The Little Drummer Girl

three

Joseph and Charlie were formally introduced to each other on the island of Mykonos, on a beach with two tavernas, at a late luncheon in the second half of August, just around the time when the Greek sun hits its fiercest heat. Or, in terms of the larger history, four weeks after Israeli jets bombed the crowded Palestinian quarter of Beirut, in what was afterwards declared to be an effort to destroy the leadership, though there were no leaders among the several hundred dead-unless of course they were the leaders of tomorrow, for many were children.

"Charlie, say hullo to Joseph," said somebody excitedly, and it was done.

Yet both behaved as if the meeting had scarcely taken place: she by pulling her revolutionist's frown and holding out her hand for an English schoolgirl's handshake of quite vicious respectability; and he by casting her a glance of calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition.

"Well, Charlie, yes, hullo," he agreed, and smiled no more than was necessary to be polite. So it was actually he, not Charlie, who said hullo.

She noticed that he had the military mannerism of pursing his lips just before he spoke. His voice, which was foreign and held under close arrest, had a daunting mildness-she was more aware of what was held back than what was given. His behaviour towards her was thus the obverse of aggression.

Her name was actually Charmian but she was known to everyone as "Charlie," and often as "Charlie the Red" in deference to the colour of her hair and to her somewhat crazy radical stances, which were her way of caring for the world and coming to grips with its injustices. She was the outsider of a rackety troupe of young British acting people who slept in a tumbledown farmhouse half a mile inland and descended to the shore in a shaggy, close-knit family that never broke up. How they had come by the farmhouse in the first place-how they had come to be on the island at all-was a miracle to all of them, though as actors they derived no surprise from miracles. Their benefactor was a wealthy City company that had recently taken to playing angel to the itinerant stage. Their tour of the provinces over, the troupe's half-dozen cadre members were astonished to find themselves treated to rest and recreation at the company's expense. A charter whisked them there, the farmhouse stood welcoming, and spending-money was assured by a modest extension of their terms of salary. It was too kind, too generous, too sudden, too long ago. Only a bunch of Fascist swine, they had joyously agreed when they received their invitations, could have behaved with such disarming philanthropy. After which they had forgotten how they came to be there, until one or another would sleepily raise his glass and mutter the company's name in a querulous, half-hearted toast.

Charlie was not the prettiest of the girls, by any means, though her sexuality shone through, as did her incurable goodwill, which was never quite concealed by her posturing. Lucy, though stupid, was gorgeous, whereas by accepted standards Charlie was rather plain: moche, with a long strong nose and prematurely shadowed face that was one minute childish and the next so old and mournful you feared for her experience of life this far, and wondered what more was to become of her. Sometimes she was their foundling, sometimes their mother, the one who counted the money and knew where the anti-sting was, and the sticking-plaster for cut feet. In that role, as in all her others, she was their largest-hearted and their most capable. And now and then she was their conscience, bawling them out for some real or imagined crime of chauvinism, sexism, or Western apathy. Her right to do this was vested in her by her class, for Charlie was their bit of quality, as they liked to say: privately educated and the daughter of a stockbroker, even if-as she never tired of telling them-the poor man had ended his days behind bars for defrauding clients. But class will out, whatever.

And finally, she was their undisputed leading lady. When evening came, and the family took to acting little dramas to each other in their straw hats and flowing beach gowns, it was Charlie, when she cared to take part, who was the best at it. If they decided to sing to each other, it was Charlie who played her guitar a little too well for their voices; Charlie who knew the protest folk songs, and sang them in an angry, mannish style. At other times they would lounge together in sullen council, smoking marihuana and drinking retsina at thirty drachmas a half-litre. All but Charlie, who would lie apart from them like someone who had smoked and drunk all she needed long ago. "You wait till my revolution dawns," she'd warn them, in a drowsy voice. "I'll have the whole bunch of you babies out there tilling turnips before breakfast." At this, they would pretend to take fright: where will it start, Chas? Where will the first head roll? "In bloody Rickmansworth," she'd reply, harking on her storm-tossed suburban childhood. "We're going to drive all their bloody Jaguars into their bloody swimming pools." And they would let out wails of fear, even though they knew that Charlie herself had a weakness for fast cars.

Meanwhile they loved her. Indisputably. And Charlie, for all that she denied it, loved them in return.

