Matthew’s present difficulties had started at Paul’s wedding reception ten months ago, when he had met Gemma again after an interval of three years. No longer the femme fatale she had been to her Oxford generation, nor possessing, as a workaday journalist, the glamour attaching to the first female editor of one of the university’s best-known magazines, she had impressed Matthew as far more sympathetic than he remembered. He had enjoyed talking to her about the tendency of the media to treat ideas as extensions of fashion, and she had made him laugh with suggestions for a film spoofing this process. He had not believed that she would keep her promise to get in touch again, but she had, and after further meetings, Matthew had found himself stumbling into an affair. Only then had Gemma returned to the subject of a film collaboration; this time in earnest. Would he consider a documentary about the manufacture of a pop star? He had been on the point of commissioning her to do some detailed research, when she had casually let slip that the singer she had in mind was under contract to a company controlled by Paul, and that he would naturally expect to be involved in the filming.

  From that moment Matthew strongly suspected that Paul and Gemma would long ago have discussed how best to secure the benefits which television exposure might bring to their pop-promoting partnership. Remembering the misery they had absent-mindedly caused him at university, Matthew had been mortified to find himself still considered such easy meat. He had soon pondered a disarmingly simple question. If Gemma was ready to employ seduction to make him malleable, why not go along with her for a while? Who would the laugh be on when he pulled out several months later and admitted he had never had any intention of obliging her. It was time someone showed them that they could not go on indefinitely using old friends as unwitting recruits in their private theatricals.

  In recent months Matthew had gone ahead, and been granted the double luxury of settling old scores while enjoying a rich sexual diet. Since Gemma had always affected to believe that romantic love was a pretty disguise for possessiveness and jealousy, he had not worried over-much about her moral indignation when the balloon finally went up. He had imagined the têtes à têtes she would be having with Paul. ‘Oh yes, he’s coming along nicely. Only a week or two till it’s settled with his bosses.’ Matthew had become expert in spinning things out. The next offers meeting had been postponed. ‘Documentaries’ had finally thrown it out (bloody fools); ‘Features’ were definitely interested. The Controller was on their side, but the departmental head was new, and shouldn’t be pressed till he’d settled in. So hard to get new projects approved.

  As the imposture had become harder to sustain, Matthew’s emotional detachment had started to crack. A couple of bad moments with Bridget had clinched the matter. His decision to come clean had been reached a few days before the arrival of Paul’s invitation.

  Believing he had been asked only so Paul could apply the final squeeze of pressure still required after Gemma’s gentle preliminaries, Matthew had not been keen to come. But once aware of Bridget’s determination to accept, he had started to see advantages in taking the game to them, and daring to end it with a knock-out. It might take Gemma years to forgive him, but it would not be her style to say anything to Bridget, and Paul would quickly forget that there had ever been any ill-will.

  Armed with such thoughts, Matthew followed the dark-suited functionary across the cavernous Great Chamber towards the smaller room where Lord and Lady Carnforth were dining with their guests. Through an unassuming Tudor arch (ideal for a tracking shot revealing red-robed Wolsey and rising Master Cromwell pondering the king’s ‘great matter’), Matthew came upon his fellow guests: a company blending traditional and contemporary specimens. Gemma in figure-hugging lurex beside a middle-aged man with a face as urbane as a Reynold’s portrait, to his right an elegant female sporting a brace of diamond clips. Eleanor was next to a languid young Orsino in a dinner jacket (strong family resemblance; perhaps her brother?). Bridget sat between Paul and a youth with shoulder length hair and a beige Wild West jacket. The only empty chair was opposite Gemma’s.

  From her end of the table Eleanor looked up as Paul rose to greet his friend. The recent spate of articles provoked by Matthew’s television series on the perils of pollution had made her slightly uneasy about meeting such a firebrand. Nor had she been unimpressed to learn that Matthew had been the director of Paul’s most ambitious undergraduate production – a musical review she had seen as a schoolgirl during its brief West End transfer. She was therefore nonplussed that he seemed so like all the other vaguely classless intellectual types she had met: awkward, badly dressed, and reluctant to take part in general conversation. She felt that, like Gemma, he would consider her life a joke but never come straight out with it.

