Carnforth's Creation (3 page)

Lord Carnforth’s chauffeur walked round the elderly black Daimler to open one of the rear doors. Instead of his lordship emerging, another young man stepped out, blinking, into the late evening sunlight. He squinted up at the finials and heraldic beasts above the hall, and then allowed his eyes to wander round the Gatehouse Court – an area considerably larger than the main quad of the Oxford college where he and Paul had once been undergraduates. Matthew Nairn had freckles, curly brown hair, and, when he was not frowning (which he did more often than he knew), an agreeable open face.

As a man in a dark suit hurried towards him, apparently intent on relieving him of his case, Matthew’s lips twisted into a grin. What was he? Footman, odd job man, butler? Fantastic, in the late Sixties, that anyone could maintain such a vast establishment. And as for the house – it was ‘real’, of course, in the monumental way of all historic buildings, but improbable too: a period piece, crying out for inhabitants from another century, wearing festive clothes.

Since the others were already dining, Matthew was asked whether he would prefer to go up and change, or wash downstairs and go straight in. Ignoring the way the man was looking at his corduroy jacket, he took the second option. Because he had been committed to a full day’s work in a dubbing theatre, his wife, Bridget, had gone ahead by car, and Matthew had followed by train to the nearest station.

At the foot of the barbarically resplendent Jacobean
staircase
, he remembered how overawed he had been on his first visit as a prep school friend. Even now, aged twenty-seven, married, and an established documentary director, Matthew felt uneasy about the coming weekend as Paul’s guest. The days when Paul had been the single most important influence
on his life had ended with Oxford, but since then,
particularly
during the past year, Matthew had often felt the need to be on his guard.

The fact that he was at Castle Delvaux at all – ostensibly to witness whatever festivities Paul had in mind for the
following
day – was in itself a cause for concern since he had been reluctant to come. To say that he had been persuaded by his wife, although true, was no adequate explanation. Unwilling to be truthful about his reservations, he had been reduced to making ineffectual remarks about finding the splendours of Paul’s life unsettling, and being worried that he would have little in common with other guests. This had encouraged Bridget to tell him (not for the first time) that anyone responsible for as many television documentaries as he was, on such subjects as urban blight, child poverty and
worldwide
pollution, could hardly expect to keep his joie de vivre. He needed a change. If not the light-hearted film project suggested by Paul several months ago, something very similar. As part of his campaign for nudging Matthew into making a film about his pop protégé, Paul had told Bridget that there would be money in it for all of them, as well as plenty of fun during the filming. Since Matthew had kept his opinions to himself, Bridget had remained
enthusiastic.

At university Bridget had never held it against Paul that he had made love to her during one of his brief periods of disaffection with Gemma. Matthew was less forgiving.
During
an earlier rift between Paul and his step-sister, he had fallen for and temporarily secured Gemma, without any warning that his tenure was likely to be short. Afterwards, when Paul had been reinstated, although Matthew had finally drifted back into his orbit, he had never reconciled himself to his friend’s anarchic morality. He still sometimes regretted that Paul had subsequently introduced him to Bridget, and could therefore claim marginal involvement in his choice of a wife.

Matthew’s present difficulties had started at Paul’s
wedding
reception ten months ago, when he had met Gemma
again after an interval of three years. No longer the femme fatale she had been to her Oxford generation, nor possessing, as a workaday journalist, the glamour attaching to the first female editor of one of the university’s best-known
magazines
, she had impressed Matthew as far more sympathetic than he remembered. He had enjoyed talking to her about the tendency of the media to treat ideas as extensions of fashion, and she had made him laugh with suggestions for a film spoofing this process. He had not believed that she would keep her promise to get in touch again, but she had, and after further meetings, Matthew had found himself stumbling into an affair. Only then had Gemma returned to the subject of a film collaboration; this time in earnest. Would he consider a documentary about the manufacture of a pop star? He had been on the point of commissioning her to do some detailed research, when she had casually let slip that the singer she had in mind was under contract to a company controlled by Paul, and that he would naturally expect to be involved in the filming.

