"Well, Charlie, yes, hullo, how do you do?" he said calmly, and they shook hands.
A stage hiatus, then-as though it had at last been let loose from its captivity and was flying free for the first time-a full-scale smile, young as a schoolboy's and twice as infectious. "But I thought Charlie was a boy's name?" he objected.
"Well, I'm a girl," said Charlie, and everybody laughed, Charlie included, before his luminous smile withdrew just as suddenly to the strict lines of its confinement.
For the few days that were left to the family, Joseph now became their mascot. In the relief of Alastair's departure, they adopted him wholeheartedly. Lucy propositioned him; he declined, courteously, even regretfully. She passed the sad news to Pauly, who met with a somewhat firmer rejection: further impressive proof that he was sworn to chastity. Until Alastair's departure, the family had been contemplating a slackening of their lives together. Their little marriages were breaking up, fresh combinations were not saving them; Lucy thought she might be pregnant, but then Lucy often did, and with reason. The great political debates had died for want of impulse, since the most they really knew was that the System was against them, and that they were against the System; but in Mykonos the System is a little hard to find, particularly when it has flown you there at its own expense. At night in the farmhouse, over bread and tomatoes and olive oil and retsina, they had begun to talk nostalgically of rain and cold days in London, and streets where you could smell the breakfast bacon cooking on Sunday mornings. Now suddenly exit Alastair and enter Joseph to shake up the pieces and give a new perspective. They embraced him avidly. Not content with commandeering his company on the beach and in the taverna, they made an evening for him at home, a Josephabend, as they called it, and Lucy, in her role of mother-to-be, produced paper plates, taramasalata, cheese, and fruit. Feeling herself exposed to him by Alastair's departure and frightened by her own disordered feelings, Charlie alone held back.
"He's a forty-year-old fraud, you idiots. Can't you see! You can't, can you? You're such a pack of freaked-out frauds yourselves, you literally can't see!"
They were puzzled by her. What had become of her old generosity of spirit? How could he be a fraud, they argued, when he wasn't claiming to be anything in the first place? Come on, Chas, give him a break! But she wouldn't. In the taverna, a natural sitting order developed at the long table, where Joseph by popular will quietly presided at the centre, empathising, listening with his eyes, yet saying remarkably little. But Charlie, if she came at all, sat fretting or fooling as far from him as possible, despising him for his accessibility. Joseph reminded her of her father, she told Pauly, in what was supposed to be a dramatic insight. He had the same creepy charm exactly: but bent, Pauly, just completely bent all through; she'd seen it at a glance, but don't say anything.
Pauly swore he would not.
Charlie's just having one of her things about men, Pauly explained to Joseph that evening; it wasn't personal with Charlie, it was political-her bloody mother was a sort of witless conformist, and her father was this incredible crook, he said.
"A crooked father?" said Joseph, with a smile that suggested he knew the genus well. "How glamorous. Tell me about him, I insist."
So Pauly did, and drew pleasure from entrusting Joseph with a confidence. And in this he was not alone, for when lunch was over, or dinner, there would always be two or three who lingered to discuss their theatrical talents with their new friend, or their love-affairs, or the great agony of their artistic condition. If their confessions threatened to lack spice, they added some from their imaginations in order not to be dull for him. Joseph gravely heard them out, gravely nodded, gravely laughed a little; but he never offered advice, nor, as they soon discovered to their great astonishment and admiration, did he traffic information: what went in, stayed. Better still, he never matched their monologues with his own, preferring to lead from behind with tactful questions about themselves, or-since she was so often in their thoughts-about Charlie.
Even his nationality was a riddle. Robert for some reason pronounced him Portuguese. Someone else insisted he was Armenian, a survivor from the Turkish genocide-he had seen a documentary about it. Pauly, who was Jewish, said he was One of Us, but Pauly said everyone was, so for a while they ruled him Arab just to annoy Pauly.
But they didn't ask Joseph what he was, and when they tried to corner him about his work, he replied only that he used to travel a lot but had recently settled down. He almost made it sound as if he had retired.
"What's your firm then, Jose?" asked Pauly, braver than the others. "You know-who do you work for, like?"
Well, he did not think he really had a firm, he replied carefully, with a thoughtful tip to the brim of his white cap. Not any longer. He was doing a little reading, a little trading, he had recently inherited a little money, so he supposed he was, technically speaking, self-employed. Yes, self-employed was the expression. Call him self-employed.
Only Charlie was dissatisfied: "We're a parasite, are we then, Jose?" she demanded, colouring. "We read, we trade, we spend our money, and periodically we hoof it to a sexy Greek island-for our pleasure? Right?"
With an unruffled smile, Joseph consented to this description. But Charlie did not. Charlie lost her composure and rode out ahead of herself.
. "So what do we read, for Christ's sake? That's all I'm asking. What do we trade in? I can ask, can't I?" His agreeable silence only provoked her further. He was simply too senior for her gibes. "Are you a bookseller? What's your bag?"
He took his time. He could do that. His periods of prolonged consideration were already known in the family as Joseph's Three Minute Warnings.
"Bag?" he repeated with puzzled emphasis. "Bag? Charlie, I am most things, perhaps, but I am not a burglar!"
Shouting down their laughter, Charlie appealed desperately to the others: "He can't just sit there in a vacuum and trade, you pinheads. What does he do? What's his racket?" She flopped back in her chair. "Christ," she said. "Morons." And gave up, looking spent and fifty, which she could achieve at the drop of a hat.
"Don't you really think it's all too boring to discuss, actually?" Joseph asked, perfectly pleasantly, when still no one came to her aid. "I would say money and work are the two things one comes to Mykonos to escape, actually, wouldn't you, Charlie?"
"Actually, I'd say it was like talking to a bloody Cheshire cat," Charlie retorted rudely.
Suddenly something came apart in her completely. She stood up, uttered a hissed exclamation, and, mustering the extra force required to drive away uncertainty, smashed her fist onto the table. It was the same table they had been sitting at when Joseph miraculously produced Al's passport. The plastic cloth slipped and an empty bottle of lemonade, their wasp-trap, flew straight into Pauly's lap. She began with a stream of obscenities, which embarrassed them because in Joseph's company they tended to drop the language; she accused him of being some kind of closet weirdo, draping himself around the beach and playing power games with chicks half his age. She wanted to say gumshoeing round Nottingham and York and London as well, but time had made her doubt her ground, and she was terrified of their ridicule, so she held it back. How much he understood of that first salvo they were not sure. Her voice was choked and furious and she was using her down-market accent. If they saw anything at all going on in Joseph's face, it was only a studious examination of Charlie.