Carnforth's Creation (7 page)

When Eleanor had finally gone into the night, Paul sat on the stairs. He knew she had booked a room at the local pub, so supposed she would be back in the morning. Because she could be fiery, honest to a fault, because he loved her, he had been certain
something
about the evening, if only for a moment, would knock askew her conventional blinkers long enough to give her a glimpse of possibilities beyond private inhibition and public politesse. But now, this hope looked as
forlorn as all acts of faith which fail. And a hard time he would have, sweeping up the debris. He felt a hand on his shoulder, looked around, and saw Matthew staring with a bitter smile.

‘You crafty sod.’

‘I don’t quite …?’

Matthew looked stupefied. ‘Is your life so thrilling you can turn mine on its head without noticing?’ Paul seemed
nonplussed
. ‘The picture,’ moaned Matthew.

‘Well?’ queried Paul. The last thing he wanted just now was to have to apply the finishing touches to Matthew’s anticipated change of heart. His friend sank down next to him, resting his head against a curved bannister.

‘Bridget’s going to take it,’ he sighed, ‘and because of my walk-out with Gemma, I haven’t a hope of stopping her.’

Paul frowned. ‘You can’t be blaming
me
for
that
?’

‘All I’m doing,’ replied Matthew, ‘is telling you I’ll do your stinking film.’

Paul raised his hands in a gesture of amazement. ‘What can I say?’

‘Any damned thing you like,’ cried Matthew, angrily thumping down the stairs. Paul jumped up and clapped his hands. Apparently troubles did not always come in
battalions
.

Eleanor did not return to Castle Delvaux until three days after the party, and by then Paul had become seriously uneasy. Nor was it reassuring that her eventual appearance coincided with a longstanding arrangement for one of her stallions to serve an equally exalted mare at the local stud. Having no desire to see a titanic natural coupling reduced to
slow-motion farce by a solicitous bevy of stud employees, Paul did not accompany his wife when she set out again, scarcely fifteen minutes after her homecoming.

She was back at Castle Delvaux two hours later and, before luncheon, Paul took a short walk with her down the lime avenue. He was struck by Eleanor’s disinclination to broach the subject which must be uppermost in her mind; but, well aware that she held him entirely responsible for their
predicament
, he was not really surprised by her reticence. She would not stoop to bludgeon contrition out of him; nor step down from her martyr’s pedestal until he had done some very convincing grovelling at its base. But how could he, in all conscience, without misleading her into supposing him sorry for an evening he still thought of in terms of triumph rather than disaster?

Moving through pools of sunlight filtered by the pale green leaves, Paul murmured, ‘You know my real sin, Elly? I never grew up to take this place for granted.’ Her sun-glasses made her thoughts impossible to guess. ‘But you, Elly,’ he went on softly, ‘you don’t even consider yourself particularly
well-off
. In comparison with the Grosvenors and the Cavendishes you feel quite run-of-the-mill.’

‘What’s that got to do with the other night?’

Paul gazed reflectively at the park, shimmering like a green mirage.

‘For six years I didn’t come anywhere near Delvaux. Never expected to inherit a blade of grass …’ He glanced back at the house. ‘Perhaps that’s why it never became casual-wear for my personality.’

She flicked off her sun-glasses, and walked ahead of him.

‘You know what gets me about landowners?’ he asked, squinting up at the leaves, ‘The way they hang on to
property
. But do they ever
add
anything? Ever ask what went to pay for pictures in the eighteenth century? Ever work out what it cost to knock down perfectly good old houses to build bigger new ones?’ He threw up his hands. ‘And what about the gardens they tore up; the villages they moved?’

‘You’re suggesting
we
do that?’ she asked frostily.

‘Come on,’ he laughed. ‘The past doesn’t oblige us to be museum curators, that’s all. Still plenty of ways to use money imaginatively.’ His smile won no response. ‘Well, do
you
understand why more rich men don’t buy newspapers or theatres; don’t back magazines or galleries?’

‘What about you?’ she demanded, waving away a wasp with her scarf.

He shrugged. ‘A forty per cent stake in a music publisher, which handles artists.’

