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!
Do you think they’re finished with this house?
Will your young blond second tenor come and stay with you when I’m not here?
Ah. Since when is he blond?
Since this morning when he left here, and you must be watching yourself pretty carefully if you remember you didn’t mention his hair. Did he have curry last night?
Will your digestion be better if I say no?
My digestion is perfect. Say no.
No. He’s a friend of Dudley Allott’s. Tell me more about Tessa.
The film?
Tessa and the film.
Undress.
All alone?
No.
Maybe you shouldn’t have brought Jenny that memory of the red-haired woman and Reid.
Maybe I shouldn’t have come back.
I was feeling something even before the burglary.
What?
I phoned Dagger to ask how Alba was. You know how he is. He said he’d come over and keep me company.
You phoned him.
This time yes. He told me his brother—
His brothers range from twenty-five to fifty.
His brother the car salesman had to stand by and watch his alcoholic cousin let the business go down. They were on the edge of Watts. The cousin kept saying Negroes buy Cadillacs too, in fact that is what they buy. But they didn’t buy that many and then
they didn’t keep up the payments and one of these Cadillacs disappeared and Dagger’s brother had to fly down to Mexico to repossess it but by then the chief of police was driving it around and said they could have it for thirty-three hundred dollars.
But the car salesman doesn’t work for the bank.
Anyhow it was funny.
Lorna always took her pants off before her bra.
I’ve heard that story before, I said.
She was sitting beside me. He asked if you’d take your film thing with you.
He was getting in touch with Claire, I said.
We listened to Will come upstairs. He walked around. From the head of the stairs to the hall beside my sister’s ghetto photos, his doorway, the bathroom (light on but at once off), hall down toward our room, back to the head of the stairs, his room, bathroom (again light on, off), his room, Jenny’s room, linen cupboard for some reason, and then his doorway.
He said, What’s the great circle route, Dad?
I’ll tell you in the morning.
OK.
I pictured the Cadillac dusting a village, shedding its muffler. Dagger had stories to get him from Casas Grandes to Chihuahua, from Tampico to Veracruz. Probably he’d been to Mexico. Lorna and I had not.
What must happen before anything else was that I must finish with Tessa’s moments. Lorna curled herself around behind me where I sat upright in thought—she had only her bra on—and I reminded her of the drink we’d all had in ’68. I’d had some jellied eel and three oysters in the street that afternoon, just passed a stall and had to have some. Then at six I got a stabbing pain below the belt just as we were sitting down with Tessa and Dudley to have a drink and wait for her father who was meeting us. It was one of those old pubs that have kept the three divisions, Public Bar, Private Bar, Saloon Bar. We were in the Private, a wedge of a nook that made you half recall a horse-drawn hansom you’d just pulled up in. In the normal course of accident and permutation, I’d never seen Dudley with his father-in-law, who had once so terribly opposed their marriage. Tessa’s father was an unassimilated German enclosing an assimilated Jew. When Dudley and Tessa made it doubly definite that they were getting married and that Dudley could not convert to Judaism, Tessa’s father put him through scenes of prophetic frenzy—rising to agonies of blood no rabbi’s indoctrination could have equalled, particularly for a young American scholar of modern European history, and descending to exhausted acknowledgment that Dudley was in fact circumcised. But before Tessa’s father arrived at the pub, my vitals attacked, and I left to go downstairs to the Men’s. The pain passed, but as I stood at the wash basin an old man with an enormous nose and hands and a baggy cloth cap and a louring face got hold of me to tell me his plan for a pub. He caught my arm as I reached for the paper towel and he wouldn’t let go and I let my hands just drip. His plan would cater to everyone, mind—it wouldn’t just be the jukebox and the rock-and-roll, there’d be a room for older people and then a room where you could bring a lady for a quiet talk and the dart-board room like the Public Bar now but no jukebox and there’d be room for the rock-and-roll records—I leaned gently away—and there’d be a family room where you’d bring the family for a sandwich and crisps of a Saturday, and maybe other rooms, but the plan would be radiating, see, radiating—you’d get your central bar in like a circle and all the rooms would radiate outward, see, like a wheel.
I said I’d think about it. He said, Right you are, Guv.
He didn’t leave when I did.
At the door to the Private Bar I heard Tessa saying, What would we have done without bombed houses! Her father put down his wine glass of neat whiskey to shake my hand. Lorna and Tessa sat snugly together on the leather cushions. Dudley was tamping his pipe and smiling at no one in particular. He said, That’s the trouble with London, no more bombed houses. Tessa’s father shook his head, no no we didn’t want any more bombed houses, no indeed, why when he came from Germany in ’38 he took a janitor’s job and every house on the other side of the road was demolished. When the planes came over, Tessa sat like an Egyptian cat in the Morrison Shelter. Tessa’s father seemed to be talking toward Dudley’s drink, a pint of beer; he described a Morrison Shelter, right-angle, dimensions—the density and strength of the steel mesh that hung down on all four sides like an oversize tablecloth.
