But was he pleased to see him? Paul couldn’t tell. The predictable path he was tripping down was disappointing, but not cruelly so. Roy was on his own now, and Paul had no desire to reclaim him. His worst problem seemed to be boredom, when he wasn’t working. And when he was, it usually took an amphetamine breakfast to get him ready for the studio. Valium at lunch to come down a few notches; one of the psychedelics around supper to ‘get out’; then bedtime and Tony handing out a nice old-fashioned barbiturate with his hot chocolate. Well – not always that bad; but too often to be dismissed as every now and then.

  ‘A big problem,’ Roy admitted, after five minutes of random chat, ‘is to know who’s a real mate, and who’s sucking me off.’

  Sad really, thought Paul; enough mistresses to last a lifetime, but no friends. He judged the moment had come to ask him to watch Matthew’s film with him. Roy wasn’t enthusiastic; he’d more or less decided not to look. ‘Got enough problems …’ He paced about restlessly. ‘You oughter watch with Eleanor.’ Paul told him why this was not a possibility. For the first time that evening, Roy reacted more like his old self; alert and sympathetic. ‘Tell me where, man.’ Since Eleanor was occupying Wilton Crescent, Paul suggested Roy’s place.

  *

  And so the following Tuesday found them sitting on the same sofa in front of Roy’s colour set, drinks close to hand. A minute into it, they hadn’t got much beyond the titles, but already Paul’s head was aching with the tension, and Roy, who’d taken no tranquilizers all day (his story), said he was feeling queasy.

  If Paul feared each one of that terrible trio of stereotypes: fashion-mad marquess, ruthless entrepreneur or pitiable also-ran; Roy had his own horrors. Would he be shown as witless puppet, or king of the cynical sell-out?

  As Paul soon perceived, he had never come near to guessing the tone Matthew would actually adopt. Expecting criticism, he was amazed by fulsome praise for his management of Roy’s career. Then came hints of Matthew’s method: Swiftean approval, deadlier than abuse. By taking Paul’s most tongue-in-cheek remarks at face value and applauding them as though seriously intended, Matthew had turned them into literal statements of intent. When his efforts to guide Roy in the ways of wine and modern art came on the screen, Paul was stunned. His ironic jabs at the sub-moronic ‘boy-next-door’ or identikit ‘rebel’ images, beloved by PRs, had been transformed by a sunnily enthusiastic commentary into straightforward image-building, thus turning his relations with Roy into a grim parody of the toff and his socially ambitious pupil. Facts had been kept; aims reversed.

  When Roy started shouting at the screen, and then attacked Paul for never listening to his warnings about Matthew, Paul let him rave. Guessing Matthew wouldn’t be content simply to prove tawdry aims in an industry based on them, Paul wasn’t surprised to see elegant wide-shots of Delvaux (its owner wandering through, with Mozart on sound), intercut with footage of sad streets in towns where Roy had performed. And here the irony really started to work. Shots of crowds waiting; excitement; innocence; and under these shots, the jocularly cynical comments which Roy and Paul had made in a totally different context. Other nasty embellishments: the pride in Roy shown by his mother. ‘He always made people happy …’ This followed by fighting at the Delvaux concert.

  ‘I’ll kill him … kill him,’ Roy groaned.

  ‘Bit late for that.’

  Roy switched off the set; Paul turned it on again. Already he could see the film was heading for the higher peaks of snide superiority. Commercial aims neatly sliced and shredded, the scene ideally set to praise him for achieving precisely the brand of trivial success he had never cared a fig for.

  As Roy saw the first shots of himself singing at Delvaux, and realized Matthew’s only mike had been fifty or sixty yards back in the crowd, he pulled the flex out of the socket and ripped the plug off.

  ‘Get a bleedin’ screwdriver, if you wanna see how it ends,’ he told Paul, tossing the plug at him.

