Carnforth's Creation (14 page)

Ever since her visit to Matthew’s office, Eleanor had suspected that, in spite of his fighting words, he would really
welcome an excuse to pull out. She was therefore horrified to see the outrage in his face. For a moment he was unable to speak; then he rounded on Paul with bitterness beyond anything envisaged in her most pessimistic forecasts.

What sort of sick joke was it, Matthew demanded, to have fought tooth and nail to get him interested, and then, the very moment he’d succeeded, decide to junk everything? Did Paul have any idea how much film they’d already shot? Did he care about the total man-hours that had gone into the project? Did he give a monkey’s toss that he, Matthew, had come back from America solely to film Roy’s first tour? He’d engaged one of the best freelance crews in the country for a month’s filming; had prejudiced research on a potential series by being so preoccupied with the immediate decisions demanded by the film about Roy.

Paul withstood this onslaught with impassivity bordering on the miraculous; and though the cause already looked deader than the deadest duck imaginable, he plodded on. Would the final outcome really be in Roy’s best interests? Wasn’t the tone he himself had so far adopted likely to be misunderstood as cynicism? He and Eleanor had had a long talk, and he had realised how wrong he’d been not to consider her feelings more. Matthew let out a stifled cry.

‘All I’m saying,’ sighed Paul, ‘is that it would be wrong to publicize my interest in things she finds personally …’

‘She implied I’d been bribed.’

‘She was upset,’ soothed Paul.

Matthew rocked back on his heels, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he regarded Eleanor with such distaste that she felt physically soiled.

‘Just get this into your head,’ he told her. ‘I’m trying to do a difficult job as well as I can, and if I get any more foul-ups from you, I’ll see that Paul comes across as the biggest shit alive.’

Suddenly Eleanor could take no more; everything had been so disastrously different from the scene she had
imagined
. ‘Oh, darling,’ she blurted out to Paul, ‘why didn’t you warn me?’ She turned frantically to Matthew, ‘Please,
please don’t blame him … He wouldn’t have said anything unless I’d begged him to.’

Paul put a comforting arm round her shoulders. ‘Don’t worry, Elly. I know you meant no harm.’

‘But
do
you know?’ she faltered. Struggling to go on, ‘When I talked about the picture before they came … I can see what you must have thought. That I’d deliberately delayed telling you till a specially awkward time …’

She broke off as Matthew screamed, ‘
That
does
it
.’ Eleanor recoiled in horror as he advanced on her, jaw thrust forward. ‘How long did it take you to rehearse that little number?
I
never wanted it, d’you hear? Told him to leave my life alone …’ He paused for breath; his face scarlet. ‘… So he gives the bloody thing to my wife … Well it’s going back … just as soon as Bridget can make it.’ He jerked round and faced Paul. ‘Is that what you wanted all along?’

‘You
gave
that painting to
her
?’ wailed Eleanor, only just audible above exclamations from Paul, and Bridget, who was in tears. The announcement of a string of flight arrivals drowned what Paul was trying to say. In the end she heard him shout in Matthew’s direction, ‘You’re crazy, off your trolley … barking …’ The next moment Bridget was running towards the exits, knocking into people and nearly falling. As Matthew plunged after her, Paul cried out to him, ‘I never told Elly anything.’

Matthew kept moving. Groups of people turned to look at them, some shocked, others amused. Feeling faint, Eleanor leaned against a pillar and wished the building would fall on them.

*

Just over a week after the fiasco at the airport, Paul was a worried man. If, on top of everything, the film were to end up making him look idiotic, unscrupulous, or both, he doubted whether his marriage would survive the blow. His only hope of mollifying Matthew seemed to lie in convincing Bridget that his gift had been genuine.

Paying off his taxi outside Bridget’s college – a forbidding building set back from the Strand, and looking more like a
Victorian hospital than his idea of a university – Paul learned at the lodge that Mrs Nairn was in the middle of a seminar. A porter led him up several flights of stairs and then along an interminable corridor, before indicating a wooden bench where he could sit until the class ended.

The room Bridget was teaching in had a door with a glass panel through which he saw her sitting at a table with some half-dozen students, democratically clad in jeans, sweaters and anoraks. Since several peered curiously at him as he stared in, he withdrew to one side of the door, where he was still able to catch snatches of a rambling discussion of Bentham’s views on poetry.

Bridget emerged ten minutes later, and started as she saw him. After talking about future seminar dates, she came towards him, her face taut and mask-like. He said softly, ‘Matty’s wrong. I never planned to get the picture back.’

