Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

a beneficiary

CACHES of old papers are graves, you shouldn’t open them.

Her mother had been cremated. There is no marble page incised Laila de Morne, born, died, actress.

She always lied about her age; it wasn’t her natal name, that was too ethnically limiting, inherited generations back, to suggest her uniqueness in a programme cast list. It wasn’t her married name, either. She had baptised herself; professionally. She was long divorced although only in her late fifties when a taxi hit her car and (as she would have delivered her last line) brought down the curtain on her career. Her daughter Charlotte has her father’s surname and has been close to him as a child can be subject to an ex-husband’s conditions of access while the ex-wife, customarily, has custody. As Charlotte has grown up she’s felt more compatible with him than with her, fondly though she feels towards her mother’s — somehow — childishness. Perhaps acting is really continuing the make-believe games of childhood — fascinating, in a way. But. But what? Not a way she had wanted to follow. Although named after the character in which her mother had an early success (Charlotte Corday, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade) and despite the encouragement of drama and dance classes. Not a way she could follow because of lack of talent: her mother’s unspoken interpretation of disappointment, if not expressed in reproach. Laila de Morne had not committed herself to any lover so far as marrying again. There was no stepfather to confuse relations, loyalties; Charlie (as he called her) could remark to her father, ‘Why should she expect me to take after her?’

Her father was a neurologist. They laughed together; at any predestinatory prerogative of the mother, or the alternative paternal one, to be expected to become a doctor! Poking around in people’s brains? They nudged one another with the elbowing of more laughter at the daughter’s distaste.

Her father helped to arrange the memorial gathering in place of a funeral service, sensitive as always to any need in her life. She certainly wouldn’t have expected or wanted him to come along to an ex-wife’s apartment and get down to sorting the clothes, personal possessions to be kept or given away. A friend from the firm where she worked as an actuary agreed to help for a free weekend. Unexpectedly, the young civil rights lawyer with whom there had been a sensed mutual attraction taken no further than dinner and a cinema date, offered himself — perhaps a move towards a love affair, which was coming about anyway. The girls emptied the cupboards of clothes, the friend exclaiming over the elaborate range of different styles women of that generation wore, seems they had many personalities to project — as if you could choose, now you belonged to the outfit of jeans and T-shirt. Oh of course! Charlotte’s mother was a famous actress!

Charlotte did not correct this out of respect for the ambitions of her mother. But when she went to the next room, where the lawyer was arranging chronologically, for her, press cuttings and programmes, photographs displaying Laila in the roles for which the wardrobe had provided, she turned a few programmes and remarked to be overheard by him rather than to him, ‘Never really had the leads she believed she should have after the glowing notices of her promise, very young. When she murdered Marat. In his bathtub, wasn’t it. I’ve never seen the play.’ Confiding the truth of her mother’s career, betraying Laila’s idea of herself; perhaps also a move towards a love affair.

The three young people broke out of trappings of the past for coffee and their concerns of the present. What sort of court cases does a civil rights lawyer take on? What did he mean by not the usual litigation? No robberies, highjacks? Did the two young women feel they were discriminated against, did the plum jobs go to males? Or was it t’other way about, did bad conscience over gender discrimination mean that women were elevated to positions they weren’t really up to? Women of any colour; and black men, same thing? What would have been the sad and strange task alone became a lively evening, animated exchange of opinions and experiences.

Laila surely would not have disapproved; she had stimulated her audience.

There was a Sunday evening at a jazz club, sharing enthusiasm and a boredom with hip-hop, kwaito. After a dinner and dancing together, that first bodily contact to confirm attraction, he offered to help again with her task, and on a weekend afternoon they kissed and touched among the stacks of clothes and boxes of theatre souvenirs, his hand brimming with her breast, but did not proceed as would be natural to the beautiful and inviting bed with its signature of draped shawls and cushions. Some atavistic taboo, notion of respect for the dead, as if her mother still lay there in possession.

The love affair found a bed elsewhere and continued uncertainly, pleasurably enough but without much expectation of commitment. A one-act piece begun among the props of a supporting-part career.

