Lookout Cartridge (64 page)

I am Catherwood.

I am Māyā.

Why not use the film to push the diary.

As if still in Glasgow, but now with more weapons, I had nearly willed myself to sleep and knew the comb on the bathroom floor did not belong; for Alba was too careful.

Hands pinioned in the new raincoat now packed in a suitcase checked at the West London Air Terminal, I heard through that static escalator field down which I had plunged, two men angrily arguing, their voices receding.

Between this and what happened next, I knew myself to be adequate.

16

Dag, she called, and a light came on and she got no answer. I was half there.

I contemplated my absence. Nothing happened.

More light thinned my lids, and a rustling preceded a second silence unlike the first. Then above me very near, the baby moaned.

You who have me may see on the far side of my shut, untrembling lids, the tight-bunned contour of Alba’s hair silvery in this light.

She went away.

The baby squawled.

Would Alba change her in the bathroom?

Alba, I called, as if I had just woken.

Alba didn’t speak.

After a while she was nearer.

The baby at first crying as she was at last put down was not sung to but told some nonsense tale that she could not understand at two months but that in some sound of the words stilled the cycles of her energy.

Alba was in the living room, the light behind her.

I told you to take care of Dag, she said. And what have you done?

A woman with a baby, a woman with a closet full of tools, a woman with a husband she had introduced me to ten minutes after she had met him herself and five after she’d met me, in November of ’63 in the hotel room of an American acting as adviser to engineers who were about to introduce a computer into the London traffic mess, and this American Lorenzo kept hugging Dagger and calling him an untrustworthy bastard and when Dagger invited among others me and my “wife” over on Saturday and I accepted, Lorna came up behind me, said we had tickets to
Uncle Vanya
Saturday, and introduced herself to Dagger and Dagger said her dark hair and blue eyes were sensational and demanded to know when our show let out Saturday. Six of us that Tuesday night (for Lorna had a sitter) went off to Alba’s for spaghetti, and it was clear that she and Dagger clicked. She kept her aphorisms demurely few but sharply apropos.

Here cut in ten seconds of Dagger’s applause record, a particular favorite with Cosmo, who taped it for his own collection.

Add: Dagair, Dagair, I will geeve you da Croix de Guerre, crooned by Alba’s Paris pal, the model, kissing him once on each lip.

Or if maps came with sound, think of Bourguignon d’Anville the eighteenth-century cartographer clearing away the false lakes of Africa and shrinking the Antarctic continent he refused to believe covered half the southern hemisphere.

If you have filmed Alba with sound, but failed to change the aperture when shifting up to slow motion, you who knew her and had seen her would have the efficient voice still more sequential. With it you could call up the turn of one shoulder toward you with the dip of the neck as she introduced between (a) your curious question (Did you recently refinish the table by the window?) and (b) a simple reply (which would have been No) the counter-query to you, Why did you have to keep a diary in the first place?

Anyhow facing you she was so gently still that slow motion would have singled out only her lips: unlike the night Dag and I came back from the final shooting at the air base and I insisted on our filming with Alba’s 8 their flat and the three people we found there, and suddenly I knew how to do it—in slow motion with the sound later slowed also—a fitting end for our film and for me a private recollection of a dream I’d had a week after Lorna and I fought our one and only first and last physical fight, and after trying to dream my lookout dream I was stuck instead with our fisticuffs and wrestling falls and crabbed fingers slow motion as if we were running down, or approaching the state of stills or being analyzed in someone else’s purview plan we’d no say in, and the dream turned words and grunts into some unheard-of madness or underlying real structure that in my dream I was merely impatient with though I’d heard in these disintegrated sounds evidence that Lorna was Jewish—and Alba the night we came back from the base was so restless, up and down, smoking, cocking her wrist, jumping to change a record-band, that she would have constituted a struggling current in the ultimate footage: but Dagger yakking on about Cartwright’s unique plan for a moving terminal had not changed the aperture, and though he said he’d send the film in, there was no hope—as it turned out—at that speed apparently you need much more light. And since I was going away mad, Dag decided to be funny describing Phil Aut, a tense abstemious man, who had told Claire a rule of thumb for 16-millimeter production was a thousand dollars a minute, but the three fellows in Alba’s Swedish chairs either were tired or didn’t find our film venture droll, and neither did I till I was in the minicab Alba called for me and was away from her living room watching white-framed windows flicker down a quiet sturdy street and then saw we were wrong and told the driver to turn, and then was sorry, as if a univac’s fingerprint of micro-rectangles had switched us to a more logical route at the end of which was the chance I had always foreseen that the film would come to nothing, and a gate swung open upon the nuclear family if in fact you got past omens along the way and reached the gate and inside the gate slept wife and hilly seaside village a week hence—son and maybe daughter—who were
not
coming to the seaside village—and the memory of two helium balloons Dagger gave them the first Christmas we knew him, 1963.

