Reality and Dreams (17 page)

‘But
you have a pass,’ he said.

‘I have
a pass. But I’m not going to use it to let you in. What kind of a fool do you
think I am?’

‘Why
didn’t you let me know?’ said Kevin.

‘I only
found out after you’d left London.’

He
looked across the field to the great barn where there were some lights on. ‘I
suppose,’ he said, ‘that I could get in unnoticed, but I’m not going to risk
it. The police are still on my heels. Good-bye, darling.’

It was
indeed a dangerous moment for Kevin Woodstock. Rose and Tom were back on
intimate terms and certainly he was jealous. ‘Why should he come and take my
wife whenever it suits him?’ he had said to Marigold, overlooking the fact that
Rose had been separated from him for almost two years, that their divorce
proceedings were well advanced, and Rose had been in the interim living with
Johnny Carr. In fact Kevin needed money. He needed it now as he had needed it
when he had shot Dave so neatly. As Marigold had said it was simply ‘bad news’
that he couldn’t just go unnoticed into that studio with her and sabotage the
crane.

Marigold
watched him swivel his car round and head back for London. Just then a fax came
through from Claire. She wanted to talk to Tom with all urgency.

Marigold
phoned back. Claire was not at home, only Tom. ‘I’ve had a fax. Ma wants to
talk to you urgently.’

‘Thanks.
She’s not at home just now, but I’ll wait. What are you doing? Where are you?’

‘In my
caravan for the week-end.’

‘It’s
up to you, but I think you’re crazy. Take care who you open the door to.’

‘Don’t
worry about me.’

Marigold
looked at the fax and saw it had come from a number different from Claire’s.
She faxed back:

‘Pa is
at home. Marigold.’

Claire,
having dinner with a friend, remarked, ‘Sometimes Marigold is quite decent to
us, quite civilised.’

‘Why
should she not always be?’ said her friend. ‘She has taken the trouble to
answer my fax. I had her private fax number, you see …

The
friend sighed.

Claire got home as soon as
she could decently get away from her friend’s dinner. She found Tom still up.

‘Tom, I
had a dream,’ she said. ‘Very vivid. I wasn’t going to mention it, but in the
course of the day it seemed I must. It was so very clear. Normally I forget my
dreams, but not this one.’

‘You
sound like my Celt.’

‘Perhaps
I do. And Caesar’s wife had dreams. It’s the crane. I dreamt you went up and
fell down thirty feet. Someone had tampered with it. There is a point where it
tilts forward you know, and that had been unscrewed.’

‘How
weird. I’ve been up with a cameraman already and swung down again without
trouble. It’s quite exhilarating up there. No director, should be without a
great crane.’

‘I want
you to have it examined. Be careful.’

‘I
will. Where was the crane in your dream?’

‘In a
huge studio barn in Northumberland. Something like yours, in fact. All the
crew was there and your crane working electronically.’

‘It
would take a lot of know-how to sabotage a great crane.’

‘I
think I could do it,’ said Claire. ‘It’s a question of loosening things, that’s
all.’

‘Well,
I’ll have it well tested before I use it. I’ll be back on the set Monday
morning. It’s so beautiful in Northumberland.’

‘Marigold
is there to-day,’ she said. ‘Her fax is working.’

‘I’m
aware of that. She can’t get near the equipment without it being noticed. I
inaugurated a pass system on the grounds of insurance. Tell me more of your
dream. Any details.’

‘Only
the details of some people, I think up there in the cage, surreptitiously
loosening the limbs and the joints and a pivot. Who they were I don’t know. But
they meant you harm.’

‘It’s
so very difficult,’ said Tom, ‘to realise that one makes enemies, especially in
one’s family. It’s not real.’

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

‘What we are doing,’ Tom
told his crew, ‘is real and not real. We are living in a world where dreams are
reality and reality is dreams. In our world everything starts from a dream.’

He had
phoned Claire. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the crane. It’s lovely. We’re busy
now, up to the neck.’

A vaguely familiar dark
Volkswagen came up the drive. Claire, looking out from an annex to the kitchen
where she had been sorting out the flowers, had a slight sensation of
tiresomeness which she soon located. It was Jeanne. ‘Oh God!’ thought Claire. ‘To
what do I owe this visit, what’s wrong with her now?’

