I smelled the shots.
I wanted to be invisible and stay here and see what the relations really were, though film might have failed to do them justice. And what did Gene’s wife behave like with Gene?
An American proverb says, Modest dogs miss much meat.
The film, if only what was missing in it, was bringing on the very feelings that lay behind it.
But we weren’t finished, though Gene’s wife preferred that we not use the living room.
John and Len disappeared. Gene’s wife made buckwheat spaghetti with soy sauce and insisted we eat.
Now that we were going, Gene’s wife touched Dagger and kissed him.
The rain was trying to stop.
Dagger got a ten-second wide-angle hand-held pan of house, patio, and grounds.
We had more film, and we turned in at the vicar’s. He was a tall, thin, white-haired widower officially retired but serving as supply priest. His reversed collar gave his lean, loose old neck room and his gray serge hung on him gracefully. He gave us a tour of his mantelpiece, all the postcards and knickknacks ending with Marilyn, who had died while he was in America. He had brought this picture. He had given three sermons, one a year, on Marilyn Monroe, and they had been a great success because out here in the country we’d be surprised, he said, but people thought about America. The title of the last had been Marilyn Monroe and the Knights in Shining Armor.
He showed us his set of Mark Twain and asked if we’d read “The Stolen White Elephant”—we had not.
Dagger filmed him but we didn’t have sound, but I’d never have been able to forget the love in his Nordic blue eyes above the thin unhurried mouth that had spoken its brief Communion sermon this morning, even if when we said goodbye out in the drive in the Scotch mist he hadn’t told us — slipping the black-and-white postcard of Marilyn into his pocket — that he had a married daughter in Cincinnati and one here in a hospital.
Elizabeth on the way back to London was of the opinion that Len was envious of John and having it off with Gene’s wife. And who was Gene?
Dagger said I had almost gotten something interesting out of the scene when I baited John.
I said I hadn’t baited him, John was just a bumptious bright Englishman rolled into one big mouth connected to a larger bowel.
Someone made a ts-ts sound — English chiding — restrained condescension.
Elizabeth wanted to know how long I’d been over, I said long enough, Herma asked where Sherman was, Dagger said Back loading his pistol.
It was his? said Herma’s boyfriend.
How does one know? said Elizabeth.
I wondered what was on our film. A minor room mainly. A space containing persons English and American, possibly containing the outer spaces of field and farm and church and children in their glimmering slickers.
Why would Outer Film pay us to go to Corsica? It had been an even longer ride back from Ajaccio. Now two weeks later I saw the Corsican venture had had an effect on Dagger and me. We were both venturing a bit further into the somewhat chance material.
Or that had always been my idea.
But Dagger had now returned to Yucatan, as if what had passed through the Beaulieu lenses onto film feeding across the camera’s gate had gotten him from the dwarf’s elevation into power, to now the present — or as if the Marvelous Country House hadn’t happened.
Lorna started using the word marvelous a lot in 1958. The time of the first quickening of the Tessa relation. And terribly in that English or Anglo-Wasp sense of very. These words from Lorna’s mouth, whether describing what Dudley looked like when she met him the Saturday they all (except me) went to South Pacific at the Dominion Cinema, or reporting Tessa’s facetious respect for Dudley’s historical researches, grew round them a conundrum importance that placed me between two fates: to be right in the wrong spirit, and to be wrong in the right spirit. I am confounding what already was a swollen cartridge but now has still not burst but billows with soft insistence into the creases of many times. My father oddly then in ’58 did not say Well as for me I’d sooner see the rest of America first, though he did imply Well what exactly are you doing there. My mother went further and wanted to know what she could tell two of her dear friends it was I was doing abroad. Staring through her tourist lens foreseeing transparencies (called slides in the States), she found an alien element in the invisibly circled square of lens-view and did not wish to pivot to something else, for what she wanted was right here: in background a band-shell and two hundred empty folding chairs, in foreground upright masses of gross red carnations and rain-fed green (the shrubbery that evoked country estate, the sward that threw up or unfolded in front of you English cathedrals, Lincoln, Wells, Salisbury — within smell of beer mugs and taste of Worcester in the tomato juice) — but there was son Cartwright with a new beard in ’58 and ’59 and his hands in his pockets pursing skeptical lips not setting the scene, not moving out of the way — I speak figuratively, in fact I have on occasion stepped to one side so a lady of some nationality in flat walking shoes could “get” what lay behind me. No, my father said, hell it makes sense for you. It’s a good life. And he told business associates about that good life of mine and my family’s, though my catch-as-catch-can methods of finding a living came out in his words as some culturally filtered mode of capital diversification.
Lorna spoke about a country house. First back in New England. Then later nearer to home, as we increasingly thought of it.
We had six hundred feet, mostly of that dining room. Over twenty minutes. Pretty extravagant I thought then and that night when I got started writing. But the film shrank and my diary account (which I had to stop working on when Lorna came in and I noticed I had a headache) began to seem a rightful decompression.
The dwarf had told Dagger that after he’d killed the gobernador his mother died. But at another village there is an immeasurable well leading to a cave that goes miles and miles to another town, and in this cave by an underground stream an old woman with a snake at her feet sells small portions of water in return not for legal tender but for a tender criatura to feed the snake. And that old woman is the dwarf’s mother.
Dagger slapped me on the right arm and I tried to be companionable and said I bet he’d made half of this up.
A little editing, said Herma’s boy.
One of the boys asked if Herma had read Vonnegut.
I said my daughter had read him for days at a go.
The dwarf when Dagger talked to him was pretty well off, but political changes had come and he was no longer top dog, but the locals were afraid of him and he is afraid to go down that well to see his mother because he is after all not much bigger than a criatura.
When Dagger dropped me off in Highgate the summer light was still with us.
Out of the back seat Elizabeth said, If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go live in America?
I reached back and touched her leg and said I’d phone her, we were shooting Stonehenge in two weeks. As I straightened up outside the VW, Lorna and Will pulled up in the Fiat and Dagger waved frantically.
Parting, I still had one big thing to myself. Dagger hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t think he’d believe me. And the morning in Ajaccio when the three people passed the wall of the fort he hadn’t had the 12–120 zoom we borrowed, and then the three didn’t like being filmed and hurried away. If Dagger hadn’t seen it himself, he wouldn’t now believe me — that the skinny bald man in that threesome in Corsica had been Len — a face which (along with Tessa’s “moments”) I recorded early in the original diary of that day we shot the Marvelous Country House, but which now in this swollen uncartridge-like and maybe no longer so replaceable memory of day and diary I put practically last.