From that moment Matthew strongly suspected that Paul and Gemma would long ago have discussed how best to secure the benefits which television exposure might bring to their pop-promoting partnership. Remembering the misery they had absent-mindedly caused him at university, Matthew had been mortified to find himself still considered such easy meat. He had soon pondered a disarmingly simple question. If Gemma was ready to employ seduction to make him malleable, why not go along with her for a while? Who would the laugh be on when he pulled out several months later and admitted he had never had any intention of obliging her. It was time someone showed them that they could not go on indefinitely using old friends as unwitting recruits in their private theatricals.

In recent months Matthew had gone ahead, and been granted the double luxury of settling old scores while
enjoying
a rich sexual diet. Since Gemma had always affected to believe that romantic love was a pretty disguise for
possessiveness
and jealousy, he had not worried over-much about
her moral indignation when the balloon finally went up. He had imagined the têtes à têtes she would be having with Paul. ‘Oh yes, he’s coming along nicely. Only a week or two till it’s settled with his bosses.’ Matthew had become expert in spinning things out. The next offers meeting had been postponed. ‘Documentaries’ had finally thrown it out (bloody fools); ‘Features’ were definitely interested. The Controller was on their side, but the departmental head was new, and shouldn’t be pressed till he’d settled in. So hard to get new projects approved.

As the imposture had become harder to sustain, Matthew’s emotional detachment had started to crack. A couple of bad moments with Bridget had clinched the matter. His decision to come clean had been reached a few days before the arrival of Paul’s invitation.

Believing he had been asked only so Paul could apply the final squeeze of pressure still required after Gemma’s gentle preliminaries, Matthew had not been keen to come. But once aware of Bridget’s determination to accept, he had started to see advantages in taking the game to them, and daring to end it with a knock-out. It might take Gemma years to forgive him, but it would not be her style to say anything to Bridget, and Paul would quickly forget that there had ever been any ill-will.

Armed with such thoughts, Matthew followed the
dark-suited
functionary across the cavernous Great Chamber towards the smaller room where Lord and Lady Carnforth were dining with their guests. Through an unassuming Tudor arch (ideal for a tracking shot revealing red-robed Wolsey and rising Master Cromwell pondering the king’s ‘great matter’), Matthew came upon his fellow guests: a company blending traditional and contemporary specimens. Gemma in figure-hugging lurex beside a middle-aged man with a face as urbane as a Reynold’s portrait, to his right an elegant female sporting a brace of diamond clips. Eleanor was next to a languid young Orsino in a dinner jacket (strong family resemblance; perhaps her brother?). Bridget sat
between
Paul and a youth with shoulder length hair and a
beige Wild West jacket. The only empty chair was opposite Gemma’s.

From her end of the table Eleanor looked up as Paul rose to greet his friend. The recent spate of articles provoked by Matthew’s television series on the perils of pollution had made her slightly uneasy about meeting such a firebrand. Nor had she been unimpressed to learn that Matthew had been the director of Paul’s most ambitious undergraduate production – a musical review she had seen as a schoolgirl during its brief West End transfer. She was therefore
nonplussed
that he seemed so like all the other vaguely classless intellectual types she had met: awkward, badly dressed, and reluctant to take part in general conversation. She felt that, like Gemma, he would consider her life a joke but never come straight out with it.

Though sitting next to her cousin, Jonathan, who always amused her – as did her uncle, Bruno Lindsay, further up the table – Eleanor was not happy. Tomorrow’s entertainments, originally dreamed-up to involve her, had soon been
reclaimed
as Paul’s private preserve. The only ‘involvement’ she looked like getting was acting as nominal hostess on the night. Nor did she care for the emphasis he was putting on ‘spontaneity’ and ‘surprise’. To have spelled out everything in advance, he had insisted, would have been to wreck her appreciation of the effects he was after. Committed to a stance of easy-going tolerance, Eleanor thought it too late in the day to change her tune.

That there would be pop music tomorrow evening was not in doubt, since Roy (of the cottage louts) had been invited down early by Paul, and was even now sitting next to Matthew’s blue-stocking wife. Eleanor thought Paul
insensitive
to have asked him to stay, since he obviously felt out of place.

