Carnforth's Creation (8 page)

Only a few months back, Roy had seen the easy pickings grabbed by companies like Exodus as a sick rip-off. Though nominally a music publisher, just a fraction of its income came from sheet music; the vast majority gushing in as record royalties on song rights and management fees on artists. Now that he was being paid a weekly retainer for doing sod all, his disapproval had lost some of its bite. Enough leeches bleeding the profit-vampires might even do the job the taxman couldn’t manage. That’d been Roy’s own notion; but Paul was the real maestro in that line. ‘Why worry about changing your point of view? Think what the Victorians believed … what people thought ten years ago. This is a fact, Roy: the only truth that never changes, is that truth is always changing.’ And that’d been fine (nothing wrong with raping a few principles in private), but on film it mightn’t look such a gas.

This was what had bothered Roy ever since the evening at Alexandra Palace. Before the film had started to look more like a real possibility than a wanker’s day-dream, Roy had doubted whether Paul had the umph to get things going. But the way he’d dinned into him what to say to Matthew, had changed Roy’s mind. He was serious all right, but way off target. Free publicity certainly didn’t come any better than fifty minute TV documentaries, but was Matthew going to hand that out to anyone he half-way suspected of sending him up?

But when Roy said this to Paul, he told him not to worry. This was on one of Paul’s infrequent visits to his office in the steel and glass tower occupied by Exodus and seven other companies. Though Paul only spent a few hours a week there, Roy knew for a fact that he had recently been attending
meetings, and had even started beavering around making outside contacts.

Paul swung round in his leather swivel-chair and looked out at the trees in Hyde Park. ‘You see, Roy,’ he murmured, ‘Matty’s problems are Matty’s problems. It’s more
important
for us to sort out what we’re aiming for, and stick to it.’

‘Which shouldn’t mean I carry on like Moses selling the Ten Commandments.’

Across the room, Gemma poured herself coffee from a bubbling percolator. ‘What you’ve got to understand is Matthew doesn’t go for people who don’t believe in what they do. That’s why you’ve got to get behind your image.’

‘Dead right,’ declared Paul, swinging round to face Roy. ‘This is what we agreed we didn’t want: the “ordinary” kid type of star … ex-secondary modern lad from the suburbs, lively, no hang-ups, disarmingly natural. Musical talent obvious when he started banging a toffee tin aged three; first guitar at ten; bought a purple jacket with velvet lapels and joined the youth club group at sixteen …’

What was spooky about Paul, Roy decided, was the casual way he made disagreement look crazy. On the walls of his office were photographic blow-ups of a few dozen
celebrities
, almost all members of the class of ’62 to ’65. Hardly a new face for ’68 and ’69. Just oldies: Animals, Kinks, Bee Gees, Beach Boys, Who, Stones. Like a game of musical chairs where the winners of the mid-Sixties got mean and refused to leave their seats. And if the normal rules of built-in obsolescence had been suspended, Paul was even righter about the need for a change. No more self-pitying songs, no more pie in the sky rebellion; not that he meant to ditch the ‘ordinary’ kid entirely; nobody got any teen votes who was stuck-up and out of reach. So keep the ‘one of us’ idea, and add enough brains to work the system by seeing through it. Success and subversion in the same package. But Paul still hadn’t said how they could stop him looking like a rat-faced teen-hustler, smugger than Bond and as corny.

When Roy pitched in with this, Gemma did the
answering
.

‘Just because you can’t stand drabness and drifting, it doesn’t mean you’re some greasy Mr Fix-it.’ She was in her ‘girl in a man’s world’ journalist gear (shaggy old sheepskin waistcoat and patched denims), and her no-nonsense manner matched. ‘Most successes are a bit paranoid with it. Isn’t that how to play it? Plenty of public cool, but a hint of psychic poisons gnawing away inside. You’re too good at being anguished on stage to end up a slick fixer.’

Behind her head, Roy’s eye briefly rested on a placard reading POLITICS IS PART OF SHOW BIZZ, and next to it a picture of the Prime Minister, grinning like a jackass, arm in arm with two knockabout comedians. Paul got up
abruptly
, announcing that he had to see a man about a camera. A camera? Was that just one more thing being said to phase him? Like he and Gemma were supposed to be doing
something
later that hadn’t been spelled out. But when he asked questions, the big hint was dropped that he was asking them to explain things too plonking obvious to need it. Drift along with us, baby, was the message he kept getting; and the way they put it over, nine times out of ten he drifted. What was more bothering, he thought, following Gemma to the door, was how little he had started to mind.

