Though reluctant to mention the film at an emotional moment, Paul feared that not to do so straight away would be to risk having her attack it later, in circumstances of still greater tension. ‘You’re asking for a gesture of good faith,’ he murmured. ‘All right … I’ll try to talk Matthew into cutting me out.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she exploded, ‘given your importance in it, how could he? The only answer’s to stop the whole thing.’

  ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘I’d like to finish.’ She moved closer; over-wrought, but appealing too. ‘You know how much I dread your telling millions of people what you did, and why. You’ll come out looking a cheat, however clever you are …’ A trembling whisper, ‘Please stop it … for both of us. If it’s going to mean paying the company a lot, just pay it.’

  Paul did his best to explain that no television company could allow it to be known that they’d abandoned a project after accepting payments. Think of the implications; the possible misunderstandings. They owned the material already shot and were entitled to use it.

  ‘But Matthew could say you’d refused to co-operate, and without you the thing wouldn’t be worth going on with.’ She gazed at him eagerly. ‘Well couldn’t he? In his shoes that’s what I’d do.’

  Paul sighed heavily. ‘You want me to say, “Cut me out”, and, “Whether you do or don’t, I’ll have nothing else to do with it”?’

  She nodded urgently, ‘It would mean the world to me.’

  ‘Then I’ll try.’

  She embraced and held him for a time. ‘Would you mind dreadfully, darling, if I was with you when you talked to Matthew?’

  Assuming he would have time to talk to Matthew on the telephone before this threesome, Paul saw no danger in agreeing. This earned him more hugs; even a kiss. Afterwards Eleanor became solemn.

  ‘This is what I’d like, dearest,’ she murmured, ‘Matthew’s in America till next Thursday.’ She smiled winningly. ‘Let’s meet him at the airport.’

  Paul did his best to hide his shock with a chuckle. ‘Afraid I might phone him first?’

  Eleanor shook her head. ‘His secretary doesn’t know his number … he’s moving about too much.’

  ‘You seem to have done your homework,’ he replied flatly. ‘How come they could give you details of his return flight?’

  ‘They booked it for him before he went.’

  Paul sank down on the ottoman to the left of the window. ‘Fairly embarrassing if Bridget’s going to meet him too.’

  Eleanor looked bewildered. ‘I don’t see why.’

  When she sat down next to him, and leant her head against his shoulder, Paul did not move away. The knowledge that he had been out-manoeuvred did not upset him for long. Matthew wouldn’t agree and that would be that.

  A little later, when Eleanor kissed him on the lips, Paul responded warmly. She had made things hard for him, but had been intelligent and dignified; as he should have known she would be. A great shame she mistrusted the film so much; but there too it was impossible to blame her. Probably the only chance of converting her lay in completing it. To stick to his guns would therefore be in her interest too in the long run.

  She gazed at him tenderly. ‘If you only knew how relieved I am we came through without a ghastly scene.’

  ‘I do know,’ he murmured, meaning it. ‘It’s what I feel.’

  *

  Matthew’s plane was already half-an-hour overdue; but so far Bridget had not appeared (a fact which did not surprise Paul, since he had telephoned to ask her to give himself and Eleanor a wide berth till Matthew arrived). Sitting beside his wife on a plastic sofa, outside the customs area, Paul watched several processions of suitcases, jerking along on conveyor belts, pursued by their owners.

  Shortly after the announcement that Matthew’s plane had touched down, Eleanor turned to him matter-of-factly. ‘Darling, why didn’t you tell me about “The Mill at Haastrecht”?’ He looked back with apparent mystification; though knowing at once she meant the Hobbema, and cursing himself for reassuring Bridget to the extent he had done. Eleanor said patiently, ‘Lot 36 in Sotheby’s next auction of Old Masters … no seller named.’

  Wanting to race across the customs hall and scream at Bridget for not waiting till the film had been made, Paul shrugged. ‘So I’m selling it.’ He smiled sheepishly. ‘You never told me you get their catalogues.’

  ‘Not me. Uncle Bruno does.’ She paused while two flight arrivals were announced. ‘“Wasn’t it one of ours?” Bruno asked. So I looked it up … same name and description.’

  ‘Then what did you do?’

  ‘Rang Sotheby’s of course. Told them who I was … said it was a very strange thing … perhaps there’d been some mistake.’ A tight smile. ‘Anyway there was a lot of muttering at the other end, and I was passed from person to person … and the final upshot was a man telling me everything was in order; no mistake, and the vendor had requested anonymity, which they meant to respect. End of conversation.’

  A most unpleasant presentiment led Paul to ask, ‘Why leave mentioning it till now?’

  Very simple, she’d said. She’d only discovered three days after their reconciliation, and hadn’t wanted to leap straight in without finding out what she could first. Much kissing and greeting was going on around them as passengers off a flight from Vienna cleared customs and were reunited with friends and relatives. Eleanor added bleakly, ‘I don’t mind admitting I was angry enough to ring Wentworth and ask if I could stop the sale.’

  Paul gaped. ‘You took legal advice without a word to me?’

  ‘You weren’t at Delvaux, and I couldn’t get you in town.’ She drummed her fingers on her bag. ‘Anyway, a fat lot of good it did me. He bleated on about no community of property in marriage, but if I’d been petitioning for a divorce I could … I can’t remember the phrase …’ She broke off, her face creasing. ‘Oh really, Paul, it’s intolerable.’

  ‘I should have told you,’ he murmured, ‘but I wanted the money to buy the rights in Roy’s songs, and I knew what you’d …’

  ‘But why a picture?’ she cried. ‘Why not shares?’

  ‘Pictures don’t yield anything.’

  A man with a luggage trolley knocked against Paul’s leg, making him swear.

  ‘Then tell me why that picture?’ she demanded.

  ‘I hardly ever look at it,’ he replied, rubbing his bruised shin.

  ‘Which goes for dozens of others.’

  ‘Yes, but it was obviously one of the better ones hidden away so to speak.’

  ‘But only one of them,’ she insisted fiercely. ‘You know what Bruno said to me? That he’d always thought it a crime to bury it in a bedroom.’

  ‘People stay in there,’ Paul pointed out. ‘Bruno himself for one.’

  ‘That room’s never used unless we’ve got quite large numbers staying.’

  Wondering what he could say to calm her, Paul caught sight of Matthew at the far end of the vast hall, peering anxiously at the conveyor-belts, in search of his case. The next second Paul was aware of Bridget coming towards him.

  Eleanor felt overwhelmed. She had expected guilt over the picture to bind Paul more closely to her at this important moment. Instead the timing of her revelation seemed to have done the reverse. Her fists were tightly clenched, when she heard Bridget’s precise little voice, ‘What on earth are you two doing here?’ Then Paul, cheerful and unembarrassed, ‘Only what you’re doing … meeting Matty.’ Surprise from Bridget; good-natured explanation from Paul. He’d been having a hard think about the film, and the more he’d gone into it, the more certain he’d become that the line he was taking would damage Roy’s career. Amazement on Bridget’s side: Matthew had been talking about the project so enthusiastically before he went away, and considering all the doubts he’d had to begin with. She did not finish because, after speeding through customs, Matthew was approaching.

  ‘Hell’s bells,’ he gasped, ‘everyone except the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.’

  With her heart thumping hard, Eleanor waited for Paul to begin his delicate task. But first he asked Matthew questions about his trip; what had he achieved, and so forth. In the end it was Bridget who broke the news about Paul’s change of heart.

  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.’