C by Tom McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page B

‘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.
    The workshop door, window impastoed with a film of grease and dust, is unlocked; Sophie pushes it creaking open. An array of instruments greets them, strewn across shelves and benches: manometric flame and typesetting machines, phonautographs, rheotomes, old hotel annunciators and telegraph station switches—most of them opened, disgorged, their inner wiring spilling tangled, trailing from one level to another. Sophie selects a low-lying table and, pushing her right arm from her long silk robe and moving it across the table in a slow, broad sweep, indiscriminately slides the objects from its surface to the floor. Serge, meanwhile, starts opening cupboards.
    “Where’s the set?” he asks.
    “Above the work table,” she tells him.
    He clambers onto this and retrieves, from a glass-fronted cupboard on the wall, a large boxed chemistry set. His father gave it to him for his seventh birthday, but Sophie’s made it more hers than his. She grabs it keenly as he passes it down, and tells him:
    “Get the book as well.”
    His hand feels its way around the cupboard and pulls out a heavy hard-bound tome: The Boy’s Playbook of Science . She grabs this from him too. By the time he’s climbed back to the floor she’s opened the box’s lid and is flipping through the book, looking for an experiment to carry out. Her eyes dart from it to the glassed, coloured liquids with a kind of avarice. Serge kneels on a stool beside her, peering over her shoulder. Her hair smells fresh and alive amidst the workshop’s must.
    “Sulphur,” she says. “Yes, we’ve got that. Potash … yes. Nitre?” Her finger runs up and down the rows of bottle-stoppers as though playing a glockenspiel. Serge feels a chemical reaction in his stomach, a kind of effervescent coupling and expanding of juices and elements. “Right,” Sophie announces. “We’ll do this one. Read me the recipe. Page eighty-four.”
    She thrusts the book at him and starts laying out tubes, bottles, retorts and a gas burner. The Playbook’s cover has a flowery pyramid embossed on it. Serge flips it open, flips past “Properties of Matter,” “Adhesive Attraction,” “Impenetrability,” arrives at “Chemistry.” Hermes or Mercurius Trismegistus, minister of Osiris … alchemy … chemical combination, one or more substances uniting and producing third or other body different in nature from … Page 84: To return to …
    “ ‘To return to our first experiment with the gunpowder,’ ” he reads, “ ‘take sulphur, place some in an iron ladle, heat it over a—’ ”
    “Iron ladle?” Sophie says. “We can use a cup.” She roots around the work table, tips a bunch of