by Muriel Spark
Charlie Good, having located Marigold, went neither to her parents nor the police. He went to a television network and for a fair fee conducted them to the field where Marigold was camped.
Tom, at that hour, was in Dave’s sitting room in Camberwell having a cup of tea, as he sometimes did before or after a meditative cruising session. Dave’s wife, slim, fair-skinned, always amiable to Tom whom she liked tremendously, turned on the television news. Tom always liked to watch news.
A crowd of excited journalists, a number of onlookers … The name ‘Marigold’ … A police car … A close-up of a young man, yes, but it could be a girl, and anyway it was Marigold. She was making a statement. ‘I’m free to do what I like, live where I want. I don’t know anything about any shooting. I’ve been living like this in order to experience at first hand what it’s like to be destitute. After my work in the field of redundancy I decided to write a book. Few realise what redundancy can lead to. Loss of home, loss of social background. Complete destitution. Some people I know live in their cars. With their dogs for protection and company. The people round here have been very good to me. They bring me food and even calor gas.’ The camera beamed on a young woman holding a white plastic supermarket bag with the top of a loaf of bread sticking out. ‘I had no idea that Jimmy was Marigold. We always knew her as Jimmy. But she’s doing no-one no harm, and living in dignity. I just brought her a few provisions.’ Gently enough, Marigold was then led away to a police car.
‘Where is all this going on? Did you hear?’ said Tom.
‘I didn’t catch it,’ said Dave. ‘But anyway, you know she’s alive and she’s explaining herself all right.’
Tom got up slowly from the sofa, for his back still gave him trouble when he sat on a low seat. ‘I better phone Claire,’ he said.
Within a few days Marigold had become a national folk heroine. The papers announced:
Marigold Found!
Millionaire Film Magnate’s daughter lives rough to show solidarity with the out-of-works.
The police could find nothing whatsoever to connect her with the shooting of Dave. She gave interviews such as Tom and Claire could only admire: Why was she passing herself off as a man? — Partly for self-protection, she said. Partly, she wanted to be unrecognised and left alone. ‘Besides, it’s the men who mostly suffer from redundancy. I wanted to actually feel the situation. Somehow the gulf between rich and poor, between employed and jobless must be bridged. Increased unemployment is leading the country to disaster.’
‘She means it,’ said Claire. ‘I’m sure she means every word. I’ve had a long conversation with her.’
Cora returned to London declaring she had never worked so hard in her life. ‘Ivan is keeping on the office. There are so many missing persons, and now that he has the set-up it would be foolish to waste it.’
‘He didn’t get very far with Marigold,’ said Tom.
‘Oh, he would have got there in the end, I’m sure of that,’ said Cora. But she was glad to be back in her flat in London. She told Claire that she was tired of living with all Ivan’s electronic equipment, which had spilled over into their flat. Which meant she was tired of Ivan. He was soon to be part of the unwanted equipment, something of the past.
Marigold was back in her house.
‘I still feel guilty about Dave,’ Tom said. ‘That shooting had something to do with me, I’m sure.’ Claire, as he spoke, was busy. He felt a wave of deep affection for her. What would he do, he wondered, without Claire with her old-fashioned charity ledgers and her card indexes, wearing her Chanel suits and her Worth scent (Je Reviens)? For Claire he even tolerated that other Claire in the kitchen with her unspeakable food, her beetroots and her Beef Stroganoff and her spotted dumpling bilge.
Marigold had taken possession of the large cottage in Surrey where she had shared her brief married life with James. When he was not away on his literary travels he was in the habit of using the cottage as his headquarters, and now that Marigold had reappeared it seemed fair that the cottage should become part of the arrangement for their inevitable divorce. The house had been a wedding present to them both from Claire.
Marigold, now busy with a ghost-writer on her recent experiences as an out-of-work down-and-out, had no objection to recompensing James for his share of the house and any other important joint possessions arising from their marriage. A violent row had broken out between them, however, on the proprietorship of Coleridge’s Poetical Works, Vols. I and II which Marigold claimed had been meant as a present for her alone by a school friend, and which James insisted was part of their joint wedding-present haul. The resulting argument, incongruous though it actually was in view of the book’s minor value, reached the ears of the ghost-writer two rooms away. All the venom these two people had stored against each other was spurted out in the cause of this quite replaceable book, which neither party cherished for any particular reason. The book of poems was in any case presently lost sight of under the mounting heap of recriminations from both sides.