She clutched her clipboard and papers like a protective breastplate. ‘All I know is what a fool I’ve been.’ She sat on the edge of the seat and stared at the cracked linoleum. ‘Matthew warned me not to accept it.’

Paul said, ‘I never told Eleanor. Matthew did that. You heard how shocked she was. Nobody could have pretended
that
well.’

Bridget looked at him imploringly. ‘All I want is to forget it all and get on with my life.’

Knowing she had withdrawn the picture from auction, Paul set great store by pleading with her to put it up again. But when he suggested it, she shook her head.

‘It’s legally yours,’ he murmured. ‘You can’t force me to take it back.’

‘Then I’ll give it to a real charity,’ she blurted out.

The implication galled him, but he kept his temper. ‘If there’d been the slightest hint of anything like that, you’d never have accepted in the first place.’

‘You
know
I thought it fantastically generous …’ Her voice caught, and she could not go on.

‘Then
keep
it.
’

‘Matty’d never speak to me again.’

Her misery distressed him. ‘At least tell him I won’t take it back,’ he entreated. She did not answer. ‘He may not know it, but if he hatchets me in the film, it’ll be goodbye Eleanor.’ Still nothing. A single tear spilled over and ran down her cheek. Without calculation, he leant towards her and kissed it away. Then he began to walk.

*

On one of those bright April days that starkly demonstrate how long it is since a window cleaner called, Bridget was sitting in the flat thinking up exam questions. ‘“Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote …” “April is the cruellest month …” Contrast Chaucer’s vision of spring with Eliot’s.’ Changing attitudes to nature, through Shakespeare, Marvell, Pope, on to the Romantics; beyond them to the Industrial Revolution, Clough, Arnold, and modern urban alienation. The ultimate general question … When she started to write again, her biro seized up. As usual not a pen, pencil, or ballpoint in sight.

By the door she spotted Matthew’s briefcase. He had gone out to the corner-shop for cigarettes while waiting for an already overdue taxi to take him to King’s Cross (a midday appointment in Cambridge with a don: agronomy,
socio-economic
-something).

The briefcase was too tightly packed for her to thrust her hand to the bottom to feel around for a writing implement. The second folder she removed was labelled: ‘Rory Craig: Tape Transcripts’. As she laid it on the floor, she heard the flat door open. Without time to replace the folder, she kicked it under a chair. Matthew always raised hell over any
interference
with his papers, even when left all over the floor. While hoping he might go to the loo or change his jacket, giving her time to return the papers, Bridget was not unduly bothered. On a day devoted to other matters, he wouldn’t miss his ‘Rory’ material.

Matthew burst in, gave her a hasty peck on the cheek, and seized his briefcase. ‘Taxi’s outside,’ he gasped, running out on to the landing. A fairly typical departure. Eventually Bridget found a pencil stub in the cutlery drawer, and got
back to work. Half-an-hour later she remembered the folder. She retrieved it and was soon engrossed. Occasionally she laughed aloud at things said by Paul or Roy; sometimes she was bored (transcripts of occasions like a BBC play-list conference, a DJ’s record hour, and a photographic session were downright dull). Then she came across an interview with Roy’s parents, which she thought tasteless and
embarrassing
. Worse still was a lengthy interview with Roy
himself
. The majority of the questions struck her as framed with the intention of encouraging mistrust of Paul’s motives. Nor did she think it likely that Roy would have said what he had done unless urged on by Matthew’s slanted questions. Typical answers from Roy: ‘I mean, I’m not saying a lot of Paul’s ideas aren’t a gas; but … uh … maybe he needs to strike attitudes to sorta hide his doubts about himself.’ ‘It all comes down to him calling the shots, which is why he’s tried to isolate me … like leaving it till the last sodding moment to set me up with a live backing group. A singer’s gotta have a band drivin’ behind him, and kids up front digging his sound. Lock him in a studio, and it’s like choppin’ off a pianist’s hands.’

Bridget dropped the folder on her knee. Was this the ‘hatcheting’ Paul dreaded, or common or garden
documentary
truth-telling? Bridget didn’t know – except
whatever
it was would make evil viewing for Eleanor, and if Paul had been honest about his problems with her …

It was late in the afternoon by the time she finally rang Paul. She started by saying she would never forgive him if he told Matthew about her call. When he had sworn secrecy, she gave him a rough idea of the contents of the transcripts. Only Roy’s remarks seemed to upset him. After a long silence, she asked if he was still there.

