Reality and Dreams (7 page)

Tom
started going out at night in a taxi the driver of which he had befriended. All
Tom wanted was locomotion. They cruised merely, surprising many participators
of the night street drama. Dave, the driver, of second-generation West Indian
origin, was in full sympathetic understanding with Tom. He didn’t know why Tom
wanted to float around the night-life districts without a reference to sex,
but since he was a biblically religious married man he deeply enjoyed Tom’s
religious reflections on such occasions.

‘Are
you married?’ Tom had asked him.

‘Yes,
my wife’s part-time at Harrods in hosiery. We’ve got three children, a boy of
sixteen and two girls, fourteen and eight.’

The
taxi with its sign of ‘engaged’ was waiting at the door in the fading light.

Tom
manoeuvred himself down the front door steps with marvellous agility. Claire
watched from the dining room window as Tom got in beside the driver and slammed
the door shut.

Let
us go then, you and I,…

‘Your
wife doesn’t mind you going off like this?’

‘No,
she doesn’t mind at all. She knows I like locomotion.’

‘My
wife would mind,’ said Dave.

‘Maybe
she’d have reason. Claire doesn’t interfere.

Everything
I do is basically connected with my work,’ Tom said. ‘Everything.’

‘Claire
is rich, a millionaire, I read about her in a magazine,’ said Dave. ‘American
biscuits. She was born into that fabulous family, what’s their name?…’

Tom had
never read any reference to Claire during all the years he had known her, which
did not qualify her in terms of her wealth, as if that were her one salient feature.
She did not resent the image. In fact she spent some hours of nearly every
week-day with two old-fashioned leather-bound ledgers which recorded her
charitable transactions; these were then transferred to a computer and rapidly
conveyed by her efficient secretary to one of her money-lawyers to deal with.
Claire took seriously all letters asking for money, being very clever at
discriminating between fraudulent attempts at rip-off and genuine appeals. To
this extent alone she submitted without resentment to the idea that she was
essentially a money person.

Although
it was true that money was a built-in part of Claire’s personality, she was
many things besides. Tom was fully aware of this. What steadily drew him
towards her was her loyalty to him which always predominated over her
infidelities; the latter hardly counted. So that, when from time to time Tom
muttered to himself or to one of his women friends, ‘My wife has a man,’ the
remark held no foreboding, and no more than a touch of impatience.

Cruising
around in those bright-lit streets Tom sat beside his driver, seldom commenting
on their surroundings. Faces looked into the windows at the traffic lights,
perhaps wondering what they had to buy or sell, sex, drugs, whatever; but on
the whole they merged, ignored, with the rest of the traffic.

‘It
says in the Bible,’ said Dave, “‘A woman, if she maintain her husband, is full
of anger, impudence, and much reproach.”‘

‘Where
does that come, in the Bible?’

‘Ecclesiastes.’

‘The
Bible doesn’t teach Christian beliefs. It only illustrates them. The Bible
came before Christianity by hundreds of years. That’s history.’

‘Is
that really so? I don’t believe it.’

‘Please
yourself. My wife Claire would never reproach me even if she had to maintain
me, which she doesn’t.’

They
were held up in the traffic beside a bright-lit electronics emporium, packed
with customers, mostly very young and not very prosperous-looking.

‘The
less money they have,’ said Tom, ‘the more home movie-cameras they buy. I don’t
understand why.’

‘They’ll
put you out of business,’ said Dave.

‘They
look unemployed to me,’ said Tom.

‘Publicans
and sinners.’

‘How do
you know? No man has hired them. It’s in the Bible that Jesus saw those men
idle in the market place, looking for jobs. He said they should get paid just
the same as those who had work. They were waiting around all day to be hired,
and at the end of the day they said “No man has hired us.” According to Jesus,
they were entitled to their pay just the same as those who had done a day’s
work.’

‘My
brother-in-law is out of work,’ Dave said. ‘He was in a pizza-bar and they
sacked him to take on a man for less pay. He’s fighting a case, but in the meantime
where does it get him? And he spends more time looking for a job, going through
all the regular routes, than a lot of employed fellows. Redundancy worries me;
it hangs over us all.’

‘There
should always be a job for a driver, especially a cab-driver.’

‘Should
be. But it doesn’t work that way.’
Let us go then, you and I,…

‘Do you
know the lines from a poet, T.S. Eliot:

‘Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;…’?

‘No,
never heard that before.’ ‘What do you suppose it means?’ ‘Say it again.’

Tom
repeated it.

‘I’d
say it means that here’s these people going out for a walk in the evening and
they’re going to discuss a third person, someone not there. And these two are
going to talk about that third person, the patient.’

‘Analyse
him, take him to bits?’

‘Something
of that. Don’t you know what it means?’

‘Nobody
really knows.’

When he
got home Tom woke up Claire who had just fallen asleep. He handed out his
spectacles case to her. ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘that this contains a present. Show
me how you would take it.’

Claire
hesitated, smiled, put out her hand and took the case.

