Reality and Dreams (6 page)

‘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.