Meanwhile they loved her. Indisputably. And Charlie, for all that she denied it, loved them in return.
Whereas Joseph, as they called him, was not part of their family at all. Not even, like Charlie, a splinter group of one. He had a self-sufficiency that to weaker souls was a kind of courage by itself. He was friendless but uncomplaining, the stranger who needed nobody, not even them. Just a towel, a book, a water-bottle, and his own small foxhole in the sand. Charlie alone knew he was a ghost.
Her first local sighting of him occurred the morning after her big fight with Alastair, which she lost on a straight knockout. There was a central meekness in Charlie somewhere that seemed to attract her fatally to bullies, and her bully of the day was a six-foot drunken Scot known to the family as ‘Long Al’, who menaced a lot, and quoted inaccurately from the anarchist Bakunin. Like Charlie, he was red-headed and fair-skinned, with hard blue eyes. When they rose shining out of the water together, they were like people of a separate race from anyone else around, and their sultry expressions advised you they knew it. When they set off abruptly for the farmhouse, hand in hand, speaking to no one, you felt the urgency of their desire like a pain you had endured but seldom shared. But when they fought – which had happened that previous evening – their rancour cast such a blight over tender souls like Willy and Pauly that they slipped away until the storm was over. And on this occasion so had Charlie: she had crept off to a corner of the loft to nurse her wounds. Waking sharply at six, however, she decided to take herself for a solitary bathe, then walk into town and treat herself to an English-language newspaper and breakfast. It was while she was buying her Herald Tribune that the apparition occurred: a clear case of psychic phenomenon.
He was the man in the red blazer. He was standing right behind her at that moment, choosing himself a paperback, ignoring her. No red blazer this time, but a tee-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Yet the same man without a doubt. The same cropped black hair frosted at the tips and running to a devil’s point at the centre of the forehead; the same brown and courteous stare, respectful of other people’s passions, that had fixed on her like a dark lantern from the front row of the stalls of the Barrie Theatre in Nottingham for half a day: first the matinée, then the evening performance, eyes only for Charlie as they followed every gesture she made. A face that was neither softened nor hardened by time, but was finite as a print. A face that to Charlie’s eye spelt one strong and constant reality, in contrast to an actor’s many masks.
She had been playing Saint Joan, and going nearly mad about the Dauphin, who was miles over the top and upstaging every speech she made. So it was not till the final tableau that she first became aware of him sitting among the schoolchildren at the front of the half-empty auditorium. If the lighting hadn’t been so dim, she probably wouldn’t have spotted him even then, but their lighting rig was stuck in Derby waiting to be sent on, so there was none of the usual glare to swamp her vision. She had taken him at first for a schoolteacher, but when the kids left, he stayed in his seat reading what she took to be the text of the play, or perhaps the Introduction. And when the curtain rose again for the evening show, there he was still, in that same central spot, his placid unresponsive gaze locked on her exactly as before; and when the final curtain fell, she resented it for taking him away from her.
A few days later, in York, when she had forgotten him, she could have sworn she saw him again, but she wasn’t sure; the stage lighting was too good, she couldn’t penetrate the haze. Nor did the stranger stay in his place between shows. All the same, she could have sworn it was the same face, front row centre, raptly upturned to her, and the same red blazer too. Was he a critic? A producer? An agent? A film director? Was he from the City company, perhaps, that had taken over the sponsorship of their troupe from the Arts Council? He was too lean, too watchful in his immobility, for a mere professional money-man who was checking out his firm’s investment. As to critics, agents, and the rest, it was a miracle if they stayed for one act, let alone two consecutive performances. And when she saw him on a third occasion – or thought she did – just before leaving for her holiday, on the very last night of their tour, in fact, posted at the stage door of the little East End theatre, she had half a mind to bowl straight up to him and ask him outright what his business was – whether he was an embryonic Ripper, an autograph-hunter, or just a normal sex maniac like the rest of us. But his air of studious righteousness had held her back.