What
was wrong was that her role as Marie-Antoinette being amply fulfilled Jeanne
had been laid off. She made this known to Claire without so much as a
good-morning. Claire knew by now that Jeanne was by nature incapable of
considering anybody else’s problems. If she could have got into 10 Downing
Street with her gripe she would have felt herself entitled to total attention.

Why had
Tom picked her in the first place? Claire thought back, how Tom, after his
fall, in a state of confusion had hankered after the original girl. He felt
that even the actress who had played her part, Jeanne, was his true hamburger
girl, his obsession. He had even dreamed of changing his will in her favour,
oblivious to the fact that she was only playing a part in his film. But how,
why, had he picked on this thoroughly objectionable nuisance?

‘I can’t
speak for Tom,’ Claire said. ‘But I have a very busy day ahead of me.’ She went
on cutting the stems of her flowers ready to put them in vases. Jeanne helped
herself to a chair and sat down.

‘Tom
can’t get rid of me so easy,’ said the girl. It seemed to Claire that Jeanne
was going to faint. Her face was grey-white; she was shaking.

‘You
look ill,’ said Claire. ‘You should see a doctor.’

‘What
do you mean by that?’ said Jeanne.

‘What
have you been taking? What pills?’

‘What
do you mean?’

‘You
look bad. Why don’t you let me arrange for you to see a doctor?’

‘I’ll
see my lawyer.’

‘Perhaps
you’d better do that. Is Marigold paying your lawyer’s bill?’

‘No,
she isn’t. You only think of money. Why should Marigold pay for me?’

Claire
simply didn’t believe her. She got rid of Jeanne eventually by promising to ‘talk
to Tom.’ Later, Claire was glad that she had called after Jeanne, kindly: ‘Try
to get some sleep. You need some rest.’

Jeanne found Marigold absent
from her caravan and from the set when she got there next day. Tom, working in
the open, noticed her and vaguely wondered what she was doing there. She seemed
pleased with herself. Hadn’t she been paid off?

Tom had
a lot on his mind, he and the main members of his crew were out shooting in his
built-up fortified Roman town, but a good deal of activity was going on in the
great shed. The crane had been brought there and lowered. Jeanne walked to the
crane so decisively and jauntily that no one felt obliged to stop her. It
seemed clear she was on some errand; and so, in a sense, she was.

It had
been one of Marigold’s bitter confidences, ‘I’d like him to go up in the crane
and this time come down with a final thump. He doesn’t need the crane. These
days it is only a director’s expensive toy. I’d like to fix it for him, and him
with it,’ that had worked on Jeanne’s drugged brain. She climbed in the open
case and worked the lifting gear. On the rising platform, she tilted the
pivot-arm to an angle, leaned over it clumsily and slipped nearly twenty feet.
It was a very bad thump on to a cement floor. She was killed outright.

Tom
looked down at her twisted face as the ambulance screamed to a stop outside
the studio.

‘Who
let her touch the crane?’

‘We
couldn’t stop her … We thought you knew she was here …’

‘Where
is Marigold?’

Someone
answered him: ‘She’s not here this afternoon. She didn’t think she’d be
wanted. She’s gone.’

A
technician was looking at the crane. ‘Nothing wrong with the machine. She just
didn’t know how to handle it. What did she want to go up there for, anyway?’

‘Perhaps
to wreck it,’ said Tom. ‘Perhaps merely to see what it was like to look down at
a crowd of people.’

Later,
in London, he said to Claire,

‘I’m
glad the film is coming to an end. We’re just about ready to wrap it up.’

Cora
came over, appalled by the disaster. ‘Who sent her to Northumberland, Pa? How
did she know about the crane? Did Marigold tell her?’

‘Oh, I
don’t know. There was no secret about the crane. I wanted it, I needed it and I
got it.’

Marigold
had left for the United States. She had given a press television interview at
the airport. ‘The great crane was quite unnecessary for the film. It was my
father’s party game.’

Cora
was so beautiful it seemed impossible that she could have an ugly suspicion.

Claire
poured drinks all round. Both Tom and Cora felt her strength and courage
sustaining them, here in the tract of no-man’s land between dreams and reality,
reality and dreams.