‘
Artists
?’ she laughed harshly. ‘Oh brave new media world …’

He bowed his head. Hopeless even to think of arguing the cultural insignificance of tasteful minorities; to point to the realities. Suddenly inspiration: tell her the truth; not all, but enough to claim common ground. Maximise satirical
purpose
, minimize fascination and enjoyment.

He said, ‘You don’t have to
like
pop to find it interesting … truly, Elly.’ An engaging smile. ‘What else says it clearer? Success as numbers, greed decked out as love; price as value?’ He slung his jacket over his shoulder. ‘So why not see if one can sell it straight? No frills, no illusions … I get my star twinkling by every known gimmick, and a few that aren’t, and have him
say
how it happened.’ Her shocked face underlined the margin of his failure.

‘What would that do to
him
?’

‘Nothing,’ he laughed, still trying. ‘Name me anything more disarming than total honesty?’ He moved closer to make sure of her attention. ‘Once people identify with him, he becomes their success too; if he’s a fraud, so are they. You think he’ll be disowned?’ He took her hand and swung her round to face him. ‘Don’t you see how amazing it would be? Make a phenomenon of someone by having him admit to all the grubby motives most people do their damnedest to disguise. And this is the coup de grâce: condemnation only leads to notoriety, which makes for more success in that world.’

‘If it’s so obvious,’ she whispered, ‘Why bother to prove it?’

He lobbed a stone high into the branches. ‘Think what a moral swipe it’d be if I
could
?’

‘But if everyone’s been so thoroughly fooled,’ she asked calmly, ‘who’s going to believe your proof?’

He frowned thoughtfully. ‘Won’t that be even more
intriguing
to find out?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she replied, turning towards the house.

By the middle of the afternoon Paul thought matters were improving. He had given his word never to mount any more ‘entertainments’ at Delvaux, and had apologised, not for what he had done, but for distress caused. Though she seemed a little mollified, the uncharacteristic detachment of the morning was still in evidence. The weather was hot, and though anything but keen to play tennis, when Eleanor suggested it Paul agreed. She never treated any game as a romp, and as usual he had to work hard to avoid losing the first set. Changing ends, he grabbed her racket.

‘Elly,’ he sighed, ‘if you live as you like, and I’m with you a lot, does it matter that I do other things you don’t care for?’

‘You’re going to go on doing them, so why bother asking?’ She walked to the base line and began gathering balls.

At the end of the game he came to the net. ‘If I want to sit on more beaches than the one I’ve been washed up on, is it the end of the world?’

‘Paul,
nobody
gets what they want most,
and
the next best thing.’ She served a ball hard into the side-netting. ‘Like a happy marriage
and
the world as your playground.’

He bounced his racket on the net-cord. ‘People with our advantages don’t need to play
that
safe.’

Hands on hips, in her girlish tennis slip, she stared back implacably. ‘Perhaps an ordinary life is worth playing safe for.’

‘And
you
live an
ordinary
life?’ he gasped, moving towards the base line.

Later, after swimming, Eleanor sat on the springboard sipping a large Pimms, her long legs in the water. Paul swam to the steps and sat near her. After a silence he said
conversationally
, ‘If aristocratic tastes still ruled the roost, that’s
where the challenge would be … but mass tastes make the running now.’

‘Not for me,’ Eleanor replied, fishing a strawberry from her glass and dropping it in her mouth.

Paul forced a smile. ‘Hidden away you certainly are, but you’re still living in the same age as the rest of us.’

‘I ride, garden, play tennis, swim,’ she murmured, stirring the water with a foot. ‘There’s this for breakfast, that for dinner, people to stay … What difference does the “age” make to that?’

‘Not a scrap if you shut your eyes whenever you leave the estate.’

She got up and looked down at him. ‘You know the joke about the man who needed glasses, but kept saying books weren’t printed like they used to be?’ She sipped her drink. ‘That’s you, Paul. Things have to be the way you see them …’ She met his eyes. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see your way, my love. I hate pop; don’t like the influence you want to have. I’m scared you see so much of Gemma. But what happened the other evening is enough to tell me how little I’d enjoy joining in.’

He stared at the water. ‘Are you asking me to abandon everything?’

‘And resent me all the time?’

‘So what’s the answer?’ he asked gently.

