The Little Drummer Girl Page 9

  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 Barclaycard, 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 inflections 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 whole-heartedly. 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, s
ince 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 rôle 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 coffees 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.’