The penny dropped — noiselessly — two pennies — a pound — an inflation of pounds blown up and dropped on the moon. But how can a paper pound drop into a slot. My brain was going soft. But so were the things that had been occupying its slots.
In shape or not, I was on the treadmill and couldn’t get off but it was moving the way I wanted it to and I was adding my movement to it. Dagger’s letter was May 24. So he’d already known about a group in Wales; but we didn’t find them in their field (by accident) till Friday, May 28.
The phone was ringing on the receptionist’s desk. I was receiving signals and the Cartwright-DiGorro enterprise looked like passing into receivership. Whole printed circuits sailed softly through the new soft-warped slots of my head. Micro-circs. Faster than a speeding bullet, slower than an old movie. Sub believed in messages; people who knew the precision of his professional mind and the inspired practicality with which he keeps his home going do not know about his messages — pain in the dentist chair (a message understood, hence liquidated); coincidence a section drawn from the map of one’s force field; if he had considered his word clairvoyant, no telling what he’d make of it. Or of Jim and the aerial stabbing now so far back, yet not six working days from this present Monday night, 8:45, October 18, 1971.
But Wales was not Dagger’s idea, it was mine. For Wales was passion and sorcery, heroes and deceptive mountains and music and boozing and hidden communes up behind a misty hill and lambs bleating in the gorges. There was the story of the hound-dog Gelert left by his master the warrior Llywelyn in a tent to watch over his infant son. When Llywelyn returned that night he found the tent collapsed and his dog calmly sitting beside it, his head and coat all matted with blood. Llywelyn in a frenzy of vengeance ran Gelert through with his spear, but hearing then a cry he pulled back the canvas and found not only his child safe in the cradle but a huge wolf ripped open and hideously dead. Gelert breathed his last licking Llywelyn’s hand and Llywelyn gave him a hero’s burial in a tomb visible to this day, a great slab on its side and two upright stones, and the valley where the meadow lies is called Bethgelert. Dudley Allott would tell you of American place names in Wales; he made no more of Gelert, Ontario, than of Tessa’s animal legends, he wasn’t much on mystic tumuli or Arthur’s knights, but Dudley knew where the stone castles had been that marked the lines of the River Wye and the River Usk and he was moderately interesting on a name like Gelliswick, which is Celtic gelli (hazel grove) and Norse wick (haven). And he knew who holed up at Harlech and what prince of Gwynedd held a mountain against strangers from the east by means of the canniest practical skill. How Green Was My Valley came from my parents’ book club and I read it from cover to cover the weekend of Pearl Harbor and got 70 on my geography test Monday. There was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas whom my immediate predecessor with Lorna took us to hear read at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association before we left for England and who in ’52 or ’53 along the college circuit seemed like the Voice of America until he was consumed by an America in himself. Lorna read him, I could not; but I could listen. And there was a young Welsh conductor for whom Lorna had sung in a chorus who went to Cleveland and New York seeking his fortune, and Cincinnati and Florida, and who got sick of podium politics and came back to London though his wife stayed. Catherwood’s friend Stephens records a theory that ascribes to the Welsh the first and original peopling of America. Ned Noble and my sister and I saw the movie of How Green Was My Valley and when the lights went up Ned taunted me that there were tears in my eyes, and Ned would have had a fat eye or a bloody nose if we hadn’t by some magical incoherence shunted off into whether it was anthracite or bituminous coal the miners were mining in the picture and my sister sided with me because she was still clutching my bandanna handkerchief that she had borrowed dry. Tessa and Dudley spent some weekends in a converted schoolhouse in Wales that had been bought by a friend who Dudley said had had the DT’s at one time, but he wasn’t American. The Welsh “Bells of Rhymney” Pete Seeger made into an American socialist anthem and we heard him sing it in Royal Festival Hall with the changeless Dietrich his friend sitting in the same row with us and Tessa, which was some months before the Allotts went to America in ’64. Wales, then, had been in my mind.
But this fact remained, that Dagger had known that on Friday, May 28, the day after the day we’d planned to be on the south coast where I had to see a man about a boatyard, on Friday the 28th of May, after passing through Bristol to say hello to a mutual friend an actor in the repertory and to take another look at Brunel’s great suspension bridge on the Clifton heights, we would film a group in Wales which was to Claire the group. Had known as early as the 24th. Earlier.
I snapped out the match, moved toward the partitioned-off cubicle, wheeled about, found Claire’s desk and retrieved Dagger’s letter, didn’t fold it lest it crackle, went again toward Aut’s cubicle wondering what I would do if I found him sprawled in his swivel chair dead, put down the letter, struck a match, heard the steps approach like two people with one unnatural rhythm, doubtless the two who’d paused to look at Outer Film’s door and the darkness on my side and might conceivably have seen my match.
They didn’t stop. I was at what must surely be Aut’s desk. It was full. I went through drawers that told me nothing. I was meant to be here, to have come here from Monty’s via Sub’s, to Aut’s office, Claire’s desk, Aut’s.
The phone had been ringing and ringing. I fingered letters, folders, scripts. I accidentally pushed something off onto the rug.
I was holding the match so close to the files in a lower drawer that even though the fire flamed upward I may have singed a manila corner. My eyes still dumbly told me something. There was something looking at my eyes.
My God it was the Unplaced Room. The morning of May 24 we’d shot the Unplaced Room, and here was my old friend Dag saying we’d had some practice that morning but as of the 24th P.M. we’d shot only the May 16 ball game.
But this wasn’t what my inkling eyes meant. There was something else staring. However, I would run out of matches if I had to go through all of Aut’s stuff. I looked up from the lower drawer and just as the flame at desk-top level pricked my thumb, I found at the edge of this light what had been shadowing my attention.
On the cubicle wall to the left of the desk were four framed black-and-white photos. One was a close-shot of a woman caught smiling thoughtfully, lips parted enough to show strong, unevenly spaced teeth with an animal gap in the middle, lips resisting this as if the smile had been got out of her against her will. I couldn’t have guessed her size if I had not known at once who she was: she was the red-haired woman who’d been talking to the Indian near our ball game and whom Dagger must have meant as one of the moments mentioned to Claire; and she was the red-haired woman who had seemed to my puzzled paternity yesterday morning in London to be competition with Jenny for Reid.
The second, smaller picture was of two full-length figures, one a woman plump and pretty and seemingly gray-haired, the other a boy with longish hair and bluejeans seeming to suffer her arm around his shoulder — and he was indubitably Jerry, the friend of John, the man in glasses from the Mercer Street loft.