Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online Page A

we
were all characters in one of God’s dreams. To an unbeliever this would have
meant the casting of an insubstantiality within an already insubstantial
context. Tom was a believer. He meant the very opposite. Our dreams, yes, are
insubstantial; the dreams of God, no. They are real, frighteningly real. They
bulge with flesh, they drip with blood. My own dreams, said Tom to himself, are
shadows, my arguments — all shadows.
    Tom
started going out at night in a taxi the driver of which he had befriended. All
Tom wanted was locomotion. They cruised merely, surprising many participators
of the night street drama. Dave, the driver, of second-generation West Indian
origin, was in full sympathetic understanding with Tom. He didn’t know why Tom
wanted to float around the night-life districts without a reference to sex,
but since he was a biblically religious married man he deeply enjoyed Tom’s
religious reflections on such occasions.
    ‘Are
you married?’ Tom had asked him.
    ‘Yes,
my wife’s part-time at Harrods in hosiery. We’ve got three children, a boy of
sixteen and two girls, fourteen and eight.’
    The
taxi with its sign of ‘engaged’ was waiting at the door in the fading light.
    Tom
manoeuvred himself down the front door steps with marvellous agility. Claire
watched from the dining room window as Tom got in beside the driver and slammed
the door shut.
    Let
us go then, you and I,…
    ‘Your
wife doesn’t mind you going off like this?’
    ‘No,
she doesn’t mind at all. She knows I like locomotion.’
    ‘My
wife would mind,’ said Dave.
    ‘Maybe
she’d have reason. Claire doesn’t interfere.
    Everything
I do is basically connected with my work,’ Tom said. ‘Everything.’
    ‘Claire
is rich, a millionaire, I read about her in a magazine,’ said Dave. ‘American
biscuits. She was born into that fabulous family, what’s their name?…’
    Tom had
never read any reference to Claire during all the years he had known her, which
did not qualify her in terms of her wealth, as if that were her one salient feature.
She did not resent the image. In fact she spent some hours of nearly every
week-day with two old-fashioned leather-bound ledgers which recorded her
charitable transactions; these were then transferred to a computer and rapidly
conveyed by her efficient secretary to one of her money-lawyers to deal with.
Claire took seriously all letters asking for money, being very clever at
discriminating between fraudulent attempts at rip-off and genuine appeals. To
this extent alone she submitted without resentment to the idea that she was
essentially a money person.
    Although
it was true that money was a built-in part of Claire’s personality, she was
many things besides. Tom was fully aware of this. What steadily drew him
towards her was her loyalty to him which always predominated over her
infidelities; the latter hardly counted. So that, when from time to time Tom
muttered to himself or to one of his women friends, ‘My wife has a man,’ the
remark held no foreboding, and no more than a touch of impatience.
    Cruising
around in those bright-lit streets Tom sat beside his driver, seldom commenting
on their surroundings. Faces looked into the windows at the traffic lights,
perhaps wondering what they had to buy or sell, sex, drugs, whatever; but on
the whole they merged, ignored, with the rest of the traffic.
    ‘It
says in the Bible,’ said Dave, “‘A woman, if she maintain her husband, is full
of anger, impudence, and much reproach.”‘
    ‘Where
does that come, in the Bible?’
    ‘Ecclesiastes.’
    ‘The
Bible doesn’t teach Christian beliefs. It only illustrates them. The Bible
came before Christianity by hundreds of years. That’s history.’
    ‘Is
that really so? I don’t believe it.’
    ‘Please
yourself. My wife Claire would never reproach me even if she had to maintain
me, which she doesn’t.’
    They
were held up in the traffic beside a bright-lit electronics emporium, packed
with