Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

She’s tall and dainty, her page-boy newly trimmed. She gives you a lifesaver. She stops the transistor, and her name comes back: Connie — Constance. She makes references to her parents and the job she’s just packed up, and a play she got a ticket for at the last minute last night. She puts a hand to her cheek thinking. She puts the transistor on the bed, opens the suitcase and carefully tears out two travelers checks. When you ask how Sub and his wife are, she locks the case, comes very close to you and says, Not good.

She’s better being solemnly shy in the slow elevator. She thanks the attendant, who thanks her, and doesn’t volunteer additional information when I answer her question about the big orange globes on posts at crossings. Belisha Beacons. Belisha. Someone during the war.

You cross Oxford Street and in the busy seclusion of Soho Square she turns the talk from your awe-inspiring expatriation to the church on the left which you find you don’t know anything about though you’ve sat on these benches reading The Evening Standard waiting for Lorna. You say it’s Huguenot you believe, let’s look.

Anon, leaving the far side of the Square you point out the film companies and for some reason say you want to make a film. About England sort of. When she asks if you have any experience, she seems quite alone.

To reach Blake’s house you cut through quiet St. Anne’s Court where, nodding at the male window-shoppers, you ask if she wants a little bedside reading, and she giggles. At the corner of Broadwick and Marshall down the block and across the street from the pub named for the pioneer anesthetist Dr. Snow, there is the sign on the small house, and you both read it. She says, Blake’s wife was totally uneducated. Let’s see, what would he have said about pornography?

You tell her a hat-designer friend of yours is just round the corner, and Carnaby Street’s a few steps further down Canton, but she asks if St. Paul’s is near Aldermanbury Square, she promised to say hello to an associate of Daddy’s. You say, That’s getting down into the City; she says, Where are we now then? and you explain the City with a capital C.

Her father’s associate is of course a broker. He is plugged into a New York Stock Exchange computer but of course when he plays with it to show what it can do the quotation on the read-out panel is yesterday’s closing because it’s only 6;30 A.M. in New York. He cashes a travelers check for Connie.

Children roam St. Paul’s. They pass under arches and look up into Wren’s Roman dome. Leave the Whispering Gallery to them. You show your guest the gold American chapel from the war, and she says she sometimes forgets if Churchill is dead yet or not and you say he wouldn’t appreciate that in his present state, and she says, Of course I wouldn’t say it to him, and giggles as if she’s chilly. She wants to see John Donne in his winding sheet and you tell her where it is and say you’ll wait.

In a small antique pub where every varnished line seems out of plumb you buy her a late lunch. You tell how Wren couldn’t get his way after the Great Fire, the Parisian unity of radiating axes offended the English mind, so London remains neighborhoods. Yes, instead of a baroque wheel (you say, wondering about another pint and about Connie), or for that matter say a grid like Manhattan, you say — but then you say Oh Christ and with a smile raise your mug and she touches and says, Thanks for riding down in the elevator with me, and she means it. You say she could have walked down, and she says she has several times.

You bear two halves of best bitter back to your lanterned nook thinking that Lorna said, Don’t you dare bring her home for dinner.

Connie asks if you have money of your own.

You return to the elevator. She says they just terrify her, that’s all there is to it, it’s her only neurosis.

She wants to see the London Stone, she isn’t sure why. The what? you say. We’re quite warm, she says, her finger on square 2B page 62 of her A to Z .

You say, Something to tell my English friends about, I mean whoever heard of the London Stone?

It’s stuck, in fact, into the outside of the Bank of China. The Cannon Street traffic grinds by, and she reads the plaque out loud, you watch her lips pucker on a couple of w ’s and the tip of her nose takes a delicate dip-and plaque and A to Z mingle in the mind — this relic moved here 1962 from Church of St. Swithun’s south wall where it had been since 1798 (whip out your box and snap it onto Kodachrome), piece of original limestone once fronting Cannon Street Station, something about 1188 Henry Son of Elwyn de Loudenstone later Lord Mayor, this hunk is the stone the Romans used to measure all distances from London.

She’s a real walker, but when you find a little church she seems glad to go in and sit. She says things are so bad with Sub and Rose she doesn’t like to visit them; Sub gets a second wind and is charming to Connie and Rose accuses Connie of taking sides. Too bad Rose is pregnant again.

You suggest tea at Connie’s hotel. Can’t I buy you a drink? she says.

Pubs aren’t open till five thirty.

And I’ve got my train to catch, she says.

You think, Well that’s that.

Salisbury by dusk, she says, maybe wear myself out so I can sleep.

Can’t sleep?

Not in the normal course of things, she says.

You push a bit: the normal course of things?

She turns in the pew and contemplates your lapel before dismissing you.

I could have given you Raymond Chandler, you say, The Big Sleep .

Travel books, she says, they’re wonderful drugs.

You ask if they put her to sleep, and she says almost but not quite.

So, out of bed tomorrow morning in Salisbury; meet friends, drive to Stonehenge, get ahead of the crowds. Do you believe the Druids used it? she says. Why not? they use it now. Well, do you believe they sacrificed human people there? she asks. Maybe. Have you been? Never. The raincoat has parted over her thighs, are those patterned stockings tights? Two black copies of the Book of Common Prayer stand in the rack. You put your hand on hers and look her in the eye and say, Do you believe Merlin was buried alive under one of those megaliths at Stonehenge?

I’ll have to see, she says.

At her hotel she declines your help saying she’s got to get organized.

You wonder if Lorna rang up the garage, they’ve had the bloody car ten days. You buy an Evening Standard at the tube.

Before I could wait for Outer Film I had to make sure they’d take action. Under the timeless tungsten of the tenth-floor hall, I felt in my pocket through English and American change for the key that Sub had given me, but then Myrna let me in. Her dark face broke the momentary glare of a living-room window which for a second took even her eyes into blackness. She must have heard my steps and looked through the peep hole. She scuffed back to Sub’s room. Her stockings were laddered each in exactly the same way. She’d had her hair conked but then fluffily curled so it looked like an Afro I’d seen on a white girl in Claire’s elevator.

On Sub’s bedpost hung a towel or two maybe still damp after the drier. Wash quilted the big bed, a week of Sub’s and his children’s things. Over a bunched sheet lay what looked from where I stood in the hall like the Johann Sebastian Bach sweatshirt I’d brought Billy from the States the spring JFK beat Humphrey. When Billy out grew it Lorna passed it back across the Atlantic.

I would phone Outer Film.

Between the fridge and the kitchen table the ironing board had been set up and on it was a blue glass of water and the iron on end, its cord taut across the adjacent counter to the plug. Water in a saucepan had come to a bubble; I turned the flame off, found a glove-potholder and poured, and the teabag label popped into the mug. I phoned the charter man to see if he wanted to have a drink, though we could have settled our business on the phone — it was the England holdovers on New York-to-Sidney charter flights: people had complained. I asked him to speak up; he said it was the connection. Myrna stepped around me to rescue her tea.