She took off her bathing hat and shook out her long black hair. ‘That’s your pigeon, Paul.’

‘And you’ll suffer in silence?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

Eleanor shrugged. ‘What you get up to, I suppose … That’s not for
me
to decide.’

Before they left the changing hut, Paul made an
injudiciously
lighthearted remark about being glad she had not laid down a code of conduct. The vehemence of her answer gave him a fair idea what to expect were she one day to decide her ‘trust’ was being abused.

In the weeks following his brief stay at Castle Delvaux, Matthew Nairn found it convenient to let Bridget believe him ready to collaborate with Paul because eager to cancel out the sense of obligation the man’s generosity had placed him under. In reality Matthew had come to see the film less as an imposition than as an unlooked-for opportunity to get even with Paul for making his life a nightmare. Not that this would be easy.

Matthew did not intend to try to persuade Paul to appear in sequences that could be twisted to his disadvantage. Control over the film would not be won by malicious
direction
or cutting-room tricks; quite simply, it would go to whichever one of them could win a decisive influence over Roy.

By late August Matthew had finished his only work in progress: a film on alternative resources – solar energy, wind and wave power, synthetic protein production, and so forth. Because his series on pollution had attracted many official brickbats, he had been obliged to mount an ‘objective’ twenty minute studio discussion, for screening immediately after transmission of his new documentary. Knowing what this would do to the film’s impact, his mood was not benign as he sat in the studio gallery, running through the routine sequence of opening shots with his cameramen and
vision-mixer
.

During the brief pause before the recording, while the contributors were in make-up, Matthew was shocked to hear familiar voices behind him. Somehow Paul and Gemma had wangled their way past half-a-dozen ‘No Entry’ signs and as many commissionaires. Ever since his decision to make their project his next, they had subjected him to numerous
unannounced
visits. Ignoring them, he went on setting-up: the
zoom on the opening wide shot should be slower, camera three’s two-shot of Sir John Norbury and Professor Dwyer should be tighter. Had he been in charge of a complicated drama in three or four sets, rather than a bread-and-butter ‘chat’ set-up, he would have been less put out when Paul started rhapsodizing about the dimly lit gallery, the banks of monitors, and the air of ‘professional calm’. With six ‘guests’ and no studio audience, Matthew reckoned an intelligent monkey could have done his job. When he heard Paul say he reminded him of Jack Hawkins on the bridge of a
battle-cruiser
, Matthew asked him and Gemma to wait in his office.

When he joined them there, Matthew was as usual struck by the casual way in which Paul had taken his change of heart about the film. He had come to discuss schedules, without a care for the possibility that dear old Matty might resent his behaviour. Perhaps it hadn’t occurred to him that once the Hobbema became a row of figures in Bridget’s bank account, she would hold the whip-hand in a wide range of domestic decisions previously shared. Matthew liked the
unpretentious
flat they lived in; Bridget did not. So if she decided to buy somewhere in a more desirable neighbourhood, what would Matthew be able to do? Yet Paul dismissed the possible stresses caused by his ‘generosity’ as blandly as he side-stepped the film’s most basic problems. What was he doing about finding the songs that would propel Roy to stardom? Why was he making no efforts to replace Roy’s old group? And how did he propose to save the whole project from the cutting-room bin, if Roy didn’t make it? When Matthew came out with this final question, Paul grinned at him.

‘Come on, Matty, you knew you’d have to have faith in people.’

‘But not blind faith,’ Matthew told him, knowing that he could not let Paul go on supposing that matters would be allowed to drift at whatever speed suited him. Always it came back to control, and which of them should exercise it. ‘I can reduce the risks,’ Matthew announced.

‘How?’ demanded Gemma, resting her cowboy-booted
feet on the edge of his desk. He eyed her briefly. From the moment he had agreed to make the film, he had heard nothing more about her desire for clandestine meetings.

Matthew shrugged. ‘I could easily cover myself by filming other unknown groups and singers. The shot-gun principle – a dozen pellets stand a better chance of hitting the target than a single bullet.’

Gemma’s boots flashed floorwards. ‘Where does that leave us?’

Affecting not to realize how angry she was, Matthew smiled affably. ‘There’ll certainly be other pebbles on the beach … unless Roy brings out a single before we start filming.’

