Lookout Cartridge (60 page)

But a briefly fast 64 fps if you ever get it developed comes out of your 24 fps projector slow motion.

Babysitters were thirty cents an hour, chars sixty. Lorna began to want a job, but an interesting one. The children were still too young. We bought a better piano. By the time we moved to High-gate to a house that despite the corruption of its roses is worth nine times what we paid for it in ’58, I was glad to leave that plain white room bare again, a possibility for someone else, and Dagger DiGorro on May 24 would not have understood my sense of the room we filmed—a room anywhere, a future.

Jan Aut’s marmalade cat walked slowly out of the Unplaced Room and made its way to the kitchen. The phone had rung again, so I waited. Kate had said
Speak of the
…when she picked up; then she said, Her brother; then a succession of yeses; and then: I’ll tell him.

When she came out she was the gallery girl again, and so, picking up her last remark before the phone calls, I said, Jan’s persuasive all right but she needs a helping hand.

I nodded at the picture leaning against the piano leg. Kate looked pretty well through me, but found a smudge of foreign matter and could not look further.

Where are you off to now?

Back to New York, I said, some work that Paul’s involved in. I’ve hardly been away.

Kate’s hand found the collarbone, but no connection occurred, and I wondered if she had tried two glasses of warm water and a good vomit first thing before breakfast.

She couldn’t quite let me go. What limit would my going put upon her? She ran her words together: Just as well this film was lost, p’raps you’ll try another someday.

I took two steps to her, my hands at my sides: Who says it’s lost?

Beyond her shoulder I saw the door to the Unplaced Room stir but it was only my angry imagination fueling the fire of my diary with a chair seat and a table leg or two from the absent brother’s hut.

I had a hand on her shoulder and did not let her move. I asked what the devil
she
knew about an Unplaced Room, or Māyā, or a Hawaiian Hippie playing a guitar under the Science Museum and his little girlfriend from Long Island in a U.S. sergeant’s jacket swaying from one boot to the other above a dirty yellow felt hat on the ground with a coin in it. What had such a thing to do with Kate’s job in a gallery, with a green, stone-walled private school? What was West Hempstead, Long Island, to Kate? Not even a suburban town that supplied an entrant for the Miss New York State contest. Had Kate any feeling for a couple like that? the boy’s father in the iron business in Honolulu County, the girl’s father in the carbon business; the girl as American as a Duncan Hines brownie, the boy as American as a quart can of pineapple juice, a dropout on the move represented in the 1960 tattoo on Savvy Van Ghent’s strong arm by one star no newer than the star that stands for that ancient and fundamental signatory state Virginia. There was a simple power in the two of them together that Kate could disparage as boring and American and even unsavory—

Wait, she said without removing her shoulder from my hand, oh wait, half my friends are Americans.

I said what could Dagger’s rhythm of approach mean to Kate. Without a dolly he had had to level his walk as if with a sort of slow-motion gear astonishingly well-coordinated, the camera like a quart of trinitro-glycerine—though the different speeds at which he went by the two young people did not include actual slow-motion, though after five or six passes we set up right in front of them so pedestrians who’d been our camera point of view would now be separate and pass between us and the two kids—

I may not know what you mean by Māyā but I do have some feeling for fine things—

—and now at my urging (for two bowlers and two rolled black umbrellas came bobbing and capering toward us respectively down the passage) we went to 64 frames a second so in the print the Hawaiian Hippie’s fingers would be dream-slow and the girl’s bending and swaying might hint of girls in grass skirts and thick swinging leis performing to make compatriot tourists feel right at home under a sunny volcano just as the bowlers and brollies marched darkly past in a sudden resumption of the sound of the hard authentic unsweetened version of “Both Sides Now,” and Dagger had made the preceding series of approaches from the Science Museum end of the tunnel with the South Ken Underground end facing us beyond the boy and girl almost as if we were trying again and again to make someone appear at that end and come toward us, but I had inserted a silence without telling Dagger, just switching off the little Nagra we were using while creating a silence between the music so the music would ride on with its own momentum or the viewer could suddenly find he’d been making his own music all the time, or silence would plunge him into meditation. Dagger had said when we started out that American kids playing in Undergrounds around London could be a good little scene and Jenny you see had spoken a day or two before of how she and I and Will used to go to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum and so I suggested that pedestrian tunnel and there we found this boy and girl but they weren’t there when Reid and Jenny ran into Dudley and Jane in the same tunnel three weeks later.

