Make me a Star (The Silver Bridle Book 1)

by Caroline Akrill

  I wanted to be ready. Everything had to be tidily arranged. In every possible way I felt I had to be prepared. And so, with a deep sense of destiny, akin to that of a dying man, I began to set my affairs in order. I took all my dirty washing to the launderette.

  I sorted my clean, but crumpled, clothes. I rolled each item of dancewear and stowed it in my drawstring bag. I zipped my fencing gear into its unwieldy canvas carrying case with my foil and visor. I folded my everyday clothes and put them into my holdall. My forty-three text books (Voice and the Actor, The Actor and his Body, A Concise History of the Theatre, and endless titles by Stanislavsky, Wesker, Brecht, all of them required reading for drama students) I stacked into portable piles and tied each with string. They sat in the middle of the floor, like effects of the deceased, forlornly awaiting my fate.

  I cleaned out my room from corner to corner. As a last resort I scrubbed the inside of my cosmetic bag clean of lipstick and mascara smears. I had no way of knowing whether I should depart from Henry Irving in glory or ignominy, but neither would find me unprepared.

  On the evening before the film test, when there was no longer anything left to prepare, I sat on my tidy bed in my tidy room, and thought about Richard.

  Richard was not tidy. I had said unfair and wounding things to him and now there was bad feeling between us. It did not feel right. It seemed to me that I had done the right thing in the wrong way, that if I had to do the sensible thing and end it, then I should have made it a clean break. Regret would have been in keeping. Sorrow would have been permissible in the face of such finality. But not this untidy parting with frayed ends of hurt, resentment and remorse left dangling. No, I decided, it could not be left like this, I could not afford to leave anything unresolved. If everything was to be tidy, then that included Richard. I wanted all the signs to be prophetic. I got up from my tidy bed, took some coins from my purse, and went downstairs to the pay-phone.

  Mercifully, Henry Irving was deserted. Mickey was away on a three-day assignment for a mail-order catalogue, Emma was at her singing lesson. The fencing partners were at rehearsals. It was Lancelot’s evening for late-night shopping; I had seen him leave Henry Irving earlier hung with shoulder bags, wearing a jump-suit striped in a zebra pattern accessorized by a brass ear hoop the size of a curtain ring.

  When I picked up the receiver my courage almost failed me. Perhaps Richard would refuse to speak to me. Perhaps he would pretend to be out. I looked at my watch. Seven forty-five. Perhaps he was out – with Marcia Cunningham. I forced a fifty pence piece into the slot and dialled his home number.

  “Wallingford 273.” Richard’s voice.

  “Richard, it’s me, Grace.”

  A silence. Then, “Grace, this is an honour.” The tone was icily polite.

  It was difficult to know how to begin. After all, I was not wanting to resume the relationship. I had not telephoned in order to beg. I wanted only to apologize. It ought to be easy.

  “I suppose you are ringing to tell me you’ve landed a starring role?”

  The sarcasm rankled.

  I had intended to launch straight into apology, but – “Actually, I have,” I said. “Actually, I’ve been chosen to play the female lead in a new Tom Silver television serial. I felt I had to ring you with the news. I knew how pleased you would be.”

  Two could be sarcastic.

  “How very nice for you.” Richard’s voice was frosty. In case I imagined that he considered I had achieved anything remotely commendable, he added in a biting tone, “After all this time.”

  I felt myself becoming hot. This was not what I had intended at all. I had not telephoned in order to score points. I just wanted to leave things tidy. “Richard,” I said, “you know me. Sometimes I’m hasty. Often I speak before I think. On top of that, I’ve never found it easy to apologize.”

  Ricard was not about to make it easier. There was another, more prolonged, silence.

  “But now I want to apologize for what I said to you the other day. It wasn’t fair. Not only that; it wasn’t true.”

  “But it showed how you felt nevertheless. And you probably did me a favour in the long run because at least I now know exactly where I stand. I had not realised,” Richard Egan said in a cold voice, “how much you despised me.”