Whereas Joseph, as they called him, was not part of their family at all. Not even, like Charlie, a splinter group of one. He had a self-sufficiency that to weaker souls was a kind of courage by itself. He was friendless but uncomplaining, the stranger who needed nobody, not even them. Just a towel, a book, a water-bottle, and his own small foxhole in the sand. Charlie alone knew he was a ghost.

Her first local sighting of him occurred the morning after her big fight with Alastair, which she lost on a straight knockout. There was a central meekness in Charlie somewhere that seemed to attract her fatally to bullies, and her bully of the day was a six-foot drunken Scot known to the family as "Long Al," who menaced a lot, and quoted inaccurately from the anarchist Bakunin. Like Charlie, he was red-headed and fair-skinned, with hard blue eyes. When they rose shining out of the water together, they were like people of a separate race from anyone else around, and their sultry expressions advised you they knew it. When they set off abruptly for the farmhouse hand in hand, speaking to no one, you felt the urgency of their desire like a pain you had endured but seldom shared. But when they fought-which had happened that previous evening-their rancour cast such a blight over tender souls like Willy and Pauly that they slipped away until the storm was over. And on this occasion so had Charlie: she had crept off to a corner of the loft to nurse her wounds. Waking sharply at six, however, she decided to take herself for a solitary bathe, then walk into town and treat herself to an English language newspaper and breakfast. It was while she was buying her Herald Tribune that the apparition occurred: a clear case of psychic phenomenon.

He was the man in the red blazer. He was standing right behind her at that moment, choosing himself a paperback, ignoring her. No red blazer this time, but a tee-shirt, shorts and sandals. Yet the same man without a doubt. The same cropped black hair frosted at the tips and running to a devil's point at the centre of the forehead; the same brown and courteous stare, respectful of other people's passions, that had fixed on her like a dark lantern from the front row of the stalls of the Barrie Theatre in Nottingham for half a day: first the matinee, then the evening performance, eyes only for Charlie as they followed every gesture she made. A face that was neither softened nor hardened by time, but was finite as a print. A face that to Charlie's eye spelt one strong and constant reality, in contrast to an actor's many masks.

She had been playing Saint Joan, and going nearly mad about the Dauphin, who was miles over the top and upstaging every speech she made. So it was not till the final tableau that she first became aware of him sitting among the schoolchildren at the front of the half-empty auditorium. If the lighting hadn't been so dim, she probably wouldn't have spotted him even then, but their lighting rig was stuck in Derby waiting to be sent on, so there was none of the usual glare to swamp her vision. She had taken him at first for a schoolteacher, but when the kids left, he stayed in his seat reading what she took to be the text of the play, or perhaps the Introduction. And when the curtain rose again for the evening show, there he was still, in that same central spot, his placid unresponsive gaze locked on her exactly as before; and when the final curtain fell, she resented it for taking him away from her.

A few days later, in York, when she had forgotten him, she could have sworn she saw him again, but she wasn't sure; the stage lighting was too good, she couldn't penetrate the haze. Nor did the stranger stay in his place between shows. All the same, she could have sworn it was the same face, front row centre, raptly upturned to her, and the same red blazer too. Was he a critic? A producer? An agent? A film director? Was he from the City company, perhaps, that had taken over the sponsorship of their troupe from the Arts Council? He was too lean, too watchful in his immobility, for a mere professional money-man who was checking out his firm's investment. As to critics, agents, and the rest, it was a miracle if they stayed for one act, let alone two consecutive performances. And when she saw him on a third occasion-or thought she did-just before leaving for her holiday, on the very last night of their tour, in fact, posted at the stage door of the little East End theatre, she had half a mind to bowl straight up to him and ask him outright what his business was-whether he was an embryonic Ripper, an autograph hunter, or just a normal sex maniac like the rest of us. But his air of studious righteousness had held her back.

The sight of him now, therefore-standing not a yard from her, seemingly unaware of her presence, contemplating the display of books with the same solemn interest that he had only days before been lavishing upon herself-threw her into an extraordinary state of flurry. She turned to him, she caught his unflustered glance, and for a second she stared at him a lot more fiercely than he had ever stared at her. And she had the advantage of dark glasses, which she had put on to hide her bruise. Seen so close, he struck her as older than she had imagined, leaner and more marked. She thought he could do with a good sleep and wondered whether he had jet-lag, for there was a downward settlement to the edges of his eyes. Yet he offered not a flicker of recognition or excitement in return. Thrusting the Herald Tribune back into its rest, Charlie beat a swift retreat to the safety of a waterfront taverna.