Charlotte brushed aside any offers, also from her office friend, to continue with the sorting of Laila’s — what? The clothes were packed up, some seemed wearable only in the context of a theatrical wardrobe and were given to an experimental theatre group, others went to the Salvation Army for distribution to the homeless. Her father arranged with an estate agent to advertise the apartment for sale; unless you want to move in, he suggested. It was too big, his Charlie couldn’t afford to, didn’t want to live in a style not her own, even rent-free. They laughed again in their understanding, not in criticism of her mother. Laila was Laila. He agreed, but as if in relation to some other aspect. Yes, Laila.

The movers came to take the furniture to be sold. She half-thought of inheriting the bed, it would be luxurious to flop diagonally across its generosity; but you wouldn’t be able to get it past the bedroom door, in her small flat. When the men had departed with their loads there were pale shapes on the floors where everything had stood. She opened windows to let out the dust, the special atmosphere of an occupation like the air of a cave, and turning back suddenly saw something had been left behind. A couple of empty boxes, the cardboard ones of supermarket delivery. Irritated, she went to gather them; one wasn’t empty. It seemed to be filled with letters. What makes you keep some letters and crumple others for the bin. In her own comparatively short life she’d thrown away giggly schoolgirl stuff, sexy propositions scribbled on the back of menus, once naïvely found flattering, polite letters of rejection in response to a job beyond her qualifications she had applied for — a salutary lesson on what her set called the Real World. This box apparently contained memorabilia different from the other stuff already dealt with. The envelopes had the look of personal letters. Hand-addressed, without printed logos of business, bank. Did Laila have a personal life at all that wasn’t her family-the-theatre? One child, daughter of a divorced marriage, hardly counts as ‘family’.

Charlotte — that was the identity she had in any context of her mother — sifted over the envelopes. If her mother did have a personal life it was not a material possession to be disposed of like garments taken on and off; a personal life can’t be ‘left to’ a daughter, a beneficiary in a will. Whatever letters Laila chose to keep were still hers; just quietly burn them, as Laila herself was consumed, to join her. They say (read somewhere) nothing no-one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space — atoms infinitely minute beyond conception of existence are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time. Just as she had noticed this one box that was not empty, as she shook it so that the contents would settle and not spill when lifted, she noticed some loose sheets of writing paper face-down. Not held in the privacy of an envelope. She picked them out face-up. Her father’s handwriting. More deliberately formed than Charlie knew it, what was the date at the top of the page under the address of the house she remembered as home when she was a small girl. A date twenty-four years back — of course his handwriting had changed a bit, it does with different stages in one’s life. His Charlie is twenty-eight, so she would have been four years old when he wrote the date, that’s about right, must have been just before the divorce and her move to a new home with Laila.

The letter is formally addressed on the upper left-hand side of the paper to a firm of lawyers, Kaplan McLeod & Partners, and directed to one of them Dear Hamish. Why on earth would Laila want to keep from a dead marriage the sort of business letter a neurologist might have to write on some question of a car accident maybe or non-payment of some patient’s consultation fee or surgery charges. (As if her father’s medical and human ethics would ever lead him to this last…) The pages must have got mixed up with the other, personal material at some time. Laila and Charlotte changed apartments frequently during Charlotte’s childhood and adolescence.

The letter is marked ‘Copy’.

