The Little Drummer Girl

eight

If she dreamed, she had no knowledge of it when she woke. Or perhaps, like Adam, she woke and found the dream true, because the first thing she saw was a glass of fresh orange juice by her bed, and the second, Joseph striding purposefully about the room, pulling open cupboards, drawing back the curtains to let in the sunshine. Pretending to be still asleep, Charlie watched him through half-closed eyes, as she had watched him on the beach. The line of his wounded back. The first light frost of age touching the sides of his black hair. The silk shirt again, with its gold furnishings.

"What's the time?" she asked.

"Three o'clock." He gave a tug of the curtain. "In the afternoon. You have slept enough. We must get on our way."

And a gold neckchain, she thought; with the medallion tucked inside the shirt.

"How's the mouth?" she asked.

"Alas, it appears that I shall never sing again." He crossed to an old painted wardrobe and extracted a blue kaftan, which he laid on the chair. She saw no marks on his face, only heavy rings of tiredness beneath his eyes. He stayed up, she thought, recalling his absorption with the papers on his desk; he's been finishing his homework.

"You remember our conversation before you went to bed this morning, Charlie? When you get up, I would like you please to put on this dress, also the new underclothes you will find in the box here. I prefer you best in blue today and your hair brushed long. No knots."

"Plaits."

He ignored the correction. "These clothes are my gift to you and it is my pleasure to advise you what to wear and how to look. Sit up, please. Take a thorough look at the room."

She was naked. Clutching the sheet to her throat, she cautiously sat up. A week ago, on the beach, he could have studied her body to his heart's content. That was a week ago.

"Memorise everything around you. We are secret lovers and this room is where we spent the night. It happened as it happened. We were reunited in Athens, we came to this house and found it empty. No Marty, no Mike, nobody but ourselves."

"So who are you?"

"We parked the car where we parked it. The porch light was burning as we arrived. I unlocked the front door, we ran together hand in hand up the broad staircase."

"What about luggage?"

"Two pieces. My briefcase, your shoulder bag. I carried both."

"Then how did you hold my hand?"

She thought she was outguessing him, but he was pleased by her precision.

"The shoulder bag with its broken strap was under my right arm. My grip was in the right hand. I ran on your right side, my left hand was free. We found the room exactly as it is now, everything prepared. We were scarcely through the door before we embraced each other. We could not contain our desire a second longer."

With two steps he was at the bed, rummaging among the tumbled bedclothes on the floor until he found her blouse, which he held out for her to see. It was ripped at every button-hole and two buttons were missing.

"Frenzy," he explained as flatly as if frenzy were the day of the week. "Is that the word?"

"It's one of them."

"Frenzy then."

He tossed aside the blouse and allowed himself a strict smile. "You want coffee?"

"Coffee would be great."

"Bread? Yoghurt? Olives?"

"Coffee will do fine." He had reached the door as she called after him, in a louder voice: "Sorry I swiped you, Jose. You should have launched one of those Israeli counterstrikes and felled me before I thought of it."

The door closed, she heard him stride away down the passage. She wondered whether he would ever come back. Feeling utterly unreal, she stepped gingerly from the bed. It's pantomime, she thought-Goldilocks in the bears' house. The evidence of their imagined revelry lay all round her: a vodka bottle, two-thirds full, floating in an ice bucket. Two glasses, used. A bowl of fruit, two plates complete with apple peel and grape pips. The red blazer draped over a chair. The smart black leather grip with side pockets, part of every budding executive's virility kit. Hanging from the door, a karate-style kimono, Hermes of Paris-his again, heavy black silk. In the bathroom, her own schoolgirl's sponge-bag cuddled up beside his calf-skin holdall. Two towels were offered; she used the dry one. Her blue kaftan, when she examined it, turned out to be rather pretty, in a heavy cotton with a high, demure neckline and the shop's own tissue paper still inside it: Zelide, Rome and London. The underclothes were high-class tart's stuff, black and her size. On the floor, a brand-new leather shoulder bag and a pair of smart flat-soled sandals. She tried one on. It fitted. She dressed and was brushing out her hair when Joseph marched back into the room bearing a tray with coffee. He could be heavy, and he could be so light you'd think they'd lost the soundtrack. He was somebody with a wide range of stealth.

"You look excellent, I would say," he remarked, placing the tray on the table.

