She did not want another child.
Ned Noble had promised me his crystal set even after he knew he was dying.
Lorna phoned Tessa Friday morning, November 22, even though we were going to see them that night. Lorna told Tessa Dagger’s story — the Maya orchestra, the raspadores, the punishment.
At 6:45 P.M. when I began to smell onions, I switched on “The Archers — An Everyday Story of Country Life.” I had been listening to it since ’54: Farm talk about markets and new methods; Dan Archer’s good sense; hired man Ned Lar kin’s south-country accent with its rounded American r‘s (and a measured something like my grandfather’s Maine cadences that he never lost even when he found himself removed to a city as foreign to him as if he had gone to live abroad); pub gossip; the antique dealer’s love life; the new entrepreneur in the village; Doris Archer’s nerves; more farm gab; for me the ripe soil, the thick-tufted pasture grass, great sheltering trees by a group of graystone barns and sheds and dwellings with the small square parish church tower in the background so the whole scene reminded me of some famous painter’s paintings I’d seen years ago at the Met; the sweet rotten odor of silage, the petty and poignant preoccupation with annual events, the village of Ambridge (for Americans who do not know “The Archers”) ridiculed by Geoff Millan but not by Lorna. (Why does a hen lay eggs, said Jenny at six or seven, the riddle stage, when I would sometimes want in desperation to tell her what her intimations about her parents could not quite reach, but she would have to wait, for she was too young, but even if she had not been, I could not clearly have said what was wrong with Lorna and me.)
At the end of one episode of “The Archers” when Mr. Grenville the local gentry had his car crash destroying his leg and killing John Tregoran’s fiancée, the BBC did not close with the theme music, a heart-warming jig: there was just silence, which even I felt — and then the seven o’clock news.
But the music did play at the end on Friday the 22nd, and I turned back to the front page of The Evening Standard.
And then came the news from Dallas.
Where it was only one o’clock.
Which made me feel that I’d been missing something all afternoon, yet there was a chance to catch up.
Lorna was already weeping before I had understood the chance Kennedy was dead.
The other couple who were coming to dinner with Tessa and Dudley phoned to ask if we would rather not, and I do not recall what I said as if underwater at a very long distance — I thanked them and I must have given them a rain check, and I could not say goodbye because the waterworks exploded unexpectedly in my head and Will materialized and he could not for a moment think of the words in which to ask who had died.
I do not remember Alba saying much about Kennedy Saturday night. The French liked Jackie. The story had not yet come out that the blood-stained wife in the open accelerating car had been reaching back for a piece of her husband.
Lorna was saying she wanted to go back.
Johnson! she said.
Then at eight thirty we were finishing our drinks with Dudley and Tessa and I remembered having spoken on the phone to our other guests.
Lorna said I might have told her.
I put my glass down in a hurry and raised my hands to my face.
My mother phoned from New York.
Geoff Millan phoned, distraught.
I kept the radio on in the kitchen and got up from the dinner table once to go and listen.
Dudley was subdued in any case, but tonight partly because he did not feel what Lorna and I did. He said it was too soon, the death.
We let that lie. But Tessa said, Dudley will have an opinion on this by 1980 if you can wait till then.
Can you? I said.
Lorna and I had triple helpings of lasagna.
Dudley said to Tessa that after all it wasn’t as if he’d ever been a Republican. But Tessa went beyond that: Kennedy was beautiful. Unusual beauty draws secret violence toward it.
I could not believe he was dead, and I said Rubbish.
Ned Noble’s crystal set means more than if he’d been faithful to his promise. There was a red stripe across the base of a condenser and blue numbers on what he said was a rectifier.
Dudley agreed it was rubbish and he and Tessa argued but as if soundlessly, for Lorna and I were stuffing our faces and looking at each other. Dudley got up in a huff and I followed him into the living room still chewing, where I found him inspecting a photograph of my sister.
I went back to the table. Lorna was weeping. As Dudley returned I daydreamed a way of posting a clandestine letter to Tessa. Now it looks like a long-term plan.
Sub’s letter was the first of the American letters to reach me after the assassination. He said that that weekend several of his friends had screwed like crazy. He and Rose even, and they weren’t getting along.
On Sunday there were queues clear round the Embassy. Cabdrivers parked their cabs and got on line. BBC radio interviewed people waiting to sign the book.
On Saturday Mr. Jones in the dairy said, Mr. Cartwright I want you to know that Mrs. Jones and I sympathize with you and your family. This is a sad time for all of us.
Jenny picked up our purchases. I couldn’t answer. My mouth was nowhere. I just nodded.
We gave Tessa and Dudley our tickets to Uncle Vanya.
Saturday we went to Dagger DiGorro’s for the first time.
A very bright and sexy Pole taunted Alba. He said Ho Chi Minh’s father, a mandarin scholar whose knowledge of Chinese was said to be at least as good as that of anyone else in Vietnam, had lost his job because he refused to corrupt his language by learning French.
That’s something he and I have in common, said Dagger appearing magically and sweeping Alba against him so that I wondered what had happened since the computer man’s Tuesday night hotel room and Alba’s spaghetti.
Alba could only beam at Dagger and say — in answer to some unasked but implicit question — Yes.
That weekend receded. Alba emerged from the baby’s room. She had told me not to think Jan was helping Paul escape from his two brothers but she had said Paul was dropping everyone now and she had almost echoed me in her reference to this cut-throat thing of the two films, and she had brought Nash and Chad and a deserter together, and I believed my daydream on the plane was largely true and this was why Kate or someone she had spoken to had got on the blower to Savvy Van Ghent’s party (which in turn reminded me that Lorna might now be at Geoff’s).
The bell rang. The downstairs bell. The minicab. Alba opened the door for me. I had my pack in one hand.
She said, You weren’t really asleep. The lights went out just as my cab rolled up.
Tell me who Bobby is.
The one who talked to the deserter in your film.
Alba wanted to close the door.
I was half in, half out. Tell me, I said, why the hair in the comb on your bathroom floor is red.
Alba tried to close the door on me.
Failing, she spoke: Dagger was afraid Phil Aut would find out about the portrait of his son. It shows up in your scene of the Unplaced Room.
I remembered the palette-knife-thickened face with the lustrous hair, to my right against the wall. And on my left Dagger turning the Beaulieu briefly on me, panning downward as if to show the equipment or study my feet.
I said: You would never leave a comb lying on the floor. It’s Jan’s hair in the comb. She was here this evening.
My words weakened me, like the stomach-turning sight of all that equipment in the camera shop in New York just after the stabbing accident.