The Little Drummer Girl (14 page)

Suddenly there was silence, and all Ned could hear was the song in his own heart. He blew out his cheeks and, trying to appear businesslike, tugged at each of his elegant cuffs in turn. He adjusted the rose which Marjory had that very morning put into his button-hole with her usual instruction not to drink too much at lunch. But Marjory would have thought quite differently if she had known that, far from wanting to buy Ned out, they were actually proposing to give their beloved Charlie her long-awaited break. If she had known that, old Marge would have lifted all restrictions, of course she would.

Kurtz and Litvak drank tea, but at The Ivy they take such eccentricities in their stride, and as for Ned he required little persuasion to choose himself a very decent-half bottle from the list and, since they seemed to insist upon it, a big, misted glass of the house Chablis to go with his smoked salmon first. In the taxi, which they took to escape the rain, Ned had begun to relate to them the amusing story of how he had acquired Charlie as a client. In The Ivy he resumed the thread.

"Fell for her hook, line, and sinker. Never done such a thing before. Old fool, that's what I was--not as old as I am now, but still a fool. Nothing much to the show. Little old-fashioned revue, really, dolled up to look modern. But Charlie was marvellous. The defended softness, that's what I look for in the gals." The expression was in fact a legacy of his father's. "Soon as the curtain came down, I popped straight round to her dressing-room--if you could call it a dressing-room--did my Pygmalion act, and signed her on the spot. She wouldn't believe me at first. Thought I was a dirty old man. Had to go back and fetch Marjory to persuade her. Ha!"

"What happened after that?" said Kurtz very pleasantly, handing him some more brown bread and butter. "Roses all the way, huh?"

"Oh, not a bit of it!" Ned protested guilelessly. "She was just like so many of ‘em at that age. Come bouncing out of drama college all starry-eyed and full of promise, get a couple of parts, start buying a flat or some stupid thing, then suddenly it all stops for ‘em. The twilight time we call it. Some pull through it, some don't. Cheers."

"But Charlie did," Litvak softly prompted, sipping his tea.

"She held on. Sweated it out. It wasn't easy, but it never is. Years of it, in her case. Too many." He was surprised to discover himself so moved. From their expressions, so were they. "Well, now it's come right for her, hasn't it? Oh, I am pleased for her! I really am. Yes, indeed."

And that was another odd thing, Ned told Marjory afterwards. Or maybe it was the same thing over again. He was referring to the way the two men changed character as the day wore on. Back in the office, for instance, he'd hardly got a word in edgeways. But at The Ivy they gave him centre stage and nodded him through his lines with hardly a word between them. And afterwards--well, afterwards was another damned thing completely.

"Terrible childhood, of course," said Ned proudly. "A lot of the gals have that, I notice. It's what sends ‘em towards fantasy in the first place. Dissembling. Hiding your emotions. Copying people who look happier than you are. Or unhappier. Stealing a bit of ‘em--what acting's half about. Misery. Theft. I'm talking too much. Cheers again."

"Terrible in what way, Mr. Quilley?" Litvak asked respectfully, like someone who was researching the whole question of terribleness. "Charlie's childhood. Terrible how, sir?"

Ignoring what he only afterwards saw to be deepening gravity in Litvak's manner and in Kurtz's gaze as well, Ned entrusted to them whatever knowledge he had incidentally acquired during the little, confessive lunches he occasionally gave her upstairs at Bianchi's, where he took them all. The mother a ninny, he said. The father some sort of rather awful swindler chap, a stockbroker who'd gone to the devil and was now mercifully dead, one of those plausible liars who think God put the fifth ace up their sleeve. Ended up in jug. Died there. Shocking.

Once again, Litvak made the mildest intervention: "Died in prison, did you say, sir?"

"Buried there too. Mother so bitter she wouldn't waste the money moving him."

"This something Charlie told you herself, sir?"

Quilley was mystified. "Well, who else would?"

"No collateral?" said Litvak.

"No what?" said Ned as his fears of a takeover suddenly revived.

"Corroboration, sir. Confirmation from unconnected parties. Sometimes with actresses--

But Kurtz intervened with a fatherly smile: "Ned, you just ignore this boy," he advised. "Mike here has a very suspicious streak in him. Don't you, Mike?"

"Maybe I do, at that," Litvak conceded, in a voice no louder than a sigh.

Only then did Ned think to ask them what they had seen of her work, and to his pleasurable surprise it turned out that they had taken their researches very seriously indeed. Not only had they obtained clips of every minor television appearance she had ever made, they had actually traipsed up to beastly Nottingham on their previous visit to catch her Saint Joan.

