‘A ladder,’ Eleanor sobbed, ‘and boards …’

  The drop was too deep to pull him up, and the danger of tearing his flesh too great.

  ‘Everyone must be down here,’ she shouted, watching the torches fan out along the brink of the hundred yard ditch. The boy was moaning and crying, his voice rising above the song:

  ‘Getting tough today and not tomorrow,

  Laughing away that pain and sorrow,

  Clever, clever, getting clever …’

  ‘Whose bright idea was this stuff?’ she heard the choked voice of Sandford, her chauffeur. Eleanor turned and ran.

  Still they were coming; most of them turning when they saw the torches, seeking another way. Eleanor blundered along the line of the beech hedge: fifteen feet high and made impenetrable by wire filling every gap. She could hear shouts coming from the direction of the Topiary Garden. Barriers designed to keep trouble out were now penning it in, causing rage and frustration. Where the corrugated-iron fencing began, she found the estate carpenter, and a maintenance man, working to open an exit with metal-cutters and a sledge-hammer. Thank God for initiative, she thought, herself beginning to rally after the succession of shocks. Warily she continued towards the Topiary Garden.

  Before she got there, she found Martin, the head gardener, on his hands and knees holding his side.

  ‘Little bastards … bastards,’ was all he could say. Then gradually it came out: how he’d seen them (upwards of forty) charging against the iron fence and failing to push it down, then turning back, kicking through flowerbeds, snapping off limbs of shrubs, and at last hurling themselves on the Renaissance gardens: the pride of every head gardener for three hundred years. As if dreaming, Eleanor saw the topiary shapes: the intricately clipped orb and cross above the chess king’s crown, the delicate tiers of the geometric obelisks. Blinded by tears, she darted forward. A hand caught her, and she fell.

  ‘No, no, my lady,’ she heard Martin’s slow sing-song voice, ‘you can’t do that. You’d best look to the ’ouse now.’

  She bent down next to him. ‘Will you be able to walk if you lean on me?’

  ‘Happen I’ll be able to run,’ he murmured, grasping her outstretched hand.

  14

  Mid-afternoon the following day; fine rain falling. Paul, with his hand in plaster pinned across his chest, was surveying, with the head gardener and a local detective inspector, trampled hedges and broken stumps of yew and box. Unable to bear it, Eleanor had already gone back to the house, leaving Martin, with his strapped ribs and ashen face, as a more than adequate stand-in. Well remembering how, with the help of woodcuts and engravings, Elly and the garden staff had painstakingly reconstructed authentic Jacobean knot-patterns and herb beds between the mature hedges, Paul could imagine no other place in the entire estate which he would rather have seen spared. Elsewhere a damaged shrub could be replaced without disastrous distortion; but here, in the Topiary Garden, mutilations would be endlessly preserved: the dwarfishness of young yews, next to ancestral specimens, emphasizing the general injury.

  Martin had already told the detective he could identify several of the vandals, two of whom worked in Frimpton garage; another as a plumber’s mate in Belstead. ‘Trespass and malicious damage,’ he told the policeman grimly, as he jotted down facts in his notebook. ‘And others could pick’un out too.’ Paul drew a deep breath, and announced that he did not intend to bring proceedings. The investigation into the ticket forgeries was another matter.

  Unable to remain silent in the face of Martin’s choking indignation, Paul led him aside and did his best to explain. For a start the worst injuries of the night had occurred in the gardens, and it would be pointed out by defence council that the kind of barriers employed would have been better suited to a concentration camp than a garden. Inevitably Lady Carnforth’s insistence on barbed wire would arouse comment, as would the fact that all the trespassers had been prevented from buying tickets at the gates. It would also be argued that the fans had only run amok after repeatedly attempting to leave the gardens. Sentences would not be heavy, and would only cause local bitterness. ‘You invited ’un here, Lord Carnforth,’ muttered the gardener. Instead of suggesting that this was cause for clemency, rather than the slaughter of scapegoats, Paul nodded meekly. For Martin to give notice would be to ice with arsenic an already lethal cake.

