by Muriel Spark
‘Are you sure,’ said Dave, ‘you aren’t imagining things? Not everyone is gossiping about you. They don’t all believe in rumours. Far from it.’
After a while Dave added, ‘In any case maybe the truth is that she left of her own free-will to make a break from you. Your name alone is overpowering. Think of it.’
The press had made much of the ‘relations’ between Marigold and Tom.
‘All my so-called friends have talked to the press. In the old days,’ Tom said, ‘there would have been plenty of friends stop by to see me after all the fuss and talk in the press, on the T.V. They would have called me up from wherever they were. Now all they can do is make publicity for themselves by giving interviews. “Marigold as I knew her,” “Marigold has something to fear,” “Has she lost her memory?” So on, so on. If Binkie Beaumont was still alive he would have rung me, asked me round for a drink. He was a powerful theatre producer, Tennent’s. The world’s biggest queer but very abounding in hospitality there in Lord North Street. He was convinced his house had been a brothel to serve the Houses of Parliament. There were little wash-basins in some of the rooms, which Binkie just left there, and also some parliamentary division bells had been installed. So I suppose he was right. It was a brothel or the house of someone’s mistress. There one met tout le monde. But Binkie was afraid of death. He didn’t like the subject or even the word. This sometimes limited his choice of plays. All the same, Binkie would have called me up to show solidarity. But Binkie’s dead. Essentially, Dave, a person consists of memories.’
‘Are we born with memories?’ Dave said.
‘There is a theory of that nature. It well might be.’
‘I just wondered. Sometimes I seem to know of things I couldn’t possibly have experienced. And sometimes the children come out with something that makes you wonder: Wherever did they pick that up from? As if they knew things from a time before they were born.’
‘Children are quite psychic,’ Tom said. ‘Very intuitive. They can tune into your thoughts, it’s a bit disquieting. You should try always to give them happy memories. It’s the only thing you can leave to your children with any certainty — happy memories.’
‘I lost a lot of friends,’ said Dave. ‘And now they’ve gone, they’re only memories. And I missed the chance of talking to them about a great number of subjects. In my trade one meets people. Now it’s too late.’
‘Don’t you make new friends?’ Tom said.
‘No, I don’t seem to, Tom. You excepted. The people who get in a taxi, even the regulars, don’t talk. They sit back and close in with themselves.’
Tom, also, was now closed in with himself. He was thinking how afraid everyone was since Marigold’s disappearance, to get mixed up with him. Just in case … Tennessee Williams, he thought, would have called me from the States. He often called on the phone, often and often. He would have been a true friend. Tom remembered the last time he met Tennessee, at a party in New York in the sixties, at Edward Albee’s place. The party was given for the Russian Ballet but they didn’t turn up. Not allowed. Noel Coward, still then very much alive, had slithered over to him with that walk of his, ‘Can you really understand Albee’s plays?’ he had asked Tom, almost within ear-shot of his host. Tom had replied, ‘I’m fascinated by Albee, in fact.’ ‘Are you really, darling?’
Tom said to Dave, ‘Auden would have asked me to dinner without mentioning Marigold. He would have gone out of his way to do so. The last time I saw Auden was in his house at Kirchstetten outside Vienna. I found Wystan going through different editions of Agatha Christie, marking them up at the places where she deleted her colour-racism or softened her anti-semitism over the years. We thought of making a film of Proust. It’s almost impossible. There was a film but it was no good. It wasn’t Proust. Did you ever read any Proust?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Dave said.
‘Have a try,’ said Tom. ‘The English translation is better than the original French, many people say. I’ll bring you a volume. Auden agreed that Proust’s twelve-volume novel was economic compared with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Ulysses. He thought Joyce long-winded and ill-mannered towards the public. Auden himself had wonderful manners. Except, of course, when pushed.’
‘You should write your memoirs,’ Dave said.
‘I mean to do so as soon as we have definite news of Marigold. Until then, I can do nothing with my memories except go over the people I’ve seen more recently, the world I’ve been living in lately.’
