Lookout Cartridge (6 page)

Dying to try America. Has a new boyfriend. Plans to take A-levels in Latin, I hope.

Now Claire let
me
wait. What’ll you do with the film they missed?

Who’s
they?

My chat with Geoff Millan recircuited Fast Forward; I heard nothing new.

Claire smiled: It’s your life; how would I know who
they
is? Going to make any more films?

I’m still working on this one. It’s all written down.

Who reads any more? said Claire.

VACUUM INSERT

Show an American girl London the day before the young bodies of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney are missing in Mississippi—which makes it summer solstice years ago. She rang you at home in Highgate, got your wife Lorna who passed the phone instantly to you even though you were twenty feet away.

Now you hear the girl again when the bearded desk clerk hands you the house phone. She’s running behind schedule, she says, would you like to come up.

OK, but what’s with her? It’s too early for a drink even if she had a bottle in her room. You don’t know her. Surely she doesn’t want you to listen to her brush her teeth.

The lift’s ornate ironwork opens each floor as you and the attendant rise past. It’s a lovely machine, ride all day, not a cage. You catch the eye of a chamber maid passing along a hall her arms full of last night’s sheets, then she’s out of sight below you.

Your college friend Sub’s wife’s former roommate this is: you forget the first name as you take her hand crossing the threshold, it’s a double room. A harpsichord steady and copacetic is coming from a little transistor on a plaid suitcase. Not a stitch of clothing adrift, not a half-slip, not a passport on the bureau’s glass top or a collection of change. Her bed is turned right down and a London
A
to
Z
is on the night table by a half full tumbler with bubbles at the bottom and up the side. She takes the tumbler into the lav.

She’s tall and dainty, her page-boy newly trimmed. She gives you a lifesaver. She stops the transistor, and her name comes back: Connie—Constance. She makes references to her parents and the job she’s just packed up, and a play she got a ticket for at the last minute last night. She puts a hand to her cheek thinking. She puts the transistor on the bed, opens the suitcase and carefully tears out two travelers checks. When you ask how Sub and his wife are, she locks the case, comes very close to you and says, Not good.

She’s better being solemnly shy in the slow elevator. She thanks the attendant, who thanks her, and doesn’t volunteer additional information when I answer her question about the big orange globes on posts at crossings. Belisha Beacons. Belisha. Someone during the war.

You cross Oxford Street and in the busy seclusion of Soho Square she turns the talk from your awe-inspiring expatriation to the church on the left which you find you don’t know anything about though you’ve sat on these benches reading
The Evening Standard
waiting for Lorna. You say it’s Huguenot you believe, let’s look.

Anon, leaving the far side of the Square you point out the film companies and for some reason say you want to make a film. About England sort of. When she asks if you have any experience, she seems quite alone.

To reach Blake’s house you cut through quiet St. Anne’s Court where, nodding at the male window-shoppers, you ask if she wants a little bedside reading, and she giggles. At the corner of Broadwick and Marshall down the block and across the street from the pub named for the pioneer anesthetist Dr. Snow, there is the sign on the small house, and you both read it. She says, Blake’s wife was totally uneducated. Let’s see, what would
he
have said about pornography?

You tell her a hat-designer friend of yours is just round the corner, and Carnaby Street’s a few steps further down Canton, but she asks if St. Paul’s is near Aldermanbury Square, she promised to say hello to an associate of Daddy’s. You say, That’s getting down into the City; she says, Where are we now then? and you explain the City with a capital C.

Her father’s associate is of course a broker. He is plugged into a New York Stock Exchange computer but of course when he plays with it to show what it can do the quotation on the read-out panel is yesterday’s closing because it’s only 6;30
A.M
. in New York. He cashes a travelers check for Connie.

Children roam St. Paul’s. They pass under arches and look up into Wren’s Roman dome. Leave the Whispering Gallery to them. You show your guest the gold American chapel from the war, and she says she sometimes forgets if Churchill is dead yet or not and you say he wouldn’t appreciate that in his present state, and she says, Of course I wouldn’t say it to him, and giggles as if she’s chilly. She wants to see John Donne in his winding sheet and you tell her where it is and say you’ll wait.

