For rehearsing As You Like It, the company had rented an old Territorial Army drill hall near Victoria Station and she went there each morning, and each evening she washed the smell of stale military beer from her hair.
She allowed Quilley to lunch her at Bianchi's and found him odd. He seemed to be trying to warn her of something, but when she asked him outright what it was, he clammed up and said that politics were people's own affair, which was what he'd fought the war for, in the Green Jackets. But he got awfully drunk. Having helped him sign the bill, she rejoined the crowds in the street and had the feeling of riding out ahead of herself; of following her own elusive shape as it slipped away from her, through the bobbing people. I am separated from life. I'll never find my way back. But even while she thought this, she felt the brush of a hand against her elbow as Joseph drew momentarily alongside before peeling away into Marks & Sparks. The effect of these sightings upon her was soon extraordinary. They kept her in a constant state of vigilance and, if she was honest with herself, desire. A day without him was a nothing day; one glimpse, and her heart and body thrilled to him like a sixteen-year-old's.
She read the respectable Sunday newspapers and studied the latest amazing revelations about Sackville-West--or was it Sitwell?--and marvelled at the self-regarding irrelevance of the ruling English mind. She looked at the London she had forgotten, and found everywhere support for her identity as the radical committed to the violent path. Society as she knew it was a dead plant; her job was to clear it away and use the soil for something better. The hopeless faces of the shoppers shuffling like manacled slaves through the neon-lit supermarket told her so; so did the despairing old, and the venomous-eyed policemen. So did the lounging black kids watching the Rolls-Royces sweep by, and the shiny banks with their air of secular worship and their righteous martinets of managers. The building societies luring the deluded into their property traps; the booze shops, the betting shops, the vomit--with little effort on Charlie's part, the entire London scene presented an unemptied dustbin of discarded hopes and disappointed souls. Thanks to the inspiration of Michel, she constructed her mental bridges between capitalist exploitation in the Third World and here on her doorstep in Camden Town.
Lived so brightly, life even sent her a heavy symbol of man adrift. Taking an early Sunday-morning walk along the Regent's Canal towpath--in reality, for one of her few scheduled meetings with Joseph--she heard the sound of a deep-throated string instrument warbling a Negro spiritual. The canal opened up and she saw, in the centre of a harbour of discarded warehouses, an old black man straight out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, sitting on a tethered raft and playing his cello to a group of spellbound children. It was a scene from Fellini; it was kitsch; it was a mirage; it was an inspired vision risen from her subconscious.
Whatever it was, for several days it became a private term of reference for everything she saw around her, too private to confide even to Joseph, for fear he would laugh at her--or, worse still, offer a rational explanation.
She went to bed with Al a few times because she wanted no crisis with him and because, after the long drought with Joseph, her body needed him, and, besides, Michel had ordered her to. She wouldn't let him visit her flat because he was homeless again and she was afraid he would try and stay, which was what he had done before, until she had flung his clothes and razor into the street. Anyway, her flat possessed new secrets that nothing on God's earth would have persuaded her to share with him: her bed was Michel's, his gun had lain beneath the pillow, and there was nothing Al or anyone else could do to force her to desecrate it. She also trod wary with Al because Joseph had warned her that his movie deal had fallen through, and she knew of old how bad he could get when his pride was hurt.
Their first impassioned reunion took place in his usual pub, where she found the great philosopher ensconced with a couple of female disciples. As she walked across to join him, she thought: He'll smell Michel; he's in my clothes, my skin, my smile. But Al was too busy demonstrating his indifference to smell anything. He pushed back a chair for her with his foot, and as she sat down she thought: God help me, not one month ago this midget was my top adviser on what makes the world tick. When the pub closed and they went to a friend's flat and commandeered his spare room, she was appalled to find herself imagining it was Michel inside her, and Michel's face gazing down at her, and Michel's olive body bearing in on her in the half dark--Michel, her own little killer boy, driving her to the brink. But beyond Michel there was another figure still, Joseph, hers at last; his burning, locked-in sexuality finally burst loose; his scarred body and his scarred mind hers.
Apart from the Sundays, she read capitalist newspapers sporadically, listened to consumer-orientated radio bulletins, but heard nothing of a red-headed English girl sought in connection with the smuggling of high-grade Russian plastic explosive into Austria. It never happened. It was two other girls, one of my little fantasies. In most other respects, the state of the wider world had ceased to interest her. She read of a Palestinian bombing in Aachen, and of an Israeli reprisal raid on some camp in the Lebanon claiming large numbers of civilian dead. She read of mounting popular fury in Israel, and was duly chilled by an interview with an Israeli general who promised to solve the Palestinian problem "from the roots up." But after her crash course in conspiracy, she had no faith in the official description of events and never would have again. The only news items she followed with any loyalty concerned a female giant panda at London Zoo who was declining to mate, though feminists insisted it was the male's fault. Also, the zoo was one of Joseph's places. They would meet on a bench there, if only to squeeze hands like lovers, before going their separate ways.
Soon, he would say. Soon.
Floating this way, acting all the time for an unseen audience, guarding her every word and gesture against a momentary carelessness, Charlie found herself relying heavily on ritual. At weekends she usually went to her kids' club in Peckham and, in a great arched hall big enough for Brecht, whipped her kids' drama group back into action, which she loved. They were planning a rock pantomime for Christmas, a piece of sheer anarchy.
On Fridays she sometimes went to Al's pub, and on Wednesdays she took two quart bottles of brown ale to Miss Dubber, who lived round the corner, a retired tart from the chorus line. Miss Dubber had arthritis and rickets and woodworm and several serious ailments as well, and cursed her body with a zeal she had once reserved for ungenerous lovers. Charlie in return filled Miss Dubber's ear with marvellous made-up stories about the scandalous goings-on in the world of show business, and they laughed so raucously together that the people next door turned up their television set to drown the din.