Lookout Cartridge (24 page)

There was an alertness in the way she said
Reid?

You know Reid, I said.

She had work to do now.

She got up.

I said, Will you take a message from someone you don’t know to someone you do? From Jenny to Reid, it’s this: there’s a carbon of the film diary in her cupboard.

She backed away, got out from behind her desk, side-stepped toward the door to the back room.

Might I use her phone?

She said no. Then she said in a different measured tone that if I saw Reid, someone had been trying to phone him here and would he stop giving this number.

I said I was not in touch with Reid; sorry.

I preferred that Lorna not hear my call, so before returning home I found a kiosk. Cosmo wouldn’t be in my address book, but my address book was back at Sub’s. Now the third of the four London phone directories was missing that in the alphabetical sequence contained Cosmo’s name. I was close to the Knightsbridge bed-and-breakfast hotel where Lorna didn’t know I’d spent last night—long after she’d perhaps prepared that curry for the second tenor. The hotel would have all four phone books. But as I pushed open the glass door of my kiosk I recalled Cosmo’s number—pure accident.

He said he’d got my card and Dagger had told him who Claire was but he didn’t understand why
she
would want to know where
I’d
seen Krish.

Then Cosmo didn’t say anything. After all we are not friends, he knows me only through Dagger and perhaps I don’t like Cosmo.

He said, Yeah well.

I said, What are you doing?

He waited, maybe thinking. Then he said, Just sitting.

I said, I’m off to New York tonight.

He said, That’s your line, man.

I got back to Highgate and Lorna wasn’t home. Will wouldn’t be home from school. I got into the garden along a walk past our black plastic dustbins. The Joni Mitchell
Blue
was in the Knightsbridge B & B. I was three miles or whatever it was away now. London is so large. It is as long as a life. Cosmo had been just sitting, probably reading the sports in the Paris
Herald
. He would phone his sinister Indian friend Krish who must know already I was in London. Say Krish
was
the one who’d ruined our film, what if I never found out why? But what if I did? If I did I could blow the whistle. But why?

Maybe Cosmo was just, as he said, sitting.

There are times when your sense of being between here and there, between people, between one thing and another, fades not even into absurdity but into something else, death or revelation, more likely death, as you sense that whatever they are (whom you are or were between), they are not near after all, not holding, don’t know you, or just don’t know.

The only ground-floor window that I could see from outside wasn’t locked was in full view of the back of the house of one of our neighbors who had complained about the tortoise. It was not locked, but it was a while before I could ram it upward so my old paint-job unstuck.

Minutes it took me. The window was narrow, so rather than dive into this storeroom I got myself slowly around in order to lower my feet to the floor, and this took more minutes. The room was dark but even so I felt the long but now surely shortening twilight on its way. But it was really too early for it; furthermore, in New York, where my body clock perhaps still slowly turned inside my suitcase that Lorna had slowly packed the other night while Jenny and I argued, it was hardly 10
A.M
. Maybe I should just sit. Maybe that was what Phil Aut was doing right now.

Jenny’s cupboard smelled of her perspiration and soap. It was the first time I’d been upstairs since being home. There was an American science-fiction book on the floor. I was sitting on Jenny’s bed checking the pages of my carbon when I heard the door downstairs.

The Mick Jagger poster was slowly coming down over her mantel; a corner was loose like a film wipe peeling a pale fold over the bright brow and toward one eye, the face Rembrandt-bright among the black, brown, blue, and purple of night and clothing, though split and lighted by bits and stripes of ornament that at a glance might as well have been in the audience or low on the sky horizon as on the singer’s shirt and pants. I found I hated him and I tried to control this only to find that I hated him for giving concerts in America.

The gray suitcase Jenny’s fingers had slowly packed for our film stood before the unplugged electric heater rather than in her cupboard where she usually kept it. If I had seventeen carbons of the film diary it would be satisfying to pack them in this suitcase for my getaway.