  Abandoning any thought of conciliatory conversation with Eleanor, at least until the park had been cleared, Paul reflected on how much worse things could have been. Not one fractured skull; cuts, lacerations, bruises certainly; a handful of drug overdoses; but only three cases of broken bones (his own and Martin’s cracked ones included). No break-in at the house; not even a broken window, thanks largely to his floodlights. He had already visited the three fans detained in hospital, and had promised that Rory himself would be dropping in with signed copies of his LP. Any objective account of the day would surely prove that the earlier troubles had in the end only served to underline Rory Craig’s coming of age as a performer; and unless Matthew chose to edit out the crowd’s rapture, this would have to be his message too.

  Yet for all this, Paul was plagued by feelings of emptiness; depression worse than any ordinary sense of ‘morning after’ bathos. Even fears that the restoration of anything resembling trust between himself and Eleanor, would prove beyond him, could not explain sensations so oppressive.

  Gemma, Matthew, Bridget … all living their own stories, away from him. But that was months old now. So, last night: what he’d thought himself saving for the future, had instead ended. Not his marriage, which he sensed would matter more to him, but everything that had started with Gemma’s suggestions before his wedding, and had gone on ever since, from the ‘happenings’, to first recordings, filming, concert triumphs, right up to the night before.

  The stark simplicity of it defied denial. The very event he had been certain would draw Roy closer, had set the seal on his independence. It would have come eventually – all kingmakers faced it in the end – but Paul had been sure of a stay of execution at least until Roy’s American tour (already contemplated for the following summer). And before that, so much happening: the film’s transmission, new records, a possible European tour, more British concerts. But suddenly, another shaft of self-knowledge: none of it would have mattered to him. Even before the concert in the park, he had drunk the bright cocktail to the bottom of the glass. Roy’s image Paul’s creation; his best-known song containing a high percentage of Paul’s words … now nothing else could be done to influence the shape of Matthew’s film.

  In time there would be new projects – feature films perhaps; a musical; new spheres in which to be Maecenas to other men’s talents – but for the moment the future felt too distant to touch him. Wandering in the overcast park, among dead beer cans, discarded hot-dogs, and miscellaneous garbage, the clangour of the stage coming down scarcely reached him. As if, when he had turned his head, the world had drawn back a little. A foreground still crowded, but beyond it, emptier, less dramatic country.

  The solution: perhaps for a year or so to give up certain things, and concentrate only on what lay close to hand: on Elly, Delvaux, and the children he knew she wanted.

  *

  Many times during that autumn, Paul told himself it would take time to win her back. Though there was no acting discernible in her indifference, he did his best to persuade himself she was playing a part; did his utmost through unobtrusive remorse to inch his way into her heart. And yet it was sometimes beyond him to endure her impersonal voice, and looks that drifted past him or fell short, without betraying anger and resentment. When talking to her, he often felt he had summoned her from a faraway place, where she had urgent business requiring a speedy return.

  Less closely involved, he might have found his situation clinically intriguing; but, caring for her more than at any time since their marriage, there was too much humiliation in it for that. For instance (in line with his policy of removing, where possible, grounds for conflict), he had decamped into a dressing-room, giving Eleanor no pretext to object to his presence in her bed. Weeks later, she had still not spoken to him about his voluntary exile. Communication on mundane matters continued almost normally; he would be told she meant to go riding in the afternoon; there was a weekend shoot at this or that neighbour’s; she planned to spend next Tuesday and Wednesday in town; but though he was not positively excluded, these were clearly her plans, mentioned as a matter of courtesy. Had he been able to believe that unhappiness lay behind this marble facade, Paul would have been more hopeful; but, though self-absorbed, she did not seem miserable. Day by day he came closer to concluding that she had placed him in the wrong, so irretrievably, that forgiveness was not just unlikely but impossible.

  One evening during a game of backgammon, he asked in an emotional voice, whether she would like him to go away for a while. After her next throw (a good one, enabling her to establish two new points), she smiled briefly. ‘If you want to.’ Her eyes slid away from him, and seemed to light upon the legs of a marquetry table. ‘I seem to have lost the knack for having … an attitude towards you.’ A small furrow appeared between her brows. ‘I suppose I thought I’d married someone I never did.’

  ‘People change … I’ve changed, Elly.’

  She rattled the dice absently. ‘Perhaps I just don’t care for my Paul: maybe I’d have been happier with Roy’s or Gemma’s.’

  ‘There’s only one now … yours.’