I'm mad, she thought, as she lifted her trembling coffee cup to her mouth. I'm making it all up. It's his double. I shouldn't have swallowed that bloody happy-pill Lucy gave me to cheer me up after Long Al belted me. She had read somewhere that the sense of deja vu was the consequence of a lapse in communication between brain and eye. But when she glanced down the road in the direction she had come from, there he sat, perceptible to sight and intellect alike, at the next taverna along, wearing a peaked white golfing cap tipped steeply downward to shade his eyes, while he read his English paperback: Conversations with Allende, by Debray. She'd thought only yesterday of buying it herself.

He's come to collect my soul, she thought as she swung jauntily past him in order to demonstrate her immunity. Yet when did I ever promise him he could have it?

The same afternoon, sure enough, he took up his post on the beach, not sixty feet from the family encampment. Wearing a pair of prim monk's bathing trunks, black, and carrying a tin water-bottle from which he occasionally took frugal sips, as if the next oasis were a day's march off. Never watching, never paying the slightest heed, reading his Debray from under the shade of his baggy white golf hat. Yet following every move she made-she knew it, if only by the pitch and stillness of his handsome head. Of all the beaches on Mykonos, he had chosen theirs. Of all the places on their beach, he had lighted on the one high point among the dunes that commanded every approach, whether she was taking a swim or fetching Al another bottle of retsina from the taverna. From his raised foxhole he could pick her off at leisure, and there was not a damned thing she could do in return to dislodge him. To tell Long Al was to expose herself to ridicule and worse; she had no intention of giving him such a golden chance to pour scorn on yet another of her fantasies. To tell anyone else was no different from telling Al: he would hear of it within the day. She had no solution but to hug her secret to herself, which was what she wanted.

Therefore she did nothing, and so did he, but she knew that he was waiting, all the same; she could feel the patient discipline with which he counted off the hours. Even when he lay as dead, a mysterious alertness seemed to wink from his lithe brown body, carried to her by the sun. Sometimes the tension seemed to snap in him, and he would leap suddenly to his feet, remove his hat, stroll gravely down his dune to the water like a tribesman without his spear, and dive in soundlessly, hardly troubling the water's skin. She would wait; then still wait. He had drowned, without a doubt. Till at last, when she had given him up for good, he would surface far across the bay, swimming in a leisurely overarm freestyle as if he had miles to go, his cropped black head glistening like a seal's. There were motorboats careering about, but he ignored them. There were girls, but his head never turned for them-she watched to see. And after his swim again, the slow, methodical succession of physical exercises, before he replaced his tilted golf hat and settled once more to Allende and Debray.

Who owns him? she wondered helplessly. Who writes his lines and gives him his directions? He was on stage for her, just as she had been for him in England. He was a trouper like herself. With that scorching sun trembling between sky and sand, she could watch his honed, mature body for minutes on end, using it as the target for her excited speculations. You to me, she thought; me to you; these children do not understand. But when lunchtime came and they all trailed past his castle to the taverna, Charlie was enraged to see Lucy detach her arm from Robert's and give a tart's wave at him, sticking out her hip.

"Isn't he fabulous?" said Lucy loudly. "I'd have him with my salad any day."

"Me too," said Willy, louder still. "Wouldn't I, Pauly?"

But he ignored them. In the afternoon, Al led her up to the farmhouse where they made fierce, unaffectionate love. When they returned to the beach in the early evening and he was gone, she was unhappy because she had been unfaithful to her secret man. She wondered whether she should comb the night-spots for him. Failing to communicate with him by day, she decided he was nocturnal in his habits.

Next morning she would not go down to the beach. In the night, the strength of her fixation had first amused, then scared her, and she woke determined to break it. Lying beside Al's sleeping hulk, she had imagined herself wildly in love with someone she had not spoken to, taking him in all kinds of inventive ways, dumping Al and running away with him for ever. At sixteen, such daftness was permissible; at twenty-six indecent. To dump Al was one thing, and it must happen sooner rather than later. To be chasing a dream in a white golf hat was another, even on holiday in Mykonos. So she repeated her routine of yesterday, but this time-to her disappointment-he did not pop up behind her at the bookshop, nor did he drink coffee at the taverna next door to hers; nor, when she went window-shopping in the boutiques along the waterfront, did his reflection appear beside her own as she kept hoping it would. Joining the family for lunch at the taverna, she learned that in her absence they had christened him Joseph.

