‘I’m obviously not hard-bitten enough.’

  ‘I didn’t ask yer to be … just ter think what could keep us on the road; I’d’ve done anything meself, and I mean anything.’

  She took his hand sadly, as though thinking of something else. ‘And all because you couldn’t believe you’d have won if Paul had forced me to choose.’

  ‘He did have a few things goin’ for ’im.’ He spoke bitterly, but knew she was right. He hadn’t had that kind of faith. But she couldn’t blame him. Should’ve guessed he wouldn’t believe that people like her, who took being milady of the castle so sodding much for granted, would actually be prepared to chuck it all in. It was so frigging unfair laying the blame on him: ‘Did it for you, Roy, but look where it’s got us.’

  Not knowing how the hell to tell her this, Roy fought his frenzy. No good telling tragedy queens they shouldn’t muck around with poisoned goblets if they wanted to stay healthy.

  Then she asked why he had told Paul about her father? Hadn’t it been obvious she’d been speaking in confidence? Given how things were with Paul, hadn’t he been the last person who ought to have been told?

  ‘How was I meant to know he didn’t know the lot already?’ he shouted, knowing at once he should’ve reasoned it out; told her how Paul had said he was no better than a sexy chauffeur or gamekeeper in her eyes. But even when she started lashing him, he still didn’t explain how Paul had forced it out. And why? Because he’d made the same mistake as her … needed to prove things to Paul. Had to tell him it was love, love, love … like the damned thing couldn’t survive without screaming, “Look at me.”

  So on she went, telling him Paul couldn’t possibly have known already, seeing it was a new situation, which Roy had to know because he’d been there the night of Mummy’s crisis phone call. ‘But you told me your dad had been screwing around for years. Paul must’ve known that much.’ Roy looked at her imploringly. ‘You gotta know what a secret is, before yer can be nailed with blowing it.’

  ‘But you told Paul you listened to me on the phone,’ she accused him, voice shaking.

  ‘He got it wrong then … why’dya have to believe him? And anyway, where’s the big sin in listening on the phone? Jesus Christ it’s not the White House hot-line.’

  When she started holding back sobs that shook her right through, he wasn’t able to take any more. ‘I had to give him the lot,’ he groaned, ‘… sex, love, you name it. He thought I was going ter shove off cos he said so … I had ter lay it on the line.’

  ‘Why did he think you’d shove off?’ No more grief; just fury.

  ‘Cos he’s off his bleedin’ chump.’

  ‘No,’ she screamed. ‘Because that’d been the arrangement from the start.’

  ‘There wasn’t any goddam arrangement,’ he screamed back.

  Then an ugly silence, till she covered her face and moaned a few words. The only one he caught was ‘sordid’.

  ‘What we did? What we said?’ he shrieked. ‘All that’s sordid now, is it? Cos he serves up a load of lies?’

  Looking back, Roy would wish more than anything that he could take back those last few minutes and try again. It was ‘sordid’ that did it. One of those cruel upper-class put-down words (like ‘vulgar’, or ‘uncivilized’). But ‘sordid’ … that to describe their love … it was beyond anything.

  ‘You see these things …?’ he cried, snatching up a couple of books. ‘Books, you say. So I get books … Drab, you say, no colour, so I get these …’ He kicked at one of the Turkish carpets. ‘Flowers …’ He pulled a handful from a vase and tossed them at her. ‘Just so you could have a fantastic time here … remember it all your life. I’m not scared of sounding soft; it’s how I feel. That’s what it’s about … how it is now; not why it started. Who cares about that? And all the way here, you must’ve been going over what you’d ask me, how you’d make me sweat; and I’d been thinking, “Only an hour till she gets here … only ten minutes, five … can’t wait.” So I didn’t make out in the frigging court-room drama, didn’t …’

  Then when he saw her making for the door, he lost control, tried to drag her back, shouted that she couldn’t love him. And all the time she was saying she had to go, couldn’t think, didn’t know what to do. When he realized she was really going, he started yelling about the cook and how everything was ready, and couldn’t she even wait till they’d eaten. But not a chance. Then he got rough, kicking over chairs … Sordid, vulgar, uncivilized. And all she did was say she couldn’t stay, over and over. Till in the end, as though a spring inside him had been wound one turn too many, he lashed out. Hit her across the face.