‘Mm,’ he sighed. ‘Christ it’s difficult. If I let Roy know I’m on to what he said to Matty, he’ll go screaming to Matthew asking why he told me … And it wouldn’t take Matty long to find out who told me in the first place.’

‘But at least you know what’s going on now,’ she pointed out. ‘That’s a tremendous help, surely?’

‘Well,’ murmured Paul, ‘I can’t quite see that.
Information’s
no good unless you can use it.’ A pause. ‘There must be some way of telling Roy what you’ve said, that’ll also stop him blabbing to Matthew.’

Alarmed, Bridget stammered, ‘Please, Paul … nothing drastic’

‘I didn’t say what I had in mind. Look, have a think about alternatives, and ring me back.’

Twenty minutes later, having failed to come up with anything, Bridget telephoned again, and asked him to spell out what he wanted.

‘You may not like it,’ Paul began hesitantly, ‘but hear me out anyway. Suppose you were to make out to Roy, as if it slipped out accidentally, that Matty really has a pretty low opinion of pop … then my guess is Roy’d get jittery about the film, and start wondering who his real friends are.’

‘He might still confide in Matthew,’ objected Bridget.

‘Not if I follow up with a few thunderclaps … like if I ever get the feeling he’s doing down his image, and my
investment
, I’ll tear up his contract on the spot.’

‘It’s still risky,’ she insisted, suddenly realizing that Paul had asked her to ring back, so
he
could get
his
thoughts together. His silence made her feel less and less sure that she’d thought enough before warning him.

At last he said, ‘You mean practical problems? This is just an idea … Roy’s doing a foreign service broadcast at Bush House next week … just round the corner from your college. So you have lunch in a local restaurant. Roy and I happen to wind up in the same place. “Fancy meeting you here.”’

‘Pop stars eat in the kind of quick service …?’

Paul laughed. ‘Roy hates posh nosh. He loves Greek food.’

‘So we bump into each other? And …?’

‘Play it by ear. Either we get the right moment or we don’t.’

She had twisted the plastic-coated wire so tightly round
her wrist that her hand felt numb. ‘I’ll have to sleep on it.’

‘Fine,’ he said cheerfully. ‘One thing you can count on:
I
can’t
say
anything.
So even if you decide to come, you’ll be free to do whatever you like.’

*

After ordering taramasalata and dolmades, Bridget waited tensely, staring absently at the selection of dried gourds, goatskins, and tourist posters on the walls. On the white margin of a shot of Olympia, some wag had scrawled, ‘For Olympia only, change at Earl’s Court.’

They arrived as she was starting her vine leaves. Paul (trust him to think of it) decided not to see her, leaving that to Roy, who took his time obliging. Perhaps uncomfortable about the gin-flinging episode, he sounded unenthusiastic as he asked if they could join her. A forced breeziness, as Paul joked about the difficulties of getting a star ready for the ‘big one’. ‘Like growing a prize marrow. You’re buggered if it comes on too fast and bursts before the show, and buggered if it stays the size it was.’

But today, Roy was not his usual chirpily combative self. The conversation drifted. He said he had seen Gemma, who was ‘really low, man’; though why he was blaming Paul, Bridget couldn’t imagine. Nor why he seemed to bear a personal grudge against Eleanor. Trying to perk him up, she said she’d turned on the radio two nights back, and chanced to hear his latest single. He stared back gloomily. ‘Don’t write me own stuff; don’t do live gigs. I’d’ve looked a git even in the plonking Fifties.’

‘You’ll be on tour by June,’ soothed Paul, before ordering drinks.

Roy’s mood was not improved by retsina, or kebab (his favourite according to Paul). After eating the last chunk of meat on his skewer, he told Bridget he didn’t care if he was being tactless, but Matthew and the ‘frigging film’ were driving him bananas. ‘Not just what it’s done to Gemma, or getting Lady C’s camiknickers in a twist.’ He swilled some more retsina. ‘Couple o’ days back my old man rings me in a state … He’s been on the telly, he thinks. Had a bloke
asking questions all day. Turns out Matthew told him my publicity says he’s meant to be a dead merchant seaman and me mum an usherette. He wasn’t chuffed. Then it was Mum’s turn. What was I like when I was little? Five mins later she’s dabbin’ her eyes on camera, saying what a
sensitive
wee feller I was. “You wanter see some photies, love?” “Yes, perlease,” says Matty.’