‘I’ll say one is,’ said Charlie.
He looked to see what she was reading, and the next thing she knew they were discussing the part of Rosalind, practically scene by scene; except that Joseph was doing both sides of the talking. ‘She is so many people under one hat, I would say. Watching her unfold throughout the play, one has the impression of a person occupied by a whole regiment of conflicting characters. She is good, she is wise, she is forfeit somehow, she sees too much, she has even a sense of social duty. I would say that you were well cast for this part, Charlie.’
She couldn’t help herself. ‘Ever been to Nottingham, Jose?’ she demanded, staring straight at him and not troubling to smile.
‘Nottingham? I fear not. Should I have been? Is Nottingham a place of particular merit? Why do you ask?’
Her lips were getting pins and needles. ‘It’s just I was acting there last month. I hoped you might have seen me.’
‘But how awfully interesting. What should I have seen you in? What was the show?’
‘Saint Joan. Shaw’s Saint Joan. I was Joan.’
‘But that’s one of my favourite plays. I am sure that not a year passes without my rereading the Introduction to Saint Joan. Will you be playing it again? Perhaps I shall get another chance?’
‘We played at York too,’ she said, her eyes still intently fixed upon his own.
‘Really? So you took it on tour. How nice.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? Is York a place you’ve been to on your travels?’
‘Alas, I have never been farther north than Hampstead, London. But I am told that York is very beautiful.’
‘Oh, it’s great. Specially the Minster.’
She went on staring at him as long as she dared, the face in the front row of the stalls. She searched his dark eyes and the taut skin round them for the smallest tremor of complicity or laughter, but nothing yielded, nothing confessed.
He’s amnesiac, she decided. Or I am. Oh mother!
He did not offer her breakfast or she would surely have declined. He simply called over the waiter and demanded in Greek to know what fish was fresh today. With authority, knowing that fish was what she liked, holding a conductor’s arm in the air to arrest him. Then sent him off and talked more theatre to her, as if it were the most natural thing to be eating fish and drinking wine at nine o’clock on a summer’s morning – though for himself he ordered Coca-Cola. He talked from knowledge. He might not have been up north, but he possessed an intimacy with the London stage that he had not revealed to anyone else in the gang. And as he talked she had that unsettling feeling which she had had about him from the start: that his outward nature, like his presence here, was a pretext – his task was to force a breach through which he could spirit his other and totally larcenous nature. She asked him, did he get to London often? He protested that, second to Vienna, it was the only city in the world.
‘If there is the smallest opportunity, I seize it immediately by the forelock,’ he declared. Sometimes even his spoken English had the air of being dishonestly acquired. She imagined stolen hours of night-reading with a phrase-book, so many idioms memorised per week.
‘Only we took Saint Joan to London as well – just, you know – like a few weeks ago.’
‘To the West End? But, Charlie, that’s an absolute calamity. Why didn’t I read about it? Why didn’t I immediately go?’
‘The East End,’ she corrected him gloomily.
Next day they met again at a different taverna – whether it was by chance, she couldn’t say, but instinctively she doubted it – and this time he asked her casually when she expected to start rehearsing for As You Like It, and she replied, with nothing more in mind than small talk, not till October and, knowing the company, maybe not then either, and anyway it looked like being a three-weeker at most. The Arts Council had overspent on their budget, she explained, and were talking about withdrawing their touring grant altogether. To impress him, she added a small piece of decoration of her own.
‘I mean, you know, they swore our show would be the last to go, and we’ve had this fantastic back-up from the Guardian, and the whole thing costs the taxpayer about one-three-hundredth of an army tank, but what can you do?’
So how would she be spending her time meanwhile? Joseph asked with splendid disinterest. And it was a curious thing, which she afterwards thought about a lot, that by establishing that he had missed her Saint Joan, he established also that they owed it to each other to make up the lost ground in some other way.
Charlie answered carelessly. Barmaiding round the theatres most likely, she said. Waitress work. Repainting her flat. Why?
