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of you. You can’t possibly blame Cora
if a man loses his head over her.’
    Claire
looked at her watch. ‘It’s time for your injection,’ she said. She went over
to the door of the adjacent room and, opening it, found Julia preparing her
shot. Turning to Marigold, Claire said, ‘Let’s go down.’
    ‘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