by Muriel Spark
‘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.’
‘Put on a CD,’ Tom said to Julia. ‘Find Mahler’s Symphony No.1, New York Philharmonic.’ She gave him his injection, found the disc and put it on.
Next morning, Sunday, came the relief nurse.
Tom’s incoming calls were controlled by the house so that he shouldn’t be worried by unwanted callers, but he had a direct outgoing line. He dialled Cora’s number and got an answering machine on which he left a message for her to call him back. He felt guilty about his wish to interfere in Cora’s life, but the desire was stronger than the guilt. He wasn’t at all sure what he would say to Cora by way of enquiry, warning, deprecation of her presumed affair with Ralph. She was getting a divorce from Johnny. She was free. She was twenty-nine.
‘What’s going on downstairs?’ he asked the nurse, who was making the bed with a flourish of sheets that looked like a ship in full sail.
‘Your wife is preparing the vegetables because it’s Sunday and there’s no cook.’
‘She likes to cook.’
‘She told me she hates doing the veg. but she likes to cook, as you say. I offered to help because, after all, your meals are involved, but Claire wouldn’t let me. ‘The nurse’s long arms threw the final cover in the air and landed it neatly on the bed.
‘Who’s coming to lunch — anybody?’
‘I don’t know. It looks like company’s expected.’
‘Find out,’ said Tom.
A knock on the door. The masseur, a squat, powerful Greek came in with a bag of ointments. His name was Ron. Tom lay down on the orthopaedic chaise-longue while Ron kneaded, pummelled and rubbed for three-quarters of an hour, during which Tom forgot to brood on Cora’s affair and who was lunching with Claire.
‘This physical experience is almost a spiritual one,’ he observed to Ron.
‘I hear this before, it’s well-known,’ said Ron. ‘Many persons feel they relax in the spirit from massage.’
‘What is the difference between body and spirit?’ said Tom.
‘There is a difference but both are very alike, you know,’ said Ron.
‘At least, interdependent I should say,’ Tom said.
It was not to be expected that Tom would be sympathetically inclined towards the substitute director of his film. The man came to see Tom to explain his method, which he called his aesthetic strategy, thus outraging Tom from the start. The new director was moreover about thirty-five, far too young in Tom’s view. Everything was now being done at a speed which was strained even for the film industry, apparently to recoup the damage done to the project by Tom’s fall. The title of the film was now to be neither The Hamburger Girl nor I’ll Kill You If You Die. It was to be The Lunatic Fringe, to which Tom objected for obscure reasons. He took the title, the breathless course of events, and the ever-recurring phrase ‘cost-effective’ as a personal insult. ‘This is too much,’ Tom said; ‘one title last week and a different one this week. I’m aware that we live in a world of rapid change. Only last week my wife was complaining that her shares in Barings Bank had gone down the drain, and this week her shares have not gone down the drain. But this is too much. You can’t change the title without changing the film altogether. I won’t agree to it. Tell them I’ll sue.’
It would be useless to give here the name of the latest director because, not surprisingly, he was out of the show in less than a month, but not before Tom had been considerably upset by the cancellation of the contract of two young male actors.
‘I chose them,’ Tom said with shrill emphasis, ‘for their looks.’
‘Ah!’ said the upstart, ‘you can’t hire actors mainly for their looks.’ He looked for support at the casting director, a mature woman, whom he had brought along with him on this occasion. But the casting director had eyes only for Tom, whom she adored.
‘They are adequate actors,’ said Tom, ‘but more important, they look like the actors who play the parts of their respective parents.’
‘Uncannily like,’ said the casting director. ‘Plausibility, my dear man,’ said Tom, ‘is what you aim for as a basis for a film. Achieve that basic something, and you can then do what you like. You can make the audience go along with you, anywhere, everywhere. It is extremely difficult to cast parents and their adult children, except in a homogeneous society. To me,’ he hammered on with justified pride and no tact, ‘it is not good enough to cast sons and daughters totally different from at least one of the parents, or parents who have no pretence of a family likeness with their children, as you see in so many films. In Scandinavia, of course, the casting is easier. Bergman’s blood-relations, for instance, always look like blood-relations.’
When the new director shortly flopped out Tom tried to get back his original ‘blood-relations’ into the act. He was not successful because the screenplay had been changed to eliminate them. They were unnecessary.
Tom had money in the film. ‘Call Fortescue-Brown, ‘he told Claire. ‘I want to withdraw from the film altogether. It’s no longer mine. I wash my hands of it. I withdraw my name. I want my money back.’
‘You could go and direct in a wheel chair,’ said Claire.
‘You’ll be about in a wheel chair before long. We could easily arrange for you to go on the set a few hours a day.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Tom said.
However, he did dream of it. He was now able to leave his room and get himself wheeled into the house’s new service lift. Claire fussed greatly, getting him into the car with his folding chair at the back. The driver. The instructions. He suspected that Claire was glad to get him out of the way for hours on end.
‘Where’s my great crane?’ said Tom. ‘What have you done with our Chapman crane?’
‘Tom,’ said his assistant. ‘You can’t go up in that crane any more.’
‘I want to know where it is?’
‘We rented it out. Anyway, you can’t even use the dolly just yet. Do you really think they’d let you sit at those angles?’