Joseph was wildly distressed. ‘But, Charlie, that’s very poor stuff. Surely your talent merits a better occupation than barmaid? What about the teaching or political professions? Wouldn’t that be more interesting for you?’
Nervous, she laughed rather rudely at his unworldliness. ‘In England? With our unemployment? Come off it. Who’s going to pay me five thousand a year to destroy the existing order? I’m subversive, for God’s sake.’
He smiled. He seemed surprised and unconvinced. He laughed in polite remonstration. ‘Oh now, Charlie. Come. What does that mean?’
Prepared to be annoyed, she met his stare again, head on, like an obstruction.
‘It means what it says. I’m bad news.’
‘But whom are you subverting, Charlie?’ he protested earnestly. ‘You strike me as a most orthodox person, actually.’
Whatever her beliefs might be that day, she had an uncomfortable instinct that he would outstrip her in debate. To protect herself, therefore, she elected a sudden tiredness of manner.
‘Back away, will you, Jose?’ she advised him wearily. ‘We’re on a Greek island, right? On holiday, right? You keep off my politics, I’ll keep off your passport.’
The hint was enough. She was impressed and surprised by her power over him at the very moment when she was fearing she had none. Their drinks came and as he sipped his lemonade, he asked Charlie whether she had seen many Greek antiquities during her stay. It was an enquiry of the merest general interest and Charlie replied to it in a tone of matching inconsequence. She and Long Al had been to Delos for the day to visit the Temple of Apollo, she said; that was the most she’d done. She forebore from telling him that Alastair had got fighting drunk on the boat, or that the day had been a write-off, or that afterwards she had spent a lot of hours in the town stationers, reading up the guidebooks about the little she had seen. But she had a shrewd intimation that he knew anyway. It was not till he raised the matter of her return ticket to England that she began to suspect a tactical intention behind his curiosity. Joseph asked if he might see it, so with a shrug of indifference she dug it out for him. He took it from her and leafed through it, earnestly studying the particulars.
‘Well, you could perfectly well use this from Thessalonika,’ he pronounced finally. ‘Why don’t I simply call a travel-agent friend of mine and have him rewrite it? Then we can travel together,’ he explained, as if this were the solution both of them had been working towards.
She said nothing at all. Inside her it was as if each component of her nature had gone to war against the other: the child fought the mother, the tart fought the nun. Her clothes felt rough against her skin and her back was hot, but she still didn’t have a thing to say.
‘I have to be in Thessalonika one week from now,’ he explained. ‘We could rent a car in Athens, take in Delphi, and head north together for a couple of days, why not?’ He was unbothered by her silence. ‘With a little planning, we should not be over-troubled by the crowds, if that is what is concerning you. When we reach Thessalonika, you can take a London flight. We can even share the driving, if you wish. I have heard from every side how well you drive. You would be my guest, naturally.’
‘Naturally,’ she said.
‘So why not?’
She thought of all the reasons that she had rehearsed for just this moment or one like it, and of a
ll the pithy, flat-voiced phrases she fell back on when older men made passes at her. She thought of Alastair, of the tedium of being with him anywhere except in bed and latterly there also. Of the new chapter in her life that she had promised herself. She thought of the drab trail of cheeseparing and scrubbing which awaited her once she got back to England with her savings spent, and of which Joseph by chance or cunning had reminded her. She looked sideways at him again and saw not a glimmer of supplication anywhere: why not? and that was all. She remembered his lithe and powerful body, cutting its lone furrow through the sea: why not? again. She remembered the brush of his hand and the eerie note of recognition in his voice – ‘Charlie, yes, hullo’ – and the lovely smile that had hardly come back since. And she remembered how often it had crossed her mind that if he ever did let go, the detonation would be deafening, which she told herself was what had drawn her to him above all else.
‘I’m not going to have the gang knowing,’ she muttered, head down to her drink. ‘You’ll have to fiddle it somehow. They’d laugh their bloody heads off.’
To which he replied briskly that he would depart tomorrow morning and arrange things: ‘And of course if you really wish to leave your friends in the dark –’
Yes, she damn well did, she said.
