Reality and Dreams (13 page)

‘That’s
a fact,’ said Dave.

‘I
daresay you’ve wondered if this misfortune of yours might have some connection
with him?’

‘I’ve
wondered,’ Dave said. ‘And so has he. We didn’t want the press and the T.V. to
get hold of the idea.’

‘Well,’
said the man, ‘it’s one of those cases where it even might be helpful if the
press did catch on to it.’

‘It
could be anybody,’ Dave said. ‘How much can a hit-man cost?’

‘A lot,’
said the policeman.

‘That
leaves out a lot of people,’ Dave said. ‘If they wanted to get at Tom through
me, the number is limited. If they only wanted to get at a taxi-driver, a Mr.
Anybody on the street, like they do and you know it, there is no limit to the
category of person.’

‘Who
are Tom Richards’ enemies?’

‘You
have to ask him yourself. There are always cranks who want to hit the famous.’

‘But
they hit you.’

‘Well,
it could have meant a piece of advice for Tom and then again, it couldn’t.’

‘How
are you feeling?’

‘Pretty
rotten. I’ve got a headache. I dream of the hospital, though. The lovely
nurses.’

The
press had been sympathetic, indignant, puzzled.

Tom
said to Claire, ‘We have too much money. It allows us too many possibilities,
endless options. It could be Marigold, quite easily. It’s unlikely to be Jeanne
although she would have some sort of motive. Jeanne couldn’t afford it.
Marigold could.’

‘And
Rose Woodstock?’ Claire said.

‘You
can forget Rose. She got her prize at Venice, didn’t she?’

‘Yes,
but you didn’t wait to see her collect it.’

To the
police, Tom said, ‘It fills me with horror but I find the idea that the bullet
which hit Dave was meant to intimidate me irresistible. What other reason
should bring him into the news like this? What they’re saying is “Next time it
will be you, and we’ll get you.” But Why? Supposing Dave had been killed. Who
would it serve?
Cui bono
as Cicero said.’

‘We’re
a long way from Cicero’s time. He probably didn’t give much thought about the
motiveless crime. I’m not up in Cicero,’ said the inspector.

‘The
gratuitous gesture? Do you think it’s that?’ Tom said.

‘Can’t
rule it out.’

They
didn’t say, but they plainly suspected, Marigold.

‘Is
there no way you can make your daughter come out in the open? She needs help.
She’s probably dangerous.’

‘Perhaps
if I separated from Claire. If we put in for a divorce, she might come out of
hiding, if that’s where she is. But even if we did that, she wouldn’t be
convinced. You know, we’re neither of us at all sure but it could be Marigold
who hired that killer in the B.M.W.’

‘Have
the police been back to see you?’ Dave said on the phone to Tom.

‘Yes.’

‘What
did they say?’

‘Nothing.
They talk in circles.’

‘That’s
to trip you up,’ said Dave. ‘Second, third time round you’re almost bound to
contradict yourself.’ He wanted very much to go cruising with Tom again.

‘Let’s
wait awhile,’ said Tom. He hated to be afraid.

Tom got out some
photographs of Marigold. Marigold at sixteen in her tennis clothes. Marigold at
a ball, frilled up in white. Marigold eating a frankfurter at a swimming-pool
in New York State.

‘She is
not so hideous,’ Tom said to Claire.

‘She
has a fairly good figure,’ said Claire, looking at the photos that Tom had
handed her. ‘It’s only the expression.’

‘In
fact,’ said Tom, ‘by modern standards she has quite an interesting face. Not a
beauty. But interesting; photogenic. She would do well in a harsh movie. Say,
Ibsen; say Ibsen, a film adaptation. Say Thomas Hardy. I wish I’d thought of
it.’

‘Has
she ever had a film test?’

‘Not
that I know of,’ said Tom. ‘Not by me, anyhow. Those little eyes …

‘They
make too much of the eyes in my opinion in modern films and T.V.,’ Claire said.
‘They can’t get a decent script so they make it up with huge watery shining
eyes brimming with feeling. Too much, too many —’

‘Well,
you could be right.’

