by Muriel Spark
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
‘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 lik
e 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.
‘You mean murdered?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am not convinced about that. In fact, I haven’t thought on those lines,’ said Tom. ‘Should I?’
‘It’s one of the possibilities,’ said the man.
‘And you’re working on that possibility?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘She could walk in at any time,’ Tom said. ‘Just any time. She must know the worry she’s causing.’
The papers had been full of Marigold’s disappearance, especially when she was first definitely missed.
‘But,’ Tom added, ‘I’m not sure that she’d care about us, how we feel. In a way that fact is a hopeful sign.’
Tom was in fact thinking the deeply disloyal thought ‘Why should anyone bother to murder Marigold?’
‘It may be,’ he said to the officer, ‘she has just gone away to write a novel.’
‘Has she expressed a desire to that effect?’
‘No. But everyone is writing a novel, why not Marigold?’
‘You feel she’s alive somewhere?’
‘I have a hunch that she is, that’s all.’
‘Try,’ said the policeman, ‘to analyse your hunch. If you come up with anything, any clue, let us know. We ourselves have no hunches.’
They had been through Marigold’s diary, and had interviewed nineteen people who had been interviewed by Marigold in connection with her research on redundancy.
‘You say she seemed an eccentric.’
‘I didn’t say that. I said she was a strange sort of woman.’
‘Attractive?’
‘Not really. But all right in bed for a few hours.’
‘Why did you have sex with her?’
‘She invited me. She was out with it — just like that. No mimble-mamble.’
‘Why did you accept?’
‘I felt it was part of the interview, and I felt inclined. When you’ve lost your job you need something to make you feel good.’
Another man explained, ‘I knew she was the daughter of Tom Richards, the film director. A name is a glamorous lay, isn’t it?’
One of the women the police interviewed gave the information: ‘She was very eager to know how much I spent on my clothes and beauty products, and how much I needed those items to keep a job.’
‘Didn’t you think it was a normal question for someone studying the economics of employment and unemployment?’
‘Yes, but she went on about it.’
‘Did she suggest to you a lesbian relationship?’
‘No, she didn’t. She wanted to know about the men, always the men, in my office where I had been working. Did “redundant” mean only that one wouldn’t sleep with them, and so on.’
‘And did redundancy mean that in your case?’
‘No, it didn’t. It just meant that eight of us lost our jobs.’
‘She didn’t use her married name, apparently. Would you say that Marigold Richards disliked, resented, men?’
‘Perhaps, a bit. She didn’t look as if she could hold a man. But she was interested, more, in sex. I was rather embarrassed by her questions. Don’t think I’m inhibited by sex —’Neither am I,’ said the police officer. ‘Without sex none of us would be here. But we’re trying to find a woman who’s vanished, and some sort of motive…’
&nb
sp; Cora gave out the possibility that Johnny, her nearly ex-husband, might have induced Marigold to join him in India where she presumed he still was in his flight from materialism.
‘Why should he do that?’
‘He was in a phase of rejecting conventional ideas of beauty,’ Cora said.
The policeman looked at good-looking Cora in amazement. ‘We’ll follow that line,’ he said. They did not need to follow it very far. Handsome Johnny Carr had returned from India and was consoling Rose Wood-stock in Tom’s absence.
Tom confided to the taxi-driver Dave as they cruised the night-lit streets: ‘Marigold,’ he said, ‘is a wrecker. But in a way I’m closer to my wife, Claire, than I’ve been since we were young. Claire feels badly: her only child. At least I have Cora. And I can’t help saying to myself, thank God Cora is safe.’
‘Do you mean that Marigold’s a wrecker or that she’s a victim — which?’ said Dave.
‘I don’t think anything,’ Tom said. ‘But I can’t cast Marigold in the role of victim.’
‘Some people suspect you,’ said Dave.
‘I know. I can feel it in the air. Why should I want to do away with Marigold, I’d like to know?’
‘Blackmail, they say. They say she knew too much.’
‘Too much about what?’
‘About you and Rose Woodstock and the little actress Jeanne somebody.’
‘I have no secrets of that kind. Jeanne is a wasp. I’ve actually dropped Rose. The worry of it all has put me right off her. And do you know what? — She’s left her husband entirely and has moved in with Cora’s husband Johnny.’
‘I saw them, yes, in a magazine. They look a good-looking couple.’
‘What feelings can she have, with her husband out of work?’
‘He was already out of work when she was with you.’
‘Thanks for reminding me. He was the last person we know of to see Marigold. She taped a sample interview with him for her study of redundancy. They had dinner together. Then — then nothing. No bed, no sex. Apparently the subject didn’t arise; do you believe it? Nothing. The rest is silence. And where are my friends? Where are they?’