Jeal Carnforth's Creation

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30398-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 258 Seiten

Tim Jeal's sixth novel, first published in 1983, recreates the frenetic Britain of the 1960s and tells an enthralling tale of three individuals bound together by a risky experiment conducted amid the pop-cultural ferment of the era. Paul Carnforth is young, wealthy, titled, and alive to the opportunities of his times. 'You don't have to like pop to find it interesting', he tells his sceptical wife. Paul decides to fashion a pop star of his own - as a 'moral swipe', also proof of his individual brilliance. But the creation will soon threaten to outgrow his creator. 'Pop music, working class heroes, record companies, music publishers and stately homes as settings for orgiastic settings, it's all here ... Mr Jeal writes comedy very well.' Irish Times 'Tim Jeal is a writer very much out of the ordinary - trenchant, elegant, subtle.' Sunday Telegraph

Tim Jeal is an acclaimed novelist and biographer, whose Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer was published by Faber in 2007 and was a BBC Radio Four 'Book of the Week'. Stanley was named Sunday Times Biography of the Year, and, in the US, won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography for 2007. Tim's memoir Swimming with my Father was published by Faber in 2004 and was also a BBC Radio Four 'Book of the Week' and was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize for autobiography. In September 2011 Faber will publish Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure, which, thanks to much original research, will shed fascinating new light on the 'Search for the Nile' and its colonial consequences. In 1973 Tim Jeal's Livingstone (1973) was selected as a 'Notable Book of the Year' by the New York Times Book Review and one of the 'Best and Brightest of the Year' by the Washington Post Book World.Livingstone formed the basis for a BBC TV documentary and a film for the Discovery Channel. It has never been out of print. Nor has Tim Jeal's Baden-Powell (1989), which was a 'Notable Book of the Year', and was chosen by Channel 4 for its 'Secret Lives' strand. In 1975 Tim was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jeal, Tim

Leseproben

1

When Eleanor decided to accept Paul Carnforth’s proposal, she found her parents’ opposition infuriating. They had always wanted a ‘brilliant’ marriage for her, and now, on the verge of getting one, they were objecting to a man who was not only a marquess, but one rich enough to have nothing in common with popular mythology’s typical peer, clutching his tin cash box, while coach-loads trailed dripping ice-creams past tables laid for fantasy feasts.

Adoring Paul as she did, Eleanor ridiculed her father’s pessimistic forecast that Paul would always be something of a misfit. The very facts he considered proof of this, in her opinion merely underlined Paul’s adaptability. Disinherited by his father, for openly siding with his mother at the time of their cruelly publicized divorce, Eleanor had thought it greatly to Paul’s credit that he had been spirited enough, while still at Eton, to taunt rich young peers-to-be with jibes about their predictable fates as dreary business lords or obsolete rural buffoons. At Oxford he had gone on making a virtue of necessity – choosing for his closest friends middle class boys with ambitions in fields like journalism and broadcasting, rather than banking or bloodstock. Yet from the way her parents talked, Paul might almost have rejected his own class as a matter of deliberate choice.

At times her parents came close to implying that the heart attack which had unexpectedly removed Paul’s father – making him the direct heir of his octogenarian grandfather – had been at best a mixed blessing. Perhaps it was a little ironic that the family fortune should have come winging back just when Paul had convinced himself he would do very well without it, but Eleanor still thought her father misguided to read so much into the failure of Paul’s new friends to come to terms with his wealth. Seven years into the Sixties, Paul might in any case have been sucked into the maelstrom of London’s à la “Mod” trend-setting community. Plenty of other young peers had been, without Paul’s excuse of reacting to an astonishing change.

Eleanor shared her parents’ incredulity at the amount of publicity recently lavished on models, photographers, and semi-literate singers, but she saw nothing particularly reprehensible about Paul’s name appearing in gossip columns largely devoted to their goings-on. Believing that few reputations were wholly undeserved, her father tended to credit much of what he read about Paul’s ‘womanizing’. Eleanor told him it was absurd to expect any bachelor with Paul’s advantages to turn down all the propositions that were bound to come his way.

But, in the end, the justice or injustice of remarks about his past did not seem crucial. Eleanor had a simple and effective answer to all criticisms. Paul would never have asked her to marry him, unless already determined to change his way of life.

*

On a fine April morning, eight months after her wedding day, Eleanor was at Castle Delvaux discussing with her head gardener how best to regenerate the Jacobean knot garden. Should the gaps between the interlocking bushes be filled with herbs or with brick-dust for greater contrast? Paul’s interest in such matters was less marked, but Eleanor was delighted by his adaptation to country life. Before marrying her, he had spent most of his time in London, apparently considering Delvaux little use to him except as a setting for parties. Now he only left it for three or four days a month when his presence was required by his legal and financial advisers, who were still grappling, five years after his grandfather’s death, with the complicated arrangements framed to ease payment of massive death duties. He was in town today, and as usual Eleanor was impatient for his return.