‘Bitch and hermaphrodite!’
‘Exploiter of women!’
‘Instigator of murder!’
‘Failed writer! Now you have to come begging a job from my father.’
‘He’s lucky to get me. What about you? — You should talk. Getting an important part just to keep you quiet. What chance would you ever have had to star in a film if you hadn’t been Tom Richards’ daughter?’
‘Part? — I have no part in any film.’
Nevertheless, that was how Marigold came to learn that Tom had thought of giving her a part.
‘Pa, is it true you have a part for me?’ she said on the phone, later.
‘Yes it is. A male part.’ He no longer wanted Marigold to play a ‘strong hard woman’. He wanted her for Cedric the Celt himself. ‘You did it so well on the campsite I don’t see why you shouldn’t do well for me. I thought of it even before you turned up.’
‘A male part. You think I’m a hermaphrodite?’
‘Don’t be silly. I’ve known you since you were born. But remember Shakespeare put men into female roles. I don’t see why a girl can’t play a boy, a very special boy, an ancient Briton. Elizabeth Bergner played the boy David in a play of the thirties. She was terrific.’
Marigold polished off her book through the ghost-writing agency she was dealing with. She had moved back to her mews flat in London, bringing with her nothing but Coleridge’s Poetical Works, Vols. I and II, and leaving James to have what pickings he wanted from the cottage in Surrey. He was furiously angry, but there was nothing he could do but pack his suits, bring round the removal vans and see his lawyers.
He told Tom, ‘Marigold is exasperating.’
‘I know,’ Tom said. ‘She has too much money, that’s the trouble with her. But she’s going to make a marvellous prophet-Celt. Fortunately she knows how to work, she likes work.’
It was typical of Tom, and in a way a part of the mores of that world of dreams and reality which he was at home in, the world of filming scenes, casting people in parts, piecing together types and shadows, facts and illusions, that he made no distinction between divorced members of his family and those still married. That James and Marigold were breaking up meant nothing compared to James’s value as location researcher. Marigold’s dramatic disappearance and the discomfort it had caused were completely lost in the enthusiasm Tom felt for his hermaphroditic Celt of the years c. 436.
Rose Woodstock wanted to star. She had won an important award in Tom’s last film. She was good box-office. Tom and his producers snapped her up to play the part of the centurion’s wife, the Celt’s lover perhaps. Rose was once more ravishing in Tom’s eyes.
And Jeanne, his late hamburger girl, who no longer haunted him except through her lawyer’s office — Claire had a good idea for keeping her quiet. ‘Give her a flash-forward part, just a glimpse. That’s all she’s good for, but she’s quite effective at that. Why don’t you make the Celt foresee the French Revolution? Jeanne could
play Marie-Antoinette. That would flatter her. Marie-Antoinette on the way to her execution, and a flash forward at the scaffold? How good Jeanne would be!’
Jeanne signed up for this part amicably, just as though she had never threatened Tom with legal action through the tough lawyer. That was the world they lived in.
Marigold was photographed and publicised in the early, preparatory, stages of the film. She had entered the national consciousness. It was often said privately that her disappearance had been a publicity stunt to work up interest in Watling Street. And when this was suggested publicly on a talk-show, she denied it vehemently. Her experiences were real sufferings, she explained, and her book would explain the rest. Which it did, and went into several fat editions. Out of Work in a Camper gave Marigold a glamour which Tom could only admire.
‘I think she’s more ambitious than I am,’ Tom said to Dave.
‘Can you trust her?’ Dave said.
‘That I don’t know.’
They had reached a point in the film where the question was, normally, irrelevant. Actors were not at this stage trustworthy or otherwise. They functioned or they didn’t. But Marigold?