  ‘The daft thing is,’ murmured Paul, ‘he could have laughed at me for missing the mid-Sixties bonanza, or for shooting sophistication at kids who’d never latch on …’

  ‘Aw c’mon, man, he was jealous of you from way back.’ Roy stared at him disbelievingly. ‘Like it’s so fucking true it isn’t funny … the way clever people can be so goddam stupid …’ He flopped down next to Paul and banged his head against the back of the sofa, as he muttered, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck …’

  Paul wandered how many minutes more or less than Roy, Eleanor had lasted; even a glance at the programme would have done immeasurable harm. Roy shuffled over to the stereo and put on a disc: Stevie Wonder. ‘Why can’t I sing like that?’ he rasped, as Stevie sang, ‘Maybe because you’re not black and blind.’ During the song, Paul told Roy he was better than Stevie, but he didn’t look any happier. He wanted to tell him that he’d been right at Delvaux: they had given pop ‘class’; style; a glint of steel it hadn’t had before; but this evening Roy would only toss back comforting thoughts.

  By the time the record ended, Roy’s expression had softened. He flipped through some records, but didn’t choose anything. ‘Tellya something,’ he mumbled, looking embarrassed, ‘it isn’t all down to you … I made plenty of mistakes with Mat.’ He kicked at the leather pouffe he had been sitting on. ‘Not just the Bridget stunt … but how I made out he was eatin’ outer your hand.’ Another kick. ‘Like asking him to prove something.’

  ‘We didn’t have all the luck we could’ve done with either.’ Paul smiled. ‘Hey, don’t worry.’

  But worried Roy certainly seemed, pacing about like a caged puma. He burst out suddenly, ‘And what it’s done to you and your woman …’ His voice had become tight and emotional. ‘I’ve just come out lookin’ a creep … but you’ve been hurt, man.’ He turned away. ‘Maybe if I could take some o’the blame, she might give yer a break? Like I say I blew it …’

  ‘It’s decent of you; but no way she’d believe it …’

  ‘She might,’ cried Roy. ‘Gotta trust some day.’

  ‘Sounds like a song.’

  ‘A good one.’ Roy danced a few quick steps, wielding an invisible mike, ‘You gotta trust; baby, you really must … some day …’

  After a silence, Paul said quietly, ‘When one person’s always the guilty one, and the other’s always in the right, nothing’s going to change it, unless the good girl gets naughty too.’

  Roy looked astonished. ‘You mean gets herself laid by another guy?’

  ‘The way she treats me now … I guess it really might take something like that.’

  Roy’s mouth opened, but no words. At last: ‘If she didn’t think working-class guys one worse than child-fuckers … wouldya want me to …?’

  Paul considered for several seconds, then smiled. ‘When things are bad any change looks like a good idea.’

  ‘That’s pretty sick,’ gulped Roy.

  ‘So is what I’ve had to take …’ He stood up. ‘Best forget it.’

  As Paul was leaving, Roy said, ‘You did a lot for me, right? So I try and talk her round. You don’ wanter to get inter thinking: got to make her guilty; gotta have this or that stick to beat her with.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ murmured Paul, ‘go and see her. Do what you like … can’t make anything worse.’ Roy’s crestfallen face reproved him. ‘I’m sorry.’ He grasped his hand. ‘Give it all you’ve got.’

  16

  Winter fog outside, and Eleanor snugly cocooned in her Wilton Crescent drawing room. Seated at a Queen Anne bureau she made notes on Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Around her, lights glowed through shot-silk shades, drawing more warmth from Persian rugs and embroidered cushions. Abandoning Burckhardt, she leafed through a folder of Piero della Francesca colour plates. A reposeful strength about the human figures struck her; demanding nothing they seemed simply to exist, serenely. Eleanor found them painful to look at.

  To keep boredom and distress at bay, she had recently begun an extra-mural Fine Arts course. Having written nothing more demanding than occasional letters since leaving school, she found essay-writing humiliatingly hard, but was still determined not to fall back on softer options, lampshade-making or needlework, as several of her well-heeled female fellow-sufferers had already done.

  Embarking upon her present stay in London, she had believed that temporary separation from Paul would help heal the wounds he had inflicted. He too, she hoped, would benefit – his isolation at Castle Delvaux providing a much-needed opportunity for self-examination. His earlier phone calls had seemed to indicate improvement. Then she noted something else: an edge of grievance creeping in – even after the ignominy of the film. His tone was muted; but more and more she sensed that he now felt wounded by her behaviour. At other times she suspected something worse: he was calmly sitting out her displeasure, waiting for a change of weather on her side.