‘My wife Laila de Morne is an actress and in the course of pursuing her career has moved in a circle independent of one shared by a couple in marriage. I have always encouraged her to take the opportunities, through contacts she might make, to further her talent. She is a very attractive woman and it was obvious to me that I should have to accept there would be men, certainly among her fellow actors, who would want to be more than admirers. But while she enjoyed the attention, sometimes responded with the general kind of social flirtation, I had no reason to see this as more than natural pleasure in her own looks and talents. She would make fun of these admirers, privately, to me, sharp remarks on their appearance, their pretentions and if they were actors, directors or playwrights, the quality of their work. I knew I had not married a woman who would want to stay home and nurse babies, but from time to time she would bring up the subject, we ought to have a son, she said, for me. Then she would get a new part in a play and this was understandably postponed. After a successful start her career was however not advancing to her expectations, she had not succeeded in getting several roles she had confidently anticipated. She came home elated one night and told me she had a small part in a play accepted for performance overseas in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She had been selected because the leading actor himself, Rendall Harris, had told the casting director she was the most talented of young women in the theatre group. I was happy for her and we gave a farewell party in our house the night before the cast left for the United Kingdom. After Edinburgh she spent some time in London, calling to say how wonderful and necessary it was for her to experience what was happening in theatre there and, I gathered, trying her luck in auditions. Apparently unsuccessfully.

Perhaps she intended not to come back. She did. A few weeks later she told me she had just been to a gynaecologist and confirmed that she was pregnant. I was moved. I took the unlikely luck of conception — I’d assumed when we made love the night of the party she’d taken the usual precautions, we weren’t drunk even if she was triumphant — as a symbol of what would be a change in our perhaps unsuitable marriage. I am a medical specialist, neurological surgeon.

When the child was born it looked like any other red-faced infant but after several months everyone was remarking how the little girl was the image of Laila, the mother. It was one day, a Saturday afternoon when she was kicking and flinging her arms athletically, we were admiring our baby’s progress, her beauty, and I joked “Lucky she doesn’t look like me” that my wife picked her up, away, and told me “She’s not your child.” She’d met someone in Edinburgh. I interrupted with angry questions. No, she prevaricated, all right, London, the affair began in London. The leading actor who had insisted on her playing the small part introduced her to someone there. A few days later she told: it was not “someone” it was the leading actor. He was the father of our girl child. She told this to other people, our friends, as through the press it became news that the actor Rendall Harris was making a big name for himself in plays by Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams.

I couldn’t decide what to believe. I even consulted a colleague in the medical profession about the precise variations in the period of gestation in relation to birth. Apparently it was possible that the conception could have taken place with me, or with the other man a few days before, or after, intercourse with me. There never was any intention expressed by Laila that she would take the child and make her life with the man. She was too proud to let anyone know that the fact probably was that he didn’t want her or the supposed progeny of one of his affairs.

Laila has devoted herself to her acting career and as a result the role of a father has of necessity led to a closer relation than customary with the care of the small girl, now four years old. I am devoted to her and can produce witnesses to the conviction that she would be happiest in my custody.

I hope this is adequate. Let me know if anything more is needed, or if there is too much detail. I’m accustomed to writing reports in medical jargon and thought this should be very different. I don’t suppose I’ve a hope in hell of getting Charlie, Laila will put all her dramatic skills into swearing she isn’t mine.’

THAT Saturday. It landed in the apartment looted by the present filled it with blasting amazement, the presence of the past. That Saturday just as it had come to him. Charlotte/Charlie (what was she) received exactly as he had, what Laila (yes, her mother, giving birth is proof) had told.

How to recognise something not in the vocabulary of your known emotions. Shock is like a ringing in the ears, to stop it you snatch back to the first page, read the letter again. It said what is said. This sinking collapse from within, from flared breathless nostrils down under breasts, stomach, legs and hands, hands that not only feel passively but go out to grasp what can’t be. Dismay that feeble-sounding word has this ghastly meaning. What do you do with something you’ve been Told? Something that now is there in the gut of your existence. Run to him. Thrust his letter at him, at her — but she’s out of it, she’s escaped in smoke from the crematorium. And she’s the one who really knows — knew.

Of course he didn’t get custody. He was awarded the divorce decree but the mother was given the four-year-old child. It is natural, particularly in the case of a small girl, for a child to live with the mother. In spite of this ‘deposition’ of his in which he is denied paternity he paid maintenance for the child. The expensive boarding school, the drama and dance classes, even those holidays in the Seychelles, three times in Spain, once in France, once in Greece, with the mother. Must have paid generously. He was a neurologist more successful in his profession than the child’s mother was on the stage. But this couldn’t be the reason for the generosity.

