For a few seconds Linda tried to stretch her T-shirt enough to cover her pubic hair, but merely split the seam under her arm, and finally fled into the kitchen. With relief Eleanor noticed that, while she had been involved with Linda Mudge, Roy had found a length of cloth and was binding up his colleague’s heel.

  ‘Probably needs stitches,’ he said, in a tone implying that an amputation would not surprise him. He smiled. ‘Lady Carnforth are we? So Paul’s yer ’usband.’ He finished knot ting the improvised bandage and rocked back on his haunches. ‘You’re going to tell us to split … right?’

  ‘If you mean “get out”,’ replied Eleanor, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Only thing is – your feller said we could stay three weeks.’

  ‘Well maybe “my feller” didn’t know you’d be getting mixed up with the police,’ said Eleanor, fighting the rush of anger that was making her tremble. Roy scratched his curly hair.

  ‘You could be wrong there. Like I reckon he knew we’d blow it here. Then he comes in nice and gentle and picks up the pieces.’ He leant against the wall. ‘Me being one of the pieces …’ Eleanor advanced menacingly.

  ‘Are you aware that the police came to see me this morning?’

  ‘Now you tell me.’

  ‘And you’re stupid enough to be using drugs and seducing a girl of fifteen, when at any moment …’

  ‘Cool it. She didn’t bring ’er birth certificate.’

  ‘Only ’er cap,’ leered the one with the bandaged heel.

  ‘He’s not very civilized, but I’m working on him,’ Roy assured Eleanor. He pulled a long face. ‘So when do you want us out by? I’ve had this place up to here.’ He indicated a point near the bridge of his nose.

  ‘What about noon?’

  ‘You hear that?’ shouted Roy.

  ‘Rhymes with moon and coon,’ said the one who had been lying next to Linda. ‘Boy, am I spaced out.’ He hummed to himself for a moment, then crooned, ‘Gee I’d like to see you looking swell, baby. Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn’t sell, baby.’

  ‘Yeah, they think noon’s all right. Better than her ladyship fetching the fuzz … Right, you finks?’

  The youth in the striped underpants made a lunge for Roy’s ankle which he easily evaded. Walking out to where she had left her horse, Eleanor still had not decided what to ask Roy. If she seemed too inquisitive he might simply refuse to talk. Then suddenly he said, ‘We’re breaking up, see. Four years and shazzam.’ He flung out his arms dramatically. ‘Still, I suppose I should be grateful to Exodus Music and your ’ubby.’

  ‘You don’t sound very grateful,’ she murmured, doing her best to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  Roy smiled and shook his troubadour’s locks. ‘He’s no different from other promoters … likes getting his own way.’

  Eleanor’s fingers tightened on her whip. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he had enough time to be a very energetic … promoter.’ The last word stuck in her throat.

  ‘Couple of days a month, maybe. More of a rich man’s hobby. Leaves most of the work to Gemma or the bods in the office.’ He frowned. ‘Far as I know, I’m just about the only performer he handles personally. Not that anything’s come of it.’

  Having thought that Paul no longer saw his step-sister, Roy’s mention of Gemma shook Eleanor badly. Nor was it consoling to be told a little later that it had been through Gemma that Paul had met Roy, and on a suggestion of hers that he had bought a stake in a ‘management company’. Evidently pleased to have won her attention, Roy added helpfully, ‘The way the A and R boys listen to him at Exodus, he must have pumped in plenty.’ Too dazed to ask what ‘A and R boys’ were, Eleanor stared at the grass while Roy told her about the strengths and weaknesses of his group. ‘Our technique’s fine for ballsy rock numbers, but useless for low volume backing. Which means now Paul’s made up his mind to push me as a solo singer, the rest of the lads have got to go.’ Soon Eleanor gleaned that Paul had recently lost patience with the group for failing to master new material he had commissioned for Roy. He had given them a deadline, and shown he meant business by offering a rent-free cottage miles away from any distraction, with rehearsal space in the village hall at Frimpton. Eleanor suspected he had chosen Frimpton, rather than Flixton, because it was further from Delvaux. Unless there had been trouble with the police, she would never have heard anything about Roy and his chums.