  “Oh Richard, I don’t despise you,” I said. “You must know that I don’t. How could I? I just hit out at you because you happened to ring when I was having a bad time; I’d had a terrible weekend at home, full of fights and recriminations, and the television part was very much in the balance. I was anxious and frustrated and the people I cared most about seemed to be against me at a time when I badly needed their support – surely you can understand that?”

  There was a further silence whilst Richard considered this. “Yes,” he said finally and, it seemed, reluctantly. “Yes, I can understand it.”

  The money ran out. Heartened, I forced another fifty pence into Henry Irving’s pay-phone. In an effort to lighten the atmosphere I said, “I have to learn to ride for this part. There’s a horse in the story.”

  “A horse?”

  “I’m afraid so. I play a girl who falls in love with a horse she sees in her dreams and then finds him in real life.”

  “Hrmmm.” Richard sounded less than impressed.

  “I realize it sounds a bit extreme, but it won’t be. Not the way Tom Silver will write it. He’s absolutely brilliant.”

  “He sounds as if he needs to be. You seem to have a lot of faith in Tom Silver.”

  “In this business you need to have faith. Sometimes it’s all you have got.” Ziggy’s words.

  “So where are you going to learn to ride?”

  “At a stables near Hyde Park. I can’t afford to pay for lessons because they’re very expensive, but they’ve said I can work in the yard in exchange for rides.”

  “Won’t the television company pay?”

  “Er… the fact is, they don’t actually know I can’t ride.”

  “You mean you bluffed your way into it?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, well,” Richard said in a thoughtful tone as if he must now re-evaluate me as a person capable of such deception. “You know, I’ve often thought I should take up riding again. You may not remember, but in my youth I was the leading light of the Wallingford Branch of the Pony Club.”

  Typical. “But you would have been, wouldn’t you.” The retort was on my lips before I realized it. “Simply because your father bought you the best and most expensive ponies.”

  “Ah,” said Richard in an I-might–have-known-it-couldn’t-last manner.

  “But then why not?” I reminded myself I had to keep things tidy. “I suppose a good pony costs as much to keep as an inferior one.”

  “But good ponies do not necessarily make good riders,” Richard said in a dry tone, “as you will soon discover when you are let loose in Hyde Park.”

  Had the ice thawed sufficiently for us to part on good terms? I thought it worth a try. “Richard,” I began, “about our relationship.”

  “After our last telephone conversation I rather doubted we had one,” he said.

  “Yes… I mean no; you see, that’s why I’m ringing…”

  To my annoyance, now the moment was opportune to explain why I had rung, I was reluctant to do so. I did not want to say it. It could not be because I wanted to have a relationship with Richard, I had already made my decision about that. As Emma Hall had said, as an aspiring actress I couldn’t afford him, and yet… “Oh Richard,” I said, “I can’t bear this bad feeling between us. Please can’t we be friends?”

  “What kind of friends, Grace?”

  “Well,” I said in an uncertain tone, not having really considered it, “just ordinary, common-or-garden sort of friends… Nothing special… You know – like you and Marcia Cunningham.”

  “I think we’ll keep Marcia Cunningham out of this.”

  “Quite,” I agreed.

  “Are you suggesti
ng, Grace, that you and I should just be casual acquaintances, that sort of thing?” he wanted to know.

  “Yes,” I said, relieved to have it said at last, grateful that he had understood despite the appallingly inept way I had explained it. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “No,” said Richard Egan flatly.

  “I’m sorry?” I wondered if I had misheard.

  “I said no, Grace. No. No, No, NO!”

  We seemed to have covered this ground somewhere before. “You mean you won’t stay friends with me?” I said, astonished.

  “Certainly not.”

  “You mean you won’t speak to me, you’ll ignore me, you’ll drive past me in the street without even a wave? You can’t be serious!”

  “I’m deadly serious,” he confirmed. “If we can’t be close friends, then I’m not prepared to be friends at all.”

  “Close friends?” I said.

  “Close friends,” he emphasized.

