But it’s Jack’s! I cried, and Paul Flint flicked his head around, then back to the red light that has been oncoming through the swash of three cabs Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday this terminal October week.
But wait: I didn’t mean this was Jack’s taxi; I meant that Jan had told me her erstwhile husband was doing a science film for young people and he was doing it with Jack Flint, and I meant that Red had said he was now into audio-visuals for schools and that Red had tried to put me on hold when I asked if he knew Phil Aut: so that, improbable as it seemed, I would be surprised if Jack Flint did not have a controlling interest in the very science firm for which Red provided executive noise and I was the erstwhile U.K. rep. So I had been working part-time for Jack perhaps. But if he and Phil were doing that film together, why wasn’t Jack behind my film too? Jan did not have the imagination to take that further step — she had been busy saving the world or bringing understanding to it. You might as well try to convey my shtip of understanding to Tessa’s father: Lorna gets up to leave, depressed by Dudley more than his nastiness; and so it turns out we’re leaving with the Polish woman I’ve been saying goodbye to, while Tessa, who didn’t get through to her clan chief, examines Jane’s cast so closely she does not even say goodbye to us, and in the front garden, half of which Queenie Stone faithfully weeds each damp English week, I say to Lorna Oh I am going to the film after all, and she says Dagger can’t see you after all, and I say You didn’t put anything on Will’s nose, and she says Jenny’s date was called off too, she can come, but Jenny says I’m not sure: and Tessa’s father’s front door unlatches and swings in and Tessa runs out toward us as if we’ve stolen something, but only to ask if she and Jane can come to the cinema tonight.
But the cast! the cast!
I didn’t say this out loud and still Paul looked round.
Something was wrong with Paul’s cab. Less swing and swash but no increased structural tightness. A shock gone? A waterbed losing water? Brunel would have the door open at once and be two-thirds out hanging under the body, the back of his brain six inches off the street whose potholes, ridges, and cracks at this speed had a liquid flow of which in turn the great man pushing through cave-in, shipwreck, and fire to success would be unaware, giving his undivided attention now to this cab’s under-carriage, not (or not yet) the larger related problems of paving material and traffic stress, or the soluble and insoluble problem of his own gravity, for I am inside the cab’s passenger compartment holding his feet.
Now my own Māyā proverb may be 75 percent right — a shtip in time must suffice to be merely its own reward. However, that Sabbath stab in Tessa’s father’s front hall reached also some system of attention that felt less my own than borrowed or shared — whereby the message on Jane’s itchy cast came to me through others: and the message was that the woman Nash and Incremona had come to meet on June 27 in the pedestrian subway leading under the Science Museum to the South Kensington tube had been Tessa Allott, and by some improbable accident she had been proxied unknowingly by Dudley and Jane.
This was a message fleeting enough; for the cast had hardly any future: two days after our Sabbath lunch July 3 and within hours of Dagger’s call to say Corsica was on after all, Jane’s cast was hacked and scissored off in Dudley’s presence while Jane pretended agony at every cut. But she did not pretend when she looked at last at her mended arm. She ran a finger over the crease in the soft flesh above the elbow where the cast had reached, and she looked at the diaphanous pallor against the warm color of her other arm that had been exposed to London sun and Edinburgh rain and the Channel winds of the Kent coast where she had visited a schoolmate whose parents had a cottage in Deal. You see, Dudley talked to me. I would sometimes guess why, but I didn’t know; and he’d have been embarrassed if I’d asked.
Tuesday, July 6, we rested in the water at the far end of the pool, an elbow lying on the tile, feet idly treading for pleasure, and Dudley told me how he had not liked the doctor’s rough handling of Jane’s cast but when she looked at her arm he had felt something else, a shtip—he stopped, he smiled the scholar’s quick mad smile to himself — a shtip indeed, a shtip—for her reaction hurt him, her arm was a thing the way it is when circulation gets cut off and you have to pick your arm up and hold it while you shift your position in bed, and what hurt her hurt him.
But even more idly than I was treading, I was staring idly at his pale and hairy stomach enlarged in the tile-blue-tinted water, a lens for Corsica — not so much Dag’s call the night before to announce that it was on again he was glad to say, but more what I’d proposed: the women looking ten years older than the men, a woman flogging Napoleon souvenirs, a university student in a café explaining in English to an American the meaning of the ’68 slogan THE MORE I MAKE LOVE THE MORE I WANT TO MAKE THE REVOLUTION, American dropouts living in the coastal caves, sharp CUT to a construction crew wiring sticks of dynamite apparently (because of the sharp cut) on top of the very cliff that housed the caves, and finally (or as far as I had gone with Dagger on the phone) a Corsican breaking open his fowling piece and cleaning it and laying it back in the boot of his car.
Thus preoccupied, I wondered only later if my reason for not asking Dudley why he talked to me openly the way he did was that I was afraid he would reply in his direct way something that on the contrary would embarrass me, or lead if you will beyond the inherent reward of Dudley’s candor on certain accepted subjects.
He is an honorable man.
There in the water he said, Well I couldn’t let her go to the doctor on her own with Queenie, could I?
But he would never have said, That bitch of a wife of mine had to pick yesterday morning to go to the British Museum to try to identify the person on whom the romantic hero of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White is based who also may well have given his name or most of it to the heroine of that book.
But Dudley — as a combination of waters now washed glimmeringly into my view — could embarrass Tessa when he wanted. Yes, that Sabbath shtip apart from its inherent reward had its 25 percent of incremental information gossiping through gate after gate like a digital sum to the hot and nice but (because Will had not washed the tub) faintly scummy bath water from which I delivered to Lorna my two-part definition of Hindu Māyā and she for her part told how Dudley had angered Tessa at that party by asking Dag and interrupting to ask again and yet again who was this Nash, eh? who was Nash?
A query I now saw came from Jane’s cast, destroyed to reveal the true limb it had been made to mend — first inspected — inspected rather casually I should have guessed that Sunday, July 3, while Tessa washed the teacups and Jane looked up the movie they would see with us that night.
But Jenny did not go after all. She phoned Reid, and they met, and the quid pro quo of their meeting I imagined now in Paul’s cab that had gone strange on us this October Thursday in New York just as accurately as Jenny herself told me when I got it out of her Saturday.
But why did Nash want to call himself to Tessa’s attention?
Mike! I exclaimed.
Mike indeed. Mike who had heard me answer Mary Napier that the name of my friend who visited in Edinburgh was Tessa Allott.
But Mike had heard this in Ajaccio, whereas on the Sunday Nash autographed Jane’s cast Dagger and I had not even been to Corsica. A valve had opened with a blink like the Mercurial god of film, cutting some prefigured Corsica into a Marvelous Country House as yet unshot, and some coordinate part of me had leaned naturally toward that vacuum blink, but must say No, and in lieu of an answer ask the question Why did Dagger change his mind and say on Monday night, July 5, that we were going to Corsica after all?