Lookout Cartridge (20 page)

It had not been Claire who’d come out of the Knightsbridge gallery. It had been Jenny. If Reid had nothing to do with the film, then neither had Jenny. But Jenny had something to do with the film. She had typed most of my diary. But that was not what I meant.

I know this route from Holloway tube past the great brown compound of Council flats, the ABC cinema, the branch of Sains-bury’s fastidious supermarket where Lorna comes down once a week to shop, the branch of Marks and Spencer’s which is for everyday clothes what Salisbury’s is for food and in whose bright aisles may be felt the M & S empire’s grand auspices like a father’s welcoming foreknowledge—and past the mile of shop fronts of this noisy domestic north-London thoroughfare off which down one street Lorna took Will for a National Health x-ray when he had bronchitis that wouldn’t go away—yes, I know it so well that I was under the impression I did not think about what Reid and I passed in our bus. And yet it was important precisely for being taken for granted—though at this moment of my threatened life this didn’t occur to me.

I am really here: this is what I saw when at our stop Reid had to wait, with his newspaper under his arm and his pony tail hanging outside his jean jacket collar which was of brown corduroy—while two old parties (in macs, in blue macs, and round white straw hats like snugger halos) stepped down; but he did not turn to my corner where I now took the precaution of twisting around as if to see something in the street and found myself looking at my unshaven cheeks above my beard, though in retrospect when I think hard about it I imagine people take my beard for granted and are thus able to see my whole face better, or then look at the mole in the middle of my forehead which for some reason I myself seldom see when I look in the mirror.

Then Reid was gone round the greengrocer’s corner into the traffic and business of Highgate High. Mine was the other way. Yet there were more than two ways.

The buildings seemed low.

It was Monday. At the cash register in the window of the dairy in an ample white coat was Mr. Jones, who believed me no more surely when I said they didn’t eat marmite in the States than Tris and Ruby believed me when they tasted on Pepperidge Farm whole wheat this spread like undiluted beef bouillon cubes and were told that English kids have marmite for tea.

Between two elms in the square a child’s large ball was at rest, yellow in the autumn sun.

At other entrances to the square I saw no Reid. My house seemed forbidden. I had not made up Sub’s day bed. Lorna would sit in her nightgown at the piano and work out another Charles Ives song she was performing at a local benefit. I had to admit I liked melody even (or especially) when being washed in the blood of the Lamb; the Ives songs were too intelligent, as if some old American strains were interrupting each other so as to break down into their comparative frequencies, so you got their true neural meanings only to find that after all you didn’t really want these explicit.

The West Indian attendant sat on the black railing by the Public Convenience looking across toward a downhill lane whose opening gave a sight of central London silently rising through its own air but as if nearer and nearer rather than higher and higher—or this seemed the direction in which the West Indian attendant was looking.

I was not going to call Dagger.

It was eleven twenty-five, and several retired persons of genteel aspect would be settled into the Reading Room of the High-gate Literary and Scientific Institution across from the square. A sports car whipped in, gunning down for the turn. A sycamore leaf with its five limbs out like a rough star or some bundled human abstract lay on the pavement in front of a bench I had often passed.

A man and a girl were on the courtyard wall of a pub waiting for it to open. As I looked, it did.

I met no one I knew.

When it rains you don’t think of the leaf shapes.

One should stay in one place.

My house seemed unusually close to the square. I came uncertainly abreast of the steps and the door lock cracked and I automatically decided not to arrive. I wanted to touch Lorna’s spine.

Walking on, I crossed the road and stopped by a tree to light my cigarette of the day.

My angle of observation was poor so I saw only Lorna’s arm. Her cardigan.

Perhaps you have not been here and so don’t know what my eyes, my feet, my feelings took for granted, standing in, seeing through. But I have in my head things I may not exactly have seen, just as you who read this have me.

Lorna said, You really can go now, and then she said something I missed.

I moved dangerously far and she had her back to the street. I moved further and bent away lighting another match.

Lorna was facing into the hall, facing a man blond, young, and clean-shaven. Above his head at the landing above the rear end of the hall, light from the garden smudged the leaded compartments of our florid stained glass.

He would be the second tenor, but Lorna’s lock was fixed.

I could not tell if the second tenor looked past Lorna. There wasn’t a picture of me in the house.

