Reality and Dreams (15 page)

‘Where
is all this going on? Did you hear?’ said Tom.

‘I didn’t
catch it,’ said Dave. ‘But anyway, you know she’s alive and she’s explaining
herself all right.’

Tom got
up slowly from the sofa, for his back still gave him trouble when he sat on a
low seat. ‘I better phone Claire,’ he said.

Within a few days Marigold
had become a national folk heroine. The papers announced:

Marigold
Found!

Millionaire
Film Magnate’s daughter lives rough to show solidarity with the out-of-works.

The
police could find nothing whatsoever to connect her with the shooting of Dave.
She gave interviews such as Tom and Claire could only admire: Why was she
passing herself off as a man? — Partly for self-protection, she said. Partly,
she wanted to be unrecognised and left alone. ‘Besides, it’s the men who mostly
suffer from redundancy. I wanted to actually
feel
the situation. Somehow
the gulf between rich and poor, between employed and jobless must be bridged.
Increased unemployment is leading the country to disaster.’

‘She
means it,’ said Claire. ‘I’m sure she means every word. I’ve had a long
conversation with her.’

Cora
returned to London declaring she had never worked so hard in her life. ‘Ivan is
keeping on the office. There are so many missing persons, and now that he has
the set-up it would be foolish to waste it.’

‘He
didn’t get very far with Marigold,’ said Tom.

‘Oh, he
would have got there in the end, I’m sure of that,’ said Cora. But she was glad
to be back in her flat in London. She told Claire that she was tired of living
with all Ivan’s electronic equipment, which had spilled over into their flat.
Which meant she was tired of Ivan. He was soon to be part of the unwanted
equipment, something of the past.

Marigold
was back in her house.

‘I
still feel guilty about Dave,’ Tom said. ‘That shooting had something to do
with me, I’m sure.’ Claire, as he spoke, was busy. He felt a wave of deep
affection for her. What would he do, he wondered, without Claire with her
old-fashioned charity ledgers and her card indexes, wearing her Chanel suits
and her Worth scent
(Je Reviens)?
For Claire he even tolerated that
other Claire in the kitchen with her unspeakable food, her beetroots and her
Beef Stroganoff and her spotted dumpling bilge.

Marigold had taken
possession of the large cottage in Surrey where she had shared her brief
married life with James. When he was not away on his literary travels he was in
the habit of using the cottage as his headquarters, and now that Marigold had
reappeared it seemed fair that the cottage should become part of the
arrangement for their inevitable divorce. The house had been a wedding present
to them both from Claire.

Marigold,
now busy with a ghost-writer on her recent experiences as an out-of-work
down-and-out, had no objection to recompensing James for his share of the house
and any other important joint possessions arising from their marriage. A
violent row had broken out between them, however, on the proprietorship of
Coleridge’s
Poetical Works,
Vols. I and II which Marigold claimed had been meant as a
present for her alone by a school friend, and which James insisted was part of
their joint wedding-present haul. The resulting argument, incongruous though
it actually was in view of the book’s minor value, reached the ears of the
ghost-writer two rooms away. All the venom these two people had stored against
each other was spurted out in the cause of this quite replaceable book, which
neither party cherished for any particular reason. The book of poems was in any
case presently lost sight of under the mounting heap of recriminations from
both sides.

‘Bitch
and hermaphrodite!’

‘Exploiter
of women!’

‘Instigator
of murder!’

‘Failed
writer! Now you have to come begging a job from my father.’

‘He’s
lucky to get me. What about you? — You should talk. Getting an important part
just to keep you quiet. What chance would you ever have had to star in a film
if you hadn’t been Tom Richards’ daughter?’

‘Part?
— I have no part in any film.’

Nevertheless,
that was how Marigold came to learn that Tom had thought of giving her a part.

‘Pa, is
it true you have a part for me?’ she said on the phone, later.