Tell me, Alba, why did we even go there? I asked her now in October in answer to her challenge that you who have me will recognize echoed her light parting plea to me in July to take care of Dag during the Corsican trip. But I added that I had not needed to go to Ajaccio to know that Mary-the-Scot’s brother had helped to influence Paul to disentangle himself.

I got my feet onto the floor. Would the lady like me to go? I asked.

What did it matter? she said.

Very tired I was, I said.

Had I been locked out then? she said. Surely
Will
was at home?

Dagger’s plan to put the Softball Game between HH and SSP would bring into linkage or collision with the mystery snapshot and the tunnel I’d more than once traversed with Jenny and Will as children, the top of Will’s head: for the camera as I’d thought (and Dagger confirmed) had scalped Will—for Dagger panning behind home stopped to get a long shot of Krish, Jan, and the other Indian sitting on the grass, and Will was under the Beaulieu’s path and we got his hair. But what could it matter, editing a film that was possibly as Claire had said nonexistent—said so bleakly I’d wondered that first noon in her flat if after all she did indeed care; no, it was Monty who cared, and in part because of his sister Jan whom I assumed Alba knew, though I asked not about her but (yawning) whether Monty had got back from Coventry, I’d meant to phone the number there, did Alba have it?—which drew from her then, You mean John? and I at once though casually said yes that bumptious florid chatterbox ego and she said well he was very intelligent and was always going off to America but she hardly knew him and had
I
involved Dag with him? he was in munitions. Monty, I said, was responsible for that, and if Dagger was going to have secrets from me with Claire I could not very well be held responsible for his involvements.

I rose—still profound with my brief half-sleep—and followed Alba into the kitchen. My rucksack seemed even more in evidence as if Alba had lifted it and let it slump back lower against the wall.

She filled a kettle and did not look at me. She said she should imagine Lorna was home by now if I wanted to phone.

To ask, Is the film destroyed, and to hear, Dag
told
you so, why ask me?—was like going back to September yet like drifting into November—Guy Fawkes pennies dropping boom boom—Thanksgiving harvest—Christmas cassettes from the U.S. But Alba was less tired than she claimed, for when I said I’d never really
had
the film so I could not really discard or lose it, she cited the Sufi sage who retorted to a man lamenting his penniless state, My son, perhaps you paid but little for your poverty.

But my diary was gone too, I pointed out; and in the instant now before Alba’s startling answer I saw the dilettante geologist in his red mini combing Callanish for Krish, and maybe Jack with him, for Jack had sent Krish to pump the man, which might mean Jack was not sure of the man, yet were one of them to find Jenny’s cache and Reid were then to know, Reid might pay her back, assuming I was right that Reid was merely using her for information, albeit information on how much information I and possibly Dagger and others had on him and others associated with a project I now had to assume went well beyond the mere harboring of Vietnam exiles and drug-pushing in the Underground.

I
know
, said Alba, and took a plate down from the closet and automatically ran water on it, and it’s just as well for all of us your diary is gone.

She would like
me
gone.

She and Dagger served each other, and also by absence.

Jenny looked up from her hard concentrated typing and when I gave her a peck on the forehead she asked what I’d meant in what I’d written about the Corsican waiter and the Italian who imposed his will on all those shrimp, and I said that if Dagger or Alba were ever to read the passage they’d laugh.