I heard no steps downstairs. If Will, the kitchen; if Lorna, living room; if Jenny, here; if an intruder, anywhere or here. The distant creak was the fridge; it didn’t make much sound closing because its magnet had failed and we stuck a hunk of cardboard in the top of the door to hold it.

The water running was unusual for Will.

Maybe Lorna rinsing big pale green soft-seeded grapes purchased from our greengrocer by the bus stop.

The water continued to fall, and I took the ninety-odd sheets of typing paper and on impulse a magic marker standing on the windowsill like a mechanical candle, and I eased slowly down these stairs whose dynamics I discovered I had an intimate electric knowledge of, though I had never thought about these stairs except when we were refinishing the wood a long time ago.

Against the stained glass on the landing halfway down I felt exposed as if the color made some friendly demand.

The hall came fully into view and the water running was closer, the faucet needed a new washer.

Will began to sing. He didn’t know I was in London. His voice had changed directly from soprano to a low tenor.

The athletic West Indian who was in charge of the Men’s Convenience in our square greeted me. He leaned against the railing by the bushes, he was waiting for the neighborhood kids to come and play soccer there. On the brick wall near him stood three pint mugs; the pub had closed a few minutes ago until five thirty.

I took a bus to the bottom of Highgate Hill, the Archway, exhaust bad even inside but worse when I got off in Junction Road looking for a Xerox.

The diary would be ready at five. I would not have been followed.

I wondered what Will had been washing. I think I am a counter-puncher, I don’t necessarily start things. It is a fault. Dagger spoke of a film; I made something of it. I did not, as I sat in the downhill bus, rightly know what Dagger had, or thought he had, made of it. I could not have proceeded differently these last few days. Dagger would be sitting at his big table pouring wine for a couple of friends and cutting sausages and discussing a revolutionary newsletter a Pole and an American we knew were putting out broadside. It was a joke, I thought. Dagger seemed more serious talking about L.A. and going back.

I read an
Evening Standard
on the bus and tube. There was nothing in it except an opinion poll from Middle America but I kept looking, kept turning the neat tabloid.

You don’t leave your newspaper on the seat in London; maybe you find a trash can.

I was seeing nothing but the inside of the gallery as I made my way out of the Knightsbrige Underground and up the street.

The girl was standing near her desk with a yellow cup in her hand, no one else in evidence.

She tilted it over her nose to sip.

She nodded and turned to go into the back room where the big canvases were. A chair was pulled out in there and I may have heard her bottom settle just before the knock of her cup on wood.

I went to the Jan Graf picture of the woman. I could not say then how the painter’s analytic design had let me see the red-haired woman; for one thing the abstraction didn’t shift into something comfortable other than its tumbling cubic artily disheveled self, but she was there.

I would visit the homeopathic Druid. He’d known about my diary. He knew me. But he knew something else, even though it might turn out to be associated with his various respiratory and muscular knowledge.

I would like to take a cab home but I had almost nothing but dollars and anyway I didn’t want to spend the money.

With Jenny’s magic marker I colored in the hair of the woman a slick, dry, too orange rust-red. I did not move. The picture had changed. I wasn’t so worried about Jenny. The hair had become too vital and the abstraction had become either more subtle or less strong, depending on your viewpoint.

Jenny could go to America if she wanted. San Francisco would be safer than New York. Even L.A. She could do what she liked with her remaining A-levels. Yet I would never tell her so.

I left the gallery. I was getting fairly close to rush hour, which I avoid.

In a later
Evening Standard
I bought at the tube the only thing different was a stop-press item down the side of the page at right angles to the main print, about a Rembrandt drawing. It had just sold in New York for a puzzling three thousand less than it had been appraised. No doubt no one had lost. The inflation has to stop someplace. I was in a smoker and women on either side of me were smoking purposefully and not reading. You do not pass from car to car in the London Underground, you get in a car and stay there. A boy and girl with high rucksacks on their backs stood swaying at the pole by the door; their packs were sewn all over with insignia.