‘Yes it
is. A male part.’ He no longer wanted Marigold to play a ‘strong hard woman’.
He wanted her for Cedric the Celt himself. ‘You did it so well on the campsite
I don’t see why you shouldn’t do well for me. I thought of it even before you
turned up.’

‘A male
part. You think I’m a hermaphrodite?’

‘Don’t
be silly. I’ve known you since you were born. But remember Shakespeare put men
into female roles. I don’t see why a girl can’t play a boy, a very special boy,
an ancient Briton. Elizabeth Bergner played the boy David in a play of the
thirties. She was terrific.’

Marigold
polished off her book through the ghost-writing agency she was dealing with.
She had moved back to her mews flat in London, bringing with her nothing but
Coleridge’s
Poetical Works,
Vols. I and II, and leaving James to have what pickings he
wanted from the cottage in Surrey. He was furiously angry, but there was
nothing he could do but pack his suits, bring round the removal vans and see
his lawyers.

He told
Tom, ‘Marigold is exasperating.’

‘I
know,’ Tom said. ‘She has too much money, that’s the trouble with her. But she’s
going to make a marvellous prophet-Celt. Fortunately she knows how to work,
she likes work.’

It was
typical of Tom, and in a way a part of the mores of that world of dreams and
reality which he was at home in, the world of filming scenes, casting people in
parts, piecing together types and shadows, facts and illusions, that he made no
distinction between divorced members of his family and those still married.
That James and Marigold were breaking up meant nothing compared to James’s
value as location researcher. Marigold’s dramatic disappearance and the
discomfort it had caused were completely lost in the enthusiasm Tom felt for
his hermaphroditic Celt of the years
c.
436.

Rose
Woodstock wanted to star. She had won an important award in Tom’s last film.
She was good box-office. Tom and his producers snapped her up to play the part
of the centurion’s wife, the Celt’s lover perhaps. Rose was once more ravishing
in Tom’s eyes.

And
Jeanne, his late hamburger girl, who no longer haunted him except through her
lawyer’s office — Claire had a good idea for keeping her quiet. ‘Give her a
flash-forward part, just a glimpse. That’s all she’s good for, but she’s quite
effective at that. Why don’t you make the Celt foresee the French Revolution?
Jeanne could play Marie-Antoinette. That would flatter her. Marie-Antoinette on
the way to her execution, and a flash forward at the scaffold? How good Jeanne
would be!’

Jeanne
signed up for this part amicably, just as though she had never threatened Tom
with legal action through the tough lawyer. That was the world they lived in.

Marigold
was photographed and publicised in the early, preparatory, stages of the film.
She had entered the national consciousness. It was often said privately that
her disappearance had been a publicity stunt to work up interest in
Watling
Street.
And when this was suggested publicly on a talk-show, she denied it
vehemently. Her experiences were real sufferings, she explained, and her book
would explain the rest. Which it did, and went into several fat editions.
Out
of Work in a Camper
gave Marigold a glamour which Tom could only admire.

‘I
think she’s more ambitious than I am,’ Tom said to Dave.

‘Can
you trust her?’ Dave said.

‘That I
don’t know.’

They
had reached a point in the film where the question was, normally, irrelevant.
Actors were not at this stage trustworthy or otherwise. They functioned or they
didn’t. But Marigold?