Sitting next to Gemma, as she flipped her yellow roadster in and out of lane, Roy wondered how she hadn’t killed herself years ago. Whenever she stopped zapping him with her switched-on stunt, he enjoyed being with her. But her obvious simpatico with Lord Paul was a ‘Hands Off sign he didn’t reckon there’d be much point ignoring. An odd set-up though; if she and Paul were balling each other (and they had to be) what would Gemma think about Eleanor? Husbands didn’t just
look
at wives like that when they got home; unless they were headcases. Himself, Roy guessed he’d stick to Eleanor; though for guys who liked their birds
armour-plated
, Gemma was obviously a challenge for their tin-openers.

Soon they were jinking about in a network of side-streets
between King’s Cross and Islington – not a part of town Roy knew too well. Gemma flung the Lotus round another corner and slowed down a bit.

‘I’ve been thinking about your name,’ she said out of the blue; maybe because she was also looking at a lot of street names.

‘Yeah?’

‘You say “yeah” quite a bit, Roy.’

‘Yeah,’ he echoed. ‘Think I should call meself Vince or Marty?’

Gemma sniffed. ‘I rather like Rory, actually. Almost Roy, but better.’

‘Rory what?’

‘Rory Craig. No folksy crap like Lightbody or
Green-water
. Nothing too commercial … Flame, Fury, and that stuff.’ They had started to curb-crawl, and a van was flashing them. Gemma ignored it. ‘I know Rory’s slightly
pretty-pretty
, but Craig’s rugged enough to make the contrast bite.’ She stopped the car and started flipping through a street map. ‘Keep your finger there,’ she told him, thrusting the map in his direction.

The street in question turned out to be a run-down terrace, scheduled for demolition, with one side already rubble. On one of the surviving houses, squatters had painted a huge bleeding eye, peering out of a tangle of thorn bushes. ‘That’s the one,’ said Gemma, indicating the house next door.

Her deadpan, uninformative approach amused Roy. If she thought he was going to start begging her to explain things, she could think again. Out on the pavement she looked round appreciatively. ‘Not bad?’ she murmured. ‘Paul found it.’

‘He’s thinking of moving house?’

‘Not
him
,
Roy. No … for this film you’ve got to live somewhere. Or at least we’ve got to
show
you living
somewhere
.’

Roy laughed drily. ‘You reckon my real pad isn’t
kitchen-sink
enough? Wanted some place that’d make Arnold Wesker throw-up?’

‘Course not,’ she laughed. ‘What we wanted was
somewhere
falling apart, sure; but only for the contrast. In the midst of chaos, there’s your room; an island of order.’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘You get things together whatever your surroundings.’

‘Do I get to choose my own place when I’ve made it?’

‘You’re not going to
live
here, Roy,’ she said patiently.

‘So I’m uh in amongst the garbage, but sort of away from it?’

She nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly. A touch of
remoteness
is going to make people want to get through to you.’

The house chosen for his television home was a fair-sized Victorian building, smelling of rot but so far not broken apart by vandals. At the top of the staircase, Gemma
unlocked
a door and walked into a freshly whitewashed room. Iron bedstead, scrubbed pine table, a rush-bottomed chair like Van Gogh painted, and a couple of grainy art pics on the walls: one of a naked girl in front of an open window (too much light flooding past to see her tits or pubes); the other of a man with one made-up eye and a clown’s dead-white face. A piano too.

‘So what do I do when the camera’s here?’ Roy looked around. ‘Crouch under the table?’

‘Can you play the piano?’ Roy shook his head. ‘So you listen to records. Maybe nothing to do with pop. Wagner might be right. That’s good because …’ She kicked at the chair-leg in exasperation, ‘Jesus, you know what I mean.’

Roy nodded; and suddenly he
did
know what she meant. A shot from outside. One lighted window the only sign of life in the decaying house. Loud music. Wagner. The camera moves in. Cut to interior and he’s sitting in his monk’s hideaway, drawing weird things like the eye on the wall. On sound, commentary about Rory Craig coming a long way since he lived in Desolation Row, but ‘Rory still has that inner karma, that self-sufficiency that cuts out the kinda crap most unaware shits fill their lives with …’ He grinned to himself, then told Gemma he could be drawing weird stuff. She liked it.

‘I went to art school, didn’t I?’ He was pleased with the way he’d asked this as a question.

‘You could have done that,’ she agreed, thinking about it.

