And because Dag had been disturbed (said Alba) he’d let her go over to France to see her parents that weekend alone, though I knew he didn’t much care for Seine suburbia, the French language, or all that tennis.
Well, had she talked all this over with Dag?
Actually to Cosmo. But only about filming the Hawaiian boy in the Underground, and how (said Alba) Dagger was afraid of you now because he did not know all you knew and didn’t know what you’d do.
I said I was armed only with other people’s weapons. Alba asked if I had disarmed Sherman. I asked if he was with Reid. Alba said that was why Dag had gone off in a hurry — someone was going to get hurt, someone had already been hurt. What do you need me for in this war of yours, said Alba.
Tessa was taking apart the pieces; she was saying that blood and cruelty are to the Maya the source of what is good, and that the famous Maya blue, the color of sacrifice even more than the red magic that was bled from some poor penis, draws the horror up into a blue hole in the blue sky. But I needed Alba’s defenses here, for she defended herself against me by telling me things: Incremona was dangerous; I must not ally myself with him.
But I had found myself to be helplessly a collaborator, mingling beyond mere will with the mixed obsessions of others. It had been months before our first friendly fuck in New York that I’d gratuitously daydreamed a safe way to write Tessa in London: I’d just write her London address on the envelope’s upper left, stamp it with insufficient postage, and mail it to a fictitious New York address. But the daydream: why was it painful? how did the Maya punish adultery with wife’s one-time best friend? Answer: Reid and Sherman dividing Jenny.
Why did we go to Corsica? I said.
Alba did not know.
What had been Dagger’s real reason?
Alba fended me off: Nash had been at Savvy’s tonight all dressed up with his rings on trying to make Nell Flint laugh and when she went into the bedroom he followed her. Could you see Nell fancying that bundle of nerves? They were talking about a car, no doubt all he could manage.
Why did we go to Corsica? I said.
To get away, said Alba.
Was Incremona at Savvy’s?
The handsome bald man?
Yes, Incremona.
No, he was not there, but his name was spoken by the man with the rings, Nash.
To whom?
To the black man.
Chad?
Yes.
Would Alba like to hear my views on Nash?
Nash? No, please, please. Please go. Incremona and the man with the rings, said Alba, as if she were saying something. Chad does not like the man with the rings.
Nash? I said.
Yes, he suspects Nash was looking for Bobby’s friend the deserter at Stonehenge. Chad looked angry at Nash.
I said, Krish wasn’t there — did Nash get a nosebleed?
The question infiltrated Alba, as if its far origin had built up a force too strange by the time it arrived.
What killed Krish? I asked myself. John’s pistol? The sight or idea of it? The Great Menhir?
I’ll go, I said, if you’ll tell me why Dag deliberately kept from Claire the fact that we had shot the Unplaced Room.
Alba could only answer unasked questions. Krish was in rebellion against his father who belonged to the Mahasabba and claimed (though Krish did not believe his father) to have been involved with the Mahasabba people who supposedly were behind Gandhi’s assassin. He believes he has personal power and perhaps he has; he has control over Cosmo and the man with the rings; they tell him everything. So in a way Krish is very different from Jan. But don’t think Jan was helping Paul escape from his two brothers, she simply wanted to know why he was dropping everyone now, I don’t know what that means, I don’t want to know. She is interested in Reid, not Paul, she’s had such trouble with Aut, so has Claire, poor Claire, this cut-throat thing of the two films, what do you know of Claire. Aut found a letter in her desk and phoned Jan in London to find out if Claire was in cahoots with Monty or Dag to steal Jan’s idea, and Jan went up to the Hebrides to see Paul purely for information, not for what you think, and she is disturbed about her son as well, she did a beautiful picture of him, maybe you’ve seen it, the son is the one thing she and her husband have together, he adores the boy, who hardly ever sees him, but if Jan wanted to stop anyone it would be Reid.
Alba leaned her elbows on the sink, her face in her hands.
You’re afraid of me, I said.
Only for Dagger, she said.
That why you got him out of Corsica in a hurry?
Alba shook her head, did not look up.
I phoned home. Will said Lorna had said she was going to Geoff’s.
I asked Alba for the taxi number.
I had nothing to do with his coming back from Corsica, she said. He was a day early; I wasn’t even here.
It was a minicab. It would come in five minutes. The voice sounded Irish.
The overhead light was on in the bathroom. I bent down to look at the comb on the floor. Alba would have been carrying the baby when she came into the bathroom.
Alba had disappeared.
I would be drawn into a past as paralyzingly elusive as the crystal receiver set Ned Noble designed and soldered all by himself and promised to give me. As pointlessly elusive as that weekend in ’63 when we had tickets to Uncle Vanya with Redgrave and Olivier and Plowright and had promised to drop in on our new friend Dagger DiGorro after the theater. But we gave away our tickets.
The sequence is not clear. Ned Noble’s now nonexistent crystal set may help. In the hotel room, I was asking the American computer man’s friend, an ex-serviceman who’d stayed in Europe, whether he did much mutual-fund business here in England or confined himself to the Continent. There was a large elderly English woman in a permanent who totally obscured Lorna, but it was Lorna I heard and she was telling how an actor who wrote children’s books had asked two sculptors to design a cat to go on top of the Whitting-ton Stone on Highgate Hill because in a story he was writing the Queen stopped to talk to Dick Whittington’s cat at the spot where the boy who was to be thrice Lord Mayor of London turned round three times — and there was no cat.
At Alba’s after the cocktail party Dagger told of his search for his lost brother in Mexico, not a real brother but close enough. Lorna was with Alba washing up in the kitchen. The computer-traffic man and his friend the ex-serviceman selling mutual funds to servicemen in Europe, listened to Dagger digress upon those instruments called raspadores made of bones human, deer, or tapir which made a grating sound and if a player in the Maya orchestra did not keep time he was punished painfully though not (like the hapless captives of war) sexually mutilated; there was no “pure” music, but songs that told old tales, and dances to bring new rain.
But the World Tiddlywinks Congress at Cambridge did not occur in November ’63; it was in June of ’58 after Lorna and her new friend Tessa attended the Festival Hall recital of Menuhin, who lives in Highgate not far from the house we’d recently bought. And a clergyman had urged the world to look to tiddlywinks as a way of recapturing primeval simplicity.
I remember because a week later came the execution of Nagy in Hungary.
Which was the day (yes) before Lorna and Tessa took the children and Dudley to the Dominion Cinema to see South Pacific.
Macmillan had been in Washington with Eisenhower, which would have been impossible in November of ’63.
Thursday Lorna and I had a fight which would have been impossible in June of ’58 when I still treated her as an invalid.
At the end of our fight I told her Dagger’s music story about punishments for not keeping time, and we laughed ourselves to sleep.