There was nothing exceptional to this; the family awarded names to everyone who caught their eye, usually from plays or films, and the ethic required that, once approved, they be generally adopted. Their Bosola from The Duchess of Malfi, for instance, was a restive Swedish shipping magnate with a sliding eye for flesh, their Ophelia a mountainous Frankfurt housewife who sported a pink-flowered bathing cap and little else. But Joseph, they now declared, was to be so named for his Semitic looks and for the striped coat of many colours that he wore over his black trunks when he strode to their beach, or left it. Joseph also for his standoffish attitude to fellow mortals and his look of being the chosen one to the detriment of others not so favoured. Joseph the despised of his brethren, aloof with his water-bottle and his book.

From her place at the table, Charlie looked on grimly as their crude annexation of her secret property gathered way. Alastair, who felt threatened as soon as anyone was praised without his blessing, was in the act of filling his glass from Robert's tankard.

"Joseph my arse," he announced boldly. "He's a stinking poof like Willy and Pauly here. He's cruising, that's what he's doing. Him and his bedroom eyes, I'd like to bash his face in. I will too."

But Charlie was already heartily sick of Alastair that day, sick of being his Fascist body-slave and his earth-mother both at once. She was not normally as abrasive as this, but her growing distaste for Alastair was warring with her feelings of guilt about Joseph.

"If he's a poof, why should he cruise, you pinhead?" she demanded savagely, swinging round on him to twist her mouth in ugly anger. "Two bloody beaches up, he can take his pick of half the queens in Greece. So can you."

Acknowledging this incautious advice, Alastair dealt her a heavy slap on the side of her face, making it go first white, then scarlet.

Their speculations continued into the afternoon. Joseph was a voyeur; he was a prowler, a flasher, a murderer, a breather, a drag artist, a Tory. But it was left to Alastair, as usual, to provide the definitive accolade: "He's a bloody jerker!" he bellowed with a sneer out of the corner of his mouth, and gave a suck to his front teeth to underline his shrewdness of perception.

But Joseph himself acted as oblivious to these insults as even Charlie could have wished, so much so that by mid-afternoon, when the sun and the pot had lulled them into near stupidity-all but Charlie, once again-they decided he was cool, which was their ultimate compliment. And for this dramatic change, it was Alastair, once more, who led the pack. Joseph would not be shaken off by them and he could not be pulled-not by Lucy, not by the lover-boys either. Ergo cool, like Alastair himself. He had his territory and his whole presence said so: nobody drives me, this is where I have pitched camp. Cool again. Bakunin would have given him high marks.

"He's cool and I love him," Alastair concluded as he thoughtfully stroked Lucy's silky back, all the way down to the hipband of her bikini, then on again. "If he was a woman, I'd know exactly what to do with him. Would I not, Luce?"

The next minute, Lucy was standing up, in that heat the only upright person on the shimmering beach. "Who says I can't pull him?" she said, climbing out of her bathing dress.

Now Lucy was blonde and broad-hipped and as tempting as an apple. She played barmaids, tarts, and principal boys, but her speciality was teenage nymphomaniacs, and she could pull any fellow just by giving him the eyelash. Knotting a white bathrobe loosely under her breasts, she picked up a wine jug and a plastic beaker and strode across to the foot of the dune, the jug on her head, hips rolling, and thighs peeking, giving her own satirical rendering of a Hollywood Greek goddess. Having scaled the little slope, she knelt beside him on one knee and poured the wine from high up, letting the robe fall open as she did so. Handing him the beaker, she decided to address him in French, or as much of that language as she knew.

"Aimez-vous?' asked Lucy.

Joseph showed no awareness of her presence. He turned a page; then he observed her shadow, and only then did he roll onto his side and, after considering her critically with his dark eyes from the shadow of his golf cap, accept the beaker and gravely drink a toast, while from twenty yards away her supporters' club clapped or made House of Commons growls of fatuous approval.

"You must be Hera," Joseph remarked to Lucy with about as much feeling as if he were reading a map. And it was then that the dramatic discovery was made: he had these scars!

