What did it matter? she said.
Very tired I was, I said.
Had I been locked out then? she said. Surely Will was at home?
Dagger’s plan to put the Softball Game between HH and SSP would bring into linkage or collision with the mystery snapshot and the tunnel I’d more than once traversed with Jenny and Will as children, the top of Will’s head: for the camera as I’d thought (and Dagger confirmed) had scalped Will — for Dagger panning behind home stopped to get a long shot of Krish, Jan, and the other Indian sitting on the grass, and Will was under the Beaulieu’s path and we got his hair. But what could it matter, editing a film that was possibly as Claire had said nonexistent — said so bleakly I’d wondered that first noon in her flat if after all she did indeed care; no, it was Monty who cared, and in part because of his sister Jan whom I assumed Alba knew, though I asked not about her but (yawning) whether Monty had got back from Coventry, I’d meant to phone the number there, did Alba have it? — which drew from her then, You mean John? and I at once though casually said yes that bumptious florid chatterbox ego and she said well he was very intelligent and was always going off to America but she hardly knew him and had I involved Dag with him? he was in munitions. Monty, I said, was responsible for that, and if Dagger was going to have secrets from me with Claire I could not very well be held responsible for his involvements.
I rose — still profound with my brief half-sleep — and followed Alba into the kitchen. My rucksack seemed even more in evidence as if Alba had lifted it and let it slump back lower against the wall.
She filled a kettle and did not look at me. She said she should imagine Lorna was home by now if I wanted to phone.
To ask, Is the film destroyed, and to hear, Dag told you so, why ask me? — was like going back to September yet like drifting into November — Guy Fawkes pennies dropping boom boom — Thanksgiving harvest — Christmas cassettes from the U.S. But Alba was less tired than she claimed, for when I said I’d never really had the film so I could not really discard or lose it, she cited the Sufi sage who retorted to a man lamenting his penniless state, My son, perhaps you paid but little for your poverty.
But my diary was gone too, I pointed out; and in the instant now before Alba’s startling answer I saw the dilettante geologist in his red mini combing Callanish for Krish, and maybe Jack with him, for Jack had sent Krish to pump the man, which might mean Jack was not sure of the man, yet were one of them to find Jenny’s cache and Reid were then to know, Reid might pay her back, assuming I was right that Reid was merely using her for information, albeit information on how much information I and possibly Dagger and others had on him and others associated with a project I now had to assume went well beyond the mere harboring of Vietnam exiles and drug-pushing in the Underground.
I know, said Alba, and took a plate down from the closet and automatically ran water on it, and it’s just as well for all of us your diary is gone.
She would like me gone.
She and Dagger served each other, and also by absence.
Jenny looked up from her hard concentrated typing and when I gave her a peck on the forehead she asked what I’d meant in what I’d written about the Corsican waiter and the Italian who imposed his will on all those shrimp, and I said that if Dagger or Alba were ever to read the passage they’d laugh.
French for revolution is French also for revulsion, the Corsican waiter (looking daggers at those shrimp) serves the affluent Italian’s bald power not quite satisfactorily cloaked just as the Italian’s smug will serves the waiter’s energy — this on each side in lieu of wishing real change.
Dagger that first night in Alba’s flat after drinks in Lorenzo’s hotel room, reached an arm round Alba’s shoulder to slide in another box of spaghetti. He ordered her around. She opened a bottle of Chianti which of course she would have in her larder. Lorna asked the computer man if Kennedy was in trouble and he said Jack was doing better with the girls than with Congress, and I shut up because Lorna had recently condemned me for talking for her in public.
But go back to ’58—the eve of Tessa’s disappearance — and I’ll tell you Lorna wanted more than that: she wanted me silenced, wanted me in some subtle or tentative embodiment dead. We would speak not quite loud enough: What? The words would get said again. Lorna often didn’t hear when she should have heard. And she guessed wrongly all I heard in her silences, conceded me a power.
Which might be like what Alba was coldly to concede later tonight as I was leaving when she said, I do not want to know what you know. But Alba conceded in another stubbornly obeisant way now and a moment before, by hinting Lorna’s whereabouts, a party (which could not be Geoff Millan’s, that I now recalled we had been asked to, for he did not know Dagger and Alba) — and hinting she’d heard my diary had been destroyed (which meant that Kate or someone who’d spoken to Kate had routed the knowledge to where Alba was).
So Lorna let the cat out of the bag tonight, I said.
Of course it wasn’t Lorna, said Alba, it was Savvy.
But he heard it from Lorna, I said.
No, someone phoned him in the bedroom, Michelle woke up and was crying, and I was sorry I’d come, I’m very very tired, he hung up and asked me where Dag had really gone. He asked if I knew your diary had been burned.
But Alba had not been too tired to lift Cosmo’s carton out of sight.
She simply wanted to get rid of me.
She hadn’t even asked how I’d got in, maybe thought if Cosmo had a key why not Cartwright. Yet it wasn’t tiredness that made her try to stop me as I went on to tell her how Jack had told Gene that Incremona was armed and Sherman was armed, and Gene had lied to Jack about the Marvelous Country House (chosen, I added, by Dagger not me) and Claire had told Jack that our Bonfire in Wales had also been shot by Aut’s own man — well, there I’d been in Paul’s hut telling Jack about the Maya when Gene had slid my diary into the fire, and on top of that, Kate (for I assumed Savvy’s news had come from her direction) had told me Jenny was in danger, and I was about to go on to tell Alba that Gene had let Jack think the portfolio was Jan’s — but Alba brought the needlessly rerinsed plate down into the sink hard and cracked it, and said Stop! — but meant to stop my giving her what she didn’t want by (it now seemed) stuffing back at my voice any information that came into her head. She said, You are powerful; you were powerful the morning you picked Dag up to go film the Hawaiian boy in the Underground; Dag was deeply disturbed by that, and he is somewhere I don’t know where now because he is deeply worried and Jenny is part of it and I want you out of here, please, you are armed.
But before I’d arrived the morning we went to film the tunnel under the Science Museum, Dagger and Alba had been having a little battle in my opinion.
And that would be at least as good a reason for him to be disturbed.
I’d sensed it when he said would she be in all morning in case of a phone call; I saw it in her blank look when I found her in the balcony room stacking two suitcases on the glass cabinet, thus partly blocking the framed Mercator; it was in their manner of parting: no loud call from Dag out of sight, nor a joke and a kiss; just his pause and an exchange of times and places at ten paces, her belly beginning to show. But if Alba said Dag had been disturbed by my suggesting that particular tunnel, what of the fact that when Jenny and I had talked about A-levels, continuity, and museums, it had been Jenny who brought up the tunnel?