Make me a Star (The Silver Bridle Book 1)

by Caroline Akrill

  “Mother,” I said warningly, “don’t start…”

  “Soon you will have spent a year of your life without any sort of job. Is it pride that won’t allow you to admit that it’s hopeless? Why can’t you come home, take a secretarial course, and settle down in a proper job?” Angrily she took the head off a rose which was only just coming into flower. “If your father knew you were living in Finsbury Park with that peculiar landlord, spending your time hanging around Soho and living on Social Security, he would never rest in his grave.”

  I had listened to similar tirades many times and knew there was little point in retaliation. Nevertheless: “That isn’t quite fair,” I said, “and it isn’t quite true either. Father encouraged me to go to drama school. He believed I could make it and he wouldn’t have wanted me to give up without having a jolly good try. He paid for my training and I mean to give him some return for that. I owe it to him as well as to myself.” As there was no immediate response to this, I added resentfully, “Crouch End isn’t Finsbury Park anyway, it’s almost Muswell Hill.”

  My mother snipped off a few more deadheads in a resigned sort of way.

  “You have never really tried to understand me,” I complained. “You never stop trying to make me see your point of view, but you have never tried to see mine.”

  My mother closed her secateurs and snapped on the safety catch. She sighed.

  “You grumble at me because I don’t come home often enough and you grumble at me all the time when I do.”

  Mother pushed her way through the floribundas and emerged at my side. In a gesture which was regretful without being in any way apologetic, she handed me the rose she had beheaded by mistake. “I suppose that after all this time I ought to be able to accept that you are what you are,” she said.

  With the basket of deadheads we walked back across the lawn towards the cottage which had been my home for the whole of my life.

  “You never were an easy child to understand,” my mother said, “even as an infant.”

  “It’s too late for me to change now,” I replied.

  After supper, whilst Mother settled down with the nine o’clock news, I took Vigor for his evening walk. Vigor was a cross between a spaniel and a collie. He had only one eye, had lost half an ear, and limped. When my father died, Mother had visited a local dog pound to give a home to a stray just as Vigor was being dragged out of his pen towards a final, deadly injection. The dog pound usually managed to find homes for most of its canines, but nobody wanted a dog who had been born in the wild and had almost been reaped by a combine harvester. Vigor’s time had run out.

  Mother adopted him. By an extraordinary twist of fate, the very imperfections that might have sentenced him to death had at his eleventh hour been his salvation and Vigor, now fit and fully grown, had proved a marvellous companion. Familiarity rendered his Frankenstein looks more endearing than alarming.

  I strolled through the village with Vigor bounding ahead, past cottages where nobody bothered to draw their expensive lined curtains; where each interior was much the same as the next, displaying exposed beams, restored inglenook fireplaces, tasteful wall lights; with pretty bone china and old silver standing on good oak furniture; with heavy cut-glass decanters filled with spirits and the palest, driest sherry. Cottages belonging to respectable people, professional people, qualified, salaried and established people; the sort of people who had dishwashers and wine-racks in their kitchens and Volvos in their garages; people who had proper jobs.

  Past the Dog and Badger Inn I walked, where those same professional people were busy downing scotch and gins and tonics at the bar, barking with laughter over trivialities exchanged with acquaintances whose Jaguars and Range Rovers overflowed out of the car park and into the road, then on towards the Rectory and the quiet, secluded, unlit lane beside the church.

  It was at this point that Vigor and I were overtaken by a familiar bright red Porsche 924 whose driver suddenly applied his brakes and came to a halt in a dangerously abrupt manner accompanied by a protesting squeal from the tyres and a shower of displaced gravel.

  There was nowhere for me to hide, and in any case it was too late for that.

  Richard Egan jumped out of the car. “Grace!” he exclaimed in a furious voice. “What on earth are you doing here? You didn’t tell me, nobody told me you were expected this weekend!”