Lucy could scarcely contain herself. The most appealing of them was a neat drill-hole the size of a five-pence piece, like one of those bullet-hole stickers Pauly and Willy had on their Mini, only this one was on the left side of the stomach! You couldn't see it from a distance, yet when she touched it, it felt all smooth and hard.

"And you're Joseph," Lucy replied mistily, not knowing who Hera was.

Renewed applause drifted across the sand as Alastair held up his glass and shouted a toast: "Joseph! Mr. Joseph, sir! Power to your elbow! Sod your envious brothers!"

"Come and join us, Mr. Joseph!" Robert cried, to be followed by Charlie's furious order telling him to shut up.

But Joseph didn't join them. He raised his beaker and it seemed to Charlie's raging imagination that he raised it to herself particularly, but how could she have registered such a distinction at twenty yards, one man toasting a group? Then he returned to his reading. He didn't snub them; he didn't do anything plus or minus, as Lucy put it. He just rolled back onto his tummy and got on with his book, and goodness it really was a bullet-hole, the exit scar was on his back, big as a splat gun! As Lucy went on staring, she realised she was observing not just one wound but a range of them: his arms, scarred along the under-parts of the elbow; the islands of hairless and unnatural skin over the backs of the biceps; the vertebrae scoured, she said-"like somebody had taken a red-hot piece of wire wool to him"-maybe somebody had keel-hauled him even? Lucy stayed with him for a bit, pretending to read his book over his shoulder while he turned the pages, but in reality wanting to stroke his spine because his spine, apart from being scarred, was hairy and recessed in a cleft of muscle, her favourite kind of spine. But she didn't, because, as she explained to Charlie later, having touched him once, she wasn't sure that he was touchable again. She wondered-said Lucy, with a rare spurt of modesty-whether she ought at least to knock first. It was a phrase that afterwards lodged in Charlie's mind. Lucy had thought of emptying his water-bottle and filling it with wine, but then he hadn't really drunk the wine anyway so maybe he liked water better? Eventually she set the jug back on her head and pirouetted languidly home to the family, where she made her breathless report before falling asleep on somebody's lap. Joseph was deemed cooler than ever.

The incident that brought the two of them into formal touch occurred next afternoon, and Alastair was the occasion of it. Long Al was leaving. His agent had sent a cable, which was a miracle in itself. Until then it had been generally assumed with some justice that his agent was unaware of this costly form of communication. It had come up to the farmhouse on a Lambretta at ten that morning; it had been brought down to the beach by Willy and Pauly, who had been having a late lie-in. It offered what it styled "possibility major film part," and this was a great thing within the family, because Alastair had one ambition only, which was to star in large, expensive films or, as they called it, crack a movie. "I'm too strong for them," he'd explain each time the industry rejected him. "You've got to cast up to me; that's the trouble and the swine know it." So when the cable came, they were all happy for Alastair, but secretly a great deal happier for themselves, because his violence had begun to sicken them. It sickened them for Charlie, who was becoming black and blue from his assaults, and it made them frightened for their own presence on the island. Charlie alone was upset at the prospect of his going, though her grief was directed principally at herself. For days, like them, she had wanted Alastair out of her life for ever. But now that her prayers were answered by the cable, she felt sick with guilt and fear at the sight of another of her lives ending.

The family led Long Al down to the Olympic Airways office in the town as soon as it opened after siesta, in order to get him safely on the next morning's flight to Athens. Charlie went too, but she was white and giddy and kept her arms folded tightly round her chest as if she were freezing.

"Bloody flight will be booked solid," she warned them. "We'll be stuck with the bastard for weeks."

But she was wrong. There was not only a seat available for Long Al, but a reserved seat in his full name, booked by telex from London three days ago and reconfirmed yesterday. This discovery took away their last remaining doubts. Long Al was headed for the Big Time. No such thing had happened to any of them, ever. Even the philanthropy of their sponsors paled beside it. An agent-Al's agent of all people, by common consensus the biggest slob in the entire cattle market-booking actual bloody air tickets for him by telex!

"I'll cut him on his commission, mind," Alastair told them over several ouzos while they waited for the bus back to the beach. "I'm not having any bloody parasite taking ten per cent of me for the rest of my life, I'll tell you that for free!"

A flaxen-haired hippy boy, a weirdo who sometimes tagged on to them, reminded him that all property was theft.

