The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space by Pippa Goldschmidt Page B

admirable about that. He can never look down on her, or even scale her heights. She is a mountain of a woman and he is nothing without her.
    But he needs more. Charles is good but he needs the collaborators he used to have, Margarete, Elisabeth, Ruth. People who think in his own language so he is not constantly trying to reinvent himself in new words, which is exhausting.
    He has the newspapers spread out in front of him, and he is searching through them. It is news, after all, a world premiere of a play by Brecht. ‘Brecht’ this time is himself and Laughton. In the past, ‘Brecht’ has been Brecht and Hauptmann, or Brecht and Berlau, or Brecht and Steffin. Or even Hauptmann and Brecht. She may have contributed more than him, on occasion.
    Perhaps he should take Helene home. He is surprised by this thought and stops, the papers forgotten. Home. Where is home? Where there is work. Proper work for the two of them, and for others as well. It doesn’t matter if he gets blacklisted here, he can’t work properly in this place anyway.
    Nothing happens for a long moment as he allows himself to dream about a workers’ theatre in Germany. Then he goes back to the papers.
    But the reviews confuse him. In spite of all his long speeches, they persist in seeing Galileo as a hero who defies the authorities by sacrificing his health to his work and smuggling that work out of the country under the noses of the Inquisition.
    He sighs. A quote from one of the reviews snags in his mind, ‘Condemn Galileo? I can’t. Not when I see him on stage. On paper, it’s another matter. But the words are nothing without the performance, the physical gestures. Only then can we understand the man.’
    Hiroko’s already waiting for me outside the Ritzy.
    ‘Gardenias! My favourite! How did you know?’ She looks happy.
    ‘A lucky guess,’ I grin. I don’t care what happens after this evening, at least I’ve got her to myself for a few hours.
    ‘So what’s the movie? What are we going to see?’
    ‘The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer’, with Shirley Temple and Cary Grant.’
    ‘You have to be joking.’ She sounds incredulous and I don’t blame her. With her charcoal hair and sad, sad eyes, she’s about a million miles from being some vacuous blond bobby-soxer.
    ‘No! It’ll be great. Just pretend you’re back at high school and you’re on a date with the boy you had a crush on. The rest of the audience look like they’re high-school kids anyway,’ I try not to look too obviously at the audience around us. I can’t see any of Walter’s other men, but who knows? Perhaps they’re just better at the job than I am.
    ‘I never went on dates when I was a teenager. There weren’t opportunities for dates at the place where I went to school,’ and I see her hand is shaking slightly as she tries to pin the flower onto her dark dress. ‘Could you do this for me, please?’
    And so I get to feel the warmth of her body through the thin ash-grey fabric and I allow my hand to rest just a moment above her breast. The flower looks wrong now, almost garish against her monochrome beauty, but she looks down at it and smiles. Then she takes my hand and raises it to her mouth and she kisses it, ‘Do we have to see the film?’ she murmurs.
    The feeling of her lips against my skin is the most intimate thing that has ever happened to me, far more moving than any hump I’ve had with some girl who only put out to get something back, like a pair of nylons or a good steak. I want to take Hiroko somewhere private but my room is too shabby and mean for her and I am ashamed of it, and she has to share a room with two other students. So we end up in the café again. At least we can talk there. But we will have to talk quietly sonobody can overhear us.
    ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ She is sitting next to me, feeding me teaspoons of hot chocolate. The whole length of my arm is lying on the back of her chair, so that she can lean against it. I can