Reality and Dreams (16 page)

‘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.’

‘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.’

‘Tom,
you know how it is. Agree with everyone, but have your own way finally.’

‘Oh,
yes. But it’s wearing. I hate to have enemies.’

‘I don’t
think you have enemies,’ Claire said.

‘No?
Then who took that shot at Dave, and why?’

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

‘For a spectacular like
this I need a crane,’ Tom said.

‘There are
those wonderful new cameras,’ said one of the cameramen. ‘Cranes are really
out, Tom.’

‘Nonsense,
I need a crane. I have to direct the Battle of Agincourt. I have to take shots
of those helicopters that Cedric sees in his dreams. I have to know from above,
from some mountain, what’s going on down there in the fort on Hadrian’s Wall
where they are sorting and sifting the grain.’

‘Well,
Tom, I should think you had enough of the crane last time.’

‘This
time I’ll fasten the safety belt. I’ve borrowed a mobile crane, like the one
they sold, a Chapman. I hope the technicians are up to moving it about. If not,
hire the experts.’

Tom was on location in
Northumberland filming a sequence of a Roman British fort at Hadrian’s Wall, a
busy scene in the courtyard of a specially-constructed inn and, after that, a
rowdy scene at a fair. Rose Wood-stock as the centurion’s British wife, so
tall, so fair and beautiful, crossed the courtyard between a milkmaid with a
pole across her shoulders bearing up a pail on each side, and a boy piling wood
in neat, efficient rows. She was next seen at the fair, moving from stall to
stall in the fruit market and at the pastry-cook’s. Marigold, as Cedric, in her
rough knee-length tunic, cross-strapped legging sandals and her sullen glitter-eyed
look, stood against a tree contemplating the centurion’s lovely wife. The
latter turns her head and catches the gaze of the dark sooth-sayer. (A repeat
shot, for Marigold had already posed under a tree looking at nothing — ‘in case’.)
‘O.K.
Cut.’

Work
stopped early. They started early with the light just right for continuity. By
six in the morning the long shed which was headquarters was already alive with
actors and their preparatory activities. Tom arrived promptly. At this stage in
the film he was no longer an object of awe. No hush greeted him as he came into
the shed, which satisfied him greatly. It meant that work was proceeding
seriously. There was hardly a square foot of the shed unoccupied. It seemed
that everyone was changing their clothes, or, being young children, being
changed by their mothers or minders. In a corner at a table, sat the music man,
touching up a piece of music. Along one side of this location-studio a row of
dressing tables had been fixed, each with a mirror encircled by fierce lights.
The make-up men and women were busy on the actors, dabbing light and shade on
their faces, splashing them with artful, cosmetic mud, tracing deep wound
marks, pock-marks, brushing out their hair, making them into Roman soldiers or
early Britons.

‘They
look too clean,’ Tom would often say, ‘too well-fed. In Roman Britain the
children would often be dirty and skinny, with bad teeth. Can’t you at least
make their teeth look bad?’ He knew they could do this, and that they would
scatter a touch of ‘decay’ among the healthy teeth of the minor and meaner
actors.

Enough
for now of the British fort. On with a French crowd scene. ‘My Colossal’ Tom
said, referring to the film. In fact he hated crowd scenes, but had decided to
do as many as he could in Northumberland where he had hired a lot of space. The
cast was indeed colossal, but he loved his very long, very high barn and the
caravans that he and the principal actors worked from. Cedric the Celt is made
to see and describe a ‘helicopter’ from which (Tom’s crane) can be filmed a
shot of a border skirmish, — a small crowd of marauding Danes. Tom’s crane,
which had been lugged carefully to Northumberland, was one of his real joys on
that location.

He had
to have a meeting with his producers, the men with the money, in London; he
went there at the week-end accompanied by Rose Woodstock. As a large box-office
participant, Rose, with her lawyer, attended the meeting, which took place on
Saturday afternoon. Tom had been looking forward to spending the evening alone
with Rose, dining at some glamorous night-spot where Rose loved to be seen,
then afterwards to her flat for the night. She was, in fact, well-disposed to
this idea. But something about financial meetings and the sight and sound of
top stars discussing their percentages of gains (which they called their
percentuals), always put Tom off the romantic side of his life. Rose was not at
all pleased when he told her he would have to spend the evening ‘discussing
something’ with Claire. ‘I wanted to discuss a new part to be written-in for
me.’

Tom
knew she would immediately get hold of someone else to go out with, perhaps
someone younger and more exciting. But he was Tom Richards; he could not help
his moods.

Claire
was not in the house. She was out for dinner. Tom made himself comfortable with
a sandwich and a glass of wine. What a fool I am! he thought, as he realised he
had probably done permanent damage to his love-affair with gorgeous Rose. But
at the same time he knew there had been nothing he could do to change events.
He had been overtaken by a moral distaste for Rose Woodstock, and even that was
probably unjust. She was perfectly entitled to make an attempt to alter a
contract in her own favour; she was justified in having a lawyer by her side
when she did business. But it had put Tom off; he could not change his nature.

Nor
could he be more than icily pleasant to Claire the cook when she offered him
her attentions. ‘I have some boeuf bourguignon all ready,’ she said,
practically licking her lips about it. ‘My nephew’s here on a visit.’

‘I want
a sandwich and a glass of red wine. A ham sandwich. Definitely, that’s all.’

His
wife, Claire, he reflected in his dark thoughts, had been brought up between
Claridges and the Paris Ritz. Claire was a woman of style. Beautifully dressed.
Less than ever, could he understand her loyalty to her Hungarian cook ‘with her
communist sausages, her cabbage and her mash-potato swill. Every one of her
meals is an act of sabotage.’ Tom longed for Dave, and perhaps also Dave’s
wife, to talk to.

Tom
rang Cora and was relieved to find her in. She so much restored his soul.

Marigold’s blue, red and
gold actor’s caravan was comfortably arranged inside and well-heated against
the cooler evenings. In the front was a dressing room and a large mirror in
which Marigold, when she wore her blue tunic for the film, looked more like a
renaissance painting than that of an early Briton, a painting garlanded with
lights (by Ghirlandaio himself?) of a dark, wild-eyed youth. Perhaps through
living for a time in the country she had lost her bloated look.

She had
decided to stay in Northumberland for the week-end and remain in her caravan
rather than in the hotel room which was booked for her. She loved caravans. Not
only for this reason the thought had sometimes fleetingly crossed Tom’s mind
that Marigold might have nomad blood. How that could be he didn’t care to
hazard since he himself was of no such descent that he knew, and probably
neither was Claire. It was a thought best left alone to stew by itself, and
although he was a brooder this was far from a subject on which Tom would brood.

The
caravan was one of four — one each for the day-use of Tom, Rose, Marigold and
Brian (the actor who played Paulus the centurion). It had a dressing room section,
a bed-recess, a good arm-chair, a wash-room, an ample corridor with a phone and
a fax machine, a small kitchen and a room at the back with a circular bench
round a circular table.

At two
in the afternoon, punctually, a car drew up. Kevin Woodstock. Marigold was
expecting him. ‘Bad news,’ was what she said. ‘The insurance company has
demanded that everyone who enters and leaves the studio while it’s not in use
shall show a pass. There’s a double guard day and night, mainly on account of
the big crane, I imagine.’