The same tunnel? said Kate, and I removed my hand from her shoulder. I was between her and something that was going on outside this flat.

Yes the same tunnel, I said, and Dudley Allott was wearing a black V-neck pullover under his mac exactly like one that was packed in a later scene of our film.

But wasn’t it a coincidence their meeting?

They were bound to meet someday, I found myself saying. Like Dudley and your employer’s brother-in-law Monty Graf who have been on the blower discussing Maya within the last seventy-two hours. Like Nash and the deserter at Stonehenge.

Kate backed away and sat down by the table from which I’d taken the red jaguar. That was Monty Graf just now, she said, and I had the sense (which I felt then that no formula could validate) that I’d drawn her into a moment of freedom where accelerations had equaled one another and she would give me anything I wanted, even the knowledge of what it was I wanted. The door of the Unplaced Room moved. The cat, having come out of the kitchen, walked across a rug. Put the two shots together, rig the illusion of an adventure, and the viewer like some attentive victim-to-be of terrorism could be made to see the cat as moving the door instead of the real event which was the wind from the window of our May 24 film scene which at that moment of increasing weightlessness and vision I inclined to see as my own presence in that Unplaced Room plotting my way, glad of my young wife’s willingness in the fifties to live abroad for a while, listening to Will somewhere in that first house screaming while I watched Miss Topp and blue-nosed Mr. Sharpe with his pruning shears in the adjacent garden standing like conspirators by the smoking incinerator into which he had stuffed refuse, and the two of them then turn to catch me watching from my study which in ’58 I was to abandon for the Highgate house where my study had none of that free unspecified air in which as in our film much was possible.

Or for that matter (I said) me and Phil Aut’s cameraman who wouldn’t have understood the silence I inserted like a breath of seawater waxed in your ears.

The words came unchosen, and I added, Oh we ran him ragged at Stonehenge, he didn’t have a clue.

There’s not much John misses, said Kate.

For one thing, I said, he sometimes misses Incremona’s moods. Which is about as risky as you can get. Now
that was
a coincidence, I said (thinking that that bumptious John of the Marvelous Country House had certainly not been the other man with the movie camera at Stonehenge).

What
was? asked Kate.

Running into Incremona in Corsica, I said.

But the other coincidence, said Kate, as if not wanting to change the subject—who is Jane?

I was picturing John the man in glasses from the Mercer Street loft holding a camera in the lurid flashes of our Stonehenge night. That cameraman hadn’t been wearing glasses, and this John of mine on the loft floor where I’d dropped him had been half-blind till he got his steel-rims back on. I told Kate Jane was the daughter of the man that Monty had been phoning for information, and I remarked that the real coincidence was that Jane knew Reid.

But my words were again almost too much for the occupant of that Unplaced Room amid the circuiting dark of many degrees of past: for hoping to look only out ahead, wherever I looked was back—the tunnel of pedestrians impeding our scene in static twilight while the boy from Honolulu banged his steel strings, the tunnel bearing me home from the fact of English twilight which that afternoon I had learned must preclude any undertaking to launch a Drive-in cinema in the Liverpool area, the tunnel of Beatle rock in my carriage drowsing me toward that mobile terminal the wheels of which are paved with peat but which recedes from what Ned Noble once called my pedestrian imagination, so maybe I will never except in daydreams catch it and patent it or in some weightless or depictured bare unsituated room plan it down to each revolution of each wheel, but there is no revolution, the wheel is at Yarner’s Coffee Shop in Upper Regent Street and it is a huge elegant coffee-grinder wheel for show, and Jane to be precise had said merely that Reid had waved passing the window: but to Tessa? or to the other woman? what was her name? Hunt, Winston, she was American, Simpson,
Flint
, it was Flint.

