Ancient Images Part 7

When he didn't reach in the drawer, Sandy stepped forward. Lying at the bottom of the drawer were a few ------------------------------------101 brownish pages torn raggedly from a notebook. In the shadow of the drawer the penciled scribble on the topmost page looked too faded to decipher. "Take them if you want them," Eames urged her. "They're the notes Spence gave me. They won't bite."

He hadn't opened the drawer very wide. As Sandy reached in, she had the irrational notion that he meant to close the drawer on her wrist like a trap. She touched something cold and small that made her think of uneven teeth until she realized they were paper clips. She lifted the pages out by one corner. "Will you help me read them?"

"Didn't I begin by telling you I'm busy?" He flapped his hand at the pages. "Take them with you. You can read them if you put your mind to it. I had to."

Sandy shaded her eyes and leaned close to the gray writing. "Does this say 'biblical parallels'?"

"I believe it does," Eames said with another of his unexpected laughs. "You'll have less trouble with them than I had. He had too many ideas too late, it seems to me. Some of this stuff I didn't even try to incorporate."

"You'd have liked to stay closer to the story the film was based on."

"No, just to know at the outset what was expected of me. That story was nothing special. Have you not read it? I found the book for tenpence recently, below in the shop." He fumbled under the suit draped over a chair and produced a book. "My sometime friend downstairs seemed glad to be rid of it. You may have it."

The pages hung out of the binding, which was so shabby that she couldn't make out the t.i.tle or even what color the boards had once been. "It's very kind of you," Sandy said. "Did you show this to Graham Nolan?"

"I hadn't found it then, nor the notes. Don't forget those."

Sandy picked up the ragged pages and thought she heard the doorbell stir. The restless clatter must have been a ------------------------------------102 bird on the roof, for Eames didn't respond to it. She slipped the pages inside the book and realized that he was smiling at her. "Do you know," he said, "I'm quite glad I changed my mind and let you come. It must have been a relief for me to talk. I certainly feel better."

"I hope it helps you with your lecture."

"I'm sure it will. I'll be more encouraging. These aren't mine, you should know," he said, patting the pile of ma.n.u.scripts. "They're from the writers' group I have to lecture to, thanks to the bookman downstairs. Who knows, there may just be one among them I can guide into the career I should have had."

He watched her make room for the book in her handbag and snap the clasp. "Are you bound for the coast now?" he said.

"Not that I'm aware of. Should I be?"

"Didn't you say you aimed to talk to anyone connected with the film? Tommy Hoddle is in Cromer, in a show at the end of the pier. I heard him being interviewed on their local station on the wireless."

"Tommy Hoddle ...8 She remembered the name from Graham's list.

"The comic relief. He and Billy Bingo used to play two timorous policemen. I quite enjoyed writing their scenes. Billy died some years ago, but Tommy's still performing a solo version of their stage routine. It must be the only life he knows."

"You wouldn't know if Graham met him?"

"I believe he already had when he came to see me."

In that case she ought to meet him, however unlikely he sounded as the owner of a copy of the film. She could drive east to Cromer now and still be in time for her next appointment, in Birmingham tomorrow. "Thanks for all your help," she said to Eames. "I'll be thinking what I can do to keep your name alive." ------------------------------------103 He grinned down at her, his false teeth glinting in the dimness at the top of the stairs, as she closed the outer door. She was pleased that she'd cheered him up. The sunlight felt like a smile on her face as she hurried to her car. She thought she might have some fun at the end of the pier. ------------------------------------104 Two hours later she was in the midst of Norfolk, and reminding herself never to rely on the map. A road drawn almost taut on the page seemed in practice never to run straight for more than a few hundred yards. She ought to be in Cromer in plenty of time to catch Tommy Hoddle before the evening show, but she thought she had better do without lunch. When she found herself at the tail end of yet another cortege unwilling to overtake a slow-moving car, she s.h.i.+fted down a gear as soon as she saw an uncurved stretch of road ahead, and was past the four cars before any of them had started signaling.

