The Little Drummer Girl

seven

To resume his little chat with Charlie, Kurtz had selected a tone of benevolent finality, as if he wished to check a few last fiddly points before moving to other things.

"Charlie, regarding your parents once more," he was saying.

Litvak had pulled a file from his briefcase, and was holding it out of Charlie's line of sight.

"Regarding them," she said, and reached bravely for a cigarette.

Kurtz took a little break while he studied certain documents that Litvak had slipped into his hand. "Looking at the final phase of your father's life now, his crash, financial disgrace, death, and so forth. Can we just confirm with you the exact sequence of those events? You were at English boarding school. The terrible news came. Take it from there, please."

She didn't quite follow him. "From where?"

"The news comes. Go on from there."

She shrugged. "The school threw me out, I went home, the bailiffs were swarming over the house like rats. We've been there, Mart. What else is there?"

"The headmistress sent for you, you said," Kurtz reminded her after a pause. "Great. So what did she say? Precisely, please?"

" 'Sorry but I've asked Matron to pack your things. Goodbye and good luck.' Far as I remember."

"Oh, you'd remember that" said Kurtz with quiet good humour, leaning across to take another look at Litvak's papers. "No homily from her on the big wicked world out there?" he asked, still reading. " 'Don't give yourself away too easy' type of thing? No? No explanations of why, exactly, you were being asked to leave?"

"The fees hadn't been paid for two terms already-isn't that enough? They're in business, Mart. They've got their bank account to think of. This was a private school, remember?" She made a show of weariness. "Don't you think we'd better call it a day? I can't think why but I seem to be a trifle flaked."

"Oh, I don't think so. You are rested and you have resources. So you went home. By rail?"

"All the way by rail. On my own. With my little suitcase. Homeward bound." She stretched, and smiled around the room, but Joseph's head was turned away from her. He seemed to be listening to other music.

"And you came home to what precisely?"

"To chaos. I told you."

"Just specify the chaos a little, will you?"

"Furniture van in the drive. Men in aprons. Mother weeping. Half my room already emptied."

"Where was Heidi?"

"Not there. Absent. Not counted among those present."

"Nobody sent for her? Your elder sister, the apple of your father's eye? Living ten miles up the road? Safely married? Why didn't Heidi come over and help?"

"Pregnant, I expect," said Charlie carelessly, looking at her hands. "She usually is."

But Kurtz was looking at Charlie, and he took a good long time to say anything at all. "Who did you say was pregnant, please?" he asked, as if he hadn't quite heard.

"Heidi."

"Charlie, Heidi was not pregnant. Heidi's first pregnancy occurred the following year."

"All right, she wasn't pregnant for once."

"So why didn't she come along, lend some family help?"

"Maybe she didn't want to know. She stayed away, that's all I remember. Mart, for Christ's sake, it's ten years ago. I was a kid, a different person."

"It was the disgrace, huh? Heidi couldn't take the disgrace. Of your father's bankruptcy, I mean."

"What other disgrace was there?" she snapped.

Kurtz treated her question rhetorically. He was back at his papers, watching Litvak's long finger point things out to him. "In any case, Heidi stayed away and the entire responsibility of coping with the family crisis fell upon your young shoulders, okay? Charlie, aged a mere sixteen, to the rescue. Her 'crash course in the fragility of the capitalist system,' as you put it so nicely a while back. 'An object lesson you never forgot.' All the toys of consumerism-pretty furniture-pretty dresses-all the attributes of bourgeois respectability-you saw them physically dismantled and removed before your very eyes. You alone. Managing. Disposing. In undisputed mastery over your pathetic bourgeois parents who should have been working class but carelessly were not. Consoling them. Easing them in their disgrace. Almost a kind of absolution you gave them, I guess. Tough," he added sadly. "Very, very tough," and stopped dead, waiting for her to speak.

But she didn't. She stared him out. She had to. His slashed features had undergone a mysterious hardening, particularly around the eyes. But she stared him out all the same; she had a special way of doing it left over from her childhood, of freezing her face into an ice-picture, and thinking other thoughts behind it. And she won, she knew she did, because Kurtz spoke first, which was the proof.

"Charlie, we recognise that this is very painful for you, but we ask you to continue in your own words. We have the van. We see your possessions leaving the house. What else do we see?"

"My pony."

"They took that too?"

"I told you already."

"With the furniture? In the same van?"

"No, a separate one. Don't be bloody silly."

"So there were two vans. Both at the same time? Or one after the other?"

"I don't remember."

"Where was your father physically located all this time? Was he in the study? Looking through the window, say, watching it all go? How does a man like him bear up-in his disgrace?"

"He was in the garden."

"Doing what?"

"Looking at the roses. Staring at them. He kept saying they mustn’t take the roses. Whatever happened. He kept saying it, on and on. 'If they take my roses, I'll kill myself.' '

"And your mother?"

"Mum was in the kitchen. Cooking. It was the only thing she could think of to do."

"Gas or electricity?"

"Electricity."

"But did I mishear you or did you say the company switched the power off?"

"They reconnected it."

"And they didn't take away the cooker?"

"They have to leave it by law. The cooker, a table, a chair for everyone in the house."

"Knives and forks?"

"One set for each person."

"Why didn't they just sequester the house? Throw you all out?"

"It was in Mother's name. She'd insisted on it years before."

"Wise woman. However, it was in your father's. And where, did you say, did the headmistress read about your father's bankruptcy?"

She had almost lost it. For a second, the images inside her head had wavered, but now they hardened again, providing her with the words she needed: her mother, in her mauve headscarf, bowed over the cooker, frantically, making bread-and-butter pudding, a family favourite. Her father, grey-faced and mute in his blue double-breasted blazer, staring at the roses. The headmistress, hands behind her back, warming her tweed rump before the unlit fire in her imposing drawing-room.

"In the London Gazette," she replied stolidly. "Where everybody's bankruptcies are reported."

"The headmistress was a subscriber to this journal?"

"Presumably."

Kurtz gave a long slow nod, then picked up a pencil and wrote the one word presumably on a pad before him, in a way that made it visible to Charlie. "So. And after the bankruptcy came the fraud charges. That right? Want to describe the trial?"

"I told you. Father wouldn't let us be there. At first he was going to defend himself-be a hero. We were to sit in the front seats and cheer him on. When they showed him the evidence, he changed his mind."

"What was the charge?"

"Stealing clients' money."

"How long did he get?"

"Eighteen months, less remission. I told you, Mart, I said it all to you before. What is this?"

"Ever visit him in prison?"

"He wouldn't let us. He didn't want us to see his shame."

"His shame," Kurtz echoed thoughtfully. "His disgrace. The Fall. It really got to you, didn't it?"

"Would you like me better if it hadn't?"

"No, Charlie, I don't suppose I would." He took another small break. "Well, there we are. So you stayed home. Gave up school, forsook the proper instruction of your excellent developing mind, looked after your mother, waited for your father's release. Right?"

"Right."

"Never went near the prison once?"

"Jesus," she muttered hopelessly. "Why do you keep twisting the knife like this?"

"Not even near it?"

"No!"

She was holding back her tears with a courage they must surely admire. How could she take it? they must be wondering-either then or now? Why did he persist in tapping away so remorselessly at her secret scars? The silence was like a pause between screams. The only sound was from Litvak's ballpoint pen as it flew across the pages of his notebook.