It was Tessa, not her father, who’d told us about his law practice and the house in Munich and everything else that had been taken away except her mother, who had also been taken away. And about coming to England at nine and living for six months with a relation, not knowing till her father later told her that after she’d been sent to England he was picked up and would have died in a camp but as a World War I veteran he was excused so long as he left Germany at once. But her father now gave us a gentler, smaller picture to entertain us—of all the German Jews in North London trying to avoid the authorities who would intern them. They would be sent out by their wives first thing in the morning, and it was a sight, Tessa’s father said, all these German Jews with sandwiches in their long overcoats, hands behind them, aliens each on his own pacing Hampstead Heath all day till the coast was clear at home.
My pain stupidly returned and I was about to get up again, but Tessa cried out in something like a laugh and said, Guess what, sometimes they got home and the coast was completely clear—no house!
The barmaid put her head around the partition. Dudley lowered his pipe hand to the table: That was in bad taste, Tessa.
Tessa put her hand over Lorna’s where it rested lightly on the edge of the table and said, If I’m lucky, Dudley darling will buy me my dream house.
I said, Where? in Middle America?
Tessa snapped back, New York’s not Middle America—but we were all laughing, Lorna too, who several years before—though I’d not remind her now as she lay curled around behind my back with her knickers off—had been enough changed by her friendship with Tessa to find herself the following autumn, which would be ’58, plunging into the purchase of the house we now lived in.
I leaned to pull off my socks and looked around at a space of Lorna’s thigh that seemed tonight less routine and less real than the transoceanic clothes I was getting out of.
I said, I suppose the connection with the film scene wouldn’t mean as much to you as to me.
OK, so we laughed at Tessa but maybe I did because she had my hand clamped down.
Of course we all laughed at her—Dudley too.
She’d had a hard day.
I opened my belt and unbuttoned my shirt, which was the same blue as the trim on my teacup this morning when the maid at the Knightsbridge B & B brought my tray and I turned my bare shoulders and chest toward her and raised myself on an elbow and looked beyond her leg to my jockey shorts on the nearly napless oriental rug where they’d landed a few hours before directly below the Joni Mitchell record on the chair.
Diary and film parted and came together, hiding one another, parted and came together like some flesh breathing, an organ like a creature, and I must turn only to the ruining of the film, who did it, who had it done, and why. I would not tell Dagger a burglar had taken the original of the diary.
I turned and put my hand behind Lorna to unsnap her but found no snaps and drew the back of the bra upward toward her head. But she rolled around on her back preventing me from going further in that direction but seeming too to open herself to my feelings. But she rolled toward me and so I reached again to raise the bra over her head. But the phone was ringing downstairs and the ghost of some bad gag tiptoed away down our long-ago refinished stairs and I jumped up and followed, and passed my son standing in his doorway with a ballpoint in his hand.
And I picked up the phone hoping it was Dagger, and heard the male overseas operator telling me something I’d been told for years which I didn’t hear, then Sub’s voice approaching and receding down some drowned cable. And I must go back to America tonight.
I phoned my charter associate. He said I hadn’t a minute to spare.
/> I needed something to write with. The ballpoint in Will’s hand was a very special one given me by a man I knew in NASA.
When I went up, Lorna hadn’t moved. I didn’t tell her precisely what had happened in Sub’s apartment, only that I must go.
But, she said, what was so marvelous about this country house? What did it look like?
From about any angle except a helicopter the house looked circular; but in fact it was shaped like a squat egg with the ends sliced curved, and it had a circular stone wall around it. The odd thing was that I in fact had told Dagger I wanted a house that looked circular but wasn’t and he found the exact thing.
Lorna simply lay curled on the bed. I did not want to say what the film was about.
I’m sorry, I said.
I’m thinking, she said. That Dudley found a house in the country just like that. And Tessa spoke of it at dinner here. She’d been in Scotland with her friend. You were here part of the evening. You left to meet Geoff Millan, he wanted you to meet an American.
When was it?
Lorna told me.
It had been way back in March long before we shot the Marvelous Country House.
But not long before we laid our plans.
OK, I was fallible. I did recall hearing the beginning of Tessa’s account.
The three key moments moved among all those perhaps trivial pages that I’d written and Jenny had typed.
I remember Tessa’s description of the house. Her having in some eerie way been waiting for me was the least of my worries at this point.
LOVE SPACE
Top-secret lips like a soft book closed. Random elation. I forget during, I forget after, almost. The skin of the back bends from a gloam like Attic honey—late sun behind—to a stretch beyond the couched shoulder blade blue and amber near gray. Does sound from the street in a current of day under the window shade color us? It is skin I finger, not hue, but I have forgotten her first name for a second, and remember that it was a lot like this before with her or someone else, do you remember how the memory slides out or you slip into it? I speak for myself, not for her, though—and for her ribs and a down above the knees and for her fleshly shoulders that are not what you would think from her tense figure clothed, the parts of her body I speak for still speak for themselves, but I can’t speak for her, I have her, I breathe with her, have in my hands even what I wouldn’t ever want to get at in her, like one of my whole memories I can’t divide.
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