Jeanne’s
lawyer wrote. Tom, he said, had represented to Jeanne that her role in
Unfinished
Business
was to be a major one. He had actually put that in writing. ‘Of
major importance.’ Instead, she had occupied a minor part. And so on. ‘My
client deserves an explanation with adequate compensation for the professional
damages undergone.’

The
lawyer was a well-known and expensive one, who would never have taken on such a
doubtful case without a good down-payment. Where did Jeanne get the money?

‘Probably
Marigold,’ said Claire. ‘It was a mistake on my part to ever settle money on
her. But as she’s my daughter…’

In the
course of their enquiries with the shooting of Dave, an ex-boyfriend of
Marigold’s emerged. Now discarded, he was the same man as was concealed with
her in the trailer when Tom and Claire went to look for her in the Haute
Savoie. That was now four months ago. The youth recounted his experience with
Marigold but said they had parted shortly afterwards. He did not discount that
Marigold was perfectly capable of hiring a hit-man if the plan suited her. The
police eventually believed the boy, whose name for the present purpose is
irrelevant, and let him go. Where was Marigold? Nobody knew for sure.

Cora
and Ivan had by now set up an efficient office in Paris fitted with more
sophisticated investigative equipment and information-receivers, where clues,
indications and probable sightings of Marigold were abundantly recorded. Ivan
no longer claimed she was still in Europe. She had been seen in Peru, in Cochin
and parts of Southern India, she had been seen in Georgetown, Washington and in
Pakistan.

Cora’s
brief affair with Marigold’s brother-in-law Ralph was over. Claire had somehow
got him a managerial job, a better one than he had before. He had returned to
his wife, Ruth, who had no inkling of his affair with Cora and refused to
believe it when Jeanne rang her up to tell her.

‘Back
to reality,’ he said at the first sign of a return of his impotence with Ruth.
She was annoyed.

Cora
was fascinated by her new boyfriend, Ivan the investigator, and their flat in
Paris. Marigold had become part of their career.

Tom
sought a meeting with the boyfriend of the camping-site, he who had last been
known to see and speak to Marigold in the flesh. ‘Put word round,’ Tom said, ‘that
when she turns up I intend to star her in a film. I think her star quality. She
is photogenic. I never realised it, but she is. Put round the word. I will show
footage of her face. Not on paternal grounds. On artistic grounds.’

‘Put
round where?’ said the young man. ‘I haven’t a clue who she sees.’

‘Have a
try,’ said Tom, handing him an envelope. The money was received without
comment, stuffed into a pocket of a young man’s jeans, perhaps to bear fruit,
perhaps not.

‘If she
turns up,’ said Tom, ‘I will do everything she wants, short of supporting drugs
or terrorist activities.’

‘Why do
you say that?’

‘I owe
no explanation.’

Cora
faxed that Marigold had been seen for certain in Brazil in a clinic for plastic
surgery. ‘Be quick,’ Cora wrote, ‘as she’s definitely there now, having a face
change.’

As with
the other sightings this proved to be a false alarm. ‘Marigold,’ Tom observed
to Claire, ‘would in any case never change her face. When she looks in the
glass she does not see the interesting face that she has, she sees absolute
beauty, I’m convinced. Love is blind.’

It was
possible, he knew, that some of the sightings — there was a very likely one in
Cork — were genuine. But the investigators always got there a day too late. She
had been, yes. But she had gone.

Tom’s lawyer,
Fortescue-Brown on the phone: ‘Can you look in at the office or can you make it
convenient for me to come to you?’

‘What
about?’ said Tom.

‘That
change in your will. It’s been in abeyance for some months.’

‘What
change in my will?’

‘What
you called me about when you were in hospital. There was a girl involved. I
hope, in fact, you’ve thought it over.’

‘Girl?’
— He must mean the hamburger girl. Tom marvelled at his past dream, now
exhausted by the reality of the film and his actual boredom with the tiresome,
real Jeanne. ‘Forget the alterations to the will,’ he said.

‘Scrap
them all?’

