Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  But my diary was gone too, I pointed out; and in the instant now before Alba’s startling answer I saw the dilettante geologist in his red mini combing Callanish for Krish, and maybe Jack with him, for Jack had sent Krish to pump the man, which might mean Jack was not sure of the man, yet were one of them to find Jenny’s cache and Reid were then to know, Reid might pay her back, assuming I was right that Reid was merely using her for information, albeit information on how much information I and possibly Dagger and others had on him and others associated with a project I now had to assume went well beyond the mere harboring of Vietnam exiles and drug-pushing in the Underground.

  I know, said Alba, and took a plate down from the closet and automatically ran water on it, and it’s just as well for all of us your diary is gone.

  She would like me gone.

  She and Dagger served each other, and also by absence.

  Jenny looked up from her hard concentrated typing and when I gave her a peck on the forehead she asked what I’d meant in what I’d written about the Corsican waiter and the Italian who imposed his will on all those shrimp, and I said that if Dagger or Alba were ever to read the passage they’d laugh.

  French for revolution is French also for revulsion, the Corsican waiter (looking daggers at those shrimp) serves the affluent Italian’s bald power not quite satisfactorily cloaked just as the Italian’s smug will serves the waiter’s energy—this on each side in lieu of wishing real change.

  Dagger that first night in Alba’s flat after drinks in Lorenzo’s hotel room, reached an arm round Alba’s shoulder to slide in another box of spaghetti. He ordered her around. She opened a bottle of Chianti which of course she would have in her larder. Lorna asked the computer man if Kennedy was in trouble and he said Jack was doing better with the girls than with Congress, and I shut up because Lorna had recently condemned me for talking for her in public.

  But go back to ’58—the eve of Tessa’s disappearance—and I’ll tell you Lorna wanted more than that: she wanted me silenced, wanted me in some subtle or tentative embodiment dead. We would speak not quite loud enough: What? The words would get said again. Lorna often didn’t hear when she should have heard. And she guessed wrongly all I heard in her silences, conceded me a power.

  Which might be like what Alba was coldly to concede later tonight as I was leaving when she said, I do not want to know what you know. But Alba conceded in another stubbornly obeisant way now and a moment before, by hinting Lorna’s whereabouts, a party (which could not be Geoff Millan’s, that I now recalled we had been asked to, for he did not know Dagger and Alba)—and hinting she’d heard my diary had been destroyed (which meant that Kate or someone who’d spoken to Kate had routed the knowledge to where Alba was).

  So Lorna let the cat out of the bag tonight, I said.

  Of course it wasn’t Lorna, said Alba, it was Savvy.

  But he heard it from Lorna, I said.

  No, someone phoned him in the bedroom, Michelle woke up and was crying, and I was sorry I’d come, I’m very very tired, he hung up and asked me where Dag had really gone. He asked if I knew your diary had been burned.

  But Alba had not been too tired to lift Cosmo’s carton out of sight.

  She simply wanted to get rid of me.

  She hadn’t even asked how I’d got in, maybe thought if Cosmo had a key why not Cartwright. Yet it wasn’t tiredness that made her try to stop me as I went on to tell her how Jack had told Gene that Incremona was armed and Sherman was armed, and Gene had lied to Jack about the Marvelous Country House (chosen, I added, by Dagger not me) and Claire had told Jack that our Bonfire in Wales had also been shot by Aut’s own man—well, there I’d been in Paul’s hut telling Jack about the Maya when Gene had slid my diary into the fire, and on top of that, Kate (for I assumed Savvy’s news had come from her direction) had told me Jenny was in danger, and I was about to go on to tell Alba that Gene had let Jack think the portfolio was Jan’s—but Alba brought the needlessly rerinsed plate down into the sink hard and cracked it, and said Stop!—but meant to stop my giving her what she didn’t want by (it now seemed) stuffing back at my voice any information that came into her head. She said, You are powerful; you were powerful the morning you picked Dag up to go film the Hawaiian boy in the Underground; Dag was deeply disturbed by that, and he is somewhere I don’t know where now because he is deeply worried and Jenny is part of it and I want you out of here, please, you are armed.

