by Muriel Spark
‘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?’
‘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 seri
als 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.’