Oh Reid knows everyone, said Kate.

You didn’t know him when I asked you Monday.

Kate’s hand skipped her collarbone and went to her eyes. She crossed her legs.

I would try one more thing, then give up here in order to preserve momentum. I was going to Dagger’s to find out why he was holding the Unplaced Room out from Claire, why he’d wanted to put the Hyde Park Softball Game between the Hawaiian and the Suitcase; to find out if in fact the film I’d seen unwound and tangled on Dagger’s table (of even less value now than the strips of adhesive tape that had been used to seal the silver cans) had been our film, and if not, why not—and to find out where the sound was, that Monty outside my New York cab had suddenly thought of when the headless bike-rider whipped by. Also I had to cash a check.

I moved toward the foyer and asked, without looking back, if Kate would be surprised to know with whom Paul and Jan might be staying in Scotland.

Kate was close behind me, her steps left the rug and touched the floor.

You
knew
she wouldn’t be here, didn’t you! Why did you come?

I turned to Kate in the foyer and over her shoulder the crack of dark into the Unplaced Room flickered like a Highland chieftain’s thigh or Tessa’s, or like Dudley’s detached elbow in the pool lane parallel to mine, or like my face retracting from the bare window of my room in the Marylebone house in ’55 when Miss Topp and Mr. Sharpe the gardener looked around from the incinerator, or like the mystery snap packed quick as a blink between sweater and shampoo.

You don’t know Mary’s brother, I said, who used to be a force in the Scottish Nationalist Party.

I had the door open. I didn’t feel the weight of my pack. I had been editing the film as if it existed. Did I want it to exist? In my dream, miles of film paid out of my abdomen into the light as someone walked away holding the leader.

I’d nearly run through the cash I’d taken from the Indian’s wallet.

Kate had her hands crossed over her chest. Her eyes were wide. I had won her, if not her information.

Where? she said.

Mary’s brother?

Kate nodded.

I leaned toward the open doorway and shifted my feet.

Kate’s next words were barely breathed. Your daughter may be in weal twouble.

Jan before Jenny, I said, but pictured two heads on a motorbike and two hands signaling an impossible turn, and a diary cached at Callanish.

Even
I
am supposed to be tonight, she said. In danger.

England is not safe for me, I said. But neither is where I’m headed.

My voice sounded loud after Kate’s. Will you be seeing the Flints? I have something for them.

Kate whispered in reply: That was Nell who
phoned
.

I replied in a whisper. I stroked the cheek of this English girl wondering if my heart had shrunk like the brave dismembered Montrose’s into a secret cartridge:
Māyā
, Kate, means the world is not separate from me. It is color, it is black and white.

Kate and I talked low as if indeed there were someone in the Unplaced Room.

Your film, was it in color?

Some of it. The Unplaced Room was.

Oh, the paintings.

We took them down.

Where are you going?

Who was the third phone call?

Nash.

Whom were you going to tell what?

You never told me your dream.

My daydream will have to do.

What’s your favwit color?

You ask as if you knew.

Orange Monday, red tonight, said Kate.

So in return for inadvertently identifying the Flints for me. Kate had noticed the jaguar’s absence.

I thought of shadowing the building to see who went in and who left. But in return for the ten quid I borrowed from her, Kate said she’d phone me a minicab.

The driver was very young. I got hardly a glimpse of his face. His accent was not English, not European, a hint of Irish that he might have been hiding.

My pack was in the front seat and the pockets of my parka were lighter sitting down.

15

The second-floor windows were dark, but it was early for Dagger and Alba to be in bed. On the other hand, the baby was less than two months old and Alba had been tired. The house in Belsize Park in which they had their high-ceilinged floor-through flat was fronted with pillars like Geoff Millan’s. But theirs was part of a row of heavy cream-colored residences owned by the Church, whereas his was a narrower brown brick with gray and red on either side.

The names by the bell were lighted. The downstairs door has had no lock for as long as I have known the house. I did not ring. The cab motor idled; under the dome-light the young man was studying his
A to Z
as if he was aware of me. There was a white stripe painted down the middle of the bonnet.