‘That’s an idea,’ Dave said. ‘You might hit on a clue to her whereabouts. Memory’s a wonderful thing.’
‘I’m like a drowning man sometimes,’ Tom said. ‘The events of my life flash past in my mind. Perhaps I’ll remember something useful without any effort.’
‘My sympathy to Mrs. Richards,’ Dave said. ‘I’ll tell Claire.’
Claire woke about four every morning with a sudden idea about the whereabouts of Marigold. Had she gone on a climbing trip to Nepal? Had she returned to the cottage in Provence she had once rented for a holiday? Or was she in the Haute Savoie on some campsite pretending to be, or imagining she was, Tom’s hamburger girl? Claire would resolve to investigate all the possibilities that occurred to her in the middle of the night, would settle down to sleep restlessly, but in the morning when she woke again she would feel paralysed by the improbability, the futility, of her ideas.
The thought that Marigold might be somewhat out of her mind had taken a hold on Tom. He was convinced that if she was still alive she had lost her memory. When Claire said, one morning, ‘In the middle of the night it came to me that Marigold might be looking for your hamburger girl, the real one, perhaps impersonating her. But how could she?’
‘Why not?’ said Tom. ‘Why not? She was always resentful of that dream of mine. She could well have been driven by rancour. Let’s go to that campsite and see.’
It was the end of September. ‘Let’s see,’ Tom said. In his film the campsite had been located in Scotland. It had required very few shots. In the film Jeanne had stood over her makeshift stove stolidly making hamburgers. She had only once raised her eyes. That was when she caught sight of the older man looking at her, watching. She had dropped her eyelids again, intent on her hamburgers, dishing them out to the holiday makers as they queued up outside her tiny kiosk.
The campsite in the Haute Savoie was still there, a number of trailers were lined up at the bottom of the field. Jeanne’s kiosk was there, shuttered up. The camp itself was closed. At the hotel nearby where they stopped for the night, Tom showed a photograph of Marigold. The owner, at the reception desk shook his head, but his wife, a large woman who stood looking over his shoulder said, ‘One moment. Perhaps … Recently, I don’t know … We have so many clients coming and going…’ They looked up Marigold’s names, both married and unmarried, in the register dating back long before Marigold’s disappearance. There was no sign of her there.
Nothing was certain. Nothing was resolved. Tom and Claire ate a delicious meal at the hotel; enjoying it in spite of their anxiety.
‘Why on earth should we distress ourselves like this?’ Tom said. ‘What have we done?’
‘I, too, am asking myself, What are we doing here?’ Claire said.
They ate their good French dinner in rather a better mood, both feeling that by their visit to the campsite they had exhausted their duty. The very fancified menu was translated into an English which they contemplated with some pleasure, the main course being ‘steak with an escort of green runner beans and a fanfare of pan-fried red pepper.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The amusement of Tom and Claire over the wording of the menu was a small matter compared to the hilarity of Marigold and her new lover, shacked up as they were in one of the forlorn trailers on the campsite where her parents had stood surveying the desolate scene.
‘They had a hunch I’d be here,’ spluttered Marigold, ‘and I had a hunch that they’d have that hunch. He’s obsessed with his hamburge
r girl, and there they were standing and looking right at us.’
‘Why didn’t they look thoroughly? They could easily have found us. Why shouldn’t we be here, anyway?’
‘They don’t want to find me,’ Marigold said. She was now smiling her very grim smile. ‘That’s the truth. Deep down, they don’t want me around.’
‘What a laugh! To see them standing there … Will you let them know?’
‘One day, yes.’
They had been three days in the trailer and were about to leave. Marigold had only partly dreamed that Tom and Claire would follow her to this very spot which she had read about in some of the film’s pre-release publicity. The place had been in his mind for over a year. ‘The idea came to Tom Richards when he made a casual stop at a campsite…’ The actual place had been photographed, in the fullness of its high summer activity. Buckets and washing and children’s swings. People in shorts. Children everywhere. At the entrance a little kiosk with a girl with her back to the camera serving hamburgers. It was anybody’s campsite, but it was near the village Tom had mentioned so often. That had been the reality from which Tom’s dream had emerged. The trailers were now empty, detached from their motors. ‘Let’s wait here,’ Marigold had said. ‘I’m sure this is the spot. But will he come here looking for me? It’s a long, long shot but we could wait and see.’
