Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (13 page)

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, shame 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 meandering 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.

Now what sort of a conundrum is that supposed to be? She was produced by what was that long term, parthenogenesis, she just growed, like Topsy? You know that's not true.

He arranged for her seat as his guest for the rest of the repertoire in which he was playing the lead. It was taken for
granted she'd come backstage afterwards. Sometimes he included her in other cast gatherings ‘among people your own age' obliquely acknowledging his own, old enough to be her father. Cool. He apparently had no children, adult or otherwise, didn't mention any. Was he gay? Now? Does a man change sexual preference, or literally embrace both. As he played so startlingly, electric with the voltage of life the beings created only in words by Shakespeare, Strindberg, Brecht, Beckett—oh you name them from the volumes holding down the letter telling of that Saturday. ‘You seem to understand what I—we—actors absolutely risk, kill themselves, trying to reach the ultimate identity in what's known as a character, beating ourselves down to let the creation take over. Haven't you ever wanted to have a go, yourself? Thought about acting?' She told: ‘I know an actuary is the absolute antithesis of all that. I don't have the talent.' He didn't make some comforting effort. Didn't encourage magnanimously, why not have a go. ‘Maybe you're right. Nothing like the failure of an actor. It isn't like many other kinds of failure, it doesn't just happen inside you, it happens before an audience. Better be yourself. You're a very interesting young woman, depths there, I don't know if you know it—but I think you do.'

Like every sexually attractive young woman she was experienced in the mostly pathetic drive ageing men have towards them. Some of the men are themselves attractive either because they have somehow kept the promise of vigour, mouths with their own teeth, tight muscular buttocks in their jeans, no jowls, fine eyes that have seen much to impart, or because they're well-known, distinguished, well yes, even rich. This actor whose enduring male beauty is an attribute of his talent, he is probably more desirable than when he was a novice Marat
in Peter Weiss's play; all the roles he has taken, he's emerged from the risk with a strongly endowed identity. Although there is no apparent reason why he should not be making the usual play towards this young woman, there's no sign that he is doing so. She knows the moves; they are not being made.

The attention is something else. Between them. Is this a question or a fact? They wouldn't know, would they. The other, simple thing is he welcomes her like a breeze come in with this season abroad, in his old home town; seems to refresh him. Famous people have protégés; even if it's that he takes, as the customary part of his multiply responsive public reception. He's remarked, sure to be indulged, he wants to go back to an adventure, a part of the country he'd been thrilled by as a child, wants to climb there where there were great spiky plants with red candelabras—it was the wrong season, these wouldn't be in bloom in this, his kind of season, but she'd drive him there; he took up the shy offer at once and left the cast without him for two days when the plays were not those in which he had his lead. They slipped and scrambled up the peaks he remembered and at the lodge in the evening he was recognised, took this inevitably, autographed bits of paper and quipped privately with her that he was mistaken by some for a pop star he hadn't heard of but ought to have. His unconscious vitality invigorated people around him wherever he was. No wonder he was such an innovative director; the critics wrote that classic plays, even the standbys of Greek drama, were re-imagined as if this was the way they were meant to be and never had been before. It wasn't in his shadow, she was: in his light. As if she were re-imagined by herself. He was wittily critical at other people's expense and so with him she was freed to think—say—what she realised she found ponderous in
those she worked with, the predictability among her set of friends she usually tolerated without stirring them up. Not that she saw much of friends at present. She was part of the cast of the backstage scene. A recruit to the family of actors in the coffee shop at lunch, privy to their gossip, their bantering with the actor-director who drew so much from them, roused their eager talent. The regular Charlie dinners with her father, often postponed, were subdued, he caught this from her; there wasn't much for them to talk about. Unless she were to want to show off her new associations.