Reality and Dreams Read Free Page A

like living people.’

 
     
    CHAPTER
THREE

     
     
     
    It was left to Cora, the
family beauty, to break the news to her father that he had to go back into
hospital for a spinal operation. Cora was now in England, staying with Claire.
She had no hope of a new contract with Channel Four, and her husband, handsome
Johnny, three weeks after his redundancy was declared, had disappeared to India
with his severance pay. Cora did not expect to see him again.
    Before
telling Tom what the specialist had said about his last X-rays, ‘We have to
operate on his back,’ Cora told him about her husband’s recent defection. She
knew her father’s rages, both of frustration and indignation, and decided that
the latter, if exhausted first, might mitigate the former.
    In his
sober moments he agreed with Claire about the irascibility of his nature.
Shortly after she had married him Claire observed, ‘At times you act like a
female hedgehog or a porcupine that has been sexually violated. All quills out,
running around. A ravished porcupine, that’s what you are at such times.’
    ‘I
know,’ he said.
    It was
one of these attacks that Claire feared when she sent Cora into his bedroom to
tell him that he had to go back to hospital. His sense of frustration was
already near the boil since he couldn’t yet walk properly. He crawled round
the room slowly on an elbow-crutch. What incensed him most was when the
visiting doctor told him how lucky he was to be alive, and reminded him that he
had had a very bad fall.
    Cora
had a second mission: this was to tell Tom that the backers had withdrawn from
the film. It was all folded up. The actors had gone home and Tom’s worked-over
script (for he never had a full-scale screenwriter, but himself wrote a lot of
the films he directed) was lying downstairs in his study. He was still unable
to go downstairs, but Claire felt he would have to know sooner or later, about
the odd silence surrounding his proposed film provisionally entitled The
Hamburger Girl. This provisional title was believed by all to be ambiguous
and Tom certainly intended to change it. He was beginning to wonder about the
lack of news, except for kind messages and flowers, from the area of that film.
Cora knew he would choke with indignation when he heard it had folded up. And
so she preferred to channel some of his ire into frustration first.
    ‘Pa,’
she said straight out, ‘you need an operation on your spine next week, or you’ll
never walk right again. You’re booked into the clinic.’
    He was
standing in the middle of his vast bedroom, leaning on two elbow-crutches.
    To her
amazement he said, ‘All right.’
    And
when she went on to tell him about the work-stoppage on his film he said, ‘Good.
They would only have made a mess of it, Cora, without me.’
    Claire
and the nurse Julia, listening outside the bedroom door, were equally
astonished.
    ‘Tell
me,’ said Tom, ‘how Johnny came to get to India. Who paid his fare? Did you?’
    ‘In
actual fact he took his redundancy money. It was quite a lot. Some thousands of
pounds. Pa, I wasn’t going to tell you, but he’s gone.’
    ‘What
did he give to you before he left?’
    ‘Nothing.
He just took off.’ Cora was crying now.
    ‘Let
him go,’ said her father. ‘Don’t ever take him back. You can get a divorce. He
wasn’t ever your type and now you know it. Little egocentric swine.’
    ‘Johnny
was so good-looking,’ said Cora. ‘We made a fine couple, let’s face it.’
    ‘He
would never have looks as good as yours. Let’s face it,’ said Tom to his really
beautiful daughter. Only to see her move half across the room was an aesthetic
delight.
    ‘India,’
she said. ‘I said, Why India? He said, “To see my guru and a couple of temples
in the south, and get lost to this materialistic hell. It’s good-bye,” he said,
“for always. I’m not coming back. You can sell the sapphire ring. We can have a
divorce any time you like. It’s