Reality and Dreams (9 page)

‘My father suggested I
should interview you,’ said Marigold. ‘As I said, I’m writing a book on
redundancy. Could you tell me some of your experiences as a redundant T.V.
programme director. What were your first feelings when you were told to go?’

‘You
can’t imagine,’ said Kevin Woodstock.

‘Oh yes
I can,’ said Marigold. ‘I am a redundant wife.

I was
told. Just like that.’

‘I was
stunned.’ Rain splashed at the small windows of Marigold’s cottage in Surrey.

‘Me,
too. After a while I realised that I expected it.

But at
the first moment I was stunned,’ Marigold told him.

‘Yes, I
should have expected it, too. I had programmes planned ahead. They had to be
scrapped. Crow Television paid out, all round. I got offered a lump sum but my
lawyer’s fighting it.’

‘Were
you the only one made redundant?’

‘No,
seven of us had to go.’ He gulped his beer. Marigold sipped her calorie-free
Coke.

‘Have
you thought of emigrating?’ Marigold said.

‘Yes,’
he said. ‘But where to? My wife is in demand for motion pictures all the time
in the U.K. and the U.S. There’s nothing for me abroad. Rose would never
emigrate even if so.’

‘Have you
thought of T.V. ads? Commercials?’

‘Rose
wouldn’t like that. It would be a come-down. It would affect her career as an
actor (she won’t be called actress, by the way) if I went on the T.V. pushing
track-shoes, mountain bikes, holiday homes, whatever.’

‘Has
your redundancy affected your matrimonial life?’

‘There’s
a danger of that,’ said Kevin Woodstock, ‘but don’t quote me personally on the
question.’ For some inscrutable reason he added, ‘We’ve been married eleven
years. Rose uses her married name professionally.’

Marigold
assured him he was, for her purpose, an anonymous case history.

She had
thought him charming but she had made up her mind not to be personally
influenced by any such fact. However, when he said, ‘I hope that you, as a
redundant wife, will be free for dinner,’ she accepted.

Although
they left Surrey in Marigold’s car, because of the problems of parking Marigold
drove it to her private garage in her small mews flat off Brompton Road, where
she left it. They then got a taxi to Soho to an Indian restaurant called Dish
Delhi, arriving about nine o’clock. They left shortly after eleven-thirty. Marigold
took a taxi home. He walked a short distance until a cruising taxi passed which
he took to his home at Camden Town.

It was
towards the end of September, when Tom’s film had been finished and was off his
hands for the past three weeks, that Tom said to Claire, ‘Have you seen
Marigold lately?’

She had
not. Nobody else they knew had seen or heard of Marigold for many weeks. This
was not so very unusual, but the length of time during which she did not ring
or show up, was beginning to be unusual. She didn’t answer the phone. Her
cleaning woman had gone to Spain for her holidays and being unable to get into
the mews flat on her return, presumed Marigold to have gone off somewhere. Her
daily help in her cottage in Surrey had not seen her.

One way
and another it was now almost five weeks that Marigold was missing.

Marigold
was the one settled thing in common between Claire and Tom. She kept telling
her parents that they had nothing in common, and therefore should divorce, not
realising that she — that the appalling nature of their only offspring — was
mainly the cause of Claire and Tom’s inseparability. They were drawn together
in wondering about Marigold and guilt about their feelings towards her. Even
her disagreeable face kept them together like birds in a storm.

Marigold
had made a home-movie video cassette on the subject of redundancy. In a
simulated job-interview she played the part of the prospective employer. This
she sent to Tom ‘for his information’ meaning for his approval. He watched it
with Claire and found it terribly funny. Marigold’s face on the screen came
out in this very amateur production bloated, blotched with too many depressive
turn-down lines. Her eyes had faded somehow. (Wasn’t she, surely, an addict or
ex-addict of something?) Tom and Claire hurled themselves about the sofa in
their hilarity. Marigold’s voice croaked authoritatively, nastily:

‘On
what grounds were you made redundant? Was it a group action? Was it individual
performance?’

The
idiotic actor being interviewed, nervously touched his tie and said, from the
dreadful, prepared script, ‘It was actually the latter criterion which applied
in my case.’

‘That
is a mark against you,’ Marigold said, her face twitching. ‘One mark at least.’

They
switched it off before the end. Tom took the cassette out of the machine. ‘My
God,’ he said, ‘however did we spawn her?’

Claire
was literally dabbing the corner of her eyes, still convulsed with laughter.

This
had been roughly three weeks from the night Marigold was last seen by Kevin
Woodstock in the taxi that bore her from the restaurant.

Tom had
put the cassette aside, mentally composing in his mind a tactful note to
Marigold, or a way of approach if she should turn up confronting him for an
opinion, ‘Marigold, I could have it done professionally for you. There is just
a touch of the amateur. Of course, I understand that this is intended for
job-consultants, yes, yes, I quite understand…’

The
cassette lay on one side where he had put it. Later, finding it, he handed it
to Claire. They were now childless and clouded over with guilt.

