What friends were those? I said. But Monty wanted to get something accomplished and he at once asked if Stonehenge was the scene we’d got a rush of.
Claire looking at me said, No no no, that was the last scene they shot, they had their rush long before that.
Oh of course, said Monty gently.
His power with Claire did not come from his knowledge of our film, though in some indirect way maybe from his being Phil Aut’s brother-in-law. But this wasn’t the main hold on Claire. She liked Monty, liked the house and the couch. She had smiled at him after her first sip (it was only tonic) and had drawn her bare feet up under her like a daughter or wife.
I was losing Monty and Claire, the attachments here in this picture-lined room asserted their drab gravity, and my stomach complained and I smelled bluefish and lobster and fennel-stewed squid, and cheeseburgers, and I gulped my drink and schemed.
I decided to lie.
You asked about the rush. OK, it was the night scene originally number three, then two when we shifted the Softball Game.
This shifting, said Claire, it’s all pretty much in your mind, right, because you never got a real print to cut.
But she was interested.
The night scene I told you about, the second day I got here. Wales and the fire. We had to see if it had come out. We couldn’t be sure. The light, the dark. Silhouettes. And that grove.
Claire didn’t blink.
So we took it next day to the man in Soho, you know the man.
I don’t think so, said Claire.
Dagger said you knew him.
Monty watched Claire as he drank.
And the man who came out of the grove, we wanted to see if he was just another thing like the flank of a cow or a shape of shrubbery. Dagger probably wrote you about this scene, didn’t he?
I stood up and stretched and yawned.
No, said Claire, he didn’t write.
Then how did you know about all those Mayas?
Māyā’s Hindu.
I told Claire we’d had this conversation last week and she better decide if Dagger had or had not written about the Bonfire in Wales. But, said Monty, that could be a marvelous beginning.
Near where the Usk crosses the Breconshire-Monmouth border, I said.
Is there any land for sale? said Claire. Let’s live in Wales, Daddy.
First let’s get to know our friend Cartwright better.
You knew me well enough to use my name the other day, I said, and pose as me.
Say that again, said Claire.
A little harmless cloak-and-dagger work, said Monty.
Sometime we’ll have to discuss what you found out, I said, but I was thinking of what Gilda could have told him and what she looked like when she was telling him, but also what might be of interest in the Softball Game to anyone wishing to destroy our film — for the Softball Game was the footage we’d had developed, and I wished now that I’d seen another run-through before coming to New York — I didn’t even know where Dagger had been lucky enough to have it stashed at the time of the break-in.
But now without any warning I wondered how he had known we were near the intersection (his word) of the River Usk and the Breconshire-Monmouth border. How in hell had he known that? No one there had told him, for I’d have heard. And outside the radial neighborhoods of our London Dagger is no geographer. He can make time on a main route, but he has no patience with maps. Yet he’d known this thing.
I was still standing. I looked at a wall at a photograph covered with glass that reflected my face. It was next to a painting that looked familiar.
Claire said, You look drawn.
I said, This painting by your sister?
Monty said, Yes.
Nice color, but messy. What’s it of?
Monty asked if Commons was about to vote Britain into the Market.
In this picture she’s trying to make the colors rise up against each other. So what?
Monty asked when I’d eaten.
I said no, really I thought she could use a few lessons in black-and-white drawing and she should learn not to use color so indiscriminately.
Claire came between us. Monty, she said, had wanted to be an engineer when he was a boy and he’d promised his sister he’d build a spaceship for the two of them.
Monty ignored Claire. He said he loved his sister and he loved her work. She’d been unlucky in more than one respect and he’d be obliged if I would not attack her work.
The word was too right, and Claire couldn’t resist identifying herself and said, You’ve come a long, long way today.
I excused myself and went downstairs. I heard Monty say, what about all those Mayas?
The phone was ringing.
I got on the scales.
I had not questioned Monty on what he’d meant about two films last Thursday.
He had not pressed me about the sound track.
I couldn’t hear anything upstairs.
