Alba made friends easily in London. She said she could get excited by Dagger’s absence, but the truth was she had many resources beyond her life with him, friends he hardly knew, a Milanese couple who designed furniture, a Greek engineer with twelve toes, an American golfer who had found life in England married to a Spanish girl congenial, several Italian, French, and Swiss au pairs, and an old Rumanian Yiddish poet more personally anarchist than his ideologue friends from the Whitechapel of 1914, a good poet who was said except when he was with Alba to speak only Yiddish, who drank anything and sang, and whom Alba had thrown out on one occasion for pissing on the bathroom floor.
She kept her stationery supplies here in this cupboard, not at the long and vulnerable table where her typewriter kept its distance from Dagger’s. In the large lower space from waist-level down she kept her heavy equipment. An olive green tool box, planes, a drill, a level whose window blinked its bubble at Krish’s flame, and hanging from the sides and from the underside of the shelf saws that glinted like swords — then right above a shellacked box marked BITS (and beside a hammer) a brace fixed angular on the wall, in shape like the zig-zag crank of the Angenieux zoom we’d used to shoot the naval engagement in the very bay for whose depth I had used flippers hired in the sight of Incremona’s blond sidekick sitting with a girl in a port café across the cobbles from the plongeur van. Alba’s flippers — bought for her by Dag — lay one on top of the other at the back of this neat dark closet forgotten the day we left for Corsica and recalled with Corsica tonight. Alba’s Super-8 camera came into view at another cavelike level of her closet. The cartridges in their little yellow cartons were all unexposed, for you could not imagine Alba not having a cartridge developed as soon as she’d shot it; in fact, she rarely used the camera. The cartridge of baby film bizarrely burned by a brief ray of radiance through the atmosphere, through a bright clean windowpane, and through the lens of a magnifying glass had been on its side when I arrived in response to Dagger’s call. There were burn marks on the sides; my feelings I had thought at the time were like the 16-mill. corkscrewed around the table but may have been more like the ruined 8 still acrid and even (I thought for a moment, visibly) smoking inside — a cartridge browned at the edges but not noticeably harmed.
I wheeled out of the closet mouth, three rooms and more distances in mind at once — the bedroom clock and cupboards (closets in American), the living room with Dagger’s work table that must have burn marks from at least the first inches of leader I saw lying on the table that day, and the bathroom darkroom off the hall in quite another direction the thought of which staggered my already warped line so I kept turning and faced again this packed closet whose cartridges might be the heart of the matter somewhere in their relative unimportance to Alba, and wheeling again I moved past Cosmo’s heavy-looking carton and into the living room where I switched on a light and examined the table and found nothing on Alba’s finish but the wine spill.
I switched off the light and saw parked five doors down across the street a driverless vehicle that had the same broad white stripe painted down the middle of its bonnet from windscreen to grille that my minicab had had — it looked like the same car. The silence of Dagger’s and Alba’s things seemed at this displaced time better far than to ask — to interrogate. Dagger’s old cousin in Farmingdale, New Jersey, was a Trotskyite hanging on to a future that was the socialist nostalgia of his Jewish friends there. Bob Harte gave away the key to a builder who was working at Avenida Viena; Trotsky saw him do it and warned him; the young American was easy-going. Who else had a key to Dagger and Alba’s? Lorna didn’t have a key to Tessa’s. I hadn’t a key even to my own fresh lock in Highgate.
It was not ten twenty any more. I went for the balcony room and its cabinet, but passing Cosmo’s carton and my half-full rucksack slumped softly against the wall and between them Alba’s closet with the cartridge boxes that had made me wonder about those apparently unopened cassettes in the glass-fronted cabinet, I turned into the dark bathroom.
This was an impulse, a godlike move veering and light as if Red Whitehead had given me an expense account. Here baby flesh was overcome by the acid of urine and the foggy perfume of talc. I was getting closer. A red light went on beside the sink. I avoided the mirror. There were chemicals and two pans but no film cans or spools. I got a shtip in my gut — Tessa’s Yiddish for stab—and I wanted a long hot bath. I got away from the smell.