‘All.
They’re a thing of the past.’

In
fact, Tom was immersing himself into an altogether new story for a film.

Let
us go then, you and I,
…

He was
indulging one of his favourite dream-games:

‘If Julius
Caesar came back to life, you take him up in a lift, you take him up in an
aeroplane. What would his reaction be? Caesar would have understood Ascot but
an electric kettle would have had him foxed. You bring back the Brontës and
stage a rock-concert outside their house at Haworth. What would their reaction
be? You bring back Sophocles and play him Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 …’

‘There’s
no end to it,’ said Dave. ‘No end to it.’

Historical
shifts had started fertilising in Tom’s mind. ‘My new film,’ he eventually told
Dave, ‘is set in Roman Britain towards the end of the occupation, around the
fifth century A.D. I have this centurion, he really doesn’t want to uproot
himself, Britain has been his family’s home for over two centuries. His
brothers and cousins are mainly civil servants and might stay on. But my man is
in the army, he has to go. Orders from Rome. The legions were needed to defend
Rome at that period, you see.’

‘I
better look it up in the encyclopaedia. What’s his name?’ said Dave.

‘I don’t
know yet. Call him Paul. Call him anything. He’s married with children. He has
a servant, a Celt, a native of Britain. That’s what the story is going to be
about, mainly.’

‘Is he
gay?’

‘No.
But he’s devoted to his Celt who is a most eccentric type. The wife tolerates
the friendship, but his daughter, no. She’s a fierce one. Striking looks, not
good-looking in fact plain ugly. But striking. Jealous, fierce, vindictive
through and through.’

‘Sounds
like Marigold,’ said Dave.

‘Now
that you mention it, yes,’ Tom said. ‘In fact I would offer Marigold the part
if I ever set eyes on her again.’

‘Would
she accept?’

Tom
paused to think this over quite a long time. Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t
know. I really don’t know. Perhaps not.’ Tom reached out and took the photograph
of Marigold that he had given to Dave to prop up in the front of the taxi, just
in case Dave should come across her in his day’s work.

‘Has it
occurred to you,’ Dave said, ‘that Marigold has a psychological problem? Really
and truly, Tom, she can’t be altogether right.’

‘I
never actually thought much of that,’ Tom said, studying the photograph.

‘They
say you don’t, with your nearest kin. It’s the last thing you think of. The
realisation sometimes comes slowly.’

‘I’ll
talk to Claire. It could be. You know, I wonder if she’s alive and if so, where
she is.’ Tom slipped back the photograph. Marigold did look not quite balanced;
something about the eyes.

‘Too
rich,’ said Dave. ‘You see on the T.V. shows, people looking for missing
persons. They’re nearly all poor. They find missing people at the railway
station, at cafés, in bars, at bus-stops. That’s the sort of place where they
are sighted. But Marigold … Has she touched her money?’

‘Not
that we know of. But we don’t know of all the places, the countries, where she
could have kept her money.’

Tom’s centurion and Celt
continued to amplify in his thoughts and mind. The story was already like a
tree; it put out branches, sprouted leaves.

Cedric
(provisional name of the Celt — Tom made a note ‘Look up names, see if Cedric
is right for the period.’) was to be gifted with second sight. He could see
into the future, the near future to give plausibility to his forecasting
capacities, and the distant future, which sounded quite crazy, dangerously so
in those days of popular suspicions and superstitions. Tom’s Celt could ‘see’
for instance, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the building of Versailles, the
discovery of Florida. Wildest of all, he could see men walking on the moon.
This last vision he was to be warned about. Diana, the goddess of the moon, was
still a considerable political force in the Roman Empire and beyond. And here
in Britain the Druids ruled the people. Tom’s Celt babbled about motor-bikes.
He could also foresee tomorrow’s weather with an accuracy which would incense
the Druids. As the centurion and his Celt took shape as characters Tom grew
more and more enthusiastic, convinced he had a first-class film idea. He would
have to map out the story, prepare a treatment, raise money, think of casting.
It made Tom very happy to be once more lost in his profession.