Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Pippa said, shaking her head and looking at him very seriously. ‘I don’t think you’d have signed up for the RAF. I think you were always going to be an actor, Jerome Didier. And if I think that, I think you must always have thought so, too.’

  He watched her play croquet again, all afternoon. He would gladly have watched her all afternoon whatever she had been doing. He would have spent the entire afternoon watching her if she had just been sleeping, because the longer he watched her, the more certain he became that he loved her.

  He loved her intensity. The way she played croquet, it was as if she was playing for her life. Her involvement was total. During the game she hardly looked to where Jerome sat, she simply watched what her opponents were doing and how the game was progressing. Until it was her turn, she would adopt the same pose, sitting on her upturned mallet with her sun-tanned arms folded across her breasts, with her pretty head tilted forward. And then when it was her turn, she would hurry into position, having already worked out her ploy, line up her shot, stick her tongue firmly in one cheek, turn her left toe in and strike.

  Jerome was entranced, bewitched. Soon the summer afternoon began to fade slowly into evening, but still they played, and still he watched, and the longer he did so, the more he found to love about her. Besides her intensity, there was her air of innocence. She argued like a child guilelessly, wide-eyed, her face a study in bewilderment, as she wondered at the waywardness of some of Cecil’s shots, before giving a deep sigh and playing them out of trouble, at which point she would then turn and grin cheekily at Cecil, which would at once allay Cecil’s obvious and mounting anxiety. Poor Cecil, Jerome thought from the sidelines. He was so helpless and so utterly in Pippa’s thrall.

  She also had such a pretty laugh, Jerome noticed, an attribute lacking in so many of the girls he had taken out. It was a light laugh, infectious and full of merriment and good humour, and he loved that too, just as he loved the way she moved, with a natural athleticism and grace. From his position on the wall, Jerome decided lithe might be an appropriate description for her, as she prowled the croquet lawn, looking to see how best to make her shots, watching to see how the game developed.

  But most of all he loved the sudden way she would look round at him where he sat perched up on the brick wall. As the evening drew on, she would look up more and more, from under her tumbling head of dark brown hair, and she would smile at him carefully, shyly, as if more and more pleased to see that he was still there.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, as her opponents finally conceded defeat. ‘Let me walk you home.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she said, but only out of politeness, not to deter him. ‘It’s only one field.’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s only fifty yards,’ Jerome said, taking her arm. ‘I want to be with you until the moment I have to leave for London.’

  It was deep dusk as they walked along the edge of the hayfield, hand in hand. The woods alongside the path were full of the evensong of birds, and the faint clatter of small animals hurrying about their business before night fell. In the darkening sky above, where already the evening star shone brightly, birds gathered suddenly from nowhere, and formed into huge, dark squadrons, before wheeling and turning for home. Bobby added to the action by putting up a few rabbits which fled bob-tailing before him, deep into the safety of the thickets, and thence underground, while the air was thickening with the smell of wild columbine, and dog roses.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Pippa said after a long while.

  ‘That is because for once,’ Jerome replied, ‘even I can think of nothing to say. Because for once, everything is quite perfect.’

  Pippa’s mother was in the drawing room, sitting by the open french windows with a book in her lap, when they appeared from the garden.

  ‘This is Jerome Didier, Mother,’ Pippa told her, having long ago freed her hand from Jerome’s. ‘A friend of mine.’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Nicholls,’ Jerome said, his hands clasped before him and he half bowed to her, having quickly noticed how badly Pippa’s mother’s hands were affected by arthritis. ‘I’m glad to meet you.’

  ‘How do you do?’ Mrs Nicholls looked over the top of her reading glasses at Jerome. ‘You must be the actor.’

  ‘An actor,’ Jerome corrected her, tongue in cheek, pleased that Pippa had obviously spoken to her about him.

  ‘Do you mind if I make Jerome some sandwiches, Mother?’ Pippa asked. ‘He’s got to go back to London, and the croquet game went on rather long.’

  ‘Hasn’t Cecil’s mother been feeding him?’ her mother asked, returning to her book.

  ‘Good heavens, yes!’ Jerome laughed. ‘I’ve done most terribly well!’ He turned to Pippa his hands clasped behind his back, and now bent himself slightly towards her. ‘I really am not at all hungry,’ he told her in a stage whisper.

