Reid appeared in white blouse and white jeans. He asked how it was going. He was graceful and relaxed, he seemed to have moseyed over from his own acreage where he’d been doing some work. Hey, he said, is Savvy writing a piece on this?
I guess I’ll be the only one, I said.
The man from the Ministry hoped everyone would be accounted for.
The small Elizabeth with a proper sense of order came pelting over to us to say that the fair-haired boy with beard had disappeared. Dagger and I knew this to be the deserter. Elizabeth pelted away into the dark. Dagger gave me the camera and followed her.
Behind me I heard through the openings of the ring we’d tried to blur closed, the American voice confirming the bank clerk’s words about human effort. The moon was still cloud-bound, but I could see Elspeth and a pair of stragglers going toward the car park. I had asked Dagger to ask her. She had asked three friends and one of them had asked a friend with a car. Nell had come with two kids, plus two men I didn’t know. There was a University of Maryland part-timer who had thrown a Thanksgiving party several years ago that Will and Jenny and I had gone to and who’d been greeted with open arms by Dagger tonight. It was a pretty eclectic coven. You make sacrifices in the interests of accident and naturalness. People had friends nearby. There was a party somewhere in a caravan.
Dagger and I had come separately, he in the VW with Cosmo and others, I in the Fiat. Tessa had looked at a cottage in Hampshire on our way down and wanted to see another tomorrow on the way back. We were supposed to be giving a lift to Elizabeth, who was staying with an aunt in Salisbury. Some of these arrangements were not in the diary.
I did include, though, that I wanted to change my life: for this, however light, was my reply to Elizabeth, who came back looking for Dagger and was most distressed about the deserter who hadn’t yet been found and then asked with that English no-nonsense trick what in fact was the point of our film.
We had six hundred feet I knew would be better in the processed print than my sense tonight of the muddled scene. But when I’d been here in March with Jenny, I’d felt like a giant. The hingeless doorways had unlocked their field of possibility and all those concentric fronts of memory had passed out the lens of my loved daughter’s camera before she turned to me radiant and announced that Stonehenge was a message; and inspired by her I thought, That’s it! Instant developing movie film! And I was even free (though not so great) when the voice behind began doling out distances and weights and I pictured proving myself by showing a hundred Stone Age huskies how to get the Sarsens into the foundation holes and, topping that feat even, lift the lintels let’s say by rocking them on a log-staging till the lintel was high enough to roll onto the pillars, there to be fixed with my patent lock of mortise and tenon.
And I thought it was this passage, linking daughter and lock, that brought Jenny to me in tears after she’d proofread the typescript. Tears damped the lashes and shone on the cheekbones, I hadn’t known her to cry in years, she’s dry cork as the poet says, though not cold; and she wept again then, asking if I would show this to Mummy; and then I saw it must be the part about Lorna’s sobs.
Materials for a life, I said.
It’ll take a lot of editing, I was about to say, but Lorna had forgotten her key and I went to let her in. Upon entering the living room she took a Kleenex and dabbed at Jenny’s makeup.
Dagger came back and I handed over the Beaulieu. I’d had the touch of an idea but lost it when he spoke, but maybe it was Tessa now quiet at my side. There were shouts and singing somewhere and cars starting. Someone called, Where’s your torch? Dagger said he’d felt it needed something more and he now had had a thought for another scene which we could discuss when we got home.
The man from the Ministry came from another part of the circle. He said he must say these New Druids took rather an activist line.
I said somebody had to in this benighted country, and Dagger said Here here! and I said if you leaned on a stone and waited for something to happen, nothing would, and the bank clerk with a tremor in his tone said he wasn’t at all sure about that.
Headlights beamed through us.
The other way, to the south, I saw a flashlight moving through a field. (A torch, these hoary English call it.)
I asked Tessa if her shoes were wet.
We were moving north toward the passage that went under the road and came up by the car park.
Dagger called back into the dark, Closing up!
