The letter is formally addressed on the upper left-hand side of the paper to a firm of lawyers, Kaplan McLeod & Partners, and directed to one of them Dear Hamish. Why on earth would Laila want to keep from a dead marriage the sort of business letter a neurologist might have to write on some question of a car accident maybe or non-payment of some patient’s consultation fee or surgery charges. (As if her father’s medical and human ethics would ever lead him to this last . . .) The pages must have got mixed up with the other, personal material at some time. Laila and Charlotte changed apartments frequently during Charlotte’s childhood and adolescence.
The letter is marked ‘Copy’.
‘My wife Laila de Morne is an actress and in the course of pursuing her career has moved in a circle independent of one shared by a couple in marriage. I have always encouraged her to take the opportunities, through contacts she might make, to further her talent. She is a very attractive woman and it was obvious to me that I should have to accept there would be men, certainly among her fellow actors, who would want to be more than admirers. But while she enjoyed the attention, sometimes responded with the general kind of social flirtation, I had no reason to see this as more than natural pleasure in her own looks and talents. She would make fun of these admirers, privately, to me, sharp remarks on their appearance, their pretentions and if they were actors, directors or playwrights, the quality of their work. I knew I had not married a woman who would want to stay home and nurse babies, but from time to time she would bring up the subject, we ought to have a son, she said, for me. Then she would get a new part in a play and this was understandably postponed. After a successful start her career was however not advancing to her expectations, she had not succeeded in getting several roles she had confidently anticipated. She came home elated one night and told me she had a small part in a play accepted for performance overseas in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She had been selected because the leading actor himself, Rendall Harris, had told the casting director she was the most talented of young women in the theatre group. I was happy for her and we gave a farewell party in our house the night before the cast left for the United Kingdom. After Edinburgh she spent some time in London, calling to say how wonderful and necessary it was for her to experience what was happening in theatre there and, I gathered, trying her luck in auditions. Apparently unsuccessfully.
Perhaps she intended not to come back. She did. A few weeks later she told me she had just been to a gynaecologist and confirmed that she was pregnant. I was moved. I took the unlikely luck of conception—I’d assumed when we made love the night of the party she’d taken the usual precautions, we weren’t drunk even if she was triumphant—as a symbol of what would be a change in our perhaps unsuitable marriage. I am a medical specialist, neurological surgeon.
When the child was born it looked like any other red-faced infant but after several months everyone was remarking how the little girl was the image of Laila, the mother. It was one day, a Saturday afternoon when she was kicking and flinging her arms athletically, we were admiring our baby’s progress, her beauty, and I joked “Lucky she doesn’t look like me” that my wife picked her up, away, and told me “She’s not your child.” She’d met someone in Edinburgh. I interrupted with angry questions. No, she prevaricated, all right, London, the affair began in London. The leading actor who had insisted on her playing the small part introduced her to someone there. A few days later she told: it was not “someone” it was the leading actor. He was the father of our girl child. She told this to other people, our friends, as through the press it became news that the actor Rendall Harris was making a big name for himself in plays by Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams.
I couldn’t decide what to believe. I even consulted a colleague in the medical profession about the precise variations in the period of gestation in relation to birth. Apparently it was possible that the conception could have taken place with me, or with the other man a few days before, or after, intercourse with me. There never was any intention expressed by Laila that she would take the child and make her life with the man. She was too proud to let anyone know that the fact probably was that he didn’t want her or the supposed progeny of one of his affairs.
Laila has devoted herself to her acting career and as a result the role of a father has of necessity led to a closer relation than customary with the care of the small girl, now four years old. I am devoted to her and can produce witnesses to the conviction that she would be happiest in my custody.
I hope this is adequate. Let me know if anything more is needed, or if there is too much detail. I’m accustomed to writing reports in medical jargon and thought this should be very different. I don’t suppose I’ve a hope in hell of getting Charlie, Laila will put all her dramatic skills into swearing she isn’t mine.’
THAT Saturday. It landed in the apartment looted by the present filled it with blasting amazement, the presence of the past. That Saturday just as it had come to him. Charlotte/Charlie (what was she) received exactly as he had, what Laila (yes, her mother, giving birth is proof) had told.
How to recognise something not in the vocabulary of your known emotions. Shock is like a ringing in the ears, to stop it you snatch back to the first page, read the letter again. It said what is said. This sinking collapse from within, from flared breathless nostrils down under breasts, stomach, legs and hands, hands that not only feel passively but go out to grasp what can’t be. Dismay that feeble-sounding word has this ghastly meaning. What do you do with something you’ve been Told? Something that now is there in the gut of your existence. Run to him. Thrust his letter at him, at her—but she’s out of it, she’s escaped in smoke from the crematorium. And she’s the one who really knows—knew.
