The Little Drummer Girl (20 page)

She knew without looking that he was smiling his good-hearted smile, suggesting that such frailty on Charlie's part would be only human.

"So what we can do in that case, Charlie," he resumed, "we take a nice house somewhere--say, on a beach, somewhere pleasant, no problem. We give you company, some people similar to the kids here. Nice people but able. We fake some reason for your absence, most likely a voguish one that fits your volatile reputation, such as a mystical sojourn to the East."

His thick fingers had found his old wristwatch on the table before him. Without looking at it, Kurtz lifted it and set it down six inches nearer to him. Needing an activity herself, Charlie took up a pen and began to doodle on the pad before her.

"Once you are out of quarantine, we do not desert you--far from it. We straighten you out, we give you a sack of money, we keep in touch with you, make sure you are not incautious in any way, and as soon as it's safe we help you to resume your career and friendships. That's the worst that can happen, Charlie, and I'm only telling it to you because you may be harbouring some crazy notion that by saying ‘no' to us, now or later, you're going to wake up dead in a river wearing a pair of concrete boots. We don't deal that way. Least of all with friends."

She was still doodling. Closing a circle with her pencil, she drew a neat diagonal arrow above it to make it male. She had flicked through some work of popular psychology that used that symbol. Suddenly, like a man annoyed at being interrupted, Joseph spoke; yet his voice, for all its severity, had a thrilling and warm effect on her.

"Charlie, it will not be enough for you to play the sullen witness. It is your own dangerous future they are discussing. Do you mean to sit there and allow them to dispose of it practically without consulting you? A commitment, do you understand? Charlie, come!"

She drew another circle. Another boy. She had heard everything Kurtz had said, every innuendo. She could have played back every word for him, just as she had done for Joseph on the Acropolis. She was as keen-witted and alert as she had been in her life, but every cunning instinct in her told her to dissemble and withhold.

"So how long does the show run, Mart?" she asked, in a lacklustre voice as if Joseph had never spoken at all.

Kurtz rephrased her question: "Well now, I guess what you really mean is what happens to you when the job runs out. Is that right?"

She was wonderful. A shrew. Flinging down her pencil, she slapped the table with her palm: "No, it bloody well isn't! I mean how long does it run, and what about my tour with As You Like It in the autumn?"

Kurtz betrayed no triumph at the practicality of her objection. "Charlie," he said earnestly, "your projected tour with As You Like It will in no wise be affected. We would surely expect you to fulfil that engagement, assuming the grant for it is forthcoming. As to duration, your commitment to our project could take six weeks, it could take two years, though we would surely hope not. What we have to hear from you now is whether you wish to audition with us at all or whether you prefer to tell good night to everybody here and go home to a safer, duller life. What's your verdict?"

It was a false peak he had made for her. He wished to give her a sense of conquest as well as of submission. Of having chosen her own captors. She was wearing a denim jacket and one of the tin buttons hung loose; this morning when she put it on, she had made a mental note to stitch it during the boat trip, then had promptly forgotten it again in her excitement at meeting Joseph. Taking hold of it now, she began testing the strength of the thread. She was centre stage. She could feel their collective gaze fixed on her, from the table, from the shadows, from behind her. She could feel their bodies craning in tension, Joseph's also, and hear the taut, creaking sound that audiences make when they are hooked. She could feel the strength of their purpose and of her own power: will she, won't she?

"Jose?" she said, without turning her head.

"Yes, Charlie."

She still did not turn to him, yet she had the clear knowledge that from his candlelit island he was waiting on her answer more keenly than all the rest of them together.

"This is it, is it? Our big romantic tour of Greece? Delphi, all the second-best places?"

"Our drive north will in no wise be affected," Joseph replied, lightly parodying Kurtz's phraseology.

"Not even postponed?"

"I would say it was imminent, actually."

The thread broke, the button lay on her palm. She tossed it on the table, watched it spin and settle. Heads or tails, she thought, playing them. Let them sweat a little. She puffed out some breath as if blowing away her forelock.

"So I'll stick around for the audition then, won't I?" she told Kurtz carelessly, looking nowhere but at the button. "I've got nowt to lose," she added, and immediately wished she hadn't. Sometimes, to her own annoyance, she overdid things for the sake of a good exit line: "Nowt I haven't lost already, anyhow," she said.

Curtain, she thought; applause, please, Joseph, and we'll wait for tomorrow's reviews. But none came, so she picked up a pencil and drew a girl for a change, while Kurtz, perhaps without even knowing he was doing so, transferred his watch to another, better spot.