"Any of that any use to you, Mike?" Kurtz asked of Litvak, without turning his gaze from her.

"Great," Litvak breathed as his pen continued racing. "It's gritty, it adds up, we can use it. I just wonder whether she might have a catchy anecdote for that prison stuff somewhere. Or maybe when he came out is better-the final months-why not?"

"Charlie?" said Kurtz shortly, passing on Litvak's enquiry.

Charlie made a show of pondering for them till inspiration came to her. "Well, there was the thing about the doors," she said doubtfully.

"Doors?" said Litvak. "What doors?"

"Tell it to us," Kurtz suggested.

A beat while Charlie lifted one hand and delicately pinched the bridge of her nose between her forefinger and thumb, indicating deepest grief and a slight migraine. She had told the story often, but never as well as this. "We weren't expecting him for another month-he didn't phone, how could he? We'd moved house. We were on National Assistance. He just showed up. Looked slimmer, younger. Hair cut. 'Hullo, Chas, I'm out.' Gave me a hug. Wept. Mum was upstairs, too scared to come down to him. He was completely unchanged. Except for the doors. He couldn't open them. He'd go up to them, stop, stand at attention with his feet together and his head down, and wait for the warder to come and unlock them."

"And the warder was her," said Litvak softly from Kurtz's side. "His own daughter. Wow!"

"The first time it happened, I couldn't believe it. I screamed at him. 'Open the bloody door!' His hand literally refused."

Litvak was writing like a man possessed. But Kurtz was less enthusiastic. Kurtz was at the file again, and his expression suggested serious reservations. "Charlie, in this one interview you gave-the Ipswich Gazette, is this?-you tell some story how you and your mother used to climb a hill outside the prison together and wave so as your father could see you from his cell window. Yet, ah, according to what you told us, just now, you never went near that prison once."

Charlie actually managed to laugh-a rich, convincing laugh, even if it was not echoed from the shadows. "Mart, that was an interview I gave," she said, humouring him because he looked so grave.

"So?"

"So in interviews one tends to sauce up one's past to make it interesting."

"You been doing that here at all?"

"Of course not."

"Your agent Quilley recently told someone of our acquaintance that your father died in prison. Not at home at all. More saucing it up?"

"That's Ned talking, not me."

"Quite so. So it is. Agreed."

He closed the file, still unconvinced.

She couldn't help herself. Turning right round in her chair, she addressed Joseph, indirectly begging him to get her off the hook.

"How's it going, Jose-all right?"

"Very effectively, I would say," he replied, and continued as before with his own affairs.

"Better than Saint Joan!"

"But, my dear Charlie, your lines are a lot better than Shaw's!"

He's not congratulating me, he's consoling me, she thought sadly. Yet why was he so harsh to her? So brittle? So abstaining after he had brought her here?

South African Rose had a tray of sandwiches. Rachel was following her with cakes and a thermos of sweet coffee.

"Doesn't anybody sleep around here?" Charlie complained as she helped herself. But her question went unheard. Or, rather, since they had all heard it clearly, unanswered.

The sweet time was over and now it was the long-awaited dangerous time, the middle hour of watchfulness before the dawn, when her head was clearest and her anger sharpest; the time, in other words, to transfer Charlie's politics-which Kurtz had assured her they all deeply respected-from the back burner to a more conspicuous heat. Once again, in Kurtz's hands, everything had its chronology and its arithmetic. Early influences, Charlie. Date, place, and people, Charlie: name us your five guiding principles, your first ten encounters with the militant alternative. But Charlie was in no mood for objectivity any more. Her fit of drowsiness was past, and in place of it a sense of rebellion was beginning to turn restlessly inside her, as the crispness of her voice and her darting, suspicious glances should have told them. She was sick of them. Sick of being helpful in this shotgun alliance, of being led blindfold from room to room without knowing what these trained, manipulating hands were doing on her elbow and what these clever voices were whispering in her ear. The victim in her was spoiling for a fight.

"Charlie, dear, this is strictly but strictly for the record," Kurtz declared. "Once we have it for the record, we shall be able to shed a couple of veils for you," he assured her. But he still insisted on dragging her through a wearying catalogue of demos and sit-ins and marches and squats and Saturday-afternoon revolutions, asking in each case for what he called "the argumentation" behind her action.

"For Christ's sake, stop trying to evaluate us, will you?" she threw back at him. "We're not logical, we're not informed, we're not organised-

"So what are we, dear?" said Kurtz with saintly kindness.

"We're not dear either. We're people] Adult human beings, get it? So stop riding me!"

"Charlie, we are surely not riding you. Nobody here is riding you."

"Oh, screw you all."

She hated herself in this mood. She hated the harshness that came over her when she was cornered. She had a picture of herself beating her puny, girl's fists uselessly against a huge wood door, while her strident voice battled with dangerously unconsidered slogans. At the same time she loved the bright colours that came with anger, the glorious release, the smashed glass.

"Why do you have to believe before you reject?" she demanded, remembering a grand phrase Long Al had fed to her-or was it someone else? "Maybe rejecting is believing. Has that occurred to you? We're fighting a different war, Mart-the real one. It's not power against power, East against West. It's the hungry against the pigs. Slaves against oppressors. You think you're free, don't you? That's because someone else is in chains. You eat, someone starves. You run, someone has to stand still. We have to change that whole thing."

She had believed it once; she really had. Perhaps she still did. She had seen it and had it clear before her in her mind. She had knocked on strangers' doors with it and watched the hostility lift from their faces as she made her pitch. She had felt it and marched for it: for the people's right to free the people's minds, to unclog one another from the engulfing morass of capitalist and racist conditioning, and turn towards each other in unforced companionship. Out there, on a clear day, the vision even now could fill her heart and stir her to feats of courage that, cold, she would have shrunk from. But inside these walls, with all these clever faces, she had no space to spread her wings.

She tried again, more strident: "You know, Mart, one of the differences between being your age and mine is we're actually a bit fussy about who we give up our existence for. We're not keen, for some reason, on laying down our lives for a multinational corporation registered in Liechtenstein and banking in the bloody Dutch Antilles." That bit was Al's for certain. She had even borrowed his sarcastic rasp to wash it down. "We don't think it's a very good idea to have people we've never met or heard of or voted for going round ruining the world for us. We're not in love with dictators, funnily enough, whether they're groups of people or countries or institutions, and we're not in love with the arms race, or chemical warfare, or any part of the whole catastrophe game. We don't think that the Jewish state has to be an imperialist American garrison and we don't think Arabs are either flea-ridden savages or decadent oil-sheiks. So we reject. In favour of not having certain hang-ups-certain prejudices and alignments. So rejection is positive, right? Because not having them is positive, got it?"

"How ruining the world, exactly, Charlie?" Kurtz asked while Litvak patiently jotted.

"Poisoning it. Burning it. Fouling it up with trash and colonialism and the total, calculated mindbending of the workers and"-and the other lines I'll remember in a minute, she thought. "So just don't come asking me for the names and addresses of my five main gurus-right, Mart?-because they're in here"-she thumped her chest-"and don't go sneering at me when I can't recite Che Guevara to you all bloody night; just ask me whether I want the world to survive and my babies to-

"Can you recite Che Guevara?" Kurtz asked, interested.