"Excellent*!"

"Beautiful. Enchanting. Radiant. You have seen the orchids?"

She hadn't, but she saw them now and her stomach turned over the way it had on the Acropolis: a sprig of gold and russet with a small white envelope propped against the vase. Deliberately, she finished her hair, then picked the little envelope from its perch and took it to the chaise longue, where she sat down. Joseph remained standing. Lifting the flap, she drew out a plain card with the words "I love you" written in a sloping, un-English hand, and the familiar signature, "M."

"Well? What does it remind you of?"

"You know damn well what it reminds me of," she snapped as, far too late, she made that connection in her memory, as well.

"So tell me."

"Nottingham, the Barrie Theatre. York, the Phoenix. Stratford East, the Cockpit. You, crouching in the front row making cow eyes at me."

"The same handwriting?"

"The same hand, the same message, the same flowers."

"You know me as Michel, 'M' for Michel." Opening the smart black grip, he began swiftly packing his clothes into it. "I am all you ever desired," he said, without even looking at her. "To do the job, you don't just have to remember it, you have to believe it and feel it and dream it. We are building a new reality, a better one."

She put aside the card and poured herself some coffee, playing deliberately slow against his haste.

"Who says it's a better one?" she said.

"You passed your holiday in Mykonos with Alastair, but in your secret heart you were waiting desperately for me, Michel." He darted into the bathroom and returned with his holdall. "Not Joseph-Michel. As soon as the holiday was over, you hurried to Athens. On the boat you told your friends you wanted to be alone for a few days. A lie. You had an assignation with Michel. Not Joseph-Michel." He tossed the holdall into the grip. "You took a taxi to the restaurant, you met me there. Michel. In my silk shirt. My gold watch. Lobsters ordered. Everything you saw. I brought brochures to show you. We ate what we ate, we talked excited sweet nothings in the manner of secret lovers reunited." He unhooked the black kimono from the door. "I tipped lavishly and kept the bill, as you noticed; then I took you up to the Acropolis, a forbidden journey, unique. A special taxi, my own, was waiting. I addressed the driver as Dimitri-

She interrupted him. "So that was the only reason you took me up the Acropolis," she said flatly.

"It was not I who took you. It was Michel. Michel is proud of his languages, of his abilities as a fixer. He loves flourish, romantic gestures, sudden leaps. He is your magician."

"I don't like magicians."

"He also has a genuine if superficial interest in archaeology, as you observed."

"So who kissed me?"

Carefully folding the kimono, he laid it in the grip. He was the first man she had met who knew how to pack.

"His more practical reason for taking you up the Acropolis was to enable him to take discreet delivery of the Mercedes, which for his own reasons he did not wish to bring into the city centre during the rush hour. You do not question the Mercedes; you accept it as part of the magic of being with me, just as you accept a clandestine flavour in whatever we do. You accept everything. Hurry, please. We have much driving to do, much talking."

"What about you?" she said. "Are you in love with me too, or is it all a game?"

Waiting for him to answer, she had a vision of him physically stepping aside to allow the shaft to speed harmlessly past him towards the shadowy figure of Michel.

"You love Michel, you believe Michel loves you."

"But am I right?"

"He says he loves you, he gives you proof of it. What more can a man do to convince you, since you cannot live inside his head?"

He had set off round the room again, poking at things. Now he stopped before the card that had accompanied the orchids.

"Whose house is this?" she said.

"I never reply to such questions. My life is an enigma to you. It has been so since we met and that is how I like it to remain." He picked up the card and handed it to her. "Keep this in your new handbag. From now on I expect you to cherish these small mementoes of me. See this?"

He had lifted the vodka bottle halfway out of its bucket.

"As a man, I naturally drink more than you. I don't drink well; alcohol gives me a headache, occasionally it makes me sick. But vodka is what I like." He dropped the bottle back into the bucket. "As for you, you get one small glass because I am emancipated, but basically I do not approve of women drinking." He picked up a dirty plate and showed it to her. "I have a sweet tooth, I like chocolates, cakes, and fruit. Particularly fruit. Grapes, but they must be green like the grapes of my home village. So what did Charlie eat last night?"

"I don't. Not when it's like that. I just smoke my post-coital fag."

