Lookout Cartridge (58 page)

I returned to Dagger.

What energy in process were we tying into here? It was an energy constantly disturbed in its course or starting out again and again at new points.

The film might be a mess but we’d have to see. Tessa and I weren’t driving back to London tonight. Dagger and I hadn’t negotiated the centrifugal pan that with the processional reprise (plus chant) might climax the scene. But we still had plenty on the third spool. There seemed fewer people, but these were crowded around the Altar Stone.

Tessa was goading the deserter, Are you going to let him tell you to shut up?

This must be the deserter’s
companion. He looked
at me keenly as I prepared to record. Gene’s wife was there with two children who had climbed onto the fallen stone and were trying to push each other off.

Yeah, said Nash, don’t tell him to shut up. I’ll shut
you
up.

Look out you don’t get a nosebleed, Nash, said the deserter’s companion.

Again I wanted to ask Tessa whom she’d had by the hand before. She certainly wasn’t missing her green beret. The man from the Ministry stood calmly embarrassed next to the bank clerk. Nash got pushed, and he and the deserter and the other fellow as they jostled each other toward the single upright of the Sunset trilothon were joined by Cosmo who was saying something and was told by Nash to stop shooting off his mouth. They went outside the Sarsen Circle and I heard the deserter say something like, You
did
see him.

Whereupon of all people little Elspeth of the long hair and stern visage was at my side introducing the Indian from Kansas City and telling me his responses to Stonehenge might be relevant, he didn’t think the place essentially English.

This was now pounced on by Tessa (ah that curled lip!) who declared the
quintessential
Englishness of this place, the practical mysticism of the
land
. An English voice was heard to say, There, there! and I turned asking who had said that.

But Dagger was shooting the scuffle now intermittently manifest through the north northeast part of the circle, and I said, wishing to rescue our scene, Let’s do the big pan.

Dagger agreed and called to the New Druids to line up and reprocess before the torches went out, and I suddenly asked if Reid was here, the guerrilla-theater actor, and Dagger said yes somewhere.

And though I couldn’t enter it into my diary which Jenny was going to type, I felt that very much a part of this scene was her off-again-on-again relation with Reid who had got some hold over her but who had not been the reason I’d made sure Jenny wasn’t here tonight. But the word Reid threw me out into the real successes of our silent Softball Game where
I
and he had appeared together, and the Indian Krish (now perhaps dead in a ditch).

And Reid had appeared (or disappeared) with the red-haired woman, and as he’d crossed the grass beyond third base and headed off into foul ground and Hyde Park he’d had a glow about his body, almost an aureole, that had probably not come out on our film. But Dagger said, Wake up! and he was right and I found myself waking from some still further arc of time whose formula I couldn’t frame but whose swimming materials I knew included Tessa’s mouth and the cassette recorder my mother wanted us to write letters to her on, and a sheet of liquid crystals like a negative being peddled by the God Mercury Cartwright, and a rusty zipper between two sleeping bags in the light of moonlight wind upon a lake in Maine: and the arc whose formula these partly were, was the softly cadenced sigh of Lorna’s sobbing in the late fifties that I could hear even when she was out of the house like a new motion of our Highgate things, a picture, a hunk of quartz, a piano, a Victorian couch, a refinished stairway, all for a long moment on loan and not after all ours—sobs that made me fear for my life.

And as I got with the reprocession but was still afield on waves of pointless past, I said Who is this that people are asking about—is he here, is he not here, who
is
it?

Probably not just one person, said Dag, maybe some of these Hindu mystics are your greatest sex fiends when you get away from the firelight, right?

In the dark, through between two lintel-less slabs, I saw Nash moving his hands in front of someone all in white whom I couldn’t see.

We tracked the procession back toward the northeast portal on a route that led toward the Slaughter Stone again and the Avenue and the Heel Stone, but when Dagger said, Now! he swung past them counterclockwise and I kept out of his way as we made one revolution passing the procession, made a second revolution-pan so fast Dagger staggered, and a third even faster with Cosmo calling, Just loop that pan and run it as many times as you want.