Dagger’s talk of a new scene had interfered with my thought of one. Or had it been Tessa, who might now be contemplating our hotel room in Salisbury a few miles away. It had been six years. She took my arm and asked if Dagger had seen my written account of this mad documentary of ours. And as I said No, my idea came cresting back: to film the boatyard in which I had an interest, and get the old man to put in a nice clear explanatory word about making things by hand.
It might help, said Tessa.
We turned and the others went on. I couldn’t make out the ruined horseshoe, only the open wall of Sarsen monoliths. The moon was trying to come out.
To one side of the circumference I saw, at a distance I could not gauge, two silent flashlights. Tessa said, Good luck to them.
Priestly shit indeed, I said—think of the poor fucking Catholics being interned.
In London Dudley told me mumbo jumbo meant not just nonsense or obscure ritual but also a fetish; he got out a book to show me that mumbo jumbo came from Mandingo for a magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.
Now what had been the Stonehenge message Jenny had felt in March? But she’d been looking out of the circle. Did that mean you only got it as it left? or if you stood in it and conveyed it out?
Waves aren’t simple; they hit each other; they interfere, take each other’s force, but also reinforce.
Ned Noble could tell you.
In the stillness of the Highgate house once I read about a scientist who made up a law about waves hitting particles so that every point in space becomes a source of spreading waves.
But Tessa was simply a good fuck in ’64 and ’65—and in ’71 in a green beret and nothing else but some enigmatic chit-chat queries about our other film-scenes, was there one in Wales? one in South Kensington Underground? and what was the American blow-hard professor really doing there?
But I was afraid time would stop if I didn’t get to Jan Aut’s and beyond.
I did not need to buzz Jan’s flat to get in downstairs. I hadn’t noticed the old house, its outside, what it was made of. I was in Notting Hall Gate.
Maybe I was the message.
Cartridges stayed hard when out of touch with other cartridges but when in touch opened and shifted—even to glows of high hue or even varying grays with a black as lush as Lorna’s suede gloves so richly wrinkled, from finger to elbow setting out for our first and last Embassy cocktail party where a matter-of-fact madam’s orange hat and blue-green eyeshadow or a patronizing young parliamentary secretary’s machine-matched mauve tie and snotrag stood out like senseless data next to my Lorna with her gray wool dress that showed her wholeness, her high waist and her hips and stomach, and with her dark almost black hair alive around the gray-blue eyes. I was proud enough of her not to get mad afterward in a cab when she said, You like that crap more than you admit.
The door wasn’t open when I reached the second landing. There was no key under Jan’s mat. The last time I’d come with a friend, two others, a camera, and sound.
Lorna did not know how near I was.
There was a new lock on our door in Highgate. Had Jack had our house broken into? I couldn’t tell on the phone from New York how badly Lorna had felt about it—scared, unready, sad. Her tears were never hot pools on the carpet (where Tessa had dropped her butt) but slow and steady as if measured out.
And as I heard a hand on Jan Aut’s doorknob, I knew I was still between—for I knew (for how could I not have seen that) lock in Jenny’s cryptic note had an h: a lo
ch to look at, a cross to bear: whatever waves I’d made had traveled on ahead to here, but back as well to Callanish behind me where my American daughter had saved the other remaining copy of the diary.
14
Which put me between again.
But with what in front?
Godlike I saw through Jan Aut’s door before it opened. She was fresh from a bath, a twist of towel round her hair. But she’d been up on Lewis with Paul. She might be anywhere, South Uist, Edinburgh, Wales.
The turban was still a towel, but no—she looked like Jenny; that was it. I was ahead of my own sound, I could have been still asleep three nights ago in my Glasgow hotel. I reached out to her still feeling for Jenny, and in the instant that I checked the impulse Claire accepted my embrace and I blocked the new wish to draw back, and was glad because I knew I could not help her. But no: Claire’s dog had just come out of hospital and she hadn’t settled her affairs at Outer Film and there was no reason to think Monty would want her here in London with him on business. But why did I think Monty was in London tonight—because he’d phoned Dudley? because if this system, whosever it was, was closed, the probabilities were that things should be beginning to come together?