"Hold it," said Litvak, and lifted one flimsy hand for pause while he wrote furiously with the other. "This is great. Just hold it for one minute, Charlie, will you?"

"Why don't you dash out and buy yourself a bloody tape-recorder?" Charlie snapped. Her cheeks were hot. "Or steal one, since that's what you're into?"

"Because we don't have a week set aside for reading transcripts," Kurtz replied while Litvak continued writing. "The ear selects, you see, dear. Machines don't. Machines are uneconomical. Can you recite Che Guevara, Charlie?" he repeated while they waited.

"No, of course I bloody well can't."

From behind her-it seemed a mile away-Joseph's disembodied voice gently modified her answer.

"But she could if she learnt him. She has excellent recall," he assured them, with a touch of the creator's pride. "She has only to hear something and it belongs to her. She could learn his entire writings in a week, if she put her mind to it."

Why had he spoken? Was he trying to mitigate? Warn? Or impose himself between Charlie and her imminent destruction? But Charlie was in no mood to heed his subtleties, and Kurtz and Litvak were conferring again, this time in Hebrew.

"Do you mind speaking English in front of me, you two?" she demanded.

"In just one moment, dear," said Kurtz pleasantly. And went on talking in Hebrew.

In the same clinical fashion-strictly for the record, Charlie-Kurtz led her painstakingly through the remaining disparate articles of her uncertain faith. Charlie flailed and rallied and flailed again with the growing desperation of the half-taught; Kurtz, seldom criticising, always courteous, glanced at the file, paused for a word with Litvak, or, for his own oblique purposes, jotted himself a note on the pad before him. In her mind, as she floundered fiercely on, she saw herself in one of those improvised happenings at drama school, working her way into a part that increasingly lacked meaning for her as she advanced. She watched her own gestures and they no longer belonged to her words. She was protesting, therefore she was free. She was shouting, therefore she was protesting. She listened to her voice and it belonged to nobody at all. From the pillow-talk of a forgotten lover she snatched a line of Rousseau, from somewhere else a phrase from Marcuse. She saw Kurtz sit back and, lowering his eyes, nod to himself and put down his pencil, so she supposed that she had finished, or he had. She decided that, given the superiority of her audience and the poverty of her lines, she had managed quite decently after all. Kurtz seemed to think so too. She felt better, and a lot safer. Kurtz too, apparently.

"Charlie, I surely congratulate you," he declared. "You have articulated with great honesty and frankness and we thank you."

"Sure do," murmured Litvak the scribe.

"Be my guest," she retorted, feeling ugly and over-heated.

"Mind if I attempt to structure it a little for you?" Kurtz enquired.

"Yes, I do."

"Why's that?" said Kurtz, unsurprised.

"We're an alternative, that's why. We're not a party, we're not organised, we're not a manifesto. And we're not for bloody-well structuring."

She wished she could get out of the bloodies somehow. Or else that her swearing would come more easily to her in their austere company.

Kurtz did his structuring all the same, and made a point of being ponderous while he was about it.

"On the one hand, Charlie, we seem to have what is the basic premise of classic anarchism as preached from the eighteenth century down to the present day."

"Oh balls!"

"Namely, a revulsion against regimentation. Namely, a conviction that government is evil, ergo the nation-state is evil, an awareness that the two together contradict the natural growth and freedom of the individual. You add to this certain modern postures. Such as a revulsion against boredom, against prosperity, against what I believe is known as the air-conditioned misery of Western capitalism. And you remind yourself of the genuine misery of three-quarters of the earth's population. Yes, Charlie? You want to quarrel with that? Or shall we take the 'Oh balls' for granted this time?"

She ignored him, preferring to smirk at her fingernails. For Christ's sake-what did theories matter any more? she wanted to say. The rats have taken over the ship, it's often as simple as that; the rest is narcissistic crap. It must be.

"In today's world," Kurtz continued, unperturbed, "in today's world I would say you have more sound reasons for that view than ever your forebears had, because today the nation-states are more powerful than ever; so are the corporations, so are the opportunities for regimentation."

She realised he was leading her, yet she had no way left to stop him. He was pausing for her comments, but all she could do was turn her face away from him and hide her growing insecurity behind a mask of furious negation.

"You oppose technology gone mad," he continued equably. "Well, Huxley did that for you already. You aim to release human motives that are for once neither competitive nor aggressive. But in order to do this, you have first to remove exploitation. But how?"

Yet again he paused, and his pauses were becoming more threatening to her than his words; they were the pauses between footsteps to the scaffold.

"Stop patronising me, will you, Mart? Just stop!"

"It is on this issue of exploitation, so far as I read you, Charlie," Kurtz continued, with implacable good humour, "that we spill over from anarchism observed, as we might call it, to anarchism practised." He turned to Litvak, playing him off against her. "You had a point here, Mike?"

"I would say exploitation was the crunch issue, Marty," Litvak breathed. "For exploitation read property and you have the whole bit. First the exploiter hits the wage-slave over the head with his superior wealth; then he brainwashes him into believing that the pursuit of property is a valid motive for breaking him at the grindstone. That way he has him hooked twice over."

"Great," said Kurtz comfortably. "The pursuit of property is evil, ergo property itself is evil, ergo those who protect property are evil, ergo-since you avowedly have no patience with the evolutionary democratic process-blow up property and murder the rich. You go along with that, Charlie?"

"Don't be bloody silly! I'm not into that stuff!"

Kurtz seemed disappointed. "You mean you decline to dispossess the robber state, Charlie? What's the matter? Shy, suddenly?" To Litvak again: "Yes, Mike?"

"The state is tyrannous," Litvak put in helpfully. "Charlie's words exactly. She also referred to the violence of the state, the terrorism of the state, the dictatorship of the state-just about everything bad a state can be," Litvak added, in a rather surprised voice.

"That doesn't mean I go round murdering people and robbing bloody banks! Christ! What is this?"

Kurtz was not impressed by her alarm. "Charlie, you have indicated to us that the forces of law-and-order are no more than the satraps of a false authority."

Litvak offered a footnote: "Also that true justice is not available to the masses through the law courts," he reminded Kurtz.

"It isn't! The whole system is crap! It's fixed, it's corrupt, it's paternalistic, it's-

"Then why don't you destroy it?" Kurtz enquired perfectly pleasantly. "Why don't you blow it up and shoot every policeman who tries to stop you, and for that matter every policeman who doesn't? Why don't you blow up colonialists and imperialists wherever you find them? Where's your vaunted integrity suddenly? What's gone wrong?"

"I don't want to blow anything up! I want peace! I want people to be free!" she insisted, scurrying desperately for her one safe tenet.

But Kurtz seemed not to hear her: "You disappoint me, Charlie. All of a sudden you lack consistency. You've made the perceptions. Why don't you go out and do something about them? Why do you appear here one minute as an intellectual who has the eye and brain to see what is not visible to the deluded masses, the next you have not the courage to go out and perform a small service-like theft-like murder-like blowing something up-say, a police station-for the benefit of those whose hearts and minds are enslaved by the capitalist overlords? Come on, Charlie, where's the action? You're the free soul around here. Don't give us the words, give us the deeds."

