In truth, Dorothy was a deeply interesting woman but she didn’t look like one: she looked like sex. If two frustrated young men with a little artistic flair had thought up the woman of their desires and drawn her on paper she might have looked like Dorothy: hair long and blonde to the point of being white, of medium height, a waist tinier than that of a young boy, breasts bigger than was really plausible on such a tiny frame, legs improbably long for someone under six foot tall. She shouldn’t have been possible but there she was.
She had a corrosive wit, kept mostly under control, born out of her sensitivity, which was considerable. Her intelligence and emotional insight had been set on the wrong path by a dreadful event when she was nine years old. Her older sister, beloved by all, had gone on a picnic to a nearby lake with family friends, where she had drowned when a boat capsized. On hearing the news the dead child’s mother, not realizing her youngest was standing behind her, called out: ‘Why couldn’t it have been Dorothy?’
Even an emotional clod would have been marked for life by this and Dorothy was very far from that. But the wittiness she developed to deflect the world often outraged it and she was constantly having to apologize for this or that wounding remark. She had married young but within two years her husband had been killed in a war vital to the survival of the nation for reasons that no one could now remember. As a person from a family of minor importance she had naturally been visited by minor royalty, a matriarch set aside for state condolences. She’d been asked by her regal visitor if there was anything she could do for her – the proper answer being no.
‘Get me another husband.’ It was out before she knew it. It resulted in the appalled matriarch giving her an angry telling off for making light of her late husband’s tragic sacrifice.
‘In that case,’ said an unrepentant Dorothy, ‘how about going and getting me a pork pie from the shop on the corner?’
It was this outrage that led to Dorothy being ostracized from all but the margins of society and ending up, after many adventures on the wilder shores of love, as the greatest and least perpendicular of all the great horizontals of the four quarters. It was this reputation that brought her to the chair opposite Bose Ikard.
‘So I want you to charm the little monster.’
‘Won’t it be too obvious?’
‘That’s really your problem. I can have you introduced innocently enough, then it’s up to you.’ He passed a file over to her. ‘Read this.’ He began offering his opinions but she was more concerned with finding room in her vanity bag for the file, slowly emptying its contents onto the desk in front of her in order to create room. Eventually the file was squeezed into place and she began refilling the bag with the objects she had put on the table. Last among them was an extremely old, dried-up apple that had been lurking unseen at the bottom of the bag for over a week. Bose Ikard was staring at the apple with disapprovaclass="underline" it hardly spoke of her reputation for sophisticated entrapment. ‘Don’t mind that,’ she said, seizing the ancient apple with mock delight. ‘It was given to me by my nanny when I was a little girl and I can’t bear to part with it.’
Cale’s visit to Potsdam had produced an upsurge in morale among the troops and a renewed determination to fight that diminished in power in proportion to the distance from Potsdam. It gave IdrisPukke time to create his troupe of imposters but that was all. Getting actors wasn’t difficult but getting ones that could be relied on to keep their mouths shut was more of a problem, as were the costumes. After the first day of try-outs it was clear that they had a major difficulty: the actors were too small, which is to say they were normal height, but Cale’s dream of a powerful cloaked figure standing on a lonely mountain crag to encourage the faint-hearted came up against a practical snag: once the costumed actors were at any kind of distance – a precaution necessary not to give the game away – no detail about them could be recognized: not the grand gestures, the menacing hood or even whether they were kneeling or standing. They were just black specks and, worse, black specks against a black background.
‘We have to make everything big,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Big costume, big gestures, big everything. A pantomime larger than life.’
Within a week he’d hired every theatrical fabricator in Spanish Leeds and for two hundred miles around and built several giant costumes with stilts and extended arms and huge shoulders and enormous heads.
‘The head’s about right,’ said Vague Henri to Kleist, when they were shown it. ‘Not sure about the rest of it.’
‘Kiss my ears,’ replied Cale.
‘It’s got to be like this or we’ll have to think again.’
In fact, IdrisPukke did both. The puppet Cale could be made to work in the right place, with fires behind it to create enough light to see it and with puppeteers to wave his ten-foot-tall cassock about so it looked as if he were braving great winds. But they also had to go back to a version of their first model, with padded shoulders and false arms, made by a man who usually built the mannequins for the magician’s trick of sawing the woman in half using imitation legs. ‘In pantomime,’ he said, ‘everything has to be big, it’s true, but it’s got to be the right kind of big.’
This second version had to be viewed from a much closer proximity but in the twilight where it couldn’t be seen so clearly. Best of all for showing it off was the magic hour, the time before evening falls when the light allows even the crudest shape to take on the glow and power of another world.
‘Why,’ said Cale, ‘is everything always more difficult than you think? Why is stuff never less difficult?’
Feeling ill and irritated he arrived at that evening’s festivities in a very bad mood. That the entire evening had been set up to try to discover whether or not he was dead made him even more snaky. ‘If they’re looking for an excuse to take me on, let them try.’ He had taken recently to muttering to himself. This time it was loud enough to attract Vague Henri, who was in the next room writing a letter about boots.
Vague Henri put his head round the door.
‘Did you say something?’
‘No.’
‘I heard you talking.’
‘I might have been singing. So what?’
‘It wasn’t singing, it was talking. You were talking to yourself again. First sign of madness, mate.’
That night Bose Ikard made a point of re-introducing Cale to the comparatively few people who had spoken directly to him, all of whom had been instructed to ask him as many complicated questions as possible. His success in drawing Cale out reached its height when he was introduced to the King – his longest response to the supreme head of state was, ‘Your Majesty.’ For the rest it was a single word or a shrug. In desperation, Bose Ikard brought in Dorothy. She entered the room and it was no exaggeration to say that there was something like a gasp at her appearance. She was wearing a red velvet dress cut shamefully low and red velvet gloves that covered her arms a good deal more than the dress covered her breasts. Her waist was cinched skinny-boy-thin, the skirt of the dress was decorous enough when she was still, but when she moved it revealed her left leg almost to her hip. With her crimson lips and white-blonde hair she should have looked like an expensive tart – but she could carry it off in a way that simply caught you in the chest, whimpering with desire. And this was an effect by no means limited to the men. She stopped and talked to a few of the most important people in the room, her lovely smile revealing teeth like little pearls, all except one of them that was a little snagged, an odd proportion, which only made her seem more beautiful. She stopped for a little while to talk to Bose Ikard and positioned herself so that Cale could see and appreciate her gorgeousness. Then, when she noticed he had observed her two or three times while pretending to look indifferently around the room, she walked directly up to him. She’d decided that bold would work best with him, bold and beautiful.