In a small antique pub where every varnished line seems out of plumb you buy her a late lunch. You tell how Wren couldn’t get his way after the Great Fire, the Parisian unity of radiating axes offended the English mind, so London remains neighborhoods. Yes, instead of a baroque wheel (you say, wondering about another pint and about Connie), or for that matter say a grid like Manhattan, you say—but then you say Oh Christ and with a smile raise your mug and she touches and says, Thanks for riding down in the elevator with me, and she means it. You say she could have walked down, and she says she has several times.

You bear two halves of best bitter back to your lanterned nook thinking that Lorna said, Don’t you dare bring her home for dinner.

Connie asks if you have money of your own.

You return to the elevator. She says they just terrify her, that’s all there is to it, it’s her only neurosis.

She wants to see the London Stone, she isn’t sure why. The
what?
you say. We’re quite warm, she says, her finger on square 2B page 62 of her
A to Z
.

You say, Something to tell my English friends about, I mean whoever heard of the London Stone?

It’s stuck, in fact, into the outside of the Bank of China. The Cannon Street traffic grinds by, and she reads the plaque out loud, you watch her lips pucker on a couple of
w
’s and the tip of her nose takes a delicate dip-and plaque and
A to Z
mingle in the mind—this relic moved here 1962 from Church of St. Swithun’s south wall where it had been since 1798 (whip out your box and snap it onto Kodachrome), piece of original limestone once fronting Cannon Street Station, something about 1188 Henry Son of Elwyn de Loudenstone later Lord Mayor, this hunk is the stone the Romans used to measure all distances from London.

She’s a real walker, but when you find a little church she seems glad to go in and sit. She says things are so bad with Sub and Rose she doesn’t like to visit them; Sub gets a second wind and is charming to Connie and Rose accuses Connie of taking sides. Too bad Rose is pregnant again.

You suggest tea at Connie’s hotel. Can’t I buy you a drink? she says.

Pubs aren’t open till five thirty.

And I’ve got my train to catch, she says.

You think, Well that’s that.

Salisbury by dusk, she says, maybe wear myself out so I can sleep.

Can’t sleep?

Not in the normal course of things, she says.

You push a bit: the
normal course
of things?

She turns in the pew and contemplates your lapel before dismissing you.

I could have given you Raymond Chandler, you say,
The Big Sleep
.

Travel books, she says, they’re wonderful drugs.

You ask if
they
put her to sleep, and she says almost but not quite.

So, out of bed tomorrow morning in Salisbury; meet friends, drive to Stonehenge, get ahead of the crowds. Do you believe the Druids used it? she says. Why not? they use it now. Well, do you believe they sacrificed human people there? she asks. Maybe. Have you been? Never. The raincoat has parted over her thighs, are those patterned stockings tights? Two black copies of the Book of Common Prayer stand in the rack. You put your hand on hers and look her in the eye and say, Do you believe Merlin was buried alive under one of those megaliths at Stonehenge?

I’ll have to see, she says.

At her hotel she declines your help saying she’s got to get organized.

You wonder if Lorna rang up the garage, they’ve had the bloody car ten days. You buy an
Evening Standard
at the tube.

3

Before I could wait for Outer Film I had to make sure they’d take action. Under the timeless tungsten of the tenth-floor hall, I felt in my pocket through English and American change for the key that Sub had given me, but then Myrna let me in. Her dark face broke the momentary glare of a living-room window which for a second took even her eyes into blackness. She must have heard my steps and looked through the peep hole. She scuffed back to Sub’s room. Her stockings were laddered each in exactly the same way. She’d had her hair conked but then fluffily curled so it looked like an Afro I’d seen on a white girl in Claire’s elevator.

On Sub’s bedpost hung a towel or two maybe still damp after the drier. Wash quilted the big bed, a week of Sub’s and his children’s things. Over a bunched sheet lay what looked from where I stood in the hall like the Johann Sebastian Bach sweatshirt I’d brought Billy from the States the spring JFK beat Humphrey. When Billy out grew it Lorna passed it back across the Atlantic.

I would phone Outer Film.

Between the fridge and the kitchen table the ironing board had been set up and on it was a blue glass of water and the iron on end, its cord taut across the adjacent counter to the plug. Water in a saucepan had come to a bubble; I turned the flame off, found a glove-potholder and poured, and the teabag label popped into the mug. I phoned the charter man to see if he wanted to have a drink, though we could have settled our business on the phone—it was the England holdovers on New York-to-Sidney charter flights: people had complained. I asked him to speak up; he said it was the connection. Myrna stepped around me to rescue her tea.

