The Little Drummer Girl

She was wonderful. A shrew. Flinging down her pencil, she slapped the table with her palm: "No, it bloody well isn't! I mean how long does it run, and what about my tour with As You Like It in the autumn?"

Kurtz betrayed no triumph at the practicality of her objection. "Charlie," he said earnestly, "your projected tour with As You Like It will in no wise be affected. We would surely expect you to fulfil that engagement, assuming the grant for it is forthcoming. As to duration, your commitment to our project could take six weeks, it could take two years, though we would surely hope not. What we have to hear from you now is whether you wish to audition with us at all or whether you prefer to tell good night to everybody here and go home to a safer, duller life. What's your verdict?"

It was a false peak he had made for her. He wished to give her a sense of conquest as well as of submission. Of having chosen her own captors. She was wearing a denim jacket and one of the tin buttons hung loose; this morning when she put it on, she had made a mental note to stitch it during the boat trip, then had promptly forgotten it again in her excitement at meeting Joseph. Taking hold of it now, she began testing the strength of the thread. She was centre stage. She could feel their collective gaze fixed on her, from the table, from the shadows, from behind her. She could feel their bodies craning in tension, Joseph's also, and hear the taut, creaking sound that audiences make when they are hooked. She could feel the strength of their purpose and of her own power: will she, won't she?

"Jose?" she said, without turning her head.

"Yes, Charlie."

She still did not turn to him, yet she had the clear knowledge that from his candlelit island he was waiting on her answer more keenly than all the rest of them together.

"This is it, is it? Our big romantic tour of Greece? Delphi, all the second-best places?"

"Our drive north will in no wise be affected," Joseph replied, lightly parodying Kurtz's phraseology.

"Not even postponed?"

"I would say it was imminent, actually."

The thread broke, the button lay on her palm. She tossed it on the table, watched it spin and settle. Heads or tails, she thought, playing them. Let them sweat a little. She puffed out some breath as if blowing away her forelock.

"So I'll stick around for the audition then, won't I?" she told Kurtz carelessly, looking nowhere but at the button. "I've got nowt to lose," she added, and immediately wished she hadn't. Sometimes, to her own annoyance, she overdid things for the sake of a good exit line: "Nowt I haven't lost already, anyhow," she said.

Curtain, she thought; applause, please, Joseph, and we'll wait for tomorrow's reviews. But none came, so she picked up a pencil and drew a girl for a change, while Kurtz, perhaps without even knowing he was doing so, transferred his watch to another, better spot.

The interrogation, with Charlie's gracious consent, could now begin in earnest.

Slowness is one thing, concentration another. Kurtz did not relax for a second; he did not permit himself or Charlie even half a breathing space as he willed her, coaxed her, lulled and woke her up, and by every effort of his dynamic spirit bound himself to her in their burgeoning theatrical partnership. Only God and a few people in Jerusalem, it was said within his service, knew where Kurtz's repertoire was learnt--the mesmeric intensity, the horse-drawn Americanised prose, the flair, the barrister's tricks. His slashed face, now applauding, now ruefully incredulous, now beaming out the reassurance that she wanted, became by degrees an entire audience in itself, so that all her performance was directed towards winning his desperately coveted approval and no one else's. Even Joseph was forgotten: put aside until another life.

Kurtz's first questions, by design, were scattered and harmless. It was as if, thought Charlie, he had a blank passport application pinned up in his mind and Charlie, without being able to see it, was filling in the boxes. Full name of your mother, Charlie. Your father's date and place of birth if known, Charlie. Grandfather's occupation; no, Charlie, on your father's side. Followed, with no conceivable reason, by the last known address of a maternal aunt, which was followed yet again by some arcane detail of her father's education. Not a single one of these early questions bore directly upon herself, nor did Kurtz intend it to. Charlie was like the forbidden subject he was scrupulous to avoid. The entire purpose behind this cheerful quick fire opening salvo was not to elicit information at all, but to instil in her the instinctive obedience, the yes-sir-no-sir of the classroom, on which the later passages between them would depend while Charlie, for her part, as the sap of her trade increasingly worked in her, performed, obeyed, and reacted with ever-increasing compliancy. Had she not done as much for directors and producers a hundred times--used the stuff of harmless conversation to give them a sample of her range? All the more reason, under Kurtz's hypnotic encouragement, to do it now.

"Heidi?" Kurtz echoed."Heidi? That's a damned odd name for an English elder sister, isn't it?"

"Not for Heidi, it isn't," she replied buoyantly, and scored an immediate laugh from the kids beyond the lighting. Heidi because her parents went to Switzerland for their honeymoon, she explained; and Switzerland was where Heidi was conceived. "Among the edelweiss," she added, with a sigh. "In the missionary position."

"So why Charmian?' Marty asked when the laughter had finally subsided.

Charlie lifted her voice to capture the curdled tones of her bloody mother: "The name Charmian was arrived upon with a view to flattering our rich and distant cousin of that name."

"Did it pay off?" Kurtz asked as he inclined his head to catch something Litvak was trying to say to him.

"Not yet," Charlie replied skittishly, still with her mother's precious intonation. "Father, you know, has passed on, but Cousin Charmian, alas, has yet to join him."

Only by these and many similar harmless detours did they gradually advance upon the subject of Charlie herself.

"Libra," Kurtz murmured with satisfaction as he jotted down her date of birth.

Meticulously but swiftly, he bustled her through her early childhood--boarding schools, houses, names of early friends and ponies--and Charlie answered him in kind, spaciously, sometimes humorously, always willingly, her excellent memory illuminated by the fixed glow of his attention and by her growing need to be on terms with him. From schools and childhood it was a natural step--though Kurtz took it only with the greatest diffidence--to the painful history of her father's ruin, and Charlie rendered this in quiet but moving detail, from the first brutal breaking of the news to the trauma of the trial and sentence and imprisonment. Now and then, it was true, her voice caught slightly; sometimes her gaze sank to study her own hands that played so prettily and expressively in the downlight; then a gallant, lightly self-mocking phrase would come to her, to blow it all away.

"We'd have been all right if we'd been working class," she said once, with a wise and hopeless smile. "You get sacked, you go redundant, the forces of capital run against you--it's life, it's reality, you know where you are. But we weren't working class. We were us. The winning side. And all of a sudden, we'd joined the losers."

John le Carre's books