  Nothing much after that. She walked past him as if he’d disappeared and went out to her car.

  He drove up to London the same evening, but she wasn’t at the house. He phoned Paul at Delvaux. He hadn’t seen her. Back to Mummy or Daddy probably. So what could he do?

  *

  Then pills, booze; dozing during the day, unable to sleep at night. A week went by before the sharpest aches receded, but the emptiness was worse. Like the tender gap left by a missing tooth, it invited constant examination. And this hollow went right through him – drawing him so far inside himself he couldn’t think of his American tour (only two months away now) or any of his new songs. He started to miss rehearsals; felt ill much of the time. When he moved quickly he saw spots in front of his eyes. He suffered from indigestion which didn’t improve when he ate – not that he did much of that.

  The only song he thought about was one he wrote for her. It wouldn’t be recorded, of course – not in vinyl micro-grooves anyway – though scratched diamond deep in his skull. Lady Helena he called it. Lancelot and Guinevere stuff; a bit corny, but with the right backing (something like hyped-up Greensleeves on electric harpsichord) could have been special.

  ‘Lady, O Lady of the avenues of night,

  Long ago a minstrel boy came riding, riding,

  Lady, O Lady have mercy on his plight,

  You know he’ll die if all your love you keep on hiding.’

  But Tudor blues was one more part of the whole big might-have-been. Along with teaching him to ride … He’d had amazing images of that: very Ken Russell; windswept hills, blown-back hair, thundering hooves.

  The phone rang endlessly, but never her. Tony brought in papers, food; said he should see a doctor or a shrink. About a month till he left the house; but by then they’d been getting so shit-scared at Exodus, it had finally got through to him. Five weeks till New York, Chicago, L.A. How many people waiting, how many dollars at stake, couldn’t he grab hold of what he’d be sued for if he didn’t get off his ass and get his act together? One day Heffernan came down and started blubbing. What was he doing? Trying to wipe them out financially? No company had shoved out more cash in pre-publicity since the Stones’ second tour.

  With only a month left, he agreed to come to London. Should have gone earlier, because rehearsing did help him during the eight hours a day he put in with the group. The sets were unbelievable; built for Exodus by a film special effects company. The complete dream-kit most rock groups never got beyond fantasizing about: lightning bolts (like they had in the last Frankenstein re-make), a forty foot boat to carry the band across the stage through blue smoke, a giant master-set in the shape of a Wurlitzer organ. And every last wire and bolt of this hardware was going to be air-freighted out. Twenty grand on that alone. He’d written to Wilton Crescent a dozen times in case her stuff got forwarded. ‘Why not drop by when I’m rehearsing? No scenes, no questions.’ Nothing.

  Then – the Sunday after the sets had been crated, he was lying-in when Tony tossed in the papers. He leafed through one of the tabloids where he’d often figured. Big splash: MINISTER WAS HOUSEWIFE’S SUGAR DADDY. When he caught an eyeful of the minister’s name, he hit the librium good and hard. Needn’t have been Paul who’d tipped off the press. Probably hadn’t been … not his style. But he wouldn’t pass up the chance it offered. ‘What did you expect?’ he’d ask Eleanor. ‘Lead the poor sod on till he’s slobbering all over you, and then kick him in the pills. Did you think he’d piss off quietly and forget about it? Bashed you round the head, didn’t he? Bit of a madman … not the type to trust with family skeletons.’ And though it could’ve been anyone who blew the whistle – Elly’s mum, the husband, the wife, an envious neighbour, or a journalist with a nose for muck – the timing was lethal. Just five fucking weeks after she’d rapped him for babbling to Paul, her dad gets the full Fleet Street mud-bath.

  More time and he felt calmer. She’d probably reckon it was chance too; could’ve happened months ago; might’ve blown next year or the one after. Big wigs who screwed around and handed out cash were asking for it. Security risks, possible blackmail, questions in the House, MI5, busybody secretaries. Elly would have had all that on her mind long ago.