And then, unexpectedly, something seemed to click, and he saw it from her side. They weren’t talking about
him
at all, but this Rory charmer. They could make up any damned thing they liked, and it was no reflection on Roy Flannery. So why
not
do it different? No smashing up hotel rooms, no jumping on car bonnets. No cute publicity about buying gran a bungalow, and liking model railways. What a prat he’d been not to get there quicker. When he started in with ideas too, his hang-ups about
them
doing all the thinking wouldn’t figure.

He sucked in his cheeks. ‘I think we oughta work out what’s given me this loneliness thing.’ Gemma agreed.

On the way back to the West End, and what turned out to be a Balinese restaurant full of puppets and rubbery plants, Roy’s factory foreman father became a dead merchant
seaman
, and his mother played around with being a cinema usherette and a retired chorus girl. The usherette might be good because Roy would have cut his teeth on more movies than most people dreamed of. Pretty way-out educationally. Waiting for their food, they drank some hooch fermented from Balinese bark (Gemma’s story) that tasted less like paint-stripper after the second glass. Roy said he ought to have a kid sister in a nut house, which could account for the loneliness, and make him want to screw the system that screwed her.

‘Mustn’t be too bleak, Roy.’

‘I was thinking a bit more like Orton’s plays … black comedy and all that.’ He frowned. ‘Could be too
sophisticated
?’

Gemma smiled. ‘Could be.’

The bark juice made Roy feel fairly relaxed after another glass, and he started asking a few pertinent questions, like how was he ever going to make it without a group, and without any songs? But Gemma said not to worry because Paul had had an amazing idea that’d make him
famous before his first single had even been pressed.

‘You won’t forget to tell me what it is? Could be quite a shock otherwise.’

She leaned forward solemnly across her Pacific prawns. ‘Just trust in the Lord, Roy.’

Eleanor gazed out between glazed chintz curtains at wet pavements and the constant stream of cars and taxis bound for Hyde Park Corner. Even on this drab September day she would far rather have been in the country than cooped up in the Carnforth’s Wilton Crescent house. But since Paul had recently increased the length of his London visits, she had thought it advisable to spend more time in town. Her aim was not to watch him, but to give notice that she meant to go on loving the whole man she had married, and not just the part of him he chose to exhibit at Castle Delvaux.

Yet undeniably, with Paul out so much, she was often bored. There was shopping, of course; she could go to a theatre matinée or a film; have tea at Fortnum’s or the Ritz. But how long before that became dreary? To talk to friends might help, she sometimes thought. But whenever she did go out with someone she had known a long time, she could not bring herself to talk about her problems.

Later that morning Eleanor was under the dryer in a traditionally chic, though far from trendy Knightsbridge hairdressing salon. Having forgotten to bring a book, she flicked through the varied assortment of magazines. Most of her favourites were being read, so she soon found herself sampling reading matter she would not otherwise have chosen. A lot of the articles were about cinema stars, sporting
personalities, off-the-peg fashion and other subjects she considered more Paul’s line of country than hers. Yet for that very reason, this was an opportunity to inform herself.

Then suddenly her detachment gave way to interest. In amongst the columns of print were three photographs: one of Paul, one of Roy Flannery, and a smaller picture of Matthew Nairn. A forthcoming television film about ‘Rory Craig’. The name meant nothing to her, although she quickly noticed that it appeared under Roy’s picture. She read rapidly; nervousness making her concentration wobble. The film to be directed by Matthew. But why was Paul part of it? Because he had
discovered
‘Rory’ and was promoting him. Only now did she notice the heading: POP GOES THE PEERAGE. As her heart started to slow down, she began to recognise the gushing tongue-in-cheek style, and knew that Gemma was the author.

Having got the gist of the piece, Eleanor overcame a powerful urge to fling away the magazine. But there might be a sting in the tail. Spurts of anger made her hands shake as she read:

Back in Wilton Crescent, phrases from the article
remained
with Eleanor, causing her such anger that she longed to rush into the street and take the first cab she saw. But dashing off to abuse Paul seemed unlikely to solve anything. She sank down in a chair and shut her eyes. ‘Sometimes I really love my work …’ She imagined Paul and Gemma side by side in front of the same typewriter, laughing and nudging one another intimately as they wrote. And because he had assumed she would never read it, he hadn’t even mentioned the article.