The infectious jolliness in Kurtz had reached new heights. His eyes were so creased at the corners that they were black curves cut into his battered skin. But Charlie could fight too, and she was talking straight at him, using words the way he did, clubbing him with them, trying to beat a last desperate exit past him to freedom.

"Look, I'm superficial, got it, Mart? I'm unread, illiterate, I can't add or reason or analyse, I went to tenth-rate expensive schools, and I wish to God-more than anything on earth I do-I wish I'd been born in a Midland back-street and my father had worked with his hands instead of ripping off old ladies' life savings! I'm sick of being brainwashed and I'm sick of being told fifteen thousand reasons every day why I shouldn't love my neighbour on equal terms, and I want to go to bloody bed!"

"You telling me you're recanting on your stated position, Charlie?"

"I haven't got a stated position!"

"You haven't."

"No!"

"No stated position, no commitment to activism, except that you are unaligned."

"Yes!"

"Peaceably unaligned," Kurtz added contentedly. "You belong to the extreme centre."

Slowly unbuttoning a pocket of his jacket, he fished in it with his thick fingers, producing, from among a lot of junk, a folded press cutting, quite a long one, which, judging by its exclusive position, differed in some way from those contained in the folder.

"Charlie, you mentioned in passing a while back that you and Al attended a certain residential forum down in Dorset some place," said Kurtz as he laboriously unfolded the cutting. " 'A weekend course in radical thinking' was how you described it, I believe. We didn't enter very deeply into what transpired there; it is my memory that for some reason we kind of glossed over that part of our discussion. Mind if we dig a little deeper?"

Like a man refreshing his memory, Kurtz silently read the press cutting to himself, occasionally shaking his head as if to say "Well, well."

"Seems quite a place," he remarked genially as he read. "Weapon training with dummy guns. The techniques of sabotage-using plasticine instead of the real stuff, naturally. How to live in hiding. Survival. The philosophy of the urban guerrilla. Even how to look after an unwilling guest. I see: 'Restraint of unruly elements in a domestic situation.' I like that. That's a fine euphemism." He glanced over the top of his cutting. "This correct, this report, more or less, or are we dealing with the typical exaggerations of the capitalist Zionist press here?"

She no longer believed in his goodwill, nor did he want her to. Kurtz's one aim now was to alarm her with the extremity of her opinions, and force her into flight from positions she did not realise she had taken. Some interrogations are conducted in order to elicit truth, others to elicit lies. Kurtz wanted lies. His grating voice had therefore discernibly hardened, and the fun was fading quickly from his face.

"Want to give us a more objective picture, Charlie, maybe?" Kurtz enquired.

"It was Al's scene, not mine," she said defiantly, making her first withdrawal.

"But you went together."

"It was a cheap weekend in the country at a time when we were broke. That's all."

"That's all," Kurtz murmured, leaving her with a vast and guilty silence too heavy for her to shift single-handed.

"It wasn't just me and him," she protested. "It was-God-twenty of us. Kids, acting people. Some of them were still at drama school They'd hire a bus, take some hash, play musical beds till morning. What's wrong with that?"

Kurtz had no opinion, just then, of what was wrong with anything.

"They," he said. "What were you doing? Driving the bus?-the great driver we hear you are?"

"I was with Al. I told you. It was his scene, not mine."

She had lost her hold and was falling. She scarcely knew how she had slipped, or who had stamped on her fingers. Perhaps she had just grown tired and let go. Perhaps she had wanted to all along.

"And how often would you say you indulged yourself in this fashion, Charlie? Talking hot air. Smoking hash. Participating in free love innocently while others engaged in terrorist training? You speak as if it was a habitual thing. Correct? Habitual?"

"No, it is not habitual! It's over, and I did not indulge myself!"

"Want to say how frequent?"

"It wasn't frequent either!"

"How often?"

"A couple of times. That's all. Then I got cold feet."

Falling and spinning, and the dark getting darker. The air all round her but not touching her.

Joseph, get me out of this! But Joseph had got her into it. She listened for him, sent messages to him with the back of her head. But she received nothing in return.

Kurtz looked straight at her and she looked straight back.

She'd have looked clean through him if she could, she'd have blinded him with her defiant glower.

"A couple of times," he repeated thoughtfully. "Right, Mike?"

Litvak glanced up from his notes. "A couple," he echoed.

"Want to say why you got cold feet?" Kurtz asked.

Without allowing his gaze to leave her face, he reached for Litvak's folder.

"It was a rough scene," she said, dropping her voice for effect.

"It sounds it," said Kurtz, opening the folder.

"I don't mean politically. I mean the sex. It was more than I wanted to handle. Don't be so obtuse."

Kurtz licked his thumb and turned a page, he licked his thumb and turned another page; he muttered something to Litvak, who breathed a couple of words in return, and they were not in English. He closed the buff folder and slipped it into the briefcase. " 'A couple of times. That's all. Then I got cold feet,' ' he intoned thoughtfully. "Want to revise that statement at all?"

"Why should I?"

" 'A couple of times.' That correct?"

"Why shouldn't it be?"

"A couple is two. Right?"

Above her, the light wavered, or was it her mind? She turned deliberately in her chair. Joseph was bowed over his desk lamp, too busy even to look up. She turned back and found Kurtz still waiting.

"Two or three," she said. "What the hell?"

"Four? Is a couple four as well?"

"Oh, get lost!"

"I guess it's a matter of linguistics. 'I visited my aunt a couple of times last year.' Well, that could be three, couldn't it? Four is possible. Five, I guess, five is around the limit. With five it's 'half a dozen.' " He continued slowly shuffling through his papers. "Want to revise 'couple,' make it 'half a dozen,' Charlie?"

"I said a couple and I mean a couple."

"Two?"

"Yes, two!"

"Two then. 'Yes, I have been to this forum on two occasions only. Others may have engaged in warlike practices but my interests were sexual, recreational, and social. Amen.' Signed Charlie. Want to put a date on the two visits?"

She gave a date last year, soon after she and Al had got together.

"And the other one?"

"I forget. What does it matter?"

"She forgets." His voice had slowed almost to a halt, yet lost none of its power. She had an image of it lumbering towards her like an ungainly animal. "Did the second time come soon after the first time, or was there a gap between the two occasions?"

"I don't know."

"She doesn't know. Your first weekend was an introductory course for novices. Correct?"

"Yes."

"What were you introduced to?"

"I told you-group sex."

"No discussions, no seminars, no instruction?"

"We had discussions, yes."

"On what subjects, please?"

"Basic principles."

"Of what?"

"Of radicalism, what do you think?"

"Remember who addressed you?"

"A spotty lesbian on Women's Lib. A Scotsman on Cuba, someone Al admired."

"And the next occasion-date forgotten, the second and last-who addressed you that time?"

No answer.

"Forgotten that as well?"

"Yes!"

"That's unusual, isn't it? That you remember the first occasion intimately-the sex, the topics of discussion, the tutors. And the second not at all?"

"After staying up all night answering your crazy questions-no, it's not!"

"Where are you going?" Kurtz asked. "You want the bathroom? Rachel, take Charlie to the bathroom. Rose."

She was standing. From the shadows she heard soft feet approaching her.