Utterly apart from Alastair, aching for him, Charlie scowled and drank nothing. "Al," she whispered once, and reached for his hand. But Long Al was no more gentle in success than he was in failure or love, and Charlie that morning had a split lip to prove it, which she kept wistfully exploring with her fingertips. On the beach, his monologue continued as relentless as the sun. He'd need to approve the director before he signed, he announced.

"No south-of-the-border English faggots for me, thank you, girl. And as for the script, I mean I'm not your type of docile ham actor who just sits on his rectum having lines thrown at him to mouth like a parrot. You know me, Charlie. And if they want to know me, the real me, they'd better get used to that idea right now, Charlie girl, because otherwise them and me, we're going to have a grade-one battle royal with no prisoners taken, oh but we are!"

At the taverna, to command their attention, Long Al took the head of the table, and that was the moment when they realised he had lost his passport and his wallet, and his Barclay-card, and his air ticket, and almost everything else that a good anarchist might reasonably regard as the disposable trash of the enslaved society.

The rest of the family missed the point to begin with, as the rest of the family very often did. They thought it was just another black argument brewing up between Alastair and Charlie. Alastair had grabbed her wrist and was forcing it against her shoulder and Charlie was grimacing while he muttered insults close into her face. She gave a smothered cry of pain and immediately afterwards, in the silence, they finally heard what he had been saying to her in one way or another for some time.

"I told you to put them in the bloody bag, didn't I, you stupid little cow. They were lying there, on the counter at the ticket office, and I told you, I said to you, I told you: 'Pick them up and put them in your shoulder bag, Charlie.' Because the boys, unless they are dirty-minded little south-of-the-border faggots like Willy and Pauly here, the boys do not carry handbags, darling, do they, darling? So where have you gone and put them, girl, where? That's no bloody way to stop a man from going to his destiny, believe you me! That's no way to put the brakes on male chauvinism, however jealous we may be of our bloke's success. I've got work to do back there, girl, and bloody castles to capture, and all!"

It was about there, at the height of the combat, that Joseph made his entry. Quite from where, nobody seemed to know-as Pauly put it, somebody just rubbed the lamp. So far as could afterwards be established, he entered left-or, in other words, from the direction of the beach. Anyway there suddenly he stood, in his coat of many colours and his golf hat tipped forward, bearing in his hand Alastair's passport and Alastair's wallet and Alastair's brand-new air ticket, all of which he had apparently picked from the sand at the foot of the taverna steps. Expressionless, at the most a trifle puzzled, he surveyed the scene between the warring lovers, waiting like a distinguished messenger till he had their attention. Then he laid out his finds on the table. One by one. Not a sound anywhere in the taverna suddenly, except the little pat as each in its turn hit the table. Finally he spoke.

"Excuse me, I have an idea somebody is going to be missing these quite soon. One ought to be able to do without them in life, I suppose, but I fear it would be actually rather difficult."

Nobody but Lucy till then had heard his voice, and Lucy had been too stoned to notice its inflexions or anything else about it. So they hadn't known about his flat, ordered English with every foreign wrinkle ironed out of it. If they had known, they would all have been imitating it. There was amazement, then laughter, then gratitude. They begged him to sit with them. Joseph protested and they grew strident. He was Mark Antony before the clamorous crowd: they made him do it. He studied them; his eyes took in Charlie, moved on, then returned to Charlie again. Finally, with an accepting smile, he capitulated. "Well, if you insist," he said; and they did. Lucy, as an old friend, embraced him. Pauly and Willy between them did the honours. Each member of the family in turn faced his straight glance, until suddenly it was Charlie's harsh blue eyes versus Joseph's brown, Charlie's furious confusion versus Joseph's perfect composure from which all triumph was so carefully extinguished-yet which she alone knew to be a mask fixed upon quite other thoughts and motives.

"Well, Charlie, yes, hullo, how do you do?" he said calmly, and they shook hands.

A stage hiatus, then-as though it had at last been let loose from its captivity and was flying free for the first time-a full-scale smile, young as a schoolboy's and twice as infectious. "But I thought Charlie was a boy's name?" he objected.

"Well, I'm a girl," said Charlie, and everybody laughed, Charlie included, before his luminous smile withdrew just as suddenly to the strict lines of its confinement.