  But before I’d arrived the morning we went to film the tunnel under the Science Museum, Dagger and Alba had been having a little battle in my opinion.

  And that would be at least as good a reason for him to be disturbed.

  I’d sensed it when he said would she be in all morning in case of a phone call; I saw it in her blank look when I found her in the balcony room stacking two suitcases on the glass cabinet, thus partly blocking the framed Mercator; it was in their manner of parting: no loud call from Dag out of sight, nor a joke and a kiss; just his pause and an exchange of times and places at ten paces, her belly beginning to show. But if Alba said Dag had been disturbed by my suggesting that particular tunnel, what of the fact that when Jenny and I had talked about A-levels, continuity, and museums, it had been Jenny who brought up the tunnel?

  And because Dag had been disturbed (said Alba) he’d let her go over to France to see her parents that weekend alone, though I knew he didn’t much care for Seine suburbia, the French language, or all that tennis.

  Well, had she talked all this over with Dag?

  Actually to Cosmo. But only about filming the Hawaiian boy in the Underground, and how (said Alba) Dagger was afraid of you now because he did not know all you knew and didn’t know what you’d do.

  I said I was armed only with other people’s weapons. Alba asked if I had disarmed Sherman. I asked if he was with Reid. Alba said that was why Dag had gone off in a hurry—someone was going to get hurt, someone had already been hurt. What do you need me for in this war of yours, said Alba.

  Tessa was taking apart the pieces; she was saying that blood and cruelty are to the Maya the source of what is good, and that the famous Maya blue, the color of sacrifice even more than the red magic that was bled from some poor penis, draws the horror up into a blue hole in the blue sky. But I needed Alba’s defenses here, for she defended herself against me by telling me things: Incremona was dangerous; I must not ally myself with him.

  But I had found myself to be helplessly a collaborator, mingling beyond mere will with the mixed obsessions of others. It had been months before our first friendly fuck in New York that I’d gratuitously daydreamed a safe way to write Tessa in London: I’d just write her London address on the envelope’s upper left, stamp it with insufficient postage, and mail it to a fictitious New York address. But the daydream: why was it painful? how did the Maya punish adultery with wife’s one-time best friend? Answer: Reid and Sherman dividing Jenny.

  Why did we go to Corsica? I said.

  Alba did not know.

  What had been Dagger’s real reason?

  Alba fended me off: Nash had been at Savvy’s tonight all dressed up with his rings on trying to make Nell Flint laugh and when she went into the bedroom he followed her. Could you see Nell fancying that bundle of nerves? They were talking about a car, no doubt all he could manage.

  Why did we go to Corsica? I said.

  To get away, said Alba.

  Was Incremona at Savvy’s?

  The handsome bald man?

  Yes, Incremona.

  No, he was not there, but his name was spoken by the man with the rings, Nash.

  To whom?

  To the black man.

  Chad?

  Yes.

  Would Alba like to hear my views on Nash?

  Nash? No, please, please. Please go. Incremona and the man with the rings, said Alba, as if she were saying something. Chad does not like the man with the rings.

  Nash? I said.

  Yes, he suspects Nash was looking for Bobby’s fr
iend the deserter at Stonehenge. Chad looked angry at Nash.

  I said, Krish wasn’t there—did Nash get a nosebleed?

  The question infiltrated Alba, as if its far origin had built up a force too strange by the time it arrived.

  What killed Krish? I asked myself. John’s pistol? The sight or idea of it? The Great Menhir?

  I’ll go, I said, if you’ll tell me why Dag deliberately kept from Claire the fact that we had shot the Unplaced Room.

