"As I would stand by any of them!" Ned rejoined with a flash of spirit. "Dash it all, she's an actress! Don't take her so seriously. Actors don't have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There's a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she'll be Born Again!"
"Not politically, she won't," said Litvak nastily, under his breath.
For a few moments longer, under the helpful influence of his claret, Ned continued on this bold course. A sort of giddiness overtook him. He heard the words in his head; he repeated them and felt young again and completely divorced from his own actions. He spoke of actors generally and how they were pursued by "an absolute horror of unreality." How on stage they acted out all the agonies of man, and off stage were hollow vessels waiting to be filled. He talked about their shyness, their smallness, their vulnerability, and their habit of disguising these weaknesses with tough-sounding and extreme causes borrowed from the adult world. He spoke of their self-obsession, and how they saw themselves on stage twenty-four hours a day--in childbirth, under the knife, in love. Then he dried, a thing that happened to him a mite too often these days. He lost his thread, he lost his bounce. The wine waiter brought the liqueur trolley. Under the cold-sober eyes of his hosts, Quilley desperately selected a Marc de Champagne and let the waiter pour a large one before he made a show of stopping him. Meanwhile Litvak had recovered sufficiently to bounce back with a good idea. Poking his long fingers inside his jacket, he drew out one of those notebooks made like a blank picture, with imitation crocodile backing and brass corners for the little sheets of paper.
"I say we start with first principles," he proposed softly, more to Kurtz than to Ned. "The when, the where, the who with, the how long." He drew a margin, presumably for dates. "Rallies she's been in. Demonstrations. Petitions, marches. Anything that has maybe caught the public eye. When we have it all out on the table, we can make an informed assessment. Either buy the risk or get the hell out the back door. Ned, when to your knowledge was she first involved?"
"I like it," said Kurtz. "I like the method, I think it's right for Charlie too." And he managed to say this exactly as if Litvak's plan had come to him out of a clear sky, instead of being the product of hours of preparatory discussion.
So Ned told them that too. When he could, he glossed things over, once or twice he told a small lie, but in the main he told them what he knew. He had misgivings certainly, but those came afterwards. As he put it to Marjory, at the time they just swept him along. Not that he knew very much. The anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear stuff, of course--well, that was common knowledge anyway. Then there was that Theatre of Radical Reform crowd she rode with occasionally, who had made such a damn nuisance of themselves outside the National, stopping the performances. And some people called Alternative Action in Islington, who were some kind of loony Trot splinter group, all fifteen of them. And some awful women's panel she had appeared on at St. Paneras Town Hall, dragging Marjory along in order to show her the light. And there was the time two or three years ago she had rung up in the middle of the night from Durham police station, asking for Ned to come and bail her out, after being arrested at some anti-Nazi jamboree she'd got up to.
"This the thing that made all the publicity, got her picture in the papers, Mr. Quilley?"
"No, that was Reading," said Ned. "That was later."
"So what was Durham?"
"Well, I don't know exactly. I rather forbid it as a topic, to be frank. It's just what one hears by mistake. Wasn't there some nuclear power station project up there? One forgets. One simply does forget. She's become much more moderate latterly, you know. Not half the fireball she used to pretend she was, I can assure you. Far more mature. Oh yes!"
"Pretend, Ned?" Kurtz echoed doubtfully.
"Tell us about Reading, Mr. Quilley," said Litvak. "What happened there?"
"Oh, the same sort of thing. Somebody set fire to a bus, so they all got charged for it. They were protesting against reducing services for old people, I believe. Or was it something about not taking on the niggers as conductors? The bus was empty, of course," he added hastily. "Nobody got hurt."
"Jesus," said Litvak, and glanced at Kurtz, whose questioning now acquired the resonance of a courtroom soap opera:
"Ned, you indicated just now that Charlie was maybe softening somewhat in her convictions. Is that what you are saying?"
"Yes, I think so. If her convictions were ever very hard, that is. It's only an impression, but old Marjory thinks so too. Sure of it--"
"Has Charlie confided such a change of heart to you, Ned?" Kurtz interrupted, rather sharp.
"I just think that once she gets a real chance like this--
Kurtz overrode him: "To Mrs. Quilley perhaps?"
"Well, no, not really."
"Is there anybody else she might have confided in? Such as this anarchist friend she has?"
"Oh, he'd be the last to know."
"Ned, is there anybody apart from you--think carefully, please, girlfriend, boyfriend, maybe an older person, family friend--in whom Charlie would confide such a shift in position?Away from radicalism? Ned?"
"Not that I know of, no. No, I can't think of a soul. She's close in some ways. Closer than you'd think."
Then a most extraordinary thing happened. Ned later provided Marjory with an exact account of it. To escape the uncomfortable and, to Ned's ear, histrionic crossfire of their separate gazes on him, Ned had been playing with his glass, peering into it, rolling the Marc around. Sensing that Kurtz had somehow rested his case, he now glanced up, and intercepted an expression of quite evident relief in Kurtz's features that he was in the act of communicating to Litvak: his actual pleasure that Charlie was not after all softening in her conviction. Or, if she was, had not admitted it to anybody of note. He looked again and it had gone. But not even Marjory could afterwards persuade him it had not been there.
Litvak, the great barrister's junior, had taken over the questioning: a quicker tone to wrap the case up.
"Mr. Quilley, sir, do you hold in your agency individual office papers on all your clients? Files?"
"Well, Mrs. Ellis does, I'm sure," said Ned. "Somewhere."
"Mrs. Ellis been doing that work for long, sir?"
"My goodness, yes. She was there in my father's time."
"And what type of information does she store there? Fees--expenses--commission taken, kind of thing? Are they merely arid business papers, these files?"
"Good Lord, no, she puts everything in. Birthdays, the kind of flowers they like, restaurants. We even found an old dancing-shoe in one. Names of their kids. Dogs. Press cuttings. Any amount of stuff."
"Personal letters?"
"Yes, of course."
"In her own hand? Her own letters, going back over the years?"
Kurtz was embarrassed. His Slav eyebrows said so; they were massing in a pained line round the bridge of his nose.
"Karman, I think Mr. Quilley has given us enough of his time and experience already," he told Litvak severely. "If we need more information, Mr. Quilley will surely supply it later. Better still, if Charlie herself is prepared to talk this out with us, we can get it from her. Ned, this has been a great and memorable occasion. Thank you, sir."
But Litvak was not so easily put off. He had a young man's obstinacy: "Mr. Quilley doesn't have any secrets from us," he exclaimed. "Hell, Mr. Gold. I'm only asking him what the world already knows, and what our visa people will find out in point zero five seconds on their computer. We're in a hurry with this. You know that. If there's papers, her own letters, using her own words, mitigating circumstances, evidence of a change of heart maybe, why don't we have Mr. Quilley show them to us? If he's willing. If he's not--well, that's another matter," he added, with unpleasant innuendo.