"Well, my goodness what a sly pair you are!" cried Ned as the waiters cleared their plates and set the scene for roast duck. "If you'd given me a call, I'd have driven you up there myself, or Marjory would. Did you go backstage, take her out for a meal? You didn't? Well, I'm damned!"

Kurtz allowed himself a moment's hesitation and his voice grew grave. He cast a questioning glance at his partner, Litvak, who gave him a faint nod of encouragement. "Ned," he said, "to tell you the truth, we just didn't quite feel it was appropriate in the circumstances."

"Whatever circumstances are they?" asked Ned, supposing he was referring to some point of agents' ethics. "Good Lord, we're not like that over here, you know! You want to make her an offer, make one. Don't have to get a chit from me. I'll collect my commission one day, don't you worry!"

Then Ned went quiet because they both looked so bloody solemn, he told Marjory. As if they'd swallowed bad oysters. Shells and all.

Litvak was carefully dabbing his thin lips. "Mind if I ask you something, sir?"

"My dear chap," said Ned, very puzzled.

"Would you tell us, please--your own assessment--how does Charlie interview?"

Ned put down his claret glass. "Interview? Ah well, if that's your worry you can take it from me that she's an absolute natural. First rate. Knows instinctively what the press boys want and, given the chance, how to provide it. Chameleon, that's what she is. Bit out of practice recently, I'll grant you, but she'll pick it up again like a shot, you'll see. Don't have any anxiety on that score." He took a long pull of wine to reassure them. "Oh no."

But Litvak was not as uplifted by this news as Ned had hoped. Pressing his lips into a kiss of worried disapproval, he began assembling crumbs on the tablecloth with his long, thin fingers. So that Ned actually lowered his own head and tilted his face up in an effort to draw him from his doldrums: "But, my dear fellow!" he protested uncertainly. "Don't look like that! What can possibly be wrong with her interviewing well? There are plenty of gals around who make a perfect hash of it. If that's what you want, I've got any number of ‘em!"

But Litvak's favour was not to be won. His only response was to lift his gaze briefly to Kurtz as if to say "Your witness," then lower it again to the tablecloth. "A real two-hander" Ned told Marjory ruefully afterwards. "You felt they could have switched parts at the drop of a hat."

"Ned," said Kurtz, "if we sign your Charlie for this project, she is going to get one hell of a lot of exposure, and I mean a lot Once she is into this thing, your kid is going to have her whole life spread right out in front of her face. Not only her love life, her family, her taste in pop-stars and poetry. Not only the story of her father. But also her religion, her attitudes, her opinions."

"And her politics," Litvak whispered, raking in the last of the crumbs. At which Ned suffered a mild but unmistakable loss of appetite, and laid down his knife and fork, while Kurtz kept rolling on: "Ned, our backers in this project are nice Midwestern American people. They have all the virtues. Too much money, ungrateful children, second homes in Florida, wholesome values. But especially the wholesome values. And they want those values reflected in this production, all the way down the line. We can laugh at it a little, weep at it a little, but it's the reality, it's television, and it's where the money is--

"And it's America," Litvak breathed patriotically, to his crumbs.

"Ned, we will be frank with you. We will be truthful. When we finally decided to write you, we were all ready, subject to obtaining other consents along the way, to buy your Charlie out of her commitments and start her on the big road. But I will not conceal from you that in the last couple of days,Karman here and myself have heard things around the bazaars that made us sit up and start to wonder. Her talent, no problem--Charlie is a fine, fine talent, under-exercised, diligent, all set to go. But whether she is bankable within the context of this project. Whether she is exposable. Ned, we want some reassurance from you that this thing isn't serious."

It was Litvak who again put in the decisive thrust. Relinquishing his crumbs at last, he had crooked his right forefinger under his lower lip and was gazing mournfully at Ned through his black-framed spectacles.

"We hear she's currently radical," he said. "We hear she's far, far out in her political causes. Militant. We hear she's currently allied with a very flaky anarchist guy, some kind of crazy. We don't want to condemn anybody on the strength of idle rumour, but the stuff that's reaching us, Mr. Quilley, it's like she's Fidel Castro's mother and Arafat's sister rolled into a single hooker."

Ned stared from one to the other of them, and for a moment he had the delusion that their four eyes were controlled by one optic muscle. He wanted to say something but he felt unreal. He wondered whether he might have drunk the Chablis faster than was prudent. All that he could think of was a favourite aphorism of Marjory's: there is no such thing in life as a bargain.

