Daniel Martin (44 page)

We sat on the highest mound of rubble, facing towards the Sangre de Cristo mountains thirty miles to the east; Taos Mountain and the Rockies north; and over the desert south the Water-Melon near Albuquerque. One could see as far as the earth’s curvature allowed. Much closer at hand, two miles away over another mesa, two ravens spiralled and soared, their voices indistinguishable from those that sometimes hear in Devon still; a bird, a voice, that always shifts me, thirty years in the tiniest fraction of a second, to boyhood. And Jenny beside me, her hands clasped round a raised knee, small tongues of wind in the licks and curls of hair that escaped from the headscarf.

‘What are they?’

‘Ravens.’

‘I thought ravens were just British.’

‘Holarctic. All over the northern hemisphere. Where they have space to survive.’

She stared at them a moment, then gave me a sly look. ‘They’re not saying “Nevermore”.’

‘He got it wrong. Evermore was the real message.’

‘“Ghastly grim and ancient raven… Quoth the raven, Evermore”.’ She bit her lips. ‘It’s not as good.’

‘And blame everything but your own species.’

She swivelled round to face me, rested her elbows on her knees, chin cupped in hands, staring at me, amused.

‘I’ve trodden on someone’s corn.’

‘The foot malady or the false sentiment?’

‘Come on. What’s wrong with Edgar Allan and me?’

‘The only real nevermore in this world is sticking out of the forest behind you.’

Tsankawi is on the fringe of the Los Alamos atomic-bomb laboratory area. We could just see the top of a huge silver hangar several miles away; occasional watchtowers over the wire fence that runs for hidden miles in the trees. Jenny glanced round, then back.

‘I still think it’s a lovely old ham poem.’

‘That’s because you’re a lovely young ham actress.’

She eyed me. ‘I don’t like that.’

‘A bird blind to ornithornancy.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Divination by flight and call. The Romans went in for it.’

‘Did they throw all disbelievers to the lions? Like you?’

She was still staring at me, no longer teasing.

‘You did recognize that junco this morning. I have hopes yet.’

‘Why isn’t it enough that I just love it here? That I don’t want to know all the silly names and the frightfully scientific words.’

‘Because you shouldn’t justify contempt from ignorance. In anything.’

‘But that’s just what you’re doing. Despising me because you don’t know how I feel. That being here with you means more to me than just being here with the birds and the bees. And the raven.’

She said, ‘I’m a people person. That doesn’t mean I’m blind to everything else.’

‘Don’t let’s argue.’

‘I’m not arguing. Just complaining.’

‘Okay.’

‘You get so uptight when I have my own ways of seeing things.’ I didn’t answer, and she added, ‘And use words like uptight.’ I smiled at her, and she held my eyes a moment, then turned and lay on an elbow. ‘Anyway, what’s the point. My next man will probably be just as bored with the nature bit as everyone else.’

‘I thought we’d agreed not to play that game.’

She said nothing. There was a heap of loose earth from a chipmunk burrow just in front of her. She picked out a shard, began idly brushing it clean. Then she held it for me to see.

‘Isn’t that extraordinary there’s a hole in one corner. Someone must have worn it as an ornament.’

It was some two inches square, with a pattern of black lines and heavier zigzags on a pale grey background; and I could see the hole, carefully drilled by some squaw hundreds of years ago. Jenny held it against her blue shirt.

‘Isn’t it pretty?’ She sat up on one arm, began sifting through the earth. ‘I wonder if there are any more.’ Two more shards came to light, but smaller, less conspicuously marked. Again she tried her perforated shard against her shirt. ‘If you had four or five like this, in a pendant, they’d be heavenly.’ Suddenly she put a hand up and tapped her forehead. ‘Dan, I’ve got a marvellous idea. That little jeweller’s studio on Fairfax. They could mount them on silver wire. All my people at home I can’t think what to buy for.’

It was a subject that had already come up that morning in Santa Fe, as I had stood watching her sort through countless trays of rings and bracelets and beads, her taste in agonized conflict with her hatred—half ancestral and half from the fierce determination not to be a mere spendthrift film-star of being fleeced. With one exception, a necklace for her mother, what she had wanted to buy out of liking she had refused to buy out of price.

‘There speaks a true Scot.’

‘Boo. They’d be much more personal.’

And she was on her feet, looking round, then saw more spoil a few yards away. I watched her kneel by it, begin scrabbling in the loose earth again, and almost at once she was showing me another large shard.

‘Look, it’s so pretty. Even nicer.’

She was like a small girl, obsessed by finding the wretched shards. sat there as she wandered further away, every so often kneeling.

I saw her pull off her pink headscarf at one place, and then when she stood again, she held it by the corners, an improvised bag.

I am still not quite sure what combination of factors it was that made me feel offended. The double attempt on her part to raise the banned topic of our future and a corollary feeling that it had be less raised seriously than as a disguised taunt; the little show of independence on the matter of nature; the feeling that she did not sense this place’s uniqueness, for her it was merely a variation on the others; a feeling of transience, un-recapturabilities, abysses, the worm in the rose; that it was against all probability that I would ever be here with her again a feeling that was more often a pleasure, since impermanence adds a zest to experience no fixed marriage can ever achieve but which now, in this vast Olympian landscape, seemed sour and bitter.

The two ravens’ calls became more frequent and I saw them attacking a red-tailed hawk, the noise even distracted Jenny and she turned from forty yards away to point the cause out to me that had encroached on their territory. Though the Americans term the bird a hawk, it is in fact a mere racial variant of the English buzzard, indeed indistinguishable at a distance, just as the mobbing behaviour was indistinguishable from similar scenes in any South Devon sky; which took me back to Thorncombe, my past there and my present, and the impossibility of weaving Jenny into any lasting future.