But I was rehearsing; and, even irredeemably between, I knew my power lay in not rehearsing; and so as the door came open I would still proceed as if I had a plan even if I were no god.
It was Kate, the girl from the gallery. Her hand, the fingers of her tanned hand, went to her collarbone. She’d been in no mood to imagine me a god when we’d first met. I inserted myself sideways past her, bumping my pack, saying Jan expected me.
My pack stood next to the brown velvet chesterfield; my parka I laid over the arm so the pockets rested on the cushions.
Of course, said Kate.
The portrait of Jan’s to which I had added leaned against the leg of a baby grand. The piano was a Yamaha, the firm that makes motorbikes and flutes.
There was no one here. I fell into the chesterfield. The room was full of things chosen over a long period of time one by one. It had not been right for what we’d wanted when we’d filmed here. I said this to Kate, who stood at the foyer entrance, one ankle almost touching my pack.
You filmed here?
Yet looking around at a delicate brown bowl, a solid red jaguar some ten inches by four, a silver belt of ornately worked links lain across a bright-woven shawl thrown over a table, I felt that this room impossible to unplace. May 24 was personal not local. That is, you would not have looked at it and said England. There was a turtle. There was a color photo of Jupiter on the music stand above the keyboard.
I got up and walked away from Kate to a doorway. It was evening. A blanket or two lay on the floor beside a large bed with dark green sheets twisted and draping. I turned away to a further door that was almost closed.
What did you film? said Kate.
I don’t know any more, I said.
The Unplaced Room of our film was dark through a crack, and I did not go in. I remembered morning light through the top of a green tree. A bold bright portrait of someone with long lustrous hair leaning against the wall near where I stood. Large open windows with those peculiar screw locks at the middle and along the sash. The garden didn’t appear in the film. Pale clouds were filling the early blue when Dagger and I and the featured performers arrived. The sky in New York is gross, it is a blue land that will get you.
She’s not here, as you can see, said Kate. She was by the couch now. She started to lift my parka but I stopped her.
I said, Saturday night. I need a bath. I’ve just been up to Paul’s.
Why had she said Of course when I’d come in?
She sat on the piano stool. It’s Sunday, she said.
In the corner of my eye something moved, inanimate. Kate’s small mouth dimpled, in a quiver not a smile. She did not point out that as of Monday I hadn’t known Jan Graf. Either she thought I’d faked ignorance then, or she was doing something very special now.
I asked if she’d been at the gallery the day Aut’s man filmed; I said I knew Jan and the four men had been in it, but I hadn’t heard Kate mentioned.
When she shook her head—almost as if she couldn’t speak—I put my head back and closed my eyes and intoned like a list of heroes the names of Reid, Gene, Sherman, Incremona. I sighed and said it was a sordid thing, this commercial competition, utterly cutthroat.
Take my film diary, I said, my eyes still closed; it was incinerated in Paul’s hut on Mount Clisham yesterday. So that’s that. A regular trade war. What’s the use?
I sighed. Even Paul got demoralized, I said—he stopped caring about all the deserters coming through Norway and the islands.
I let myself seem tired. Kate nodded once. My mind played in a field of someone else’s inventing, more than one someone, I thought. Maybe I was as tired as I was seeming. I rolled my head toward where the inanimate movement had been, and saw it again. The door to the Unplaced Room swayed. I said there was a draft, and with a groan I leaned forward but Kate was up, crossing to the Unplaced Room, saying she’d close the windows, but I said just shut the door, and she did, stopping short of it so she had to reach out for the knob, and pulling it to so quickly—as if she had other duties to pass on to—that I felt she’d never meant to go in there and close the windows. I asked for Jan; Kate said she was here looking after the cat while Jan was away. That was like a past part of the truth. Kate was being careful. I asked for a drink. I’d been dreaming in the plane from Glasgow, I said, I was wild, I had all the passengers looking back at me. What a dream! Could I tell Kate about it?
Please do.
