The Little Drummer Girl (12 page)

"So you're Austrian."

"Charlie. Please. Let us say I am a mongrel of mixed European and Oriental origins. Would that satisfy you?"

By this time the gang was coming out on Joseph's side with a series of embarrassed murmurs: "Charlie, for Christ's sake--come on,Chas,you're not in Trafalgar Square now--Chas,honest."

But Charlie had nowhere to go but forward. Flinging an arm across the table, she snapped her fingers very loud under Joseph's nose. One snap, then a second, so that by now every waiter, every customer in the taverna had turned to watch the fun.

"Passport, please! Come on, cross my frontier. You dug up Al's for him, now let's see yours. Date of birth, colour of eyes, nationality. Give!"

First he looked down at her outstretched fingers, which at that angle had an ugly obtrusiveness. Then up at her flushed face as if to reassure himself of her intention. Finally he smiled, and to Charlie his smile was like a light, unhurried dance upon the surface of a deep secret, taunting her with its assumptions and omissions.

"I'm sorry, Charlie, I fear that we mongrels have a rooted objection--I would say a historical one--to having our identity defined by pieces of paper. Surely as a progressive person you would share my sentiment?"

He took her hand in one of his and, having carefully folded up her fingers with the other, returned it to her side.

Charlie and Joseph began their tour of Greece the following week. Like other successful proposals, it was one that in a strict sense was never made. Cutting herself off from the gang completely, she had taken to walking into town early while it was still cool and frittering away the day in two or three tavernas, drinking Greek coffee and learning her lines from As You Like It, which she was to take to the West of England that autumn. Aware of being stared at, she glanced up and there was Joseph straight opposite her across the street, coming out of the pension, where she had discovered he was living: Richthoven, Peter, room 18, alone. It was the sheerest coincidence, she told herself afterwards, that she had chosen to sit in this taverna at the very hour when he would be leaving for the beach. Catching sight of her, he came and sat beside her.

"Go away," she said.

With a smile, he ordered himself a coffee. "I fear that now and then your friends become a somewhat rich diet," he confessed. "One is driven to seek the anonymity of the crowds."

"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 in consequence She and Long Al had been to Délos for the day to visit the Temple of Apollo, she said; that was the most she'd done. She forbore 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 all 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."