In her mirror she saw them trundle into a side road, and then she was alone. A doughy cloud half the size of the sky lowered itself over the horizon until the sky was clear above the fields. Although the landscape was flat, she could never see far ahead, because of the hedges that bordered the devious roads. Sometimes the roads named on signposts at junctions weren't the roads the map would have her believe they were. Once she reached Cromer she would make time to relax, she promised herself.

She braked at curves, gathered speed, braked again. Fields of grain stirred beyond her open window. She glanced at the mirror in case the movement she'd glimpsed back at the last curve meant that someone intended to pa.s.s her, but the road was deserted, s.h.i.+vering with dust and heat beneath the glaring sky. She swung around another curve and looked to see what was coming up fast behind her. It ------------------------------------105 must have been a trick of perspective, a shrub of the hedge appearing to leap onto the tarmac as the curve shrank in the mirror before disappearing from view.

The hedge nearer the car was growing taller, throwing the noise of the engine back at her. The noise seemed so like a choked growling in the hedge that she braked in case the engine had developed a fault. She was glad when the hedge and the noise sank, and she was able to hear that nothing was wrong with the car. A breeze rushed through a swath of the gra.s.s of the field she was speeding past--either a breeze or an animal. The airstream of the car might be causing the restlessness in the gra.s.s: surely no wild animal would stay so close to a moving vehicle. She trod hard on the accelerator as the road continued straight. It must be the car that was disturbing the field, for the movements were still pacing her. She reached a long gradual curve along which the hedge reared high, and didn't brake at first. She came in sight of the next straight stretch, and jerked her foot off the accelerator. Where the road curved again, a police car was waiting.

"Exactly what I needed," Sandy sighed. "Thanks so much." She would have more to say to her imagination if it had brought her trouble with the police. She was a hundred yards from the police car when it flashed its lights to halt her.

As she pulled onto the verge, the driver climbed out and shut his door with a chunk like the stroke of an ax. His shoulders were so wide that they made her think of American football. She wondered if walking slowly was part of police training, intended to give their quarry a chance to quake. He pushed his peaked cap higher on his ruddy forehead that looked dwarfed by his shoulders, and glanced up from her number plate. "May I ask where you're going to?"

"Cromer."

He nodded as if he was weighing her answer. "Where from?"

"Cambridge." ------------------------------------106 "You're a bit lost then, aren't you?"

"I shouldn't be surprised, the way you signpost your roads."

She didn't mean him personally or even the police force, but his face drooped like a hound's. "Actually," she said, "I'm sure this will take me to Cromer."

He tramped around her car and took hold of her door, resting the ball of his thumb on the groove into which her window had sunk. "I'd like to see your driving license."

She imagined him playing hockey instead of football, in a girl's gym suit, and felt somewhat better as she opened her handbag. "I believe you'll find that's in order," she said, flicking through the transparent plastic pockets until she found the one that held her license.

He scrutinized both sides of it, and made to hand the wallet back to her. As he did so, her staff ident.i.ty card flipped up. He stared at it with such distaste that she had the absurd notion that the ubiquitous Stilwell had even managed to prejudice him. "I'd watch out if I were you," he said.

She would have asked what for if she had thought he would tell her. He went back to his vehicle, walking slowly in the middle of the road, as if warning her not to overtake him. He'd made her so tense that when she pa.s.sed the junction he must have been watching she neglected to read the sign. It was a minor road, surely no use to her, and besides, there was a signposted crossroads a few hundred yards ahead.

A dull sound of engines had begun to weigh down the air. She thought it must be farm machinery, though she could see none in the fields. Now she could read the signpost, which confirmed that she was on a road to Cromer. Lights across the field that met one angle of the junction caught her eye, and she braked. Whatever was rumbling toward her from the southwest, it had a police escort.