"I'm leaving. Exercising my options. I want out. Now."

"Your options will be exercised at specific stages, and only when we invite you. If you forget who addressed you at this second seminar you attended, then perhaps you will tell me at least the nature of the course."

She was still standing, and somehow being upright made her smaller. She glanced round and saw Joseph, head in hand, his face turned away from the lamplight. To her frightened eye, he seemed to be suspended in a kind of middle city, between her world and his. But wherever she looked, Kurtz's voice kept filling her head and deafening the people inside it. She put her hands on the table, she leaned forward; she was in a strange church without friends to advise her; not knowing whether to stand or kneel. But Kurtz's voice was everywhere and it wouldn't have mattered whether she had lain on the ground or flown out through the stained-glass window and a hundred miles away, nowhere was safe from its dinning intrusion. She took her hands off the table and put them behind her back, holding them tight because she was losing control of her gestures. Hands matter, hands speak. Hands act. She felt them comfort each other like terrified children. Kurtz was asking her about a resolution.

"Did you not sign it, Charlie?"

"I don't know!"

"But, Charlie, there is always a resolution passed at the termination of a session. There is discussion. There is a resolution. What was the resolution? You trying seriously to tell me you don't know what it was, you don't know whether you signed it even? Might you have refused to sign it?"

"No."

"Charlie, be reasonable. How can a person of your much underrated intelligence forget such a thing as a formal resolution at the end of a three-day seminar? A thing which you draft and redraft-and vote about-and pass and don't pass-sign and don't sign? How do you do that? A resolution, that's a whole laborious series of incidents, for goodness' sake. Why are you so vague suddenly, when you are capable of such fine precision on other matters?"

She didn't care. She cared so damn little she couldn't be bothered to tell him she didn't care. She was tired to death. She wanted to sit again but she was stuck standing. She wanted an interval and a pee and time to fix her make-up, and five years' sleep. Nothing but a leftover sense of theatrical proprieties told her she must stand and see it through.

Below her, Kurtz had dug himself out a fresh piece of paper from the briefcase. Having worried over it, he decided to address himself to Litvak. "She said two occasions, right?"

"Two was maximum," Litvak agreed. "You gave her every chance to raise the bidding but she stuck at two."

"And what do we make it?"

"Five."

"So where does she get two from?"

"She's understating," Litvak explained, contriving to look even more disappointed than his companion. "She's understating by like two hundred per cent."

"Then she's lying," said Kurtz, slow to accept the inference.

"She sure is," said Litvak.

"I didn't lie! I forgot! It was Al! I went for Al's sake, that's all!"

Among the gunmetal pens in the top pocket of his bush jacket, Kurtz kept a khaki handkerchief. Taking it out, he now passed it in an odd dusting motion over his face, ending with his mouth. Then he put it back in his pocket. Then he moved his watch again, from left to right in a private piece of ritual.

"You want to sit down?"

"No."

Her refusal only saddened him. "Charlie, I have ceased to understand you. My confidence in you is ebbing."

"Then it can bloody well ebb! Find someone else to kick around! Why should I play parlour games with a bunch of Israeli thugs? Go and car-bomb some more Arabs. Get out of my hair. I hate you! All of you!"

Saying this, Charlie had a most curious intimation. She decided that they were only half listening to her words, and with the other half of their attention studying her technique. If somebody had called out "Let's take that one again, Charlie, maybe a little slower," she would not have been a bit surprised.

But Kurtz meanwhile had his point to make and nothing on his Jewish God's earth-as she by now well knew-was going to stop him.

"Charlie, I do not understand your evasion," he insisted. His voice was recovering its pace. Its power was undiminished. "I do not understand the discrepancies between the Charlie you are giving and the Charlie we have on record. Your first visit to this revolutionary school took place on July fifteenth last year, a two-day course for novices on the general subject of colonialism and revolution, and yes, you all went by bus, a group of acting people, Alastair included. Your second visit took place a month later, also with Alastair, on which occasion you and your fellow students were addressed by a so-called Bolivian exile who declined to give his name, also by a similarly anonymous gentleman claiming to speak for the provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. You generously signed both of those organisations a personal cheque for five pounds, and we have photocopies of the cheques right here."

"It was for Al! He was broke!"

"The third time you went was a month later, when you took part in a very pathetic discussion on the work of the American thinker Thoreau. The group's verdict on that occasion, to which you subscribed, was that when it came to militancy, Thoreau was an irrelevant idealist with little practical understanding of activism-in short, a bum. You not only supported that verdict but initiated a supplementary resolution calling for greater radicalism on the part of all comrades."

"It was for Al! I wanted them to accept me! I wanted to please Al! I'd forgotten it next day!"

"Come October, you and Alastair were back there, this time for a particularly apposite session on the subject of bourgeois Fascism in Western capitalist societies, at which you played a leading role in group discussions, regaling your comrades with many mythical anecdotes regarding your criminal father, your inane mother, and your repressive upbringing generally."

She had stopped protesting. She had stopped thinking or seeing. She had blurred her gaze and taken a piece of the inside flesh of her mouth between her teeth and she was softly biting it as a punishment. But she couldn't stop listening, because Marty's voice didn't allow that.

"And the very last occasion occurred, as Mike here reminded us, in February this year, when you and Alastair graced a session whose theme you have obstinately dismissed from your memory, except for a moment previously when you lapsed into abuse of the State of Israel. This time the discussion was devoted exclusively to the lamentable expansion of world Zionism and its link with American imperialism. The leading performer was a gentleman purportedly representing the Palestinian revolution, though he declined to say which wing of that great movement he belonged to. He also refused in the most literal sense to reveal himself, since his features were hidden behind a black balaclava helmet, which gave him a becomingly sinister air. Do you still not recall this speaker?" He left her no time to answer. "His theme was his own heroic life as a great warrior and killer of Zionists. The gun is my passport to my homeland,' he declared. 'We are no longer refugees! We are a revolutionary people.' He caused a certain alarm around him and one or two voices, not your own, felt he had gone a little far." He paused, but still she did not speak. He moved his watch closer to him and smiled at her a little wanly. "Why don't you tell us these things, Charlie? Why do you flop from place to place not knowing which lie to tell us next? Did I not assure you that we need your past? That we like it very much?"

Again he waited patiently for her answer, but in vain. "We know your father never went to prison. You never had the bailiffs in, nobody took your pony from you. The poor gentleman suffered a small, incompetent bankruptcy, injuring nobody except a couple of local bank managers. He was discharged with honour, if that is the expression, long before his death; a few friends raised a little money between them, and your mother remained a proud and devoted wife to him. It was never your father's fault that you left school prematurely, it was your own. You had made yourself, let us say, a little too available to several boys in the local town, and word of this had duly gotten back to the school staff. You were accordingly expelled from the school in haste as a corrupting and potentially scandalous element, and returned to your grossly over-indulgent parents, who as usual forgave you for your transgressions, to your great frustration, and did their best to believe everything you told them. Over the years you have spun an ingenious fiction around the incident in order to make it bearable, and you have come to believe in it yourself, though secretly the memory still turns you inside out and drives you in many strange directions." Yet again, he transferred his watch to a safer spot on the table. "We're your friends, Charlie. Do you think we would ever blame you for such a thing? Do you think we do not understand that your politics are the externalisation of a search for dimensions and responses not supplied to you when you most needed them? We're your friends, Charlie. We're not mediocre, bored, apathetic, suburban, conformist. We want to share with you, to make use of you. Why do you sit there deceiving us when all we wish to hear from you, from start to end, is the unadorned objective truth? Why do you hinder your friends, instead of giving us your full-hearted trust?"