"I'm afraid I do not allow smoking in the bedroom. In the Athens restaurant, I tolerated it because I am liberated. Even in the Mercedes, for you, I occasionally allow it. But never in the bedroom. If you were thirsty in the night, you drank water from the tap." He began pulling on the red blazer. "You noticed how the tap gurgled?"

"No."

"Then it didn't gurgle. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't."

"He's an Arab, isn't he?" she said, still watching him. "He's your archetypal Arab chauvinist. It's his car you've nicked."

He was closing the grip. Straightening, he gazed at her a second, partly in calculation and partly, she could not help feeling, in rejection.

"Oh, he is more than just Arab, I would say. He is more than just chauvinist. There is nothing ordinary about him at all, least of all in your eyes. Go over to the bed, please." He waited while she did so, watching her intently. "Feel under my pillow. Slowly-take care! I sleep on the right-hand side. So."

Cautiously, as he commanded, she slid her hand under the cold pillow, imagining the weight of Joseph's sleeping head pressing down on it.

"You have found it? I said take care."

Yes, Jose, she had found it.

"Lift it carefully. The safety catch is off. Michel is not in the habit of giving warnings before he shoots. The gun is a child to us. It shares every bed we sleep in. We call it 'our child.' Even when we are making passionate love, we never disturb that pillow and we never forget what is underneath it. That is how we live. Do you see now that I am not ordinary?"

She contemplated it, how it lay so neatly in her palm. Small. Brown and prettily proportioned.

"Have you ever handled such a gun?" Joseph asked.

"Frequently."

"Where? Who against?"

"On stage. Night after night after night."

She handed it to him and watched him slip it inside his blazer as easily as if he were putting away his wallet. She followed him downstairs. The house was empty and unexpectedly cold. The Mercedes stood waiting in the forecourt. At first she just wanted to leave: go anywhere, get out, the open road and us. The pistol had scared her and she needed movement. But as he started down the drive something made her turn and gaze back at the crumbling yellow plaster, the red flowers, the shuttered windows and old red tiles. And she realised too late how beautiful it all was, how welcoming just as she was leaving. It's the house of my youth, she decided: one of the many youths I never had. It's the house I never got married from; Charlie not in blue but white, my bloody mother in tears, and goodbye to all that.

"Do we exist as well?" she asked him as they joined the evening traffic. "Or is it just the other two?"

The three minute warning again before he answered. "Of course we exist. Why not?" Then the lovely smile, the one she would have tied herself to the railings for. "We are Berkeleyans, you see. If we do not exist, how can they?"

What's a Berkeleyan? she wondered. But she was too proud to ask.

For twenty minutes by the quartz clock on the dashboard, Joseph had barely spoken. Yet she had sensed no relaxation in him; rather a methodical preparation before the attack.

"So, Charlie," he said suddenly, "you are ready?"

Jose, I am ready.

"On the twenty-sixth of June, a Friday, you are playing Saint Joan at the Barrie Theatre, Nottingham. You are not with your regular company; you have stepped in at the last minute to replace an actress who defaulted on her contract. The scenery is late arriving, the lighting is still on its way, you have been rehearsing all day long, two of the staff have gone sick with influenza. The occasion is so far clear in your memory?"

"Vivid."

Mistrusting her levity, he threw a questioning glance at her, but apparently could find nothing to object to. It was early evening. The dusk was falling fast, but Joseph's concentration had the immediacy of sunlight. This is his element, she thought; this is what he does best in his life; this remorseless momentum is the explanation that was missing till now.

"Minutes before curtain-up, a sprig of gold-brown orchids is delivered for you at the stage door with a note addressed to Joan. 'Joan, I love you infinitely.' '

"No stage door."

"There is a back entrance for stage deliveries. Your admirer, whoever he was, rang the bell and put the orchids into the arms of the janitor, a Mr. Lemon, together with a five-pound note. Mr. Lemon was suitably impressed by the large tip and promised to take them to you instantly-did he?"

"Barging into ladies' dressing-rooms unannounced is Lemon's best thing."

"So then. Tell me what you did when you received the orchids."

She hesitated. "The signature was 'M.' '

"M is correct. What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"Nonsense."

She was stung: "What was I supposed to do? I had about ten seconds before I was on."

A dust-laden lorry was careering towards them on the wrong side of the road. With majestic unconcern Joseph guided the Mercedes on to the soft shoulder and accelerated out of the slide. "So you threw thirty pounds' worth of orchids into your waste-paper basket, shrugged your shoulders, and went on stage. Perfect. I congratulate you."