  “Obviously.” I directed a meaningful look towards the passenger seat. Marcia Cunningham gave me a cautious smile which I did not return. I had not wanted to meet Richard or indeed anyone from the village this weekend. I could no longer face their inevitable enquiries about my career. A career which had once seemed to be so assured and was now regarded as something pathetic, a disability even; ‘Hello Grace, how’s the acting?’ couched in a sympathetic tone as if it were shingles or arthritis. I had only agreed to come home to placate my mother, and now I was annoyed to find myself compromised.

  I would have walked on, but Richard positioned himself firmly in my path. “Why the hell didn’t you let me know you were coming?” he demanded. “If I’d known…”

  “If you’d known,” I said crossly, “we could have made a jolly threesome I suppose – you, me and Marcia Cunningham!”

  “Don’t be a fool. You know that isn’t what I meant.”

  “I don’t think I really care what you meant,” I said. “Let’s get this perfectly clear, Richard. You don’t have to apologize to me for being with Marcia, because you are perfectly entitled to be with whoever you like, perfectly!”

  “And let’s get this clear,” he said in a perfectly cold voice, “I am not apologizing.”

  “Good,” I snapped, “because there’s no need. I don’t care who you go out with.”

  “Then why are you so cross?”

  “I’m not cross!”

  “You are!”

  “I’m not!”

  Vigor came pounding back along the lane. “Excuse me,” I said politely, “I have to take my dog for a walk.”

  “Not yet,” Richard said firmly, “Not until we have sorted one or two things out.” He stretched out an arm and took my elbow in a vice-like grip.

  “Let me go, Richard,” I told him. “Let me go. Leave me alone.” I tried to pull away. Richard tightened his grip. “And anyway,” I reminded him, “there’s Marcia.”

  “Yes,” he agreed in a pleasant tone, “there’s always Marcia.” Marcia notwithstanding, he bundled me unceremoniously through the lych-gate and into the shadowy churchyard. Vigor pressed close. He knew Richard as a friend, but was now made wary by the uncertainty of the situation.

  “All right, Grace,” Richard said. “Let’s get a few things clear.” As usual he was casually, but immaculately dressed in corduroy trousers, a silk open-necked shirt, a cashmere jersey and a brown leather gilet. And as usual his thick, straight blond hair fell forward over his smoothly handsome face into his heavily lashed blue eyes. No wonder my mother thought him too good to lose. No wonder Marcia Cunningham fancied him. No wonder that, peeved and unsociable as I felt, still I allowed myself to be propelled into the churchyard among the ancient, leaning tombstones, beneath the black and sighing cypress trees.

  “Marcia Cunningham means nothing to me,” Richard declared in a furious voice, “nothing!”

  “Of course not!” I agreed. “That’s why she’s sitting in the passenger seat of your car.”

  “If you had condescended to let me know you were coming home this weekend, you know I wouldn’t have bothered with her,” he said angrily, “because you know, and I know, that we have an arrangement.” He moved closer to me, his hands on my shoulders, pushing me towards the church wall.

  “Really?” I said innocently. “What arrangement is that?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about!” My back came into contact with hard stone. Richard was very close now. His breath fanned my face. “Don’t think you can play about with me, Grace. You’ve known me a long time. You know I always get what I want.”


  “Nearly always,” I corrected him.

  Vigor growled.

  “That’s right, boy,” I said in an encouraging tone. “Kill!”

  “Why do you always have to be so difficult, Grace?” Richard’s eyes were fathomless pools edged with dark rushes. His mouth breathlessly near, seeking to fasten itself on mine.

  “Richard!” Marcia Cunningham’s voice called nervously from the lych-gate. “Richard, are you there?”

  Vigor launched himself in the direction of the voice giving tongue with enough volume to do justice to The Hound of the Baskervilles. There followed the unmistakeable sound of someone falling headlong into gravel. Marcia began to scream.

  “God Almighty!” Tight-lipped with exasperation, Richard plunged to the rescue across weathered slabs, rusting fleur-de-lis and hummocks of grass.