The interrogation, with Charlie's gracious consent, could now begin in earnest.

Slowness is one thing, concentration another. Kurtz did not relax for a second; he did not permit himself or Charlie even half a breathing space as he willed her, coaxed her, lulled and woke her up, and by every effort of his dynamic spirit bound himself to her in their burgeoning theatrical partnership. Only God and a few people in Jerusalem, it was said within his service, knew where Kurtz's repertoire was learnt--the mesmeric intensity, the horse-drawn Americanised prose, the flair, the barrister's tricks. His slashed face, now applauding, now ruefully incredulous, now beaming out the reassurance that she wanted, became by degrees an entire audience in itself, so that all her performance was directed towards winning his desperately coveted approval and no one else's. Even Joseph was forgotten: put aside until another life.

Kurtz's first questions, by design, were scattered and harmless. It was as if, thought Charlie, he had a blank passport application pinned up in his mind and Charlie, without being able to see it, was filling in the boxes. Full name of your mother, Charlie. Your father's date and place of birth if known, Charlie. Grandfather's occupation; no, Charlie, on your father's side. Followed, with no conceivable reason, by the last known address of a maternal aunt, which was followed yet again by some arcane detail of her father's education. Not a single one of these early questions bore directly upon herself, nor did Kurtz intend it to. Charlie was like the forbidden subject he was scrupulous to avoid. The entire purpose behind this cheerful quick fire opening salvo was not to elicit information at all, but to instil in her the instinctive obedience, the yes-sir-no-sir of the classroom, on which the later passages between them would depend while Charlie, for her part, as the sap of her trade increasingly worked in her, performed, obeyed, and reacted with ever-increasing compliancy. Had she not done as much for directors and producers a hundred times--used the stuff of harmless conversation to give them a sample of her range? All the more reason, under Kurtz's hypnotic encouragement, to do it now.

"Heidi?" Kurtz echoed."Heidi? That's a damned odd name for an English elder sister, isn't it?"

"Not for Heidi, it isn't," she replied buoyantly, and scored an immediate laugh from the kids beyond the lighting. Heidi because her parents went to Switzerland for their honeymoon, she explained; and Switzerland was where Heidi was conceived. "Among the edelweiss," she added, with a sigh. "In the missionary position."

"So why Charmian?' Marty asked when the laughter had finally subsided.

Charlie lifted her voice to capture the curdled tones of her bloody mother: "The name Charmian was arrived upon with a view to flattering our rich and distant cousin of that name."

"Did it pay off?" Kurtz asked as he inclined his head to catch something Litvak was trying to say to him.

"Not yet," Charlie replied skittishly, still with her mother's precious intonation. "Father, you know, has passed on, but Cousin Charmian, alas, has yet to join him."

Only by these and many similar harmless detours did they gradually advance upon the subject of Charlie herself.

"Libra," Kurtz murmured with satisfaction as he jotted down her date of birth.

Meticulously but swiftly, he bustled her through her early childhood--boarding schools, houses, names of early friends and ponies--and Charlie answered him in kind, spaciously, sometimes humorously, always willingly, her excellent memory illuminated by the fixed glow of his attention and by her growing need to be on terms with him. From schools and childhood it was a natural step--though Kurtz took it only with the greatest diffidence--to the painful history of her father's ruin, and Charlie rendered this in quiet but moving detail, from the first brutal breaking of the news to the trauma of the trial and sentence and imprisonment. Now and then, it was true, her voice caught slightly; sometimes her gaze sank to study her own hands that played so prettily and expressively in the downlight; then a gallant, lightly self-mocking phrase would come to her, to blow it all away.

"We'd have been all right if we'd been working class," she said once, with a wise and hopeless smile. "You get sacked, you go redundant, the forces of capital run against you--it's life, it's reality, you know where you are. But we weren't working class. We were us. The winning side. And all of a sudden, we'd joined the losers."

"Tough," said Kurtz gravely, with a shake of his broad head.

Backtracking, he probed for the solid facts: date and place of trial, Charlie; the exact length of sentence, Charlie; names of lawyers if she remembered them. She didn't, but wherever she could she helped him, and Litvak duly noted down her answers, leaving Kurtz free to give her his entire benevolent attention. Now all laughter had ceased completely. It was as if the soundtrack had stopped dead, all but hers and Marty's. There was not a creak, not a cough, not an alien shuffle from anywhere. In her whole life, it seemed to Charlie, no group of people had been so attentive, so appreciative of her performance. They understand, she thought. They know what it is to live the nomad's life; to be thrown upon your own resources when the cards are stacked against you. Once, on a quiet order from Joseph, the lights went out and they waited together without a sound in the tense darkness of an air raid, Charlie as apprehensive as the rest, till Joseph announced the all-clear and Kurtz resumed his patient questioning. Had Joseph really heard anything, or was this their way of reminding her that she belonged? The effect on Charlie was in either case the same: for those tense few seconds she was their fellow conspirator with no thought of rescue.

