"Tough," said Kurtz gravely, with a shake of his broad head.
Backtracking, he probed for the solid facts: date and place of trial, Charlie; the exact length of sentence, Charlie; names of lawyers if she remembered them. She didn't, but wherever she could she helped him, and Litvak duly noted down her answers, leaving Kurtz free to give her his entire benevolent attention. Now all laughter had ceased completely. It was as if the soundtrack had stopped dead, all but hers and Marty's. There was not a creak, not a cough, not an alien shuffle from anywhere. In her whole life, it seemed to Charlie, no group of people had been so attentive, so appreciative of her performance. They understand, she thought. They know what it is to live the nomad's life; to be thrown upon your own resources when the cards are stacked against you. Once, on a quiet order from Joseph, the lights went out and they waited together without a sound in the tense darkness of an air raid, Charlie as apprehensive as the rest, till Joseph announced the all-clear and Kurtz resumed his patient questioning. Had Joseph really heard anything, or was this their way of reminding her that she belonged? The effect on Charlie was in either case the same: for those tense few seconds she was their fellow conspirator with no thought of rescue.
At other times, wresting her gaze briefly from Kurtz, she would see the kids dozing at their posts: Swedish Raoul,with his flaxen head sunk upon his chest and the sole of one thick track-shoe flattened against the wall; South African Rose propped against the double doors, her runner's legs stretched in front of her and her long arms folded across her chest; North Country Rachel, the wings of her black hair folded round her face, eyes half closed, but still with her soft smile of sensual reminiscence. Yet the smallest extraneous whisper found every one of them instantly alert.
"So what's the bottom line here, Charlie?" Kurtz enquired kindly. "Regarding that whole early period of your life until what we may call the Fall--
"The age of innocence, Mart?" she suggested helpfully.
"Precisely. Your age of innocence. Define it for me."
"It was hell."
"Want to name some reasons?"
"It was suburbia. Isn't that enough?"
"No, it is not."
"Oh, Mart--you're so--" Her slack-mouthed voice. Her tone of fond despair. Limp gestures with the hands. How could she ever explain? "It's all right for you, you're a Jew, don't you see? You've got these fantastic traditions, the security. Even when you're persecuted, you know who you are, and why."
Kurtz ruefully acknowledged the point.
"But for us--rich English suburban kids from Nowheresville--forget it. We had no traditions, no faith, no self-awareness, no nothing."
"But you told me your mother was Catholic."
"Christmas and Easter. Pure hypocrisy. We're the post-Christian era, Mart. Didn't anybody tell you? Faith leaves a vacuum behind it when it goes away. We're in it."
As she said this, she caught Litvak's smouldering eyes upon her and received the first hint of his rabbinical anger.
"No going to confession?" Kurtz asked.
"Come off it. Mum didn't have anything to confess! That's her whole trouble. No fun, no sin, no nothing. Just apathy and fear. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of the neighbours--fear. Somewhere out there, real people were living real lives. Just not us. Not in Rickmansworth. No way. I mean, Christ--for children--I mean talk about castration!"
"And you--no fear?"
"Only of being like Mum."
"And this notion we all have--ancient England steeped in her traditional ways?"
"Forget it."
Kurtz smiled and shook his wise head as if to say you could always learn.
"So as soon as you could, you left home and you took revenge in the stage and radical politics," he suggested contentedly. "You became a political exile to the stage. I read that somewhere, some interview you gave. I liked it. Go on from there."
She was back to doodling again, more symbols of the psyche. "Oh, there were other ways of breaking out before that," she said.
"Such as?"
"Well,sex, you know," said Charlie carelessly. "I mean we haven't even touched on sex as the essential basis of revolt, have we? Or drugs."
"We haven't touched on revolt," said Kurtz.
"Well, take it from me, Mart--
Then a strange thing happened: proof, perhaps, of how a perfect audience can extract the best from a performer and improve her in spontaneous, unexpected ways. She had been on the brink of giving them her set piece for the unliberated. How the discovery of self was an essential prelude to identifying with the radical movement. How when the history of the new revolution came to be written, its true roots would be found in the drawing-rooms of the middle classes, where repressive tolerance had its natural home. Instead of which, to her surprise, she heard herself enumerating aloud for Kurtz--or was it for Joseph?--her rows and rows of early lovers and all the stupid reasons she had invented for going to bed with them. "It's completely beyond me, Mart," she insisted, once more opening her hands disarmingly. Was she using them too much? She feared she might be, and put them in her lap. "Even today. I didn't want them, I didn't like them, I just let them." The men she had taken out of boredom, anything to move the stale air of Rickmansworth, Mart. Out of curiosity. Men to prove her power, men to avenge herself against other men, or against other women, against her sister or her bloody mother. Men out of politeness, Mart, out of sheer bone-weariness at their persistence. The casting couches--Christ, Mart, you can't imagine! Men to break the tension, men to create it. Men to inform her--her political enlighteners, appointed to explain to her in bed the things she could never get her mind round from the books. The five-minute lusts that smashed like pottery in her hands and left her lonelier than ever. Failures, failures--every one of them, Mart--or so she wanted him to believe. "But they freed me, don't you see? I was using my own body in my own way. Even if it was the wrong way. It was my show!"
While Kurtz nodded sagely, Litvak wrote swiftly at his side. But in her secret mind she was picturing Joseph seated behind her. She imagined him looking up from his reading, his strong index finger laid along his smooth cheek, while he received the private gift of her amazing openness. Scoop me up, she was saying to him; give me what the others never could.
Then she fell quiet and her own silence chilled her. Why had she done that? In her entire life she had never played that part before, not even to herself. The timeless hour of the night had affected her. The lighting, the upstairs room, the sense of travel, of talking to strangers on a train. She wanted to sleep. She'd done enough. They must give her the part or send her home, or both.
But Kurtz did neither. Not yet. Instead, he called a short interval, picked up his watch, and buckled it to his wrist by its khaki webbing strap. Then he bustled from the room, taking Litvak with him. She waited for a footfall from behind her as Joseph also left, but none came. And still none. She wanted to turn her head but didn't quite dare. Rose brought her a glass of sweet tea, no milk. Rachel had some sugar-coated biscuits, like English shortbread. Charlie took one.
"You're doing great," Rachel confided breathlessly. "You really laid it on the line about England. I just sat there drinking it in, didn't I, Rose?"
"She really did," said Rose.
"It's just how I feel," Charlie explained.
"Do you want the loo, love?" said Rachel.
"No thanks, I never do between acts."
"Right then," said Rachel, with a wink.