Reality and Dreams Read Online Free PDF

a small medicine glass containing a number of antibiotic pills in one hand
and a glass of water in another. Tom swallowed the pills and washed them down. ‘Beastly
stuff,’ he said.
    Julia
bent her smile on Ralph as she went out.
    ‘Good-looking,’
said Ralph.
    ‘Toothy.’
    ‘Toothy
women are said to be sexy.’
    ‘I
wouldn’t know. She has a husband and three children. At the moment I’m not
sexually active, but I have the most intense desires. Normally, I have a great
many women.’
    ‘So I’ve
heard. Hadn’t I better go?’
    ‘No,
don’t go. Mornings are the most boring times for me. In the afternoons I read
and in the evenings I watch something on the television, idiot-box though it
is, or a video, sometimes with Claire. Unless you’re in a hurry —’
    ‘No
hurry at all. I came really to tell you that Claire has been awfully good to
us. Last night she gave Ruth a cheque for five thousand pounds. We are not at
the moment in need but it is acceptable and wonderful of Claire, considering we
are not very closely related.’
    ‘Claire
is very rich,’ Tom said. ‘Claire is also very generous with her money. I’m glad
to say.’
    ‘I
wanted to make sure you approve.
    ‘Oh, I
approve of everything Claire does. I spend my life approving of Claire. We have
been married over a quarter of a century.’
    ‘You
seem to have spent your life being a success.’
    ‘It’s
not enough,’ said Tom. ‘Now I’m redundant.’
    ‘Not
permanently. To be in your position must be a great satisfaction,’ said Ralph.
He got up and went to the window, apparently to look at the garden below. It
was a fine day, a fact which did not seem to be of much comfort to Ralph, Tom
thought; quite the reverse, perhaps.
    ‘When I
was a young writer, when I first wrote and directed,’ Tom said, ‘I had a great
many friends older than myself, some a little older, some much older. Now that
I need them to come and visit me, to pass by and talk to me, most of them are
dead. If Auden were alive he would have come to see me in his shabby clothes.
Wystan said he always felt his parents should provide his clothes and couldn’t
shake off that feeling even now when he was an adult. He liked to spend his
money on food. Wystan gave good dinners. I remember in the sixties when he
lived in Manhattan in a near-slum in St. Mark’s Place what fine food he would
sit one down to. At least, his man friend Chester Kallman used to cook that
delicious food. Wystan kept his new work under the sofa. He would scramble
under the sofa to bring out his batch of poems to read to me. Chester would
come out of the kitchen into the room with a red face, wearing his cooking
apron. In fact I seldom saw Chester without his apron. Even in Austria the last
time I went to see them, Chester was wearing that big kitchen apron. He made
Austrian food — dumplings, but so special. He was more than a cook, however, he
was a good librettist.
    ‘If
Graham Greene were alive he would have looked in to see me, perhaps not in
hospital but certainly here at home. Sex was his main subject, when you met him
at least to start with. He had a mix-up of women and felt guilty the whole
time. Without girls I think he couldn’t have carried on. He needed it for his
writing. Graham would have sent me a dozen bottles of rare wine or champagne.
He would have come for an evening’s talk and drink if he had known I was stuck
in this bedroom. He would talk about sex always as if it was the forbidden
fruit of the tree of knowledge. Sex and desire and the hazards thereof, such as
divorce and venereal disease. I tried to get him on to religion but he was
chary of that subject, Catholicism. He believed in it without swallowing
everything, which is possible, and in fact more widely practised than one might
think. In fact he couldn’t not believe, in spite of himself.
    ‘So
much for his beliefs, but in some ways he had a bureaucratic conception of
Catholic doctrine, but so do many Catholics