Oh, yes, and by the way: he still loved me, he declared; still hoped to impregnate and to marry me. To that end we ought still to Have Sex from time to time, once my bleeding stopped, what? Not to worry about the rent and the groceries; we’d manage. But I might be seeing a bit less of him in the days ahead, when he suspected that Andrea’s condition, his authorial concerns, and his activities in Prinz’s film might all approach critical levels.
Have I mentioned that, unaccountably, I Still Love Him too? Elsewise I’d clear straight out of this incubator of mildew and mosquitoes and get me to the clear cold air of Switzerland, or the at-least-civilised perversions of my “Juliette” in Nanterre. I could truly almost wish I were lesbian! When Magda came ’round this morning — ostensibly to ask whether I wanted to go with her to visit Mother Mensch in hospital, but actually to comfort me for Ambrose’s infidelity — when to the surprise of both of us we found ourselves embracing and enjoying a good womanly weep together — I was so moved by her direct understanding and sympathy, so relieved to be close to another woman for a change, I could almost have Gone Right On. She too, I half think, and altogether guiltlessly. There was a rapport there… But we didn’t, and I’m not, and what would please me even better would be to be sexless altogether, as shall doubtless come to pass soon enough. In the meanwhile, and mean it is, I love and crave (and miss) that unconscionable sonofabitch Ambrose; that — that scratcher of my itch; that writer.
And I have got clear ahead of my story. No question but moviemakers have the world in their pocket in our century, as we like to imagine the 19th-century novelists did in theirs. Let Ambrose ask the skipper of the Original Floating Theatre II to delay his leaving Cambridge for half an hour so that he can make a few notes thereupon for a novel in progress: the chap wouldn’t have considered it. But let a perfectly unknown Reg Prinz show up with camera crew and the vaguest intentions in the world… the world stops, reenacts itself for take after take, does anything it can imagine its Director might wish of it!
The showboat was docked at Long Wharf on the weekend of the Marshyhope fiasco: we were to have gone to see Bea do her Mary-Pickford-of-the-Chesapeake on the Saturday evening — and Ambrose actually went, straight out of the pokey, as did Prinz & Co., but yours truly was too ill with consternation for further vaudeville. The O.F.T. II was to have sailed on the Monday, but lingered till the Wednesday, cast and all, so that Prinz could get footage for possible use, and agreed to an unscheduled return to Cambridge on 4 July so that he could combine shots of the locally famous fireworks display with — here we go — a “sort of remake” of the Gadfly excitement of just a fortnight past! History really is that bird you mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament!
En attendant, as I despaired here in Dorset Heights, and wondered where on earth a sacked acting provost might go from Marshyhope, the cinematographic action shifted down-county to “Barataria,” where it and Ambrose and Bea got on quite well without me. I wonder who does Prinz’s cost accounting? That set, elaborate for him, was built months ago and has scarcely been used; as of the end of Giles Goat-Boy (I’m done), there is no mention of the 1812 War in your works. But on 23 June 1813, a British naval force attempted to dislodge Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians from their stronghold on Grand Terre Island, near New Orleans, and on the following day Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake fleet sacked Hampton, Virginia, raping a number of American ladies in the process. It was decided to combine “echoes” of both events in an obscure bravura scene shot on their approximate sesquicentennial down at the Bloodsworth Island set. Don’t ask me why they didn’t throw in Napoleon’s abdication on the 22nd (which coincided nicely with my cashiering and Jerome Bonaparte Bray’s abandoning the goat farm and pursuing Bea to Maryland on the Sunday), or Custer’s Last Stand against Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn on the 25th.
