Read Online Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page B

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 like that.’
    Hideous
Marigold. Always negative Marigold. Her parents had