Claire
remembered one of the last times she had seen Marigold, who had kept on
bitching about Tom’s affair with Rose and what she called his shabby treatment
of Jeanne. Marigold had taken the trouble to inform herself about the gossip
flying around the studio where
The Hamburger Girl
(again the title) was
winding to an end.

‘Your
pride. How can you stand it?’ Marigold said. ‘You must feel terrible.’

‘And
how do you feel about being abandoned?’ said Claire.

‘It’s a
totally different case,’ screamed Marigold. ‘A mother shouldn’t talk to a
daughter like that.’

Hideous
Marigold. Always negative Marigold. Her parents had searched through the past,
consulted psychiatrists, took every moment to bits. In no way could she be
explained. The second psychiatrist had even interviewed Marigold. ‘You see,’ he
told Claire, ‘it’s a cocktail. Personality is a mixture of genes. You can’t do
anything about it. You can’t put there what there isn’t a place for, you can’t
take anything away without leaving a bad trace. She would have to want to
change.’

‘She
won’t do that,’ said Tom, ‘not her.’

He
always thought secretly of Cora, the loving and the beautiful. Claire, too, was
attached to Cora. In her way Marigold got on quite well with her older
half-sister. She had never showed signs of jealousy. Marigold had been jealous
of no-one, in fact. She was too satisfied with herself for envy, jealousy or
the like.

‘If it
had been Cora, I think I’d feel less appalled,’ Tom said to Claire soon after
Marigold’s disappearance, trying to cope with it as they were.

‘I’d
feel the same,’ Claire said. ‘With Marigold, there’s a feeling of frustration,
of unfinished business. I think of her face, the tragic mask. Why?’

‘That’s
it,’ Tom said. ‘You’ve said it exactly. It’s unfinished business.’

Whether
it was an unconscious memory of these words or not, Tom had the title of his
film changed the next week, finally, to
Unfinished Business.
He hardly
knew he had done so. He busied himself unnecessarily in perfecting the film; he
dropped Rose Woodstock as a lover. But concentrated on her, on Jeanne, and on
the actor who had played his part in the video on redundancy, only as possible
accomplices in the disappearance of Marigold. Had she been murdered? In fact,
his feelings were chaotic.

‘The
century is old,’ said Tom in one of his more lucid moments with Claire; ‘it is
very old.’

CHAPTER
TEN

The answers that Marigold’s
family and friends were able to give to the police about her habits, her
possible movements, her whereabouts, only served to show how little anyone knew
her. Tom’s indignant guilt sent the investigators on grotesquely false trails.
He was not convinced she had been abducted and killed, as was certainly held
by the police to be a strong possibility. Claire clung to the theory that
Marigold had just wandered or walked off the scene, possibly to start a new
life. It was impossible to know if she had taken money or precious objects,
maybe jewellery, with her. Nobody knew about her money, her goods. It appeared
just then that Marigold had been all her life exceedingly secretive.

Cora
said: ‘I feel we should have taken more interest in Marigold.’

‘So do
I,’ said Tom. ‘But how? How?’

Tom
thought back on the times he had tried to make Marigold part of the family. Her
manners were frightful. She was a positive embarrassment at any party that
involved her parents’ friends. This was apparent before her fifteenth year,
when she could be described as ‘difficult’. But as her adolescence wore off,
she became ever more aggressive, ever more impossible to have around the house,
ever less welcome in a house where some elements of domestic staff were necessary.
Tom and Claire tended at first to blame themselves. But they were in no wise to
blame. Marigold was simply a natural disaster.

Her
marriage had been a touch and go affair. Her property — the house in Surrey and
the flat in London — together with her very wealthy mother, made her into a
material catch. But it could never have lasted.

Discussing
her one day as they often did, Claire said to Tom, ‘Another thing I don’t
understand about Marigold — she can be so
common.
Where does she get
that vulgarity? From which of us, from what side, does the street-corner touch
come?’

Nobody
could answer that one.

Tom
told the police investigators who enquired about her character, ‘I know very
little about that. She resembles neither my wife nor me, except that, like me,
she’s sexy.’

‘Do you
mean she might have gone off with anybody?’

‘Yes,
she might, if she fancied the man. Or the woman.’

‘Any
idea what she might be doing for money?’

‘No, we
don’t know anything about where she keeps her money. She had plenty from her
mother. It might be deposited all over the place, just anywhere.’

The
police investigator was in plain clothes. A grey suit, a grey tie. Tom would
not have cast him as a policeman. He thought the face too soft, too much the
face of a man who resembled his mother rather than his father. And yet, Tom
reflected, perhaps, after all, this would be the ideal casting. Not at all the
cliché
of a police officer. Yes, he would be interesting in the part. (But what
part?)

‘Have
you faced the possibility that she might be dead?’ the policeman asked.