To one side of the circumference I saw, at a distance I could not gauge, two silent flashlights. Tessa said, Good luck to them.
Priestly shit indeed, I said — think of the poor fucking Catholics being interned.
In London Dudley told me mumbo jumbo meant not just nonsense or obscure ritual but also a fetish; he got out a book to show me that mumbo jumbo came from Mandingo for a magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.
Now what had been the Stonehenge message Jenny had felt in March? But she’d been looking out of the circle. Did that mean you only got it as it left? or if you stood in it and conveyed it out?
Waves aren’t simple; they hit each other; they interfere, take each other’s force, but also reinforce.
Ned Noble could tell you.
In the stillness of the Highgate house once I read about a scientist who made up a law about waves hitting particles so that every point in space becomes a source of spreading waves.
But Tessa was simply a good fuck in ’64 and ’65—and in ’71 in a green beret and nothing else but some enigmatic chit-chat queries about our other film-scenes, was there one in Wales? one in South Kensington Underground? and what was the American blow-hard professor really doing there?
But I was afraid time would stop if I didn’t get to Jan Aut’s and beyond.
I did not need to buzz Jan’s flat to get in downstairs. I hadn’t noticed the old house, its outside, what it was made of. I was in Notting Hall Gate.
Maybe I was the message.
Cartridges stayed hard when out of touch with other cartridges but when in touch opened and shifted — even to glows of high hue or even varying grays with a black as lush as Lorna’s suede gloves so richly wrinkled, from finger to elbow setting out for our first and last Embassy cocktail party where a matter-of-fact madam’s orange hat and blue-green eyeshadow or a patronizing young parliamentary secretary’s machine-matched mauve tie and snotrag stood out like senseless data next to my Lorna with her gray wool dress that showed her wholeness, her high waist and her hips and stomach, and with her dark almost black hair alive around the gray-blue eyes. I was proud enough of her not to get mad afterward in a cab when she said, You like that crap more than you admit.
The door wasn’t open when I reached the second landing. There was no key under Jan’s mat. The last time I’d come with a friend, two others, a camera, and sound.
Lorna did not know how near I was.
There was a new lock on our door in Highgate. Had Jack had our house broken into? I couldn’t tell on the phone from New York how badly Lorna had felt about it — scared, unready, sad. Her tears were never hot pools on the carpet (where Tessa had dropped her butt) but slow and steady as if measured out.
And as I heard a hand on Jan Aut’s doorknob, I knew I was still between — for I knew (for how could I not have seen that) lock in Jenny’s cryptic note had an h: a loch to look at, a cross to bear: whatever waves I’d made had traveled on ahead to here, but back as well to Callanish behind me where my American daughter had saved the other remaining copy of the diary.
14
Which put me between again.
But with what in front?
Godlike I saw through Jan Aut’s door before it opened. She was fresh from a bath, a twist of towel round her hair. But she’d been up on Lewis with Paul. She might be anywhere, South Uist, Edinburgh, Wales.
The turban was still a towel, but no — she looked like Jenny; that was it. I was ahead of my own sound, I could have been still asleep three nights ago in my Glasgow hotel. I reached out to her still feeling for Jenny, and in the instant that I checked the impulse Claire accepted my embrace and I blocked the new wish to draw back, and was glad because I knew I could not help her. But no: Claire’s dog had just come out of hospital and she hadn’t settled her affairs at Outer Film and there was no reason to think Monty would want her here in London with him on business. But why did I think Monty was in London tonight — because he’d phoned Dudley? because if this system, whosever it was, was closed, the probabilities were that things should be beginning to come together?
But I was rehearsing; and, even irredeemably between, I knew my power lay in not rehearsing; and so as the door came open I would still proceed as if I had a plan even if I were no god.
It was Kate, the girl from the gallery. Her hand, the fingers of her tanned hand, went to her collarbone. She’d been in no mood to imagine me a god when we’d first met. I inserted myself sideways past her, bumping my pack, saying Jan expected me.
My pack stood next to the brown velvet chesterfield; my parka I laid over the arm so the pockets rested on the cushions.
Of course, said Kate.
The portrait of Jan’s to which I had added leaned against the leg of a baby grand. The piano was a Yamaha, the firm that makes motorbikes and flutes.
There was no one here. I fell into the chesterfield. The room was full of things chosen over a long period of time one by one. It had not been right for what we’d wanted when we’d filmed here. I said this to Kate, who stood at the foyer entrance, one ankle almost touching my pack.
You filmed here?
Yet looking around at a delicate brown bowl, a solid red jaguar some ten inches by four, a silver belt of ornately worked links lain across a bright-woven shawl thrown over a table, I felt that this room impossible to unplace. May 24 was personal not local. That is, you would not have looked at it and said England. There was a turtle. There was a color photo of Jupiter on the music stand above the keyboard.
I got up and walked away from Kate to a doorway. It was evening. A blanket or two lay on the floor beside a large bed with dark green sheets twisted and draping. I turned away to a further door that was almost closed.
What did you film? said Kate.
I don’t know any more, I said.
The Unplaced Room of our film was dark through a crack, and I did not go in. I remembered morning light through the top of a green tree. A bold bright portrait of someone with long lustrous hair leaning against the wall near where I stood. Large open windows with those peculiar screw locks at the middle and along the sash. The garden didn’t appear in the film. Pale clouds were filling the early blue when Dagger and I and the featured performers arrived. The sky in New York is gross, it is a blue land that will get you.
She’s not here, as you can see, said Kate. She was by the couch now. She started to lift my parka but I stopped her.
I said, Saturday night. I need a bath. I’ve just been up to Paul’s.
Why had she said Of course when I’d come in?
She sat on the piano stool. It’s Sunday, she said.
In the corner of my eye something moved, inanimate. Kate’s small mouth dimpled, in a quiver not a smile. She did not point out that as of Monday I hadn’t known Jan Graf. Either she thought I’d faked ignorance then, or she was doing something very special now.
I asked if she’d been at the gallery the day Aut’s man filmed; I said I knew Jan and the four men had been in it, but I hadn’t heard Kate mentioned.
When she shook her head — almost as if she couldn’t speak — I put my head back and closed my eyes and intoned like a list of heroes the names of Reid, Gene, Sherman, Incremona. I sighed and said it was a sordid thing, this commercial competition, utterly cutthroat.
Take my film diary, I said, my eyes still closed; it was incinerated in Paul’s hut on Mount Clisham yesterday. So that’s that. A regular trade war. What’s the use?