Of course he didn’t get custody. He was awarded the divorce decree but the mother was given the four-year-old child. It is natural, particularly in the case of a small girl, for a child to live with the mother. In spite of this ‘deposition’ of his in which he is denied paternity he paid maintenance for the child. The expensive boarding school, the drama and dance classes, even those holidays in the Seychelles, three times in Spain, once in France, once in Greece, with the mother. Must have paid generously. He was a neurologist more successful in his profession than the child’s mother was on the stage. But this couldn’t be the reason for the generosity.
Charlotte/Charlie couldn’t think about that either. She folded the two sheets, fumbled absently for an envelope they should have been in, weren’t, and with them in her hand left the boxes, the letters, Laila’s apartment, locked, behind the door.
HE can only be asked: why he’s been a father, loving.
The return of his Saturday, it woke her at three, four in the morning when she had kept it at bay through the activities of the day, work, navigating alone in her car the city’s crush, mustn’t be distracted, leisure occupied in the company of friends who haven’t been Told. She and her father had one of their regular early dinners at his favourite restaurant, went on to a foreign movie by a director whose work she admired and the Saturday couldn’t be spoken: was unreal.
In the dark when the late-night traffic was over and the dawn traffic hadn’t begun: silence.
The reason.
He believed in the one chance of conception that single night of the party. Laila’s farewell. Even though his friend expert in biological medicine said, implying if one didn’t know the stage of the woman’s fertility cycle you couldn’t be sure, the conception might have achieved itself in other intercourse a few days before or even after that unique night. I am Charlie, his.
The reason.
Another night-thought; angry mood—who do they think they are deciding who I am to suit themselves, her vanity, she at least can bear the child of an actor with a career ahead in the theatre she isn’t attaining for herself, he in wounded macho pride refusing to accept another male’s potency. His seed has to have been the winner.
And in the morning, before the distractions of the day take over, sham
e on herself, Charlie, for thinking so spitefully, cheaply about him.
The next reason that offers itself is hardly less unjust, offensive—confusedly hurtful to her, as whatever it is that comes, called up by her. He paid one kind of maintenance, he paid another kind of maintenance, loving her, to keep up the conventions before what he sees as the world. The respectable doctors in their white coats who have wives to accompany them to medical council dinners. If he had married again it would have been a woman like these. Laila was Laila. Never risk another.
The letter that didn’t belong to anyone’s daughter was moved from place to place, in a drawer under sweaters, an Indian box where she kept earrings and bracelets, behind books of plays, Euripides and Racine, Shaw to Brecht, Dario Fo, Miller, Artaud, Beckett, and of course Weiss’s annotated Marat/Sade; Charlotte’s inheritance, never read.
When you are in many minds, the contention makes someone who has been not quite what one wanted, who doesn’t count, the only person to be Told. In bed, yet another night, after love-making when the guards go down with the relaxed physical tensions. Dale, the civil rights lawyer who didn’t act in the mess of divorce litigation unless this infringed Constitutional Rights, told in turn of the letter: ‘Tear it up.’ When she appealed, it was not just a piece of paper—‘Have a DNA test.’ How to do that without taking the whole cache that was the past to the father. ‘Get a snip of his hair.’ All that’s needed to go along with a sample of her blood. Like who was it in the bible cutting off Samson’s beard. How was she supposed to do that, stealing upon the father in his sleep somewhere?
Tear it up. Easy advice from someone who had understood nothing. She did not.
But a circumstance came about as if somehow summoned . . . Of course, it was fortuitous . . . A distinguished actor-director had been invited by a local theatre to direct a season of classical and avant-garde plays, taking several lead roles himself. It was his first return to the country, the city where he was born and had left to pursue his career, he said in newspaper interviews and on radio, television—how long?—oh twenty-five years ago. Rendall Harris. Newspaper photographs: an actor’s assumed face for many cameras, handsomely enough late-middle-aged, defiant slight twist to the mouth to emphasise character, eyebrows heightened together amusedly just above nose, touch of white in short sideburns. Eyes are not clearly to be made out on newsprint. On television, alive; something of the upper body, gestures coming into view, the close-up of changing expressions in the face, the actual meeting with deep-set long eyes, grey darkening by some deliberate intensity almost flashing-black, to yours, the viewer’s. What did she expect, a recognition. Hers of him. His, out of the lit-up box, of her. An actor’s performance face.
She can’t ignore the stir at the idea that the man named by her mother is about in the city. Laila was Laila. Yes. If she had not gone up in smoke would he have met her, remembered her. Did he ever see the baby, the child was two before he went off for twenty-five years. What does a two-year-old remember. Has she ever seen this man in a younger self, been taken in by these strikingly interrogative eyes; received.
She was accustomed to go to the theatre with friends of the lawyer-lover although he preferred films, one of his limited tastes she could at least share. Every day—every night—she thought about the theatre. Not with Dale. Not to sit beside any of her friends. No. For a wild recurrent impulse there was the temptation to be there with her father, who did not know she knew, had been Told as he was that Saturday, passed on to her in the letter under volumes of plays. Laila was Laila. For him and for her.