The dismay that had descended over Ned was like the panic of the old and helpless. He felt physically unequal to the task, too weak for it, too tired. All Americans unsettled him; and most scared him, either by their knowledge or their ignorance, or both. But these two, blankly gazing at him while he floundered for an answer, inspired a spiritual alarm, greater than anything he was prepared for. He was also, in a useless sort of way, very angry. He loathed gossip. All gossip. He regarded it as the blight of his profession. He had seen it ruin careers; he detested it and he could become red-faced and almost rude when it was offered to him by those who did not know his feelings. When Ned talked about people, he did so openly and with affection, exactly as he had talked about Charlie ten minutes ago. Dammit, he loved the girl. It even crossed his mind to indicate this to Kurtz, which for Ned would have been a bold step indeed, and it must have crossed his face as well, for he fancied he saw Litvak start to worry and prepare to back off a little, and Kurtz's extraordinarily mobile face break into a come-now-Ned sort of smile. But an incurable courtesy, as ever, held him back. He was eating their salt. Besides, they were foreign and had totally different standards. Then again, he had to admit, reluctantly, that they had a job to do, and backers to humour, and even in a sense a certain awful rightness on their side, and that he, Ned, must either meet their point or risk wrecking the deal, and with it all his hopes for Charlie. For there was another factor here, that Ned in his fatal reasonableness was also obliged to acknowledge--namely, that even if their project turned out to be dreadful, which he assumed would be the case; even if Charlie were to throw away every line she was given, walk on to the set drunk, and put broken glass in the director's bath-tub, none of which in her professionalism she would contemplate for one faltering second--nevertheless her career, her status, her plain commercial value, would at last be taking that longed-for leap forward from which it need never seriously retreat.

Kurtz, all this while, had been talking undeterred. "Your guidance, Ned," he was saying earnestly."Help. We want to know this thing isn't going to blow up in our faces on the second day of shooting. Because I'll tell you this." A short strong finger was pointing at him like a pistol barrel. "Nobody in the state of Minnesota is about to be seen paying a quarter of a million dollars to a red-toothed enemy of democracy, if that's what she is, and nobody in GK is going to advise them to commit harakiri doing it."

To begin with, at least, Ned rallied rather well. He apologised for nothing. He reminded them, without giving the smallest ground, of his description of Charlie's childhood, and pointed out that by any normal standards she should have ended up a full-scale juvenile delinquent or--like her father--in prison. As to her politics or whatever one wished to call them, he said, in the nine years odd that he and Marjory had known her, Charlie had been a passionate opponent of apartheid--"Well, one can't fault that, can one?" (though they seemed to think one could)--a militant pacifist, a Sufist, a nuclear marcher, an anti-vivisectionist, and until she went back to smoking again, a champion of campaigns to eliminate tobacco from theatres and on the public underground. And he had no doubt that before Charlie was finally gathered to the Great Reaper, a whole bunch of other, equally disparate causes would attract her romantic, if brief, patronage.

"And you stood by her through all that, Ned," Kurtz marvelled in admiration. "I call that fine, Ned."

"As I would stand by any of them!" Ned rejoined with a flash of spirit. "Dash it all, she's an actress! Don't take her so seriously. Actors don't have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There's a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she'll be Born Again!"

"Not politically, she won't," said Litvak nastily, under his breath.

For a few moments longer, under the helpful influence of his claret, Ned continued on this bold course. A sort of giddiness overtook him. He heard the words in his head; he repeated them and felt young again and completely divorced from his own actions. He spoke of actors generally and how they were pursued by "an absolute horror of unreality." How on stage they acted out all the agonies of man, and off stage were hollow vessels waiting to be filled. He talked about their shyness, their smallness, their vulnerability, and their habit of disguising these weaknesses with tough-sounding and extreme causes borrowed from the adult world. He spoke of their self-obsession, and how they saw themselves on stage twenty-four hours a day--in childbirth, under the knife, in love. Then he dried, a thing that happened to him a mite too often these days. He lost his thread, he lost his bounce. The wine waiter brought the liqueur trolley. Under the cold-sober eyes of his hosts, Quilley desperately selected a Marc de Champagne and let the waiter pour a large one before he made a show of stopping him. Meanwhile Litvak had recovered sufficiently to bounce back with a good idea. Poking his long fingers inside his jacket, he drew out one of those notebooks made like a blank picture, with imitation crocodile backing and brass corners for the little sheets of paper.