Reality and Dreams (2 page)

‘Next
week, but I have to take two nurses home with me.’

‘Two?’

‘One
for day and one for night. Is it your money or mine?’

‘I told
you to take out an insurance.’

‘Well I
didn’t. Find some money. Scratch around.’

He was
no sooner out of the door than Tom chucked a tumbler full of water at the door,
so that Fortescue-Brown could hear it. Broken glass and water all over the
place. There was something else he had wanted to say to the lawyer, but never
mind. There was a vow. But what vow?

As the
cleaners mopped it up Tom smiled sweetly at them. ‘It just flew out of my hand
as I sat up.’

‘Don’t
try to sit up, Mr. Richards. Just ring the bell.’ Tom lay thinking … Yes, I
did feel like God up on that crane. It was wonderful to shout orders through
the amplifier and like God watch the team down there group and re-group as
bidden. Especially those two top stars and the upstart minor stars, with far
too much money, thinking they could direct the film better themselves. There
was none of the ‘Just a minute, may I suggest…’ that held up my work
constantly on the floor. Right up there I was beyond and above pausing a minute
and listening to their suggestions. What do they think a film set is? A
democracy, or something? I simply don’t regret that crane for a moment. All I
want to know is who fouled us up. Who made the wheels hiccup on the tangle of
wires, so that I was thrown clean off, crash. Twelve ribs and a broken hip, and
lucky, very lucky, to be alive.

CHAPTER
TWO

As Tom Richards was
carried upstairs at home he made the stretcher-bearers stop for a minute. Up
came voices from down below.

‘Five,
that makes five of us in the family.’

‘Yes,
when you look at it that way —’

‘Yes it’s
a record, no doubt. Like those families who lost all their sons in the war,
five men, seven men, and death duties payable on all estates.’

‘Oh, we’re
better off than the war-bereaved.’ That was his wife’s voice. ‘Redundancy is
not killed in action.’

‘It can
feel like it,’ said Tom’s brother.

That
was how he found out that since his fall two men and two women of his family
had been made redundant besides Johnny, Cora’s husband. Incidentally, as he
found out later, another relative, a woman personnel manager, had herself made
redundant twenty-eight men in her office.

Tom confided in his day
nurse, Julia: ‘I fall in love easily and often. When I am overwhelmed with love
I am in a state of complete enchantment, forgetting all the previous times I
have fallen into raptures over a woman. At such times it doesn’t matter who my
wife is, what she knows, what she thinks. Nothing matters but the woman of my
current obsession, of my dreams.’

It was
four in the afternoon. Julia was preparing to go home. The night nurse came on
at eight.

‘And
who is the lucky girl of the moment?’ said Julia. ‘No one. With a damaged spine
and a broken leg and my ribs all in pieces, I may never love again.’

‘With
all those glamorous film stars in your life?’ said Julia. ‘I wouldn’t believe
it.’ She took away his tea tray.

‘I may
never direct another film. Do you think anybody would put their money into a
redundant director?’

‘Personality
is everything,’ said Julia.

‘I
suppose you’ve got a husband,’ said Tom.

‘Yes,
and three children.’

‘Three
lovely children.’

‘I didn’t
say lovely.’

‘You’re
the only young mother I’ve met who hasn’t. What does your husband do?’

‘He’s
second mechanic in a garage.’

‘Is his
job safe?’

‘Oh, I
think so. He’s very well thought of.’

Her
uniform was mauve, faintly striped with white. Her hair was blonde with
darkened roots. Her figure was good, not too thin, it looked as if it had had
three children. Her eyes were light blue. She was nothing special. For that, he
liked her. He liked her in the way he had taken to that girl in France who was
making hamburgers and sandwiches on a camping site, and who had struck his
imagination so that he had kept her in his thoughts for weeks. He drafted a
film script about her. He called her Jeanne. He got a screen-writer to do a
first screenplay. He raised the money. He was directing the film when he fell.
All of which had started with the sight of a nondescript sort of girl in a pink
overall on a summer campsite in the Haute Savoie, making up sandwich packs for
the campers and frying hamburgers for them on a rigged-up spirit stove, in a
space so small that only the French could have contrived to cook in it. Tom
had no further interest at all in the girl, except that glimpse. She would
never know she had inspired a film, first in the hands of one and now in the
hands of another director.

Julia
had gone home. Tom was left brooding on the film in the hands of another
director, so working himself up. He now recalled the plans he had made and the
vow he had taken before he underwent the operation that followed his fall. The
plans, the vow, were absurd. He had made them in a state of shock. No wonder he
hadn’t been able to recall what they were when he saw Fortescue-Brown. The
plans were to trace the hamburger girl on the campsite, with the aid of
Fortescue-Brown, and give her anonymously, just make her a gratuitous gift of,
an enormous fortune. He would have to acquire a fortune speedily with the aid
of Fortescue-Brown, probably by murdering his wife Claire in some undetectable
way, and inheriting her money.