  Alba could only answer unasked questions. Krish was in rebellion against his father who belonged to the Mahasabba and claimed (though Krish did not believe his father) to have been involved with the Mahasabba people who supposedly were behind Gandhi’s assassin. He believes he has personal power and perhaps he has; he has control over Cosmo and the man with the rings; they tell him everything. So in a way Krish is very different from Jan. But don’t think Jan was helping Paul escape from his two brothers, she simply wanted to know why he was dropping everyone now, I don’t know what that means, I don’t want to know. She is interested in Reid, not Paul, she’s had such trouble with Aut, so has Claire, poor Claire, this cut-throat thing of the two films, what do you know of Claire. Aut found a letter in her desk and phoned Jan in London to find out if Claire was in cahoots with Monty or Dag to steal Jan’s idea, and Jan went up to the Hebrides to see Paul purely for information, not for what you think, and she is disturbed about her son as well, she did a beautiful picture of him, maybe you’ve seen it, the son is the one thing she and her husband have together, he adores the boy, who hardly ever sees him, but if Jan wanted to stop anyone it would be Reid.

  Alba leaned her elbows on the sink, her face in her hands.

  You’re afraid of me, I said.

  Only for Dagger, she said.

  That why you got him out of Corsica in a hurry?

  Alba shook her head, did not look up.

  I phoned home. Will said Lorna had said she was going to Geoff’s.

  I asked Alba for the taxi number.

  I had nothing to do with his coming back from Corsica, she said. He was a day early; I wasn’t even here.

  It was a minicab. It would come in five minutes. The voice sounded Irish.

  The overhead light was on in the bathroom. I bent down to look at the comb on the floor. Alba would have been carrying the baby when she came into the bathroom.

  Alba had disappeared.

  I would be drawn into a past as paralyzingly elusive as the crystal receiver set Ned Noble designed and soldered all by himself and promised to give me. As pointlessly elusive as that weekend in ’63 when we had tickets to Uncle Vanya with Redgrave and Olivier and Plowright and had promised to drop in on our new friend Dagger DiGorro after the theater. But we gave away our tickets.

  The sequence is not clear. Ned Noble’s now nonexistent crystal set may help. In the hotel room, I was asking the American computer man’s friend, an ex-serviceman who’d stayed in Europe, whether he did much mutual-fund business here in England or confined himself to the Continent. There was a large elderly English woman in a permanent who totally obscured Lorna, but it was Lorna I heard and she was telling how an actor who wrote children’s books had asked two sculptors to design a cat to go on top of the Whitting-ton Stone on Highgate Hill because in a story he was writing the Queen stopped to talk to Dick Whittington’s cat at the spot where the boy who was to be thrice Lord Mayor of London turned round three times—and there was no cat.

  At Alba’s after the cocktail party Dagger told of his search for his lost brother in Mexico, not a real brother but close enough. Lorna was with Alba washing up in the kitchen. The computer-traffic man and his friend the ex-serviceman selling mutual funds to servicemen in Europe, listened to Dagger digress upon those instruments called raspadores made of bones human, deer, or tapir which made a grating sound and if a player in the Maya orchestra did not keep time he was punished painfully though not (like the hapless captives of war) sexually mutilated; there was no “pure” music, but songs that told old tales, and dances to bring new rain.

  But the World Tiddlywinks Congress at Cambridge did not occur in November ’63; it was in June of ’58 after Lorna and her new friend Tessa attended the Festival Hall recital of Menuhin, who lives in Highgate not far from the house we’d recently bought. And a clergyman had urged the world to look to tiddlywinks as a way of recapturing primeval simplicity.

  I remember because a week later came the execution of Nagy in Hungary.

  Which was the day (yes) before Lorna and Tessa took the children and Dudley to the Dominion Cinema to see South Pacific.

  Macmillan had been in Washington with Eisenhower, which would have been impossible in November of ’63.

  Thursday Lorna and I had a fight which would have been impossible in June of ’58 when I still treated her as an invalid.

  At the end of our fight I told her Dagger’s music story about punishments for not keeping time, and we laughed ourselves to sleep.

  She did not want another child.

  Ned Noble had promised me his crystal set even after he knew he was dying.

  Lorna phoned Tessa Friday morning, November 22, even though we were going to see them that night. Lorna told Tessa Dagger’s story—the Maya orchestra, the raspadores, the punishment.