She went alone when Rendall Harris was to play one of the lead roles. There had been ecstatic notices. He was Laurence Olivier reincarnated for a new, the twenty-first, century, a deconstructed style of performance. She was far back in the box office queue when a board went up, House Full. She booked for another night, online, an aisle seat three rows from the proscenium. She found herself at the theatre, for some reason hostile. Ridiculous. She wanted to disagree with the critics. That’s what it was about.
Rendall Harris—how do you describe a performance that manages to create for his audience the wholeness, the life of a man, not just in ‘character’ for the duration of the play, but what he might have been before those events chosen by the playwright and how he’ll be, alive, continuing after. Rendall Harris is an extraordinary actor: man. Her palms were up in the hands applauding like a flight of birds rising. When he came out to take the calls summoning the rest of the cast round him she wasn’t in his direct eye-line as she would have been if she’d asked for a middle of the row seat.
She went to every performance in which he was billed in the cast. A seat in the middle of the second row, the first would be too obvious.
If she was something other than a groupie, she was among the knot of autograph seekers, one night, who hung about the foyer hoping he might leave the theatre that way. He did appear making for the bar with the theatre director and for a moment under the arrest of programmes thrust at him happened to encounter her eyes as she stood back from his fans—a smile of self-deprecating amusement meant for anybody in the line of vision, but that one was she.
The lift of his face, his walk, his repertoire of gestures, the oddities of lapses in character-cast expression on stage that she secretly recognised as himself appearing, became almost familiar to her. As if she somehow knew him and these intimacies knew her. Signals. If invented, they were very like conviction. The more she ignored it: kept on going to take her place in the second row. At the box office there was the routine question, D’you have a season ticket? Suppose that was to have been bought when the Rendall Harris engagement was announced.
She thought to herself, a letter. Owed it to him for the impression his roles made upon her. His command of the drama of living, the excitement of being there with him. With the fourth or fifth version up in her mind, the next was written. Mailed to the theatre it most likely was glanced through in his dressing room or back at his hotel among other ‘tributes’ and either would be forgotten or might be taken back to London for his collection of the memorabilia boxes it seems actors needed. But with him, there was that wry sideways tilt to the photographed mouth.
Of course she neither expected nor had any acknowledgement.
After a performance one night she bumped into some old friends of Laila’s, actors who had come to the memorial gathering, and they insisted on her joining them in the bar. When Rendall Harris’s unmistakable head appeared through the late crowd, they created a swift current past backs to embrace him, draw him with their buddie the theatre director to room made at the table where she had been left among the bottles and glasses. For her this was—he had to be taken as an exchange of bar-table greetings; the friends, in the excitement of having Rendall Harris among themselves forgot to introduce her as Laila’s daughter, Laila who’d played Corday in that early production where’d he’d been Marat; perhaps they have forgotten Laila, best thing with the dead if you want to get on with your life and ignore the hazards, like that killer taxi, around you. Her letter was no more present than the other one under the volumes of plays. A fresh acquaintance, just the meeting of a nobody with the famous. Not entirely, even from the famous actor’s side. As the talk lobbed back and forth, sitting almost opposite her the man thought it friendly, from his special level of presence, to toss something to a young woman no-one was including, and easily found what came to mind: ‘Aren’t you the one who’s been sitting bang in the middle of the second row, several times lately?’ And then they joined in laughter, a double confession, hers of absorbed concentration on him, his of being aware of it or at least becoming so at the sight, here, of someone out there whose attention had caught him. He asked across the voices of others which plays in the repertoire she’s enjoyed best, what criticisms she had of those she didn’t think much of. He named a number she hadn’t seen; her response made clear another confession—she’d seen only those in which he played a part. When the party broke up and all were meander
ing their way, with stops and starts in back-chat and laughter, to the foyer, a shift in progress brought gesturing Rendall Harris’s back right in front of her—he turned swiftly, lithely as a young man and, must have been impulse in one accustomed to be natural, charming in spite of professional guard, spoke as if he had been thinking of it: ‘You’ve missed a lot, you know, so flattering for me, avoiding the other plays. Come some night, or there’s a Sunday afternoon performance of a Wole Soyinka you ought to see. We’ll have a bite in the restaurant before I take you to your favourite seat. I’m particularly interested in audience reaction to the big chances I’ve taken directing this play.’
Rendall Harris sits beside her through the performance, now and then with the authority to whisper some comment, drawing her attention to this and that. She’s told him, over lasagne at lunch, that she’s an actuary, that creature of calculation, couldn’t be further from qualification to judge the art of actors’ interpretation or that of a director. ‘You know that’s not true.’ Said with serious inattention. Tempting to accept that he senses something in her blood, sensibility. From her mother. It is or is not the moment to tell him she is Laila’s daughter, although she carries Laila’s husband’s name, Laila was not known by.
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black Page 9