‘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.’

  Bridget had become breathless with relief. If he’d fallen out with Matthew already she wouldn’t have to say anything. Paul asked Roy whether Matthew had warned him about filming his parents.

  ‘What do you sodding think?’

  Paul glanced at Bridget and frowned. ‘Wonder what he’s up to?’

  Roy jabbed at him with his skewer. ‘I bet you do … He’s fucking me up. And if you give me any shit about not knowing … when you sure as hell told him to …’

  ‘Did Matty say Paul had told him to mess you around?’ Bridget’s voice came out thin and scratchy.

  ‘What if he did, or didn’t?’ snapped Roy.

  ‘Matthew couldn’t have,’ she cried. ‘His one aim is to make truthful films.’

  ‘So he gives Paul a chance to sucker twenty million people?’ Roy shook his head slowly. ‘I may not have your degrees, darlin’, but if I see you and Matty sittin’ in Paul’s pocket fumbling his wallet, I don’t make out I saw different.’

  ‘That’s a bloody lie,’ she whispered. Her cheeks were burning; her chest rigid. ‘If Matthew makes a film saying pop’s a cheap commercial swindle, he’ll do it because that’s what he thinks, and not because …’ She stopped, hardly remembering what she’d said, but knowing she’d gone far beyond anything she’d intended.

  Roy’s face looked grey. ‘He thinks that?’

  ‘I … didn’t …’ she stuttered. ‘Didn’t …’

  Before Roy could speak Paul leaned forward, and said calmly, ‘Better listen carefully, Roy. If you say a sodding word about what you’ve just bullied out of her, you’ll be looking for a new management.’

  Roy slumped back in his chair and stared at the tablecloth. ‘Looks like he fooled me good enough to …’

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Paul.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Roy blustered. ‘Next time that camera rolls I’ll put it right.’

  ‘Put what right?’ Real ice in Paul’s voice.

  After giving him a long expressionless stare, Paul changed the subject. Roy left before their coffee arrived. When he had gone, Paul apologised to Bridget. Hanging her head, she said, ‘A really good wife I am. Oh God, Paul, did Matty really tell him lies about you?’

  Paul said gently, ‘Wouldn’t you say Roy ought to be grateful to me? There’s got to be some explanation.’

  Afraid she was going to cry, Bridget got up, muttering about a class. Paul dropped some bank notes on the table and followed.

  She was moving like a sleep-walker among the passers-by. As he came up, she turned to him hopelessly. ‘Why does he hate you so? Why, Paul?’ A woman with a heavy basket brushed against her, pushing her towards him. As her arms went round his shoulders, he looked down at her upturned face. ‘God knows,’ he murmured. Perhaps it was their difference in height (though he didn’t think so); but steadying herself, she seemed to pull down on him, as if suggesting a lowering of his head. Seconds after he had kissed her parted lips, Paul noticed Roy on the other side of the road, sitting beside Tony in the front of the Bentley. Determined to prevent Bridget seeing him too, Paul took her arm and walked on with her. Deciding not to mention their kiss, unless she did, he asked neutrally, ‘What did you decide about the picture?’

  ‘Please take it back,’ she begged, as if her life suddenly depended on it.

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  He raised his free hand and let it drop. ‘All right.’

  He watched her go, then rapidly retraced his steps. Roy got out of the car before Paul reached it.

  ‘Came back to say sorry, and all that … Didn’t mean ter …’

  Paul walked past him and opened one of the rear doors.

  ‘I’d like to go to Wilton Crescent, Tony.’

  Tony cast an enquiring eye in Roy’s direction. Paul said kindly. ‘Come on, Roy.’

  ‘At the double,’ he sighed, flopping into the front seat.

  12

  April; May; June. Early July now.

  Waiting with his film crew opposite a fish and chip shop in a drab side-street (so typical that, unless knowing his schedule, Matthew might have supposed himself in any large industrial town in the country), the reality of Roy’s celebrity was no longer in doubt. Hoarse and shrill chants of ‘Rory Craig’, endlessly repeated, echoed around the Hippodrome. Given Rory’s record sales, Matthew was not really surprised by what he was hearing, yet because everything to date had taken place at several sanitized removes from Roy himself, he had nonetheless been caught off-balance by the frenzy of these opening days of the singer’s first nationwide tour.