Charlotte/Charlie couldn’t think about that either. She folded the two sheets, fumbled absently for an envelope they should have been in, weren’t, and with them in her hand left the boxes, the letters, Laila’s apartment, locked, behind the door.

HE can only be asked: why he’s been a father, loving.

The return of his Saturday, it woke her at three, four in the morning when she had kept it at bay through the activities of the day, work, navigating alone in her car the city’s crush, mustn’t be distracted, leisure occupied in the company of friends who haven’t been Told. She and her father had one of their regular early dinners at his favourite restaurant, went on to a foreign movie by a director whose work she admired and the Saturday couldn’t be spoken: was unreal.

In the dark when the late-night traffic was over and the dawn traffic hadn’t begun: silence.

The reason.

He believed in the one chance of conception that single night of the party. Laila’s farewell. Even though his friend expert in biological medicine said, implying if one didn’t know the stage of the woman’s fertility cycle you couldn’t be sure, the conception might have achieved itself in other intercourse a few days before or even after that unique night. I am Charlie, his.

The reason.

Another night-thought; angry mood — who do they think they are deciding who I am to suit themselves, her vanity, she at least can bear the child of an actor with a career ahead in the theatre she isn’t attaining for herself, he in wounded macho pride refusing to accept another male’s potency. His seed has to have been the winner.

And in the morning, before the distractions of the day take over, shame on herself, Charlie, for thinking so spitefully, cheaply about him.

The next reason that offers itself is hardly less unjust, offensive — confusedly hurtful to her, as whatever it is that comes, called up by her. He paid one kind of maintenance, he paid another kind of maintenance, loving her, to keep up the conventions before what he sees as the world. The respectable doctors in their white coats who have wives to accompany them to medical council dinners. If he had married again it would have been a woman like these. Laila was Laila. Never risk another.

The letter that didn’t belong to anyone’s daughter was moved from place to place, in a drawer under sweaters, an Indian box where she kept earrings and bracelets, behind books of plays, Euripides and Racine, Shaw to Brecht, Dario Fo, Miller, Artaud, Beckett, and of course Weiss’s annotated Marat/Sade; Charlotte’s inheritance, never read.

When you are in many minds, the contention makes someone who has been not quite what one wanted, who doesn’t count, the only person to be Told. In bed, yet another night, after love-making when the guards go down with the relaxed physical tensions. Dale, the civil rights lawyer who didn’t act in the mess of divorce litigation unless this infringed Constitutional Rights, told in turn of the letter: ‘Tear it up.’ When she appealed, it was not just a piece of paper—‘Have a DNA test.’ How to do that without taking the whole cache that was the past to the father. ‘Get a snip of his hair.’ All that’s needed to go along with a sample of her blood. Like who was it in the bible cutting off Samson’s beard. How was she supposed to do that, stealing upon the father in his sleep somewhere?

Tear it up. Easy advice from someone who had understood nothing. She did not.

But a circumstance came about as if somehow summoned… Of course, it was fortuitous… A distinguished actor-director had been invited by a local theatre to direct a season of classical and avant-garde plays, taking several lead roles himself. It was his first return to the country, the city where he was born and had left to pursue his career, he said in newspaper interviews and on radio, television — how long? — oh twenty-five years ago. Rendall Harris. Newspaper photographs: an actor’s assumed face for many cameras, handsomely enough late-middle-aged, defiant slight twist to the mouth to emphasise character, eyebrows heightened together amusedly just above nose, touch of white in short sideburns. Eyes are not clearly to be made out on newsprint. On television, alive; something of the upper body, gestures coming into view, the close-up of changing expressions in the face, the actual meeting with deep-set long eyes, grey darkening by some deliberate intensity almost flashing-black, to yours, the viewer’s. What did she expect, a recognition. Hers of him. His, out of the lit-up box, of her. An actor’s performance face.