For the few days that were left to the family, Joseph now became their mascot. In the relief of Alastair's departure, they adopted him wholeheartedly. Lucy propositioned him; he declined, courteously, even regretfully. She passed the sad news to Pauly, who met with a somewhat firmer rejection: further impressive proof that he was sworn to chastity. Until Alastair's departure, the family had been contemplating a slackening of their lives together. Their little marriages were breaking up, fresh combinations were not saving them; Lucy thought she might be pregnant, but then Lucy often did, and with reason. The great political debates had died for want of impulse, since the most they really knew was that the System was against them, and that they were against the System; but in Mykonos the System is a little hard to find, particularly when it has flown you there at its own expense. At night in the farmhouse, over bread and tomatoes and olive oil and retsina, they had begun to talk nostalgically of rain and cold days in London, and streets where you could smell the breakfast bacon cooking on Sunday mornings. Now suddenly exit Alastair and enter Joseph to shake up the pieces and give a new perspective. They embraced him avidly. Not content with commandeering his company on the beach and in the taverna, they made an evening for him at home, a Josephabend, as they called it, and Lucy, in her role of mother-to-be, produced paper plates, taramasalata, cheese, and fruit. Feeling herself exposed to him by Alastair's departure and frightened by her own disordered feelings, Charlie alone held back.

"He's a forty-year-old fraud, you idiots. Can't you see! You can't, can you? You're such a pack of freaked-out frauds yourselves, you literally can't see!"

They were puzzled by her. What had become of her old generosity of spirit? How could he be a fraud, they argued, when he wasn't claiming to be anything in the first place? Come on, Chas, give him a break! But she wouldn't. In the taverna, a natural sitting order developed at the long table, where Joseph by popular will quietly presided at the centre, empathising, listening with his eyes, yet saying remarkably little. But Charlie, if she came at all, sat fretting or fooling as far from him as possible, despising him for his accessibility. Joseph reminded her of her father, she told Pauly, in what was supposed to be a dramatic insight. He had the same creepy charm exactly: but bent, Pauly, just completely bent all through; she'd seen it at a glance, but don't say anything.

Pauly swore he would not.

Charlie's just having one of her things about men, Pauly explained to Joseph that evening; it wasn't personal with Charlie, it was political-her bloody mother was a sort of witless conformist, and her father was this incredible crook, he said.

"A crooked father?" said Joseph, with a smile that suggested he knew the genus well. "How glamorous. Tell me about him, I insist."

So Pauly did, and drew pleasure from entrusting Joseph with a confidence. And in this he was not alone, for when lunch was over, or dinner, there would always be two or three who lingered to discuss their theatrical talents with their new friend, or their love-affairs, or the great agony of their artistic condition. If their confessions threatened to lack spice, they added some from their imaginations in order not to be dull for him. Joseph gravely heard them out, gravely nodded, gravely laughed a little; but he never offered advice, nor, as they soon discovered to their great astonishment and admiration, did he traffic information: what went in, stayed. Better still, he never matched their monologues with his own, preferring to lead from behind with tactful questions about themselves, or-since she was so often in their thoughts-about Charlie.

Even his nationality was a riddle. Robert for some reason pronounced him Portuguese. Someone else insisted he was Armenian, a survivor from the Turkish genocide-he had seen a documentary about it. Pauly, who was Jewish, said he was One of Us, but Pauly said everyone was, so for a while they ruled him Arab just to annoy Pauly.

But they didn't ask Joseph what he was, and when they tried to corner him about his work, he replied only that he used to travel a lot but had recently settled down. He almost made it sound as if he had retired.

"What's your firm then, Jose?" asked Pauly, braver than the others. "You know-who do you work for, like?"

Well, he did not think he really had a firm, he replied carefully, with a thoughtful tip to the brim of his white cap. Not any longer. He was doing a little reading, a little trading, he had recently inherited a little money, so he supposed he was, technically speaking, self-employed. Yes, self-employed was the expression. Call him self-employed.

Only Charlie was dissatisfied: "We're a parasite, are we then, Jose?" she demanded, colouring. "We read, we trade, we spend our money, and periodically we hoof it to a sexy Greek island-for our pleasure? Right?"

With an unruffled smile, Joseph consented to this description. But Charlie did not. Charlie lost her composure and rode out ahead of herself.