Being sure that Paul would excel in anything he set his hand to, the moment he set his hand to anything, Eleanor was not worried that he seemed no closer to a career. She was still enjoying their protracted honeymoon too much to want to hurry him. Since many of his memories of Castle Delvaux were over-shadowed by his parents’ troubles, he would need time to regain his sense of belonging. By hunting with her, pottering in the gardens, and browsing in the library, he was surely pursuing the course most likely to heal old wounds. Already it seemed wonderfully clear to Eleanor that her father’s warnings had been alarmist nonsense.

As she caught sight of the gatehouse, framed by two of the tallest and most enigmatic yews in the topiary repertoire, Eleanor felt a surge of happiness. As a girl her first glimpse of the stone bridge across the moat had summoned up images of noblemen in feathered hats, riding out with hawks on their wrists, and a crowd of liveried retainers scampering after their richly caparisoned horses. The place still bemused her. How could it contrive to be at once severe, yet homely? How combine palatial size with unassuming domesticity? Yet Delvaux did both with ease; its mellow brickwork softening the starkness of crenellated walls and towers, its gentle Dutch gables and Tudor windows setting a smile on a fortress once mistrustfully closed against the outside world.

Though well aware that snobbish dissatisfaction with her own antecedents had once increased her interest in both house and occupants, Eleanor felt unrepentant. Her father was probably right that the peerage had long ago become a thinly disguised plutocracy, but that, in her view, only set apart a family like Paul’s. Their first titles had been conferred by Henry VII as reparation for sufferings at the hands of Richard III, and Delvaux itself had been bought by the second Earl of Carnforth in 1609. Although no longer dismayed that she had been born ‘her ladyship’ only because, seventy years ago, her great-grandfather had given to Conservative party funds enough of a fortune made in tin to net a peerage, Eleanor had not become so down-to-earth that her new home and title gave her anything less than immense pleasure.

As she left the Topiary Garden and entered the broad Statue Walk, one of many eighteenth century additions to the gardens, Eleanor was suddenly faced with an astonishing sight: Mr Hankin, the butler, hurrying towards her at a speed most unsuited to his years. Since she could not recall him ever coming into the gardens with a message for her (such tasks usually being delegated to one of the housemaids), she was alarmed long before learning that a police officer was waiting to speak to her in the South Parlour.

Standing a little self-consciously beside the powerful torso of a caryatid, bearing half the weight of the marble chimneypiece, Sergeant Andrews was soon regaling her with a description of a brawl that had taken place outside the village hall in nearby Frimpton on the evening of the weekly ‘hop’. Already confused, she could not help laughing, when given gratuitously irrelevant information about the four worst offenders being members of a ‘group’ that had ‘stood in for a local band’.

‘I’m sure this is very interesting, sergeant, but how can it possibly concern me?’

The policeman stopped admiring the array of swords and daggers above the doorway, and explained that one of the young men had given the police an address on the estate. Since Lord Carnforth’s agent had been unable to deny or confirm this, Sergeant Andrews wondered whether Lady Carnforth or his lordship could help him.

About to demand whether it were likely that her husband would rent or lend property to young hoodlums, Eleanor hesitated. Two weeks ago Paul had mentioned, very much en passant, that he intended to allow some musicians the use of one of the half-dozen unoccupied tied-cottages. Since she had then been preoccupied with the logistics of a house party, Eleanor had not thought to enquire what manner of musicians they might be. The cottage in question was tucked away in the remotest corner of the home farm, and she had not anticipated having anything to do with these temporary occupants.

Finding it hard to accept the transformation of people she had vaguely supposed to be serious instrumentalists with cellos and violas, into a quartet of guitar-twanging louts, Eleanor asked edgily, ‘Did you say they were fighting with the band, or playing in it?’

‘They’re members of a pop group. Lady Carnforth.’

Even in her distressed condition Eleanor noticed the emphasis he gave the words ‘pop group’, as though she might never have heard of such a thing. She now recalled Paul letting slip that his ‘musicians’ needed seclusion to prepare themselves for some kind of performance. Could this have been said to stop her asking them to the house? Though shaken that Paul seemed to have been keeping things from her, she managed to sound calm as she asked the sergeant why the young men had been fighting.

‘An argument about a girl. She’d been going steady … regularly involved with a lad in the village. Quite often happens when visiting groups play. The extra glamour, you see.’

‘I don’t come from Mars,’ she remarked tartly. ‘Are you charging them?’

‘I’d like to know if they’re trespassing on your property.’

‘The answer to that,’ she replied, ‘is … I’ll have to let you know.’

Half-an-hour later Eleanor was hurrying into the stable yard to see whether Oliver, her favourite hunter, had been tacked-up. April was normally a time of year she enjoyed, but on this fresh morning neither the swiftly moving clouds, nor the blur of misty green among the branches, caught her eye....