  At 6:45 P.M. when I began to smell onions, I switched on “The Archers—An Everyday Story of Country Life.” I had been listening to it since ’54: Farm talk about markets and new methods; Dan Archer’s good sense; hired man Ned Lar kin’s south-country accent with its rounded American r‘s (and a measured something like my grandfather’s Maine cadences that he never lost even when he found himself removed to a city as foreign to him as if he had gone to live abroad); pub gossip; the antique dealer’s love life; the new entrepreneur in the village; Doris Archer’s nerves; more farm gab; for me the ripe soil, the thick-tufted pasture grass, great sheltering trees by a group of graystone barns and sheds and dwellings with the small square parish church tower in the background so the whole scene reminded me of some famous painter’s paintings I’d seen years ago at the Met; the sweet rotten odor of silage, the petty and poignant preoccupation with annual events, the village of Ambridge (for Americans who do not know “The Archers”) ridiculed by Geoff Millan but not by Lorna. (Why does a hen lay eggs, said Jenny at six or seven, the riddle stage, when I would sometimes want in desperation to tell her what her intimations about her parents could not quite reach, but she would have to wait, for she was too young, but even if she had not been, I could not clearly have said what was wrong with Lorna and me.)

  At the end of one episode of “The Archers” when Mr. Grenville the local gentry had his car crash destroying his leg and killing John Tregoran’s fiancée, the BBC did not close with the theme music, a heart-warming jig: there was just silence, which even I felt—and then the seven o’clock news.

  But the music did play at the end on Friday the 22nd, and I turned back to the front page of The Evening Standard.

  And then came the news from Dallas.

  Where it was only one o’clock.

  Which made me feel that I’d been missing something all afternoon, yet there was a chance to catch up.

  Lorna was already weeping before I had understood the chance Kennedy was dead.

  The other couple who were coming to dinner with Tessa and Dudley phoned to ask if we would rather not, and I do not recall what I said as if underwater at a very long distance—I thanked them and I must have given them a rain check, and I could not say goodbye because the waterworks exploded unexpectedly in my head and Will materialized and he could not for a moment think of the words in which to ask who had died.

  I do not remember Alba saying much about Kennedy Saturday night. The French liked Jackie. The story had not yet come out that the blood-stained wife in the open accelerating car had been reaching back for a piece of her husband.

  Lorna was saying she wanted to go back.

  Johnson! she said.

  Then at eight thirty w
e were finishing our drinks with Dudley and Tessa and I remembered having spoken on the phone to our other guests.

  Lorna said I might have told her.

  I put my glass down in a hurry and raised my hands to my face.

  My mother phoned from New York.

  Geoff Millan phoned, distraught.

  I kept the radio on in the kitchen and got up from the dinner table once to go and listen.

  Dudley was subdued in any case, but tonight partly because he did not feel what Lorna and I did. He said it was too soon, the death.

  We let that lie. But Tessa said, Dudley will have an opinion on this by 1980 if you can wait till then.

  Can you? I said.

  Lorna and I had triple helpings of lasagna.

  Dudley said to Tessa that after all it wasn’t as if he’d ever been a Republican. But Tessa went beyond that: Kennedy was beautiful. Unusual beauty draws secret violence toward it.

  I could not believe he was dead, and I said Rubbish.

  Ned Noble’s crystal set means more than if he’d been faithful to his promise. There was a red stripe across the base of a condenser and blue numbers on what he said was a rectifier.

  Dudley agreed it was rubbish and he and Tessa argued but as if soundlessly, for Lorna and I were stuffing our faces and looking at each other. Dudley got up in a huff and I followed him into the living room still chewing, where I found him inspecting a photograph of my sister.

  I went back to the table. Lorna was weeping. As Dudley returned I daydreamed a way of posting a clandestine letter to Tessa. Now it looks like a long-term plan.

  Sub’s letter was the first of the American letters to reach me after the assassination. He said that that weekend several of his friends had screwed like crazy. He and Rose even, and they weren’t getting along.

  On Sunday there were queues clear round the Embassy. Cabdrivers parked their cabs and got on line. BBC radio interviewed people waiting to sign the book.

  On Saturday Mr. Jones in the dairy said, Mr. Cartwright I want you to know that Mrs. Jones and I sympathize with you and your family. This is a sad time for all of us.