Reality and Dreams (5 page)

Julia
bent her smile on Ralph as she went out.

‘Good-looking,’
said Ralph.

‘Toothy.’

‘Toothy
women are said to be sexy.’

‘I
wouldn’t know. She has a husband and three children. At the moment I’m not
sexually active, but I have the most intense desires. Normally, I have a great
many women.’

‘So I’ve
heard. Hadn’t I better go?’

‘No,
don’t go. Mornings are the most boring times for me. In the afternoons I read
and in the evenings I watch something on the television, idiot-box though it
is, or a video, sometimes with Claire. Unless you’re in a hurry —’

‘No
hurry at all. I came really to tell you that Claire has been awfully good to
us. Last night she gave Ruth a cheque for five thousand pounds. We are not at
the moment in need but it is acceptable and wonderful of Claire, considering we
are not very closely related.’

‘Claire
is very rich,’ Tom said. ‘Claire is also very generous with her money. I’m glad
to say.’

‘I
wanted to make sure you approve.

‘Oh, I
approve of everything Claire does. I spend my life approving of Claire. We have
been married over a quarter of a century.’

‘You
seem to have spent your life being a success.’

‘It’s
not enough,’ said Tom. ‘Now I’m redundant.’

‘Not
permanently. To be in your position must be a great satisfaction,’ said Ralph.
He got up and went to the window, apparently to look at the garden below. It
was a fine day, a fact which did not seem to be of much comfort to Ralph, Tom
thought; quite the reverse, perhaps.

‘When I
was a young writer, when I first wrote and directed,’ Tom said, ‘I had a great
many friends older than myself, some a little older, some much older. Now that
I need them to come and visit me, to pass by and talk to me, most of them are
dead. If Auden were alive he would have come to see me in his shabby clothes.
Wystan said he always felt his parents should provide his clothes and couldn’t
shake off that feeling even now when he was an adult. He liked to spend his
money on food. Wystan gave good dinners. I remember in the sixties when he
lived in Manhattan in a near-slum in St. Mark’s Place what fine food he would
sit one down to. At least, his man friend Chester Kallman used to cook that
delicious food. Wystan kept his new work under the sofa. He would scramble
under the sofa to bring out his batch of poems to read to me. Chester would
come out of the kitchen into the room with a red face, wearing his cooking
apron. In fact I seldom saw Chester without his apron. Even in Austria the last
time I went to see them, Chester was wearing that big kitchen apron. He made
Austrian food — dumplings, but so special. He was more than a cook, however, he
was a good librettist.

‘If
Graham Greene were alive he would have looked in to see me, perhaps not in
hospital but certainly here at home. Sex was his main subject, when you met him
at least to start with. He had a mix-up of women and felt guilty the whole
time. Without girls I think he couldn’t have carried on. He needed it for his
writing. Graham would have sent me a dozen bottles of rare wine or champagne.
He would have come for an evening’s talk and drink if he had known I was stuck
in this bedroom. He would talk about sex always as if it was the forbidden
fruit of the tree of knowledge. Sex and desire and the hazards thereof, such as
divorce and venereal disease. I tried to get him on to religion but he was
chary of that subject, Catholicism. He believed in it without swallowing
everything, which is possible, and in fact more widely practised than one might
think. In fact he couldn’t not believe, in spite of himself.

‘So
much for his beliefs, but in some ways he had a bureaucratic conception of
Catholic doctrine, but so do many Catholics including the present Pope. Greene
never called me Tom, by the way. It was always “Richards”. But he called Claire
“Claire” of course. Which reminds me of Allen Tate another Catholic who was
keen on women. Have you heard of Tate?’

‘No,’
said Ralph. ‘Unless you mean an American writer, I seem to remember…’

‘You
remember right. He was an American poet, critic, and Anglophile. He went to see
Pius XII in 1957. He told me how it went. Allen said, “Your Holiness, the
English and American Catholic Bishops are feeling uneasy about the Index of
Forbidden Books. After the acts of censorship under totalitarianism the
intelligent Catholic laity want more democratic freedom.”

“‘Ah
yes,” said Pius, “Maritain was here last week with that problem. Greene came
about it recently. How many children, — nephews, do you have?”

‘Allen
told him how many.

‘The
Pope said, “Here are four rosaries. The black ones are for boys, the white for
girls.” End of audience.’

‘Was
that the Pope before this?’

‘No it
was actually five Popes ago.’

‘Don’t
your friends ring you up?’

‘Yes,
they do. Claire takes the calls. I don’t always want to talk. People can send
me a fax. They do, quite often. I don’t always want to reply. They want to know
if I’ll be ready to give a lecture on film-making at some university in six
months’ time, they want to know if they have my permission to change some
paragraphs in my film script, they want to know if they can come and see me.
What do I say? — I could say “I’ve got a back-ache. Disintegrate. Drop dead. Do
what you damn well like.” If it was Louis MacNeice I’d let him come and see me.
I worked with him several times on the Third Programme when it and the radio
really meant something. But Louis is dead.’

‘Don’t
you think you should write your memoirs?’

‘I’m
too young at sixty-three to write my memoirs. I’m still in the act of creating
memoirs, which is right. But just at the moment, as you can imagine, my experiences
of historic moments are limited if not nil. One never knows, of course, until
one looks back.’

Ralph
was still looking out of the window. ‘There’s an extremely beautiful girl,’ he
said, ‘coming up the garden path.’