A television documentary would be seen by millions. What would she feel were Paul to repeat anything like the Delvaux ‘happenings’? Would he tell people what he had told her? While she had thought Roy’s career would be the only manifestation of Paul’s interest, she had suffered in silence, but the prospect of Paul himself clambering in on the act and speaking directly to half the population was
intolerable
. But how to stop him? And when? As the afternoon dragged by, Eleanor concluded she would do nothing for her cause if she blundered in before knowing exactly what to do.

As she paced back and forth among buhl tables and Empire chairs, she wondered whether Paul’s excesses were changing her. Open and spontaneous on marrying, wasn’t she becoming the reverse? A tight-lipped ice-goddess,
denying
her spirited husband his fun. But of course … wasn’t this precisely the kind of person Paul had jokingly told her she was, right from the start? What else had he meant by telling her so often that
she
was the real aristocrat, whereas
he
crept in by the side-door of a freak inheritance? A joke perhaps, because so clearly a distortion, but the implication clear: ‘You are typecast; I am free.’ Sometimes she had been naïve enough to abet him in this travesty. Her bitchy asides, (a defence against being thought ill-educated) he read as true character. ‘That’s a very Elly answer,’ he would say.

For instance: people to dinner, an earnest political discussion
about Mr Maudling’s prospects for the Tory leadership. ‘Too fat,’ she announced briskly, ringing for the next course, and bringing to a sudden end a thoughtful conversation. And what else was ‘very Elly?’ Her toughness, her intolerance … in fact any quality that could be pinned down. Though for himself, Paul reserved a positive Houdini’s arsenal of quick-silver characteristics. Like a ship, honeycombed with watertight doors, he was unsinkable.

Yet nothing seemed to reduce her need for him; her love. Not that tough, intolerant Elly was supposed to be clinging or sentimental. (Perhaps someone else supplied these fluffy feminine things?) Undeniably he was proud of her; they looked good together in public – she dark, he fair; beautiful people both; wonderously self-assured. But in private, Eleanor sometimes got the feeling they were in public still; too self-aware to be genuinely intimate. Could this have been all Paul had hoped for when he married her?

Eleven o’clock. Lord and Lady Carnforth ‘at home’ to one another. They have dined, watched television, and talked in their brittle way about nothing much. In an armchair opposite his wife’s, Paul sipped brandy. Harmony requiring no words? Eleanor pictured Paul and Gemma at that typewriter again; they laughed and chattered; shared zany ideas. And then? But this evening Eleanor drew a mental curtain on them. She and Paul were in their own water-tight compartment, and until able to open others she would have to give her attention to the only one she knew.

Would she and Paul make love later? Partly because of her upbringing, partly because she loathed being rebuffed, but mainly because Paul liked to pretend that
she
was the one who granted
him
the favours in this line, Eleanor would not try to persuade him to fuck her unless he led the way. (‘Fuck’ was an all right word between them since Paul’s Elly was aristocratically direct and loathed mealy-mouthed
euphemisms
.) But Paul did not fuck her in the manner of the novels he professed to like. He would kiss her, would stroke her a little; but he would not admire her, or undress her, or say
endearing things about her body. And only now, as she gazed at her handsome husband sipping his brandy, did Eleanor see this too as part of the pattern. Torrid sex and
ice-princesses
were incompatible. Very-Elly-Eleanor (as Paul had shaped her) viewed sex as a mildly enjoyable physical process, which it would be vulgar to get too excited about. He behaved to her exactly as he had decided to see her. And because she still found him the most sexually attractive man she had ever met, she rarely failed to achieve orgasm. No surprises there for Paul; ice-princesses could be expected to be efficient users of their sexuality.

At eleven-thirty the Marquess and Marchioness of
Carnforth
retired to their bedroom (contemporary Chinoiserie involving bamboo bedside tables, swirling chintzes, and porcelain dragons supporting lamps). Eleanor had disliked the Edwardian dowdiness of the previous furnishings, but had started to detest the new ones more. Recently she had decided to have it ‘done’ again, which would kill six weeks or so. Paul yawned. He often seemed tired these days.

Even so Eleanor undressed a little more ostentatiously than usual. Hard to judge the impact. In bed, he lay back eyes closed, then, after two or three minutes, slowly moved towards her. Not getting her usual quick response, he
hesitated
.

‘No,’ she said suddenly, although she had meant to say something quite different. Paul drew back in mock despair. ‘Darling,’ she murmured, ‘Don’t you ever feel you’d like to …’ She broke off as she recognized the smile invariably employed to greet “very Elly” remarks.