Paul shook his head as if trying to clear it. ‘I thought we were quite clear about starting when he’s unknown. That’s the whole point … to predict his success and then show it happening. Before and after.’

Matthew pretended to weigh the pros and cons, then said firmly, ‘I’ll put in for three days’ filming before the single comes out.’ He looked up as Gemma came closer, noticing that under her leather waistcoat she was wearing a T-shirt stamped with the photographic imprint of breasts
remarkably
like those beneath. He laughed reassuringly. ‘If we stay in London, we can do plenty in the time.’

Paul made a plopping noise with his tongue. ‘Why not come clean? You’re asking for a hit with his first record.’

‘Let’s say the prospect of a hit.’

Entirely committed to getting the better of Paul, Matthew had no intention of carrying out his threat to pull out. Although suspecting that Paul and Gemma were shaken by the time they left, Matthew was sure they would bounce back in a few days, and nonchalantly resume their efforts to nudge him out of the driving seat.

Less than a week later Paul telephoned to suggest an evening in the cavernous Victorian concert hall at Alexandra Palace. Since the event was billed as
The
Twenty
Three
Hour
Banana
Be-In,
Matthew guessed that one of Paul’s purposes would be to show him how played-out hippie psychedelia
was. Having read two recent pieces by Gemma,
Hashbury
Droops
Out
and
Warholocaust
Over
?, he felt tolerably well briefed.

The atmosphere in the hall turned out to be as
disappointing
as Paul could reasonably have hoped. An audience,
preoccupied
with being serene and together, communicated their inertia to a watery folk-rock group singing about
bubble-gum
trees and listening to their minds. Against a
background
of tie-dyed bellbottoms, feather boas, and
diaphanous
muslin, Paul’s pinstripe suit looked as bizarrely out of place, as he had obviously intended. Inside a large PVC bubble, bearing the legend ‘Plastic Inevitable’, three
adolescents
were sitting with lighted sparklers, risking suicide Vietnamese style. A girl with crudely drawn spiders on her cheeks handed Paul a balloon. He fumbled in his pockets.

‘No man, it’s free.’

‘Thought you could use something.’

‘I don’t need your bread.’

Paul considered. ‘How about horse, smack, glue,
nail-polish
remover?’

The girl looked at him pityingly. ‘That’s a dumb unaware scene.’

‘What
is
this?’ Paul appealed to Gemma. ‘A chick here won’t suck it, lick it, drop it, shoot it.’

‘You’re wearing the wrong gear,’ murmured Gemma.

Paul let out a low whistle and hurriedly removed his jacket and his shirt to reveal a white singlet, announcing in blood-coloured letters ‘Sterilize L.B.J.’. Moving on, Paul began offering Smarties to passers-by. He seemed puzzled by the number of refusals. ‘So drugs aren’t cool any more?’

‘It’s macrobiotics, now,’ said Gemma.

Paul sprayed the sweets skywards in a wide arc. He grinned at Matthew. ‘Boy, is this scene deadsville.’ On the platform a feeble West Coast group had been replaced by a female singer, who was a look-alike for Cher, of Sonny and Cher. She drifted into a wistful number; Simon and
Garfunkel
on a bad day.

Gemma tugged at Matthew’s arm. ‘Pollution songs made it for a while.’

Matthew nodded. ‘You reckon I could have cleaned-up on a theme song for my series?’

‘It’s too late now.’

‘So how do you keep Roy going for over a month?’

She smiled. ‘For starters he won’t be writing his own stuff.’

‘Don’t most groups insist on it these days?’

‘You’re listening to the result.’

Gemma’s indignation amused Matthew. He imagined her telling professional song writers exactly what she wanted; putting poor Roy through complicated choreographic routines, choosing his wardrobe.

‘What you’ve got to understand,’ she told Matthew, ‘is that rock’s about doing things to an audience, not about music for its own sake.’

So, whither Roy? Matthew wondered. Now that acid dreams were passé, and smashing up instruments a period romp, what was left? Suicide rock? Blood capsules, and wild animals on stage?