  When he began telling her in admiring tones about Paul’s energy and powers of persuasion, Eleanor knew she had already heard more than enough. As she hurried across to her horse, and mounted, Roy suggested that Paul had probably sent them to the country to save himself the trouble of disbanding the group. ‘Reckoned if we were cooped up we’d get into arguments.’ As she kneed her horse round, he looked up anxiously. ‘Don’t get the idea I’m complaining. He’s right behind me as a singer.’

  ‘A word of advice,’ she said sharply, ‘Paul’s enthusiasms rarely seem to last.’ Before he could answer, she had urged her horse into a brisk trot.

  2

  Because Paul Carnforth had seen marriage more in the nature of a pleasant supplement to his life, than as a thorough-going revolution in its fabric, he had never taken any notice of friends who had told him that ‘his whole way of life’ made him wrong for ‘a girl like Eleanor’. She was undoubtedly both younger and more solidly conventional than he would have predicted for his eventual bride a year or two earlier, but he had been attracted by more than her long black hair and dark attentive eyes. He thought her poise remarkable in someone so young, and enjoyed her dive-bombing frankness, even on occasions when he was its target.

  After the blasé females at the fashionable discotheques and gaming clubs where he had once spent much of his time, Eleanor’s open admissions of love had bowled him over. Even her polite home counties’ education had its advantages. Classes in cookery and flower arranging rarely seemed to sap natural vitality to the same extent as doubt-inducing degree courses. If a few ‘county’ prejudices were the price to be paid for all that animation and self-confidence, it seemed a small one.

  When Paul had started to see her as the perfect addition to the Castle Delvaux side of his life, he had certainly reckoned on spending more time in the country, but he had never had any intention of abandoning interests which he had known she would have no desire to share. A case in point was his friendship with his step-sister, Gemma Lucas. Although only occasional lovers now, they had never lost their enthusiasm for shared schemes and projects.

  Even before Paul left Eton, Gemma had been warning him that aloofness from mass obsessions would soon amount to cultural suicide. In a proletarian future, success would only go to those who catered to popular needs. Long before critics compared the Beatles with Beethoven, Paul had appreciated her gifts. But when, shortly before his marriage, she had floated the idea of a joint foray into pop promotion, he had been wary.

  As Features Editor of a re-vamped fashion magazine, Gemma might know everything worth knowing about the rapid transformation of today’s slick truths into tomorrow’s platitudes, but it would take more than that to achieve anything genuinely new in a field where novelty itself was commonplace. Her timing also seemed suspect. The music business had slumped a long way from the heights reached in mid-decade. But, as so often in the past, the difficulties had first sparked his interest, and then converted him.

  He had needed no prompting to realise that ‘protest’ and spurious mysticism were clapped-out themes. The wonder was that any industry, really about cash and instant fame, could have kidded itself for so long that self-awareness and concern were its real objectives. A clear-cut reaction looked imminent. Within days of their ‘discovery’ of a suitable singer, Paul and Gemma had decided what kind of star they wanted him to be.

  Three months later, even after his purchase of the controlling interest in a company already handling established performers, Paul was frustrated by how little had been achieved. When he had lent Roy and his dismal backing group a disused cottage on the Castle Delvaux estate, the preliminary process of shaking him free from old ideas and loyalties had still been going on. Paul had never set out to hide what he was doing from Eleanor, but since her interests were different, he had thought it sensible to get a few results before trying to explain the appeal of his hobby. If she happened to find out before he was strictly speaking ready, Paul had not imagined much harm would be done.

  *

  An hour after his return from London, Eleanor was facing her husband across the oak table in the small dining room known as the Earl’s Cabinet. Under the sardonic gaze of two of his most rapacious Tudor ancestors, Paul, with his frank blue eyes and generous lips, could scarcely have looked less like Holbein’s tight-faced sitters. But already Eleanor could see that nothing was going to be resolved in the manner she had imagined.

  Because she had been so certain that, once aware of her distress, Paul would immediately promise to be open with her in future, it had come as a severe shock to find him not only unrepentant, but puzzled by her reproaches. Apparently he simply could not see why she had found her interview with Sergeant Andrews humiliating, nor why she should have been distressed by what she had seen at the cottage. Nobody had threatened or abused her, and, as far as he could gather, Roy and his colleagues had come out of the encounter a poor second.