Tom watched Marigold launching her book on a late night talk-show. She was so different, in this professional job, from what she had been in that awful home-movie of hers. He admired her magnetism, so that it didn’t matter that as a woman she looked hideous — quite deliberately so. She described with bitter passion her adventures looking for a job, insults levelled at her and the people she ‘represented’, insolent interrogations. Whether these were real or invented, they made good televised material. She was quite expert, even when mouthing her most banal pronouncements: ‘Psychiatrists tell us that redundancy based on poor performance often leads to feelings of guilt and even to suicide.’ There was something about the way in which she said ‘suicide’, with a half-grin showing her top gums, that made Tom wonder if Marigold would stay with the film. She was capable of disappearing again. He decided to take all the necessary shots of Marigold: this was not an uncommon method of filming. In fact, very few directors shot in the sequences of the story. It often happened when an actor was pre-engaged for another film or an actress was pregnant, or if a special type of outdoor lighting had to be caught within a short season, or for economic reasons, that the director did not film in accordance with the A to Z principle. The scenes involving Marigold, Tom decided, must be done right away if one wanted to be on the safe side. The Celt was to be assassinated by superstitious zealots in the end. Tom thought Marigold would look well, dead. He watched her face in the oblong frame of his television set. In any case, he always liked to visualise his actors in frames, as they would be eventually. Perhaps he could get Marigold to put on that part-smile as she pronounced the word ‘suicide’. It would suit her ‘dead’ look. So Tom mused while Marigold on the late talk went on about ‘the E.T.’ (Employment Training, as you were supposed to have gathered) and ‘the J.W.S.A.’ (Job plan Workshop Standard Agreement). Tom started next morning, early, filming Marigold as the Celt in every phase of the film.
‘Are you afraid I might walk out, Pa?’ she said.
‘Yes, I am.’
In ten days it was done. Marigold as Cedric the Celt lay finally with her eyes upturned, three daggers in her blood-stained tunic, and her lips forming a half-smile over the word ‘suicide’ silently formed. It was a relief to Tom to get her safely captured in at least the minimum footage, although he asked her (ordered her in fact as was his way) to ‘stick around the set as there will be considerable re-takes.’
Rose Woodstock was never very happy while making a film unless she was sleeping with the director. It was a way of directing the film herself, or at least she felt it to be so.
Two weeks into the rehearsals of Watling Street Tom Richards was once more enamoured of Rose. She was now very blonde for her part as the British wife of the Roman centurion. Her new colouring gave her a new type of glamour. He did not discourage the idea that she had a supreme and special say in his movie.
When Rose had first deserted Kevin Woodstock for him, Tom had felt some compunction. It was true that Rose had been married to Kevin for eleven years, a stretch of time when a separation could be expected, especially in the world of the cinema. But Tom respected Kevin for what he was, a professional, though mediocre, television director, specialising mainly in unusual synchronisations of sound. But Rose had moved from Kevin to Johnny Carr, obviously a temporary arrangement, so that Tom had now no qualms at all about monopolising Rose.
Tom thought of Johnny Carr as a good-looking loser. He was not greatly surprised when his lovely Cora, on abandoning her Paris adventure, shacked up again with Johnny, even while their divorce papers were being processed. She moved in with Johnny naturally and casually, presumably while waiting to decide on her next man.
Tom continued to marvel at Cora’s beauty. He remembered sometimes how he had escorted both daughters up the aisle at their weddings. To what end? He and Claire had been married in a registry office and were still together, had never been provoked one by the other into a separation.
‘Have you thought of leaving Claire?’ Rose asked him.
‘Yes, I have thought. But the answer is No.’
Kevin Woodstock had been questioned closely by the police at the time of Marigold’s disappearance. He was then considered to be the last person to have seen Marigold. He was questioned again when Dave was shot by the unknown hit-man. It was Dave himself who insisted on the possibility of Kevin’s guilt.
‘Why Kevin Woodstock?’
‘Because Tom Richards has gone off with his wife.’ But Rose herself told the police, ‘That’s ridiculous. I left Kevin of my own accord. We have parted amicably.’
Tom told Dave, ‘Even if Marigold should walk out now she can’t sabotage the film. I have all the necessary sequences featuring her. I’ll want more, but in the meantime I’ve taken this precaution. Rather as one does with very old actors.’