Tom was
aghast. The film script, which conveyed an element of this scenario, was one
thing; real life another. The main development of Tom’s scheme was of course
the murder. In the actual film the girl’s benefactor had been rich already.

Did I
really make such a vow, such plans, there in the nuns’ hospital? Tom wondered.
I must, he thought, have been very much under shock, very drugged. He thought
guiltily of Claire, his nice kind wife. What would Fortescue-Brown have thought
if he had elaborated the plan? He would have thought Tom mad. But of course
the film was non-realistic, so full of images of that old man in the years
following that gesture in defiance of his natural fears — trying to trace the
young girl again for love, all for love —The door opened. Claire, in skin-tight
blue jeans, a shirt and two strings of pearls came in, followed by Johnny Carr,
his son-in-law, who had just been made redundant by the paint firm.

Claire
said, ‘Johnny’s come to see you, Tom. He won’t stay long.’

Tom
said, ‘If you think I am a stone that you shouldn’t leave unturned, you are
wasting your time.’

‘Tom,’
he said, ‘all that matters is how are you feeling?’

‘Ah.’

His visit to Tom was
indeed by way of a probe, and Johnny Carr was furious to be confronted with so
indelicate a truth. He might have known that Cora’s father was unlikely to be
mellowed by suffering. And anyway, Claire had urged the visit far too soon: ‘He
could certainly help you, Johnny. He knows so many people.’

As it
was, Tom said, ‘Redundancy comes to this:

Nobody
fires a man if he is exceptionally good, unless the whole outfit closes down.
Your paint concern going out of business?’

‘No,
just restructuring. But forget it, Tom —’

‘Very
well.’

Johnny
had put on his best business suit, which he intended to keep in first-class
condition for interviews. After visiting Tom he went home, took off the special
suit, and put on his clothes.

‘How’s
Pa?’ said Cora.

‘He
seems to be all right.’

‘All
right!’ said Cora, who was fond of her father. ‘What do you mean, all right,
when he has broken bones all over his body. Sixty-three and nurses day and
night. Poor Pa, he’s lucky to be alive. He works so hard, he puts everything he’s
got into films. He lives films. How can he be all right?’

‘He’d
like to see you,’ said Johnny.

‘Did he
say so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Should
I just go, or make an appointment?’ said Cora.

‘Make
an appointment with his secretary,’ suggested Johnny. ‘Mentally, he is back at
work.’

Cora
just went. Her job in France was over and she was back in the office at Channel
Four. She was tall, with light brown hair and sometimes wore large gold-rimmed
spectacles. She had long legs, narrow hips and, when she visited Tom, was
dressed in a short skirt and sweater, both in turquoise blue. Cora was
twenty-nine. She bore no resemblance whatsoever to her mother, Katia, who was a
different sort of beauty, of Bulgarian-Polish origin. Katia was dark and bold,
now well into her second marriage. She had ‘served her time’ she said; she had
paid her debt to society with the film director Tom Richards, and was now
getting back her breath with the highly-paid managing director of a building
society, definitely a non-genius, but not, like Tom, a big spender.

Cora
sat in the bedside-chair while the day nurse, Julia, pulled Tom’s sheets
straight and puffed the pillows.

‘We’d
like some tea,’ said Tom.

Julia
looked at her watch.

‘Never
mind the time. We’d like some tea.’

Cora
was so beautiful, Tom wished she were not his daughter. He looked and looked.
He had always been dazzled by Cora, always besotted, always protectively chaste
so that he resented any other man who was not chaste with Cora, a string of
men, culminating with Johnny, whom, like a fool, she had married. She had
married him for his looks which were admittedly star quality; but marriage was
not a film; Cora was not a director; she had cast him in the role of a husband
and he was hopeless at it. In screenplays the husband has a script to go by.
Johnny had next to none.

‘Now he’s
out of work,’ said Tom.

‘Who is
out of work?’

‘Johnny.’

‘Oh,
Johnny. He’s looking for another job. There are millions out of work.’

‘How do
you manage the household budget?’

‘You
sound like Mum. We haven’t had much time to budget.’

‘Oh,
Cora, don’t think of maintaining a man financially. I beg you, don’t start.’

‘For
better or worse…’ said Cora. ‘You marry for better or worse. I came to see
how you were,’ Cora said. ‘I don’t want to talk about money, Pa.’

Julia
brought in a tray of tea for two. Claire followed.

‘You
have a harem to wait on you, Tom,’ she said. ‘What more can you want?’

‘My
job,’ said Tom. ‘I want to finish my film but I can’t do it. Someone else will
do it. I’m in bed. I’m out of work.’

‘There
will be other films,’ said Claire. ‘There always have been.’

‘My
film is not replaceable,’ said Tom. ‘No work of art can be replaced. A work of
art is like living people.’

CHAPTER
THREE