I phoned Outer Film and there was a voice talking before the ring could start. I asked for Mr. Aut, my gamble worked, and I settled for asking a woman to tell him I’d called and then as if as an after thought added that I’d left part of a diary at Claire’s flat and would Claire mind mailing it on. I said I’d just got in from London and was in a rush. I hung up.

Suspicion is a comfort. I was able to like Claire even less having made this phone call, though now again infused with that uncertain languor I’d felt as I came from the lav and visualized her lying along or across her bed on her belly or her back. But she might almost as well have been talking to some Man from the Moon as talking about me to the Monty Graf who’d inspired inarticulateness in her earlier.

Myrna’s tea mug was on her
News
. She was older than when I’d seen her in April, it was her smart hair—but there was her long, very bare neck sustaining the brown eyes, and her forearms lay smooth and rich. She sighed and slowly without looking up said, Mr. Cartwright you a regular globe-trotter.

Just another commuter, I said, and she sighed with a little tittering catch in her throat.

The second before I’d hung up, the secretary hadn’t tried to pass me on to Claire, which might mean Claire hadn’t got back there yet. I had to allow for the chance that Phil Aut might not get the message I’d left for Claire, but then again he might.

I wrote one for Myrna to give Claire if she phoned. She might any minute.

Myrna pushed her chair back and said she had her ironing. The phone rang and I handed her my message telling her who it might be and what to say.

But it was Sub. Myrna passed me the receiver. Sub had a late appointment at the dentist, would I pay Myrna eighteen ten. I said, What about the children. Sub said, There’s a slight though tantalizing chance Rose will take them tonight, she knows I have to be in Washington this weekend so this week she wants them on a week night. But Myrna’s there when they get home and I’ll be home no more than an hour after she leaves no matter what happens. It’s exciting, said Sub. He wanted to know if I’d be in for dinner. Myrna was scanning my note.

At a drug store I bought some 3-D cards, the Americana Hotel, Empire State, George Washington Bridge, World Trade Center, Grant’s Tomb. One I sent to my family adding that I’d forgotten what I was to bring home for Jenny. At the soda fountain counter recalling all those lemon cokes after Scout Troop meetings Friday nights, I was so near recalling what she’d asked for that I at least knew it was peculiar and I imagined now that so had been her tone and I suspected I’d done something peculiar
with
her request, I had my finger almost on it but the thin, heavily made-up elderly woman behind the counter came toward me drying her hands and said, Yes? and I thought and said BLT on white toast, forgetting about American bread.

On my way back to the scene of the accident I stopped in a record shop and looked through the bins of cassettes all tumbled together on sale. An old gent in a camel’s hair overcoat asked me the difference between a cassette and a cartridge—but a girl in a khaki cape and blue-smoked glasses spoke up and said a cassette gives half an hour on each side, an eight-track cartridge means you can flip from the middle of one track to the start of another. When he said he didn’t know why his niece would do
that
, I added that cartridge and cassette were alike in that you inserted both into solid state systems, and the girl said to the old man, I get it mixed up myself sometimes. He had a drooping white moustache.

A recording ended that I’d barely noticed; rock you’d have to call it, with southern accents and a lot of falsetto—the girl touched the old gent’s sleeve and told him the group was English.

Now
You Are Everything and Everything Is You
came on and like a sacred loop awaiting release repeated the title words and repeated. And I left the shop convinced the gift I’d forgotten wasn’t anything to do with cassettes.

Halfway down the block I knew Lorna wanted the new Joni Mitchell record.

A trip like this can get away from you and in the middle of a giant traffic that, unlike Lorna, I’d never left though never lost because never gained, you believe that there in a Manhattan avenue, as if at the bottom of some poor type-compositor’s dream surrounded by three-and four-and five-hundred-foot sticks of type, the trip’s idea has been by some regulatory betrayal fed back to your point of departure. But the idea wasn’t just there back in London, any more than you have to come to New York to shop to the music of cassettes. Any more than Dagger’s movie began as we drove across Waterloo Bridge in the middle of the night after a marathon showing at the National Film Theatre, and Dagger said as he often had said, Let’s make a film: and I said, I’ve got an idea.