have meant? There is a touch of the sibyl to Dawn Devonport. But then, does not every woman, to my enchanted eye, possess something of the prophetess?
She stopped at one point in our pacing and turned and asked if I had told Billie Stryker about my daughter. I said that I had; that, indeed, I had surprised myself by blurting it all out the first day when Billie came to the house and sat with me so taciturnly in my crow’s-nest in the attic. She smiled, and gave her head a deprecating shake. ‘That Toby,’ she said. I asked her what she meant. We walked on. Her costume was thin and she had only a light cardigan thrown over her shoulders and I worried that she would be cold, and offered her my jacket, which she declined. It was well known, she said, that Toby’s tactic when he was about to work with an actor new to him was to send in Billie Stryker to do a preliminary recce and come back with some choice bit of intimate information, preferably of a shameful or tragic nature, to be studied and stored away carefully and brought out again when and if needed, like an X-ray plate. Billie had a knack, she said, of luring people into confessing things without their being aware of what they were confessing to; it was a knack that Toby Taggart valued highly and made frequent use of. I recalled Marcy Meriwether announcing Billie Stryker the scout, and her hoarse laughter coming along the line to me all the way from sunny Carver City, and I felt slow-witted and foolish, not for the first or, I imagine, the last time, in this blended, garishly lit dream that Dawn Devonport and the rest of us are sleepwalking through together. So that is what Billie Stryker is, not so much a scout as a plain snoop. Surprisingly—at least it surprises me—I do not seem to mind that I was duped.
Speaking of dreams, I had one of my wilder ones last night; it has just come back to me this moment. It seems to demand being recounted in all its questionable detail; certain dreams have that quality. This one would require a rhapsode to do it justice. I shall try my best. I was in a house on a riverbank. It was an old house, tall and rickety, with an impossibly steep-pitched roof and crooked chimneys—a sort of gingerbread cottage out of a fairy tale, quaint yet sinister, or sinister because quaint, as is the way in fairy tales. I had been lodging there, on some sort of working holiday, I think, along with a group of other people, family, or friends, or both, although none of them was to be seen, and now we were leaving. I was upstairs, packing, in a small room with a big window open wide and looking out to a view of the river below. The sunshine outside was peculiar, a thin, pervasive, lemony element, like a very fine liquid, and it was impossible to tell from it what time of day it might be, morning, midday or eve. I did know that we were running late—a train or something would be leaving soon—and I was anxious, and clumsy in my haste to fit all my things, of which there were impossibly many, into the two or three hopelessly small suitcases standing open on the narrow bed. There must have been a chronic drought in the region, for the river, which I could see would not be wide or deep even in times of flood, was a shallow bed of sticky, light-grey mud. Busy though I was with the packing I was also on the look-out for something, although I did not know what, and I kept leaning far back, while going on with the packing, to scan the view outside the window. Glancing out now I realised that what I had taken for the trunk of a dead tree lying athwart the riverbed and slimed all over with glistening mud was in fact a living creature, a thing like a crocodile only not quite, or more than, a crocodile; I could see its great jaws moving and its ancient eyelids opening and closing slowly with what seemed a great effort. Probably it had been washed down in a flood that had preceded the drought and become lodged there in that morass, helpless and dying. Was this the thing I had been watching for? I felt anguish and annoyance in equal measure, anguish for the afflicted creature and annoyance that I would have to deal with it somehow, help to rescue it, or direct that it be put out of its misery. Yet it did not seem to be in pain, or even in much distress; indeed, it seemed quite calm and resigned—indifferent, almost. Maybe it had not been washed up here, maybe it was some mud-dwelling creature which the churnings of the recent flood as it passed by had exposed to view and which when the waters came back would sink again into its old, lightless, submerged world. I went down, my feet, in what felt like a deep-sea diver’s leaden boots, thumping clumsily on the narrow stairs, and emerged into that strange, aqueous sunlight. At the riverbank I found that the thing had extricated itself from the mud and had turned into a darkly lovely young woman—even in the dream this transformation seemed hackneyed and altogether too easy, a thing that intensified my annoyance and anxious impatience: those suitcases were still not filled and here I was being diverted from my task by a piece of trumpery masquerading as magic. There she was, however, this girl from the deep, seated on a real log on a bank of springy green turf, wearing a haughty and petulant expression, her clasped hands resting on one knee and her shining, long dark hair falling over her shoulders and down her very straight back. It seemed I should know her or at least know who she was. She was got