  No, the real killer was the taste it’d leave. Even if she thought him beyond suspicion she’d keep remembering that part of their last row and it’d smear her whole memory of him.

  And the likeliest scenario? She’d stay on with her parents for a few days, then drift back to Delvaux. And what’d Paul do? Take it nice and slowly; no reproaches; not too much sympathy either. Just leave it to her, at whatever pace she chose to take it. Roy knew he couldn’t sit back and let that happen. There had to be some way he could get Eleanor to see that what Paul had said didn’t matter, had nothing to do with how they felt about one another.

  Failure was out of the question. Without her, he couldn’t see any future. His mind was so chockful of her, there wasn’t room for anything else. Happiness, energy, confidence … she’d squeezed out the lot. He was filled with memories that killed his present stone dead. The pop scene only sickened now – the businessmen were blood-suckers; the fans, nothing but a twitching mass of over-active glands and under-developed minds.

  When she’d loved him, he could’ve clambered into his daft clothes and pranced about to order, because afterwards she’d have been there. But now? Fuck all: hotel suites in hell-hole places; reporters hassling; chicks clutching; police chiefs panicking; mayors wheeling on dopey daughters to have a front-row gawp. So jack it in? Be sued for all he’d got and more? Stay home and stare at the wall? The way Elly had wiped him out, he’d be fit for little else.

  Always back to the same base-camp. He had to make her realize her mistake. But in twenty, or however many minutes? Not a hope … he’d need days not minutes: because it wouldn’t be by arguing or evidence that he’d finally persuade her; but by showing her his love. Always it came down to time … time she wouldn’t give him. A few days back, he’d known something else: he couldn’t let her cheat him, because if he did, he’d be letting her cheat herself. If she surrendered to Paul, and refused to go away for a few days, then Roy knew he would have to take the time he needed, any way he could.

  23

  Eleanor sat beside the swimming pool at Castle Delvaux, sipping iced coffee, and reading the fat new biography of a dead philanthropist. Although Sunday, there were no newspapers on any of the tables dotted around the pool. Since that other Sunday, which Eleanor still felt sick to think about, she had read no paper of any kind – daily, weekly, Sunday. But the reassuringly unscandalous life of William Wilberforce was doing no more than intermittently hold her attention.

  Whenever escaping from thoughts of her father’s humiliation, she was plunged into still more distressing ones about Roy. She supposed it just possible he might have been indiscreet at a party, when drunk or high, but ruled out deliberate malice. In Eleanor’s eyes, his betrayal lay in deliberately concealing from her the crucial fact that Paul had first suggested his overtures. Nor could she believe that Paul had meant it as a casual joke. Unless Roy had taken him seriously, why keep his mouth shut all those months?

  It tormented her that the most wonderful experience of her life had sprung from such an odious source. Not that she for a moment doubted that Roy had finally come to love her. What she no longer knew was whether she still loved him enough to endure the consequences of continuing. If she made contact, even by letter, he would force a meeting, to beg, argue, and pledge undying love. If this were still his attitude on his return from America, it would be monstrous to refuse to see him. In the meantime she had resolved to discover whether she and Paul had burned out all their feelings for one another. Ten days after her return to Delvaux she was no nearer an answer.

  Though Paul refused to accept that she had not set out to humiliate him – and denied using Roy to place her in the wrong – he showed no signs of wishing her to leave Delvaux. His behaviour reminded her of the frozen indifference she had shown him after the concert. But whether his true feelings were as blunted as hers had been, or whether he hoped to panic her into assuming the larger share of responsibility for their predicament, Eleanor couldn’t tell. Something else had recently preoccupied her more: the lateness of her period.

  The sun had become quite hot now, and as Eleanor listened to the village church bells rippling pleasantly in the warm air, she thought of going in for a swim before returning to the house.