  Soon she was facing facts – far from healing, her wounds had started to fester. She had always stressed that her leaving Delvaux had been in both their interests; nothing to do with punishment. Now, Eleanor couldn’t help wondering whether she would ever be able to forgive, unless first making him suffer.

  A few evenings later she was recovering from a maddening interview with her father in which he had pleaded with her to return to Paul. If, as he’d put it, ‘a man like Paul would never come crawling’, why should a woman like her be expected to? She was thinking of having a bath when the doorbell rang. It being one of her maid’s evenings off, she went to answer it.

  She was astonished to see Roy standing outside in an Anna Karenina fur coat and hat. Hardly through the door, he began the second impassioned plea she had heard that day on Paul’s behalf. At first inclined to be angry, his daft appearance and lunatic self-confidence soon overwhelmed her with a desire to laugh.

  In the drawing room, he launched into a blame-me-for-everything routine. Waving her hands to stop him, she cried, ‘Aren’t you frightfully hot in that marvellous fur coat?’ When he slipped it off, she made admiring remarks about his shirt; just like a Regency duellist’s; was it all silk, and so on. He looked back at her sullenly. ‘But you can’t mind being looked at, surely?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Isn’t that the idea?’

  ‘On stage maybe.’

  She smiled apologetically. ‘Honestly I love men’s clothes to be interesting.’

  ‘Want me to walk around for yer?’

  ‘Don’t be cross,’ she choked, surrendering to her second attack of laughter. ‘It’s just so monstrous of Paul asking you to do this for him.’

  And then back he went to claiming Paul had asked him not to come; it’d been all his idea, and why couldn’t she listen?

  ‘All right,’ she promised, ‘but what about a whisky first? I’m going to have one.’

  Sitting back against the cushions on the sofa, Roy clinked the ice against the sides of his glass and looked sideways at Eleanor – dark hair swept back behind her ears, need good bones for that; the sort that only happen after lots of careful breeding. ‘Well come on then,’ he heard her say, as if inviting him to start cracking jokes. He felt anger seeping back again as the soothing influence of the whisky faded. But when he told her what he’d said to Matthew about seeing Paul and Bridget smooching, her superior smile slipped.

  ‘When did you see them?’ she whispered, shakily.

  ‘I didn’t ever,’ he lied. ‘Just felt pissed off with Matty and Paul … said it without thinking.’

  She was staring hard at him. ‘But you must have known what it would do?’

  ‘Lost me temper.’

  Her silence got on his nerves; then Eleanor murmured, ‘What slightly puzzles me is why Matthew should have taken an obvious lie so seriously?’

  Roy managed a grin. ‘Cos he’s dead paranoid … and jealous of Paul with it.’ She became thoughtful.

  ‘You told Paul you’d lied to Matthew?’ Roy nodded. ‘Then why on earth didn’t Paul tell me?’ She paused. ‘It would have helped him surely, to explain that vile film?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ he muttered, furious with himself for falling into his own pit.

  She looked into her glass. ‘I suppose he might have thought you really had seen what you said you had.’

  As if his brain had been sucked out like a collector’s egg, Roy stared blindly at the swirls and squiggles in the rug. After what seemed an hour or two, she told him not to worry. He was a good friend to have tried to help Paul, but in the end Paul was the only one who could do that. Another pause before she asked him, with surprising friendliness, what he was thinking.

  ‘What a prat I was to come.’

  ‘But why? I was awfully bored,’ she told him in a voice he couldn’t help believing. ‘We ought to have lots to talk about.’

  He’d always been puzzled by the way she could seem phoney and natural at the same time. Taught when she was knee-high to a dwarf to move the way she did and feel superior; now it was just normal. No girly tricks with her eyes or mouth either. Didn’t need to fish for signs, to know she was a stunner. ‘You remind me of a boxer,’ she said quietly. He touched his slightly twisted nose. ‘Not that,’ she laughed, ‘you keep your guard up the whole time, in case I sneak in and clout you.’

  ‘You weren’t always too thrilled by me.’