"I put them in water."

"And what did you put the water in?"

The unexpected question sharpened her recollection. "A paint jar. The Barrie doubles as an art school in the mornings."

"You found a jar, you filled it with water, you put the orchids in the water. So. And what were your feelings while you did this? You were impressed? Excited?"

His question somehow caught her on the wrong foot. "I just got on with the show," she said, and giggled without meaning to. "Waited to see who turned up."

They had stopped for traffic lights. The stillness made a new intimacy.

"And the 'I love you'?" he asked.

"That's theatre, isn't it? Everybody loves everybody, some of the time. I liked the 'infinitely,' though. That was class."

The lights changed and they were driving again.

"You did not consider looking at the audience in case you saw anyone you recognised?"

"There wasn't time."

"And in the interval?"

"In the interval, I peeked, but I didn't see anyone I knew."

"And after the show, what did you do?"

"Returned to my dressing-room, changed, hung around a bit. Thought, sod it; went home."

"Home being the Astral Commercial Hotel, near the railway station."

She had long ago lost her capacity to be surprised by him. "The Astral Commercial and Private Hotel," she agreed. "Near the railway station."

"And the orchids?"

"Went with me to the hotel."

"You did not, however, ask Mr. Lemon the caretaker for a description of the person who had brought them?"

"Next day I did. Not the same night, no."

"And what answer did you obtain from Lemon when you did ask him?"

"He said a foreign gent but respectable. I asked what age; he leered and said just right. I tried to think of a foreign M but couldn't."

"Not in your whole private menagerie, one single foreign M? You disappoint me."

"Not a one."

Briefly, they both smiled, though not at each other.

"So, Charlie. We now have day two, a Saturday matinee followed by the evening performance, as usual-

"And you were there, weren't you, bless you? Out there in the middle of the front row in your nice red blazer, surrounded by sticky school kids all coughing and wanting the loo."

Irritated by her levity, he devoted his attention to the road for a while, and when he resumed his line of questioning, it had a pointed earnestness that made his eyebrows come together in a schoolmasterly frown. "I wish you please to describe to me your feelings exactly, Charlie. It is mid-afternoon, the hall is in a half daylight owing to the poor curtains, we are sitting less in a theatre, I would say, than in a large classroom. I am in the front row; I have a decidedly foreign look, a foreign manner somehow, foreign clothes; I am extremely conspicuous among the children. You have Lemon's description of me, and furthermore, I do not take my eyes off you. Do you not suspect at any point that I am the giver of the orchids, the strange man signed M who claims to love you infinitely?"

"Of course I did. I knew."

"How? Did you check with Lemon?"

"I didn't need to. I just knew. I saw you there, mooning at me, and I thought, hullo, it's you. Whoever you are. Then when the curtain went down for the end of the matinee, and you stayed put in your seat and produced your ticket for the next performance-

"How did you know I did that? Who told you?"

And you're that sort too, she thought, adding one more hard-earned recognition of him to her album: when you get what you want, you turn all male and suspicious.

"You said it yourself. It's a small company in a one-horse theatre. We don't get many orchids-about one bunch per decade is average-and we don't get many punters staying to see the show round a second time." She could not resist the question. "Was it a bore, Jose? The show-actually? Twice running like that? Or did you quite enjoy it now and then?"

"It was the most monotonous day of my life," he replied without a second's hesitation. Then his rigid face broke and reformed itself into the best smile ever, so that for a moment he really did look as if he had slipped through the bars of whatever confined him. "As a matter of fact, I thought you quite excellent," he said.

This time she did not object to his choice of adjective. "Will you crash the car now, please, Jose? This will do me fine. I'll die here."

And before he could stop her, she had grabbed his hand and kissed him hard on the knuckle of his thumb.

The road was straight but pot-holed; hills and trees to either side were powdered with moondust from a cement works. They were in their own capsule, where the nearness of other moving things only made their world more private. She was coming to him all over again, in her mind and in his story. She was a soldier's girl, learning to be a soldier.

"So tell me, please. Apart from the orchids, did you receive any other gifts while you were playing at the Barrie Theatre?"

"The box," she said with a shudder, before she had even made a show of pondering.

"What box, please?"