up elaborately in the style of a gypsy, or a chieftainess of old, all bangles and beads and swathes of heavy, shimmering cloth in dramatic hues of emerald and golden oatmeal and rich burgundy. She was waiting impatiently and in some irritation for me to do something for her, to perform some service the need of which she resented. As happens in dreams, I both knew and did not know the nature of this task, and did not at all like the prospect of performing it, whatever it was. Have I mentioned that in the dream I was very young, hardly more than a lad, though burdened beyond my years with cares and responsibilities, the packing, for instance, left unfinished in that high room the square open window of which I could look up at now, and where the timeless, pallid sunlight was streaming in? The shutters thrown back against the wall on either side were made of what looked like rush matting, a feature I noticed particularly and one that was of an inexplicable significance. I was aware of being in danger of falling in love on the spot, instantly, with this girl, this imperious princess, but I knew that if I did I would be destroyed, or at least put through great pains, and besides, there was so much I had to do, much too much, to allow of so frivolous a surrender. Now the dream began to lose focus and grew hazy, or does so at least in my recollection of it. The location had suddenly moved inside the house, into a cramped room with tiny square windows with deep and shadowed embrasures. Another girl had materialised, the princess’s friend, or companion, older than both of us, brisk and businesslike and somehow coercive, whose coercions the princess resisted, and so did I, and who in the end lost patience with us and thrust her fists into the very deep pockets of her very long coat and went off in very high dudgeon. Left alone with the dark-haired beauty, I tried to kiss her, in a perfunctory way—I was still worrying about those half-stuffed suitcases upstairs, agape like the mouths of chicks in a nest and overflowing untidily—but she rebuffed me in a matchingly offhand fashion. Who can she have been, whom did she represent? Dawn Devonport is the obvious candidate, yet I think not. Billie Stryker, oneirically slimmed down and beautified? Hardly. My Lydia, daughter of the desert of old? Hmm. But wait—I know. She was Cora, Axel Vander’s girl, of course; not Dawn Devonport’s portrayal of her, which if I am honest I consider superficial so far, but as I see her in my imagination, strange and estranged, difficult, proud and lost. The end of the dream, as I retain it, was a wavering, a vaguening, as the enchanting girl—I have called her a princess but only for convenience, for she was certainly a commoner, though of an uncommon kind— departed from me along the barren river’s bank, not striding but as if sustained on air, moving away soundlessly and yet at the same time somehow returning to me. This phenomenon continued for some time, this impossible, simultaneous coming and going, departing and returning, until my sleeping mind could bear it all no longer and everything went slack and slowly sank, into the unregistering darkness.
Why, I asked Dawn Devonport—we are still pacing that insulted strip of grass behind the studio—why does Toby Taggart employ Billie Stryker to nose out the secret weaknesses and sorrows of his players? I knew the answer, of course, so why did I ask? ‘To have what he thinks will be power over us,’ she said, and laughed. ‘He imagines he is Svengali—don’t they all?’
It will seem odd, perhaps, but I did not think badly of Toby for this, no more than I did of Billie Stryker. He is a professional, as am I; in other words we are cannibals, the pair of us, and would eat our young for the sake of a scene. I cannot help but like him. He is large and ill-assembled, built on the lines of a buffalo, with absurdly tiny feet and skinny legs and a broad chest and broader shoulders and a shaggy mop of mahogany-coloured curls from under which shine out those glossy sad brown eyes of his, pleading love and forbearance. His name is Tobias—yes, I asked him—it is a family tradition on his mother’s side, from her father the duke back through the centuries to an originary Tobias the Terrible who fought at Hastings and is said to have cradled the mortally wounded King Harold in his armoured arm. This last is the kind of dusty heirloom that Toby loves to bring out proudly from the vault of the family’s past for us to admire. He is a sentimentalist and a patriot of the old school and cannot understand my disregard for the deeds of doughty ancestors. I explained to him that I have no ancestors to speak of, only a motley line of petty tradesmen and near-peasants who never swung an axe in battle or comforted a king with an arrow in his eye. I would say that Toby is an anachronism in the movie world if I thought there was anyone in it who is not— look at me, for heaven’s sake. How he agonises on the set. Are we all happy in our parts? Is he being true to the spirit of JB’s wonderful script? Is the studio’s money being well spent? Will audiences understand what we are attempting? There he stands, always to the right and a little behind the cameraman, amid a clutter of wiring and those mysterious long black boxes with reinforced metal corners that are strewn at random about the floor, in his big brown jumper and ragged jeans, nibbling at his nails like a squirrel at a nut, as if he were trying to get at the