Her anger swept over her like a red-hot sea. It lifted her, it cleansed her; she felt it swell and she embraced it like her one true ally. With the calculation of her trade, she let it take command of her entirely, while she herself, that tiny gyroscopic creature deep inside that always managed to stay upright, tiptoed gratefully to the wings to watch. Anger suspended her bewilderment and dulled the pain of her disgrace; anger cleared her mind and made her vision brilliant. Taking a step forward, she lifted her fist to swipe at him, but he was too senior, too daunting, he had been hit too much before. Besides, she had unfinished business just behind her.

True, it was Kurtz who by his deliberate enticement of her had struck the match that kindled her explosion. But it was Joseph's cunning, Joseph's courtship, and Joseph's cryptic silence that had brought about her real humiliation. She swung round, she took two strides to him, waiting for someone to stop her, but someone didn't. She swung her foot up and kicked away the table and watched the desk lamp curve gracefully to God knew where before it reached the limit of its flex and went out with a surprised pop. She drew back her fist, waiting for him to defend himself. He didn't, so she lunged at him where he sat, catching him across the cheekbone with all her strength.

She was screaming all her filthy epithets at him, the ones she used on Long Al and the whole blank, painful nothingness of her tangled, too-small life, but she wished he would put up an arm or hit her back. She hit him a second time with her other hand, wanting to mark and hurt the whole of him. Again she waited for him to defend himself, but his familiar brown eyes continued to watch her as steadily as shore lights in a storm. She hit him again with her half-closed fist and felt her knuckles wrench, but she saw the blood running down his chin. She was screaming "Fascist bastard!" and she went on repeating it, feeling her strength wasting with her breath. She saw Raoul, the flaxen hippy boy, standing in the doorway, and one of the girls-South African Rose-position herself before the French windows and spread her arms in case Charlie made a leap for the verandah, and she wished terribly that she could go mad so that everyone would be sorry for her; she wished she was just a raving lunatic waiting to be let off, not a stupid little fool of a radical actress who made up feeble versions of herself as she went along, who had denied her father and mother and embraced a half-cock faith she hadn't the courage to renounce, and anyway, what was there till now to replace it? She heard Kurtz's voice in English ordering everyone to stay still. She saw Joseph turn away; she saw him draw a handkerchief from his pocket and dab his lip, as indifferent to her as he might have been to a rude child of five. She screamed "Bastard!" at him again, she hit him on the side of the head, a big open-fisted clattering blow that bent her wrist and momentarily numbed her hand, but by now she was exhausted and alone and all she wanted was for Joseph to hit her back.

"Help yourself, Charlie," Kurtz advised quietly, from his chair. "You've read Frantz Fanon. Violence is a cleansing force, remember? It frees us from our inferiority complexes, it makes us fearless and restores our self-respect."

There was only one way out for her, so she took it. Hunching her shoulders, she dropped her face dramatically into her hands and wept inconsolably until, on a nod from Kurtz, Rachel came forward from the window and put her arm round her shoulder, which Charlie resisted and then let be.

"She gets three minutes, not more," Kurtz called as the two of them headed for the doorway. "She does not change her dress or put on some new identity, she comes straight back in here. I want the engine kept running. Charlie, stop where you are a minute. Wait. I said stop."

Charlie stopped, but did not turn round. She stood motionless, acting with her back and wondering wretchedly whether Joseph was doing something about that cut face.

"You did well, Charlie," Kurtz said, without condescension, down the room to her. "Congratulations. You took a dive but you recovered. You lied, you lost your way, but you hung in there and when the line broke you threw a tantrum and blamed your troubles on the whole world. We were proud of you. Next time we'll think you up a better story to tell. Hurry back, okay? Time is very, very short right now."

In the bathroom, Charlie stood with her head against the wall, sobbing, while Rachel ran a basin of water for her and Rose stood outside in case.

"I don't know how you can put up with England for one minute," said Rachel while she set the soap and towel ready. "I had fifteen years of it before we left. I thought I'd die. Do you know Macclesfield? It's death. It is if you're a Jew, anyway. All that class and coldness and hypocrisy. I think it's the unhappiest place on earth, Macclesfield is, for a Jew, I do really. I used to scrub my skin with lemon juice in the bathroom because they told me I was greasy. Don't go near that door without me, will you, love, or I'll have to stop you."

It was dawn and therefore bedtime and she was back with them, where she wanted more than anything to be. They had told her a little, they had brushed across the story as a headlight brushes across a dark doorway, giving a passing glimpse of whatever lies hidden in it. Imagine, they said-and told her of a perfect lover whom she'd never met.

She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her drifting, their straight line. After all her guilt and concealment, their acceptance. After all her words, their action, their abstemiousness, their clear-eyed zeal, their authenticity, their true allegiance, to fill the emptiness that had yawned and screamed inside her like a bored demon ever since she could remember. She was a featherweight, caught in a swirling storm, but suddenly, to her amazed relief, theirs was the commanding wind.

She lay back and let them carry her, assume her, have her. Thank God, she thought: a homeland at last. You will play yourself, but more so, they said-and when had she ever not? Yourself, with all your bluffs called, they said-put it that way. Put it any way you like, she thought.

Yes, I'm listening. Yes, I follow.

They had given Joseph the seat of authority at the centre of the table. Litvak and Kurtz sat still as moons to either side of him. Joseph's face was raw where she had hit him, a chain of small bruises ran along the bone-line of his left cheek. Through the slatted shutters, ladders of early light shone on to the floorboards and across the trestle table. They stopped talking.

"Have I decided yet?" she asked him.

Joseph shook his head. A dark stubble emphasised the hollows of his face. The downlight showed a web of fine lines round his eyes.

"Tell me about the usefulness again," she suggested. • She felt their interest tighten like a cord. Litvak, his white hands folded before him, dead-eyed yet strangely angry in his contemplation of her; Kurtz, ageless and prophetic, his cracked face sprinkled with a silver dust. And round the walls still, the kids, devout and motionless, as if they were queuing for their first communion. '

"They say you will save lives, Charlie," Joseph explained, in a detached tone from which all hint of theatre had been rigorously expunged. Did she hear reluctance in his voice? If so, it only emphasised the gravity of his words. "That you will give mothers back their children and help to bring peace to peaceful people. They say that innocent men and women will live. Because of you."

"What do you say?"

His answer sounded deliberately dull. "Why else would I be here? For one of us, we would call the work a sacrifice, an atonement for life. For you-well, maybe it's not so different after all."

"Where will you be?"

"We shall stay as close to you as we can."

"I said you. You singular. Joseph."

"I shall be close, naturally. That will be my job."

And only my job, he was saying; not even Charlie could have mistaken the message.

"Joseph will be right with you all along the line, Charlie," Kurtz put in softly. "Joseph is a fine, fine professional. Joseph, tell her about the time factor, please."