She had expected the question and already she was acting out her distaste for him, believing it was what he wanted. "It was some kind of trick. Some creep sent me a box to the theatre. Registered, special delivery."

"When was this?"

"Saturday. The same day you came to the matinee and stayed."

"And what was in the box?"

"Nothing. It was an empty jeweller's box. Registered and empty."

"How very strange. And the label-the label on the parcel? Did you examine it?"

"It was written in blue ballpoint. Capitals."

"But if it was registered, there must have been a sender also."

"Illegible. Looked like Marden. Could have been Hordern. Some local hotel."

"Where did you open it?"

"In my dressing-room between performances."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

"And what did you make of it?"

"I thought it was someone having a go at me because of my politics. It's happened before. Filthy letters. Nigger-lover. Commie pacifist. A stink-bomb through my dressing-room window. I thought it was them."

"Did you not associate the empty box with the orchids in some way?"

"Jose, I liked the orchids! I liked you."

He had stopped the car. Some laybye in the middle of an industrial estate. Lorries were thundering past. For a moment she thought he might turn the world upside down and grab her, so paradoxical and erratic was the tension in her. But he didn't. Instead, reaching into the door pocket beside him, he handed her a reinforced registered envelope with sealing wax on the flap and a hard square shape inside it, a replica of the one she had received that day. Postmark Nottingham, the twenty-fifth of June. On the front, her name and the address of the B arrie Theatre done in blue ballpoint. On the back, the sender's scrawl as before.

"Now we make the fiction," Joseph announced quietly while she slowly turned the envelope over. "On the old reality we impose the new fiction."

Too close to him to trust herself, she did not answer.

"The day has been hectic, as the day was. You are in your dressing-room, between performances. The parcel, still unopened, is awaiting you. You have how long before you are due on stage again?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe less."

"Very well. Now open the parcel."

She stole a glance at him but he was staring hard ahead at the enemy horizon. She looked down at the envelope, glanced at him again, shoved a finger into the flap, and wrenched it open. The same red jeweller's box, but heavier. Small white envelope, unsealed, plain white card within. To Joan, spirit of my freedom, she read. You are fantastic. I love you! The handwriting unmistakable. But instead of "M," the signature "Michel," written large, with the final "1" turned backward in a tail to underline the importance of the name. She shook the box and felt a soft, exhilarating thud from inside.

"My teeth," she said facetiously, but she did not succeed in destroying the tension inside herself, or him. "Do I open it? What is it?"

"How should I know? Do as you would do."

She lifted the lid. A thick gold bracelet, mounted with blue stones, nestled in the satin lining.

"Jesus," she said softly, and closed the box with a snap. "What do I have to do to earn that!"

"Very well, that is your first reaction," said Joseph immediately. "You take a look, you mutter a blasphemy, you shut the lid. Remember that. Exactly that. That was your response, from now on, always."

Opening the box again, she cautiously took out the bracelet and weighed it in her palm. But she had no experience of jewellery apart from the paste she sometimes wore on stage.

"Is it real?" she asked.

"Unfortunately you do not have experts present who can advise you. Make your own decisions."

"It's old," she pronounced finally.

"Very well, you decide it is old."

"And heavy."

"Old and heavy. Not out of a Christmas cracker, not some piece of child's nonsense, but a serious item of jewellery. What do you do?"

His impatience distanced them from one another: she so thoughtful and disturbed, he so practical. She studied the fittings, the hallmarks, but she understood nothing of hallmarks either. She scratched at the metal lightly with her fingernail. It felt oily and soft.

"You have very little time, Charlie. You are due on stage in one minute and thirty seconds. What do you do? Do you leave it in your dressing-room?"

"God, no."

"They are calling you. You must move, Charlie. You must decide."

"Stop pressuring me! I give it to Millie to look after for me. Millie's my understudy. She prompts."

The suggestion did not suit him at all.

"You do not trust her."

She was nearly in despair. "I put it in the loo," she said. "Behind the cistern-

"Too obvious."

"In the waste-paper basket. Cover it over."

"Someone could walk in and empty it. Think."

"Jose, get off my-I put it behind the paint stuff! That's right. Up on one of the shelves. Nobody's dusted there for years."

"Excellent. You put it at the back of the shelf, you hurry to take up your position. Late. Charlie, Charlie, where have you been? The curtain rises. Yes?"

