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that she would try the acting
profession and through Tom’s influence she had many opportunities. She had the
looks, was photogenic, but she didn’t have any acting imagination in her. She
treated this fact, as she did most difficulties, as an inanimate obstacle to be
overcome: this, besides her beauty, was her strength. She had a perfect form, a
fresh, charming face, good hands, grey-green eyes and a mane of brown hair.
She walked like a leopard. Tom doted on her.
    ‘What a
pity she can’t act,’ he was heard to say. ‘She has so much else. But acting is
an art that you cannot really learn. A certain amount of training might improve
the actor’s art, but essentially to be an actor you have to be born with the
whole stock and merchandise built-in. Acting is fundamentally the art of hypocrisy.
Nothing can put it there. Cora’s no good even for television commercials. She
has spontaneous expressions on her face but she can’t put them on. An art is
something you bring with you into the world, just as Cora brought her beauty.’
    So far
was Cora from any art of dissimulation, that she was at a positive disadvantage
in some of her relationships, especially with men and employers. She could not
fall in love intensely or long enough to match the desire she aroused in men.
Out of boredom, she could not stick at any job, even being photographed for
magazine covers. She was now twenty-nine, unemployed and more beautiful in her
appearance than ever, the apple of her father’s eye.
    It was
Marigold who joyfully brought to Claire and Tom the news that Cora and Ralph
were having an affair. It was not yet two weeks since Ralph had first seen Cora
from Tom’s bedroom window. Claire, Tom and Marigold were taking drinks in the
sitting room portion of Tom’s room when Marigold came out with the news.
    ‘But,’
said Tom wildly, almost hopefully, ‘Ralph has a sexual hang-up as a consequence
of being made redundant. It’s a common phenomenon apparently throughout Europe.’
    ‘Not
with Cora, he hasn’t got a hang-up. I know,’ said Marigold.
    Marigold
knows everything, Tom thought. How?
    Evidently
by making it her business to know. That’s how people know things.
    ‘And,’ said
Marigold, ‘he has bought Cora a gold watch of some extremely expensive make. He
bought it using part of the money Mother gave him, I know.’
    (She
knows…)
    ‘If it
helps him over the hump I don’t blame him,’ said Claire. ‘That’s what the money
was for.’
    ‘It isn’t
any function of Cora to help anyone over their hump,’ Tom said.
    ‘What
about his wife,’ said Claire. ‘Does Ruth know?’
    ‘I don’t
know,’ said Marigold.
    (Something
she doesn’t know … Not yet.)
    ‘Not
yet,’ Marigold added, innocently.
    Try as
he might, Tom was not fond of his daughter by Claire. Even Claire was
disconcerted at times by the way Marigold had developed.
    ‘Ruth
is bound to suspect something,’ Marigold went on. ‘He can’t explain his
absences by the excuse of job-hunting all the time.’
    ‘Let the
thing blow over,’ Tom said. ‘It will certainly blow over. He’ll probably find a
job. He’s a very able young man.’
    ‘There
are plenty of able young men,’ said Marigold. ‘And Ralph won’t find a job so
long as Mother gives him fat cheques.’
    ‘It’s
my money, not yours,’ Claire said without vehemence. She was accustomed to use
this phrase to her family. She uttered it frequently.
    ‘It’s a
question of what’s good for Ralph. His marriage. And what’s good for Cora,’
said Marigold. ‘From that point of view it’s a moral question.’
    Sooner
or later, thought Tom, Marigold had to make it out to be a moral question.
Sooner or later.
    ‘I don’t
know about a moral question,’ Claire said, ‘but Cora shouldn’t break up a young
married couple. She’s old enough to know better.’
    ‘She is
so irresistibly lovely,’ Tom said, ‘that temptation is different, more
pressing by far, for Cora than for either