‘That
will be my daughter Cora by my first marriage. Half-sister to Marigold. You
would hardly know it. Cora increases in beauty every year. Hadn’t you better be
joining the others?’

Ralph
went quite quickly, obviously hoping to encounter Cora. The girl, however, came
up by the back stairs to Tom’s room holding a single flower, a large yellow
daisy, in a slim vase, her offering of the day.

‘Can I
have my lunch with you, Pa?’

‘Fine.
Tell Claire I want it served on the Sèvres china.’

‘Oh,
no, she won’t do that.’ Cora looked over to a table where about a dozen
ordinary plates were piled up. ‘You can break these any time you like,’ said
Cora.

‘I don’t
want to break that ghastly crockery. To relieve my feelings I want the best
china in the house.’

Julia
came in with a thermometer and some pills.

‘See
you later,’ said Cora.

Tom had
an instinct of disquiet. He felt that Cora would run into Ralph, and after that
some drama might happen. He knew himself to be jealous for Cora, and didn’t
like the idea of her solving the redundant Ralph’s sexual problems.

‘Will
these pills make me impotent?’ he said to Julia.

‘Impotent?
Shouldn’t do.’

‘I miss
sex.’

‘You
mustn’t strain yourself, anyway. Think of something else.’

CHAPTER
SIX

Cora’s life had been
fairly easy for the first nineteen years. She was always much admired for her
good looks and her ability at riding, swimming and tennis. She was average at
school work. When her father left home she was too young to notice his absence,
which in any case was almost a constant factor. The difficulties of her life
had started when she was nineteen. It was obvious that she would try the acting
profession and through Tom’s influence she had many opportunities. She had the
looks, was photogenic, but she didn’t have any acting imagination in her. She
treated this fact, as she did most difficulties, as an inanimate obstacle to be
overcome: this, besides her beauty, was her strength. She had a perfect form, a
fresh, charming face, good hands, grey-green eyes and a mane of brown hair.
She walked like a leopard. Tom doted on her.

‘What a
pity she can’t act,’ he was heard to say. ‘She has so much else. But acting is
an art that you cannot really learn. A certain amount of training might improve
the actor’s art, but essentially to be an actor you have to be born with the
whole stock and merchandise built-in. Acting is fundamentally the art of hypocrisy.
Nothing can put it there. Cora’s no good even for television commercials. She
has spontaneous expressions on her face but she can’t put them on. An art is
something you bring with you into the world, just as Cora brought her beauty.’

So far
was Cora from any art of dissimulation, that she was at a positive disadvantage
in some of her relationships, especially with men and employers. She could not
fall in love intensely or long enough to match the desire she aroused in men.
Out of boredom, she could not stick at any job, even being photographed for
magazine covers. She was now twenty-nine, unemployed and more beautiful in her
appearance than ever, the apple of her father’s eye.

It was
Marigold who joyfully brought to Claire and Tom the news that Cora and Ralph
were having an affair. It was not yet two weeks since Ralph had first seen Cora
from Tom’s bedroom window. Claire, Tom and Marigold were taking drinks in the
sitting room portion of Tom’s room when Marigold came out with the news.

‘But,’
said Tom wildly, almost hopefully, ‘Ralph has a sexual hang-up as a consequence
of being made redundant. It’s a common phenomenon apparently throughout Europe.’

‘Not
with Cora, he hasn’t got a hang-up. I know,’ said Marigold.

Marigold
knows everything, Tom thought. How?

Evidently
by making it her business to know. That’s how people know things.

‘And,’ said
Marigold, ‘he has bought Cora a gold watch of some extremely expensive make. He
bought it using part of the money Mother gave him, I know.’

(She
knows…)

‘If it
helps him over the hump I don’t blame him,’ said Claire. ‘That’s what the money
was for.’

‘It isn’t
any function of Cora to help anyone over their hump,’ Tom said.

‘What
about his wife,’ said Claire. ‘Does Ruth know?’

‘I don’t
know,’ said Marigold.

(Something
she
doesn’t
know … Not yet.)

‘Not
yet,’ Marigold added, innocently.

Try as
he might, Tom was not fond of his daughter by Claire. Even Claire was
disconcerted at times by the way Marigold had developed.

‘Ruth
is bound to suspect something,’ Marigold went on. ‘He can’t explain his
absences by the excuse of job-hunting all the time.’

‘Let the
thing blow over,’ Tom said. ‘It will certainly blow over. He’ll probably find a
job. He’s a very able young man.’

‘There
are plenty of able young men,’ said Marigold. ‘And Ralph won’t find a job so
long as Mother gives him fat cheques.’

‘It’s
my money, not yours,’ Claire said without vehemence. She was accustomed to use
this phrase to her family. She uttered it frequently.

‘It’s a
question of what’s good for Ralph. His marriage. And what’s good for Cora,’
said Marigold. ‘From that point of view it’s a moral question.’

Sooner
or later, thought Tom, Marigold had to make it out to be a moral question.
Sooner or later.

‘I don’t
know about a moral question,’ Claire said, ‘but Cora shouldn’t break up a young
married couple. She’s old enough to know better.’

‘She is
so irresistibly lovely,’ Tom said, ‘that temptation is different, more
pressing by far, for Cora than for either of you. You can’t possibly blame Cora
if a man loses his head over her.’

Claire
looked at her watch. ‘It’s time for your injection,’ she said. She went over
to the door of the adjacent room and, opening it, found Julia preparing her
shot. Turning to Marigold, Claire said, ‘Let’s go down.’