But the fourth time around, the procession was just through the arches and outside the circle—the dark gaps had been run into the gray-lit stones and the stones into one whirling circuit of the continuous panning shot as if we had whirled the procession out a runway by centrifugal launch and made the circle an unbroken power once again.

A voice was saying, If you don’t feel homesick, either you ought to or you ought to stop worrying about
not
feeling it.

Nash was suddenly in view holding a handkerchief to his nose.

Dagger spun us out toward the Sarsen Circle, and the bank clerk was standing at the 21–22 arch northwest from the Altar. I urged Dagger to follow, and we gave the man a chance to speak, I felt our climatic unifying pan had not held anything together, I was a long way away from what I had felt with Jenny here, the windy innuendo I’d felt here and then the crystal truths measured for us by this very man whom you might see tracing generations of craftsmen at the County Archives during his lunch break or poking about the Wessex barrows on the crest of some remote down with not even a bike to convey him home, only a thin ash plant and his knobbly-knuckled thumbs. He was saying now that he’d just heard someone nearby groaning, Graveyard, graveyard, just a graveyard; an interesting view, but he hadn’t found the owner of the voice.

Dagger was pointing elsewhere but I had the mike close.

Yes indeed, said the bank clerk, for if it’s just a burial ground—and make no mistake, it
may
be!—(and I half-heard the word
Is
, like a gust’s mild buzz through the stones, yet there
was
no gust, no breeze) why then our main concern is the giant
work
of the thing. Now these Sarsens, the big ones, came overland from eighty miles away. A miracle. But the bluestones, which are much smaller but still run to five tons, were many if not all of them brought from Wales. Geology tells us that. Think of it! One hundred thirty miles by air—but in real miles, two hundred and forty! And this without the wheel, though possibly with rollers. But by water, more than halfway by water, from West Wales through the Bristol Channel to the mouth of the Bristol Avon—you know the gorge?—then up the Avon, then-overland, and perhaps along the river Wylye, then overland again to here. Think of it. This is what Stonehenge means, I say.

And as the man took a deep breath and began to speak of the three other (but unlikely) routes the bluestones could have taken, a voice from outside the circle with a tremor of irony I thought, said, It comes to that, and that alone.

Who spoke? said our bank clerk, and stepped out through the arch.

Tessa was with us again from another direction: I walked over some bodies out there, she said.

Did them good, I said.

The bank clerk in his plastic mac was telling Dagger of the five kinds of rock the bluestones came from, but Dagger thanked him, and as we moved away and the mike and camera were off, the bank clerk tall and devoted called to us did we know the theory there may have been an earlier Henge these bluestones composed prior to their transport here, so just possibly these stones came as one completed monument from Wales and may have been—he called desperately—a
Blue
stonechenge.

Reid appeared in white blouse and white jeans. He asked how it was going. He was graceful and relaxed, he seemed to have moseyed over from his own acreage where he’d been doing some work. Hey, he said, is Savvy writing a piece on this?

I guess I’ll be the only one, I said.

The man from the Ministry hoped everyone would be accounted for.

The small Elizabeth with a proper sense of order came pelting over to us to say that the fair-haired boy with beard had disappeared. Dagger and I knew this to be the deserter. Elizabeth pelted away into the dark. Dagger gave me the camera and followed her.

Behind me I heard through the openings of the ring we’d tried to blur closed, the American voice confirming the bank clerk’s words about human effort. The moon was still cloud-bound, but I could see Elspeth and a pair of stragglers going toward the car park. I had asked Dagger to ask her. She had asked three friends and one of them had asked a friend with a car. Nell had come with two kids, plus two men I didn’t know. There was a University of Maryland part-timer who had thrown a Thanksgiving party several years ago that Will and Jenny and I had gone to and who’d been greeted with open arms by Dagger tonight. It was a pretty eclectic coven. You make sacrifices in the interests of accident and naturalness. People had friends nearby. There was a party somewhere in a caravan.

