Free Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark

searched through the past,
consulted psychiatrists, took every moment to bits. In no way could she be
explained. The second psychiatrist had even interviewed Marigold. ‘You see,’ he
told Claire, ‘it’s a cocktail. Personality is a mixture of genes. You can’t do
anything about it. You can’t put there what there isn’t a place for, you can’t
take anything away without leaving a bad trace. She would have to want to
change.’
    ‘She
won’t do that,’ said Tom, ‘not her.’
    He
always thought secretly of Cora, the loving and the beautiful. Claire, too, was
attached to Cora. In her way Marigold got on quite well with her older
half-sister. She had never showed signs of jealousy. Marigold had been jealous
of no-one, in fact. She was too satisfied with herself for envy, jealousy or
the like.
    ‘If it
had been Cora, I think I’d feel less appalled,’ Tom said to Claire soon after
Marigold’s disappearance, trying to cope with it as they were.
    ‘I’d
feel the same,’ Claire said. ‘With Marigold, there’s a feeling of frustration,
of unfinished business. I think of her face, the tragic mask. Why?’
    ‘That’s
it,’ Tom said. ‘You’ve said it exactly. It’s unfinished business.’
    Whether
it was an unconscious memory of these words or not, Tom had the title of his
film changed the next week, finally, to Unfinished Business. He hardly
knew he had done so. He busied himself unnecessarily in perfecting the film; he
dropped Rose Woodstock as a lover. But concentrated on her, on Jeanne, and on
the actor who had played his part in the video on redundancy, only as possible
accomplices in the disappearance of Marigold. Had she been murdered? In fact,
his feelings were chaotic.
    ‘The
century is old,’ said Tom in one of his more lucid moments with Claire; ‘it is
very old.’

 
     
     
    CHAPTER
TEN

     
     
     
    The answers that Marigold’s
family and friends were able to give to the police about her habits, her
possible movements, her whereabouts, only served to show how little anyone knew
her. Tom’s indignant guilt sent the investigators on grotesquely false trails.
He was not convinced she had been abducted and killed, as was certainly held
by the police to be a strong possibility. Claire clung to the theory that
Marigold had just wandered or walked off the scene, possibly to start a new
life. It was impossible to know if she had taken money or precious objects,
maybe jewellery, with her. Nobody knew about her money, her goods. It appeared
just then that Marigold had been all her life exceedingly secretive.
    Cora
said: ‘I feel we should have taken more interest in Marigold.’
    ‘So do
I,’ said Tom. ‘But how? How?’
    Tom
thought back on the times he had tried to make Marigold part of the family. Her
manners were frightful. She was a positive embarrassment at any party that
involved her parents’ friends. This was apparent before her fifteenth year,
when she could be described as ‘difficult’. But as her adolescence wore off,
she became ever more aggressive, ever more impossible to have around the house,
ever less welcome in a house where some elements of domestic staff were necessary.
Tom and Claire tended at first to blame themselves. But they were in no wise to
blame. Marigold was simply a natural disaster.
    Her
marriage had been a touch and go affair. Her property — the house in Surrey and
the flat in London — together with her very wealthy mother, made her into a
material catch. But it could never have lasted.
    Discussing
her one day as they often did, Claire said to Tom, ‘Another thing I don’t
understand about Marigold — she can be so common. Where does she get
that vulgarity? From which of us, from what side, does the street-corner touch
come?’
    Nobody
could answer that one.
    Tom
told the police investigators who enquired about her character, ‘I know very
little about that. She resembles neither my wife nor me, except that, like me,
she’s sexy.’
    ‘Do you
mean