At other times, wresting her gaze briefly from Kurtz, she would see the kids dozing at their posts: Swedish Raoul,with his flaxen head sunk upon his chest and the sole of one thick track-shoe flattened against the wall; South African Rose propped against the double doors, her runner's legs stretched in front of her and her long arms folded across her chest; North Country Rachel, the wings of her black hair folded round her face, eyes half closed, but still with her soft smile of sensual reminiscence. Yet the smallest extraneous whisper found every one of them instantly alert.

"So what's the bottom line here, Charlie?" Kurtz enquired kindly. "Regarding that whole early period of your life until what we may call the Fall--

"The age of innocence, Mart?" she suggested helpfully.

"Precisely. Your age of innocence. Define it for me."

"It was hell."

"Want to name some reasons?"

"It was suburbia. Isn't that enough?"

"No, it is not."

"Oh, Mart--you're so--" Her slack-mouthed voice. Her tone of fond despair. Limp gestures with the hands. How could she ever explain? "It's all right for you, you're a Jew, don't you see? You've got these fantastic traditions, the security. Even when you're persecuted, you know who you are, and why."

Kurtz ruefully acknowledged the point.

"But for us--rich English suburban kids from Nowheresville--forget it. We had no traditions, no faith, no self-awareness, no nothing."

"But you told me your mother was Catholic."

"Christmas and Easter. Pure hypocrisy. We're the post-Christian era, Mart. Didn't anybody tell you? Faith leaves a vacuum behind it when it goes away. We're in it."

As she said this, she caught Litvak's smouldering eyes upon her and received the first hint of his rabbinical anger.

"No going to confession?" Kurtz asked.

"Come off it. Mum didn't have anything to confess! That's her whole trouble. No fun, no sin, no nothing. Just apathy and fear. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of the neighbours--fear. Somewhere out there, real people were living real lives. Just not us. Not in Rickmansworth. No way. I mean, Christ--for children--I mean talk about castration!"

"And you--no fear?"

"Only of being like Mum."

"And this notion we all have--ancient England steeped in her traditional ways?"

"Forget it."

Kurtz smiled and shook his wise head as if to say you could always learn.

"So as soon as you could, you left home and you took revenge in the stage and radical politics," he suggested contentedly. "You became a political exile to the stage. I read that somewhere, some interview you gave. I liked it. Go on from there."

She was back to doodling again, more symbols of the psyche. "Oh, there were other ways of breaking out before that," she said.

"Such as?"

"Well,sex, you know," said Charlie carelessly. "I mean we haven't even touched on sex as the essential basis of revolt, have we? Or drugs."

"We haven't touched on revolt," said Kurtz.

"Well, take it from me, Mart--

Then a strange thing happened: proof, perhaps, of how a perfect audience can extract the best from a performer and improve her in spontaneous, unexpected ways. She had been on the brink of giving them her set piece for the unliberated. How the discovery of self was an essential prelude to identifying with the radical movement. How when the history of the new revolution came to be written, its true roots would be found in the drawing-rooms of the middle classes, where repressive tolerance had its natural home. Instead of which, to her surprise, she heard herself enumerating aloud for Kurtz--or was it for Joseph?--her rows and rows of early lovers and all the stupid reasons she had invented for going to bed with them. "It's completely beyond me, Mart," she insisted, once more opening her hands disarmingly. Was she using them too much? She feared she might be, and put them in her lap. "Even today. I didn't want them, I didn't like them, I just let them." The men she had taken out of boredom, anything to move the stale air of Rickmansworth, Mart. Out of curiosity. Men to prove her power, men to avenge herself against other men, or against other women, against her sister or her bloody mother. Men out of politeness, Mart, out of sheer bone-weariness at their persistence. The casting couches--Christ, Mart, you can't imagine! Men to break the tension, men to create it. Men to inform her--her political enlighteners, appointed to explain to her in bed the things she could never get her mind round from the books. The five-minute lusts that smashed like pottery in her hands and left her lonelier than ever. Failures, failures--every one of them, Mart--or so she wanted him to believe. "But they freed me, don't you see? I was using my own body in my own way. Even if it was the wrong way. It was my show!"