  I might have presumed God to be on my side as, under cover of the church wall, the darkness and the rescue and calming of Marcia Cunningham, I managed to grab Vigor by the scruff of his neck, dragged him out into the lane, and made for home. But Richard was not to be outwitted so easily. He bundled Marcia into the passenger seat and came after me in the car. I ran and Vigor ran, but we were no match for a Porsche 924.

  “I’d just like you to know that it’s this stupid acting nonsense that’s ruining our relationship!” Richard shouted out of his electronic window as I pounded grimly down the lane with Vigor loping lopsidedly at my side. “If only you’d admit it’s just a stupid waste of time!”

  “Shut up!” I shouted back. “Shut up and clear off and leave me alone!”

  “Give it up, Grace! Come back to Wallingford! For once in your life, see some sense!”

  “No!” I yelled. “No, no, no, NO!”

  Abruptly I slowed to a walk. Suddenly there seemed no point in running.

  “Grace,” Richard said, “is this really the way you want it?”

  Briefly our eyes met. “Richard, it’s the only way it can be,” I said.

  The red Porsche slipped away down the lane. I watched the rear lights fade. Finally they disappeared altogether.

  Vigor and I walked on, passing through the other side of Wallingford. On this side, the council houses were the elite. The scattered cottages improvidently constructed on land which bordered the brook and flooded every winter when the snows melted, were almost derelict. Their walls were cracked and patched with damp, their timbers rotting, their thatch long ago replaced with unsightly corrugated sheeting. Their overgrown gardens were dumping grounds for worn tyres, ancient cookers and rusting bicycles. In this part of Wallingford nobody left their curtains open at night. Every shrunken window was cloaked against prying eyes.

  Nobody cares to advertise the fact that they have nothing, I thought. When things don’t work out in the way you had hoped, when you can’t seem to make a success of things however hard you try, you don’t want people to know. You don’t come home. You don’t want anyone to ask about it. You don’t want to see anyone in case they ask. Not even those you love. Sometimes, I thought, especially those you love.

  Vigor and I walked the lonely lanes together. The dog with a limp, with only half an ear and one eye, who had been born in the wild and had almost been reaped by a combine harvester, and the girl whose future was not nearly so assured, who wanted desperately to be an actress but who had not worked for almost a year, who hung around Soho and lived on Social Security.

  Above us the sky was clear and full of stars. I had never prayed. Even as a child when church attendance had been compulsory, I had never closed my eyes and addressed myself to God. I had been more interested in the earthly ritual, the splendour of my surroundings, the purple and the gold. The rantings from the pulpit, the ceremonials before the altar had been just another theatrical performance to me. Nor could I pray now. But for the first time in my life, I wished that I could. It would have been very handy to have someone omnipotent on my side at a time when things were so frighteningly uncertain. God, I might have said, if you never do another thing for me, give me this part; make me a star…

  “Horse riding?” Ziggy said when I tackled him about it. “There’s nothing to it. You got something to put your feet in, you got leather reins to hold on to, and away you go. Horse riding’s a piece of cake.”

  Over the tile-topped table in the corner booth of the Café Marengo I looked at him doubtfully.

  One of Ziggy’s more successful models, Mickey Gillespie, was sitting with us, waiting to be paid for an assignment. Mickey’s chief asset, apart from her elongated and practically fleshless limbs, was her magnificent fall of deep chestnut hair which hung without a kink or a split end to the small of her back. “I had to do some pictures on a white horse in a poppy field once,” she commented, “and I didn’t think it was a piece of cake. I felt ever such a long way off the ground and I didn’t half rock about; if my horse had gone faster than a walk I’d have fallen straight off.”

  “That’s because you don’t have the balance, Kiddo,” Ziggy told her. “That’s because you didn’t do the stage school bit and missed out on the fencing and dancing and the kung fuey. Grace Darling’ll take to riding like a duck to water; all you got to do is think of the horse as a furry bicycle.”

