Lookout Cartridge (68 page)

And the Kansas City Indian last seen at Stonehenge I had first seen the night Paul scampered from the grove in Wales.

Which Jan seemed to comprehend now not by receiving but only by in response demanding if I’d done violence to her jaguar—bored a hole maybe.

To house a bomb? To bomb a house—a structure, say, like an inveterate dream-plan where a dark watchman tries to wake and I a lookout on double watch (the squad within, the threat without) may have to cosh him so he stays coshed. Certainly I have not inserted anything in her jaguar, I’ve barely touched it since I took it two nights ago and, traveling under true colors shortly after leaving Alba put less confusion than evidence into Mike, to wit (which then seemed true as I said it) that I’d taken the red jaguar because it made me think of Nash’s nosebleeds.

But there is someone whom I make see red, I learn from Jan.

Oh who is that?

But Jan’s answering that it is not Paul (for Paul has found in stones and stars a calm beyond revolutionary purpose, beyond even peace and contemplation, that she wishes he could pass on) turns my words back to me to the hearsay tale Sunday night told by the splendid woman who left as soon as I came: the nod she gave me: her face like Lorna’s, her name something like Lana: her tale diffused in her absence into a terminal colloquium on violence guess where: but her tale: the man cartridged backwards of so many long pages: a committee of one to undermine a network of violent exiles by sowing confusion among them: is that man me?

If all this is in fact my lookout dream at last and has been since Glasgow (where in that case I am still and where a hotel bed once holding a map now holds me), then I find myself not simply defending the squad inside the target building nor yet excluded from the squad of approaching pursuers: but am instead some crystal semiconductor whose designed impurity draws the two together.

The two? The more than two. As one who once entering Paul’s hut in his absence assumed Paul’s one-time alias, Paul Wheeler, to deal with brothers Jack and Gene who were in the presence of my daughter’s present from me containing a copy of my words that are parallel to the film that was Jan’s idea, I at once now three days later reminded Jan that Paul had indeed been able to pass on to others something of the genius she felt in him.

Witness the deserter Jim and what he found. He came down from Norway and the Faeroes to the Western Isles, the outer and northern parts, and he could have stayed, he said; the low, leaning peatland where a dilettante geologist who owns a small red car put Jim ashore is like the endless Sundays of the crofters’ faith, the dense tablets of fuel dug and handled slow as that Calvinist gravity they were dried to warm; and Jim, next heard of south at Paul’s hut on the slopes of prickly damp Clisham, could just have stayed there: for Paul’s power seemed to Jim to draw an imaginary space where before there had been none so there was now no need to pass on along the line of ostracism from one center of exile altogether by finding an elsewhere in between—

Oh I see, I see what you mean, said Jan.

Which was why Bob his mentor-to-be tried to make Jim’s potentially incendiary words mean something else, for Paul who on our sound track of the Unplaced Room was never named was powerful enough to seem to Jim to change Jim’s life, which is what Jan seemed to hope could be done for someone she was thinking of before—as indeed Paul changed Claire’s life—

Claire! said Jan, blinking twice automatically.

Drew Claire into an idea for amending a world, but she need merely arrange a few introductions, not actually grind an idea into a camera.

You can’t mean Phil Aut’s Claire.

What did Paul say to Jim? Stay on in the hut? No, Paul would not say that to anyone then, not even Claire. Did he tell Jim not to get in touch with Gene, whose name had been given Jim by the dilettante geologist who’d ferried him from Norway to the Hebrides but knew only Paul’s first name and not that Gene and Paul were brothers (only that Gene was the brother of Jack, the dilettante geologist’s periodically profitable connection)? No, Paul was already breaking with the London group but he wished not to have any influence on anyone; he remembered what he had done to Chad at a time when Chad was contemplating a peaceful academic career. At the time Jim left Paul, hiking to Tarbert, buying postcards in the little Harris tweed shop and thinking again that if he could not be a fisherman or a weaver he might just go on walking, Paul was about to leave too: to see first-hand the bluestone quarries in Wales and visit rose-cheeked serious Elspeth and her Hindus and their grove near the two rivers.

Are you sure?

I was there. Near the two rivers the Usk and the Wye along which Dudley Allott on a map as if it were all real could point to where in Wales stone castles had stood long before those rivers were conveyed to Dagger—

The rivers came to Dagger?

