"Very well, that is your first reaction," said Joseph immediately. "You take a look, you mutter a blasphemy, you shut the lid. Remember that. Exactly that. That was your response, from now on, always."
Opening the box again, she cautiously took out the bracelet and weighed it in her palm. But she had no experience of jewellery apart from the paste she sometimes wore on stage.
"Is it real?" she asked.
"Unfortunately you do not have experts present who can advise you. Make your own decisions."
"It's old," she pronounced finally.
"Very well, you decide it is old."
"And heavy."
"Old and heavy. Not out of a Christmas cracker, not some piece of child's nonsense, but a serious item of jewellery. What do you do?"
His impatience distanced them from one another: she so thoughtful and disturbed, he so practical. She studied the fittings, the hallmarks, but she understood nothing of hallmarks either. She scratched at the metal lightly with her fingernail. It felt oily and soft.
"You have very little time, Charlie. You are due on stage in one minute and thirty seconds. What do you do? Do you leave it in your dressing-room?"
"God, no."
"They are calling you. You must move, Charlie. You must decide."
"Stop pressuring me! I give it to Millie to look after for me. Millie's my understudy. She prompts."
The suggestion did not suit him at all.
"You do not trust her."
She was nearly in despair. "I put it in the loo," she said. "Behind the cistern--
"Too obvious."
"In the waste-paper basket. Cover it over."
"Someone could walk in and empty it. Think."
"Jose, get off my--I put it behind the paint stuff! That's right. Up on one of the shelves. Nobody's dusted there for years."
"Excellent. You put it at the back of the shelf, you hurry to take up your position. Late. Charlie, Charlie, where have you been? The curtain rises. Yes?"
"Okay," she said, and puffed out about a gallon of air.
"What are your feelings?Now. About the bracelet--about its giver?"
"Well, I'm--I'm appalled--aren't I?"
"Why should you be appalled?"
"Well, I can't accept it--I mean it's money--it's valuable."
"But you have accepted it. You've signed for it and now you've hidden it."
"Only till after the show."
"And then?"
"Well, I'll give it back. Won't I?"
Relaxing a little, he too gave a sigh of relief, as if she had at long last proved his thesis. "And in the meantime, how do you feel?"
"Amazed. Shattered. What do you want me to feel?"
"He is a few feet away from you, Charlie. His eyes are fixed on you passionately. He is attending his third consecutive performance of your play. He has sent you orchids and jewellery and he has told you twice that he loves you. Once normally, once infinitely. He is beautiful. Much more beautiful than I am."
In her irritation, she ignored, for the time being, the steady intensification of his authority as he described her suitor.
"So I act my heart out then," she said, feeling trapped as well as foolish. "And that doesn't mean he's won set and match, either," she snapped.
Carefully, as if trying not to disturb her, Joseph restarted the car. The light had died, the traffic had thinned to an intermittent line of stragglers. They were skirting the Gulf of Corinth. Across the leaden water, a chain of shabby tankers pulled westward as if drawn magnetically by the glow of the vanished sun. Above them a ridge of hills was forming darkly in the twilight. The road forked, they began the long climb, turn after turn towards the emptying sky.
"You remember how I clapped for you?" said Joseph. "You remember I stood for you, curtain call after curtain call?"
Yes, Jose, I remember. But she didn't trust herself to say it out loud.
"Well then--now remember the bracelet too."
She did. An act of imagination all for him--a gift in return to her unknown, beautiful benefactor. The Epilogue over, she took her curtain calls, and the moment she was free she hurried to her dressing-room, recovered the bracelet from its hiding place, cleaned off her make-up at record speed, and flung on her day clothes in order to go to him fast.
But having connived at Joseph's version of events this far, Charlie backed sharply away as a belated sense of the proprieties came to her protection. "Just a minute--hang on--hold it--why doesn't he come to me? He's making the running. Why don't I just stay put in my dressing-room and wait for him to show up, instead of going out into the bushes to look for him?"
"Perhaps he hasn't the courage. He is too much in awe of you, why not? You have bowled him off his feet."
"Well, why don't I sit tight and see! Just for a bit."
"Charlie, what is your intention? You are saying to him what, in your mind, please?"
"I'm saying: ‘Take this back--I can't accept it,' " she replied virtuously.
"Very well. Then will you seriously risk the chance he will slip away into the night--never to appear again--leaving you with this valuable gift which you so sincerely do not want to accept?"
With an ill grace she agreed to go and seek him out.
"But how--where will you find him? Where do you look first?" said Joseph.
The road was empty, but he was driving slowly in order that the present should intrude as little as possible upon the reconstructed past.
"I'd run round the back," she said before she had seriously thought. "Out of the back entrance, into the street, round the corner to the theatre foyer. Catch him on the pavement coming out."
"Why not through the theatre?"
"I'd have to fight my way through the milling throng, that's why. He'd be gone long before I ever got to him."
He thought about this. "Then you will need your mackintosh," he said.
Once again, he was right. She had forgotten the Nottingham rain that night, one cloudburst after another, all through the show. She began again. Having changed at lightning speed, she put on her new mackintosh--her long French one from the Liberty's sale--knotted the belt, and charged out into the teeming rain, down the street, round the corner to the front of the theatre--
"Only to find half the audience crammed under the canopy waiting for it to clear," Joseph interrupted. "Why are you smiling?"
"I need my yellow foulard round my head. You remember--the Jaeger one I got from my television commercial."
"We note also, then, that even in your haste to be rid of him, you do not forget your yellow headscarf. So. Wearing her mackintosh and yellow headscarf, Charlie dashes through the rain in search of her over-ardent lover. She arrives at the crowded foyer--calling ‘Michel! Michel!' perhaps? Yes? Beautiful. Her cries are in vain, however. Michel is not there. So what do you do?"
"Did you write this, Jose?"
"Never mind."
"Go back to my dressing-room?"
"Does it not occur to you to look in the auditorium?"
"All right, damn it--yes, it does."
"You take which entrance?"
"The stalls. That's where you were sitting."
"Where Michel was. You take the stalls entrance, you push the bar to the door. Hooray, it yields. Mr. Lemon has not yet locked up. You enter the empty auditorium, you walk slowly down the aisle."
"And there he is," she said softly. "Jesus, that's corny."
"But it plays."
"Oh, it plays"
"Because there he is, still in his same seat, in the middle of the front row. Staring at the curtain as if by staring at it he could make it rise again upon the apparition of his Joan, the spirit of his freedom, whom he loves infinitely."
"I mean this is awful" Charlie murmured. But he ignored her.
"The same seat he has been sitting in for the last seven hours."
I want to go home, she thought. A long sleep all on my own at the Astral Commercial and Private. How many destinies can a girl meet in one day? For she could no longer miss the extra note of assurance in him, the drawing near, as he described her new admirer.
"You hesitate, then you call his name. ‘Michel!' The only name you know. He turns to look at you but does not move. He does not smile, or greet you, or in any way demonstrate his considerable charm."