  So as not to attract attention, Matthew and his crew were awaiting Roy’s arrival in a hired van, innocent of all TV insignia. It was another indication of Roy’s (and Paul’s) success, that they were parked neither by the stage-door nor the main entrance of the massive Edwardian variety theatre, but outside a small service-door, normally used by catering staff on bingo nights. While fitfully participating in a conversation that had moved on from mortgages to motor racing, Matthew pondered anxiously.

  In the past week he had lost all sense of what the film was meant to be saying. Matthew’s desire to present Paul as an old-style romantic trying to foist a dying personality cult on to a modern consumer art form, had quickly bitten the dust. On reflection it had become wonderfully clear that poets, artists, and other doyens of elitist culture were crass amateurs of this cult in comparison with the smallest gods of democratic entertainment.

  A nudge from the cameraman drew his attention to a new note of excitement rising above the steady hubbub reaching them from the far side of the Hippodrome.

  Their gear prepared, the crew set-up rapidly while the high-pitched keening of a siren grew louder, accompanied by cries absurdly mimicking its rising and falling notes.

  ‘Board in,’ shrieked Matthew, as a policeman on a motorbike materialized between the Lord Palmerston and the undertaker’s a hundred yards down the street. An eye-blink later the bonnet of a black Austin Princess swung into view, the rest of the car obscured by another police-outrider and twenty or thirty running girls. ‘I want you wide on this,’ Matthew whispered to the cameraman – though with the din bouncing off the shop-fronts there was no danger of his voice reaching the mike.

  Another motorbike; another black car, containing the backing-group; a police car; and finally Paul, in what must be a hired white Jaguar. All this Matthew perceived in fragments, because, hurtling past him now, like magnetized particles of every shape and colour, were girls and more girls. Arms outstretched, feet drumming, mouths opened to their widest extent, they were pouring into the street not only from the direction of the cars, but from the front of the building too, as though sucked irresistibly into the vortex of a whirlpool. Bemused, Matthew saw the umbilical sync-lead, connecting cameraman and sound-recordist, part, while both surged towards the service-door, impelled by forces greater than duty to snatch, from the tide-race, blurred images of Roy’s floundering five yard dash to safety.

  *

  Matthew was filming in the large dressing room which Roy, big star or not, was obliged to share with his group. Out front a support band was playing for the half-hour till ‘Rory Craig’ was due on stage. Already Matthew sensed a significant change in Roy since he had interviewed him. Every trace of resentment had gone; and, though nervous, he exuded pure confidence. And indeed, when thousands worshipped an individual as a divine being, applauding his every utterance as revelation, making public worship of his voice and body, it would be strange were he to go on seeing himself as the slave of circumstance rather than its master.

  Though four or five years younger than all other members of his group, who had played sessions for some of the biggest names in the business, Roy grinned broadly when asked how he got on with them.

  ‘They’re learning,’ he grunted, lolling in front of the mirror, while a girl in a pink leotard outlined his eyes. ‘Typical studio men … plenty of technique but no balls.’ He stroked the girl’s bottom. ‘It’s not like we’d played together three years in a tin-hut before making it.’

  ‘He’s got us taped,’ admitted a man with a droopy moustache and hair tied back in a pigtail. ‘Four jerks thrown together ’cos we can play.’

  On the shelf under the mirror was a tin of Yardley’s shampoo, ‘for men’, to which some wit had added ‘and Rory’. A member of the group, who Matthew knew as ‘the drummer’, was leafing through a pile of fan letters just delivered to the theatre.

  ‘“Dearest Rory,”’ he read breathlessly, ‘“I had a fantastic dream last night. Your car was passing my house when you had a puncture, so you had to come in and phone the garage. We got talking and you weren’t at all the draggy big-shot star but …”’ He broke off and whistled. ‘You won’t believe this. “Before you went, you asked to use the lav and I remember telling my mum she was never to clean it out again.” You ought to piss in bottles, old son; we could sell ’em at five quid a slash.’

  ‘What about spunk? That’d be big money,’ suggested the base guitarist, pulling on tight satin trousers.

  ‘Do you mind,’ said the girl in the leotard, as she back-combed Roy’s hair. ‘You won’t get that on the telly.’

