I sighed. Even Paul got demoralized, I said — he stopped caring about all the deserters coming through Norway and the islands.
I let myself seem tired. Kate nodded once. My mind played in a field of someone else’s inventing, more than one someone, I thought. Maybe I was as tired as I was seeming. I rolled my head toward where the inanimate movement had been, and saw it again. The door to the Unplaced Room swayed. I said there was a draft, and with a groan I leaned forward but Kate was up, crossing to the Unplaced Room, saying she’d close the windows, but I said just shut the door, and she did, stopping short of it so she had to reach out for the knob, and pulling it to so quickly — as if she had other duties to pass on to — that I felt she’d never meant to go in there and close the windows. I asked for Jan; Kate said she was here looking after the cat while Jan was away. That was like a past part of the truth. Kate was being careful. I asked for a drink. I’d been dreaming in the plane from Glasgow, I said, I was wild, I had all the passengers looking back at me. What a dream! Could I tell Kate about it?
Please do.
It must have come from the daydream I’d had before I dropped off: to wit, putting Paul and Chad together; plus the deserter’s dark-haired friend when we filmed here and Nash’s nosebleed when Cosmo accused him of planning to blow up the Underground. Plus Len’s angry trigger at Paul’s brother’s house.
Kate passed me a wine glass of whiskey and asked if that had been my dream, and I said it might as well have been. The door of the Unplaced Room was open a crack again but there was no draft, as if interrupting the current of air had lowered the windows automatically like the line-and-pulleys I’d rigged from my bed when I was twelve. I carried my parka into the bathroom, and Kate laughed but I didn’t believe her. But I said, Got some plastic explosive I’m carrying around.
I unlaced my boots.
I asked if she had anything to eat.
I was into a stationary area again. But area might be so only by me. I wanted what Kate knew.
I said I had been launched down a dead escalator as part of an international power struggle. My words made my hands sweat.
Kate tried to speak, reached for her collarbone, decided to slouch with a hand on her hip.
Was that your daydream, she said, the power struggle?
I half-closed the bathroom door. I said she knew of course that Sherman was very dangerous. However, they were waiting for him in New York. Paul had had a strange violent effect on Chad. (I turned on the shower. A clear plastic shower cap hung over a tap handle.) Paul had opted out of the violent project and was in danger like me. Reid’s plans went ahead. (I turned up the water and lowered my voice.)
I was easing into the water. I might have been standing in my Tuesday shower at Monty’s.
Yes, I called out, it was my daydream, but I’m adding.
Outside the fall of my shower Kate’s silence seemed not to be paying much attention to me. She wouldn’t know much. Somewhere Mummy would be hoping she’d meet someone suitable.
As for Chad, I called out — and the phone rang and I turned off the shower.
I thought Kate said — the children.
I know she said, Can I give him a message?
I would let her bring this up. I flapped the shower curtain, sang a riff from a Brandenburg, ran water hard in the basin, flushed the toilet and soundlessly closed the bathroom door.
I didn’t hear her speaking. I tiptoed wetly out and carried my pack back. I didn’t see her. The phone was in the kitchen. How did I know that?
I dressed.
I called from the bathroom, As for Chad — and then came out to my sandwich — well I see Chad as the black second lieutenant in Heidelberg who helps that kid skip to Sweden and has work for him when they meet again in London a long time after. It was Paul’s hut the kid stayed in — that’s no dream either. Only one film now. Plus a piece of ours with Paul on it, a Bonfire in Wales. When we caught him there he was already backing out of the big one, the big project, and he’d gone down to Wales. To see Elspeth, yes. I suppose you don’t know Elspeth. She was at Stonehenge. In my daydream Jan helps Paul escape from his two older brothers, who fear him. Jack has risky business up in the Hebrides anyway — yes, with a rich dilettante geologist who has gotten in too deep because the deserters and other Americans he’s ferried over from Norway are involved in a little bit more than mere exile, and this rebounds upon him and he wants out, and at this point Jack can’t afford to let that happen. Ditto the diary, so it has to be burned. I can understand. I’m not in arms about it. Nash was brought together with Krish in one scene and this could have led who knows where. Likewise Nash and the deserter at Stonehenge. Likewise in Corsica Mike and Incremona. The project will probably go through. But I’ve got to see Jan. She wouldn’t be at the Community with Paul? You know the Community?
I don’t, said Kate. I don’t think she’ll be back tonight.
You’ve been looking for adventure, Kate.
To you who have me, it may have been patent by now that I sensed a third person. If probabilities were as I imagined, this person closeted doubtless in the Unplaced Room would be someone who had already figured in my experience of the system. If it was a lover, even Kate was not so uncool as to hide him. If Jan, then why Kate’s nerves? On Jan’s behalf? Doubtful. If Paul, where was Jan? Why would this person wish not to be seen? And by me in particular? Or by anyone? But why would Kate not discourage me from staying? Either because she or the other person felt me to be dangerous or because the other person had signaled her to have me stay.
But what she said now did not fit: Be serious, she said.
She might well ask, I said, why these and others who had connections to hide should let themselves be filmed at all. Surely with what they stood to lose it was strange to consent.
Kate had to claim something for herself. She said that everyone knew how persuasive Jan could be.
I agreed with my mouth full, but having swallowed the last soft lump of grainy crust and held out my wine glass, I said there were things Jan could not understand. Nor Phil either. Did Kate know John? Ah well, John had a curious relation with Phil. John wasn’t into this other side of the film either.