"Okay," she said, and puffed out about a gallon of air.

"What are your feelings? Now. About the bracelet-about its giver?"

"Well, I'm-I'm appalled-aren't I?"

"Why should you be appalled?"

"Well, I can't accept it-I mean it's money-it's valuable."

"But you have accepted it. You've signed for it and now you've hidden it."

"Only till after the show."

"And then?"

"Well, I'll give it back. Won't I?"

Relaxing a little, he too gave a sigh of relief, as if she had at long last proved his thesis. "And in the meantime, how do you feel?"

"Amazed. Shattered. What do you want me to feel?"

"He is a few feet away from you, Charlie. His eyes are fixed on you passionately. He is attending his third consecutive performance of your play. He has sent you orchids and jewellery and he has told you twice that he loves you. Once normally, once infinitely. He is beautiful. Much more beautiful than I am."

In her irritation, she ignored, for the time being, the steady intensification of his authority as he described her suitor.

"So I act my heart out then," she said, feeling trapped as well as foolish. "And that doesn't mean he's won set and match, either," she snapped.

Carefully, as if trying not to disturb her, Joseph restarted the car. The light had died, the traffic had thinned to an intermittent line of stragglers. They were skirting the Gulf of Corinth. Across the leaden water, a chain of shabby tankers pulled westward as if drawn magnetically by the glow of the vanished sun. Above them a ridge of hills was forming darkly in the twilight. The road forked, they began the long climb, turn after turn towards the emptying sky.

"You remember how I clapped for you?" said Joseph. "You remember I stood for you, curtain call after curtain call?"

Yes, Jose, I remember. But she didn't trust herself to say it out loud.

"Well then-now remember the bracelet too."

She did. An act of imagination all for him-a gift in return to her unknown, beautiful benefactor. The Epilogue over, she took her curtain calls, and the moment she was free she hurried to her dressing-room, recovered the bracelet from its hiding place, cleaned off her make-up at record speed, and flung on her day clothes in order to go to him fast.

But having connived at Joseph's version of events this far, Charlie backed sharply away as a belated sense of the proprieties came to her protection. "Just a minute-hang on-hold it-why doesn't he come to me? He's making the running. Why don't I just stay put in my dressing-room and wait for him to show up, instead of going out into the bushes to look for him?"

"Perhaps he hasn't the courage. He is too much in awe of you, why not? You have bowled him off his feet."

"Well, why don't I sit tight and see! Just for a bit."

"Charlie, what is your intention? You are saying to him what, in your mind, please?"

"I'm saying: 'Take this back-I can't accept it,' " she replied virtuously.

"Very well. Then will you seriously risk the chance he will slip away into the night-never to appear again-leaving you with this valuable gift which you so sincerely do not want to accept?"

With an ill grace she agreed to go and seek him out.

"But how-where will you find him? Where do you look first?" said Joseph.

The road was empty, but he was driving slowly in order that the present should intrude as little as possible upon the reconstructed past.

"I'd run round the back," she said before she had seriously thought. "Out of the back entrance, into the street, round the corner to the theatre foyer. Catch him on the pavement coming out."

"Why not through the theatre?"

"I'd have to fight my way through the milling throng, that's why. He'd be gone long before I ever got to him."

He thought about this. "Then you will need your mackintosh," he said.

Once again, he was right. She had forgotten the Nottingham rain that night, one cloudburst after another, all through the show. She began again. Having changed at lightning speed, she put on her new mackintosh-her long French one from the Liberty's sale-knotted the belt, and charged out into the teeming rain, down the street, round the corner to the front of the theatre-

"Only to find half the audience crammed under the canopy waiting for it to clear," Joseph interrupted. "Why are you smiling?"

"I need my yellow foulard round my head. You remember-the Jaeger one I got from my television commercial."

"We note also, then, that even in your haste to be rid of him, you do not forget your yellow headscarf. So. Wearing her mackintosh and yellow headscarf, Charlie dashes through the rain in search of her over-ardent lover. She arrives at the crowded foyer-calling 'Michel! Michel!' perhaps? Yes? Beautiful. Her cries are in vain, however. Michel is not there. So what do you do?"

"Did you write this, Jose?"

"Never mind."

"Go back to my dressing-room?"

"Does it not occur to you to look in the auditorium?"

"All right, damn it-yes, it does."