. "So what do we read, for Christ's sake? That's all I'm asking. What do we trade in? I can ask, can't I?" His agreeable silence only provoked her further. He was simply too senior for her gibes. "Are you a bookseller? What's your bag?"

He took his time. He could do that. His periods of prolonged consideration were already known in the family as Joseph's Three Minute Warnings.

"Bag?" he repeated with puzzled emphasis. "Bag? Charlie, I am most things, perhaps, but I am not a burglar!"

Shouting down their laughter, Charlie appealed desperately to the others: "He can't just sit there in a vacuum and trade, you pinheads. What does he do? What's his racket?" She flopped back in her chair. "Christ," she said. "Morons." And gave up, looking spent and fifty, which she could achieve at the drop of a hat.

"Don't you really think it's all too boring to discuss, actually?" Joseph asked, perfectly pleasantly, when still no one came to her aid. "I would say money and work are the two things one comes to Mykonos to escape, actually, wouldn't you, Charlie?"

"Actually, I'd say it was like talking to a bloody Cheshire cat," Charlie retorted rudely.

Suddenly something came apart in her completely. She stood up, uttered a hissed exclamation, and, mustering the extra force required to drive away uncertainty, smashed her fist onto the table. It was the same table they had been sitting at when Joseph miraculously produced Al's passport. The plastic cloth slipped and an empty bottle of lemonade, their wasp-trap, flew straight into Pauly's lap. She began with a stream of obscenities, which embarrassed them because in Joseph's company they tended to drop the language; she accused him of being some kind of closet weirdo, draping himself around the beach and playing power games with chicks half his age. She wanted to say gumshoeing round Nottingham and York and London as well, but time had made her doubt her ground, and she was terrified of their ridicule, so she held it back. How much he understood of that first salvo they were not sure. Her voice was choked and furious and she was using her down-market accent. If they saw anything at all going on in Joseph's face, it was only a studious examination of Charlie.

"So what is it you want to know exactly, Charlie?" he enquired after his usual thoughtful pause.

"You've got a name for a start, haven't you?"

"You gave me one, Joseph."

"What's your real name?"

A dismayed silence had settled over the entire restaurant, and even those who loved Charlie absolutely, such as Willy and Pauly, felt their loyalty towards her strained.

"Richthoven," he replied finally, as if selecting from a considerable choice. "Like the flyer but with a 'v.' Richthoven," he repeated roundly, as if warming to the notion. "Does that make me a different person suddenly? If I'm the kind of wicked fellow you think I am, why should you believe me anyway?"

"What Richthoven? What's your Christian name?"

Another pause before he made up his mind.

"Peter. But I prefer Joseph. Where do I live? Vienna. But I travel. You want my address? I give it to you. Unfortunately you will not find me in the phone book."

"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 inconsequence. She and Long Al had been to Delos 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."

Richthoven Enterprises, she read, Export, followed by a post office box number in Vienna.

Passing a kiosk, feeling wonderfully, dangerously alive, she bought her bloody mother a crochet-work tablecloth and for her poisonous nephew Kevin a tasseled Greek cap. When she had done that, she chose a dozen postcards most of which she addressed to old Ned Quilley, her useless agent back in London, with facetious messages intended to embarrass him in front of the prim ladies who comprised his office staff. "Ned, Ned," she wrote on one, "keep all your parts for me." And on another, "Ned, Ned, can a fallen woman sink?" But on yet another of them she chose to write soberly, telling him of the mainland. "It's time our Chas topped up her culture levels, Ned," she explained, ignoring Joseph's stricture not to tell too much. About to cross the road and post them. Charlie had a feeling of being observed, but when she swung round, pretending to herself she was going to meet Joseph, all she saw was the flaxen hippy boy again, the one who liked to stalk the family and had presided over Alastair's departure. He was goofing along the pavement behind her with his arms trailing like an ape. Catching sight of her, he slowly raised his right hand in a Christ-like gesture. She waved back to him, laughing. Crazy devil's had a bad trip and can't come down, she thought indulgently as she dropped the cards into the box one by one. Maybe I should do something about him.

The last card of all was to Alastair, full of faked sentiment, but she didn't read it through. Sometimes, particularly in moments of uncertainty or change or when she was about to do a dare, it suited her to believe that her darling, hopeless, bibulous Ned Quilley, aged a hundred and forty next birthday, was the only man she'd ever truly loved.