He flopped on to his back, chuckling. ‘Trust you,’ he laughed. ‘Instead of saying, “Sorry, not tonight,” you go for the real killer.’ He put on a tired, refined voice, ‘Don’t you ever feel you’d like to read, get more sleep, do yoga, take a cold shower …?’

‘That
isn’t
what I meant,’ she cried; but instead of
conveying
tenderness, she heard only anger in her voice.

All right, if he thought he didn’t need to listen to
understand
her, she would have to show him in some other way.
She kissed him passionately with open lips, at the same time running an uncharacteristically urgent hand down his thigh.

‘Why not say it?’ he gasped, when his laughter had subsided.

‘
Say
what
?’

‘Elly, Elly … That kiss after what you’d just said …’ He was still smiling, still sure she had been piling irony on irony. So that now, if she were to say, ‘Make love to me, be tender, be sentimental,’ he would laugh even louder. But she tried once more, ‘Please, Paul,
listen
to me.’

For the first time his good humour looked strained. ‘Christ, Elly,’ he muttered, ‘the hook was terrific, I don’t need the upper-cut.’

A sort of shudder, half-way between a sob and a moan; but she breathed deeply and nothing else happened. And why should it? Neither Paul’s Eleanor, nor the real one, had ever had any truck with self-pity. Tomorrow her cook would cook, and her maid would clean; she herself would have plenty to do … browsing through fabrics and wallpapers; a snip of this end and a snip of that, and if that scissor-work began to pall she could look for ways to cut out Gemma; and after that? A small matter of a film … that first, perhaps.

*

Returning to his office from lunch, ten days after his visit to Alexandra Palace, Matthew was surprised by a call from reception.

‘We have Lady Carnforth down here, Mr Nairn.’

Although Matthew had no idea why Eleanor might want to see him, and was none too eager to see her, he said, ‘Send her up.’

Putting on his jacket, he swore under his breath. The utilitarian appearance of his office did not usually annoy him, but waiting for Eleanor he cursed the absurd dispensation that granted fitted carpets, armchairs, and bookcases to executive producers, and yet lumbered directors, who actually did the work, with rudimentary tat.

He rose as his visitor entered; as improbably perfect as a flesh and blood fashion plate.

‘I’m sorry to spring upon you unannounced,’ she said, sitting gingerly on a chair that would not have looked misplaced in a prison cell.

Matthew closed one of the files on his desk. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘That’s what I want to find out.’ She snapped open the gold clasp on her handbag and proffered a magazine article. After skimming through it, Matthew waited. She raised a graceful hand to the brim of her black trilby. ‘Do you realize how painful it’ll be for me if you go ahead?’

Though finding it ironic that she should have come to reproach him for instigating a project which Paul had dreamed-up, he managed to sound friendly as he said, ‘I really don’t intend to involve you.’

‘Anything that involves Paul involves me.’

Matthew smiled pleasantly. ‘I certainly don’t envisage making it a vehicle for Paul. Apart from Roy’s progress, it won’t be about personalities.’

‘Then what
is
it going to be about?’

‘Pop music,’ he replied, stung by her peremptory tone.

She looked at him with astonishment. ‘But it’s such
awful
trash.’

‘You think so?’

‘Don’t you? I mean the words are fatuous, the music’s bad. For idiots by idiots, if you ask me.’ She smiled. ‘Be honest … it’s nothing like your usual serious stuff.’

Too surprised by this cheerful onslaught to feel angry, Matthew told her that it was listened to by millions and therefore couldn’t be ‘negligible from a social point of view’. He frowned. ‘It’s as typical of average Britain as bingo and holiday camps.’

Eleanor laughed delightedly. ‘When did you last play bingo?’

‘I’m not very typical.’

Her black eyes narrowed. ‘Paul doesn’t give a damn about “social points of view”, so what’s
his
interest?’

Guessing that what he said would go back to Paul, Matthew decided not to give too damning an account of his
motives. ‘I imagine he’s hooked on the problems. A star having to seem original and be entirely typecast. A teasing problem for a detached mind.’

‘You mean some kind of game?’

Taken aback by her anger, Matthew did not answer.

She looked up sharply. ‘Would you ever have thought of making this programme if he hadn’t asked you to?’

‘Probably not. In my business one finds ideas where one can.’

‘And favours one’s friends?’

‘If his idea is as good as the next man’s, where’s the favour?’

Eleanor stared at the shafts of sunlight fanning-out through the slatted window blinds. ‘I suppose Paul stands to make pots of money out of Roy as a result of this film?’

‘I can’t see that mattering to Paul.’