She can’t ignore the stir at the idea that the man named by her mother is about in the city. Laila was Laila. Yes. If she had not gone up in smoke would he have met her, remembered her. Did he ever see the baby, the child was two before he went off for twenty-five years. What does a two-year-old remember. Has she ever seen this man in a younger self, been taken in by these strikingly interrogative eyes; received.

She was accustomed to go to the theatre with friends of the lawyer-lover although he preferred films, one of his limited tastes she could at least share. Every day — every night — she thought about the theatre. Not with Dale. Not to sit beside any of her friends. No. For a wild recurrent impulse there was the temptation to be there with her father, who did not know she knew, had been Told as he was that Saturday, passed on to her in the letter under volumes of plays. Laila was Laila. For him and for her.

She went alone when Rendall Harris was to play one of the lead roles. There had been ecstatic notices. He was Laurence Olivier reincarnated for a new, the twenty-first, century, a deconstructed style of performance. She was far back in the box office queue when a board went up, House Full. She booked for another night, online, an aisle seat three rows from the proscenium. She found herself at the theatre, for some reason hostile. Ridiculous. She wanted to disagree with the critics. That’s what it was about.

Rendall Harris — how do you describe a performance that manages to create for his audience the wholeness, the life of a man, not just in ‘character’ for the duration of the play, but what he might have been before those events chosen by the playwright and how he’ll be, alive, continuing after. Rendall Harris is an extraordinary actor: man. Her palms were up in the hands applauding like a flight of birds rising. When he came out to take the calls summoning the rest of the cast round him she wasn’t in his direct eye-line as she would have been if she’d asked for a middle of the row seat.

She went to every performance in which he was billed in the cast. A seat in the middle of the second row, the first would be too obvious.

If she was something other than a groupie, she was among the knot of autograph seekers, one night, who hung about the foyer hoping he might leave the theatre that way. He did appear making for the bar with the theatre director and for a moment under the arrest of programmes thrust at him happened to encounter her eyes as she stood back from his fans — a smile of self-deprecating amusement meant for anybody in the line of vision, but that one was she.

The lift of his face, his walk, his repertoire of gestures, the oddities of lapses in character-cast expression on stage that she secretly recognised as himself appearing, became almost familiar to her. As if she somehow knew him and these intimacies knew her. Signals. If invented, they were very like conviction. The more she ignored it: kept on going to take her place in the second row. At the box office there was the routine question, D’you have a season ticket? Suppose that was to have been bought when the Rendall Harris engagement was announced.

She thought to herself, a letter. Owed it to him for the impression his roles made upon her. His command of the drama of living, the excitement of being there with him. With the fourth or fifth version up in her mind, the next was written. Mailed to the theatre it most likely was glanced through in his dressing room or back at his hotel among other ‘tributes’ and either would be forgotten or might be taken back to London for his collection of the memorabilia boxes it seems actors needed. But with him, there was that wry sideways tilt to the photographed mouth.

Of course she neither expected nor had any acknowledgement.

After a performance one night she bumped into some old friends of Laila’s, actors who had come to the memorial gathering, and they insisted on her joining them in the bar. When Rendall Harris’s unmistakable head appeared through the late crowd, they created a swift current past backs to embrace him, draw him with their buddie the theatre director to room made at the table where she had been left among the bottles and glasses. For her this was — he had to be taken as an exchange of bar-table greetings; the friends, in the excitement of having Rendall Harris among themselves forgot to introduce her as Laila’s daughter, Laila who’d played Corday in that early production where’d he’d been Marat; perhaps they have forgotten Laila, best thing with the dead if you want to get on with your life and ignore the hazards, like that killer taxi, around you. Her letter was no more present than the other one under the volumes of plays. A fresh acquaintance, just the meeting of a nobody with the famous. Not entirely, even from the famous actor’s side. As the talk lobbed back and forth, sitting almost opposite her the man thought it friendly, from his special level of presence, to toss something to a young woman no-one was including, and easily found what came to mind: ‘Aren’t you the one who’s been sitting bang in the middle of the second row, several times lately?’ And then they joined in laughter, a double confession, hers of absorbed concentration on him, his of being aware of it or at least becoming so at the sight, here, of someone out there whose attention had caught him. He asked across the voices of others which plays in the repertoire she’s enjoyed best, what criticisms she had of those she didn’t think much of. He named a number she hadn’t seen; her response made clear another confession — she’d seen only those in which he played a part. When the party broke up and all were meandering their way, with stops and starts in back-chat and laughter, to the foyer, a shift in progress brought gesturing Rendall Harris’s back right in front of her — he turned swiftly, lithely as a young man and, must have been impulse in one accustomed to be natural, charming in spite of professional guard, spoke as if he had been thinking of it: ‘You’ve missed a lot, you know, so flattering for me, avoiding the other plays. Come some night, or there’s a Sunday afternoon performance of a Wole Soyinka you ought to see. We’ll have a bite in the restaurant before I take you to your favourite seat. I’m particularly interested in audience reaction to the big chances I’ve taken directing this play.’

