Dagger was pointing elsewhere but I had the mike close.
Yes indeed, said the bank clerk, for if it’s just a burial ground — and make no mistake, it may be! — (and I half-heard the word Is, like a gust’s mild buzz through the stones, yet there was no gust, no breeze) why then our main concern is the giant work of the thing. Now these Sarsens, the big ones, came overland from eighty miles away. A miracle. But the bluestones, which are much smaller but still run to five tons, were many if not all of them brought from Wales. Geology tells us that. Think of it! One hundred thirty miles by air — but in real miles, two hundred and forty! And this without the wheel, though possibly with rollers. But by water, more than halfway by water, from West Wales through the Bristol Channel to the mouth of the Bristol Avon — you know the gorge? — then up the Avon, then-overland, and perhaps along the river Wylye, then overland again to here. Think of it. This is what Stonehenge means, I say.
And as the man took a deep breath and began to speak of the three other (but unlikely) routes the bluestones could have taken, a voice from outside the circle with a tremor of irony I thought, said, It comes to that, and that alone.
Who spoke? said our bank clerk, and stepped out through the arch.
Tessa was with us again from another direction: I walked over some bodies out there, she said.
Did them good, I said.
The bank clerk in his plastic mac was telling Dagger of the five kinds of rock the bluestones came from, but Dagger thanked him, and as we moved away and the mike and camera were off, the bank clerk tall and devoted called to us did we know the theory there may have been an earlier Henge these bluestones composed prior to their transport here, so just possibly these stones came as one completed monument from Wales and may have been — he called desperately — a Bluestonechenge.
Reid appeared in white blouse and white jeans. He asked how it was going. He was graceful and relaxed, he seemed to have moseyed over from his own acreage where he’d been doing some work. Hey, he said, is Savvy writing a piece on this?
I guess I’ll be the only one, I said.
The man from the Ministry hoped everyone would be accounted for.
The small Elizabeth with a proper sense of order came pelting over to us to say that the fair-haired boy with beard had disappeared. Dagger and I knew this to be the deserter. Elizabeth pelted away into the dark. Dagger gave me the camera and followed her.
Behind me I heard through the openings of the ring we’d tried to blur closed, the American voice confirming the bank clerk’s words about human effort. The moon was still cloud-bound, but I could see Elspeth and a pair of stragglers going toward the car park. I had asked Dagger to ask her. She had asked three friends and one of them had asked a friend with a car. Nell had come with two kids, plus two men I didn’t know. There was a University of Maryland part-timer who had thrown a Thanksgiving party several years ago that Will and Jenny and I had gone to and who’d been greeted with open arms by Dagger tonight. It was a pretty eclectic coven. You make sacrifices in the interests of accident and naturalness. People had friends nearby. There was a party somewhere in a caravan.
Dagger and I had come separately, he in the VW with Cosmo and others, I in the Fiat. Tessa had looked at a cottage in Hampshire on our way down and wanted to see another tomorrow on the way back. We were supposed to be giving a lift to Elizabeth, who was staying with an aunt in Salisbury. Some of these arrangements were not in the diary.
I did include, though, that I wanted to change my life: for this, however light, was my reply to Elizabeth, who came back looking for Dagger and was most distressed about the deserter who hadn’t yet been found and then asked with that English no-nonsense trick what in fact was the point of our film.
We had six hundred feet I knew would be better in the processed print than my sense tonight of the muddled scene. But when I’d been here in March with Jenny, I’d felt like a giant. The hingeless doorways had unlocked their field of possibility and all those concentric fronts of memory had passed out the lens of my loved daughter’s camera before she turned to me radiant and announced that Stonehenge was a message; and inspired by her I thought, That’s it! Instant developing movie film! And I was even free (though not so great) when the voice behind began doling out distances and weights and I pictured proving myself by showing a hundred Stone Age huskies how to get the Sarsens into the foundation holes and, topping that feat even, lift the lintels let’s say by rocking them on a log-staging till the lintel was high enough to roll onto the pillars, there to be fixed with my patent lock of mortise and tenon.
And I thought it was this passage, linking daughter and lock, that brought Jenny to me in tears after she’d proofread the typescript. Tears damped the lashes and shone on the cheekbones, I hadn’t known her to cry in years, she’s dry cork as the poet says, though not cold; and she wept again then, asking if I would show this to Mummy; and then I saw it must be the part about Lorna’s sobs.
Materials for a life, I said.
It’ll take a lot of editing, I was about to say, but Lorna had forgotten her key and I went to let her in. Upon entering the living room she took a Kleenex and dabbed at Jenny’s makeup.
Dagger came back and I handed over the Beaulieu. I’d had the touch of an idea but lost it when he spoke, but maybe it was Tessa now quiet at my side. There were shouts and singing somewhere and cars starting. Someone called, Where’s your torch? Dagger said he’d felt it needed something more and he now had had a thought for another scene which we could discuss when we got home.
The man from the Ministry came from another part of the circle. He said he must say these New Druids took rather an activist line.
I said somebody had to in this benighted country, and Dagger said Here here! and I said if you leaned on a stone and waited for something to happen, nothing would, and the bank clerk with a tremor in his tone said he wasn’t at all sure about that.
Headlights beamed through us.
The other way, to the south, I saw a flashlight moving through a field. (A torch, these hoary English call it.)
I asked Tessa if her shoes were wet.
We were moving north toward the passage that went under the road and came up by the car park.
Dagger called back into the dark, Closing up!
Dagger’s talk of a new scene had interfered with my thought of one. Or had it been Tessa, who might now be contemplating our hotel room in Salisbury a few miles away. It had been six years. She took my arm and asked if Dagger had seen my written account of this mad documentary of ours. And as I said No, my idea came cresting back: to film the boatyard in which I had an interest, and get the old man to put in a nice clear explanatory word about making things by hand.
It might help, said Tessa.
We turned and the others went on. I couldn’t make out the ruined horseshoe, only the open wall of Sarsen monoliths. The moon was trying to come out.