Reality and Dreams (8 page)

‘It’s
called
Redundancy and the Self-Employed.’
She added, ‘That basically
means people like you, Pa. And while we’re on personal subjects, your nose is
far too long, it sticks out. If I were an artist painting your portrait I’d
make it look like a late-comer at a party compared with and joining the rest of
your features. Small breasts are very good under clothes.’

‘Sometimes,’
he said, ‘you sound quite intelligent and almost human. I don’t say you are so
but you sound so. And only sometimes. You need a man to wake you up, and that’s
the truth, Marigold.’

Tom no longer needed his
nurse. Twice a week for three-quarters of an hour, he succumbed to a physiotherapist
who took him through his exercises. The Greek masseur, Ron, came every Saturday
afternoon. Tom missed his crew of attendants and confidants. Their personal
histories which he had become acquainted with were now lost to him forever like
television serials broken off and never resumed. The last of the nurses to go
was Tom’s day nurse Julia. He had got used to the developing stories of her
three children and her husband. Julia herself had another job to go to but her
husband, second mechanic in a garage, whose job had seemed so safe, was made
redundant the week before her job with Tom came to an end. He had asked her to
keep in touch, let him know how the family were doing. He never heard.

He felt
that all through his illness from the accident and convalescence, he had been
directing a film, interviewing interminable faces for casting with a mixture
of critical scrutiny, cynicism and sincere involvement which, to him,
represented sixty per cent of a film. It was a surrealistic process, this
casting and creatively feeling at the same time. At the initial stages faces
and shapes affected the form of his movies much more than the screenplay
itself. Until a film was three-quarters completed, when people asked him what
the film was ‘about’, he simply laughed in their faces.

Tom
mused: ‘I fell off my perch. Now I want a divorce from my past ideas. How do I
achieve this?’

Let
us go then, you and I,…

Dave
the taxi-driver, expensive but true friend that he was, sat in the driver’s
seat negotiating the traffic. Tom sat beside him, so rich as he was, so
democratic. ‘What you never say,’ Dave remarked, ‘is what your film’s about.’

Tom
laughed.

‘Why
laugh? It’s a question. You talk about your film, this image, that impression,
so on, so on. You cut, you save and you scrap. But what’s it about?’

‘A
girl,’ said Tom. ‘A girl I saw one day on a campsite in France. I stopped for a
coffee at a stall on the edge of the camp. A girl was making hamburgers. She
was nothing much, just a girl. But I saw her in a frame. When I see people in
frames I know I want to make a film of just that picture.’

‘Pictures
inside frames,’ said Dave.

‘That’s
really all there is to it,’ said Tom. ‘The title of the movie is at present
The
Lump Sum…
’

The
Lump Sum … Tom knew that his film would not end up with that title. But how
he longed in his wish-dream to settle a lump sum on that young, poor hamburger
woman. To do it in an anonymous way so that she never knew how or why this
fortune had come to her. It would have to be untraceable. What would be the
consequence to her?

She
could be initially shocked, incredulous, then gradually indifferent, accepting
her vast fortune (artistically, it would have to be immense) with indifference
as to its source. Once assured it was really hers, all hers, she could possibly
slip into the part without difficulty, settling her family and friends,
escaping from them (paying off her husband if she had one), starting a new
life.

Or, she
could be forever curious, never at ease. She could possibly start a search, so
that the anonymous benefactor was the subject of a long pursuit; he would be
perpetually in flight, always very nearly caught, but not quite. (Until,
perhaps, the end.) The hamburger girl could employ the most expensive detectives,
a computerised network of clue-hunters, infallible, international. How does
one give away a virtual financial empire (it had to be an empire) without
detection? Tom was seized with nostalgia for that hospital-dream of his when,
under the influence of drugs and injections, he had thought calmly of murdering
Claire so that he could inherit her money and settle it on the hamburger girl.
(But even then he had known that Claire’s considerable fortune was not enough,
artistically.)