‘You did right,’ said Dave.
‘I hope you don’t think I’m down on the girl.’
‘Well, you are a bit. But you can’t be blamed. She’s unreliable.’
‘I want her as Cedric to foresee a few more things. Events of everyday life. A journalist in the twentieth century in Budapest being condemned to twenty years in prison. I thought of my Celt having a vision of Marcel and Odette walking in the Bois de Boulogne but these are people out of a novel. They are fiction, not fact, a pity, because it would have made a charming scene.’
‘Stick to fact,’ said Dave. ‘Don’t get carried away.
‘Good advice,’ said Tom. ‘I want that Celt to foresee Charlie Chaplin.’
Tom was now having difficulties with Jeanne who was not at all pleased with Tom’s interpretation of her role as Marie-Antoinette, seen through Cedric’s eyes, on the way to the scaffold. The flash-forward showed Jeanne in the tumbril made up to look like the drawing of the desperate Queen by the painter David — without her wig, her hair ragged and gamin-style, her face prematurely old. Not at all unlike the original hamburger girl. Whereas Jeanne had wanted an opulent form of death-procession, with high-dressed hair, silks and ruffles. An important, glamorous execution. Jeanne had played the part as Tom wanted it; in fact, being thoroughly sulky, she played it well. But having seen the rushes she was fairly furious.
It was not long after Tom had resumed his love affair with Rose that Dave said:
‘I can’t take you around any more, Tom. Rose Wood-stock is dangerous. Kevin Woodstock is still her husband. I don’t trust him and I don’t want another bullet through my head. My wife wants me to quit this taking you around. Perhaps she’s right.’
‘But Rose hasn’t been living with Kevin for nearly a year. Perhaps more than a year, I don’t know. She’s recently been with my daughter’s ex-husband Johnny Carr. Rose is getting divorced from Kevin, I’m sure. She deserves better than either of them. Carr is a born drop-out and Kevin Woodstock is a mediocrity.’
&
nbsp; ‘Reason how you like,’ said Dave, ‘but someone shot me it seems as a warning to you, and they haven’t got the man. Kevin Woodstock seems to me to fit the part. I’m going on my way, Tom.’
When he came to think of it seriously it also seemed to Tom, that Kevin fitted the part. He was out of work and in need of money. Supposing Marigold had commissioned him to take this wild action? For Kevin the motives would be jealousy, resentment, and the need for money. For Marigold … one didn’t think of motives; she was a murky proposition. To think of her at all was a great inconvenience to Tom, especially now that he had registered her part in Watling Street, and was busy putting the film together with Rose, the Irish actor who was playing the part of the centurion, and a large supporting cast. It was an inconvenience to have to cope with Jeanne and her complaints: he had reluctantly enlarged her part to include some shots of Marie-Antoinette at the height of her glamour, in which Jeanne was all right but no more than all right. Tom’s affair with Rose Woodstock was his present source of pleasure and sweetness. He had an extra-long new part written in for her, which included more close-ups than Tom normally cared for.
At intervals, especially now that Tom no longer went cruising with Dave, he turned up at his house in Wimbledon. He sometimes found Claire at home, and would spend an evening with her.
‘Marigold is writing another book. It’s to be called Shock and Despair: A Study of Redundancy To-day,’ Tom said.
‘I hope she gets a better ghost-writer this time.’
‘She comes into the studio almost every day. Do you think she’s happy?’
‘Oh, God, no,’ said Claire. ‘She’d be miserable if she was happy. She’s been working up Jeanne against you.
‘I sort of imagined that,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve had to extend Jeanne’s part as Marie-Antoinette but I might cut it out in the end. I don’t want the Celt, Cedric, to foresee only important historic moments, but fragments of the future, apparently disconnected. For instance, he has a clairvoyant moment in the sight of Michelangelo putting the finishing touches on his sculpture Moses. According to legend Michelangelo said to his statue “Speak to me.” That’s the sort of vignette I’m putting in. I don’t need Jeanne and her vulgar Marie-Antoinette frills to tell me how to make a movie.’