Rendall Harris sits beside her through the performance, now and then with the authority to whisper some comment, drawing her attention to this and that. She’s told him, over lasagne at lunch, that she’s an actuary, that creature of calculation, couldn’t be further from qualification to judge the art of actors’ interpretation or that of a director. ‘You know that’s not true.’ Said with serious inattention. Tempting to accept that he senses something in her blood, sensibility. From her mother. It is or is not the moment to tell him she is Laila’s daughter, although she carries Laila’s husband’s name, Laila was not known by.

Now what sort of a conundrum is that supposed to be? She was produced by what was that long term, parthenogenesis, she just growed, like Topsy? You know that’s not true.

He arranged for her seat as his guest for the rest of the repertoire in which he was playing the lead. It was taken for granted she’d come backstage afterwards. Sometimes he included her in other cast gatherings ‘among people your own age’ obliquely acknowledging his own, old enough to be her father. Cool. He apparently had no children, adult or otherwise, didn’t mention any. Was he gay? Now? Does a man change sexual preference, or literally embrace both. As he played so startlingly, electric with the voltage of life the beings created only in words by Shakespeare, Strindberg, Brecht, Beckett — oh you name them from the volumes holding down the letter telling of that Saturday. ‘You seem to understand what I — we — actors absolutely risk, kill themselves, trying to reach the ultimate identity in what’s known as a character, beating ourselves down to let the creation take over. Haven’t you ever wanted to have a go, yourself? Thought about acting?’ She told: ‘I know an actuary is the absolute antithesis of all that. I don’t have the talent.’ He didn’t make some comforting effort. Didn’t encourage magnanimously, why not have a go. ‘Maybe you’re right. Nothing like the failure of an actor. It isn’t like many other kinds of failure, it doesn’t just happen inside you, it happens before an audience. Better be yourself. You’re a very interesting young woman, depths there, I don’t know if you know it — but I think you do.’

Like every sexually attractive young woman she was experienced in the mostly pathetic drive ageing men have towards them. Some of the men are themselves attractive either because they have somehow kept the promise of vigour, mouths with their own teeth, tight muscular buttocks in their jeans, no jowls, fine eyes that have seen much to impart, or because they’re well-known, distinguished, well yes, even rich. This actor whose enduring male beauty is an attribute of his talent, he is probably more desirable than when he was a novice Marat in Peter Weiss’s play; all the roles he has taken, he’s emerged from the risk with a strongly endowed identity. Although there is no apparent reason why he should not be making the usual play towards this young woman, there’s no sign that he is doing so. She knows the moves; they are not being made.