Suppose
he should now say to his wife: ‘Claire, I need X millions to give away to a
girl as an experiment,’ what would she do? It would be like her answer to his
request for the Sèvres dinner plates in order to break them in a mood of
exasperation. She had sent to his room a pile of plates from the supermarket,
absolutely useless for his purpose. It would be like that. Instead of X
millions for his experiment Claire would, perhaps, suggest a few, some X
hundreds; interesting, but another story altogether, a mere kindly act, not at
all to the point. What he needed was all Claire’s millions, every last million.

Now the
hamburger girl of his dreams would naturally mistake the motive of the donor.
She would imagine that her personal attractions were what the anonymous
multi-millionaire had ‘taken a fancy’ to. She would probably look at herself in
the mirror and see a beauty, whereas she was not a beauty, only a fairly
presentable slim young girl cooking hamburgers. Would she tell all her friends?
Or only some of her friends? The fiscal problem — would capital gains come into
it? The legal question, all to be settled, her great fears allayed. The
hamburger girl might feel she would one day have to pay in some sexual terms
and might come to a near-breakdown deciding whether to give up the fortune or
fight the case — but what ‘case’?

She
might become very stingy, a miser, imagining that everyone was after her money.
Everyone might well be after her money, especially her family, her men friends.
The girl on the campsite wore no wedding ring. She did not appear to be a
married girl. She might, with enormous wealth, make a good social marriage. She
could find a
bon parti
who would arrange for her to have driving lessons
and learn to speak English (for she was still a French girl on that campsite).
She could afford to pay off endless fortune-hunters till she found the right
one, if ever.

‘Do you
think,’ said Tom to Dave, ‘that she would know what to do with that sort of
money? Would she ever learn?’

‘It
depends on the girl,’ Dave said. ‘It seems to me you’ve forgotten that the girl
has a character, a personality, already functioning before you saw her dishing
out hamburgers. She was already a person. It depends on her what she would do.’

‘The
charm of this girl is that she has no history,’ Tom said.

‘Then
she isn’t real.’

‘No,
she’s not real. Not yet.’

Like
a patient etherised upon a table;…

Rose Woodstock, the
actress who had been persuaded in the film to play the part of the rich and
eccentric benefactor’s girl-friend, had not improved, not greatly, in the act
of receiving a present. Tom accepted the last few pictures of her taking and
opening a box containing a necklace. Her hand did tremble a little more than it
had done at first, but Tom saw that this was as far as he could get with her.
As a practised director he knew when he could go no further with his demands on
an actor. It was in any case enough that Rose looked plausible. She was a star
without great quality.

She was
a box-office draw, written into the film for that reason.

The hamburger
girl herself was essentially a minor personality. The actress’s name was Jeanne
both in the movie and in the flesh. The whole point of the movie was that the
hamburger girl should not be a star. Jeanne should be a throw-away item seen
always at an angle.

Well,
Tom told himself that it was enough. But in fact nothing was enough. The film
had been held up by his accident. It had been stopped; it had been shelved;
then unshelved, as he recovered in health, dusted off and started again. Now
that it was once more in progress, the difference was that now he was in love
with the overwhelming beauty Rose Woodstock, a fact which discouraged that very
attractive waif-like nonentity Jeanne who played so well that subordinate
role, the hamburger girl. Jeanne, with her high cheekbones and ragged
hairstyle, was not only discouraged by Tom’s indifference to her off the set;
she was positively infuriated. She knew she was essentially the important
personality of the film. Jeanne resented the glow of attention that Tom turned
on box-office Rose whenever she appeared on or off the set.

Rose
had counted on the screenplay being altered so that her status was no longer
mistress; when the benefactor made love to her in bed, at intervals in the
film, with much heaving and munching, he ‘saw’ the hamburger girl.