‘They say that it was being at maximum tilt that saved me in my fall from the crane. Something scientific about the angle of the fall. Pilots who crash go up again and fly. The crane —�
�Oh, no, Tom, there is no crane. You can’t have any more trips on the crane. The insurance would never take you on, even if we would.’
‘Who is we?’
‘All of us. The crew. The production people. No crane. To be honest, we sold it.’
‘I need an amplifier. I need a lot of hand-cameras and camera rests. There is frequent sprinting towards the object in this movie. I don’t want you to be afraid of wrecking cameras. The man has to sprint and stop just inches away.’
‘All that’s been done already, Tom. At least a lot of it’s been done. There are plenty of cameras.’
‘There is all the difference,’ Tom proceeded, ‘between a dedicated cameraman and a cameraman full-stop. You need inspiration. Where have we got to?’
‘There’s had to be a lot of re-editing, Tom. We’re in a state of transition.’
‘I want the screenplay, my screenplay,’ Tom said. ‘I want to take it home and see what you’ve changed. I want some sign of inspiration. Do you know what inspiration is? It is the descent of the Holy Spirit. I was talking to a Cardinal the other day. He said there was a theory that the ages of the Father and the Son were over and we were approaching the age of the Holy Spirit, or as we used to say, Ghost. The century is old, very old. Call my car.’
‘The screenplay, Tom,’ said his assistant director, ‘is very tentative just at this moment.’ But he gave Tom a rough-handled copy. Tom waved to the assembled crew as he was wheeled out.
‘Take it easy, Tom.’ ‘Great to see you, Tom.’ ‘Keep it up, Tom.’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Tom. ‘Punctually at eight.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
A sixth sense, based on experience, told Claire that Tom would persuade himself that he should come to the rescue of Ruth while her husband, Ralph, was occupied with Cora. In fact, up to his accident, consciously or otherwise, he had made a speciality of the wives of redundant men, succeeding in about half of the cases. In arriving at this statistic Claire took into account that a film director holds a special attraction for women. And to be honest, thought Claire, the reason why I stick by him is that he’s an interesting film director. She was in her mid-fifties. Most of her friends, male and female, were now on to their third marriage. Tom was her first and although she knew why she was still attached to him, Claire never wondered why he remained with her. She was rich, discreet about her men, tolerant of his women, a good hostess and good-looking. Why should a husband over sixty want to leave her?
And in fact, Tom had no such intention. He was courting Ruth who still was not aware of her husband’s affair with Cora. She only knew that Ralph was frequently away looking for a job, having interviews all over England, and that Tom was extremely friendly and helpful. Tom was not yet up to the real, the physical, part of a love affair, which misled her considerably and in fact induced in her sentimental feelings for Tom. His wheel-chair visits and his flowers made her happy. He brought her a bracelet worked in white, red and yellow gold. She had tight-fitting jeans and long blonde hair. Tom thought of her as the hamburger girl. He thought of her as being in her early twenties although she was well into her thirties.
Claire soon got knowledge of this courtship from her daughter Marigold. As usual Claire infuriated her daughter by being absent-minded about such knowledge.
‘Don’t you care?’ said Marigold, with a little shriek accompanying the word ‘care’.
‘No,’ said Claire. ‘You know I don’t.’
‘It’s a family matter,’ Marigold said.
‘That’s why it bores me even more than your father’s other affairs.’
‘Why don’t you divorce him?’ Marigold intoned.
‘You always ask that. And I ask in return why don’t you divorce your own husband? He’s never at home.’
‘He can’t write travel books and stay at home at the same time.’
‘He can’t write travel books,’ Claire said. ‘Not good ones. They are too vague. Why don’t you go on his travels with him if he just wants to travel?’
Marigold left. It was amazing how very sour she had turned out to be. Neither Claire nor Tom could understand her.
True enough, that day he had been lunching with Ruth. Claire had simply asked him if he had.
‘How did you guess?’ he said.
‘I have heard,’ said Claire, ‘that insurance companies move their door-to-door salesmen into areas where redundant workers live, hoping to profit by their lump-sum severance pay.’
It didn’t take Tom long to make the analogy between himself and the insurance men, and he protested:
‘But we have had to reduce the cast from eleven to seven.’
‘How many men?’ said Claire.
‘Three.’
‘Are they married?’
‘Two are married. The wives are very boring. One of the actors we laid off is Jonathan Slaker and the other is Wolfgang Hertz. Mrs. Slaker is not young and Mrs. Hertz is a terrifying young computer-accountant. Not my types. Besides, you exaggerate. I’m perfectly happy at home. What about Charlie?’
‘Charlie?’ she said, for a moment genuinely puzzled. ‘Yes, Charlie.’
‘Oh Charlie. He’s a thing of the past.’
‘Redundant,’ said Tom.
‘You might put it that way,’ said Claire.
Tom often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams. To an unbeliever this would have meant the casting of an insubstantiality within an already insubstantial context. Tom was a believer. He meant the very opposite. Our dreams, yes, are insubstantial; the dreams of God, no. They are real, frighteningly real. They bulge with flesh, they drip with blood. My own dreams, said Tom to himself, are shadows, my arguments — all shadows.
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.’