  During dinner Eleanor repeated that she had no desire to cramp his independent interests; but what could he expect her to think if he pursued them so furtively? He ran a hand through his corn-coloured hair.

  ‘That I’d rather keep them to myself for the time being.’ His relaxed smile took her breath away.

  ‘But why, Paul?’ she demanded, watching miserably as he peeled a peach with the seriousness he reserved for all practical tasks.

  ‘I suppose for the same sort of reasons artists keep quiet about what they’re working on till they’ve bashed it into shape.’

  ‘But you’re not an artist.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he agreed cheerfully, reaching for the wine-coaster. ‘All the more reason to be cautious.’ He poured, and sipped thoughtfully. ‘If I was a sculptor, the results wouldn’t much matter, so long as I got some fun out of it. But to work on someone like Roy, and get nowhere with him …’ He grinned ruefully. ‘Well, can you think of anything much sillier than pushing a pop singer who never gets popular? Maybe selling balloons full of holes. You hit the jackpot or it’s pointless. So I thought I’d wait a bit, before telling you what I was up to.’

  ‘That was your only reason?’ She moved the candelabrum obstructing her view of his face.

  ‘I think I was bothered in case you thought the whole area … trivial?’ His manner was so reassuringly candid that for a moment Eleanor forgot how completely he had refused to see her point of view half-an-hour earlier. He was frowning now, as if scrupulously searching his memory for other information he might inadvertently have omitted.

  ‘It did occur to me that because this world …’ (He waved a vague hand at the heraldic ceiling-paintings.) ‘… and Roy’s world are fairly different, that you could think my interest in one implied some kind of dissatisfaction with the other, which couldn’t of course be true, simply because both are so totally different.’

  ‘So why didn’t you try to explain it to me before?’ She picked up a pair of grape-scissors and snipped the air. ‘You didn’t want to, did you?’

  ‘I thought I’d explained,’ he replied quietly, pushing back his chair. ‘Let’s have coffee.’

  As they walked down the Long Gallery on their way to the Cedar Drawing Room, Paul took her arm. Dimly lit, the gigantic room looked more than usually imposing. Shadows threw into relief carvings above the two great fireplaces, and filled each strapwork segment of the ceiling with darkness.

  ‘Says a lot to me this room,’ he remarked at last. ‘About how you got powerful by building big enough to knock out the right people. They wanted rich supporters in government jobs. You proved you’d got the necessary loot, by living lavish and dressing like Cartier’s window.’ He paused in front of a seventeenth century portrait of the first marquess, magnificent in black and gold Greenwich armour. ‘No rubbish then about inconspicuous consumption.’ He walked on slowly. ‘Must’ve been fun before the Victorians invented “service” and slammed the till.’

  ‘You think we’d be living here today, if they hadn’t?’ asked Eleanor sharply.

  Listening to him she could not help wondering if earlier approving remarks, made in the gardens, or trudging across the home farm, had been ironic. Isolated impressions, dismissed at the time as untypical, now returned to her. Conversations with members of the staff in which he had occasionally reminded her of a television anthropologist, professionally obliged to be charitable about the customs of primitive tribes.

  Later that evening, brandy glass in hand, Paul sat back in his wing-chair and drew comparisons between ‘self-made Tudor popinjays’ and their wealth-flaunting modern equivalents. Who, but the richest pop stars, could hold a candle to a modest merchant prince or nabob?

  ‘It’s not just their clothes and houses. Their whole set-up’s feudal. Heavies and roadies as retainers; P.R. men and journalists as courtiers. Who else has thousands of petitioners grovelling at their gates?’ Paul smiled serenely. ‘No harm in old aristocrats learning from their successors.’

  ‘No thank you,’ murmured Eleanor.

  Paul raised a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘I thought you wanted to be included?’ He laughed apologetically and admitted he was being unfair. But, seriously, if she really did feel excluded, what about bringing that side of his London life to Delvaux now and then?