Rose
Woodstock’s husband in real life was a young television director, at present
without work. Tom paid him for a while. Tom imagined that Rose was not supposed
to know about this, but she did. As the shooting of the film proceeded she fell
commercially but genuinely in love with Tom, which in her case was possible.

The
producers now wanted to make Jeanne into a more prominent personality. Tom’s
financial share in the film, together with his reputation, gave him a good say
on the artistic side.

They
called a meeting. It took place in a beige suite at the top of a London hotel.
Five people in all, two of whom, a man and a woman, were silent.

‘Jeanne
is nothing. Nothing at all. She’s a throw-away item. You see her only at an
angle. She’s an idea. If you make her a somebody,’ Tom said, ‘the movie falls
to pieces. It is nothing. Nothing at all.’

He
compromised by agreeing to do more close-ups of Jeanne. ‘I’ll have to look at
Rose’s contract. She’ll be furious. I’ll have to work in a few more close-ups
of Rose.’

‘Close-ups
of Rose are always money in the bank,’ observed one member of the meeting,
philosophically.

Tom
cruised around with Dave that night. ‘The trouble with producers,’ Tom said, ‘they
want both an art film and a commercial success. They want sentimentality,
emotion and the higher moods of detachment. They want bloody everything.
Fortunately I have some money of my own in the film which gives me a certain
pull. But I’m both director and script-writer which means I have to appear to
hear everybody’s ideas while taking no notice of them.’

‘Follow
your instinct,’ Dave advised. ‘Ignore the rest.’

‘But I’m
in love with Rose,’ said Tom. ‘So much in love, I can’t tell you. Off the set
she is simply delicious.’

‘Sounds
unprofessional.’

‘Oh, it’s
not professional,’ Tom said. ‘But the greatest trouble is Jeanne. She suspects
I’m having an affair with Rose. She resents what seems to be her minor role in
the film when she is in fact the important element in it. The whole environment
of the movie world is bad for Jeanne’s acting. She is beginning to get ideas.’

Not
long after this Jeanne phoned Tom’s house at about nine at night. As she had
imagined Tom wasn’t in. ‘Could I speak to Mrs. Richards?’

‘I’m
Jeanne, the hamburger girl,’ said Jeanne.

‘Oh,
hello, Jeanne. My husband’s not here. He’s probably still in the studio, in
the projection-room or at a rehearsal.’

‘Oh,
no, he isn’t in the studio,’ said Jeanne. ‘Oh, no, he is not.’

‘Well
perhaps he’s in conference, in which case he’ll be home late. Can I give him a
message?’

‘No,’
said Jeanne. ‘But I can tell you where Tom is, Mrs. Richards. He’s in Rose
Woodstock’s London flat. Her husband’s in the country.’

‘In
that case why do you ring him up here? I daresay they’re discussing the film —
but why don’t you call him there?’ said Claire. ‘That’s to say if you have the
number. I’m afraid I don’t have it. But if there’s anything urgent I’ll leave
Tom a message. He’ll get it first thing.’

‘First
thing in the morning, Mrs. Richards?’

‘That
could be,’ said Claire. ‘But you know, Tom might be back any time, any minute.
He’s still under therapy and has to go carefully…

‘He’s
in love with Rose Woodstock. Don’t you realise?’ Jeanne said. She sounded
tired, exasperated.

‘Oh,
no, that’s not at all the case,’ said Claire. ‘He thinks of nobody but you,
Jeanne. Don’t you see how it is? He talks day and night about his hamburger
girl. The original he saw on a campsite in France. I was there at the time. He’s
obsessed by you, Jeanne.’

‘He
treats me so badly,’ said Jeanne. She had started to cry. She seemed to have
quite forgotten that she was talking to a wife. Claire continued to extend
sympathy. She was expansive. She finally got Jeanne off the phone somehow. Then
she scribbled a note to Tom: ‘Jeanne is
looking
for you’ and left this
on the hall table. Then she put on her television glasses and went back to her
programme.

CHAPTER
NINE