"You take which entrance?"

"The stalls. That's where you were sitting."

"Where Michel was. You take the stalls entrance, you push the bar to the door. Hooray, it yields. Mr. Lemon has not yet locked up. You enter the empty auditorium, you walk slowly down the aisle."

"And there he is," she said softly. "Jesus, that's corny."

"But it plays."

"Oh, it plays."

"Because there he is, still in his same seat, in the middle of the front row. Staring at the curtain as if by staring at it he could make it rise again upon the apparition of his Joan, the spirit of his freedom, whom he loves infinitely."

"I mean this is awful" Charlie murmured. But he ignored her.

"The same seat he has been sitting in for the last seven hours."

I want to go home, she thought. A long sleep all on my own at the Astral Commercial and Private. How many destinies can a girl meet in one day? For she could no longer miss the extra note of assurance in him, the drawing near, as he described her new admirer.

"You hesitate, then you call his name. 'Michel!' The only name you know. He turns to look at you but does not move. He does not smile, or greet you, or in any way demonstrate his considerable charm."

"So what does he do, the creep?"

"Nothing. He stares at you with his deep and passionate eyes, challenging you to speak. You may think him arrogant, you may think him romantic, but he is not ordinary and he is certainly not apologetic or bashful. He has come to claim you. He is young, cosmopolitan, well dressed. A man of movement and money, and lacking any sign of self-consciousness. So." He switched to the first person: "You walk towards me down the aisle, realising already that the scene is not unfolding in the way you expected. It is you, not I, apparently, who must provide the explanations. You take the bracelet from your pocket. You offer it to me. I make no move. The rain is dripping from you becomingly."

The road was leading them up a winding hill. His commanding voice, coupled to the mesmeric rhythm of successive bends, forced her mind further and further into the labyrinth of his story.

"You say something. What do you say?" Obtaining no answer from her, he supplied his own. " 'I do not know you. Thank you, Michel, I am flattered. But I do not know you and I cannot accept this gift.' Would you say that? Yes, you would. But better, perhaps."

She barely heard him. She was standing before him in the auditorium, holding out the box to him, gazing into his dark eyes. And my new boots, she thought; the long brown ones I bought myself for Christmas. Ruined by the rain, but who cares?

Joseph was continuing his fairy tale. "Still I speak not one word. You will know from your theatrical experience that there is nothing like silence to establish communication. If the wretched fellow won't speak, what can you do? You are obliged to speak again yourself. Tell me what you say to me this time."

An unwonted shyness struggled with her burgeoning imagination. "I ask him who he is."

"My name is Michel."

"I know that part. Michel who?"

"No answer."

"I ask you what you are doing in Nottingham."

"Falling in love with you. Go on."

"Christ-Jose-"

"Go on!"

"He can't say that to me!"

"Then tell him!"

"I reason with him. Appeal to him."

"Then let's hear you do it-he's waiting for you, Charlie! Speak to him!"

"I'd say…"

"Yes?"

" 'Look, Michel… it's nice of you… I'm very flattered. But sorry-it's too much.' '

He was disappointed. "Charlie, you must do better than that," he reproved her austerely. "He's an Arab-even if you don't know that yet, you may suspect it-you are refusing his gift. You must try harder."

"It's not fair to you, Michel. People often get fixations about actresses… and actors… happens every day. That's no reason to go ruining yourself… just for a kind of… illusion.' "

"Good. Continue."

It was coming more easily to her. She hated his browbeating of her, as she hated any producer's, but she could not deny its effect. " That's what acting's all about, Michel. Illusion. The audience sits down here hoping to be enchanted. The actors stand up there hoping to enchant you. We succeeded. But I can't accept this. It's beautiful.' " She meant the bracelet. " 'Too beautiful. I can't accept anything. We've fooled you. That's all that's happened. Theatre's a con trick, Michel. Do you know what that means? Con trick? You've been deceived.' '

"I still don't speak."

"Well, make him!"

"Why? Are you running out of conviction already? Don't you feel responsible for me? A young boy like this-so handsome-throwing away my money on orchids and expensive jewels?"

"Of course I do! I've told you!"

"Then protect me," he insisted, in an impatient tone. "Save me from my infatuation."

"I'm trying!"