Then this, said Joseph, in the same practical tone, was what he suggested. Whether he had prepared his plan in advance or simply had that kind of mind, she couldn’t tell. Either way she was grateful for his precision, though afterwards she realised that she had counted on it.
‘You go with your friends by boat as far as Piraeus. The boat docks in late afternoon, but this week it is liable to be delayed by industrial action. Shortly before the boat enters harbour, you will tell them that you propose to wander alone round the mainland for a few days. An impulsive decision, the sort you are famous for. Don’t tell them too early or they will spend the boat trip trying to argue you out of it. Don’t tell them too much, it is the sign of an uneasy conscience,’ he added, with the authority of somebody who possessed one.
‘Suppose I’m broke,’ she said before she’d had time to think, for Alastair as usual had been through her cash as well as his own. All the same, she could have bitten her tongue off, and if he had offered her money at that moment she’d have flung it in his face. But he seemed to sense that.
‘Do they know you are broke?’
‘Of course they don’t.’
‘Then your cover story is intact, I would say.’ And as if that clinched the matter, he dropped her air ticket into an inside pocket of his jacket.
Hey, give that back! she screamed in sudden alarm. But not – though there was just a hair’s breadth in it – not aloud.
‘Once clear of your friends, take a taxi to the Kolokotroni Square.’ He spelt it for her. ‘The fare should cost you around two hundred drachmas.’ He waited to hear whether this might be a problem, but it was not; she had eight hundred left, though she didn’t tell him. He repeated the name again, and checked that she had remembered it. There was pleasure in submitting to his military efficiency. Just off the square, he said, was a pavement restaurant. He told her the name – Diogenes – and permitted himself a detour for humour: a beautiful name, he said, one of the best in history, the world needed more of him and fewer Alexanders. He would be waiting at the Diogenes. Not on the pavement but inside the restaurant where it was cool and private. Repeat, Charlie: Diogenes. Absurdly, passively, she did.
‘Next door to the Diogenes is the Hotel Paris. If by any chance I am held up, I will leave a message for you with the concierge at the hotel. Ask for Mr Larkos. He is a good friend of mine. If you require anything, money or whatever it may be, show him this and he will give it to you.’ He handed her a card. ‘Can you remember all that? Of course you can, you’re an actress. You can remember words, gestures, numbers, colours, everything.’
Richthoven Enterprises, she read, Export, followed by a post office box number in Vienna.
Passing a kiosk, feeling wonderfully, dangerously alive, she bought her bloody mother a crochet-work tablecloth, and for her poisonous nephew Kevin a tasselled Greek cap. When she had done that, she chose a dozen postcards most of which she addressed to old Ned Quilley, her useless agent back in London, with facetious messages intended to embarrass him in front of the prim ladies who comprised his office staff. ‘Ned, Ned,’ she wrote on one, ‘keep all your parts for me.’ And on another, ‘Ned, Ned, can a fallen woman sink?’ But on yet another of them she chose to write soberly, telling him she was considering delaying her return so that she could see something of the mainland. ‘It’s time our Chas topped up her culture levels, Ned,’ she explained, ignoring Joseph’s stricture not to tell too much. About to cross the road and post them, Charlie had a feeling of being observed, but when she swung round, pretending to herself she was going to meet Joseph, all she saw was the flaxen hippy boy again, the one who liked to stalk the family and had presided over Alastair’s departure. He was goofing along the pavement behind her with his arms trailing like an ape. Catching sight of her, he slowly raised his right hand in a Christ-like gesture. She waved back to him, laughing. Crazy devil’s had a bad trip and can’t come down, she thought indulgently as she dropped the cards into the box one by one. Maybe I should do something about him.