"We have very little," Joseph said. "Every hour counts."

Kurtz was still smiling, seeming to wait for him to go on. But Joseph had finished.

She had said yes. She must have done. Or yes to the next phase at least, because she felt a slight movement of relief around her, and then, to her disappointment, nothing more. In her hyperbolic state of mind she had imagined her whole audience bursting into applause: exhausted Mike sinking his head into his spidery white hands and weeping unashamedly; Marty, like the old man he had turned out to be, grasping her shoulders in his thick hands-my child, my daughter-pressing his prickly face against her cheek; the kids, her soft-footed fans, breaking ranks to gather round and touch her. And Joseph folding her to his breast. But in the theatre of deeds, it seemed, people didn't do that. Kurtz and Litvak were busy tidying papers, closing briefcases. Joseph was conferring with Dimitri and the South African Rose. Raoul was clearing away the debris of tea and sugary biscuits. Rachel alone seemed concerned with what became of their recruit. Touching Charlie's arm, she led her towards the landing for what she called a nice lie down. They had not reached the door before Joseph softly spoke her name. He was staring at her with pensive curiosity.

"So good night then," he repeated, as if the words were a puzzle to him.

"So good night to you, too," Charlie retorted, with a battered grin that should have signified the final curtain. But it didn't. As Charlie followed Rachel down the corridor, she was surprised to discover herself in her father's London club, on her way towards the ladies' annexe for lunch. Stopping, she gazed round her trying to identify the source of the hallucination. Then she heard it: the restless ticking of an unseen teleprinter, pushing out the latest market prices. She guessed it came from behind a half-closed door. But Rachel hurried her past before she had a chance to find out.

The three men were back in the resting room, where the chattering of the code machine had summoned them like a bugle. While Becker and Litvak looked on, Kurtz crouched at the desk deciphering with an air of utter disbelief the newest, unexpected, urgent, and strictly private telegram from Jerusalem. From behind him they could watch the dark sweat patch spread across his shirt like a leaking wound. The radio operator was gone, packed off by Kurtz as soon as Jersualem's coded text began to print itself. The silence in the house was otherwise very deep. If birds sang or traffic passed, they did not hear it. They heard only the stop and start of the printer.

"I never saw you better, Gadi," declared Kurtz, for whom no one activity was ever quite enough. He was speaking English, the language of Gavron's text. "Masterful, high-minded, incisive." He tore off a sheet and waited for the next to print itself. "All that a girl adrift could wish for in her saviour. That right, Shimon?" The machine resumed.

"Some of our colleagues in Jerusalem-Mr. Gavron, to name but one-they questioned my selection of you, Mr. Litvak here for another. Not me. I had the confidence." Muttering a mild curse, he tore off the second sheet. "That Gadi, he's the best I ever had, I told them," he resumed. "A lion's heart, a poet's head: my very words. A life of violence has not coarsened him, I said. How does she handle, Gadi?"

And he actually turned his head and tilted it, watching for Becker's answer.

"Didn't you notice?" Becker said.

If Kurtz had noticed, he was not at present saying so. The message completed, he swung right round on his swivel chair, holding the sheets strictly upright before him to catch the desk light that came over his shoulder. But it was Litvak, oddly, who spoke first-Litvak who gave vent to a clenched and strident outburst of impatience that took his two colleagues by surprise. "They've planted another bomb!" he blurted. "Tell us! Where was it? How many of us have they killed this time?"

Kurtz slowly shook his head, and smiled for the first time since the message had come in.

"A bomb, maybe, Shimon. But nobody died from it. Not yet."

"Just let him read it," Becker said. "Don't let him play you."

But Kurtz preferred to extrapolate. "Misha Gavron greets us and sends us three further messages," he said. "Message one, certain installations in the Lebanon will be hit tomorrow, but those concerned will be sure to avoid our target houses. Message two"-he tossed aside his pieces of paper-"message two is an order, akin in quality and perception to the order we received earlier tonight. We are to drop the gallant Dr. Alexis by yesterday. No further contact. Misha Gavron has turned over his case file to certain wise psychologists who have ruled him as crazy as a bedbug."

Litvak again began to protest. Perhaps extreme tiredness affected him that way. Perhaps the heat did, for the night had turned very hot. Kurtz, still with his smile, talked him gently down to earth.

"Calm yourself, Shimon. Our gallant leader is being a little bit political, that is all. If Alexis jumps the wall and there is a scandal affecting our country's relationship with a sorely needed ally, Marty Kurtz here takes the rap. If Alexis stays our side, keeps his mouth shut, and does what we tell him, Misha Gavron takes the glory. You know how Misha treats me. I'm his Jew."

"And the third message?" Becker said.

"Our leader advises us that there is very little time. The hounds are baying at his heels, he says. He means our heels, naturally."

At Kurtz's suggestion, Litvak went off to pack his toothbrush. Left alone with Becker, Kurtz gave a grateful sigh of relief, and, much easier in his manner, wandered over to the truckle bed and picked up a French passport, opened it, and studied the personal particulars, committing them to memory. "You are the deliverer of our success, Gadi," he observed as he read. "Any gaps, special needs, you let me know. Hear me?"

Becker heard him.

"The kids say you made a fine couple up there on the Acropolis. Like a pair of movie stars, they tell me."

"Thank them for me."

Armed with an old, clogged hairbrush, Kurtz stood himself before the mirror and set to work to give himself a parting.

"A case like this, a girl involved, a concept, I leave it to the case officer's discretion," he remarked reflectively as he laboured. "Sometimes it pays to keep a distance, sometimes- He tossed the hairbrush into an open case.

"This one's distance," Becker said.

The door opened. Litvak, dressed for the city and carrying a briefcase, was impatient for his master's company.

"We're late," he said, with an unfriendly glance at Becker.

And yet, Charlie, for all their manipulation of her, was not coerced-not by Kurtz's standards, anyway. It was a point on which he placed stress from the outset. A durable basis of morality, he ruled, was essential to their plan. In the early stages, yes, there had been fancy talk of pressure, domination, even sexual enslavement to some less scrupulous Apollo than Becker; of confining Charlie in fragmenting circumstances for a few nights before offering her the hand of friendship. Gavron's wise psychologists, having read her dossier, put forward all sorts of fatuous suggestions, including some that were on the brutal side. But it was the tested operational mind of Kurtz that won the day against Jerusalem's swelling army of experts. Volunteers fight harder and longer, he had argued. Volunteers find their own ways to persuade themselves. And besides, if you are proposing marriage to a lady, it is wiser not to rape her first.

Others, of whom Litvak had been one, had voted loudly for an Israeli girl who could be fitted out with Charlie's kind of background. Litvak was viscerally opposed, as others were, to the idea of counting on the loyalty of a Gentile, least of all an English one, for anything. Kurtz had disagreed with equal vehemence. He loved the naturalness in Charlie and coveted the original, not the imitation. Her ideological drift did not dismay him in the least; the nearer she was to drowning, he said, the greater would be her pleasure at coming aboard.

