Reality and Dreams (14 page)

‘I need
a strong hard woman. Fierce.’ (His Celt’s lover.) ‘Someone like Marigold,’ he
told Dave.

‘I’ll
have to shoot in Northumberland and in Italy,’ Tom told Claire. ‘The Italian
part should be pleasant for you.’

‘I’ll
come,’ said Claire.

Sometimes Tom had the
feeling that Marigold was quite nearby. According to Cora and Ivan, still
lingering in Paris, sightings were still being reported on their network. She
had been ‘seen’ in Greece, Puerto Rico and Vienna all in one week. Since the
shooting of Dave Interpol had taken an interest in finding her; how deep their
enquiries went no one would know.

‘They
should pack up that Paris office,’ Tom said to Claire. ‘It’s a useless
extravagance.’

‘Let
them enjoy themselves a little longer.’ He knew she meant by this to put in a
plea for Tom not to be a spoil-sport.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

In the uncertainty of
Marigold’s being dead or alive, her husband, James, told everyone he felt he
should not press the subject of divorce. He came to see Claire one late
afternoon. She poured him a drink. She looked at him and wondered, ‘Could he
possibly have murdered her?’ His whereabouts at the time of her disappearance
had been vaguely on the American continent. It was a question that inevitably
passed through her mind whenever she saw, or even thought of, anyone who had
been connected with Marigold. James was aged thirty-nine, clever, balding,
with big dark-framed glasses and the trace of a beard. He appealed to Claire
less, now, than he ever did. However, she thought it unlikely that he should
have killed a wife, presumably for gain, when he could get money out of her any
other way.

Tom had
faith in James’s scholarship. He had recently appointed him technical adviser
on early Roman sites, for his new film.

Claire
said, ‘Have you seen the police lately, James?’ He did not immediately reply.
Then, ‘Oh, you mean about Marigold? No, they’ve left me alone.’

For
some reason Claire didn’t like the sound of ‘No, they’ve left me alone.’ Nor
was she easy with his answer to her next question. ‘Are you prepared to have
another try with Marigold?’

He
looked puzzled. ‘Another try with Marigold?’

‘When
she comes back.’

‘Oh,
when she comes back. Look, Claire, I don’t think she’ll ever come back to me.’

‘Do you
mean you don’t think she’ll ever come back at all?’

‘No, I
don’t mean that. My guess is as good as yours as to what’s happened to her, and
I’ve no way of guessing, no clue.’

Claire
saw she had probed enough. It was unfair that everyone concerned with Marigold
was obliged to suspect everyone else. ‘If she’s doing this deliberately,’
Claire said, ‘I’ll never talk to her again. If she has fallen foul of someone
and is dead, I’ll never forgive myself.’

‘Why
wouldn’t you forgive yourself?’

‘I don’t
know, I really don’t know,’ said Claire. ‘It can happen that you have a sense
of guilt about somebody without having done anything in that regard.’

She was
relieved to hear him say, ‘I know what you mean. I feel exactly the same way
about Marigold. Perhaps she wants us to feel guilt.’

‘Perhaps.
In fact, Tom refuses to feel guilty. We can do no more than we are doing to
find Marigold. Tom says he refuses to distort his soul by suppressing his true
experience of his daughter just for appearances.’

‘I’m
glad of that,’ James said. ‘I’m glad he’s given me this wonderful job. It might
have been construed as disloyalty to Marigold. Everyone knows our marriage was
splitting up.’

‘Tom is
very professional,’ Claire said. ‘He wants the best people, always, for his
film. And you’re the best available historical researcher for the present film.
Besides, he’s convinced that Marigold hired the hit-man.’

‘Yes, I
think she would do that.’

‘You
think she would?’

‘Yes,
she would,’ said James. ‘I was married to her a very short time but I did learn
not to count on her equilibrium.’

What
they were both wondering was, ‘What could she do next?’

The title of the film was
to be
Watling Street,
the name of the old Roman road stretching
diagonally across the south-west of England; although this was not a Roman
name, Tom’s Celt was able to foresee that the charming name of the famous road
was Watling Street from the ninth century onwards under the occupation by
Danish forces.

The
street itself stretched from the present Hyde Park Corner in London to Wroxeter
near Shrewsbury. Wroxeter was at the time of Tom’s centurion the city of Viroconium,
remains of which still exist. Now, the Celt ‘saw ‘in advance whenever he tuned
in, everything that happened in Watling Street as he himself called the road.
He babbled about a ‘self-service laundry at Maida Vale’, about a ‘battle of
Bosworth Field between Tamworth and Hinckley’; he raved about the goings-on at ‘The
Black Swan’ at Grendon. He said it was cold at Lichfield three miles off
Watling Street under black and grey puff clouds. It was, he said, a heavy,
undulating landscape. There was a wild animal collection at Whipsnade. Tom made
long notes about what his Celt foresaw ‘in the year 433 A.D. on the site of the
future Watling Street.’ He was intent on writing at least the first draft of
the script. Under ‘Possible Names Early Britons’ he listed ‘Morgan, Bronwyn, Iolo,
Huffa, Cedric, Gareth.’ For the centurion he stuck to his first thought ‘Paulus
Aurelius’, for the Celt, Cedric was changed to Dennis, then back to Cedric
again.