—and this influence on Claire rousing a glamorous amateur to cloistered action occurred even before her rendez-vous at Callanish when Claire sought Paul’s hut by figuring alignments but also bringing to bear an interest unconnected with any mere use of Callanish, say to get someplace else. Which is worth remarking, for what did she find after taking her compass readings (which she could have avoided with a map)? She found the man himself in the flesh come all the way up from the south to Callanish to meet her.

Not Phil Aut’s Claire?

It is a refrain Jan can’t help inserting into her alternating protection of Paul with Jerry, and Jerry with Paul (though never the two protected at once). Like my Transatlantic Saving Time that holds in one liquid crystal a Tuesday loft, a London Monday.

After four hours’ sleep I’d woken in the middle of a dream about Lana, and Geoff surprisingly got up when I did—I might have been a condemned man.

I phoned my charter associate.

Geoff and I could not decide between us exactly where Lana had picked up her tale last night of undermining the ring of violent exiles by sowing confusion among them. We discussed the tale but not its link to me. My feet were sore, my daughter now quite near. We decided after all not to drink last night’s coffee. Did the Corsicans drink coffee at the time Boswell visited the revolutionary Republican Paoli? Paoli took him at first for a spy, while the people took him for a British envoy, while Boswell himself (warned on arrival that seducing Corsican women would mean “instant death”) spoke grandly of an alliance between Great Britain and Corsica. I put away half a narrow loaf of last night’s French crust with preserve whose slippery thickness of real apricot I could not bite through as neatly as the small rounds of rewarmed bread. I had to phone Lorna.

And she was asleep but at once began to talk of visitors she had not asked in, she felt guilty now—the parents of a young American. God, she’d never known I was mixed up with deserters, the name is Nielsen, the boy is Jim Nielsen. The father seemed to apologize for his son’s staying in Sweden on some American farm not facing the music, and Lorna asked why Jim
should
face it, and then a strange and sad thing happened (and Lorna still seemed as if my phone call had plugged into her sleep, and I knew she’d been at Savvy Van Ghent’s and probably out late and Will gets his own breakfast and I wanted to crawl down through that line to her and so almost wasn’t paying attention when she told what the thing was) as she and Mr. Nielsen in his lightweight beige waterproof windbreaker stood at the top of the steps Saturday: a woman tall as he and thin and round-shouldered wearing the same new windbreaker came along up the street as if flat-hunting, and it was Mrs. Nielsen and she came along up the steps to stand beside Mr. as if through indigestion she’d fallen behind in the tour but had caught up and was going to get as much out of the guide lecture as she could; she looked down at each step as she came up and didn’t look at Lorna till she got to the top.

But what was the sad thing?

They had come for Jim. Lorna said God what if he doesn’t want to go, or isn’t here? The father said that was really why they’d come. In case he wasn’t here. That is, because he ought to be here. They knew that much. And Lorna said why did they think Jim might not be in London; she said she couldn’t stop smiling. At the end Lorna went back inside, having not asked the Nielsens in, and she could have cried on Will’s shoulder if he had been there, not for her rudeness that had been genuine enough, nor for their tour of inquiries perhaps subtly budgeted; but for their matching wind-breakers. My husband is not at home, Lorna had said—it was just an accident
I
was, she said to me. The Maya, I replied, say there
are
no accidents. Lorna laughed and said, You and Tessa.

Mr. Nielsen looked toward the line of great trees shrouding the houses along what’s called The Grove, where Menuhin lives, and Nielsen had no camera nor the stomach to take a picture. He asked how high Highgate was, and Lorna said the highest spot in London.

Maybe, said Lorna, the son didn’t believe in the war. Mrs. Nielsen put a patient hand on Lorna’s wrist: Jim used to believe in God and in his heart of hearts he still does. He was in our Youth Fellowship his junior year. The Army shouldn’t have had such a bad influence on him. He liked Germany. We told him he would.

I asked Will’s whereabouts.

Away for the weekend.

I said I was sorry to ring so early. She said she was wide awake. How could she be so sentimental first thing in the morning, I said, and about windbreakers?

She thought I had gone right back to America from Glasgow.

