Now, of course, I’m indignant at such sneakery. But at the time I was still too busy feeling Zeus’d to the Plimsoll, too surprised at my lover’s shocking leap off me, too marvellous at his fury to muster a proper indignation. How Ambrose did go at him, cursing, swinging good weighty Sam: first at Prinz’s fuzzy head (who till the last possible frame kept the camera running), then at the instrument itself, when he saw Prinz more concerned for it than for his own cranium. Chucking Clarissa, Ambrose fought for that camera — it was strapped to Prinz’s arm — and threatened to smash it and Reggie’s head together if he didn’t expose that film then and there. By george he did it, too, Prinz shrieking like a wired-up bat the while: prised open the case, did Ambrose, clawed out the reel, and flung it like a Frisbee from the tower top before two of Prinz’s graduate-film-workshop types came to their master’s rescue.
You’re bananas, Prinz cries now (the clearest statement I’ve ever heard from him): that was footage! Shove your effing footage, Ambrose replies, I’m done with it. He comes back now for his britches; the three cinéastes withdraw, examining their precious machine for damage and smirking over their shoulders, the two younger ones, and me at my bottomless beau.
So ends the Mating Season Sequence, I presume! Which I might’ve suspected I was set up for, had Ambrose’s outrage not swept all suspicion before it.
And if Reg Prinz’s riposte today hadn’t so gravely upped the ante. Good as his word (What shall we do for money?), Ambrose cut off his connexion with the film company as of that Monday. Inspired perhaps by Richardson as well as by the Battle in the Belfry, he has vowed to commit himself absolutely to the printed word: letters and empty spaces on the page! The whole hot week since, he has rededicated his energies to Perseus, resolved to redraft that piece (and, I daresay, somehow to work Bea Golden into the plot, now he’s been in her knickers). Bastille Day’s humour passed; his obnoxious “5th Stage” behaviour reasserted itself. I spent my week daily visiting his mum in hospital, wishing they could let the poor thing die; Magda more often than not was with me, a real friend now I’m in “her” stage, urging upon me patience and Italian old wives’ advice for getting pregnant. Between sickbed and seedbed (daily follow-ups to the Shower of Gold, here at 24 L), we watched Apollo-11 & Co. lift off for the moon (Magda’s one of those who seriously wonder, to Ambrose’s delight, whether it isn’t All Faked by the Television People) and Dorchester County, with proportionate to-do, make ready for last night’s opening of its nine-day tercentenary celebration.