  *

  Three miles away, and closing fast, Roy sat at the wheel of his Cobra, watching the black ribbon of road stream towards him like a race-track simulation in an amusement arcade. His earlier fears already seemed as far behind him as the sprawl of factories, reservoirs and suburban streets he had blazed through on his way. Only one simple aim: to be alone with her long enough for love to speak for him. Roy knew he would do anything to stop her killing the most precious thing she owned. If that meant forcing her to come away with him, he wouldn’t hesitate.

  A few days before he’d been given some fantastic pot by his lighting director – no slow-down effects. Dead opposite in fact. Instead of making him want to flop about, it sharpened his senses to razor clarity (something he was definitely going to need today). A couple of miles from the house he pulled off the road, and rolled himself a joint.

  When he swung between the tall gates with the stone dogs sitting up on either side, he got a feeling he’d only ever had once or twice before, like a flower opening inside; a blaze of happiness, as if telling him everything was just as it should be. Another weird sensation – looking at the sunlit grass and hedgerow flowers he felt he’d lived this day before and only had to act it out.

  Half-way up the drive the park ended, and as the Cobra’s wheels hummed over a cattle-grid, he slowed down. From here he could see the gardens, but the house was still hidden. To his right he noticed a huge bank of rhododendrons, and without hesitation swung the car up on to the grass and nosed in behind them. In the silence after he cut the engine, his hearing seemed so sharp, that along with the cooling metal, the tinkle of church bells, and twitter of birds, he could even pick out the chirruping of individual insects.

  The place was perfect, because hidden from the house. If he ended up needing his fall-back plan, he’d fail unless he sorted out the geography now. If he’d parked closer to the house, and then sloped off to grab an idea of the garden lay-out, he’d have had every lackey in the place after him. From the moment he’d known there might be no alternative to carrying her off, he’d seen the importance of getting her outside. In the gardens she wouldn’t be able to start ringing bells if she didn’t like the sound of his suggestions. Shouldn’t be any problem on such a beautiful day. Nothing more natural than suggesting a breath of fresh air.

  The way he saw it, there was a fair chance she’d do what he wanted. After what she’d put him through, it wouldn’t be asking much to expect her to spend a couple of days with him. But if she did freeze him out, he had to be prepared.

  Before leaving the car, Roy spent several minutes checking, and re-checking the contents of his coat-pockets. Only when entirely satisfied did he get out.

  Fifty yards away, behind a long beech hedge, lay the main body of the gardens.

  With a lot of concert defences still in place, it took him some time to find an un-plugged gap. Soon after succeeding, Roy realized he had underrated the problem. The whole set-up was more like a maze than a garden. Not only the different levels, but the dozens of flower walks, avenues, and steps, made it a nightmare even to remember the route he had followed. He decided his best hope of knowing his position anywhere in the gardens was to memorize the direction of some of the larger trees. Should he need to get out fast, he couldn’t risk losing his way.

  On the other side of a large paved area, flanked by statues and urns spewing out trailing plants, was a wall. Having come across three walled gardens already, Roy was not interested, but coming to a small iron gate, he reckoned he might as well take a peek. What he saw inside had him flinging himself back so fast, he had to clutch at the brickwork to stop himself falling. He leaned against the wall and breathed deeply.

  Inside: a swimming pool, and getting out of it on the far side, Eleanor, apparently alone. The most fantastic piece of luck ever. The only trouble was the shock it had given him. It’d be taking a risk, but he had to take another look in case there was anyone else in there. Luck was with him. Nobody. And the next time he peered in, he saw her making for a wooden hut that must be used as a changing room. As soon as she was inside, he moved.

  *

  Eleanor had peeled off her wet costume and was towelling herself, when she let out a sharp cry. Roy had suddenly materialized in the doorway, and was staring with spell-bound attention. She secured the towel above her breasts and asked if he could wait outside.

  ‘Outside?’ he echoed in a faint tight voice, as though the word was the most brutal he had ever heard.

  ‘I want to get dressed,’ she replied softly; scared by his restlessness.

  ‘Didn’t I ever see you dress before?’ he asked, eyes fixed on a square of sunlight on the floor. She tried a conciliatory laugh.

  ‘Don’t let’s start by arguing over anything so silly.’

  He didn’t answer, but sat heavily on the lid of a locker.