  Even I, who had never mounted so much as a beach donkey, thought this an over-simplification, but any immediate objection was forestalled by the arrival of a tall, large-bosomed girl with startlingly blue eyes and thick white-blonde hair sliced to the level of her earlobes. The blue eyes appraised and dismissed Mickey and myself and came to rest on Ziggy, who was slouched in his habitual manner over half a cup of cold cappuccino, his enormous, thick silver identity bracelet dangling from his wrist, his black leather blouson with the appliqué silver star draped over his shoulder, and his bleached hair showing dark at the roots.

  “Are you Ziggy Stanislavski?” she wanted to know. “Because if you are, you did say eleven o’clock.”

  Ziggy looked up at her in a leisurely manner. “Eleven o’clock I did say,” he conceded. “You Emma Hall?”

  Emma Hall nodded. “Jerry Martin rang you about me. I want to get into West End musicals. Jerry said you would hear me.”

  “Sure I’ll hear you.” Ziggy leaned back against the plastic padding of the bench seat and gave the new arrival his fullest attention. His shrewd blue eyes travelled every inch of Emma Hall, taking in every detail of her appearance, the way she was built, the way she carried herself, registering her self-possessed manner and the way she put her clothes together, the image she presented. And yet I knew that the quality Ziggy valued most in his clients was invisible to the naked eye. What Ziggy was looking for was grit. “Acting is no baby park, Kiddo,” he had warned when I had first met him. “Maybe you got the looks, the talent, the training, but if you ain’t got the grit, you ain’t going nowhere. You got the red light before you got into first gear.”

  Now he looked approvingly at Emma Hall. “Well, you definitely got the right build for it, Blue Eyes,” he said. “You got the height, you got the shoulders, you got a well-developed chest. You certainly got room in there for resonating spaces.”

  Emma Hall did not know quite how to take this. “Oh yes,” she said. She frowned slightly.

  “You’re easy on the eye, you got style, you got presence,” Ziggy said. “On the West End stage you’d be a knockout.”

  “Do you really think so?” Emma Hall’s voice was hopeful but she was not completely taken in. I could see suspicion in the blue eyes and I was glad for her sake.

  “Only trouble is,” continued Ziggy, “twenty thousand others got the same, so you better have a voice in there, Blue Eyes, else you lost an oar before you got to the regatta.”

  “I can sing,” she said crossly, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “OK,” Ziggy said with equanimity, “let’s hear it.”

  The beautiful blue eyes widened. Emma Hall looked at Ziggy, then at Mickey and me, then she looked round at the scattering of patrons in the booths and on the counter stools of
the Café Marengo. “You mean now?” she asked in an incredulous tone. “Here?”

  Ziggy shrugged. “It’s not the Albert Hall, I grant you, but you got to start somewhere.”

  “Well, I know that,” she said, “but…”

  “Listen, Blue Eyes,” Ziggy said, “if you can’t trill a bar in front of half a dozen people, you can forget the West End.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t have the nerve,” Emma Hall snapped, “It’s just that I hardly expected…”

  “I don’t care what you expected,” Ziggy said. “You can expect what you like, there’s no charge for expectation, so you can either trill me a bar or toddle off back to Jerry Martin and tell him you flunked it.”

  Emma Hall glared at him. For a moment she looked as if she was about to leave. Then suddenly she straightened up, cleared her throat, took a breath and pitched into the audition song from ‘Stage Fright’ with enormous determination.

  She certainly had resonance chambers. I had never heard anything as loud in my life. Nor, to judge by his startled expression, had Ziggy. Emma Hall’s voice could have filled every last inch of the Albert Hall without the benefit of amplifying equipment.

  “I know

  Where I’m going

  Don’t think

  I’ll give up and go away,

  I’m here to stay!”

  All of the patrons seated on the counter stools turned as one man. Heads popped up over the top of the booths to see what was going on.

  “Pick me up and shake me

  Test me to my limits, break me,

  Make it as tough as you can make it –

  I can take it!”

  The proprietor of the Café Marengo, Mr Vincinelli, flew out from behind his espresso machine and gesticulated in a panic-stricken way behind the soloist. “Please, Mr Stanislavski,” he shouted, “you must have some consideration for my customers!”

  “You think

  I’m a loser-

  But nobody believed

  I’d even get this far;