  She put down the box with a thump. ‘I trust what people do.’ The furrow reappeared. ‘Why now, Paul … why not months ago when I needed you?’ She jumped up, suddenly frenzied. ‘You knew my great weakness … never admitting how much you hurt me; you worked on it so brilliantly that even I thought I was amazingly brave not to weep and rage. But it wasn’t brave, it was cowardly. I played your bloody games, because your flattery fooled me … made me mistake fear for self-respect. So easy for you to nudge me into the usual snobby trap: infra-dig to accuse or plead … Bite on the bullet, head up, never use love as a weapon.’

  ‘Will you keep me in the wrong forever?’

  ‘I was talking about me, Paul … the price for denying feelings. One day you look for them and they’ve crept away.’

  ‘If one keeps looking?’ he whispered.

  She took a log from the basket and dropped it in the hottest part of the fire. Green and blue tongues of flame sizzled up around it.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not that easy. All my decisions nothing but reactions to you … Got to change that, Paul. Perhaps I’m the one who should go away.’ She frowned. ‘I’ve written for details of various courses in town … not self-discovery; though who knows?’ A faint smile; reminder of a girl already gone. He found himself looking beyond her at Rubens’s portrait of Anne of Hungary. Weak mouth, restless trivial eyes. Eleanor followed his gaze. ‘I read about her the other week. Remarkable woman: musical, keen on medicine, philosophy.’

  Paul picked up the dice box. ‘Finish our game?’

  *

  Two weeks after Eleanor’s departure for London, Paul was visited by her father. Since Lord Herrick had been appointed a Minister of State for Defence, earlier in the year, Paul appreciated the compliment paid to his matrimonial difficulties. It still crossed his mind that, though loving his daughter dearly, the earl might have foreseen the political disadvantages of a ‘society’ divorce starring Eleanor. But this thought did nothing to make Paul resent his visit. The man was taking so little pleasure in being proved right about the misguidedness of his daughter’s choice of husband, that Paul felt almost friendly. He also admired the sheer doggedness of his father-in-law’s efforts to make out that, minor differences apart, they shared the same values. Drinking with him before luncheon, Paul did his best to put him right on certain misapprehensions. No, he was no longer seeing Gemma, and hadn’t been for many months; nor was he considering more concerts at Delvaux; nor any further involvement with pop singers. Lord Herrick stroked his moustache anxiously.

  ‘Eleanor knows this?’ His surprise was real enough.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  The earl sighed heavily, as if realizing he would have to say things he had hoped to avoid. He put down his glass and adjusted a good-humoured smile. ‘Ever felt you’d like to try the realities as well as the frivolities of life, Paul?’

  ‘You think Elly’d forgive me if I took a job?’

  The Cedar Drawing room was immense; Lord Herrick moved closer to Paul, perching himself on a frail looking petit-point chair. ‘I believe I could encourage her to, uh, move in that direction, if you did.’ Paul remained silent. He wondered if Eleanor had sent him as her emissary to present these terms. His father-in-law’s brow was deeply corrugated. ‘God knows you don’t have to work. Nor did I. Couldn’t stand swots at school.’ A nostalgic smile fading. ‘That’s youth though. I soon learnt that work’s a fine distraction … best of all when it’s not a bread-and-butter necessity.’ A tug at his moustache. ‘Without solid meat, the finest sauces in the world soon sicken.’

  Paul studied the earl’s well-creased trousers. ‘Did Elly ask you to …?’

  ‘Lord no … whatever you do, not a word about my visit.’ A man-to-man smile, lips humorously compressed. ‘She’s bound to have told you I’m no stained-glass saint. No preaching, you understand? But when I kick over the traces, I enjoy myself because it’s not an everyday event. No freedom without some self-restraint, eh?’

  ‘I’ll sell my shares in Exodus when Roy’s toured the States; I’ll include Eleanor in all my future business decisions; but I can’t promise to become “something in the City”.’

  ‘A lot of influence there, even these days,’ encouraged Lord Herrick, ‘and once you’re settled, the hours needn’t be inflexible. Take my own case.’ He looked away unhappily when he saw Paul’s unchanged expression. Then out of the blue, he laughed.

  After that, a dozen things Paul would never have expected: his father-in-law admitting he often dreamed of starting again, still young, with everything he’d had to depend on gone. ‘Why I envied you, dear boy, when your father cut you out.’ Why too, Paul soon learned, he had opposed the marriage. ‘Knew you’d always kick against that lost escape.’ And more admissions: young Herrick had often asked himself, why drudge for money, having more than enough?