Cedric
the Celt had to be a star, but one with a strong wild face, the face of a young
man sent mad by complete knowledge of the future, and yet with little control
over his own life, belonging as he did to his centurion. And the centurion,
Paulus Aurelius? Tom did his best not to model him on himself, or at least on
his own self-image, but finding this was impossible he gave in and decided he
could compose better if he was the model for Paulus Aurelius — what the hell?
Then Tom couldn’t sleep at nights. For a week he puzzled over the casting of
Cedric the Celt. Night after night before his closed eyes, and practically on
his pillow in the morning, looking at him, looking … he could see the dark
sullen ugly face of Marigold, herself. ‘I know of no star to resemble her,’ he
said to Claire, ‘but she haunts my dreams as the Celt, Cedric the sorcerer. I
feel he would look just like her. It’s absurd there are no star actresses like
her.’

‘Get
someone, anyone, any boy,’ said Claire, ‘and make an actor of him.’

‘Easier
said than done,’ said Tom.

Let
us go then, you and I,
…

He
explained to Dave what he was looking for. ‘A squat dark fellow. If possible
hardly any neck. Deep-set tiny black eyes. He could have a kindliness about him
but he has the tragic future written on his face. He belongs to the world of
legend and yet he is alive and real in the fifth century.’

‘I’ll
keep a look out,’ said Dave.

‘It’s
unlikely you’ll find anyone like it,’ said Tom. ‘But remember Marigold’s photo.
Keep it in front of you.’

‘It
might not be so unlikely,’ Dave said. ‘You know there are a few youths around
who look like what you want. A few more than you might think.’

‘They
would have to act,’ said Tom.

‘That
would be up to you,’ said Dave in his wisdom.

Charlie Good, Claire’s
late and most recent lover, was having a snack lunch in a pub in
Gloucestershire when he saw Marigold doing the same. Charlie was a freelance
physiotherapist. He had lived-in with Claire in their capacious house at
Wimbledon all the time Tom had been disabled. Tom had first suspected his
presence in the house by the promptness with which Charlie appeared on the
occasions when his own physiotherapist and masseur was absent a day, or held
up for some reason. ‘I’ll get Charlie,’ Claire would say, and without much
delay Charlie would appear with his jars of aromatics by Tom’s bedside or
beside his chair. Claire had hardly bothered to cover Charlie’s presence as a
permanent guest. She had parted amicably from Charlie, and in a way that suited
him, by the time Tom began to get about again.

When he
came across Marigold, however, Charlie Good was getting short of funds, a
condition which was more or less a chronic norm with him. Perhaps shortage of
money sharpened his eyes: he noticed, first, a sullen-looking youth at a corner
table. A bad face, he thought, I wouldn’t trust
him.
The youth wore a
brown leather jacket over a grey jersey and a check shirt, blue jeans, heavy,
black, muddy boots. But something about the hands, the hands … Charlie looked
more carefully and discerned Marigold. He looked away, pretending to be lost in
his dreams; he looked into his beer. He ordered another and remarked to the
landlord on the filthy weather.

Charlie
drank his beer and left the pub. He went out to his ancient Rover and there he
waited among the other vehicles, five of them, drawn up outside the pub. The
rain was heavy. Marigold appeared. Charlie ducked. She made for a camper, gave
a melancholy look around, got in and drove off. Charlie followed her and
watched her dive into a sad field next to a cemetery.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

The reports from the Paris
‘organisation’ or ‘network’ as Cora and Ivan called it — sightings of Marigold
in Honolulu, or up the Amazon as they might be — were regularly passed on to
the police by Tom. It could have been that these dazzling place-names had
waylaid the bored investigators from visualising Marigold in some funk-hole
nearer home. Big-moneyed daughters don’t live in sordid, damp discomfort, and
if disguised as boys they would likely be living with another transvestite or
such like, not alone.

Claire
had all along opposed Tom’s desire to trace Marigold through the police, and
now that she was wanted for questioning about the hit and run attack on Dave,
Claire was even less keen on the idea. She would not own that Marigold could be
responsible for an act of criminal violence. She told Tom, ‘You would incriminate
your own daughter before you knew the facts.’

‘But
she’s mad, don’t you see that?’ Tom was thinking of Dave in the hospital, his
brown worn face on the pillow, with his head in bandages, trying not to show
pain or fear. ‘It was nearly murder, very near,’ said Tom.

Charlie
Good, having located Marigold, went neither to her parents nor the police. He
went to a television network and for a fair fee conducted them to the field
where Marigold was camped.

Tom, at
that hour, was in Dave’s sitting room in Camberwell having a cup of tea, as he
sometimes did before or after a meditative cruising session. Dave’s wife, slim,
fair-skinned, always amiable to Tom whom she liked tremendously, turned on the
television news. Tom always liked to watch news.

A crowd
of excited journalists, a number of onlookers … The name ‘Marigold’ … A
police car … A close-up of a young man, yes, but it could be a girl, and
anyway it was Marigold. She was making a statement. ‘I’m free to do what I
like, live where I want. I don’t know anything about any shooting. I’ve been
living like this in order to experience at first hand what it’s like to be
destitute. After my work in the field of redundancy I decided to write a book.
Few realise what redundancy can lead to. Loss of home, loss of social
background. Complete destitution. Some people I know live in their cars. With
their dogs for protection and company. The people round here have been very
good to me. They bring me food and even calor gas.’ The camera beamed on a
young woman holding a white plastic supermarket bag with the top of a loaf of
bread sticking out. ‘I had no idea that Jimmy was Marigold. We always knew her
as Jimmy. But she’s doing no-one no harm, and living in dignity. I just brought
her a few provisions.’ Gently enough, Marigold was then led away to a police
car.