  Of course this was typical of Richard. If he couldn’t be top dog he wouldn’t play. He was spoiled. He always got what he wanted. I knew I should be firm. I knew I should do the right thing in the right way, point out that there would be no hard feelings on my side, that I would always be cordially disposed even if he was not.

  “How close is close,” I wondered.

  “Very close,” he said.

  I tried not to imagine the closeness of it. The fair hair falling over the smoothly handsome face, the beautiful, thick-lashed blue eyes looking deeply into mine.

  “I have to go for a film test tomorrow,” I told him, “but after that… if you like… I mean, only if you wanted me to… I could come home for a couple of days.”

  “Could you?” I thought I detected a trace of amusement in his voice.

  “Yes. I thought perhaps we could meet sometime… go for a drink or something.” Some spark of rebelliousness made me add, “You know: you, me and Marcia Cunningham…”

  I could almost hear the gritting of the perfectly white teeth. Yet Richard restrained himself. “When did you plan to travel down?” he enquired in a perfectly level voice.

  Again, I had not even thought of it. “I expect it would be Saturday morning,” I said. “I should probably catch the 11.15 from Victoria.”

  “In that case,” he said in a perfectly charming manner, “we could probably meet you at the station.”

  My heart plummeted. “We?” I said faintly.

  “I thought I might bring your mother,” he said.

  Despite the fact that everything was tidy, despite Ziggy’s assurances that the film test was nothing to get cooked about, I got off the bus at Whipps Common feeling sick with fright. Had I known what a crazy nightmare I was about to walk into, I might not have got off the bus at all.

  Whipps Common consisted of several acres of mown grass dotted with orderly clumps of trees. It was really more of a park, criss-crossed by tarmac paths, and liberally endowed with notices. NO LITTER. NO TRANSISTOR RADIOS. NO BALL GAMES. DOGS MUST BE KEPT UNDER CONTROL AT ALL TIMES.

  Parked near the duck pond (NO BATHING. NO POWER BOATS. NO FISHING.) was a motley collection of vehicles. As I approached, the door of a caravan opened and the head of the Casting Director appeared. “Come in, Grace Darling,” he hailed, “the boys are just grabbing a coffee before we start.”

  The ‘boys’ comprised Ted, the cameraman, who was grey-haired and wore ancient jeans, beaten-up suede shoes and a cardigan; Norm, the sound technician who, though barely out of his twenties, was almost bald but compensated for this slight of nature by the impossible tightness of his leather trousers, an extravagant excess of gold rings, madallions and bracelets, and the discreet use of eye-liner; Kevin, a location runner, who was nineteen, skinny, spotty and gormless; and another character, dark and lean and draped over a bench seat, who was introduced as ‘the handler’. I had never come across a handler before and regarded him with apprehension. He looked moody and impatient, with brooding, restless eyes, and whatever or whoever he was going to handle I hoped it would not be me.

  I had expected Tom Silver to be there and was made even more uneasy to see that he was not. I wondered why. After auditioning two hundred and twenty-seven females, surely he was sufficiently interested in his final choice to want to be present at the film test. “Where’s the writer?” I asked. “Isn’t he going to be here?”

  The Casting Director handed me a mug of uncompromisingly strong, syrupy coffee. “Nope. The writer’s too busy writing. He’s holed up in the country somewhere, finishing the script.”

  “Finishing the script? You mean our script? You mean it isn’t even finished yet?” Anxiety made my voice sharp.

  “It’s quite normal to start filming before we’ve got a complete script, you dear thing,” Norm informed me. “And we do have an insurance policy of sorts – writers have to give back their advance if they don’t come up with the goods.”

  “But what if he doesn’t come up with the goods?” I remembered the hibernation into the anorak, the firmly closed eyes, the unexpected decision to give me the part without hearing me read, the pirouette at the doors. None of these things indicated a stable, reliable temperament. “Would we still be paid?”

  “Paid?” Ted looked up at me in surprise. “Are you expecting to be paid? And anyway, why do we need a script? I thought the idea was to make it up as we went along.”