It must have come from the daydream I’d had before I dropped off: to wit, putting Paul and Chad together; plus the deserter’s dark-haired friend when we filmed here and Nash’s nosebleed when Cosmo accused him of planning to blow up the Underground. Plus Len’s angry trigger at Paul’s brother’s house.
Kate passed me a wine glass of whiskey and asked if that had been my dream, and I said it might as well have been. The door of the Unplaced Room was open a crack again but there was no draft, as if interrupting the current of air had lowered the windows automatically like the line-and-pulleys I’d rigged from my bed when I was twelve. I carried my parka into the bathroom, and Kate laughed but I didn’t believe her. But I said, Got some plastic explosive I’m carrying around.
I unlaced my boots.
I asked if she had anything to eat.
I was into a stationary area again. But area might be so only by me. I wanted what Kate knew.
I said I had been launched down a dead escalator as part of an international power struggle. My words made my hands sweat.
Kate tried to speak, reached for her collarbone, decided to slouch with a hand on her hip.
Was that your daydream, she said, the power struggle?
I half-closed the bathroom door. I said she knew of course that Sherman was very dangerous. However, they were waiting for him in New York. Paul had had a strange violent effect on Chad. (I turned on the shower. A clear plastic shower cap hung over a tap handle.) Paul had opted out of the violent project and was in danger like me. Reid’s plans went ahead. (I turned up the water and lowered my voice.)
I was easing into the water. I might have been standing in my Tuesday shower at Monty’s.
Yes, I called out, it was my daydream, but I’m adding.
Outside the fall of my shower Kate’s silence seemed not to be paying much attention to me. She wouldn’t know much. Somewhere Mummy would be hoping she’d meet someone suitable.
As for Chad, I called out—and the phone rang and I turned off the shower.
I thought Kate said—the children.
I know she said, Can I give him a message?
I would let her bring this up. I flapped the shower curtain, sang a riff from a Brandenburg, ran water hard in the basin, flushed the toilet and soundlessly closed the bathroom door.
I didn’t hear her speaking. I tiptoed wetly out and carri
ed my pack back. I didn’t see her. The phone was in the kitchen. How did I know that?
I dressed.
I called from the bathroom, As for Chad—and then came out to my sandwich—well I see Chad as the black second lieutenant in Heidelberg who helps that kid skip to Sweden and has work for him when they meet again in London a long time after. It was Paul’s hut the kid stayed in—that’s no dream either. Only one film now. Plus a piece of ours with Paul on it, a Bonfire in Wales. When we caught him there he was already backing out of the big one, the big project, and he’d gone down to Wales. To see Elspeth, yes. I suppose you don’t know Elspeth. She was at Stonehenge. In my daydream Jan helps Paul escape from his two older brothers, who fear him. Jack has risky business up in the Hebrides anyway—yes, with a rich dilettante geologist who has gotten in too deep because the deserters and other Americans he’s ferried over from Norway are involved in a little bit more than mere exile, and this rebounds upon him and he wants out, and at this point Jack can’t afford to let that happen. Ditto the diary, so it has to be burned. I can understand. I’m not in arms about it. Nash was brought together with Krish in one scene and this could have led who knows where. Likewise Nash and the deserter at Stonehenge. Likewise in Corsica Mike and Incremona. The project will probably go through. But I’ve got to see Jan. She wouldn’t be at the Community with Paul? You know the Community?
I don’t, said Kate. I don’t think she’ll be back tonight.
You’ve been looking for adventure, Kate.
To you who have me, it may have been patent by now that I sensed a third person. If probabilities were as I imagined, this person closeted doubtless in the Unplaced Room would be someone who had already figured in my experience of the system. If it was a lover, even Kate was not so uncool as to hide him. If Jan, then why Kate’s nerves? On Jan’s behalf? Doubtful. If Paul, where was Jan? Why would this person wish not to be seen? And by me in particular? Or by anyone? But why would Kate not discourage me from staying? Either because she or the other person felt me to be dangerous or because the other person had signaled her to have me stay.
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