At the Holloway Road tube stop I met in the elevator an acquaintance outside our circle. He’s a pediatrician. His heavy round face seemed browner. He’d been to 2001 this afternoon all alone. He wanted me to know it at once. He smiled.

We were waiting for a bus, and the Holloway Road lorry traffic wouldn’t let up.

What happened to your sick children then?

I share a surgery with three other doctors, I thought I would disappear this afternoon.

I knew I would remember the man’s name.

I told him the facilities for disappearing were even better in New York. He asked when I was going again, my daughter wanted to go to the States he seemed to recall, to work (wasn’t it?), I was in films he seemed to remember.

On the fringe, I said, if that.

He was quite a nice person.

He said, We know an American couple you must meet. You live in Highgate. I said I was traveling lately but we must be in touch.

Doesn’t your wife paint? he said.

Not yet, I said.

My bus came and he stepped up behind me. I needed a cigarette but we sat downstairs. Some people do listen in England or seem to. It may be better than not listening and if you are the one listened to you sometimes feel good. But there can be something wrong in it. What?

He said he would give me his number and when my timetable was easier we’d get together.

He got my address and number.

I asked if he thought Dr. Spock would make a good President.

I pulled out my little notebook and with it a crumpled American air letter which fell to the floor of the bus. I asked him how to spell his name, I said I couldn’t spell worth a damn.

He had to get up to press the Request button but we were nowhere near his address; I was thinking about his address, visualizing it, I knew the block. He said, I’m just going to take a long look at the work of our mutual friend, and he named Geoff Millan. He smiled again as if at a mystery divided between us. What had he said about New York that night? Nice place to live but dreadful to visit—the opposite of what one said.

Why couldn’t I have asked the gallery girl point blank who the picture was of? Maybe because she wouldn’t have known, or wouldn’t have told. She’d be from a medium posh school on a green estate with stone walls and a sign. She’d be living now in a bed-sitter in South Ken part paid by Daddy and if she gave me her address I could drive there as directly as any licensed hack.

I had missed the rush hour.

The pediatrician’s name was Stein.

But the traffic was thick and so slow even a passenger might the, up Highgate Hill past the Whittington Hospital, past Waterlow Park where when I had plenty of time I’d get off and walk, past places I always used to point out to visitors, Nell Gwynne’s Lauderdale rest house, Cromwell’s (which was Cromwell’s?), past the neat two- and three-story commercial buildings of the Village, the ceramic interior of the antique shop whose bearded proprietor waited for pub-opening time, the now stained long white coat of the butcher whose display of Scotch and Argentine beef seemed to sag in the light, the art supply shop whose well-preserved proprietress told Will and me just before I went to New York that the vibrations of the new traffic up Highgate Hill bound for the North Circular were weakening walls and foundations—past our bank, past a Chinese and not an Indian restaurant and to virtually the top of the hill, the last stop where my bus came to rest window-to-window with the greengrocer where there was a queue from inside out onto the pavement around the shallow wood cartons of something I did not note except some red and some yellow and where inside there was still an awful lot of produce considering the hour.

I cut quickly past the boys playing soccer in the square.

Will let me in. There was not that little surprise to pass through, for Lorna had told him I was back. He didn’t even ask about the film, the suddenness of my return, what airline. He did give a succinct report of the robbery. He asked me to come at once to his room, he had found in Jenny’s room an ordnance survey map that was fabulous, he’d never known about them, it was just that his maths master digressing from averages into applications of averages had spent the whole hour on how map elevations are shown and how you can stick pins at various heights and make a sculptural drape to give a perspective view of what the master called a smoothed statistical surface. I said to Will that I’d had ordnance survey maps around the house for years. In fact, didn’t I recognize that one?

You said we could go up there camping, but we never did.

There?

Well, Scotland. And you said the people had a hard life up there and were very honest.

I could never remember.

Will said he’d come up the stairs from the kitchen figuring just what a burglar would look at coming into our rooms but not knowing what was there and where to begin—and on Jenny’s mantel—Will liked Jenny’s room because she was always changing it—he’d found this ordnance survey map.