I wondered if Sub had noticed the dishes were done.
I was now not sure of Dagger.
Somewhere in my system I knew that we devise motives for ourselves in order to supply their lack.
No. I was not sure of Dagger DiGorro any more.
THE MARVELOUS COUNTRY HOUSE
My idea. But what a day. Beaulieu magazine loaded with color in case we saw an elephant we could cut into the house after the footage was developed.
We’d focus on the inside of the house, Dagger thought. I believe we’d agreed that panning 180 degrees beyond the dining room to the window would not only give motion to the room itself but imply depth; and Dagger did get a shot of the patio through the rain streaming down the dining-room window and through the rain pelting down around the big striped table-umbrella covering the portable television someone had left on with the Apollo 15 jalopy on the screen or pointing the view. I never saw the Falcon module till lift-off the next day in Highgate.
But my idea. Flanked by green manurey meadows, neighbored by stone farms fixed in the earth and the yard mud and by the thick trees and past them the square tower of a parish church, the graystone country house was in a space of land we learned had shrunk under previous owners and been further hedged by the neighbors and by constables who had got into the habit of trying a polite bust on the odd weekend. The house of our film was in a way England, and you could imagine you heard a purling rill.
But the day was circuitous first and last.
Dagger had said we’d need a larger car. But he turned up with the old Volkswagen and I said we could have used my Fiat station wagon if I’d known. He was on time, for him. But then he said we had to make some stops. It was a real Sunday circuit of north and northwest London, four different bed-sitters; in one we picked up a couple, and at another we picked up no one but stopped to give the girl who looked like my sister twenty years ago a chance to change. So after a while we were six — two in front, four in back — and headed into Kent or Sussex. Dagger said the house was close to the Sussex border. Herma, the dark-haired American girl who had changed her clothes, said she thought it was wonderful we were making a film just like that. She had a single long plait. Elizabeth, who was so small she could sit upright on her boyfriend’s lap without banging her head on the VW roof, said, What the middle class won’t do to keep itself entertained. She was English. Dagger said, That’s what a man needs behind him, a good woman. The boys who were English joked about someone they knew and after I’d seen a Canterbury sign left, Dagger turned right and soon stopped at a tidy bed-and-breakfast cottage in the middle of nowhere with a circle of hardy perennials at the center of an oblong lawn, and we acquired a seventh person, a tall Jewish boy named Sherman. He limped out with a high orange rucksack with bedroll on top and collapsed aluminum tentpoles sticking up like antennae and he set about lashing this rig to the luggage rack. Then he insinuated himself into the crowded back seat. Dagger said, Sherman’s from St. Louis. I said my sister lived there and was married to the manager of a department store. Sherman said, I just came from Africa. Herma asked if he’d ever been in a movie and he said he’d been invited to be in a skin flick, and Dagger said how was his performance, and he said it would have been OK. Elizabeth’s boy said his brother had been in a documentary on one of the Aldermaston marches by accident, and Elizabeth said, My father took me. Big deal, said Sherman quietly. Well as for me, said Herma, I’ve never been in a film. Elizabeth said, What do you mean, big deal. Dagger’s circus car was getting fuller, I saw another Canterbury sign, then two busloads of tourists; the traffic was heavier, Dagger turned off the Canterbury road. What were you doing in Africa? said Herma. Seeing some friends, said Sherman. Did you get your rhino? said Elizabeth. That’s not their scene, said Sherman. Still, said the English boy under Herma, you’re pretty tough aren’t you. Elizabeth said, For my father and for many of us it was a big deal. Liberals, said Sherman, the Jewish hiker from St. Louis. I said Let’s get them to go through this again when we get to the house. Dagger said Yucatan was just as tough as Africa and the heads were even tougher, and he told about a Mexican Indian he’d run across down there, a dwarf. Perhaps there were unusually many cars on the road; but enclosed in his VW I had the feeling that Dagger was prolonging the trip to the Marvelous Country House in order to complete his story.