Why the hell should she assume that? I said too fast.

Geoff was slowly counting spoons of fresh-ground coffee.

You going back?

Why?

Geoff dragged a black terry-cloth sleeve over some pale Danish butter to get to the small Aladdin’s Lamp dripping fresh-ground Milano that would be too harsh for me at this hour.

Just so I can tell Jenny and Will.

Will’s away, you said.

At Stephen’s.

And Jenny’s in New York. So enjoy yourself.

I did not wish to discomfit Lorna.

New York!

That’s also why I have to be there. How did the Nielsens get my name?

Someone named Bob said you might help.

How?

Find Jim.

Why
were
you in, by the way.

Waiting for a phone call.

Jan after hearing this a day and a half later nonetheless said:
Claire?
Did you
mean Claire?

Claire Wheeler, I said. The astronomer-painter. Not the girl at Outer Film.

Jan walked away, as the movie heroine does when in turmoil. She now recalled her Callanish alias. If, as she now said, there was something too much in my knowledge, she herself was adding to it. Well, she said, she was through protecting Paul; she would leave that to Elspeth and Mr. Andsworth; even that poor idiot Jim, who could not begin to know the size of Paul’s abdication, had gotten into the risky bit of protecting Paul and what with my own involvement with Jim perhaps I was in the business of protecting Paul too, but what could I know of Paul—mere information—business—and she would not hold that against Paul. He did what he could with his gifts…and yet he didn’t.

I suggested Jan introduce Jerry to Paul, Jerry could use help.

Which here Ned Noble, even on his death bed up to the very time he told me I was not getting either his crystal set or the plan for his time machine, would have called a pedestrian trick to learn more of Paul. Yet Jan coming back close to me turned now to the son and not the hero, maybe because it struck her she knew where Paul was and I did not.

If only Jerry would come and live in London. I have so many good friends; an Indian—but you know I’m sure. Jerry is so gifted, so resentful. John has been good to him, Jerry has been good to John. Phil hates me probably. He did the film to lure Jerry, though Jerry says it was to get me. If Phil was corrupting John, as Jerry said, how could Jerry reconcile that with my film itself when John was more than glad to shoot some scenes? Jerry wouldn’t come over when John and June shot the air base. Not even and stay with me. He would do anything to help me. He hates his father owning my gallery. Phil imagines it will keep me in London, but it isn’t the gallery. And here I am: I’m not even
in
London. Phil doesn’t know I’m here unless you told him. But Jerry knows.

My suitcase was at Monty’s, the case that in the minds of Mike and Jan might still be checked in Glasgow, and of whoever had spread word that in Jan’s Mexican jaguar was hidden after all not Mary Napier’s Montrose heart (conveyed to me, it was said, Stonehenge night by the Alabama archaeologist) but a bomb no less. Which, when I learned this shortly after leaving Jan, might have explained why, when I put my hand in my raincoat pocket, I said in answer to her question (What is left if all copies of your diary are gone?), Rub a whiff of nitroglycerine on a table-top, drop a book there and Bang.

Highgate, I might have told Mr. Nielsen, is at its highest 423 feet above sea level. Decomposition sets in more slowly than at peat level.

Jan would like to go shopping with Jerry, she said. Silly of her. She was too bohemian to miss that side of marriage, wasn’t she?

Bohemian? I said.

Get him new boots, or get the ones he was wearing resoled. You never knew what he’d show up in. He had beautiful hair. Why wasn’t it red? His was fine, hers tough.

Where had she gone when she left Alba’s? I asked. I got up; but I couldn’t go, as if she were painting me into her picture.

Jerry wants to do things for himself. He installed two new locks in his loft. He started resoling one boot but that was as far as it went. You’re not as bad as Jack. I didn’t mean to imply that. Just that without you the film could have come off. Paul said there should be some right-wing revolutionaries in the film too. We do not know enough; from that to a series of quiet interviews, and some close-face, calm exposures of some people telling what they want and why; it might have spread a spirit of relenting. But everyone not knowing enough wasn’t the only point; another was just not tricking up some neat script-story but taking power in process, other people’s ongoing energies and tying into them, that’s the way I express it but I got the idea from someone else and that’s appropriate too. I think Jerry understood. But for him as you know Phil is an exploiter.