The map that Will now kneeled on in his room in Highgate was almost half blue, the land area was coast, maybe island. The rest was white and tan, the tan mainly elevation contours.
He stopped talking as I entered, but began again as if we had a briefing deadline.
You see, he said, you have to think of each of these isarithms as if a plane has been passed through the land at a certain height. These are the z levels, Mr. Ogg said. He read maps during the war; he is going to retire soon. The x and y values are horizontal, see, and the z is vertical, I don’t think we all understood that, but you should have seen Mr. Ogg, he got all excited drawing on the board, and Stephen laughed.
I knelt beside Will and felt the relative lightness of my beard against the darkness of his hair whose fineness didn’t lie flat because he didn’t give it a comb very often and our English water is hard.
He was getting better marks. I have encouraged him to take Spanish. He’s always been good in maths, which his teacher in primary school said frankly was not much of an indicator at that age, but now he was as good in English as Jenny had been and also wrote impressively boring essays on world interest rates, the Boston Tea Party, and the history of tobacco that were a bit slow but were saved by a tone of authority. He considered himself an American but told his friends that he would visit but never live there, Americans were too interested in making money and the cities were too dangerous.
You see this, he said, running an index finger around a nest of contours and working inward but occupying too much space with his fingertip so I couldn’t tell which level he was on — you see, he said, this distance between two z levels, one at two hundred feet, one at one hundred, well the distance between tells you the gradient.
I asked how from this map he’d tell the exact gradient.
Mr. Ogg hadn’t told them that. He got onto maps from something else, by accident, he was talking about percentages and the income tax and got sidetracked; he didn’t do that often, he stuck to the point and you could never get him off it, but today he drifted into averages and statistical surface and how you can put the pins in and drape plastic wrap over the pins and make a real topography and he drew a set of contours on the board getting smaller and smaller going inward and then he went silent and stared. Stephen was trying to catch my eye.
Were you scared when you heard someone in Jenny’s room in the night?
I guess so. But I wanted to see.
Were you disappointed it was only Mummy?
No. But she thought I was the one breaking in. I didn’t like that.
Why not? It’s funny.
This is our house.
Could you find your way around in it blind?
Naturally!
Mr. Ogg.
Mr. Ogg stood looking at the board almost with his back to us and his ears sticking out and I looked at Scott because he might be inclined to burst into snickers and shake his head as if Ogg was bonkers, Scott’s done that before; but he was interested and he didn’t even look at me.
What did Ogg do then? I asked, and I smelled the first softenings of our dinner in pan and oven downstairs as if being on my hands and knees brought me closer.
Old Ogg drew this super thing on the board. It was an island, a hypothetical island all mountain, and on a little platform like. And he drew all the z levels like pieces of stiff cartridge paper sort of half cutting into the mountain at different heights and from the front edge of each cut he drew dotted lines which were traces he said. But the best thing was it was three-dimensional, you could see it like a model on the desk.
Is he going on with it?
I don’t think so but I don’t know. He was saying at the end that this imaginary intersection, the plane that looks like a piece of paper, must intersect the land surface at all points having that z value, and he lost me there and when he said the trace will be a closed line and then he drew some more contours as if you were seeing them from above and he said you see these lines are closed. The hour was over. He just stood looking and I thought for a second he couldn’t move. He was thinking. Then he just gave us the next lesson in the book for tomorrow but we were all left hanging and he was too. He wanted to go on.
Will stared down at Jenny’s map. I pointed out other informations; archaic characters locating a “Chambered Cairn” or “Stone Chele” and at one spot there was a circle drawn around the designation “Standing Stones.” It seemed a long way from bedtime stories. Through level upon level of Mr. Ogg’s cartilaginous contours his ears guided his words in to memories he would rather not bring back from the wartime garden of the noble beast where at least you knew where you were and what you must do — garden of night — plucked flak, hills of bombed houses, the late Victorian castle-keeps of Tessa Allotts London childhood, her hair below her waist — what would we have done without bombed houses I hear her saying to Lorna in another room.
And so we sat down without Jenny, and as we sat down — Lorna and Will and I — the phone rang. But no one spoke when I answered.
Will switched off the lights but before lighting the candles rather than after. He opened the wine for us. He complimented Lorna on the herb stuffing stuffed into pockets in the chops. He said to me, You’re supposed to be in New York; does anyone know you’re here?
I said apart from Jenny and present company it was hard to say, and by the way Jenny was touchy about things taken out of her room.
Will said he planned to put the map back. He said did I know the dome Reid built with a friend who was on his way to Africa and stopped off in Connecticut was elliptical.
Lorna asked if I wanted to go to Geoff Millan’s Sunday night. I didn’t know.
Will cleared the table and did the dishes. Stephen phoned to ask if Will could spend the night next weekend. Will had been going this past Sunday but though Lorna urged him not to worry about her he’d only had lunch at Stephen’s and come home for supper.
Lorna and I talked in our bedroom. We looked each other over. Her cheeks had never developed that ruddiness that when you look close is a hatching of veinlets ruptured by years of tea-drunk tannic acid. She had put on lipstick for dinner; old times, new fashions. Tessa was after her to stop wearing a bra, but Tessa was built differently. Lorna had compromised on the soft contour of the new slipover that looked like a bathing-costume top.
What did you find out today? she asked.
After a moment, I said, A man who was in from the beginning and came here from New York over the weekend flew back this morning. I think of why we made the film, which may be vague in Dagger’s mind but not in mine; then I think: Why let someone get away with this!