French for
revolution
is French also for
revulsion
, the Corsican waiter (looking daggers at those shrimp) serves the affluent Italian’s bald power not quite satisfactorily cloaked just as the Italian’s smug will serves the waiter’s energy—this on each side in lieu of wishing real change.

Dagger that first night in Alba’s flat after drinks in Lorenzo’s hotel room, reached an arm round Alba’s shoulder to slide in another box of spaghetti. He ordered her around. She opened a bottle of Chianti which of course she would have in her larder. Lorna asked the computer man if Kennedy was in trouble and he said Jack was doing better with the girls than with Congress, and I shut up because Lorna had recently condemned me for talking for her in public.

But go back to ’58—the eve of Tessa’s disappearance—and I’ll tell you Lorna wanted more than that: she wanted me silenced, wanted me in some subtle or tentative embodiment dead. We would speak not quite loud enough: What? The words would get said again. Lorna often didn’t hear when she should have heard. And she guessed wrongly all I heard in her silences, conceded me a power.

Which might be like what Alba was coldly to concede later tonight as I was leaving when she said, I do not
want
to know what you know. But Alba conceded in another stubbornly obeisant way now and a moment before, by hinting Lorna’s whereabouts, a party (which could not be Geoff Millan’s, that I now recalled we had been asked to, for he did not know Dagger and Alba)—and hinting she’d heard my diary had been destroyed (which meant that Kate or someone who’d spoken to Kate had routed the knowledge to where Alba was).

So Lorna let the cat out of the bag tonight, I said.

Of course it wasn’t Lorna, said Alba, it was Savvy.

But he heard it from Lorna, I said.

No, someone phoned him in the bedroom, Michelle woke up and was crying, and I was sorry I’d come, I’m very very tired, he hung up and asked me where Dag had
really
gone. He asked if I knew your diary had been burned.

But Alba had not been too tired to lift Cosmo’s carton out of sight.

She simply wanted to get rid of me.

She hadn’t even asked how I’d got in, maybe thought if Cosmo had a key why not Cartwright. Yet it wasn’t tiredness that made her try to stop me as I went on to tell her how Jack had told Gene that Incremona was armed and Sherman was armed, and Gene had lied to Jack about the Marvelous Country House (chosen, I added, by Dagger not me) and Claire had told Jack that our Bonfire in Wales had also been shot by Aut’s own man—well, there I’d been in Paul’s hut telling Jack about the Maya when Gene had slid my diary into the fire, and on top of that, Kate (for I assumed Savvy’s news had come from her direction) had told me Jenny was in danger, and I was about to go on to tell Alba that Gene had let Jack think the portfolio was Jan’s—but Alba brought the needlessly rerinsed plate down into the sink hard and cracked it, and said Stop!—but meant to stop my giving her what she didn’t want by (it now seemed) stuffing back at my voice any information that came into her head. She said, You are powerful; you were powerful the morning you picked Dag up to go film the Hawaiian boy in the Underground; Dag was deeply disturbed by that, and he is somewhere I don’t know where now because he is deeply worried and Jenny is part of it and I want you out of here, please, you are armed.

But before I’d arrived the morning we went to film the tunnel under the Science Museum, Dagger and Alba had been having a little battle in my opinion.

And that would be at least as good a reason for him to be disturbed.

I’d sensed it when he said would she be in all morning in case of a phone call; I saw it in her blank look when I found her in the balcony room stacking two suitcases on the glass cabinet, thus partly blocking the framed Mercator; it was in their manner of parting: no loud call from Dag out of sight, nor a joke and a kiss; just his pause and an exchange of times and places at ten paces, her belly beginning to show. But if Alba said Dag had been disturbed by my suggesting that particular tunnel, what of the fact that when Jenny and I had talked about A-levels, continuity, and museums, it had been Jenny who brought up the tunnel?

And
because
Dag had been disturbed (said Alba) he’d let her go over to France to see her parents that weekend alone, though I knew he didn’t much care for Seine suburbia, the French language, or all that tennis.

Well, had she talked all this over with Dag?