The Little Drummer Girl (74 page)

The same evening, Frankie rang--Kurtz must have given her the number out of spite. The telephone was Frankie's instrument. Others might play the violin, the harp, or the shofar, but for Frankie it was the telephone every time.

Becker listened to her for quite a time. To her weeping, at which she was unequalled; to her cajolements, and her promises. "I'll be whatever you want me to be," she said. "Just tell me and I'll be it."

But the last thing Becker wanted was to invent anybody.

It was not long after this that Kurtz and the psychiatrist decided the time had come to throw Charlie back into the water.

The tour was called A Bouquet of Comedy, and the theatre, like others she had known, served as a Women's Institute and a play school, and no doubt as a polling booth at election times as well. It was a lousy play and a lousy theatre, and it came at the lower end of her decline. The theatre had a tin roof and a wooden floor, and when she stamped, bullet puffs of dust came up between the blocks. She had begun by taking only tragic parts, because after one nervous look at her Ned Quilley had assumed that tragedy was what she wanted, and so, for her own reasons, had Charlie. But she discovered quickly that serious parts, if they meant anything to her at all, were too much for her. She would cry or weep at the most incongruous places, and several times she had to fake an exit in order to get hold of herself.

But more frequently it was their irrelevance that got to her; she had no stomach any more--and, worse, no understanding--for what passed for pain in Western middle-class society. Thus comedy became, after all, the better mask for her, and through it she had watched her weeks rotate between Sheridan and Priestley and the latest modern genius, whose offering was described in the programme as a soufflé flashing with barbed wit. They had played it in York but, thank God, bypassed Nottingham; they had played it in Leeds and Bradford and Huddersfield and Derby; and Charlie for one had yet to see the soufflé rise, or the wit flash, but probably the fault was in herself, for in her imagination she went through her lines like a punchdrunk boxer who must either slug away or go down for good.

All day long, when she was not rehearsing, she lounged about like a patient in a doctor's waiting-room, smoking and reading magazines. But tonight, as the curtain rose once more, a dangerous sloth replaced her nervousness and she kept wanting to fall asleep. She heard her voice run up and down the scale, felt her arm reach this way, her foot step that way; she paused for what was normally a safe laugh, but struck instead an uncomprehending quiet. At the same time, pictures from the forbidden album began to fill her mind: of the prison in Sidon and the line of waiting mothers along the wall; of Fatmeh; of the schoolroom in the camp at night, ironing on the slogans for the march; of the air-raid shelter, and the stoic faces staring at her, wondering whether she was to blame. And of Khalil's gloved hand drawing its crude claw marks in his own blood.

The dressing-room was communal, but when the interval came, Charlie did not go to it. Instead she stood outside the stage door, in the open air, smoking and shivering and staring down the foggy Midland street, and wondering whether she should simply walk, and keep walking until she fell down or got hit by a car. They were calling her name and she could hear slamming doors and running feet, but the problem seemed to be theirs, not hers, and she left them to it. Only a last--a very last--sense of responsibility made her open the door and wander back in.

"Charlie, for Christ's  sake! Charlie, what the bloody hell!" The curtain rose and she found herself once more on stage. Alone. Long monologue, while Hilda sits at husband's desk and pens a letter to her lover: to Michel, to Joseph. A candle burned at her elbow and in a minute she would pull open the drawer of the desk in search of another sheet of paper, and find--"Oh no!"--her husband's unposted letter to his mistress. She began writing and she was in the motel in Nottingham; she stared into the candle flame and saw Joseph's face glinting at her across the table in the taverna outside Delphi. She looked again and it was Khalil, dining with her at the log table in the house in the Black Forest. She was saying her lines and miraculously they were not Joseph's, not Tayeh's, not Khalil's, but Hilda's. She opened the desk drawer and put in a hand, missed a beat, drew out a sheet of handwriting in puzzlement, lifted it, and turned to give the audience their look. She rose to her feet, and with an expression of growing disbelief, advanced to the front of the stage and began to read aloud--such a witty letter, so full of neat cross-references. In a minute her husband, John, would enter left in his dressing-gown, advance upon the desk, and read her own unfinished letter to her lover. In a minute there would be an even wittier cross-cut of their two letters, and the audience would roll about in delirium, which would turn to ecstasy when the two deceived lovers, each roused by the other's infidelities, fell together in a lecherous embrace. She heard her husband enter, and it was the cue for her to raise her voice: indignation replaces curiosity as Hilda reads on. She grasped the letter in both hands, turned, and took two paces left front in order not to mask John. As she did so, she saw him--not John but Joseph, quite distinctly, seated where Michel had sat in the centre of the stalls, staring up at her with the same dreadfully serious concern.

At first, she was really not surprised at all; the divide between her inner and outer world had been a flimsy affair at the best of times, but these days it had virtually ceased to exist.

So he's come, she thought. And about time too. Any orchids, Jose? No orchids at all? No red blazer? Gold medallion? Gucci's? Maybe I should have gone to the dressing-room after all. Read your note. I'd have known you were coming, wouldn't I? Baked a cake.

She had stopped reading aloud because there was really no point in acting any more, even though the prompter was unashamedly belting out the lines to her and the director was standing behind him waving his arms like someone fighting off a swarm of bees; they were both in her line of vision, somehow, though she was staring at Joseph exclusively. Or perhaps she was imagining them, because Joseph had become so real at last. Behind her, husband John, with no conviction at all, had started inventing lines to cover for her. You need a Joseph, she wanted to tell him proudly; our Jose here will do you lines for all occasions.

There was a screen of light between them--not a screen so much as an optical partition. Added to her tears, it had started to upset her vision of him, and she was beginning to suspect he was after all a mirage. From the wings, they were shouting at her to come off; husband John had marched downstage--clonk, clonk--and taken her kindly but firmly by the elbow as a preliminary to consigning her to the bin. She supposed that in a minute they would pull the curtain on her and give that little tart--what's-her-name, her understudy--the chance of her lifetime. But her concern was to reach Joseph and touch him and make sure. The curtain closed, but she was already walking down the steps to him. The lights went up, and yes it was Joseph, but when she saw him so clearly he bored her; he was just another member of her audience. She started up the aisle and felt a hand on her arm and thought: Husband John again, go away. The foyer was empty except for two geriatric duchesses who presumably were the management.

"See a doctor, dear, I should," said one of them.

"Or sleep it off," said the other.

"Oh leave it out," Charlie advised them happily, using an expression she had never used before.

No Nottingham rain was falling, no red Mercedes waiting to receive her, so she went and stood at a bus-stop, half expecting the American boy to be aboard, telling her to look out for a red van.

Joseph came towards her down the empty street, walking very tall, and she imagined him breaking into a run in order to beat his own bullets to her, but he didn't. He drew up before her, slightly out of breath, and it was clear that someone had sent him with a message, most likely Marty, but perhaps Tayeh. He opened his mouth to deliver it, but she prevented him.

"I'm dead, Jose. You shot me, don't you remember?"

She wanted to add something about the theatre of the real, how the bodies didn't get up and walk away. But she lost it somehow.

A cab passed and Joseph hailed it with his free hand. It didn't stop, but what can you expect? The cabs these days--a law to themselves. She was leaning on him and she would have fallen if he hadn't been holding her so firmly. Her tears were half blinding her, and she was hearing him from under water. I'm dead, she kept saying, I'm dead, I'm dead. But it seemed that he wanted her dead or alive. Locked together, they set off awkwardly along the pavement, though the town was strange to them.

the end