The film if it existed might be in the bedroom where, as I passed it again, I could tell at a glance the clock didn’t say ten twenty any more. Now the cabinet in the garden room; the shelf with the lenses and blower-brushes: the Kodak 4X movie film: three boxes open in the dark then under Krish’s flame betrayed no images; I opened the rest — for why not hide old film in new cans? — but it was the same story. If Maya as I had said to Kate meant the world was not separate from me, maybe (but I did not believe it) the film I sought had nothing to do with a world of mine.
If, as you say, you are counting on the diary to advertise the film, maybe I should see a piece of it.
But a piece of what? Monty had seen a piece of the diary. Did he want more? I was between many people in many directions. The people I was looking out for may have exited through another part of the building site and the other people coming after the people of the first part may never come. And if so, will the site blow? The steps in the hotel pass Glasgow, Portland, Cincinnati — but a modest B & B where Lorna and I had a week just before American Labor Day is relatively hall-less and I had a chance to talk to my boatyard partner about ferro-concrete hulls and to his granddad about exactly what part of a wheel the felloes were and again about why the cleavage had to be so right, and in that B & B mopping up our egg and banger-grease with fresh white bread (for breakfast is what the second B stands for) the news came on the Irish landlady’s wireless on a shelf up among some bric-a-brac and it was Nixon’s devaluation, and Lorna said we could have feathered our nest even better and I said maybe now’s the time to sell the house and transfer the money through Canada and go home, and Lorna drank her tea and looked at me: It’s possible, she said quietly; I said Jenny would like that; Lorna said she wasn’t at all sure because Jenny was English — and now by the cabinet in the dark amid Dagger, Alba, Dagger plus Alba, Alba in Dagger, Dagger in Alba, I had to try the bedroom. But then I wheeled away from the luminous clock-face far and dim, for there was a bathroom closet that might hold more than bath crystals and pumice.
Yet setting foot again in the darkroom where Dagger developed his black-and-white stills, my shoe hit something, and I bent and put my hand not first on it (a comb) but on the fino tile which Alba had laid and which I knew to be black and white diamonds, but whose cold I could not foresee: it traveled across the heel of my palm and the inside of my wrist close to my blood, straight to my armpit, and turned me blue: not blue with cold: for Tessa’s haiku quoted to me in bed by Lorna emerged briefly along that vein of thermal action — some bare chill I could not recall the words for climaxed by: my dead wife’s comb under my heeclass="underline" Lorna’s robin’s-egg blue comb, and then I did touch what my shoe had felt, and it was a wide comb — Alba’s? — with a tuft in the teeth — I had a hard-on, the two of them Lorna and Tessa in that smooth untouched bed in the next room — with me — and with the lunar intruder coming in at an extreme angle, a pilot’s five o’clock, and the shttp came again and again like the film paying out in my dream, and amid the mere things of this household beyond which or in which I must find the film or its history, I could have lain in a hot tub as I did on the night of the Marvelous Country House and been fingered by Lorna while defining Māyā for her and seeing the Southeast Asia of my sex enlarge and straighten and some time later swell and vanish like some multiple dream of achievement into the huge faded black towel she surrounded me with blotting out Dagger tooling away toward Hamp-stead with the boys and girls in the VW minus Sherman, and the Marvelous Country House in two cans and the Beaulieu — and no doubt using his talent to stir up a little friction if there wasn’t any or calm things down if there was, though when he retorted to Sherman on the way to the MCH that Yucatan was just as tough as Africa, Sherman seemed to leave that for Dagger to explore — which he did not, for he told that tale of the dwarf which purported to be first-hand from his supposed wanderings in Yucatan but derived from my idea of tying into power possessed of momentum but undeveloped purpose which Monty Graf had pondered while I ate my New York fish, though out of loyalty to myself I would not have told him my sense at the end of June that some almost too adequate purpose of mine was being drawn into Dagger’s new lack of momentum which was not his New Jersey Italian dolce far niente but his willingness to believe what his man the cine-film processor in Soho promised and his determination to use this man rather than someone who’d do the job for us at once, even though driving home from Wales in the early hours of Saturday, May 29, with (at that moving point in time) three scenes in the can (the May 16 Softball Game, the May 24 Unplaced Room, and the May 28 Bonfire) he had said it was possible but not probable we could get the man to do our work as early as Monday.