  Though sitting next to her cousin, Jonathan, who always amused her – as did her uncle, Bruno Lindsay, further up the table – Eleanor was not happy. Tomorrow’s entertainments, originally dreamed-up to involve her, had soon been reclaimed as Paul’s private preserve. The only ‘involvement’ she looked like getting was acting as nominal hostess on the night. Nor did she care for the emphasis he was putting on ‘spontaneity’ and ‘surprise’. To have spelled out everything in advance, he had insisted, would have been to wreck her appreciation of the effects he was after. Committed to a stance of easy-going tolerance, Eleanor thought it too late in the day to change her tune.

  That there would be pop music tomorrow evening was not in doubt, since Roy (of the cottage louts) had been invited down early by Paul, and was even now sitting next to Matthew’s blue-stocking wife. Eleanor thought Paul insensitive to have asked him to stay, since he obviously felt out of place.

  In spite of her uneasiness, dinner proceeded amicably until shortly after the main course had been served. Veronica Markham, whose husband owned almost as much of the county as Paul, seemed suddenly to have tumbled to the fact that Roy was in some way indebted to Paul.

  ‘But how marvellous,’ she cooed, ‘do many rich people buy pop stars these days?’

  ‘You mean like pictures and racehorses?’ enquired Paul.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ replied Veronica mischievously. ‘I’ve met people with half-shares in bull-fighters.’

  ‘Top half or bottom?’ asked Roy abruptly, surprising Eleanor not so much because he had finally said something, but because of the vitriolic tone he had given his joke.

  Affecting not to have heard, Veronica remarked blandly to Paul, ‘Isn’t pop rather a speculative field?’

  Paul lowered his fork. ‘One record in twenty-five leaves a few ripples. About the same proportion of those makes a splash.’

  ‘My God,’ laughed Veronica, ‘it makes betting on the National look a certainty.’

  ‘Not quite the same game,’ he murmured.

  ‘For starters the horses can talk,’ commented Roy, hacking at his duck.

  Eleanor heard her cousin laugh appreciatively. ‘So you’re smart and the others aren’t?’

  ‘He’s also got more talent than most singers dream about,’ said Gemma, evidently mistaking Jonathan’s friendly remark for sarcasm.

  When Eleanor’s uncle asked a harmless question about the importance of advertising, she was astonished to see the effect on Roy.

  ‘Think you can tell Paul anything about image and hype?’

  ‘Heavens no,’ soothed Bruno, glancing at Eleanor with a comical ‘what on earth have I done?’ expression. ‘I’m sure Paul’s a tremendous expert.’

  For some unfathomable reason, Roy seemed even angrier, and Eleanor only realized after several acid exchanges that the importance of publicity was a sore subject between Paul and himself. After this skirmish, an awkward silence, until Roy continued, with jaunty ill-humour, ‘Course Paul’s got a great way of putting it over. “You wanna be a minor cult, Roy? Okay; why not join the Methodists or the Bach Choir? Very tasteful. No chicks choking, no nurses running round like it’s World War One, no tits hanging out …”’

  Paul arched an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think I ever put it like that.’

  To Eleanor’s embarrassment, Roy’s next remarks seemed primarily addressed to her, as if he expected her to act as referee. ‘Pop gets straight to the masses or forget it, he reckons. Says I’ve been suckered by elitist crap … stuff written for art school drop-outs who get their ego-kicks raving about minority bands.’

  ‘If you don’t agree with him,’ she began shakily, ‘I don’t see why you have to take any notice.’

  He looked at her, as if pitying her lack of information. ‘Cos when Gemma told him Exodus was up for grabs, he bought in big enough to call plentya shots.’

  ‘There must have been lots of other people you could go to,’ she objected, exasperated with herself for not having pressed Paul to be specific about his investment in the company Roy kept rabbiting on about. Roy was grinning sadly.