Kate did not ask what other side. She carried my plate out.
I had put on my parka, and in a second, with one eye on the crack of darkness showing from the Unplaced Room, I added the heavy red jaguar to my stock of other people’s weapons. The phone rang and I moved to the foyer, looked suddenly at the Unplaced Room, lifted my pack around the corner out of sight, opened the front door — and letting it close hard I concealed myself beside the hall closet. Consequently I could not hear, except a word that sounded like gallery. I put my head around the corner; the door to the Unplaced Room had not stirred. I caught Kate looking at me around the door of the kitchen. She disappeared and closed the conversation saying, I’ll tell her you called.
Beside the painting to which I had added was a large blue-red-and-umber cushion which had figured in the otherwise drab Unplaced Room.
I had proposed that we drop to eight frames a second here and there because when eventually projected these moments would introduce an agitation into Dagger’s flat vérité.
Kate had stalled me here without being one thing or the other.
What I could have told her — fast forward, sixty-four frames a second — was that the Unplaced Room was precisely the footage Dagger had not told Claire about; the letter I had left on Aut’s desk left me no doubt about that. For Dagger there was something in the scene worth withholding. The scene held more for me. Jan’s whiskey had spread to my shoulders and fingertips. What I could have told Kate at 64 fps was the precise color of eggshell-cream I painted a room in our first house in 1955 that was to be my study. There was a golden Goya guitar — not to be confused with the two twelve-string guitars I bought in Germany the following year and sold to Americans in London — and the door was closed and window open, and when I laid down my roller I would pick up the Goya and strum my four chords and sing a ballad. “Sir Patrick Spens” was one I sang. They are out of fashion now and in all these years in England I never met anyone not American who sang them. That room was where the children wouldn’t come. Will was a baby, Jenny went half days to a play group in a church basement. I had a table and two chairs and only what I needed. Sometimes not even the paper. And Lorna had the balance of the house to herself. The old pub across the road hadn’t yet been tarted up; the prefab panels and light cubes and chrome trim were three years off. But while I liked to make space, so to speak, by piling things rather than letting them spread, objects in quantity passed through that room and sometimes stopped for considerable periods. My father had unearthed in the country several old Shell Oil bottles 14½ inches high with fancy embossing, and because I’d been struck with the tall, thin beauty of these old bottles that had jeen used to hold a quart of motor oil, I had interested a young Portobello Road shopkeeper in having (on a percentage basis) a serious bottle corner. This corner soon acquired a name for its nobly seductive American wares, though the strangely reassuring Mason jars and blown-in-the-mold medicine bottles with the four indented circles embossed on the side, the cobalt-blue witch hazels and the whittle-marked Moxie Nerve Food bottles — long ball neck, strap-sided, and (a mark of pre-1900 work) the applied lip — were mingled as you’d expect with a deceptively large sampling of non-American work — free-blown Persian saddle flasks, aqua-colored Jamaican gingers, Italian cordials with embossed suns, French perfume and English gin. And there were times when such objects as these would accumulate in that precious room of mine where Lorna would always knock before she entered. She picked up the guitar overnight and now can really play but never does. She would sit down in the bare room and I would close my manila folder over my lists, plans, and letters and she would tell me the old lady in the furnished room on the ground floor next door with access to the garden (hence a view across into ours and up to my study window) had told her her life story this morning, Miss Topp, a sitting tenant whom the new land-lord (an actor no one had ever heard of who had made some money on a film) was dying to evict along with Mrs. West on the third floor (who could barely move now, she was so fat), and Miss Topp after a tale of complaints and small revelations said, I see your husband up there busy doing his correspondence. But Lorna then heard that Miss Topp had been saying that I didn’t work, that all I did all day was correspondence, and the police-woman had come because I was living off my wife’s immoral earnings. Indeed the police-woman had come, to check our green cards, but the old lady as I pointed out to Lorna gave us credit for more imagination than we probably had — Miss Topp had heard from old Mr. Sharpe the gardener that Lorna was English, which gave her the right to take a job without going through red tape, and from the dustman that there were a number of Americans resident in the area, just living. This was off the Edge-ware Road a half a mile from Marble Arch in a little one-block street of neat, narrow, often dilapidated three-story Georgians in the borough of Marylebone since then absorbed into Westminster — and just round the block from a public baths with marvelous seven-foot tubs Lorna and I used in shifts during a water crisis our first winter, listening to the locals hollering pop songs from cubicle to cubicle. My room that I had painted off-white and at first kept free of possessions was not, as you may imagine, like an interrogation chamber — though at first it was as bookless as the early life of a 1954 draftee whose G2 loyalty check proves his mom and fiancée to have had no traffic with communists — and newspapers did pile up with occasional unread alumni reviews; and the security of that room, and of that rented house (and of that year 1955 in England featuring the autumn debate in Commons on the defectors Burgess and MacLean when Eden with Senator McCarthy in mind asked how far “we” were to go in pursuit of greater security) I see now was haunted by some secret and possible heroism, and a college friend Reb Needles from Chicago wrote that I. F. Stone had done a piece on the Watkins Committee report as a great antifascist event and in listing the Senate honor roll of Fulbright, Flanders, and Morse, Hayden, Hennings, and Hendrick-son — not to forget Benton who first looked into that demented American’s financial affairs — the writer had called them all (even Jenner) Senator but had singled McCarthy out again and again as just McCarthy, which may have seemed to say it all but said still more and left the man alone and distinct.