Her companion made a deal for three days with the trailer’s owner, actually a brother of the man who owned the hotel. And on the third day, at five-twenty in the afternoon, look! ‘That’s my mother and father,’ she said, peeping from the window, incredulous.
‘What a bitch you are!’ said the man. With which observation Marigold seemed well pleased.
The producers of Tom’s film worried about the effect of Marigold’s disappearance.
The police had moved on to a theory of suicide. Any scenario would fit: that she was depressed by the desertion of her husband to the extent that she had taken herself to the Alps and thrown herself over a precipice; that she had taken herself out to sea and jumped overboard (but from what boat?); that her body was lying at the bottom of a deep Scottish loch. She was sighted in New Orleans, however, having a good time in a discothèque; she was sighted in a cathedral in Spain, wearing a black mantilla, going to confession; she was ‘seen’ in New Delhi buying a ruby and diamond bracelet. Interpol got nowhere with these various signals and sightings. It was impossible to say whether the film was affected. Certainly, Tom’s personal popularity was low, for, in the meantime, Rose Woodward and Jeanne had grabbed as much publicity as possible out of the burning event, as if with long-handled tongs. Rose admitted her affair with Tom: ‘He was fantastically in love with me until the Disappearance. I feel sure Marigold was wounded and sometimes I blame myself. Tom neglected his daughter, I know. She wasn’t beautiful, she had no glamour. Yes, I know I’m talking in the past tense. I’m well aware of it. But I can’t help feeling that Marigold is no longer with us in this world. No, Tom frankly didn’t like Marigold. She was the first to visit him after his recent accident, when he fell from a crane in the studio — (I was there) — Marigold would have done anything for him. Her mother, Claire, was I think rather cold, for a mother. Poor Marigold, she did what she could to keep her family together. She has a half-sister, Cora. Cora was always the favourite. I don’t know — I doubt — if Tom will ever make another film. The original Jeanne, the girl who made hamburgers for a holiday camp, was no longer on his mind when we got together in the course of the film. Jeanne, the little actress who plays the part of the original girl, was really puzzled I think that Tom had no passion for her outside of her professional role about which he was always enthusiastic, of course. But Jeanne as a person — no.
‘I think Jeanne had met Marigold, and it could be that Marigold was trying to get her father to take an interest in getting Jeanne another job now that the movie was over. She was out of work. But Tom simply wasn’t interested. If he in fact knows where Marigold is, as some of us believe, he should come forward openly. It has made a vital difference to my life as a friend of Tom, indeed to everyone’s life. We are all very upset.’
Jeanne’s main interview, published in a weekly paper, went: ‘As Jeanne, the namesake part I played in the movie, I felt I had at last arrived. It was actually the most important role, and my first big chance. Tom Richards meant everything to me. He was my inspiration and guide. When he had his accident I felt I could never act for anyone else but I was under pressure by Claire, Tom’s wife, mainly. She assured me that Tom wanted me to press ahead until he was out and about again. We were told that the movie was off; then it was on again. Well I know he had a family and the girls Cora and Marigold. The other actors in the film didn’t greatly interest me although they were terribly kind and very, very competent. I did my best to make a big part of it but somehow Tom’s story line treated me like a secondary star and Rose Woodstock as a first even though the story shows a different situation, in fact quite the reverse. All I had to do really in the movie was stand and make hamburgers taken from different shots.
‘After this opportunity I want truly to find my feet in a more important part. I’m out of work, redundant. I actually contacted Marigold as she’s a sort of consultant. I think personally that Marigold is still alive. Only she felt, as I felt, Tom Richards’ neglect. Now Rose Woodstock is I believe on the margin of his interest as a result of his involvement with Marigold’s disappearance. It is a mystery I don’t want to be mixed up with, personally.’
