Jenny’s silence leaves fairness in my mouth but she comes back from the edge of the building and she tells me my life is in danger. Her phrase is solemn, she is a child again for me — my life — manageable.
Oh she could tell me some things but for God’s sake now go, go — please go.
I say she’s in danger too and it’s my fault. A police car parks across the street, both cops watching us.
At least get Reid to get my suitcase out of Monty’s.
She will call me at Sub’s — she promises — what’s his surname? What’s his address? — go.
I say she hasn’t told me anything new, I am in danger from many sides.
She asks if I looked at Jane Allott’s cast when she came in from the park and showed it to Tessa.
To see Dirk Bogarde’s signature and Reid’s?
And Nash!
Nash from the softball game?
Oh that little bloody softball game!
Sweat off a Sunday hangover.
Well Hyde Park wasn’t the only park in London. Nash was at Golders Hill that Saturday we had lunch at Tessa’s father’s. Nash came up to the bench. Jane was telling Jenny about the signatures, and Will was pretending he wasn’t interested. A clan chieftain (serious, slow, extravagant with money I guessed; pan downward to bare legs spread at his desk in Edinburgh on which Jane’s moldy cast lay like an independent object); Dirk Bogarde (eyebrows raised, kindly scribbling in the middle of a city); Reid — Reid’s handsome! said Jane.
That hippie! said Will, and Jenny said Reid was an artist and a man and Will could learn a thing or two from him about political consciousness, and Will said it was Dad who’d mentioned that hat. Jane reached her cast across: Look, you’re right here with him, Will — my Daddy said he’s in the theater. And then Jenny said Will’s signature was a carbon copy of his father’s, and at this Will got up and walked away down the path, though here standing over Jane was the man with the colored rings who asked if he too could sign — and had trouble getting his byro to run ink into the fibers of Jane’s cast, saying, If at first you don’t succeed — and then, Show that to your mother when you get home; and when he walked off he had an odd lean, like a limp you couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Jenny is back to her post. I follow just to where looking east one can see enough of the south side of King Street to see Monty’s house.
I talk to her again: But Will recognized him surely — Will was the one who called out your nose is bleeding at the softball game we filmed. And you yourself must have known Nash.
I step further to see clear down King to where I phoned June, and Jenny steps back and I grab her arm and she tries to pull away, and the cops are watching and I try to shush her, though her voice is low, and it is appearances I’m trying to save, as she was when she hid a snapshot I now knew must be of Paul and Reid together.
Her accent is native London: Oh you imagine I know him just from your baseball game — well who do you think Reid in fact was looking at down the South Ken tunnel the day he signed Jane’s cast?
The burly Frenchman like me bare-headed has turned into the far end of King (where Jan and Jerry and Jenny turned and near where I kept watch under the one or possibly two helicopters and phoned June). I duck back.
Behind me the cop in the right-hand seat which in England would be the driver’s seat (as in Sweden till recently) gets out and stands up into the street. I raise my free hand and there is a cab which overshoots me by just half a length, and as I get into it I say over my shoulder, But I bet you don’t know who Nash was with that day.
Incremona, the answer came, but not from Jenny.
Oh the retreating scene through the cab’s back window! Jenny alone, the cop looking at Jenny, then easing back into the squad car—Incremona! I answered myself: Incremona: Incremona had been the one in the South Ken tunnel with Nash: Incremona: the man at whose command Kate rang up Savvy’s farewell party to pass on to Gene the news that Jan’s red jaguar had been pinched by Cartwright but Kate passed the news to Nell, who did not tell Nash (hovering on Savvy’s bedroom threshold) but did later tell her husband Gene, the middle Flint brother, the uncertain one who in his younger brother Paul’s hut on the slopes of Mount Clisham could commit my diary to the fire with Jenny’s strange phrases on it more than clues when but a few moments before he had grimaced as if at some violation when his older brother Jack tore off a blank half-page of it so I could have a scrap to jot down compass bearings.
No matter where it took me I would go to the end. Even if only to find myself alone then with someone else’s profit system, or state of mind, or shrunken heart. Or opening at last an air letter I did not trust, that a friend named Dagger DiGorro had expressed to Monty’s. Or far from Jenny (who must have known about Len anyway but did not know about the Frenchman). Far from family and from our insulated though not friendless life in England. Far from things warm or even serious. Far from gray film or dry froth left on the soap by my son Will. Far from Isambard Kingdom Brunel fresh from nearly drowning his head in an unforeseen pool during a fire on the maiden voyage from Bristol (but not by a long shot to New York) of a great ship he had designed, the Great Western, whose boiler laggings had been laid on so near the furnace flues that, being of felt and red lead, they had ignited. And far from the interesting differences between a stand-up shower with its advantages of moving water and quick and thorough rinsing, and a tie-down bath. There one can speak to one’s dry, attendant wife on many subjects, the space program, the Vietnam war, the concept of Hindu Māyā, even if three weeks before as a bitchy bon voyage to Corsica she called the film half-baked, though in fairness to myself I had so vividly foreseen screw-ups in shot-selection, in cutting, in the issue of color and black and white, and in our story-line, that, as far back as May, I had said to Cosmo that if we didn’t watch it we could get into trouble — which I at once saw was misplaced frankness with a person of Cosmo’s insecurities, for he nodded sagely with a twisted grin glad to let me seem to put down our film when in fact all I was doing was politely not putting down his own grandiose advice that we use cartridge loops and kindred tricks.
And so instead of trailing Jan Tuesday right on into her brother’s house to find Paul at last, I had instead been found by Paul on Thursday and been picked up with John in what was clearly someone’s plan. As systematic as Jack Flint checking me out by inquiring of that Sunday armchair quarterback Red Whitehead what territory I worked and what my work was like and what my interests were. And Red “So call me Red!”—though he answered the phone “This is Mr. Whitehead”—welcomed the chance to tie into the great multiple field of impinging informations to dump his bit into the memory bank, manila folder and all, shredded for better digestion, complete with my having failed to exploit the Bristol liquid-crystal market.