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.
The old impulse came, unwelcome, to go with him to the theatre. Suppressed. But returned. Sit with him and see the one commanding on the stage. What for? Would this resolve, she is Charlotte not Charlie.
Buried under the weight of books, there came out — Charlie said, ‘Let’s see the play that’s had such rave reviews, I’ll get tickets.’ He didn’t demur, forgotten who Randell Harris was; might be.
He led to the bar afterwards talking of the play with considering interest — he’d not seen Beckett for ages, it wore well, not outdated. She didn’t want to be there, she urged it was late, no, no, she didn’t want a drink, the bar was too crowded, but he persuaded gently, we won’t stay, I’m thirsty, need a beer. The leading actor was in a spatter of applause over the drinks as he moved about the salute of admiration. He talked through clusters of others and arrived.
‘Rendall, my father.’
‘Congratulations. Wonderful performance, the critics don’t exaggerate.’
The actor — he dismissed the laudation as if he had enough of that from people who don’t understand what such an interpretation of Vladimir or Estragon involves, the (what was that word he always used) risk. ‘I didn’t feel right tonight. I was missing a beat. Charlotte, you’ve seen me do better, hey, m’darling.’ Her father picked up his glass but didn’t drink. ‘Last time I saw you was in the play set in an asylum, Laila de Morne was Charlotte Corday.’
Her father Told.
‘Of course you always get chalked up in the critics’ hierarchy by how you play the classics, but I’m more fascinated by the new stuff, movement-theatre, parts I can take from zero. I’ve sat in that bathtub too many times, knifed by Charlotte Cordays…’ The projection of the disarmingly self-deprecating laugh.
She spoke what she had not Told, not yet found the right time and situation to say to him. ‘Laila de Morne is my mother.’ No more to be discarded in the past tense than the performance of the de Sade asylum where she was Charlotte Corday to his Marat. ‘That’s how I was named.’ ‘Well, you’re sure not a Charlotte to carry a knife, spoil your beautiful aura with that, frighten off the men around you.’ Peaked eyebrows as if, ruefully, one of them, a trick from the actors’ repertoire contradicted by a momentary — hardly to be received — entrance of those eyes to her own, diamonds black with the intensity it was his talent to summon, a stage-prop claim made, to be at once released, at will.