But not, said Dudley, to press the buttons in the children’s section in the basement. To which Jane retorted that there were buttons everywhere, not just in the basement — and Dudley in his sober way added that it was not for buttons that he’d wished to visit the museum today, and Jane said, Bye bye Jenny and Reid, though Reid hadn’t been introduced except by his signature which from Jane’s side was upside down.
At which point on the night Jenny finished typing SSP and HH, she stopped the story with a shrug — I still think because she’d let herself be frank to me about Reid, like letting me take pictures of her during this fugitive period when she said she hated her looks and took (she said) nauseating pictures (which was exactly what Loma had once often said in the late fifties) — and Jenny said, well the tunnel and the sweater and the moccasins were just one of those coincidences and it wasn’t as if a hippie’d been playing a guitar with his chick in the tunnel, though in fact two chaps were suddenly having a loud argument as they got further and further away which looked like developing into a fight, but as suddenly as their argument had blown up it subsided, and Jenny stopped abruptly again but no shrug. Reid had had a headache and she had come home.
Geoff Millan’s Irish mathematician would have given me a formula for such a coincidence if I’d asked, for at that supper the night of Dudley’s operation five years earlier, the Irishman had had something for everyone, was the star, carried his brain with such levity that when I asked (thick-tongued with the Moselle Tessa’s father had ordered from next door) what university this Pythagorean savant taught at, he banged his head into his fist, and said he could not remember for the life of him the name of the insane place but there was a buttery and a brand new landscape laid on he believed by helicopter but as for him he would like to hear more about my boats on the south coast, if there were hire boats what could my margin be?
Formula for coincidence? Take a year off and study some system that makes the probable seem improbable. Oh the best I could do was add, to Jenny, that a book had been knocked off the chair when her filmed hands had snatched up those moccasins and that a bookmark had fallen from the book — and I couldn’t recall the name of the book but did recall the bookmark.
Jenny said it was one of Reid’s books and said it with such simple finality that the subject lapsed into the field of home conversation and Lorna practicing and Will on the phone; and anyway, at that stage — just June — I’d had no reason to quiz Jenny about the bookmark which she’d picked off the floor and slipped in the Suitcase Slowly Packed between the V-neck sweater and the green-and-white plastic bottle of shampoo she’d started using. A picture of Reid? I came to think it might be of someone important.
On the plane — where because Tourist had been overbooked by a Senior Citizens’ group I’d at the last minute been installed for the same reduced rate in First Class — I made a small collection of Japanese slippers and chopsticks and plastic envelopes of duck and soy sauces (plus a couple of kimonos when the steward wasn’t looking), to take to Sub’s children when I got back to New York. Should I have worried about money? About how many gross of Red Whitehead’s liquid crystal sets I could peddle? Being on a time that was neither American nor English I had tricked my body into a new exploratory line that might lead to intervals differing as the Maya sacred and solar calendars differ, the one holding within 260 days the full permutation of twenty day names and thirteen numbers, the other ordering itself into eighteen months of twenty days with five days at the end during which who knows what they did, perhaps meditated on what must have seemed in effect a cog-wheel (like an analog computer) fitting solar to sacred (tenon to mortise) so a rotation of 18,980 days or fifty-two true years would embrace all the variations or alignments of greater and smaller circles. The Irish mathematician would understand, for he seemed the night of Dudley’s appendectomy to be free-floating between gravities.
In any case it was with this inter-time, like an expansible space inside my knuckles and eyes and the back of my shoulders — an organ time which must be in its sphere like a type of weightlessness — that I phoned home from the airport in London and got Will.
Loma had spent the night at Tessa’s.
I was between them all.
Loma had wanted Will to go to his friend Stephen’s. He couldn’t believe Loma was as disheartened about the break-in as she said. He said, rather importantly, In fact, Dad, I think Mummy misses you. I suspect that’s all there is to it. Will had locked all the windows. In the front hall under an old black spread he had laid a complex field of pots and pans, and had rigged the small cassette recorder that was supposed to receive family letters from America so that if the intruder was for some reason hugging the wall he or she would rip a strong indirectly routed string yanking downward a bolt resting on the PLAY button releasing the National Anthem. Will was concerned only that he not be in a deep or bad dream from which he might wake ignorant and scared or which might itself naturally incorporate the kitchen clatter or “God Save the Queen” so he would not wake up at all. He had had nightmares.
Surely the humor of the music would have disturbed a burglar most.
I told Will I had his Wall Street literature, and asked where Jenny was.
He said off with Reid, she’d taken a bag.
There was a nearly final moment of silence in which a ghost stood at attention in our hall (and I thought, if you scare a ghost instead of being scared by the ghost, you double the event and pass through into a new field of force).
Did you ask who collected the copy and the original?
I asked if it was a man or a woman. They said they didn’t know. Someone who knew the pages were there, I said.
Will asked if I had any enemies. I felt he was writing in his leather notebook. From train numbers he’d graduated to shares — now maybe detection.
I asked him why he asked.
Routine question, he said. Was I going to Mummy’s concert?
I’d forgotten all about her chorus, but I said yes of course.
Will was going to Stephen’s tomorrow night. I recalled Loma had insisted he go even the night after the break-in, but Will would not leave her, and now he said she’d gone on about it and he almost felt obliged to spend the night at Stephen’s.
I said, She just doesn’t want to be a bother to you.
I said I’d see him when I saw him, and he agreed, and we hung up.
I was between Will and Lorna invisible. I was between June and Chad. I was between Dagger and Claire.
Jenny, however, was between me and probable northern danger, and that danger was not to me but to her, though her own damn fault.
Why had Tessa never really talked to me about the film? I was no longer between her and Dudley, or no more than anyone else was. She would take a drag and look at me and after a count of four or five say with languid finality, Oh everyone’s making a film. But then to Lorna she suddenly said, Oh but can’t you see Dudley in boots and breeches and flowing sleeves and tight cuffs marching around a set giving orders and checking historical details! And she and Lorna would laugh at that. And Dudley of course would not be present.
She and Dudley — this is not only during the time Dagger and I made the film but for a couple of years at least — didn’t go away together much. A weekend in Wales was about the size of it. Dudley took Jane, or Jane Dudley, to the Bethnal Green dolls’ house museum or a garden pub for Sunday lunch. Tessa took Jane shopping and to the cinema.