He was there to reassure her. He liked her. She was alone and had been burglarized.

He came and kissed her on the forehead. She was wearing trousers.

She could not have had eyes in the back of her head.

Between my eyes or in my throat a space spun so slow I could barely code its message that to pass through Lorna to reach this other person whom I desired to erase from my hall might open something else again behind him.

Which was Jenny. Or what lay behind her.

You can understand my state.

Under the hall table next to Lorna’s visitor was the three-dimensional noughts and crosses I’d constructed out of my head that in spite of the illuminated variations on O and X I’d drawn on the little four-by-four placards like options on a typographer’s chart tended, Lorna said, to look like someone’s three-tiered sandwich-server. For teas we’d never got in the habit of.

The door had closed, and the second tenor was still inside.

I took a turn down the block. Again I heard a door shut. I saw the second tenor turn away toward the bus.

Looking at me before she hugged me, she said, Marriage is an act of faith.

Her cheek against mine seemed to bear in to wear away the flesh. She smelled of pine soap that she said smelled like her parents’ camp in Maine, and when she said, Say something, I could think only—in rapid sequence—of the white candles during the power cuts—white as marble in our dark, cheerful, chattering rooms—of the brown turtle in the green garden, of Jenny’s dress, and Lorna’s record I’d left in the Knightsbridge B & B this morning.

I’m glad after all, said Lorna. I thought I didn’t want you to come.

You didn’t phone back, I said.

Lorna’s dark hair parted in the middle fell softly down each temple. She spoke with a new readiness and simplicity: It’s all there, I’d say.

She stepped back and looked at my feet and my raincoat. I’d left my suitcase, which Lorna had slowly packed.

Lorna said, I even started reading it.

We went and sat in the gray velvet medallion sofa in the shadow of the piano and held hands. Everyone knows something, but not enough, and still we wear gloves. Why did I not go right upstairs to Jenny’s room?

Lorna and I held hands and talked quietly as if to be private and looked at each other and I thought her face even more like Will’s than I usually do. Pale and dark with Will’s blue Celtic eyes. If I had shut my eyes I could not have told you just then what color cardigan she had on. It was one of those heavy-smooth-knit English cardigans, dark brown with a pale brown trim at the collar.

After she asked if I thought she was afraid, and I shook my head thinking her question and its tone erased the second tenor and her not mentioning him, and I recalled her state of mind in the late fifties—how afraid I was, and how fearfully far she had drifted past what I would know as fear—she now asked if all that background was actually in the film, she’d looked at the pages in Jenny’s closet and almost couldn’t stop.

I said, Well you see I had to explain some of what the film couldn’t have shown. Also, the film couldn’t have been shown in words without all that explanation.

It was the middle of the night. I’d phoned you and you weren’t in. Billy was asleep. He’d looked at the new lock and said no lock is fool proof. Then he went to bed.

Proof against a fool, I said, and kissed Lorna’s cheek, and thought that Jenny could not know how she was involved in the theft. I wanted to stay with Lorna. I wasn’t sure how to go on to Jenny. I looked back over my shoulder at the door from living room to hall, for the old pendulum clock had begun hissing and shifting getting ready to strike.

Come on, she said. It was the middle of the bloody night and I felt like a burglar in Jenny’s closet and so I stayed there reading by that little light you put in rather than bring the pages out into the room. And being in the closet must have done something to the acoustics because I heard a door unlatch and couldn’t tell if it was up or down.

Will.

Of course, but I didn’t know that, and he’d heard me and thought it was someone in Jenny’s room because I’d told him the carbon was in the closet. So he had a tennis racket and a flashlight he was going to switch on only at the last moment, holding it out from his side so the burglar wouldn’t know where he was. Well, after all that, my heart was really going; he’d had his racket up for a serve, but all I saw was a glare and his voice saying, Lucky I’ve got my torch.

What with my call to you, and Billy after me with his new tennis racket, and I’d been reading that strange account of the room you filmed, which is stranger reading it in a closet in the middle of the night, why I stayed awake till I heard the church clock strike five and five minutes later the hall clock so I could see every inch of the hall, and I was tired of actively not worrying about Jenny, you know what I mean, and I kept seeing that hideous warped old racket that you won’t throw away but this wasn’t a dream.