I am a people person; and I was so little one, in any deep way, that this must always even if there were not so many other obstacles stand between us. This minor coincidence, of seeing two species and a common behaviourism of the English countryside reproduced in a very foreign and remote one, somehow seemed to prove it; all my lasting relationships were with this world of quasi-arcane knowledge and experience… not merely of course in a natural history sense, but because I was fundamentally an observer and storer of correspondences like some iceberg, with nine tenths of what really pleased and moved me sunk well below the understanding of the people I moved among, and however intimately. I mustn’t suggest I thought of all this with some sort of guilt or regret; it was much more with a wistful vanity, a perhaps rather smug knowledge that I was much more profoundly English than Jenny realized; because it was less the outward manifestations that gave the game away than this peculiarly structured imagination, so dependent on undisclosed memories, undisclosed real feelings.

We are above all the race that live in flashback, in the past and future; and by a long blindness I had got myself into the one artistic profession where this essence of Englishness, this psychological and emotional equivalent of the flashback (or flash-forward, flash-aside) lay completely across the natural grain of the medium which was a constant flowing through nowness, was chained to the present image. Of course I had used flashbacks in scripts, and indeed was about to use them massively in the one on Kitchener, but I had never really liked them. It was part of the gospel I had imbibed (from Abe, among others) that they were intrusive, clumsy, a kind of bodge good carpenters strive, except in one or two rare cases like Citizen Kane, to avoid.

The tiny first seed of what this book is trying to be dropped into my mind that day: a longing for a medium that would tally better with this real structure of my racial being and mind… something dense, interweaving, treating time as horizontal, like a skyline; not cramped, linear and progressive. It was a longing accented by something I knew of the men who had once lived at Tsankawi; of their inability to think of time except in the present, of the past and future except in terms of the present-not-here, thereby creating a kind of equivalency of memories and feelings, a totality of consciousness that fragmented modern man has completely lost.

It was an idea, a flash-forward, that pronounced itself unattainable almost as soon as it arose and I can’t recall now whether I even thought at that moment in terms of the novel, or a novel. If my mind ran on anything practical, it was in terms of a return to the theatre… partly Jenny, she retained a strong love of the legitimate stage, and nagged at my pessimism about it. But I felt a discontent at how vastly out of reach of my actual craft this actual moment, Tsankawi, Jenny, the ravens and the hawk, all the steeped resonances, were; so infinitely beyond camera and dialogue and dramatic art, as unreachable as all the landscapes beyond the limits of my eye. In that most pure and open of places, I felt like a man in prison.

I had to attach these feelings to some present object of discontent; and I decided, quite unfairly, that it was Jenny’s shard-hunting.

Never mind that the things lay in thousands all over the top of the mesa, it was in some way sacrilegious, almost as vulgar as Abe’s inability to react to a strange environment except with wisecracks She was using the place, and she should have sensed she had no more right to its artefacts than she would have had to those in a church or a museum… or someone else’s house.

I am not now defending this obviously very strained analogy. I even told myself at the time that my irritation was absurd; and even if it had some faint justification (a notice down by the road did ask people not to remove any manmade object from the site) the proper response was to suggest gently to Jenny that some places had earned their unrifled peace. She would have understood, especially if she knew it meant something to me. But naturally or unnaturally being English I had no sooner given her a black mark than I determined to say nothing about it… that is, I used the incident to award myself a good one: not for pretending to condone her, of course, but for having once more concealed my own hiding-place in the trees.

And it was not really about Tsankawi at all. From Jenny I was secretly demanding an even more impossible reaction: to the fact that I was a lot more in love with her than with anyone else for many years. Never mind that I was quite sure that it would never work out, that it wasn’t fair to her, that we were doing the right thing, that I had very carefully set a sort of subjunctive mood between us that could only view a lasting relationship, and any discussion about it, as in bad taste if not treated as a hypothetical game; I still wanted her to read what was hidden. She was quite right. When I asked her to marry me in the Mojave, it was done in a way to invite refusal; almost out of curiosity, to see how she would answer. I even approved the half-mocking, half-affectionate way she said no. But I suppose I was also looking, as all men do, for a sacrifice of her real self, or at least of all the parts of it that conflicted with the more concealed elements of my own.

The continuing temptation to cozen her, to explore the possibility of a marriage, to lie and suggest she could be a wife, have children, live with me and lead an acting career, was strong enough for me to deserve some credit for having resisted it. One of the perennial lunacies of the film world lies in the contract squabbling that goes on over just this matter of credit in the titles, who cedes whom, how large the lettering, how long the footage; and the case that day was analogous. Jenny was not giving my renunciation enough billing; and looking back, I suspect the real offence in the shard-collecting was that she did not show enough respect to the lost civilization of me. I was the potsherds, and all they apparently meant to her was ornament, cheap gifts to sisters and friends.

She came back some twenty minutes later, with her pink scarf bulging, and squatted by me to show what she had found. She’d decided they would look even prettier framed in silver. I teased her about this abrupt departure from canniness. Deception was easy, and she was absorbed in composing her pendants, laying out little rows of threes and fives, changing them, mulling over her hoard. But then we lost our solitude. A young couple appeared from below, and Jenny rather guiltily covered her finds with her scarf. They passed close by us, a wave and a hi. The young man had their child on his back, carried papoose-style; his rather severe-faced young wife ahead, in a long hippie skirt. They had a nice feeling of closeness, unpretentiousness, simplicity; of research students, perhaps, or from some intelligent commune. But they intruded, and not only on the place. I saw it in Jenny’s eyes as well, as she watched them walk away. She did something rather strange then. She uncovered the shards and stared down at them.