  She smiled. ‘No use going on fighting lost battles.’ Another laugh. Like a schoolgirl, he thought; she was so goddam groomed and sleek, but now and then this scatty kid kept butting in. And boy was she tough; reckoning the stuff about Bridget was gospel, she was riding it like Paul had forgotten their anniversary.

  ‘So what’s this we’re meant to be able to talk about?’ he asked, finding himself grinning.

  ‘All the things you know about, but I don’t.’

  ‘Like swapping customs with a foreigner?’

  You’re not going to start playing “Them and Us” games?’ she groaned. ‘Anyway, I get on splendidly with foreigners.’

  He took a slug of whisky. ‘Once read something about debs and ski-instructors.’

  She smiled. ‘I only meant it can be easier to feel relaxed with somebody from a different background. Obvious, isn’t it?’

  Roy pulled a face. ‘Like the ski-instructor … I mean he’s so far out, he doesn’t really count.’

  He expected her to dismiss this, but instead she thought for a while. ‘Because one can’t judge him by any normal standards?’ She seemed put out; then chuckled. ‘Isn’t that rather good though? And anyway, does she really count to him? It must cut both ways, wouldn’t you say?’

  Roy found the unembarrassed way she said this unexpectedly sexy. ‘How should I know? Not being a ski-instructor.’

  ‘You’ve got imagination, surely?’

  Roy noticed her glance at her watch.

  ‘Oughta be shifting,’ he muttered.

  ‘Must you?’

  ‘I work to a tight schedule … specially evenings.’

  She tucked her legs up under her, and looked at him engagingly. ‘Am I going to see you again?’

  ‘Have to think about it.’

  She smiled to herself, her slim body curled nonchalantly beside him, like a comfortable cat. A warm direct look from her big black eyes. ‘You know, Roy, if you stopped being so sure what I think, we might end up quite friendly.’

  ‘You reckon?’ he asked, sliding an arm into his coat.

  ‘I reckon,’ she drawled; lynx-eyed beneath half-closed lids. ‘You think I could ever be really “cool”?’

  ‘Like me, baby?’ he looked her up and down; then shrugged. ‘You have to let it happen.’ He hadn’t been looking at her, but when he turned he saw her flopped back on the sofa like a rag doll; face blank, arms dangling. He fought back laughter. ‘Maybe you’ll hafta work at it.’

  She sat up eagerly. ‘But will I … get there?’

  ‘I’m keepin’ an open mind.’

  ‘By the way,’ she said in her ordinary voice, as he was going, ‘it might be cool of you to phone me before turning up next time you want to drop by. Thursdays are good because I’ve handed in my weekly essay.’

  ‘Wouldn’t wanter mess that up.’

  She laughed pleasantly. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  As he stepped out on to the pavement and looked back at the tall windows, Roy felt confused. She wasn’t the type to set about knocking out a guy just to prove she could. Nor was she the kind that got into things without knowing where they were going … but was that likely to be anywhere he wanted to go? Could be a deeper game than he knew. ‘Steer clear,’ he told himself, dejectedly, taking a last look at the house and heading for his car.

  *

  She rang him three weeks later. Why hadn’t he phoned? Hadn’t he said he would? Well yes, but … But nothing. She kept seeing snippets about him in the papers. What an incredibly energetic life he seemed to lead. It was awful of her to ask, but since he did seem to go out such a lot, would it be a fearful drag to take her along? She was intrigued to know what it’d be like to go out with a pop star … just the one time of course. Surprised to be so pleased to hear her voice, Roy said ‘yes’ the moment he knew what she wanted.

  The first shock on the night was her enthusiasm; the second, bigger one, was the clothes she’d invested in: silk trouser suit with multi-coloured horizontal stripes, and a perspex necklace the size of a kid’s mobile. That wasn’t all; she’d had her hair frizzed so he wouldn’t have recognized her in the street. ‘You sending me up?’ he’d asked. ‘Lord no, I didn’t want to let you down.’ So why press it, he’d thought. Probably more a matter of not wanting anyone to latch on to who she was. Couldn’t blame her; especially since she’d expected girls screaming after them the whole time. ‘Only get that scene,’ he’d explained, ‘when I’m gonna sing and the venue’s been advertised. The usual handful round the ’ouse are no bother.’