The last card of all was to Alastair, full of faked sentiment, but she didn’t read it through. Sometimes, particularly in moments of uncertainty or change or when she was about to do a dare, it suited her to believe that her darling, hopeless, bibulous Ned Quilley, aged a hundred and forty next birthday, was the only man she’d ever truly loved.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kurtz and Litvak called on Ned Quilley at his Soho offices on a misty, soaking Friday at midday – a social call with business as its aim – as soon as they heard that the Joseph–Charlie show was safely running. They were in near despair: since the Leyden bomb, Gavron’s croaking breath was on their necks every hour of the day; they could hear nothing in their minds but the remorseless ticking of Kurtz’s battered watch. Yet on the surface, they were just two more respectful, well-contrasted mid-European Americans in dripping new Burberrys, the one stocky with a forceful rolling walk and a bit of a sea captain to him, the other gangly and young and rather insinuating, with a private academic smile. They gave their names as Gold and Karman of the firm of GK Creations, Incorporated, and their letter paper, hastily run up, sported a blue-and-gold monogram like a thirties tie-pin to prove it. They had made the appointment from the Embassy but ostensibly from New York, personally with one of Ned Quilley’s ladies, and they kept it to the minute like the eager show-business citizens they weren’t.
‘We’re Gold and Karman,’ said Kurtz to Quilley’s senile receptionist, Mrs Longmore, at two minutes to twelve exactly, striding straight in on her from the street. ‘We have a date with Mr Quilley twelve o’clock. Thank you – no, dear, we’ll stand. Was it you we spoke with by any chance, dear?’
It was not, said Mrs Longmore, in the tone of one humouring a pair of lunatics. Appointments were the province of Mrs Ellis, a different person entirely.
‘Sure, dear,’ said Kurtz, undaunted.
And that was how they often operated in these cases: officially somehow, with broad Kurtz beating the rhythm and slender Litvak piping softly behind him with his smouldering private smile.
The stairs to Ned Quilley’s offices were steep and uncarpeted, and most American gentlemen, in Mrs Longmore’s fifty years’ experience of her post, liked to comment on them wryly and pause for breath at the turn. But not Gold; not Karman either. These two, when she watched them through her window, skipped up the stairs and clean out of sight as if they had never seen an elevator. It must be the jogging, she thought, as she went back to her knitting at four pounds an hour. Wasn’t that what they were all doing in New York these days? Running round Central Park, poor things, avoiding the perverts and the dogs? She had heard that a lot died of it.
‘Sir, we’re Gold and Karman,’ said Kurt
z a second time as little Ned Quilley cheerily opened his door to them. ‘I’m Gold.’ And his big right hand had landed in poor old Ned’s before he even had a chance to draw. ‘Mr Quilley, sir – Ned – we are surely honoured to meet you. You have a fine, fine reputation in the profession.’
‘And I’m Karman, sir,’ Litvak privately explained, just as respectfully, peering over Kurtz’s shoulder. But Litvak was not in the handshaking class: Kurtz had done it for both of them.
‘But, my dear fellow,’ Ned protested with his deprecating Edwardian charm, ‘my goodness, it’s I who am honoured, not you!’ And he led them at once to the long sash window, the legendary Quilley’s Window of his father’s day, where, as tradition had it, you sat gazing down into Soho market quaffing old Quilley’s sherry and contemplating the world go by while you made nice deals for old Quilley and his clients. For Ned Quilley at sixty-two was still very much a son. He asked nothing better than to see his father’s agreeable way of life continue. He was a gentle little soul, white-haired and something of a dresser as stage-struck people often are, with a quaint cast in his eye, pink cheeks, and an air of being agitated and delayed both at once.
‘Too wet for the tarts, I’m afraid,’ he declared, bravely flapping an elegant little hand at the window. Insouciance, in Ned’s opinion, was what life was all about. ‘Get rather a decent turnout this time of year, as a rule. Big ones, black ones, yellow ones, every shape and size you can imagine. There’s one old biddy been here longer than I have. My father used to give her a pound at Christmas. Wouldn’t get much for a pound these days, I’m afraid. Oh no! No, indeed!’
From his cherished breakfront bookcase, while they dutifully laughed with him, Ned extracted a decanter of sherry, officiously sniffed the stopper, then half filled three crystal glasses while they watched him. Their watchfulness was something he sensed at once. He had the feeling they were pricing him, pricing the furniture, the office. An awful thought struck him – it had been at the back of his mind ever since he had received their letter.