Shortly after a diversion, created by a naked man shinning up one of the towering organ pipes, Paul caught sight of Roy near the stage. On the well-tried supposition that few
meetings
happened by chance in Paul’s company, Matthew guessed the singer was being wheeled on to show the progress he had made since the weekend at Delvaux (‘progress’ in this context being the extent to which his own opinions had given way to Paul’s).

As Roy came up, he smiled broadly. ‘I could’ve been into crap like this, if Paul and Gemma hadn’t pulled me out.’

‘That’s great,’ agreed Matthew.

Apparently not satisfied by Matthew’s tone, Roy moved closer. ‘Wait a bit … lemme tell you. I think
real
pop’s dead centre,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve seen those promo movies for groups? Popular scenario – the lads in some luxy motor showroom, bouncing around in the Silver Wraith, rattling the cocktail cabinet, shaking ash on the deep pile, having a party, when wambo … this smarmy assistant tells them to leg it.’ He pauses: smiles wrily. ‘Okay, you got it … they make with the big cheque-book and Jeez does that creep jump.’

Matthew frowned. ‘I don’t get the message … the lads have thrown a spanner in world capitalism?’

Paul remarked casually, ‘Seems clear enough to me. The biggest lout that ever left school with twenty words in his head can make straight society kiss his arse if he’s got enough gravy in the bank.’

Roy snapped his fingers. ‘Work your balls off for fifty years … no dice, no Silver Wraith, no deep pile. So better get in on the act.’

‘Or if
you
can’t, better identify with the lads who can.’ This from Gemma. She took Matthew’s arm. ‘Don’t look so sour, Matty. If nobody believes in genius or tradition, what’s left but money? End result – the kids who haven’t got it get a king-sized identity crisis.’

‘So they hitch on to whatever’s raking it in biggest in pop culture.’ Roy stared at Matthew as if daring him to deny it. ‘And that’s not going to be Ravi Shankar and Indian finger cymbals, but stuff that’s fast and flash, and into sex and living plush.’

‘Pop gets to the masses or it’s nowhere?’ suggested Matthew, remembering Roy’s irony about these sentiments at Delvaux.

Roy eyed him squarely. ‘Mass market means money for some, vicarious kicks for others. So? We can’t all be into heavy movies.’

‘Sad but true,’ murmured Gemma, who had obviously enjoyed Roy’s performance.

Twenty minutes later Paul suggested leaving – apparently
the demonstration was over. Out in the car park, Roy walked with Gemma, while Paul and Matthew followed at a distance.

‘You’re pleased with him?’ asked Matthew neutrally.

‘I think he’s starting to get his thoughts together.’

Wanting to laugh, Matthew managed not to; then, just when starting to feel safe, a snorting cackle burst out. Paul looked at him enquiringly. Across the car park, a group of ravers were clambering into a pink and white converted hearse, looking like a groovy paste-up for a psychedelic record sleeve. But that was all dead now, according to Gemma, which made the hearse appropriate. Approaching Paul’s black Bristol, Matthew wondered what Roy would soon be driving (and if he would be called Roy by the time he was driving it). Very likely he won’t actually drive what he’s going to say he does, ditto for the food he’ll claim to like, the ideas he’ll have, or thinks he has, after the great taking apart and reassembling. Look no stitches.

By the time Matthew clambered into the car with the others, he had got the message. Unless he could persuade Roy to speak for himself on camera, and stop acting as Paul’s mouthpiece, the film would merely mark Paul’s apotheosis as one of the decade’s grand masters of media manipulation. Over my dead body, he told himself.

‘Why so glum Matty?’ asked Gemma, nudging him. ‘Don’t worry about whether we can make the thing original.’

‘Like the Beatles said,’ laughed Paul, ‘take an old song and make it better.’

‘They said, “Take a
sad
song”,’ murmured Matthew.

‘If the “fab four” won’t do,’ suggested Paul, ‘try
Tradition
and
the
Individual
Talent
.’

‘We didn’t make the goddam river,’ declared Gemma, ‘but we can have a bloody good swim in it.’

‘I’m all for swimming with your talent,’ muttered Roy, turning authoritatively to Paul. ‘Home James.’

‘Which home, sir?’

‘The one with the golf course on the roof.’ Roy rolled his eyes at Matthew. ‘That was a joke, man.’

‘I’d wait and see,’ advised Matthew.