  ‘Two disaster discs … a coupla years still to go on me old contract. You think I could afford to say stuff it, when Gemma tells me she’s in deep with a rich swinger who’s just gobbled a hunk of big-time management?’

  Paul clapped ironically. ‘Obviously it’s flattering to think one’s the victim of a conspiracy.’

  Roy jerked his head in Gemma’s direction. ‘The way you two tied me up, it’s a sodding miracle I can walk.’

  ‘You still seem fairly lively,’ laughed Paul. What alarmed Eleanor more than the extent of his involvement with Roy was the role Gemma was playing.

  In answer to a remark of Bruno’s about pop music seeming an odd field for aristocratic patronage, Paul said it was too late in the day to start commissioning murals or asking hermits to sit in grottoes. Then Roy started mimicking again.

  ‘You see culturally speaking, Roy old fig, the baby’s gone with the bathwater, so unless one likes pretending nothing’s happened, one might as well have some fun with the sludge round the rim.’

  Irritated by approving laughter from Gemma, Eleanor said to her husband, ‘I can’t believe you ever said anything that cynical.’

  Paul looked hurt. ‘Then tell me what a poet or a pianist would have to do to grab half the column-inches a middling pop star gets when he chucks his girl friend. Shoot the Prime Minister?’

  ‘I’m sure poets don’t want that kind of publicity,’ Eleanor replied curtly.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ laughed Gemma. ‘Course they haven’t a hope. People don’t want to be different any more; they want to be part of things; shared thoughts, shared looks. Mods, rockers, hippies …’

  ‘Totally pathetic,’ remarked Eleanor, determined to remove Gemma’s knowing smile. ‘All that tripe about “doing their own thing”, which is supposed to mean being wonderfully original, but really means fooling around like all the other hippies.’

  Gemma nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s what the poor old poets are up against.’

  Sure she was being made fun of, Eleanor could not think of a suitable answer. Roy was grinning at her. ‘I’ll tellya what Gemma reckons. You can forget originality if you want to get things across these days. Gotta pick the right popular cliché and turn it inside out.’ He appealed to Gemma meekly, ‘Got that right, did I?’

  Delighted to see Gemma’s smile fade, Eleanor also enjoyed the way Roy was gnawing at a bone, using a pose of loutishness to ridicule the argument he had just repeated. His face, which had struck Eleanor as weaselish to start with, now seemed more striking – intelligent, but tough too (this perhaps due to a slightly crooked nose, superimposed on otherwise delicate features).

  ‘So what is the right cliché?’ asked Matthew, suddenly coming to life.

  ‘Progressive pop,’ moaned Roy, as if it was too obvious to need stating. ‘In fact any kinda music that isn’t out to rip-off the broiler-chicks.’

  Paul smiled bravely. ‘And I’m cynical.’ He tut-tutted sadly. ‘Millions of young girls growing up, and what are they? Broiler-chicks, band-aids. Not enough for Roy to colour all their emotional experiences.’ He shook his head. ‘Nope, he wants to be one of rock’s philosophers. Preaching love, equality, and getting together with Biafra; then blasting off in his little ole jet, in time to make-out with a few starlets before dinner with his tax lawyer.’

  ‘Protest wasn’t just a rip-off,’ Roy insisted, looking flushed and angry.

  Paul said, with a calmness, which would have made Eleanor scream in Roy’s position, ‘It still grossed more in two years than all the aid to India in twenty.’ He turned to Matthew. ‘That’s just one of the paradoxes your film can look at.’

  Roy choked on a mouthful of wine. ‘You never said nothing about a film …’

  Paul gazed at him steadily. ‘That was rather absent-minded of me.’

  ‘Like hell,’ spluttered Roy, still coughing. He appealed to Matthew, ‘Is this straight up? Are you a TV director?’ Matthew nodded. Roy rounded on Paul. ‘Big joke, never telling me a fucking thing.’

  An embarrassed stirring in the silence that followed. Veronica said icily, ‘I’m not surprised, if that’s how you react.’