"That bracelet cost me hundreds of pounds-even you can guess that. For all you know, thousands. I might have stolen it for you. Killed. Pawned my inheritance. All for you. I am besotted, Charlie! Be charitable! Exercise your power!"

In her imagination's eye, Charlie had sat herself beside Michel in the next seat. Her hands clasped on her lap, she was leaning forward earnestly to reason with him. She was a nurse to him, a mother. A friend.

"I tell him he would be disappointed if he knew me in reality."

"The exact words, please."

She took a deep breath and plunged: " 'Listen, Michel, I'm just an ordinary girl. I've got torn tights, and an overdraft, and I'm certainly no Joan of Arc, believe me. I'm no virgin, and no soldier, and God and I haven't exchanged a word since I was chucked out of school for'-I'm not going to say that bit-'I'm Charlie, a feckless Western slut.' '

"Excellent. Go on."

" 'Michel, you've got to snap out of this. I mean I'm doing what I can to help, okay? So here, take this back, keep your money and your illusions-and thanks. Thanks, truly. Really thanks. Over and out.' '

"But you don't want him to keep his illusions," Joseph objected aridly. "Or do you?"

"All right, give up his bloody illusions!"

"So how does it end?"

"It just did. I put the bracelet on the seat beside him and walked out. Thanks, world, and bye-bye. If I hurry to the bus-stop, I'll be just in time for rubber chicken at the Astral."

Joseph was appalled. His face said so, and his hand left the wheel in a rare, if limited, gesture of supplication.

"But Charlie, how can you do this? Do you not know you are leaving me to commit suicide perhaps? To roam the rainswept streets of Nottingham all night? Alone? While you lie beside my orchids and my note in the warmth of your elegant hotel."

"Elegant! Christ, the bloody fleas are damp!"

"Do you have no sense of responsibility? You of all people, champion of the underdog-for a boy you have ensnared with your beauty and your talents and your revolutionary passion?"

She tried to bridle but he gave her no opportunity.

"You have a warm heart, Charlie. Others might think of Michel at that moment as some kind of refined seducer. Not you. You believe in people. And that is how you are tonight, with Michel. Without thought for yourself, you are sincerely affected by him."

On the skyline ahead of them a crumbling village marked a small peak in their ascent. She saw the lights of a taverna strung along the roadside.

"Anyway, your response at this moment is irrelevant because Michel finally decides to speak to you," Joseph resumed, with a swift, measuring glance at her. "In a soft and appealing foreign accent, part French, part something else, he addresses you without shyness or inhibition. He is not interested in arguments, he says, you are everything he has ever dreamed of, he wishes to become your lover, preferably tonight, and he calls you Joan although you tell him you are Charlie. If you will go out with him to dinner, and after dinner you still do not want him any more, he will consider taking back the bracelet. No, you say, he must take it back now; you already have a lover, and besides, don't be ridiculous, where is dinner in Nottingham at half past ten on a pouring wet Saturday night?… You would say this? Is it true?"

"It's a dump," she admitted, refusing to look at him.

"And dinner-you would say specifically that dinner is an impossible dream?"

"It's Chinese or fish and chips."

"Nevertheless, you have made a dangerous concession to him."

"How?" she demanded, stung.

"You have made a practical objection. 'We cannot dine together because there is no restaurant.' You might as well say you cannot sleep together because you have no bed. Michel senses this. He brushes your hesitations aside. He knows a place, he has made arrangements. So. We can eat. Why not?"

Swinging off the road, he had brought the car to a halt in the gravel laybye in front of the taverna. Dazed by his wilful leap from past fiction to present time, perversely elated by his harassment of her, and relieved that, after all, Michel had not let her go, Charlie remained in her seat. So did Joseph. She turned to him and her eyes made out, by the coloured fairy lights outside, the direction of his own. He was gazing at her hands, still linked on her lap, the right hand uppermost. His face, as far as she could read it by the fairy lights, was rigid and expressionless. Reaching out, he clasped her right wrist with a swift, surgical confidence and, lifting it, revealed the wrist below, and round it the gold bracelet, twinkling in the dark.

"Well, well, I must congratulate you," he remarked impassively. "You English girls don't waste much time!"

Angrily she snatched back her hand. "What's the matter?" she snapped. "Jealous, are we?"

But she could not hurt him. He had the face that did not mark. Who are you? she wondered hopelessly as she followed him in. Him? Or you? Or nobody?