The attention is something else. Between them. Is this a question or a fact? They wouldn’t know, would they. The other, simple thing is he welcomes her like a breeze come in with this season abroad, in his old home town; seems to refresh him. Famous people have protégés; even if it’s that he takes, as the customary part of his multiply responsive public reception. He’s remarked, sure to be indulged, he wants to go back to an adventure, a part of the country he’d been thrilled by as a child, wants to climb there where there were great spiky plants with red candelabras — it was the wrong season, these wouldn’t be in bloom in this, his kind of season, but she’d drive him there; he took up the shy offer at once and left the cast without him for two days when the plays were not those in which he had his lead. They slipped and scrambled up the peaks he remembered and at the lodge in the evening he was recognised, took this inevitably, autographed bits of paper and quipped privately with her that he was mistaken by some for a pop star he hadn’t heard of but ought to have. His unconscious vitality invigorated people around him wherever he was. No wonder he was such an innovative director; the critics wrote that classic plays, even the standbys of Greek drama, were re-imagined as if this was the way they were meant to be and never had been before. It wasn’t in his shadow, she was: in his light. As if she were re-imagined by herself. He was wittily critical at other people’s expense and so with him she was freed to think — say — what she realised she found ponderous in those she worked with, the predictability among her set of friends she usually tolerated without stirring them up. Not that she saw much of friends at present. She was part of the cast of the backstage scene. A recruit to the family of actors in the coffee shop at lunch, privy to their gossip, their bantering with the actor-director who drew so much from them, roused their eager talent. The regular Charlie dinners with her father, often postponed, were subdued, he caught this from her; there wasn’t much for them to talk about. Unless she were to want to show off her new associations.

The old impulse came, unwelcome, to go with him to the theatre. Suppressed. But returned. Sit with him and see the one commanding on the stage. What for? Would this resolve, she is Charlotte not Charlie.

Buried under the weight of books, there came out — Charlie said, ‘Let’s see the play that’s had such rave reviews, I’ll get tickets.’ He didn’t demur, forgotten who Randell Harris was; might be.

He led to the bar afterwards talking of the play with considering interest — he’d not seen Beckett for ages, it wore well, not outdated. She didn’t want to be there, she urged it was late, no, no, she didn’t want a drink, the bar was too crowded, but he persuaded gently, we won’t stay, I’m thirsty, need a beer. The leading actor was in a spatter of applause over the drinks as he moved about the salute of admiration. He talked through clusters of others and arrived.

‘Rendall, my father.’

‘Congratulations. Wonderful performance, the critics don’t exaggerate.’

The actor — he dismissed the laudation as if he had enough of that from people who don’t understand what such an interpretation of Vladimir or Estragon involves, the (what was that word he always used) risk. ‘I didn’t feel right tonight. I was missing a beat. Charlotte, you’ve seen me do better, hey, m’darling.’ Her father picked up his glass but didn’t drink. ‘Last time I saw you was in the play set in an asylum, Laila de Morne was Charlotte Corday.’

Her father Told.

‘Of course you always get chalked up in the critics’ hierarchy by how you play the classics, but I’m more fascinated by the new stuff, movement-theatre, parts I can take from zero. I’ve sat in that bathtub too many times, knifed by Charlotte Cordays…’ The projection of the disarmingly self-deprecating laugh.

She spoke what she had not Told, not yet found the right time and situation to say to him. ‘Laila de Morne is my mother.’ No more to be discarded in the past tense than the performance of the de Sade asylum where she was Charlotte Corday to his Marat. ‘That’s how I was named.’ ‘Well, you’re sure not a Charlotte to carry a knife, spoil your beautiful aura with that, frighten off the men around you.’ Peaked eyebrows as if, ruefully, one of them, a trick from the actors’ repertoire contradicted by a momentary — hardly to be received — entrance of those eyes to her own, diamonds black with the intensity it was his talent to summon, a stage-prop claim made, to be at once released, at will.

Laila was Laila.

WHEN they were silent in the pause at a traffic light he touched the open shield of his palm to the back of her head, the unobtrusive caress used the times he was driving her to boarding school. If she was for her own reasons now differently disturbed that was not to be pried at. She was to drop him at his apartment, but when she drew up at the entrance she opened the car door at her side as he did his, and came to him in the street. He turned — what’s the matter. She moved her head: nothing. She went to him and he saw without understanding he must take her in his arms. She held him, he kissed her cheek and she pressed it against his. Nothing to do with DNA.