I turned to Kate in the foyer and over her shoulder the crack of dark into the Unplaced Room flickered like a Highland chieftain’s thigh or Tessa’s, or like Dudley’s detached elbow in the pool lane parallel to mine, or like my face retracting from the bare window of my room in the Marylebone house in ’55 when Miss Topp and Mr. Sharpe the gardener looked around from the incinerator, or like the mystery snap packed quick as a blink between sweater and shampoo.
You don’t know Mary’s brother, I said, who used to be a force in the Scottish Nationalist Party.
I had the door open. I didn’t feel the weight of my pack. I had been editing the film as if it existed. Did I want it to exist? In my dream, miles of film paid out of my abdomen into the light as someone walked away holding the leader.
I’d nearly run through the cash I’d taken from the Indian’s wallet.
Kate had her hands crossed over her chest. Her eyes were wide. I had won her, if not her information.
Where? she said.
Mary’s brother?
Kate nodded.
I leaned toward the open doorway and shifted my feet.
Kate’s next words were barely breathed. Your daughter may be in weal twouble.
Jan before Jenny, I said, but pictured two heads on a motorbike and two hands signaling an impossible turn, and a diary cached at Callanish.
Even I am supposed to be tonight, she said. In danger.
England is not safe for me, I said. But neither is where I’m headed.
My voice sounded loud after Kate’s. Will you be seeing the Flints? I have something for them.
Kate whispered in reply: That was Nell who phoned.
I replied in a whisper. I stroked the cheek of this English girl wondering if my heart had shrunk like the brave dismembered Montrose’s into a secret cartridge: Māyā, Kate, means the world is not separate from me. It is color, it is black and white.
Kate and I talked low as if indeed there were someone in the Unplaced Room.
Your film, was it in color?
Some of it. The Unplaced Room was.
Oh, the paintings.
We took them down.
Where are you going?
Who was the third phone call?
Nash.
Whom were you going to tell what?
You never told me your dream.
My daydream will have to do.
What’s your favwit color?
You ask as if you knew.
Orange Monday, red tonight, said Kate.
So in return for inadvertently identifying the Flints for me. Kate had noticed the jaguar’s absence.
I thought of shadowing the building to see who went in and who left. But in return for the ten quid I borrowed from her, Kate said she’d phone me a minicab.
The driver was very young. I got hardly a glimpse of his face. His accent was not English, not European, a hint of Irish that he might have been hiding.
My pack was in the front seat and the pockets of my parka were lighter sitting down.
15
The second-floor windows were dark, but it was early for Dagger and Alba to be in bed. On the other hand, the baby was less than two months old and Alba had been tired. The house in Belsize Park in which they had their high-ceilinged floor-through flat was fronted with pillars like Geoff Millan’s. But theirs was part of a row of heavy cream-colored residences owned by the Church, whereas his was a narrower brown brick with gray and red on either side.
The names by the bell were lighted. The downstairs door has had no lock for as long as I have known the house. I did not ring. The cab motor idled; under the dome-light the young man was studying his A to Z as if he was aware of me. There was a white stripe painted down the middle of the bonnet.
I climbed the two half-flights of carpeted stairs.
I looked around the DiGorros’ door for a key.
When I went back downstairs I heard an engine fade. I found a ground-floor hall through to the rear and a door to the dark garden. The far end of the garden seemed higher than my end perhaps because of the mound of compost and junk that crested thornily above the low fence dividing it from the bottom of the opposite garden and two lighted windows at the back of the house beyond.
I got into a shed and hauled myself with surprising ease because it was dark onto a balcony. Behind me I heard a movement in the garden. The garden would be called a back yard in America. In the late summer sun I had had a drink on this balcony with Dagger and the baby and Alba nursing her. The French windows opened when I depressed the handle, and I was in the big room they used for everything except sleeping and entertaining. Dagger used this wonderfully full yet clear and open room to work in, but he often worked in the living room on the street side at the fatal table which you who have me may by now remember, if by now but dimly.
The familiar sweet and dairy-sour scent of the baby grew stronger in the hall. Yellowish light from a street lamp came through the baby’s room to where I stood as if projected in the hall with the doorway of Dagger and Alba’s bedroom behind me. Their bed was smoothly pale; a dial glowed, and by looking off-target I could tell it was ten twenty.
On a table in the balcony room my fingers found a coolness I knew to be a sheet of mica. I had bought some stained sheets cheap and had given Dagger two to try as makeshift insulation under the base of a living-room amplifier that was heating up. A strip of this flexible mica sensitively inserted could have sprung the lock of the front door for me. We had not been reimbursed for Corsica. A god does not think twice about an overdraft, but I thought again about the science-hobby exec Red Whitehead at this moment watching pro football at home in Long Island; my cut from him was small enough, but Nixon’s devaluation which in itself mattered little more to me than to a rich tourist touched off familiar reflections on the cost of living and the rising price of land. There was apparently a cat in the garden scratching in the compost or fishing from the rim of a half-open dustbin. A car engine arrived suddenly on the street side and died and I was through the hall brushing some half-open door on the way and into the living room looking out, but in the street no one moved. Matters were not exactly crystal clear. But they were neither as distant nor as shifting as a week ago. In the dim gleam of the table by the window where I had seen hundred-foot and two-hundred-foot spools and their cans and lids strewn and film cork-screwed everywhere and draping off onto the carpet, my fingertips hit a slender cigar and then picked up a sticky patch, perhaps a dried wine spill Alba had not seen late at night when she was in bed and Cosmo and Dagger were batting around the future of Allende or the death penalty or Ted Kennedy. Across the room in front of the round, carburetor-like slide-projector my hands found the red bowl of Jaffa oranges and soft leathery tangerines, and stiff-stemmed, hard, wax-paper-smooth apples green, yellow, or red, I couldn’t tell, that Alba, with her fear of not having fresh fruit and vegetables, invariably overstocked. My toe hit something heavy, it was the offending amplifier which Dagger had moved down from its stand. I could see he had removed the lattice cover, under which, as I could feel, the tubes were not all bare, some had metal housing over the glass.
Back in the balcony room I lit Krish’s lighter before a large glass-fronted cabinet of shelves. Inside were five cigarette lighters, three flashlights standing like the TNT that had got onto our film in August, a dozen little cigar-packs, and a cubic cache of Kodak and Agfa-35 film. In a lower shelf were four brand-new Japanese lenses in their boxes, four lens-dusting blower-brushes, a few flat yellow boxes of 4X movie film. In the shelf below — and as I bent, my pack slipped up like the yellow air tanks in the Gulf of Ajaccio — was a goodly trove of Beaujolais and Teachers scotch, and in front three Sony 110 tape recorders brand new in their boxes flanked by a stack of cassettes in theirs and a stack of typewriter ribbons in their boxes, a dozen or more.