  “Of course you’ll be paid, Grace Darling,” the Casting Director reassured me. “You’re getting paid as from this minute; you can even put in a claim for the taxi fare.”

  “Taxi fare?” I asked. “What taxi fare? I didn’t come by taxi, I came by bus.”

  “The Star Arrived by Bus,” Ted said in a reflective tone. “That’s quite a good title for a film.”

  “Or a book,” Norm put in, “it’s a good title for a book.”

  I was not sure if I could handle this. Somehow, the film crew were not at all how I had expected them to be. I had imagined them tough, brisk, professional. Instead they appeared to be a bunch of amiable crackpots. Were they capable of carrying out a film test? Panic began to fill up my chest. I fought it down. “Where is the make-up artist?” I said in a strangled voice. “Has she arrived yet?”

  “We don’t need a make-up artist today,” the Casting Director said. “We have to see what you look like without paint.”

  “We never do much for outside location shots anyway,” Ted explained. “Natural light’s OK. It’s studio lighting that drains the colour out of your face.”

  I should have known that. The handler gave me a thin smile which could have been construed as pitying. I hated him. I averted my eyes. “Where is the co-star?” I demanded. “Or isn’t he coming either?”

  “Now hold on, Grace Darling,” the Casting Director said in a soothing tone, “we’re all present and correct, so let’s not get anxious.” He detached the mug from my fingers and put it in the sink. There was general upheaval as ‘the boys’ recognized the need for action and collected up their equipment which included a hand-held camera, which wore its own little fitted jacket. Kevin slapped a slate clapperboard on the table and began to write on it with chalk. TEST, he wrote with painfully slow deliberation, THE SILVER BRIDLE – TAKE ONE. Immediately my stomach twisted itself into a knot. Don’t panic, I said to myself, whatever you do, don’t lose control. Force yourself to stay calm. Relax your jaw, your neck, your shoulders. Take some slow, deep breaths. None of the self-addressed instructions helped at all.

  I followed the crew out of the caravan. I was stiff with fright. I moved like a robot. I knew I would not be able to act to save my life. I would have given anything to have had Ziggy’s abrasive, optimistic presence at my elbow. Instead I had Kevin. Outside the caravan he held his clapperboard at arm’s length and frowned at it. “Should it be bridle,” he wanted to know, “or is it bridal?” I hadn’t a clue.

  The Casting Director, still in his shirt-sleeves although there was a chill wind blowing across the common, took charge and began to issue
instructions. “As we’re taping the sound last,” he said to Norm, “you can drive.” He tossed him a bunch of keys.

  “What is he going to drive?” I asked Kevin nervously. “Are we going somewhere?”

  Kevin snapped his clapperboard in an experimental manner. “We’re doing tracking shots,” he informed me, “didn’t you know?”

  I did not know. Nor was I certain I knew what tracking shots were. I would have asked for more information, but before I could find the words we were all diverted by the arrival of a man on a bicycle. The man wore a blue uniform with a red strip down the leg and his peaked cap bore the legend PARK WARDEN. He wobbled towards us looking agitated, waving an arm to gain our attention.

  “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the Casting Director muttered, “what does he want?”

  The Park Warden applied his brakes and came to a perilously abrupt halt in front of us. “You can read, I suppose,” he said in an outraged voice. “You can understand what the sign says? Because it’s quite easy to understand, it’s perfectly plain. No cars on this common, it says, no cars, no caravans and no parking, and that means everybody.”

  “Now does it really,” Ted said in an interested voice. He lifted his camera on to his shoulder, trained it at the Park Warden, and squinted at him through the lens. “Because we thought it didn’t apply to us, didn’t we, Norm?”

  The Park Warden stiffened. He tried to ignore the attentions of the camera. He was rather too tall for his uniform which looked as though it had been tailored for someone else. His ankles stuck out from the trousers and his knobbly wrists were exposed by the sleeves. He had a long, aggrieved face and a clipped moustache. He took in Norm’s exotic appearance and narrowed his eyes. He dismounted from his bicycle and leaned it with deliberate care against a convenient tree. It was new, and furnished with both bell and hooter.