their lines in preparation for the Pageant:
Then streams ran milk, then streams ran wine, and yellow honey flowed
From each green tree whereon the rays of fiery Phoebus glowed…
The lines loop and repeat, obeying commands barked by their father’s voice, which occasionally comes in, succinct and loud, over the blurred and uncertain infant voices for one or two words before retreating into the background again. The chanting fades as they pass beneath the trellises, muffled by thick poisonberry bushes.