She stopped at the junction to watch for a minute. It was ------------------------------------107 Enoch's Army, still roving England in search of a hospitable county. The decrepit vans and caravans and mobile homes crawled across the landscape slowly as a funeral, boxed in by police cars with blue lights throbbing on their roofs. Despite the police escort, the convoy seemed for a moment old as the land, a nomadic tribe without a time or place to call its own. Its time had-been the sixties, Sandy thought, and watching it wouldn't get her to Cromer. She started the car and shot across the junction, which was clear for hundreds of yards. She was just past the crossroads when a boy of about seven ran out of the long gra.s.s to her right and into the road, straight in front of her car.

She slammed on the brakes. The car skidded across the tarmac, almost into the ditch the child had jumped over. As Sandy turned into the skid a woman in a kaftan ran out of the gra.s.s after the child. She made to leap the ditch, stumbled backward as she saw the car, slipped on the muddy verge and fell awkwardly at the edge of the field. When she tried to rise and then lay wincing, one hand on her ankle, Sandy parked the car on the opposite verge and went to her.

She hadn't reached the woman when the boy flew at her, brandis.h.i.+ng a jaggedly pointed stone he had picked up. Sandy was already shaking with the effects of the near miss, and the way the boy clearly felt he needed to defend his mother from her turned her cold all over. "I'm not going to hurt her," she a.s.sured him. "I want to help."

The woman raised her face, which looked scrubbed thin and pink. Though her uneven hair was graying, she was about thirty years old. "Are you not from round here?" she said in a broad Lancas.h.i.+re accent.

"No more than you are," Sandy said. "Would that matter?"

"People don't like us going near their homes or their land."

"Pretty unavoidable, I'd say."

When the woman smiled gratefully at her, the boy ------------------------------------108 dropped his stone in the ditch with a splash. Sandy helped the woman to her feet. She took two steps and moaned through clenched lips, and tottered against Sandy. "We ought to get you to a hospital," Sandy said.

"No hospitals. They make us wait until they've dealt with anyone who's got a home address. We've herbs and a healer in the convoy."

"Do you want to wait here for them, or shall I drive you back?"

"I want to go back," the boy pleaded, and slapped the roof of Sandy's car. When Sandy supported his mother to the vehicle and let him into the back she saw he had left earthy handprints on the roof. He was the first small boy she'd met who smelled as grubby as he looked, and his mother seemed to have no use for deodorants either. Sandy turned the car and said, "What was he running away from?"

"Arcturus? All he wanted was to go in a hedge because we've no toilet in the van, and the farmer let two dogs chase him."

"What did the police do?"

The boy hissed at the mention of the police, and the woman laughed curtly. "Looked the other way. They don't want to know about us except to try and destroy us because we might make people see there are other ways of living besides theirs. Enoch says anyone who wears a pointed hat must be a dunce or a clown. One lot of police down south smashed all Arcturus's toys while they were pretending to search the van for drugs. They remind me of his father. He He used to like to smash our things until we left him and joined Enoch." used to like to smash our things until we left him and joined Enoch."

"Enoch's our daddy now," Arcturus said.

Sandy felt lightheaded with so much unexpected information. "The dogs didn't hurt you, I hope."

"No, Enoch chased them off, but Arcturus didn't realize. And do you know, the farmer started shouting, ------------------------------------109 'Don't you hurt my dogs'? Enoch says that people caring more for animals than humans shows how we've lost touch with the old ways but can't do without them. Society wants us all to dress in hides and skins now, but it used to be the priests who put on skins so they could communicate with the animals they shared the land with."

"Hmm," Sandy responded, playing safe. She was on the side road now, and the foremost police car flashed its headlights at her. As she pulled half off the tarmac and felt her left-hand wheels sink into the verge, she saw Enoch Hill marching at the head of the convoy, behind the police. She hadn't realized he was so big: six and a half feet tall at least, with a black beard that hung onto his chest, and hair that streamed as low on his back. He wore a vest and trousers that appeared to be woven of rope. Sandy found the sight of him so fascinating that at first she didn't notice that the police were gesturing her to make a U-turn. "I've brought an injured woman back to her van," she called. "She fell on the road."