  Eleanor was stupefied. Have Roy and his mates rampaging through the house? Of course not, Paul reassured her. Any music and entertainment would be out in the gardens. They could put up a marquee at the park end of the Statue Walk. Very few of their guests would be entertainers; mostly people they knew: friends, neighbouring landowners, family perhaps. And they wouldn’t be treated to a dreary hunt ball or dinner dance, but the first social occasion worthy of the setting since the last Jacobean masque or Restoration revels. Mummers, minstrels, tableaux vivants … or at any rate their nearest modern equivalents. Suspecting a joke at first, Eleanor had soon realized he was in earnest. Though herself suspicious, his enthusiasm put her in a difficult position. If she turned him down, she would risk cutting herself off entirely from that area of his existence. And since the real reason for her exclusion was Gemma’s influence (or so she suspected), Eleanor decided she would be ill-advised to reject this peculiar olive branch. If the occasion proved a disaster, then she would fight any repetition. But he would never be able to accuse her of timid prejudice or failure to respond.

  Unable to see how she could have done anything but agree, Eleanor still found it difficult to understand how she had ended up in this position when Paul had started the evening at such a disadvantage.

  3

  Lord Carnforth’s chauffeur walked round the elderly black Daimler to open one of the rear doors. Instead of his lordship emerging, another young man stepped out, blinking, into the late evening sunlight. He squinted up at the finials and heraldic beasts above the hall, and then allowed his eyes to wander round the Gatehouse Court – an area considerably larger than the main quad of the Oxford college where he and Paul had once been undergraduates. Matthew Nairn had freckles, curly brown hair, and, when he was not frowning (which he did more often than he knew), an agreeable open face.

  As a man in a dark suit hurried towards him, apparently intent on relieving him of his case, Matthew’s lips twisted into a grin. What was he? Footman, odd job man, butler? Fantastic, in the late Sixties, that anyone could maintain such a vast establishment. And as for the house – it was ‘real’, of course, in the monumental way of all historic buildings, but improbable too: a period piece, crying out for inhabitants from another century, wearing festive clothes.

  Since the others were already dining, Matthew was asked whether he would prefer to go up and change, or wash downstairs and go straight in. Ignoring the way the man was looking at his corduroy jacket, he took the second option. Because he had been committed to a full day’s work in a dubbing theatre, his wife, Bridget, had gone ahead by car, and Matthew had followed by train to the nearest station.

  At the foot of the barbarically resplendent Jacobean staircase, he remembered how overawed he had been on his first visit as a prep school friend. Even now, aged twenty-seven, married, and an established documentary director, Matthew felt uneasy about the coming weekend as Paul’s guest. The days when Paul had been the single most important influence on his life had ended with Oxford, but since then, particularly during the past year, Matthew had often felt the need to be on his guard.

  The fact that he was at Castle Delvaux at all – ostensibly to witness whatever festivities Paul had in mind for the following day – was in itself a cause for concern since he had been reluctant to come. To say that he had been persuaded by his wife, although true, was no adequate explanation. Unwilling to be truthful about his reservations, he had been reduced to making ineffectual remarks about finding the splendours of Paul’s life unsettling, and being worried that he would have little in common with other guests. This had encouraged Bridget to tell him (not for the first time) that anyone responsible for as many television documentaries as he was, on such subjects as urban blight, child poverty and worldwide pollution, could hardly expect to keep his joie de vivre. He needed a change. If not the light-hearted film project suggested by Paul several months ago, something very similar. As part of his campaign for nudging Matthew into making a film about his pop protégé, Paul had told Bridget that there would be money in it for all of them, as well as plenty of fun during the filming. Since Matthew had kept his opinions to himself, Bridget had remained enthusiastic.

  At university Bridget had never held it against Paul that he had made love to her during one of his brief periods of disaffection with Gemma. Matthew was less forgiving. During an earlier rift between Paul and his step-sister, he had fallen for and temporarily secured Gemma, without any warning that his tenure was likely to be short. Afterwards, when Paul had been reinstated, although Matthew had finally drifted back into his orbit, he had never reconciled himself to his friend’s anarchic morality. He still sometimes regretted that Paul had subsequently introduced him to Bridget, and could therefore claim marginal involvement in his choice of a wife.