"Doing what?"
"Looking at the roses. Staring at them. He kept saying they mustn't take the roses. Whatever happened. He kept saying it, on and on. ‘If they take my roses, I'll kill myself.' ‘
"And your mother?"
"Mum was in the kitchen. Cooking. It was the only thing she could think of to do."
"Gas or electricity?"
"Electricity."
"But did I mishear you or did you say the company switched the power off?"
"They reconnected it."
"And they didn't take away the cooker?"
"They have to leave it by law. The cooker, a table, a chair for everyone in the house."
"Knives and forks?"
"One set for each person."
"Why didn't they just sequester the house? Throw you all out?"
"It was in Mother's name. She'd insisted on it years before."
"Wise woman. However, it was in your father's. And where, did you say, did the headmistress read about your father's bankruptcy?"
She had almost lost it. For a second, the images inside her head had wavered, but now they hardened again, providing her with the words she needed: her mother, in her mauve headscarf, bowed over the cooker, frantically, making bread-and-butter pudding, a family favourite. Her father, grey-faced and mute in his blue double-breasted blazer, staring at the roses. The headmistress, hands behind her back, warming her tweed rump before the unlit fire in her imposing drawing-room.
"In the London Gazette," she replied stolidly. "Where everybody's bankruptcies are reported."
"The headmistress was a subscriber to this journal?"
"Presumably."
Kurtz gave a long slow nod, then picked up a pencil and wrote the one word presumably on a pad before him, in a way that made it visible to Charlie. "So. And after the bankruptcy came the fraud charges. That right? Want to describe the trial?"
"I told you. Father wouldn't let us be there. At first he was going to defend himself--be a hero. We were to sit in the front seats and cheer him on. When they showed him the evidence, he changed his mind."
"What was the charge?"
"Stealing clients' money."
"How long did he get?"
"Eighteen months, less remission. I told you, Mart, I said it all to you before. What is this?"
"Ever visit him in prison?"
"He wouldn't let us. He didn't want us to see his shame."
"His shame," Kurtz echoed thoughtfully. "His disgrace. The Fall. It really got to you, didn't it?"
"Would you like me better if it hadn't?"
"No, Charlie, I don't suppose I would." He took another small break. "Well, there we are. So you stayed home. Gave up school, forsook the proper instruction of your excellent developing mind, looked after your mother, waited for your father's release. Right?"
"Right."
"Never went near the prison once?"
"Jesus," she muttered hopelessly. "Why do you keep twisting the knife like this?"
"Not even near it?"
"No!"
She was holding back her tears with a courage they must surely admire. How could she take it? they must be wondering--either then or now? Why did he persist in tapping away so remorselessly at her secret scars? The silence was like a pause between screams. The only sound was from Litvak's ballpoint pen as it flew across the pages of his notebook.
"Any of that any use to you, Mike?" Kurtz asked of Litvak, without turning his gaze from her.
"Great," Litvak breathed as his pen continued racing. "It's gritty, it adds up, we can use it. I just wonder whether she might have a catchy anecdote for that prison stuff somewhere. Or maybe when he came out is better--the final months--why not?"
"Charlie?" said Kurtz shortly, passing on Litvak's enquiry.
Charlie made a show of pondering for them till inspiration came to her. "Well, there was the thing about the doors," she said doubtfully.
"Doors?" said Litvak. "What doors?"
"Tell it to us," Kurtz suggested.
A beat while Charlie lifted one hand and delicately pinched the bridge of her nose between her forefinger and thumb, indicating deepest grief and a slight migraine. She had told the story often, but never as well as this. "We weren't expecting him for another month--he didn't phone, how could he? We'd moved house. We were on National Assistance. He just showed up. Looked slimmer, younger. Hair cut. ‘Hullo,Chas,I'm out.' Gave me a hug. Wept. Mum was upstairs, too scared to come down to him. He was completely unchanged. Except for the doors. He couldn't open them. He'd go up to them, stop, stand at attention with his feet together and his head down, and wait for the warder to come and unlock them."
"And the warder washer," said Litvak softly from Kurtz's side. "His own daughter. Wow!"
"The first time it happened, I couldn't believe it. I screamed at him. ‘Open the bloody door!' His hand literally refused."
Litvak was writing like a man possessed. But Kurtz was less enthusiastic. Kurtz was at the file again, and his expression suggested serious reservations. "Charlie, in this one interview you gave--the Ipswich Gazette, is this?--you tell some story how you and your mother used to climb a hill outside the prison together and wave so as your father could see you from his cell window. Yet, ah, according to what you told us, just now, you never went near that prison once."
Charlie actually managed to laugh--a rich, convincing laugh, even if it was not echoed from the shadows. "Mart, that was an interview I gave," she said, humouring him because he looked so grave.
"So?"
"So in interviews one tends to sauce up one's past to make it interesting."
"You been doing that here at all?"
"Of course not."
"Your agent Quilley recently told someone of our acquaintance that your father died in prison. Not at home at all. More saucing it up?"
"That's Ned talking, not me."
"Quite so. So it is. Agreed."
He closed the file, still unconvinced.
She couldn't help herself. Turning right round in her chair, she addressed Joseph, indirectly begging him to get her off the hook.
"How's it going, Jose--all right?"
"Very effectively, I would say," he replied, and continued as before with his own affairs.
"Better than Saint Joan!"
"But, my dear Charlie, your lines are a lot better than Shaw's!"
He's not congratulating me, he's consoling me, she thought sadly. Yet why was he so harsh to her? So brittle? So abstaining after he had brought her here?
South African Rose had a tray of sandwiches. Rachel was following her with cakes and a Thermos of sweet coffee.
"Doesn't anybody sleep around here?" Charlie complained as she helped herself. But her question went unheard. Or, rather, since they had all heard it clearly, unanswered.
The sweet time was over and now it was the long-awaited dangerous time, the middle hour of watchfulness before the dawn, when her head was clearest and her anger sharpest; the time, in other words, to transfer Charlie's politics--which Kurtz had assured her they all deeply respected--from the back burner to a more conspicuous heat. Once again, in Kurtz's hands, everything had its chronology and its arithmetic. Early influences, Charlie. Date, place, and people, Charlie: name us your five guiding principles, your first ten encounters with the militant alternative. But Charlie was in no mood for objectivity any more. Her fit of drowsiness was past, and in place of it a sense of rebellion was beginning to turn restlessly inside her, as the crispness of her voice and her darting, suspicious glances should have told them. She was sick of them. Sick of being helpful in this shotgun alliance, of being led blindfold from room to room without knowing what these trained, manipulating hands were doing on her elbow and what these clever voices were whispering in her ear. The victim in her was spoiling for a fight.