Her once-loved flat, under her diligent neglect of it, now became the unkempt shrine to Michel's memory, a place of grimy, chapel-like quiet. Books and pamphlets he had given her were spread face downward over the floor and table, opened at marked passages. At night, when she could not sleep, she would sit at her desk with an exercise book jammed among the clutter, while she copied out quotations from his letters. Her aim was to compile a secret memoir of him that would reveal him to a better world as the Arab Che Guevara. She contemplated approaching a fringe publisher she knew: "Night Letters from a Murdered Palestinian," done on bad paper with a lot of misprints. There was a certain madness to these preparations, as Charlie, when she stood back from them, well knew. But in another sense she knew that without the madness there was no sanity; there was the r?le,or there was nothing.
Her excursions into the outside world were few, but one night, as further evidence to herself of her determination to carry Michel's flag into battle for him, if she could only find the battlefield, she attended a comrades' get-together in the upper room of a St. Paneras pub. She sat with the Very Crazies, most of whom were stoned into oblivion by the time they got there. But she saw it through, and she scared both herself and them with a really furious peroration against Zionism in all its Fascist and genocidal manifestations, which, to the secret amusement of another part of her, brought forth nervous complaints from representatives of the radical Jewish left.
At other times she made a show of pestering Quilley about future parts--what had happened about the screen test? For Christ's sake, Ned, I need work! But the truth was that her zest for the artificial stage was waning. She was committed--for as long as it lasted, and despite its mounting hazards--to the theatre of the real.
Then the warnings began, like the advance creakings of a sea-storm in the rigging.
The first came from poor Ned Quilley, a phone call much earlier in the day than was his custom, ostensibly to return one she had made to him the day before. But she knew at once it was something Marjory had ordered him to do the moment he got into the office--before he forgot, or lost heart, or treated himself to a sharpener. No, he had nothing for her, but he wanted to cancel their lunch that day, said Quilley. No problem, she replied, trying gallantly to hide her disappointment, for lunch was the big one they had planned to celebrate her end of tour, and talk about what she might do next. She had been really looking forward to it as a treat she might decently allow herself.
"It's absolutely fine," she insisted, and waited for him to come out with his excuse. Instead of which, he lurched the other way and made a stupid stab at being rude.
"I just don't think it would be appropriate at this time," he said loftily.
"Ned, what's up? It's not Lent. What's come over you?"
Her false frivolity, intended to make things easier for him, only spurred him to greater feats of pomposity.
"Charlie, I don't know what you've been up to," he began, from his High Altar. "I was young once myself and not as hidebound as you may think, but if one half of what is being implied is true, then I can't help feeling that you and I may do better, a lot better for both parties--" But, being her lovely Ned, he couldn't bring himself to deliver the final blow, so he said, "To put off our date until you have come to your senses." At which point, in Marjory's scenario, he was clearly supposed to ring off, and indeed, after several false curtains and a lot of help from Charlie, he managed it. She rang back immediately and got Mrs. Ellis, which was what she wanted.
"What's up, Pheeb? Why have I got bad breath suddenly?"
"Oh, Charlie, what have you been up to?" Mrs. Ellis said, speaking very low because she feared the phone might be tapped. "The police came for a whole morning about you, three of them, and none of us are allowed to say."
"Well, screw them," she said bravely.
One of their seasonal checkups, she told herself. The Discreet Enquiry brigade, barging in with hobnailed boots to top up her dossier for Christmas. They had done it periodically ever since she had started going to the forum. Except that somehow this didn't sound like routine. Not a whole morning and three of them. That was V.I.P. stuff.
Next came the hairdresser.
She had fixed her hair appointment for eleven, and she kept it, lunch or no. The proprietress was a generous Italian lady called Bibi. She frowned when she saw Charlie come in, and said she would do Charlie herself today.
"You been going with a married fellow again?" she yelled as she worked shampoo into Charlie's hair. "You don't look good, you know that? You been a bad girl, stole someone's husband? What you do, Charlie?"
Three men, said Bibi, when Charlie made her tell. Yesterday.
Said they were tax inspectors, wanted to check Bibi's appointments book and her accounts for the Value Added.
But all they really wanted to hear about was Charlie.
" ‘Who's this Charlie, here?' they say me. ‘Know her well then, Bibi? ‘Sure,' I say to them; ‘Charlie's a good girl, regular.' ‘Oh, a regular, is she? Talk to you about her boyfriends, does she? Who's she got? Where she sleep these days?' All about you been on holiday--who you go with, where you go after Greece. Me, I say them nothing. Trust Bibi." But at the door, when Charlie had safely paid, Bibi turned a little bit nasty, the first time ever. "Don't come again a little while, okay? I don't like trouble. I don't like police."
Nor do I, Beeb. Believe me, nor do I. And these three beauties least of all. The quicker the authorities know about you, the quicker we force the oppositions hand, Joseph had promised her. But he hadn't said it was going to be like this.
Next came the pretty boy, not two hours later.
She had eaten a hamburger somewhere, then started walking although it was raining, because she had a silly idea that while she was moving she was safe, and safer in the rain. She headed west, thinking vaguely of Primrose Hill, then changed her mind and hopped on a bus. It was probably coincidence, but as she glanced back from the departing platform she saw a man get into a taxi fifty yards behind her. And the way she replayed it in her mind, the flag had been down before he hailed it.
Stay with the logic of the fiction,Joseph had told her, again and again. Weaken, and you ruin the operation. Stay with the fiction, and when it's over we'll repair the damage.
Halfway to panic, she had a mind to hightail it to the dressmaker's and demand Joseph immediately. But her loyalty to him held her back. She loved him without shame and without hope. In the world he had turned upside down for her, he was her one remaining constant, in both the fiction and the fact.
So she went to the cinema instead and that was where the pretty man tried to pick her up; and where she very nearly let him.
He was tall and puckish, with a long new leather coat and granny glasses, and as he edged along the row towards her during the interval, she stupidly assumed that she knew him and in her turmoil couldn't put a name or place to him. So she returned his smile.
"Hullo, how are you?" he cried, sitting down beside her. "Charmian, isn't it? Gosh, you were good in Alpha Beta last year! Weren't you absolutely wonderful? Have some popcorn."
Suddenly nothing fitted: the carefree smile didn't fit the skull-like jaw, the granny glasses didn't fit the rat's eyes, the popcorn didn't fit the polished shoes, and the dry leather coat didn't fit the weather. He had arrived here from the moon with nothing else in mind but to pull her.
"You want me to call the manager or are you going quietly?" she said.