After that she went every day to the post office and sometimes twice, becoming a feature of the place, if only because she always left empty-handed looking more and more distraught; a delicate, well-directed piece of acting, which she worked upon with care, and which Joseph, in his capacity of secret coach, more than once personally witnessed while he bought stamps at the next-door counter.
In the same period, hoping to prompt life from him, she posted three letters to Michel in Paris, begging him to write, loving him, and forgiving him in advance for his silence. These were the first letters she had composed and written for herself. Mysteriously, she found relief in sending them; they gave an authenticity to their predecessors, and to her professed feelings. Each time-she wrote one, she took it to a postbox chosen for her and she supposed there were people covering it, but she had learned not to stare around and not to think about it. Once she spotted Rachel in the window of a Wimpy Bar looking very dowdy and English. Once Raoul and Dimitri rode past her on a motorbike. The last of her letters to Michel she sent express, from the same post office where she asked in vain for mail, and she scrawled "darling please please please oh please write" along the back of the envelope after she had franked it, while Joseph waited patiently behind her.
Gradually she came to think of her life over these weeks as possessing a large print and a small print. The large print was the world she lived in. The small was the world she slipped in and out of when the large world wasn't watching. No love-affair, even with very married men, had ever been so secret for her.
Their trip to Nottingham came on her fifth day. Joseph took exceptional precautions. He picked her up in a Rover from a remote tube station on a Saturday evening and drove her back on the Sunday afternoon. He had brought a blonde wig for her, a really good one, and a change of clothes, including a fur coat, in a suitcase. He had arranged a late dinner and it was as awful as the original; in the middle of it, Charlie confessed to an absurd panic lest the staff might recognise her despite her wig and fur coat and demand to know what had become of her one true lover.
Then they went to their bedroom, two chaste twin beds, which in the fiction they had remade by pulling them together and laying the mattresses the other way. For a moment, she really thought it was going to happen. She came out of the bathroom and Joseph was lying full length on the bed, looking at her, and she lay beside him and put her head on his chest, then lifted her face to him and began kissing him, light selective kisses on favourite places around the temples, cheeks, and finally the lips. His hand held her back, then lifted to her face, and he kissed her in return, keeping his hand along her cheek and his eyes open. Then very gently he pushed her away from him, and sat up. And kissed her once more: goodbye.
"Listen," he said as he picked up his coat.
He was smiling. His beautiful, kind smile, his very best. She listened, and heard the Nottinghamshire rain clattering against their window--the same rain that had kept them in bed for two nights and one long day.
Next morning they retraced nostalgically the little excursions that she and Michel had made together into the surrounding countryside until their desire swept them back to the motel; all for the visual memories, Joseph assured her earnestly, and for the added confidence of having seen. Between such lessons, like a light relief, he taught her other things. Silent signals, as he called them; and a method of secret writing on the inside of Marlboro cigarette packets, which somehow she could not take seriously.
Several times, they met in a theatrical costumier's behind the Strand, usually after rehearsals.
"You'll have come for the fitting, won't you, dear?" said a mountainous blonde lady of sixty in flowing robes, each time Charlie stepped through the doorway. "That's the way then, dear," and showed her into a back bedroom where Joseph sat waiting for her like a whore's client. Autumn becomes you, she thought, noticing the frost on his hair again, and the pink nip in his frugal cheeks; it always will.
Her greatest worry was not knowing how to reach him: "Where are you staying? How can I get in touch with you?"
Through Cathy, he would say. You have the safety signals and you have Cathy.
Cathy was her lifeline, and Joseph's front office, the preserver of his exclusiveness. Each evening between six and eight Charlie would enter a phone box, always a different one, and ring a West End number so that Cathy could take her through her day: how the rehearsals had gone, what news of Al and the gang, how was Quilley and had they discussed future parts, had she auditioned for the movie yet, and was there anything she needed?--often for half an hour or more. At first Charlie resented Cathy as a diminution of her relationship with Joseph, but gradually she came to look forward to her chats because Cathy turned out to possess a nice line in senior wit and a great deal of earthy wisdom. Charlie had a picture of somebody warm hearted and detached and possibly Canadian: one of those unshockable lady-shrinks she used to visit at the Tavistock Clinic after she was expelled from school and thought she might be going bananas. And this was clever of Charlie, for though Miss Bach was American and not Canadian, her family had been doctors for generations.
The house in Hampstead that Kurtz had rented for the watchers was very large, set in a quiet backwater favoured by the Finchley driving schools. Its owners, at the suggestion of their good friend Marty from Jerusalem, had tiptoed off to Marlow, but their house remained a garrison of hushed and intellectual elegance. There were pictures by Nolde in the drawing-room and a signed photograph of Thomas Mann in the conservatory, and a cage-bird that sang when you wound it up, and a library with cracking leather chairs, and a music room with a Bechstein grand. There was ping-pong in the basement and at the back a tangled garden with a crumbling grey tennis court too far gone, so the kids invented a new game for it, a kind of tennis-golf to accommodate its bunkers. At the front was a tiny gatehouse, and that was where they put their notices saying "Hebraic and Humanist Study Group, Students and Staff Only," which in Hampstead did not raise an eyebrow.