The sight of him now, therefore – standing not a yard from her, seemingly unaware of her presence, contemplating the display of books with the same solemn interest that he had only days before been lavishing upon herself – threw her into an extraordinary state of flurry. She turned to him, she caught his unflustered glance, and for a second she stared at him a lot more fiercely than he had ever stared at her. And she had the advantage of dark glasses, which she had put on to hide her bruise. Seen so close, he struck her as older than she had imagined, leaner and more marked. She thought he could do with a good sleep and wondered whether he had jet-lag, for there was a downward settlement to the edges of his eyes. Yet he offered not a flicker of recognition or excitement in return. Thrusting the Herald Tribune back into its rest, Charlie beat a swift retreat to the safety of a waterfront taverna.
I’m mad, she thought as she lifted her trembling coffee cup to her mouth. I’m making it all up. It’s his double. I shouldn’t have swallowed that bloody happy-pill Lucy gave me to cheer me up after Long Al belted me. She had read somewhere that the sense of déjà vu was the consequence of a lapse in communication between brain and eye. But when she glanced down the road in the direction she had come from, there he sat, perceptible to sight and intellect alike, at the next taverna along, wearing a peaked white golfing cap tipped steeply downward to shade his eyes, while he read his English paperback: Conversations with Allende, by Debray. She’d thought only yesterday of buying it herself.
He’s come to collect my soul, she thought as she swung jauntily past him in order to demonstrate her immunity. Yet when did I ever promise him he could have it?
The same afternoon, sure enough, he took up his post on the beach, not sixty feet from the family encampment. Wearing a pair of prim monk’s bathing trunks, black, and carrying a tin water-bottle from which he occasionally took frugal sips, as if the next oasis were a day’s march off. Never watching, never paying the slightest heed, reading his Debray from under the shade of his baggy white golf hat. Yet following every move she made – she knew it, if only by the pitch and stillness of his handsome head. Of all the beaches on Mykonos, he had chosen theirs. Of all the places on their beach, he had lighted on the one high point among the dunes that commanded every approach, whether she was taking a swim or fetching Al another bottle of retsina from the taverna. From his raised foxhole he could pick her off at leisure, and there was not a damned thing she could do in return to dislodge him. To tell Long Al was to expose herself to ridicule and worse; she had no intention of giving him such a golden chance to pour scorn on yet another of her fantasies. To tell anyone else was no different from telling Al: he would hear of it within the day. She had no solution but to hug her secret to herself, which was what she wanted.
Therefore she did nothing, and so did he, but she knew that he was waiting, all the same; she could feel the patient discipline with which he counted off the hours. Even when he lay as dead, a mysterious alertness seemed to wink from his lithe brown body, carried to her by the sun. Sometimes the tension seemed to snap in him, and he would leap suddenly to his feet, remove his hat, stroll gravely down his dune to the water like a tribesman without his spear, and dive in soundlessly, hardly troubling the water’s skin. She would wait; then still wait. He had drowned, without a doubt. Till at last, when she had given him up for good, he would surface far across the bay, swimming in a leisurely overarm freestyle as if he had miles to go, his cropped black head glistening like a seal’s. There were motorboats careering about, but he ignored them. There were girls, but his head n
ever turned for them – she watched to see. And after his swim again, the slow, methodical succession of physical exercises, before he replaced his tilted golf hat and settled once more to Allende and Debray.
Who owns him? she wondered helplessly. Who writes his lines and gives him his directions? He was on stage for her, just as she had been for him in England. He was a trouper like herself. With that scorching sun trembling between sky and sand, she could watch his honed, mature body for minutes on end, using it as the target for her excited speculations. You to me, she thought; me to you; these children do not understand. But when lunchtime came and they all trailed past his castle to the taverna, Charlie was enraged to see Lucy detach her arm from Robert’s and give a tart’s wave at him, sticking out her hip.