  ‘This is the permissive society,’ Roy told her, fingering his gold-studded leather collar. ‘Strictly for the S-M birds,’ he said to camera. ‘Sado-masochistic, for those who can read or write.’ He stared into the mirror and frowned. ‘I gotta level with you about these guys. Their sound’s so damned solid I can lean on it … which means I can really let go … get intuitive, add a few bars, change this or that, and know they’ll be right behind me, not sticking to the arrangement. Wait tillya hear Len’s slide-work and violin bow on acoustic guitar … amazing.’

  Len grinned as he flipped a pill on to his tongue. He was fair and balding with a humorous face. ‘That’s nice, Roy.’ He turned to the drummer. ‘How long till he’s sick of live gigging? Coupla months?’

  Paul appeared in the doorway and leaned against the frame. ‘Just in case anyone’s wondering, that was a salt tablet Len took. He sweats a lot.’ The drummer returned to Len’s remarks.

  ‘The worst bit is the same old dopey questions … and every time you’ve got to answer like you’ve never heard the sods before. The journalists are as dumb as the punters; wouldn’t know a harmonic from a gin and tonic if you stuck it up their ass.’

  ‘Thasright,’ agreed Len, donning a floppy gold cap which hid his baldness. ‘You gotta mess around and create some day.’ He sat down next to Roy. ‘Thaswhy so many serious groups are building their own studios. Not just to get away from the musak in the lobbies, and the whole hamburger and heroin hassle of touring.’

  Paul left the doorway and, keeping out of shot, got to where he could wink at Roy. The make-up girl stepped back to admire her work, and Roy laughed at Len, ‘Oh yeah, fame’s a hard trip … I mean that’s the smart thing to say if you’re coining it and screwing everything that moves. Keep still, darling,’ he warned the girl, who stuck out her tongue. ‘Well that’s crap, man,’ he shouted. ‘I can feel the atmosphere even in here. I can’t see ’em but I can feel. And when that curtain rises and I see those arms flailing like a forest of fucking windmills, I’ll get so tight inside, so damned electric, I could blow apart … like being God in a hurricane.’

  Len shrugged. ‘He got bored when he’d made the world.’

  Paul leaned on the back of Roy’s chair and stared at Len. ‘I guess it’s easier moaning about pulling in five hundred a week than quitting to make a masterpiece.’

  Roy laughed, ‘“Got no freedom” has to be the softest cop-out there is, specially if you’ve got money in the bank.’

  Len smiled. ‘Nice bit of HMV, Roy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His Master’s Voice, actually mate.’ He sucked in his cheeks. ‘That collar of yours reminds me of something.’ Len made a show of thinking. ‘The sort of choker millionaires stick on their poodles.’

  Roy flicked off Len’s cap. ‘You oughta get a wig, Len. We’re not playing the old folks’ homes yet. Just ’cos Paul’s a promoter, doesn’t mean he’s gotta be wrong.’ He got up. ‘And while I’m on the subject, I’d like to say something to you lot pretending not to be here.’ He stabbed a finger in the direction of Matthew and his crew. ‘That time I wittered about being suckered by Paul, I was talking bullshit. Must’ve been the biggest fink in dreamland not to see how he’s got this game sassed.’ He moved closer to the camera ‘And that goes in the film, because if it doesn’t it’ll be lies. You got a roomful of people heard me say it. Okay, you can cut now.’ Matthew did not say anything, so the cameraman kept running. Roy stuck his face right up to the lens and whispered huskily, ‘Hie there, teenyboppers, you wanna get real close to me? Mmmmm … trouble is, I got a problem with … bad breath. Really knocks you out. Wow!’ He turned away and said, ‘Everybody out … got to get myself together now.’

  As Matthew was leaving, he saw Paul and Roy exchange confiding glances.

  *

  There had been bedlam in the auditorium ever since the last band left the stage and the roadies began setting up the amps and mikes for Roy’s group. Gemma had just come down from the bar in the circle lobby where she had been drinking with a couple of journalists.

  At the back of the packed house she had a peculiar sense of déjà vu – stewards pouncing on boys standing on their seats, girls squirming in foetal positions, nurses waiting. The excitement was genuine and growing, but she couldn’t help feeling something had changed in the past few years; as if, without knowing it, these kids were living-up to notions of what was expected now. They knew the ritual, which not long ago was being invented. In a business fuelled by change, it was as hard to follow upheavals as to make them.