Tom
watched Marigold launching her book on a late night talk-show. She was so
different, in this professional job, from what she had been in that awful
home-movie of hers. He admired her magnetism, so that it didn’t matter that as
a woman she looked hideous — quite deliberately so. She described with bitter
passion her adventures looking for a job, insults levelled at her and the
people she ‘represented’, insolent interrogations. Whether these were real or
invented, they made good televised material. She was quite expert, even when
mouthing her most banal pronouncements: ‘Psychiatrists tell us that redundancy
based on poor performance often leads to feelings of guilt and even to
suicide.’ There was something about the way in which she said ‘suicide’, with a
half-grin showing her top gums, that made Tom wonder if Marigold would stay
with the film. She was capable of disappearing again. He decided to take all
the necessary shots of Marigold: this was not an uncommon method of filming. In
fact, very few directors shot in the sequences of the story. It often happened
when an actor was pre-engaged for another film or an actress was pregnant, or
if a special type of outdoor lighting had to be caught within a short season,
or for economic reasons, that the director did not film in accordance with the
A to Z principle. The scenes involving Marigold, Tom decided, must be done
right away if one wanted to be on the safe side. The Celt was to be
assassinated by superstitious zealots in the end. Tom thought Marigold would
look well, dead. He watched her face in the oblong frame of his television
set. In any case, he always liked to visualise his actors in frames, as they
would be eventually. Perhaps he could get Marigold to put on that part-smile as
she pronounced the word ‘suicide’. It would suit her ‘dead’ look. So Tom mused
while Marigold on the late talk went on about ‘the E.T.’ (Employment Training,
as you were supposed to have gathered) and ‘the J.W.S.A.’ (Job plan Workshop
Standard Agreement). Tom started next morning, early, filming Marigold as the
Celt in every phase of the film.

‘Are
you afraid I might walk out, Pa?’ she said.

‘Yes, I
am.’

In ten
days it was done. Marigold as Cedric the Celt lay finally with her eyes
upturned, three daggers in her blood-stained tunic, and her lips forming a
half-smile over the word ‘suicide’ silently formed. It was a relief to Tom to
get her safely captured in at least the minimum footage, although he asked her
(ordered her in fact as was his way) to ‘stick around the set as there will be
considerable re-takes.’

Rose Woodstock was never
very happy while making a film unless she was sleeping with the director. It
was a way of directing the film herself, or at least she felt it to be so.

Two
weeks into the rehearsals of
Watling Street
Tom Richards was once more
enamoured of Rose. She was now very blonde for her part as the British wife of
the Roman centurion. Her new colouring gave her a new type of glamour. He did
not discourage the idea that she had a supreme and special say in his movie.

When
Rose had first deserted Kevin Woodstock for him, Tom had felt some compunction.
It was true that Rose had been married to Kevin for eleven years, a stretch of
time when a separation could be expected, especially in the world of the cinema.
But Tom respected Kevin for what he was, a professional, though mediocre,
television director, specialising mainly in unusual synchronisations of sound.
But Rose had moved from Kevin to Johnny Carr, obviously a temporary
arrangement, so that Tom had now no qualms at all about monopolising Rose.

Tom
thought of Johnny Carr as a good-looking loser. He was not greatly surprised
when his lovely Cora, on abandoning her Paris adventure, shacked up again with
Johnny, even while their divorce papers were being processed. She moved in with
Johnny naturally and casually, presumably while waiting to decide on her next
man.

Tom
continued to marvel at Cora’s beauty. He remembered sometimes how he had
escorted both daughters up the aisle at their weddings. To what end? He and
Claire had been married in a registry office and were still together, had never
been provoked one by the other into a separation.

‘Have
you thought of leaving Claire?’ Rose asked him.

‘Yes, I
have thought. But the answer is No.’

Kevin
Woodstock had been questioned closely by the police at the time of Marigold’s
disappearance. He was then considered to be the last person to have seen Marigold.
He was questioned again when Dave was shot by the unknown hit-man. It was Dave
himself who insisted on the possibility of Kevin’s guilt.

‘Why
Kevin Woodstock?’

‘Because
Tom Richards has gone off with his wife.’ But Rose herself told the police, ‘That’s
ridiculous. I left Kevin of my own accord. We have parted amicably.’

Tom told Dave, ‘Even if
Marigold should walk out now she can’t sabotage the film. I have all the
necessary sequences featuring her. I’ll want more, but in the meantime I’ve
taken this precaution. Rather as one does with very old actors.’