Lorna stopped abruptly and said nothing for some time. I looked at our things in this room where we live—shells, flowers, two pewter ashtrays, stacks of magazines, a dark gold guitar leaning in a corner behind a shapeless low wide soft deep, now too deep upholstered armchair, then a pastel chalk self-portrait of my sister that makes her look like a million other eighteen-year-olds and not especially of 1945, and then over above the other Victorian sofa a 1759 French map of the Thames estuary with the Suffolk, Essex, and “Comte de Kent” coasts in blue, yellow, and red with the sandbars pricked out like live shadows—and I listened to a car rev past and then another and thought what after all was American or English or anything else here except the rectangular plugs with the tiny fuses inside and three prongs, that you won’t see in America and seem big but are better made. Lorna was scared. I looked over my shoulder again as if the old clock would go on beyond twelve. I wondered why Jenny didn’t come downstairs. Since Lorna had got into the Unplaced Room, I’d go on and tell her what had been said; but then the penny dropped, as they say in England—or
a
penny—and there was that bare table Dagger and I had set between two windows that gave light but were not on camera, and over that bare table the U.S. deserter, speaking of the northern islands to his friend, said, Listen, I almost stayed up there, I mean you know how he is: and the deserter’s friend at once said, These rich sailors they’re all the same, and the deserter protested that wasn’t what he meant and the friend whose control I now felt in my monitoring ears (even more than the Beaulieu could have seen in his almost too quiet hands palms down upon the table) interrupted blatantly, Of
course
I know how it is. And as I recalled that exchange now in a room holding hands with my wife, I could not be sure if he had stressed the word
it
—for if so he might have been trying with the most insidious rhythm of naturalness to cancel out whatever the deserter’s previous
he
had stood for. Monty Graf would never believe I’d done nothing about the sound track after the film was destroyed. But
I
could hardly believe that Dagger had not brought it up. But like that other New York that I now sensed as a new circumstance from which I necessarily followed, a medium other than our white-and-black phone dial was what stood between me and Dagger, and I would not ring him up yet.

At last Lorna said, What was on that film? What’s my friend Tessa got to do with your Marvelous Country House? I was reading the scene you call Marvelous Country House, right? And suddenly I’m in the middle of my friend Tessa. But then Billy went bump in the night and I didn’t go back to the closet.

Oh, it was the Marvelous Country House, I said.

The dining room was strange in your description, was it like that? Jenny told me once you’d surprised yourself. But Tessa? You went into her life. But she wasn’t there.

If it’s dynamite they’re looking for, they won’t find it in what I say about Tessa.

Is that why you went to New York?

I’m in New York right now, I said; but I heard an old signal in Lorna’s questions.

She drew her legs up and crossed them and kept my hand. Tessa Allott was Lorna’s friend and our friend. First, Lorna’s. From the bad time in the fifties.

That was when we lived day to day like a blind couple who know they blame it on each other, as if blame were the solid furnishings of the rooms they move about in. And Lorna then was buried somewhere parallel to me, which during that eerie period in her life was still stranger because we didn’t really stop making love.

What it was—it was that she’d been telling herself for these first three or four or five years it was OK in England; and while she did miss the States (which means nothing phrased that way—missed the East, missed New York, missed Maine), in London the cost of living, the calm, the church music at Temple Church among many others, the magic nearness of the Continent, the informality of a shopkeeper who gives you the radio someone else left to be repaired even though you’ve lost the receipt and the tradesman doesn’t know you; the privacy of private life, the trousered legs sticking out from under a small car on a Saturday morning along some garden street, the café that will not serve you a sandwich five minutes before noon; privacy haunted by the straight unbending, hence averted eyes she felt she passed shopping in the Village, so on an unlucky day she might feel like Lorna in Underland wondering if indeed it was privacy that was being preserved—all these seeming amenities and the lush parks and theater tickets at a dollar and less apiece (theater which we made a point of going to at first, Shaw, Shakespeare), and a foreign country where you spoke the language—and something else whose vagueness I hesitate to let into this Chinese box reflection (Tessa within Lorna within the American Cartwrights abroad), to wit a rich option of returning home which if we’d been living in Portland, Maine, and thinking about New York we could never have entertained in the same grand style—all these things settled us—we even felt we were or had become superior Americans.