Free Carnforth's Creation by Tim Jeal Page A

safe.’
    Hands on hips, in her girlish tennis slip, she stared back implacably. ‘Perhaps an ordinary life is worth playing safe for.’
    ‘And you live an ordinary life?’ he gasped, moving towards the base line.
    Later, after swimming, Eleanor sat on the springboard sipping a large Pimms, her long legs in the water. Paul swam to the steps and sat near her. After a silence he said conversationally , ‘If aristocratic tastes still ruled the roost, that’swhere the challenge would be … but mass tastes make the running now.’
    ‘Not for me,’ Eleanor replied, fishing a strawberry from her glass and dropping it in her mouth.
    Paul forced a smile. ‘Hidden away you certainly are, but you’re still living in the same age as the rest of us.’
    ‘I ride, garden, play tennis, swim,’ she murmured, stirring the water with a foot. ‘There’s this for breakfast, that for dinner, people to stay … What difference does the “age” make to that?’
    ‘Not a scrap if you shut your eyes whenever you leave the estate.’
    She got up and looked down at him. ‘You know the joke about the man who needed glasses, but kept saying books weren’t printed like they used to be?’ She sipped her drink. ‘That’s you, Paul. Things have to be the way you see them …’ She met his eyes. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see your way, my love. I hate pop; don’t like the influence you want to have. I’m scared you see so much of Gemma. But what happened the other evening is enough to tell me how little I’d enjoy joining in.’
    He stared at the water. ‘Are you asking me to abandon everything?’
    ‘And resent me all the time?’
    ‘So what’s the answer?’ he asked gently.
    She took off her bathing hat and shook out her long black hair. ‘That’s your pigeon, Paul.’
    ‘And you’ll suffer in silence?’
    ‘That depends.’
    ‘On what?’
    Eleanor shrugged. ‘What you get up to, I suppose … That’s not for me to decide.’
    Before they left the changing hut, Paul made an injudiciously lighthearted remark about being glad she had not laid down a code of conduct. The vehemence of her answer gave him a fair idea what to expect were she one day to decide her ‘trust’ was being abused.

6
    In the weeks following his brief stay at Castle Delvaux, Matthew Nairn found it convenient to let Bridget believe him ready to collaborate with Paul because eager to cancel out the sense of obligation the man’s generosity had placed him under. In reality Matthew had come to see the film less as an imposition than as an unlooked-for opportunity to get even with Paul for making his life a nightmare. Not that this would be easy.
    Matthew did not intend to try to persuade Paul to appear in sequences that could be twisted to his disadvantage. Control over the film would not be won by malicious direction or cutting-room tricks; quite simply, it would go to whichever one of them could win a decisive influence over Roy.
    By late August Matthew had finished his only work in progress: a film on alternative resources – solar energy, wind and wave power, synthetic protein production, and so forth. Because his series on pollution had attracted many official brickbats, he had been obliged to mount an ‘objective’ twenty minute studio discussion, for screening immediately after transmission of his new documentary. Knowing what this would do to the film’s impact, his mood was not benign as he sat in the studio gallery, running through the routine sequence of opening shots with his cameramen and vision-mixer .
    During the brief pause before the recording, while the contributors were in make-up, Matthew was shocked to hear familiar voices behind him. Somehow Paul and Gemma had wangled their way past half-a-dozen ‘No Entry’ signs and as many commissionaires. Ever since his decision to make their project his next, they had subjected him to numerous unannounced visits. Ignoring them, he went on setting-up: thezoom on the opening wide shot