"I'll take her," Enoch said. His voice was so big that it crowded out any trace of where he came from. He strode around the police escort and waited, breathing like a bull. Sandy helped her pa.s.senger out of the car, and he lifted the woman in his arms. "Vaggie's driving your van. She can drive while Merl sees to your leg."

"I'll walk with you in case there are any dogs about, shall I?" Sandy said to the boy, and his mother gave her a grateful look.

The van was at the rear of the parade of some forty vehicles, which were still moving, herded by the police. Men with piratical earrings stared out, and children with straw braided in their hair. Sandy had to trot so as to keep up with Enoch. She felt as if she were being borne along by his energy and presence, the smell of sweat and rope, the veins that stood out on his leathery arms, his hair and beard ------------------------------------110 gleaming like wire. "Thanks for looking after these two," he said. "Sorry to be pus.h.i.+ng you, but this isn't the place for a stroll."

"Absolutely," Sandy panted. "Have you far to go?"

He turned his huge weathered head and stared keenly at her without breaking his stride. "As far as we have to until we find somewhere that needs to be fed and that won't make us its slaves."

The woman in his arms nodded vigorously. "Feed the land and it will feed you."

"Our way is to move on when the land wants to rest and dream, but the ma.s.s of men won't leave it alone. Man and the land used to respect each other, but now man pollutes the land, or he stakes his claim on it and then neglects it, or he cultivates it for food that will never feed anyone. There'll come a day when the earth demands more of man than it ever did when man knew what it wanted."

Some of this made sense to Sandy, despite the phrasing. "Do you have somewhere in mind for yourselves?"

"We found a place last week, but the people around it rose up against us," Enoch said. "Territory breeds violence."

They had reached the woman's vehicle, a van painted with sunbursts around the headlamps, clouds on the sides. Immediately the woman who was driving halted to let her and the child climb in, the police car that was following began to blare its horn. "Lo and behold," Enoch said. "Everywhere is someone's territory where we aren't welcome."

"There must be people who have some sympathy for you."

"Find me them," Enoch challenged, and strode back alongside the convoy. "People hate us for showing them what's wrong with their lives, like being made to live where the state decrees, and living too close together, and being scared someone else will steal what they've got, and having ------------------------------------111 their family come apart around them but not daring to work out a different kind of family life."

Sandy wondered if the whole convoy used his words as the woman had. "Man is as savage as he ever was," Enoch was saying. "Violence used to be necessary, it used to be part of the relations.h.i.+p between man and the earth. Now it has lost its meaning it can only get worse."

"It surely can't be that simple."

"How can it mean anything when we know the Bomb can destroy the land and every one of us? What do you do?"

He was asking what her profession was, she gathered, presumably to demonstrate that she couldn't refute his ideas. "I'm a film editor."

He frowned at her, his hairy nostrils flaring. His frown felt like a change in the weather. "Then you're adding to the violence," he said sadly. "Making images of it doesn't take it out of people, not when you put it up in front of them in the dark like a G.o.d. That's just feeding the images and making them feed on themselves, and that gives them power. Soon they'll have nothing to do with humanity, they'll just be another power that gobbles up meaning and feeds people the opposite."

"Come on, all films aren't violent."

"All fiction is an act of violence." His words had almost the rhythm of a marching song. "It's all an act of revenge on the world by people who don't like it but haven't the strength to change it. It's a way of putting your own prejudices into other people's heads. Me and my folk, we've been made into a fiction, a scapegoat people think will carry away everything they hate if they can only get rid of us."

"If you let yourself be interviewed," Sandy said, more to give herself a breathing s.p.a.ce between his arguments than to persuade him, "mightn't that let the country see you as you are?"

