At Kennedy I thought of some of the people who didn’t even know I’d been in New York.
On Cosmo’s 3-D card of the Empire State Building I had Written CLAIRE WANTS TO KNOW WHERE I SAW YOUR INDIAN FRIEND BEFORE.
The plane was like an Unplaced Room.
A beauty across the aisle had a new soft-yellow tea-rose stuck through her green pullover, the petals like a bud’s tight-shut though with the merest flare at the top.
CARRIAGE
Your train like a tunnel draws you home to London from different times, to London from England, home from a small station destined to be defunct near an airbase where Dagger sometimes teaches northeast beyond Ipswich; home less recently from Axminster in the soft southwest coast; or still less recently from the seductive mid-sixties, from Liverpool north and west of London and in a second-class uncompartmented carriage where the cadence of the roadbed drags at the Beatle rock coming from somewhere in the car: your train takes you home to London, the switches up ahead pivot where necessary, bend your thrust so your train, your tunnel makes straight for its terminus, and an avenue is open to its end in High-gate, where your American family live and wait for their American father, a circuit even more open when your eyelids like NAND valves are shut and you are a tunnel in a tunnel.
The South African in his Liverpool bank by the thick waters of the River Mersey was impressed with your care for detail and your ease about the future — you’re one of his Americans — and he names two factory towns and two with new universities — if it’s to be a group of, say, five or six bookshops. But dad in Capetown who likewise believes in the new reading public here in the mid-sixties puts up ten thousand pounds only if you deliver what you said, concessions Stateside and from two paperback distributors in London, one of whom you know through a friend of Millan’s. But about the other business which your South African associate knows you were up in the Liverpool area for anyway, no questions asked and just as well; it was the subject of more than one letter to your own father back in Brooklyn Heights and easy to discuss in great detail and pleasant for your father to mention to his friends for it sounded so concrete; it was an American-style drive-in cinema, that’s all your young South African banker knows. He doesn’t know, as your train runs on to London, that the answer after weeks of possibility was negative. The English twilight did it, not the weather, not the thought of all those windscreen wipers sweeping away the rain like a scan on a radar scope so the audience could get through that out-of-focus shield to the adventure and emotion — no, not even the competition from the box, or even inertia (for Liverpool is not only the Beatles). No; after weeks of consideration, it was the long twilight. You are looking forward to a bottle of something Dagger got you from the U.S. armed forces cellars, and looking forward to joking with Lorna about this twilight because it does after all appeal to the imagination. There just are not movie projectors that can adjust to this long twilight. The Merseyside kids in the car park with their transistors in their laps would peer through a light too great for them to see what the projector cannot competitively convey onto the 100 by 60 screen, the American hero and heroine move as if in and out of a clear pastel substance that seems film itself but is the awkward light.
Famished (for there’s no buffet on this train), you drowse through distance; there must be two transistors tuned to the same station, one in front, one behind you — and you are the station! — as you drowse, that word film becomes flim your son is at the word-game stage, tiresome, so you drowse toward Euston Station but your train like your son is not tired, nor is Euston, which the planners threaten to give a face-lift but now moves: it is the first railway station on wheels — the space it occupies has become interesting and strange and Cartwright is the one who thought it up and rubber tires at that — but the wheels backfire and the station recedes, and famished you will never get there, not till you (as the teacher once said) go out and come in again, not from Liverpool in the mid-sixties but from Axminster, 1968.
Is there then a River Ax, as at Exeter a River Exe (hence Exmouth, Exminster)? You have been driven through Axminster too preoccupied with other things to look or ask for the minster of Ax if there was one then or now. Minster (You will tell Will this August of ’68 three months hence as you pass again through Axminster) comes from Latin for monastery and means a monastery church but may mean cathedral; hence the great cathedral at York is Yorkminster, which is also the name of the so-called French pub in Soho where Will’s parents have a drink on a night out in a corner in front of an iron table among framed photographs of prize fighters. Whence cometh Munster cheese, asks Lorna in August crammed in a country taxi under a bag of beach things she couldn’t get into any of the cases that are in the boot. Ah, also hence, say you: no doubt a clutch of German monks busied themselves in the crypts filling bags full of curd and punching them till they swung (back and forth) like dripping bells in the cool and sacred air — hence, Munster cheese. I don’t believe it, says Jenny, looking out at the rounded seaside pastures of the Devon-Dorset border, but she doesn’t care, we are all thinking of the pebbly strand and a lunch of fish and too many moist chips and the cold water English and damp even beyond its wetness and the great bay into which a prince once sailed hoping to overthrow a king, and thinking too of the boatyard that you suddenly by accident have a small piece of, which was why three months ago in May you visited that sea village with its senior citizens laboring up its lanes, one so steep there’s a railing to haul your heart up hand over hand — and why, having settled £2500 in that boatyard you taxi back to Axminster through the warmth of May 1968 and take the return train. You lunch at a stand-up bar in the buffet car with a Lyons businessman who knows everything. The explosive events in Paris were inevitable, les événements; but De Gaulle must survive. You object: De Gaulle will not survive. The Frenchman has been to Bristol, has seen Brunel’s suspension bridge above the Avon gorge at Clifton, merveilleux, from below it is very high, for its time ambitious, for any time beautiful. Its thrust, you say, is stunning. Correct, says your companion, though one must add that this span embodies engineering mistakes quite incredible for which he is glad to say his fellow-countryman Brunel never had to pay. It was (you point out) his father who was French, while Isambard Kingdom Brunei the son was English, though perhaps arguably in the great line of nineteenth-century French engineers. That is correct, says your companion, whose moustache you become aware of. It was (you say) the father who built the Thames Tunnel that kept caving in. That is correct, says your companion, and with curled lip declines a thin white sandwich the barman imagined him to be looking at. The Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars cut into the program of French technology (you point out) — many engineers were on the wrong side at the wrong time. Your companion orders a second whiskey. Business is a taxing business. Will the Paris événements change anything? Your companion resolutely channels the talk to New York. He has been there last year—’67—and he will go again: for business, for pleasure—formidable. On the other hand (you continue, eyeing the siphon on the bar) the naval blockade in the 178o’s that cut France off from the supplies of soda required in making glass and sundry other necessities stimulated the birth of chemical engineering in Le Blanc’s soda process. Perhaps your undergraduates are true symptoms, not just trying something on. The Frenchman smiles mechanically: Liberty is the crime which contains all other crimes — that was one of their mottoes, correct?