‘Isn’t he fabulous?’ said Lucy loudly. ‘I’d have him with my salad any day.’
‘Me too,’ said Willy, louder still. ‘Wouldn’t I, Pauly?’
But he ignored them. In the afternoon, Al led her up to the farmhouse where they made fierce, unaffectionate love. When they returned to the beach in the early evening and he was gone, she was unhappy because she had been unfaithful to her secret man. She wondered whether she should comb the night-spots for him. Failing to communicate with him by day, she decided he was nocturnal in his habits.
Next morning she would not go down to the beach. In the night, the strength of her fixation had first amused, then scared her, and she woke determined to break it. Lying beside Al’s sleeping hulk, she had imagined herself wildly in love with someone she had not spoken to, taking him in all kinds of inventive ways, dumping Al and running away with him for ever. At sixteen, such daftness was permissible; at twenty-six indecent. To dump Al was one thing, and it must happen sooner rather than later. To be chasing a dream in a white golf hat was another, even on holiday in Mykonos. So she repeated her routine of yesterday, but this time – to her disappointment – he did not pop up behind her at the bookshop, nor did he drink coffee at the taverna next door to hers; nor, when she went window-shopping in the boutiques along the waterfront, did his reflection appear beside her own as she kept hoping it would. Joining the family for lunch at the taverna, she learned that in her absence they had christened him Joseph.
There was nothing exceptional to this; the family awarded names to everyone who caught their eye, usually from plays or films, and the ethic required that, once approved, they be generally adopted. Their Bosola from The Duchess of Malfi, for instance, was a restive Swedish shipping magnate with a sliding eye for flesh, their Ophelia a mountainous Frankfurt housewife who sported a pink-flowered bathing cap and little else. But Joseph, they now declared, was to be so named for his Semitic looks and for the striped coat of many colours that he wore over his black trunks when he strode to their beach, or left it. Joseph also for his standoffish attitude to fellow mortals and his look of being the chosen one to the detriment of others not so favoured. Joseph the despised of his brethren, aloof with his water-bottle and his book.
From her place at the table, Charlie looked on grimly as their crude annexation of her secret property gathered way. Alastair, who felt threatened as soon as anyone was praised without his blessing, was in the act of filling his glass from Robert’s tankard.
‘Joseph my arse,’ he announced boldly. ‘He’s a stinking poof like Willy and Pauly here. He’s cruising, that’s what he’s doing. Him and his bedroom eyes, I’d like to bash his face in. I will too.’
But Charlie was already heartily sick of Alastair that day, sick of being his Fascist body-slave and his earth-mother both at once. She was not normally as abrasive as this, but her growing distaste for Alastair was warring with her feelings of guilt about Joseph.
‘If he’s a poof, why should he cruise, you pinhead?’ she demanded savagely, swinging round on him to twist her mouth in ugly anger. ‘Two bloody beaches up, he can take his pick of half the queens in Greece. So can you.’
Acknowledging this incautious advice, Alastair dealt her a heavy slap on the side of her face, making it go first white, then scarlet.
Their speculations continued into the afternoon. Joseph was a voyeur; he was a prowler, a flasher, a murderer, a breather, a drag artist, a Tory. But it was left to Alastair, as usual, to provide the definitive accolade: ‘He’s a bloody jerker!’ he bellowed with a sneer out of the corner of his mouth, and gave a suck to his front teeth to underline his shrewdness of perception.
But Joseph himself acted as oblivious to these insults as even Charlie could have wished; so much so that by mid-afternoon, when the sun and the pot had lulled them into near stupidity – all but Charlie, once again – they decided he was cool, which was their ultimate compliment. And for this dramatic change, it was Alastair, once more, who led the pack. Joseph would not be shaken off by them and he could not be pulled – not by Lucy, not by the lover-boys either. Ergo cool, like Alastair himself. He had his territory and his whole presence said so: nobody drives me, this is where I have pitched camp. Cool again. Bakunin would have given him high marks.