Enoch grunted and ducked his head bull-like toward her. "All they'd see is what they want to see. I've never ------------------------------------112 watched films or television since I was old enough to walk away from them. They're both addictive drugs, and we've none of those here. We tell stories at night in the old way, stories the land and our dreams tell us. Anyone can add to the story and tell it again, and it belongs to us all. That's what films and the rest of those industries stole, the old stories we're rediscovering. They stole them and spoiled them so the tellers could pretend they were the property of just a few. Man can't resume his old relations.h.i.+p with the earth until we remember the tales that told the truth. We had a blueprint for living, and civilization tore it up."

"I'd like to hear you tell those stories," Sandy said as a friendly farewell. He had led her to the front of the convoy, which had almost reached the crossroads. She gave him an apologetic smile to go with her remark, and turned to leave. Then she drew a breath that stung her nostrils. Beyond the relentless repet.i.tive glare of the police car, a van from Metropolitan Television was waiting on the Cromer road. Directing the cameraman was one of the newsmen with whom she'd had the disagreement outside Boswell's office.

He made to wave to Sandy, then tried to take the gesture back. Enoch had already noticed. He didn't even frown at her, he ignored her, which was as good as saying he'd known all the time she had meant to trick him. "I didn't even know they were here," Sandy protested. "I wasn't trying to soften you up."

"None of my folk will talk to them," he muttered like thunder. "We won't be made into images for you to put in people's heads."

She left him striding behind the police car, and stalked across the junction, past the television van. The newsman pretended not to know her until she came abreast of him. "Well done, Sandy," he murmured. "What have you got for us?"

"My self-respect, and I'll keep it, thank you. I'm on leave, in case you didn't know. They don't want you to film ------------------------------------113 them, and they're allowed to refuse, aren't they, even if you think it's for their own good?" By now she was at her car, and shouting. She climbed in and slammed the door and breathed hard until her rage subsided, and then she drove toward Cromer without looking back. ------------------------------------114 Two hours later she drove out of a forest and up a long slope past a derelict zoo, and there was the sea beyond Cromer. A shoal of sunlight played on it, all the way to the sharp horizon. A breeze that felt like a memory of sand and cold salt water made her face tingle. The openness was such a relief after the crooked roads that she drank in the view for a minute or so before heading down into the narrow streets.

The crowds in the town were so brightly dressed and so variously sunned that they looked almost cartoonish. Families nudged one another off the pavements outside shops dangling red-cheeked postcards and sprouting bunches of plastic buckets, inflated ducks, wrinkled pink lifebelts. Side streets were flagged with signs: Fish 'not' Chips, Tea and Staff o' Life, Hotel de Paris ... She thought it best to head for the esplanade, where tall slender hotels overlooked bathing cabins and the pier. The first hotel she walked into had a vacant room.

She checked in and went onto the pier, where the pavilion was advertising Valentine the Vampire: a Show for All the Family. Valentine the Vampire: a Show for All the Family. Tommy Hoddle's name had been forced almost to the bottom of the posters by photographs of a comedian and of the male and female leads, none of whom meant much to Sandy. He wasn't in the theater, the girl in the box office told her, and wouldn't be until his makeup call. The best the manager could offer was a ticket for the evening performance and the possibility of interviewing Tommy ------------------------------------115 Tommy Hoddle's name had been forced almost to the bottom of the posters by photographs of a comedian and of the male and female leads, none of whom meant much to Sandy. He wasn't in the theater, the girl in the box office told her, and wouldn't be until his makeup call. The best the manager could offer was a ticket for the evening performance and the possibility of interviewing Tommy ------------------------------------115 Hoddle afterward. Sandy thanked him and wondered where the actor might be now. "He always walks as far as he can and be sure of getting back on time," the manager said. "He might be on the cliffs or on the beach."