Yet another school of thought-for the team was nothing if not democratic, if you ignored Kurtz's natural tyranny-had advocated a longer and more gradual courtship in advance of Yanuka's kidnapping, ending with a straight, sober offer along the classically defined lines of intelligence recruitment. Once again, Kurtz strangled the suggestion at birth. A girl of Charlie's temperament did not make up her mind by idle hours of reflection, he shouted-and neither, as a matter of fact, did Kurtz. Better to compress! Better to research and prepare down to the last detail, and take her by storm in one tremendous push! Becker, when he had taken a look at her himself, agreed: impulse recruitment was best.

But what if she says no, for God's sake? they cried, Gavron the Rook among them. To have prepared so much, only to be jilted at the altar!

In that case, Misha my friend, said Kurtz, we will have wasted a little time, and a little money, and a few prayers. He held that view through thick and thin; even if, in his most private circle-which comprised his wife and occasionally Becker-he confessed that he was taking one devil of a gamble. But there again, perhaps he was playing the cocotte. Kurtz had had his eye on Charlie ever since she had first surfaced at the weekend sessions of the forum. He had marked her down, enquired about her, twisted her around in his mind. You assemble tools, you look for the tasks, you improvise, he would say. You match the operation to the resources.

But why drag her to Greece, Marty? And all the others with her? Are we a charity, suddenly, lavishing our precious secret funds on rootless left-wing English actors?

But Kurtz was unbudgeable. He demanded scale from the start, knowing he would only be whittled down thereafter. Since Charlie's odyssey must begin in Greece, he insisted, let her be brought to Greece ahead of time, where the foreignness and magic of her situation would detach her more easily from domestic ties. Let the sun soften her. And since Alastair would never let her go alone, let him come also-and be removed at the psychological moment, thus further depriving her of support. And since all actors collect families-and do not feel secure unless they have the protection of the flock-and since no other natural method presented itself by which to lure the couple abroad-So it went on, one argument predicating another, until the only logic was the fiction, and the fiction was a web that enmeshed everyone who tried to sweep it away.

As to the removal of Alastair, it provided on that very day in London an amusing postscript to all their planning up till now. The scene occurred, of all places, in the domain of poor Ned Quilley, while Charlie was still deeply sleeping, and Ned was treating himself to a small refreshment in the privacy of his room in order to fortify himself for the rigours of lunch. He was in the act of unstopping his decanter when he was startled by a stream of obscenities, delivered in a male Celtic brogue, from the direction of Mrs. Longmore's cubby-hole downstairs, and ending with the demand that she "call the old goat out of his shed before I personally go up and drag him out." Wondering who of his more erratic clients had elected to have his nervous breakdown in Scottish, and before lunch, Quilley tiptoed gingerly to the door and put his ear to the panel. But he failed to recognise the voice. A moment later there was a thunder of footsteps, the door was flung open, and there before him stood the swaying figure of Long Al, known to him from occasional sorties to Charlie's dressing-room, where Alastair was in the habit of sitting out her performances with the aid of a bottle during his own protracted spells of idleness. He was filthy, he had three days' growth, he was blind drunk. Quilley attempted, in his best Pickwickian style, to demand the meaning of this outrage, but he might as well have spared his breath. Besides, he had been through a number of such scenes in his day, and experience had taught him that one does one's best to say as little as possible.

"You contemptible old faggot," Alastair began pleasantly, holding a shaking index finger directly beneath Quilley 's nose. "You mean, scheming old queen. I'm going to break your stupid neck."

"My dear chap," said Quilley. "Whatever for?"

"I'm phoning for the police, Mr. Ned!" cried Mrs. Longmore from downstairs. "I'm dialling nine-nine-nine now!"

"Eithersitdownandexplainyourbusinessatonce,"

Quilley said sternly, "or Mrs. Longmore will phone for the police."

"I'm dialling!" called Mrs. Longmore, who had done this occasionally before.

Alastair sat down.

"Now then," said Quilley, with all the fierceness at his command. "What about a little black coffee while you tell me what I have done to offend you?"

The list was long: played him a fool's trick, Quilley had. For Charlie's sake. Pretended to be a non-existent film company. Persuaded his agent to send telegrams to Mykonos. Made a conspiracy with clever friends in Hollywood. Prepaid air tickets, all to make a ninny out of him in front of the gang. And to get him out of Charlie's hair.

Gradually, Quilley unravelled the story. A Hollywood film production company calling itself Pan Talent Celestial had telephoned his agent from California saying that their leading man had fallen sick and they required Alastair for immediate screen tests in London. They would pay whatever was necessary to obtain his attendance, and when they heard he was in Greece they arranged for a certified cheque for a thousand dollars to be delivered to the agent's office. Alastair returned from holiday hot-foot, then sat on his thumbs for a week while no screen test materialised. "stand by," said the telegrams. Everything by telegram, note well. "arrangements pending." On the ninth day, Alastair, in a state of near dementia, was instructed to present himself at Shepperton Studios. Ask for one Pete Vyschinsky, Studio D.

No Vyschinsky, not anywhere. No Pete.

Alastair's agent rang the number in Hollywood. The telephone operator advised him that Pan Talent Celestial had closed its account. Alastair's agent rang other agents; nobody had heard of Pan Talent Celestial. Doom. Alastair's judgment was as good as anyone's, and in the course of a two-day drunk, on the balance of his thousand dollars' expenses, Alastair had concluded that the only person with the motive and ability to play such a trick was Ned Quilley, known in the trade as "Desperate Quilley," who had never concealed his dislike for Alastair, or his conviction that Alastair was the evil influence behind Charlie's zany politics. He had therefore come round in person to wring Quilley's neck. After a few cups of coffee, however, he began protesting his undying admiration for his host, and Quilley told Mrs. Longmore to get him a cab.

The same evening, while the Quilleys sat in the garden enjoying a sundowner before dinner-they had recently invested in some rather decent outdoor furniture, cast-iron but done in the original Victorian moulds-Marjory listened gravely to his story, then to his great annoyance burst out laughing.

"What a very naughty girl," she said. "She must have found some rich lover to buy the boy off!"

Then she saw Quilley's face. Rootless American production companies. Telephone numbers that no longer answer. Filmmakers who cannot be found. And all of it happening around Charlie. And her Ned.

"It's even worse," said Quilley miserably.

"What is, darling?"

"They've stolen all her letters."

"They've what?"

All her handwritten letters, Quilley said. Going back over the last five years or more. All her chatty, intimate billets-doux scribbled when she was on tour or lonely. Marvellous things. Pen-portraits of producers and members of the cast. The dear little drawings she liked to do when she was feeling happy. Gone. Whipped from the file. By those awful Americans who wouldn't drink- Karman and his frightful chum. Mrs. Longmore was having a fit about it. Mrs. Ellis had gone sick.

Write them a filthy letter, Marjory advised.

But to what effect? Quilley wondered miserably. And to what address?

Talk to Brian, she suggested.

All right, Brian was his solicitor, so what the hell was Brian supposed to do?

Wandering back into the house, Quilley poured himself a stiff one and turned on the television, only to get the early-evening news with film of the latest beastly bombing somewhere. Ambulances, foreign policemen carting off the injured. But Quilley was in no mood for such frivolous distractions. They actually ransacked Charlie's file, he kept repeating to himself. A client's, dammit. In my office. And son of old Quilley sits by and sleeps his lunch off while they do it! He hadn't been so put out for years.