‘He’s cool and I love him,’ Alastair concluded as he thoughtfully stroked Lucy’s silky back, all the way down to the hipband of her bikini, then on again. ‘If he was a woman, I’d know exactly what to do with him. Would I not, Luce?’
The next minute, Lucy was standing up, in that heat the only upright person on the shimmering beach. ‘Who says I can’t pull him?’ she said, climbing out of her bathing dress.
Now Lucy was blonde and broad-hipped and as tempting as an apple. She played barmaids, tarts, and principal boys, but her speciality was teenage nymphomaniacs, and she could pull any fellow just by giving him the eyelash. Knotting a white bathrobe loosely under her breasts, she picked up a wine jug and a plastic beaker and strode across to the foot of the dune, the jug on her head, hips rolling, and thighs peeking, giving her own satirical rendering of a Hollywood Greek goddess. Having scaled the little slope, she knelt beside him on one knee and poured the wine from high up, letting the robe fall open as she did so. Handing him the beaker, she decided to address him in French, or as much of that language as she knew.
‘Aimez-vous?’ asked Lucy.
Joseph showed no awareness of her presence. He turned a page; then he observed her shadow, and only then did he roll onto his side and, after considering her critically with his dark eyes from the shadow of his golf cap, accept the beaker and gravely drink a toast, while from twenty yards away her supporters’ club clapped or made House of Commons growls of fatuous approval.
‘You must be Hera,’ Joseph remarked to Lucy with about as much feeling as if he were reading a map. And it was then that the dramatic discovery was made: he had these scars!
Lucy could scarcely contain herself. The most appealing of them was a neat drill-hole the size of a five-pence piece, like one of those bullet-hole stickers Pauly and Willy had on their Mini, only this one was on the left side of the stomach! You couldn’t see it from a distance, yet when she touched it, it felt all smooth and hard.
‘And you’re Joseph,’ Lucy replied mistily, not knowing who Hera was.
Renewed applause drifted across the sand as Alastair held up his glass and shouted a toast: ‘Joseph! Mr Joseph, sir! Power to your elbow! Sod your envious brothers!’
‘Come and join us, Mr Joseph!’ Robert cried, to be followed by Charlie’s furious order telling him to shut up.
But Joseph didn’t join them. He raised his beaker and it seemed to Charlie’s raging imagination that he raised it to herself particularly, but how could she have registered such a distinction at twenty yards, one man toasting a group? Then he returned to his reading. He didn’t snub them; he didn’t do anything plus or minus, as Lucy put it. He just rolled back onto his tummy and got on with his book, and goodness it really was a bullet-hole, the exit scar was on his back, big as a splat gun! As Lucy went on staring, she realised she was observing not just one wound but a range of them: his arms, scarred along the underparts of the elbow; the islands of hairless and unnatural skin ove
r the backs of the biceps; the vertebrae scoured, she said – ‘like somebody had taken a red-hot piece of wire wool to him’ – maybe somebody had keel-hauled him even? Lucy stayed with him for a bit, pretending to read his book over his shoulder while he turned the pages, but in reality wanting to stroke his spine because his spine, apart from being scarred, was hairy and recessed in a cleft of muscle, her favourite kind of spine. But she didn’t, because, as she explained to Charlie later, having touched him once, she wasn’t sure that he was touchable again. She wondered – said Lucy, with a rare spurt of modesty – whether she ought at least to knock first. It was a phrase that afterwards lodged in Charlie’s mind. Lucy had thought of emptying his water-bottle and filling it with wine, but then he hadn’t really drunk the wine anyway so maybe he liked water better? Eventually she set the jug back on her head and pirouetted languidly home to the family, where she made her breathless report before falling asleep on somebody’s lap. Joseph was deemed cooler than ever.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 8