  So why the change? As youthful hopes fade, the gap must be filled somehow. ‘Nine to Five’ could be a great consoler. ‘And anyway, how many people go on knowing exactly what they want? There’s no new angle on life that hasn’t been tried.’ Sampling some of Paul’s finest wines during luncheon, ending with Chateau d’Yquem 1935, Lord Herrick unbent further. Every generation lost the struggle against conformity, but thank God for every new one that tried.

  After dessert: another of Delvaux’s astonishing Sauternes, and Lord Herrick offering an older man’s advice. Wives would never understand men’s natural need of variety. So how resolve it? Surely not with women known to both? (The reference to Gemma plain.) Not with call-girls or tarts; least of all amateurs trawling for easy pickings. No, he went on, before Paul could insist that Eleanor was all he wanted, the answer was ‘a stable arrangement’. A married woman for preference; husband with other fish to fry and a job involving travel. A measure of financial help could tie things up and keep everyone happy.

  ‘But what if they ask for more?’ queried Paul; astonished to learn as much about his father-in-law’s unofficial life; intrigued to find out more.

  ‘You mean blackmail?’ Lord Herrick shrugged. ‘There’s always a risk of that … use your judgement to reduce it. Tell ’em you’d never pay.’

  Later, it occurred to Paul that, were he the complaisant husband, he might occasionally weigh the pros and cons of going for one big pay-day, if the source of his second income suddenly became a minister of the crown. But his father-in-law was so obviously of the ‘publish and be damned’ variety, that regular, if small, instalments would very likely win the day.

  Before Lord Herrick left, he returned to earlier themes. In an imperfect world, ideal lives didn’t happen. Work was no great disaster. Eleanor needed reassurance. ‘Don’t pull up the drawbridge. Write, send presents, keep at her.’ Paul promised he would. He was almost sorry when his father-in-law had to go.

  ‘And remember,’ he said, as his chauffeur opened the car door, ‘she’s young, which means demanding.’ He held out a hand. ‘Lay off the concerts; lay off the other, for a while; and give her time.’ Paul nodded. ‘She’ll change, dear boy. We all do.’

  As the big black car swung away into the carriage sweep, Paul felt happy to let him go, contented with a job well done. Why spoil his day by pointing out that she had changed already and that the problem was whether she would ever change back again?

  15

  In late November, two months after Eleanor’s move to Wilton Crescent, Paul made a last ditch attempt to talk her into watching the film with him. Close at hand, he hoped to be able to do something to unscramble some of the distortions. She refused.

  Determined not to be alone on transmission night, Paul, with a few days still to go, dropped in on Roy at his Hampstead chapel (‘the wee Kirk o’ the Heath’, as Paul sometimes called it).

  He found the singer making phone calls, and asked what he was planning. ‘Dunno yet,’ muttered Roy. Though his latest single, Gravy Train Express, was climbing fast, and even Paul was staggered by reports of the sums he was making, Roy looked worn-out and dissatisfied. Paul, who was still getting press cuttings from Exodus, could imagine Roy’s possibilities for the evening.

  He could go out with Debbie Donato, the New York model (‘We are a little bit in love.’ Daily Mail), or with Princess Lila of Rhanpur (‘She thinks it’s a giggle and so do I.’ Daily Mirror), or with Rachel Linley, the actress (‘A little high-class scalp-collecting does wonders for a guy’s ego.’ Sunday People). He might drive down to Chelsea and eat at Alvaro’s, or try the new French place in Glebe Street – no point in booking, they’d toss people out of their seats to have him seen there. But tonight was a bummer. Roy settled for Princess Lila, but took so long discovering she was in Paris that, by then, Rachel had gone out with Omar or Warren, or whoever she was/would be starring with in her last/present (next?) movie. So what about Debbie? Definitely no. She had just been in a heavy porno flick – squeezing pips out of grapes without any help from her hands or mouth. Of course he could go solo to the Speakeasy or Scotch and still get some fucking (several chicks if he wanted), and then maybe end up in a stranger’s house, snorting coke. Already the pace was getting to grips with his looks: Dorian Grey’s portrait entering phase two.