  A moment later Eleanor realized that Roy was not the only angry person at the table. Bridget looked accusingly at Matthew. ‘When I said you ought to go ahead with Paul’s idea, you told me you’d never dream of …’

  Matthew coughed uneasily. ‘I’m afraid Paul and Gemma did, uh, rather jump to conclusions.’

  This time Gemma reacted as extravagantly as Roy moments earlier. ‘You said it was a formality,’ she cried, ‘only three days ago.’

  Matthew studied his plate. ‘I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘Do we get to know why?’ hissed Gemma, leaning towards him like a silver snake.

  ‘I think later might be better.’

  ‘Thank God someone’s got some sense,’ declared Veronica.

  ‘Is it because of his dismal performance?’ demanded Gemma, stabbing her fork in Roy’s direction.

  Matthew shook his head emphatically. ‘Not in the least … I found everything he said very interesting. No. I think I went off it some time ago.’ His placid delivery left Eleanor unprepared for Gemma’s sudden torrent of nursery abuse; Matthew was sly, deceitful, a pig, and several other things she could not quite catch. As Roy started to snicker, Gemma flung down her napkin and left the room.

  With Bridget looking at her husband as though she would like to dismember him; Paul speechless for the first time Eleanor could remember; and Roy’s laughter at last erupting, Eleanor found herself laughing too, though she could not imagine why. Most of what she had heard had been far from reassuring.

  4

  Believing his marriage founded in general upon honesty and trust (and knowing there was hardly a lie he wouldn’t use to avoid telling Bridget about his recent dealings with Gemma), Matthew rarely wasted time trying to resolve these contradictions. In the library next morning, he was sitting leafing through the comprehensive range of newspapers and magazines set out in overlapping rows on the large table in the centre of the room, when Bridget came in. She walked by without a word, and stood with her back to him, gazing out of the window. Matthew had no difficulty imagining the brooding look her angular features would wear. As Paul had once said, consumptive pallor and coppery hair were great advantages in the Pre-Raphaelite wronged and haunted league.

  In their bedroom the night before, Matthew had explained away Gemma’s fury as thwarted egotism. For anyone so infatuated with her persuasive powers, the mildest disappointment would seem an intolerable rebuff. Charged directly with seeing her on the sly, Matthew had played his ace. If he was, why would he have risked saying anything she might construe as public humiliation? Bridget had switched her attack. How could he have had the gall to accept Paul’s invitation, knowing he meant to spit on the man’s pet project the moment he arrived?

  Glancing at her hunched shoulders, Matthew knew he would be in for a frosty weekend unless he persuaded her that his attitude to Paul’s plans owed nothing to pride, envy, or morbid fears about his influence. No easy matter, since Bridget’s dissatisfaction with teaching work, and her desire to exchange their relaxingly scruffy flat for something more elegant, made Paul’s prediction of a film-linked cash bonanza particularly welcome. Somehow Matthew would have to convince her that nothing would ever cajole him into making the brand of living soap opera Paul seemed to have in mind.

  ‘Listen, love,’ he murmured, coming up to her, ‘Paul’s suggesting something very tricky. He wants to chart a young hopeful’s rise to fame, while the process is actually going on. That’s not like retracing an established singer’s steps to stardom.’

  ‘So?’ she retorted flicking a wisp of hair away from her eyes.

  ‘So the filming has to take place at invervals over a longish period.’ He tried an encouraging smile. ‘But when exactly do we film Roy?’ He gave her time to see the problem. ‘In practice, when Paul phones me to say he’s set-up some particular event for the cameras.’

  ‘You’ll be doing some setting-up too, won’t you?’

  Matthew sighed. ‘I can’t choose what sort of record company to approach; can’t have publicity ideas; can’t influence the management in any way … whereas Paul obviously can.’ He frowned. ‘So Paul’s script takes over, and Roy conforms or goes.’

  ‘It’s the same for most stars, surely? Time someone made a truthful film about it.’

  ‘Truthful? The very fact of a film being made will mean breaks he wouldn’t otherwise have got near to.’

  ‘Lucky him.’

  ‘Oh, sure. The idealistic lad who’s turned into a money-grubbing monster.’