"Do you happen to know what he's wearing?" The manager shrugged. "The usual sort of thing." Sandy had an incongruous vision of him wearing a policeman's uniform, which Hoddle and Bingo had always worn in films--a vision of him wandering the beach like a sad clown searching for his mate. She stood on the pier and scrutinized the coast in case she might recognize him. Children marked out territories with sandcastles near their supine parents; a dog that looked starved went scrabbling up the cliff near her hotel. She could see n.o.body by himself on the beach or the cliff. She returned to the hotel, to use the phone in her room.

Roger didn't answer for a while, and then he said only, "Yeah, hold on." His preoccupation deserted him as soon as he heard her voice. "Hi, Sandy! Where have you got to?"

"I'm taking the sea air in the jewel of the Norfolk coast," she said, quoting the sign she'd pa.s.sed on the road into the town. "I've tracked down half of the comic relief in the film and I hope to meet him later. How are things with you?"

"The book's growing, coming along fine, I think, despite whichever of my neighbors can't keep their pets under control. Listen, I've some news you'll want to hear. Stilwell is going to have to eat his words. I've got part of the movie he said never existed."

"Where did you find it? How much have you got?" "Well, ah, just a couple of frames. But they're consecutive shots, Karloff on a tower and Lugosi looking up. I'll stake my reputation that they're not from any other movie. I only wish I had more footage, say a complete scene. It would prove to the world that Graham was right all along. Toby ------------------------------------116 found these frames at the flat, and there was a witness to confirm he did."

"What made him go back?"

"He was moving out the bed now that he's got a new place of his own. I guess he wanted a memento he'd shared with Graham. The guy who was helping him noticed something caught under the door near the hinges. Toby says he's not surprised the cops overlooked it, it must have had to work itself loose before anyone could see it. I guess these frames are from the end of a reel. Whoever stole the film from Graham must have caught the end in the door and ripped this piece loose, the way it's chewed up. h.e.l.l of a way for anyone who's supposed to care about movies to behave, even a thief."

"It is, isn't it?" Sandy was trying to find words for the uneasiness it made her feel when Roger said, "Toby tried to contact you at Metropolitan before he called me, and he says someone there wants to talk to you."

No doubt a rebuke for her bahavior at the crossroads was awaiting her. It could wait, she thought, and said "Do you want to read Graham's list to me while I've some time to spare? I promise to guard it with my life."

"Sure, so long as having it doesn't stop you calling." He dictated the list to her. "You're in Birmingham tomorrow, right? I made you an appointment the day after, in Wordsworth country, near Keswick. Charlie Miles, the set designer. Graham didn't trace him, but I managed to. Sounds crotchety but talkative."

"Well done, armchair hunter."

"The day after that I can probably meet you if you want me to, if you let me know where you'll be."

"I will. Here's something for you to ponder until we meet again. Harry Manners and Denzil Eames both gave me material relating to the film, including a film magazine called Picture Picture Pictorial, Pictorial, and do you know who was attacking the ------------------------------------117 and do you know who was attacking the ------------------------------------117 film before it was even completed? None other than our friend Leonard Stilwell."

"Jesus, that's strange. What's behind all this, do you think? I'll see what I can find out here."

"Don't go getting yourself badly reviewed."

"You wouldn't deny me a taste of the thrill of the chase."

"I'll have to remember that turns you on."

She might have said more, but she felt inexplicably constrained, as if their conversation were being overheard. She copied down the details of her appointment in Keswick, and said goodbye to Roger with a kiss that felt clammy in the mouthpiece. She tried to call several addresses further north, with so little success that she began to think she was misdialing: perhaps she needed to unwind after her journey. Shouldering her handbag, she strolled down to the promenade and sat on a bench to examine what Denzil Eames had given her.

After glancing through F. X. Faversham's book, she dropped it back in her handbag. The ornate Victorian style of writing seemed too much like hard work just now, and besides, Eames had said that the film had little to do with the original story. Instead she unfolded Spence's notes.