In spite of her uneasiness, dinner proceeded amicably until shortly after the main course had been served. Veronica Markham, whose husband owned almost as much of the county as Paul, seemed suddenly to have tumbled to the fact that Roy was in some way indebted to Paul.

‘But how marvellous,’ she cooed, ‘do many rich people buy pop stars these days?’

‘You mean like pictures and racehorses?’ enquired Paul.

‘I don’t see why not,’ replied Veronica mischievously. ‘I’ve met people with half-shares in bull-fighters.’

‘Top half or bottom?’ asked Roy abruptly, surprising Eleanor not so much because he had finally said
something
, but because of the vitriolic tone he had given his joke.

Affecting not to have heard, Veronica remarked blandly to Paul, ‘Isn’t pop rather a speculative field?’

Paul lowered his fork. ‘One record in twenty-five leaves a few ripples. About the same proportion of those makes a splash.’

‘My God,’ laughed Veronica, ‘it makes betting on the National look a certainty.’

‘Not quite the same game,’ he murmured.

‘For starters the horses can talk,’ commented Roy,
hacking
at his duck.

Eleanor heard her cousin laugh appreciatively. ‘So you’re smart and the others aren’t?’

‘He’s also got more talent than most singers dream about,’ said Gemma, evidently mistaking Jonathan’s friendly
remark
for sarcasm.

When Eleanor’s uncle asked a harmless question about the importance of advertising, she was astonished to see the effect on Roy.

‘Think you can tell
Paul
anything about image and hype?’

‘Heavens no,’ soothed Bruno, glancing at Eleanor with a comical ‘what on earth have I done?’ expression. ‘I’m sure Paul’s a tremendous expert.’

For some unfathomable reason, Roy seemed even angrier, and Eleanor only realized after several acid exchanges that the importance of publicity was a sore subject between Paul and himself. After this skirmish, an awkward silence, until Roy continued, with jaunty ill-humour, ‘Course Paul’s got a great way of putting it over. “You wanna be a minor cult,
Roy? Okay; why not join the Methodists or the Bach Choir? Very tasteful. No chicks choking, no nurses running round like it’s World War One, no tits hanging out …”’

Paul arched an eyebrow. ‘I don’t
think
I ever put it like that.’

To Eleanor’s embarrassment, Roy’s next remarks seemed primarily addressed to her, as if he expected her to act as referee. ‘Pop gets straight to the masses or forget it, he reckons. Says I’ve been suckered by elitist crap … stuff written for art school drop-outs who get their ego-kicks raving about minority bands.’

‘If you don’t agree with him,’ she began shakily, ‘I don’t see why you have to take any notice.’

He looked at her, as if pitying her lack of information. ‘Cos when Gemma told him Exodus was up for grabs, he bought in big enough to call plentya shots.’

‘There must have been lots of other people you could go to,’ she objected, exasperated with herself for not having pressed Paul to be specific about his investment in the company Roy kept rabbiting on about. Roy was grinning sadly.

‘Two disaster discs … a coupla years still to go on me old contract. You think I could afford to say stuff it, when Gemma tells me she’s in deep with a rich swinger who’s just gobbled a hunk of big-time management?’

Paul clapped ironically. ‘Obviously it’s flattering to think one’s the victim of a conspiracy.’

Roy jerked his head in Gemma’s direction. ‘The way you two tied me up, it’s a sodding miracle I can walk.’

‘You still seem fairly lively,’ laughed Paul. What alarmed Eleanor more than the extent of his involvement with Roy was the role Gemma was playing.

In answer to a remark of Bruno’s about pop music seeming an odd field for aristocratic patronage, Paul said it was too late in the day to start commissioning murals or asking hermits to sit in grottoes. Then Roy started mimicking again.

‘You see culturally speaking, Roy old fig, the baby’s gone
with the bathwater, so unless one likes pretending nothing’s happened, one might as well have some fun with the sludge round the rim.’

Irritated by approving laughter from Gemma, Eleanor said to her husband, ‘I can’t believe you ever said anything
that
cynical.’