In the mail came anonymous letters to Tom either with ‘clues’ as to Marigold’s whereabouts or with accusations: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MARIGOLD?
All these, Tom passed to the police. His life had changed.
As the weeks passed it was plain that Marigold had not been kidnapped. Various attempts to extort money from Claire on this basis had been easily exposed. ‘She’s of age. She can come and go as she pleases,’ the chief police investigator explained to Tom. ‘But we’re keeping all possibilities open. We haven’t given up.’ Tom sensed a touch of impatience with people whose lifestyle permitted the probability that they were not murdered or kidnapped — people who could just walk out of one life into another.
Claire had employed a private investigator: ‘Could she, in your opinion, have taken an overdose? Was she on drugs?’
‘Oh it’s possible,’ said Tom. ‘They all are.’
‘But do you yourself think so?’
‘No, I don’t. The girl’s very puritanical.’
‘That’s not to say…’ said the investigator.
‘True enough. But you could still find her, couldn’t you?’ Marigold’s formidable face continued for a while to look out of the pages of the glossy magazines, accompanied by captions such as ‘Marigold: Was she a dropout in the eyes of her glamorous parents?’ Inset would be a picture of Claire and Tom, in deck-chairs, looking radiant. Or a picture of gorgeous Cora: ‘The sister whose good looks Marigold could never attain.’
‘And yet,’ Tom said to Claire, ‘Marigold could be quite handsome. It isn’t her features, it’s her expression that’s so awful. If she could only get rid of that expression she could have a certain look. I don’t know what part she could be cast in, but there is a part somewhere for her.’
‘The part of a bloody bore,’ said Claire.
‘Well, in fact, you’re right,’ he said. ‘She is nemesis in drag. She is the Last Judgement. Alive or dead, that’s what she is. And in the meantime, I’m getting a bad press. You — and Cora — are also getting a bad press, although you don’t deserve it in any way.’
‘Neither do you,’ said Claire.
‘Perhaps I do, but I don’t know how,’ Tom said. ‘I only know the nicest thing that could happen to Marigold, and make her happy, is that we should have a bad reputation on her account. And you know it’s true.’
‘There’s a touch of blackmail involved in her disappearance.
‘More than a touch.’
Claire’s investigator, Ivan Simps
on, a young, good-looking man not yet thirty, was galvanised by Cora’s beauty into volunteering for longer hours than were normally called for in the search for a missing person. He put it to Cora: ‘As her sister — well, half-sister — your help would be invaluable. I have a few ideas where we could go, some likely places where she has to be looked for. I’m going to talk about them to your step-mother. Will you help?’ Cora said, ‘Fine. But if she saw me, wouldn’t she go further into hiding?’
‘She won’t see you. Leave it to me.’
‘If she doesn’t want to be found maybe she should be left alone …
‘Come with me,’ he said to the lovely girl. He thought she had the clearest complexion, the clearest eyes and whitest teeth it was possible to imagine. He noticed that her features were perfect, her body charming. She wore brief skirts or tight blue jeans. Her brown hair fell about her shoulders.
He came to Claire who was busy with her charities — her ledgers and lists — and told her his plan. France, the United States: he had clues to follow and he wanted Cora with him.
‘And Cora?’ said Claire.
‘She’ll come.’
‘Ask her father,’ said Claire. ‘If Tom’s willing, so am I. We’ll pay whatever’s necessary. If Marigold doesn’t want to come back, that’s all right. We just want to know. Everyone wants to know.’
Tom said, when he saw the young man, ‘I’ve lost Marigold — I don’t want to lose Cora.’
‘You won’t lose Cora,’ said the young man. ‘It’s just a fact-finding trip. I have a few clues.’
Cora rang up from Paris the next night, late. ‘There’s been a probable sighting,’ she said. ‘That’s all we can tell you.’
‘Where?’ said Tom.
‘I mustn’t say.’