Dagger and I had come separately, he in the VW with Cosmo and others, I in the Fiat. Tessa had looked at a cottage in Hampshire on our way down and wanted to see another tomorrow on the way back. We were supposed to be giving a lift to Elizabeth, who was staying with an aunt in Salisbury. Some of these arrangements were not in the diary.

I did include, though, that I wanted to change my life: for this, however light, was my reply to Elizabeth, who came back looking for Dagger and was most distressed about the deserter who hadn’t yet been found and then asked with that English no-nonsense trick what
in fact
was the point of our film.

We had six hundred feet I knew would be better in the processed print than my sense tonight of the muddled scene. But when I’d been here in March with Jenny, I’d felt like a giant. The hingeless doorways had unlocked their field of possibility and all those concentric fronts of memory had passed out the lens of my loved daughter’s camera before she turned to me radiant and announced that Stonehenge was a message; and inspired by her I thought, That’s it! Instant developing movie film! And I was even free (though not so great) when the voice behind began doling out distances and weights and I pictured proving myself by showing a hundred Stone Age huskies how to get the Sarsens into the foundation holes and, topping that feat even, lift the lintels let’s say by rocking them on a log-staging till the lintel was high enough to roll onto the pillars, there to be fixed with my patent lock of mortise and tenon.

And I thought it was this passage, linking daughter and lock, that brought Jenny to me in tears after she’d proofread the typescript. Tears damped the lashes and shone on the cheekbones, I hadn’t known her to cry in years, she’s dry cork as the poet says, though not cold; and she wept again then, asking if I would show this to Mummy; and then I saw it must be the part about Lorna’s sobs.

Materials for a life, I said.

It’ll take a lot of editing, I was about to say, but Lorna had forgotten her key and I went to let her in. Upon entering the living room she took a Kleenex and dabbed at Jenny’s makeup.

Dagger came back and I handed over the Beaulieu. I’d had the touch of an idea but lost it when he spoke, but maybe it was Tessa now quiet at my side. There were shouts and singing somewhere and cars starting. Someone called, Where’s your torch? Dagger said he’d felt it needed something more and he now had had a thought for another scene which we could discuss when we got home.

The man from the Ministry came from another part of the circle. He said he must say these New Druids took rather an activist line.

I said somebody had to in this benighted country, and Dagger said Here here! and I said if you leaned on a stone and waited for something to happen, nothing would, and the bank clerk with a tremor in his tone said he wasn’t at all sure about that.

Headlights beamed through us.

The other way, to the south, I saw a flashlight moving through a field. (A torch, these hoary English call it.)

I asked Tessa if her shoes were wet.

We were moving north toward the passage that went under the road and came up by the car park.

Dagger called back into the dark, Closing up!

Dagger’s talk of a new scene had interfered with my thought of one. Or had it been Tessa, who might now be contemplating our hotel room in Salisbury a few miles away. It had been six years. She took my arm and asked if Dagger had seen my written account of this mad documentary of ours. And as I said No, my idea came cresting back: to film the boatyard in which I had an interest, and get the old man to put in a nice clear explanatory word about making things by hand.

It might help, said Tessa.

We turned and the others went on. I couldn’t make out the ruined horseshoe, only the open wall of Sarsen monoliths. The moon was trying to come out.

To one side of the circumference I saw, at a distance I could not gauge, two silent flashlights. Tessa said, Good luck to them.

Priestly shit indeed, I said—think of the poor fucking Catholics being interned.

In London Dudley told me
mumbo jumbo
meant not just nonsense or obscure ritual but also a fetish; he got out a book to show me that
mumbo jumbo
came from Mandingo for a magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.

Now what had been the Stonehenge message Jenny had felt in March? But she’d been looking
out
of the circle. Did that mean you only got it as it left? or if you stood in it and conveyed it out?

Waves aren’t simple; they hit each other; they interfere, take each other’s force, but also reinforce.

Ned Noble could tell you.

In the stillness of the Highgate house once I read about a scientist who made up a law about waves hitting particles so that every point in space becomes a source of spreading waves.