‘That’s
it!’ said Tom. ‘There is a way of accepting a present. The hand should linger.
It’s been worrying me all day. The actress who’s playing Nora snatches it as if
the present were going to be taken away from her. But you’ve got it right,
Claire. The hand should linger. It’s been nagging me all day. Now, do it again,
let’s see…’

‘My niece might well drop
out of the film,’ said Mrs. Woodstock to young Alec, the top dress designer at
Blue Moon’s. ‘She says he has been simply terrible since he recovered from his
accident. He was always a temperamental swine but now he’s insufferable. Rose
might quit, any day, any hour. Don’t be surprised if you hear.’

‘The
way to get things done, making scenes is definitely not,’ Alec remarked as he
stood back from Elena Woodstock to observe the effect of some pins he had put
into her dress. He came back to her and shifted two pins under her arms. ‘He
has a reputation,’ Alec said, putting his head first to one side and then to
another.

‘Rose
will quit,’ said her aunt. ‘Do you know what a demand he made on her yesterday?
— She had to re-do an action that involved receiving a present from a lover.
Well, Rose played it eager. She snatched the jewel case and snapped it open, as
she told me, with a kind of gasp. Was that good enough for Tom Richards? No, it
wasn’t. “You must linger,” he said, as if she hasn’t been acting these
lover-parts for three, four years. “Let the hand
linger.
Don’t grab.”
Well, Rose wasn’t grabbing, she was just showing eager to see what jewel her
lover had brought. And Tom said in front of everyone, “Rose, I have to talk to
you. Tonight, before you go home. I’d like you to have a drink with me as I’ve
something to explain.”

‘Rose
said, “The hell you have, Tom. You can explain why you’re picking on me like
this. And you don’t explain tonight because I have a prior engagement.” The
truth is, Alec, he’s madly in love with Rose and he’s so frustrated he screams.
Well, yes he started to yell but Rose just left the set. If he doesn’t calm
down to-day she’ll quit the movie. Do you blame her?’

‘I don’t
blame,’ said Alec. ‘But you know how it is.’

‘Rose
is so right for the part,’ said Mrs. Woodstock.

‘Oh,
she’s ravishing,’ said the dressmaker.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

It is time now to describe
what Tom looked like, six months after his accident, about the time when he completely
lost his head over Rose Woodstock, that actress who defied him about how to
accept an important present in a film.

The
fall had damaged Tom’s appearance but by no means ruined it. He was tall with
good, even features, wide-spaced long-shaped dark eyes surrounded by some
humorous wrinkles. Since his fall he had grown a grisly grey and black beard.

Although
it was often said that Tom had survived his fall by a miracle, several
realities had in fact contributed towards the accident being less drastic than
it might have been. The crane, for instance, was not at its full height but was
at that moment being lowered and the seat was possibly at no more than eight
feet when Tom fell; the tilt, moreover, pitched Tom on his side rather than his
back, and saved his head; he fell into a pile of packing-cases — actually empty
— in a scene depicting the back store of a hair-dressing salon, indeed narrowly
missing an arrangement of mirrors which would have given him trouble, or killed
him, had he crashed upon them. One way and another Tom had been lucky. All his
ribs on his right side broken, his right hip badly fractured and the shock had
taken up six months of his life. He still walked with a stick. He was as
attractive as ever; that is to say, very attractive and at the age of
sixty-three his passion for Rose Woodstock, a young thirty-eight, was in no way
out of place because of the discrepancy in their ages. He wanted her to be a
first-class actress and was furious because he knew she could never be in the
first class. She was a star, which was something different. She drove him mad
with her opinions of contempt for ‘elitism’ by which she attempted to rationalise
her own professional deficiencies. Tom only wanted to sleep with her
successfully.

But he
now made love too fast. He could not keep it going. Rose complained, without
embarrassment on her side, or the slightest delicacy, that he made love like he
was in a hurry to get home. Tom thought of the hamburger girl cooking on the
campsite. How tender, how charmingly French and patient she would have been.
Rose had wanted to be cast as the hamburger girl but she was not right for that
part; which in any case was a comparatively small one. Trained by an academy of
dramatic art, Rose was an academy actress from start to finish. Extremely
competent, extremely ‘Academy’. Any well-informed member of the audience could
detect the source of her training. She lifted a glass off the table the ‘Academy’
way; she received bad news in the ‘Academy’ style. She was nothing like the hamburger
girl of Tom’s original conception.

The
title of the movie had recently arrived at
A Near Miss
which Tom
secretly felt just about described Rose Woodstock’s performance. (But in any
case, the Gay movement, deeply misunderstanding the meaning of this title when
it was announced, had protested, so that the title had been withdrawn and
several new suggestions for the title were already being noised about.) Tom’s
passion for Rose increased as her acting got worse. The cast were losing
spontaneity with so many rows and arguments between the director and the star;
her performance deteriorated ever more in proportion to the limited time in
which Tom was able to maintain a workable erection when he went to bed with
her. She complained, too, about his prickly beard ruining her complexion. He
took this seriously because of the film; she was gorgeously photogenic.

Claire
never waited up for him. Why not? he wondered in his fury, and there and then,
at five-thirty in the morning, several times rang up his daughter Marigold to
cover her with insults about her flat-chested puritanism and jibes about her
husband’s extra-marital evasions of duty.

‘Pa, I’m
writing a book. I went to bed late and you woke me up,’ said Marigold.

‘What’s
the book about? The abominations of sexual marriage?’