In the empty red-and-blue room there were newspaper headlines on the carpet.
I did not ask where Jenny was. When Chad sat down on the floor, that is where they all were — Gene, Mike, Jan on a bright cushion, Nash in a half-lotus kneading his lips with a knuckle, beside him the white-haired Frenchman leaning back on his hands shifting his legs, Incremona kneeling back on his heels at the far end by the other door, Chad’s tribal cuts seeming both more raw and more leathery in my state of altered alertness after the blow to my chest — all of them on the floor except John-of-Coventry leaning against the wall and he later went out through Incremona’s door to find a chair.
I moved above them, moved about the room. No one stopped me. I passed between Len and John, Jan and Mike, and therefore Chad and Mike, between Chad and Nash and therefore Chad and John.
I had brought them together. The headlines were medium big. I didn’t let John go further with Len than the curtest rebuke before I broke in. After all, I said, Len had never liked the film except as a cover, and after we caught him in Corsica with the girl Marie who could be traced to the Druid’s macrobiotic community in South London, the area where on a certain summer Sunday Len had given a pal of his a beating without visible injury in particular that tell-tale bloody nose, Len had liked me less and less; so John-of-Coventry should not stop Len from saying what he felt, any more than John should stop knocking our film which was for us, if I might speak in a pedestrian way for myself (and here my words threw up an improbable idea) an ongoing form of communication whether with Beaulieu 16, later Kodak Super 8, or now in New York (and here was the idea) slides, slides shot with an Olympus-Pen brought in from the other side by Dagger DiGorro — so, from first-strike U.S. bombers taking off, to our burly French operative in Dagger’s flat in August betraying as much with his uncomfortable face as with his taped voice (but betraying exactly what?), to a blank momentum of white screen, the plunge now to slides would be like a movie’s ultimate still — like Morse code for Beethoven, eh Lorna (dot dot dot daaa) better yet 3 (dot dot dot daaa daaa) — or a heart, Gene, which having raced like a bomb beats easier transplanted to a fresh system; listen, Jan, in this growing work of ours this jump from movie through blank screen to slides feels like a jump between two rates of Maya time that bypasses the cogged tangent where the sacred and the solar calendars, great circle, small circle, move each other meshed; so this communication grows, Nash, from Stonehenge, where you thought one rite concealed another wrong (which Jim Nielsen’s folks would have paid to hear from you in their new windbreakers if you had stood at my door in Highgate a week ago today), on up to Callanish, Chad, where by a miracle your gun helped kill the Indian agent Krish who after all was not hired to break in and destroy the film, though was indeed employed by Jack Flint with whom I’ve on occasion been inseparable as Elspeth’s mother will attest. So all in all, John, it isn’t surprising Incremona wants to liquidate me, for he’s quite right — I and this film that never says die and is worth quite a lot of cash are no good as a cover, for the cover doesn’t cover, it reveals.
CUT to CLOSE SHOTS, mosdy reaction shots where THE FACE IS NOT THE SPEAKER’S:
Chad (mouth open as if singing, while the speaker who is not Chad says): Don’t listen to him, he had the gun in my cab Sunday night in London pointing at my head — the gun isn’t in Callanish.
Nash (looking over his shoulder, but at whom? while the speaker who is not Nash shakes his head and snaps his hand with its finger stuck out like a conductor’s): Had I known what was going on I wouldn’t have merely disparaged your half-baked ideas, I’d have had the film destroyed. And that is what, Gene, you should have done. Power unfocused in process, Graf told me last weekend. Balls, I say! Sow confusion.
Gene (blue eyes into the camera, while the speaker who is not Gene says): I never called it a cover. What cover? Sherman called it a cover, not me. Cartwright lost his job with Whitehead. You didn’t know Whitehead, but I know Whitehead. Cartwright needed money. You should see the bills stuffed in the desk in his living room. I say we hit him and the girl.
Jan (slowly shaking her head while the speaker who is not Jan says): I have it on good authority through June that Callanish was not in the film. Or is it in the diary? But the film was liquidated, and so, I gather, was the diary (CUT to CLOSE SHOT of Gene). So what we need is your head, Cartwright, that is to say, how serious you are about (a) blowing the whistle and/or (b) using the original plan as Mike alleges but which seems to me strange indeed if you are working with Jack Flint.
Incremona (the decathlon star tilting as if to spring through Chad’s verbiage — but in the direction of no one, while the speaker who is not Len says): My brother didn’t find Krish. So how do you know he’s dead? And would you mind telling us (CUT to CLOSE SHOT of Jan) what you’ve done with a red jaguar.
John (who is about to remain silent but — this time the face in the close shot — speaks): Don’t speak, Nash. Suck on a ring, but do not—
Nash (automatically bringing ring hand up to mouth, then dropping it while a familiar voice that conjures up its own narrow, tan, virile face speaks in answer to John): Don’t you tell anyone shut up. Nash can speak. Speak Nash.
Frenchman (looking at his watch while speaker not the Frenchman blurts): All I say is your sister June speaks on authority too damn much. I never heard of any windbreakers. So don’t talk to me about windbreakers.
Incremona (rocking on his own private axis as we hear the Frenchman): Za Catwight gell.
Incremona (forestalling a CUT, by speaking): We got her.
Cartwright (halting on the side of the room opposite John-of-Coventry and between Mike and Jan as she suddenly says): You are heartless.
But what Len said is close to the bone. Bills in pigeon holes. For a piano. For the builder. Doctors. Magazine renewals. Bills on the floor in riffled sequences, in swirls, little white frames with names and numbers, strewn by Incremona. He’s unmarried. Jenny wants a proper shower. Lorna likes a bath; the scum gurgles down the drain, never a problem though in the winter of ’63 the outside pipes clotted, but I always paid the bills and they were there in the desk for Incremona to go through two weeks ago because Lorna saves them like the yearly New York Metropolitan Museum of Art calendar richly colored oriental medieval Moslem what have you, that my mother sends us that as Lorna looks back through our code of names, phone numbers, times, can tell her what we did. But you who have me know what Incremona doesn’t, that it looks like not one lost income but two or three, the charters, the boatyard, add to that the perqs through Dag, cheap booze, a blender, and for Will for Christmas though we sing our carols live a Sony 110 cassette recorder (like a policeman’s walkie-talkie in lieu of his traditional whistle), toss in a brandied plum pudding you can’t even buy at that Knightsbridge landmark Harrod’s where according to Queenie Stone the Queen and Philip have a charge — and American smokes though those I give or sell away. Yes, Mike, I could kill — kill Len for going in my house. Forget the diary he burgled.
Not a marvelous country house; a city house. Not a revolutionary life; a plain life. Where suitcases are packed and unpacked (never mind if Tessa says to Lorna Let him pack his own bloody case). Where the soap opera of our marriage has serialized itself in cartridges I’ve packed away in a hole in my study wall behind a picture. And where a park is near, and if we wish I and my wife may let the grass grow under our feet and the garden walls decay and title to the turtle grow as communal and friendly as the weatherman’s crystal-clear forecast of bright intervals for a hungover Sunday. Our children grow up.