  ‘You will be by the time you get back to London,’ Pippa replied with complete certainty. ‘Cecil’s the most frightfully slow driver. It’ll probably be breakfast time by the time you get back to London. Will cheese be all right?’

  Jerome raised a hand in polite assent, and Pippa left quickly to make the sandwiches before, it seemed to Jerome, her mother could stop her. He then pulled a foot-stool up next to where Mrs Nicholls was sitting, and perched on it, having first removed the pile of old magazines from the top of it.

  ‘“Now the hungry lion roars”’ he said. ‘“And the wolf behowls the moon. Whilst the heavy ploughman snores, all with weary task fordone.”’

  Mrs Nicholls was forced to look up from her book.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said eventually, looking at him once again over the top of her spectacles. ‘Aren’t actors always away on tour?’

  ‘Not always,’ he replied, realizing at once what Mrs Nicholls was getting at, namely that because of the nature of their profession, actors were not the sort of people with whom mothers necessarily wished their daughters to consort.

  Which when he had taken in the photograph on the nearby table of a handsome young man in Hussars’ uniform whom he assumed to be Pippa’s elder brother, Jerome considered to be ironic to say the least.

  ‘We’re not always on tour,’ he smiled. ‘Not like these poor chaps.’ He held up the photograph. ‘We’re not like soldiers after all. They’re forever off “on tour”, aren’t they?’ he continued. ‘And even worse, poor blighters’ job is to fight wars. I mean we actors, we might often die the death, but we don’t actually get killed.’

  A fact, Jerome considered, carefully replacing the photograph, which really had to make anyone in the armed forces the most ineligible people of all.

  ‘When may I see you again?’

  He had been meaning to ask Pippa all the time they had sat in the kitchen eating their sandwiches, but he only dared ask now, as they stood by the gate at the bottom of her garden, which was now flooded by moonlight.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pippa replied quite truthfully. ‘I’m really not sure.’

  Jerome was tongue-tied. He had taken out so many girls, so many of them beautiful, really beautiful, he had made love to most of them, never having any trouble whatsoever talking them into his arms and then into his bed, and yet now here he was with a fresh, freckle-faced nineteen year old, who wore boys’ shorts and aertex shirts, and smelt of sunshine and lavender soap, a girl who most probably had never been kissed, at least not properly, and he couldn’t think of one word to say to her, nor the next move to make.

  ‘You’re going to be late,’ Pippa warned him. ‘If Cecil says he’s leaving at ten, he doesn’t mean five-past.’

  ‘Can I ring you?’

  ‘If you want to,’ Pippa shook out her mane of hair and began to turn away.

  ‘I don’t know your number.’

  ‘Of course you do, you chump. You rang me this morning.’

  ‘Of course I did, but that’s a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Three two one,’ Pippa reminded him. ‘Midhurst three two one. It’s terribly eas
y to remember. And if you do forget it—’

  She turned back.

  ‘I shan’t forget it, Pippa. Don’t worry.’

  ‘You’re going to miss your lift,’ she warned him.

  ‘I don’t care.’ Jerome opened the gate, and then turned back. ‘Do you ever come up to London?’ he asked. ‘I mean would you come up to London?’

  ‘I do occasionally,’ Pippa admitted, ‘but it’s really not easy. It’s a question of leaving my mother, you see. Her arthritis has just got worse and worse, ever since my father was killed really. It’s as if her body is – oh, what’s the word?’ She paused, and looked up to the stars in the skies. ‘Yes,’ she remembered. ‘It’s as if her body is manifesting her feelings, at least that’s what I think. That what she’s feeling inside, it’s showing outside. And she can’t be cured. At least she can, but not until she’s together again with my father.’

  That was the moment Jerome knew that deep down in his heart he really loved this wonderful girl. She had such honesty and compassion, and a depth to her he had never found in anyone before, at least not in any girl. He also knew that he had to see her again soon, and that he simply couldn’t go on living without seeing her.

  ‘If you don’t come up to London,’ he said, ‘then I shall simply have to keep coming back down here.’

  Pippa smiled at him, as if she had no objections to the idea, and then carefully closed the gate.

  ‘You really must go,’ she said. ‘It’s practically ten o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll ring you,’ he said, taking her hand in his. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘Fine.’

  Jerome kissed her hand, and then turned and ran, not looking back, not daring to because he knew that if he did, he would never leave her. So he just ran, and as he reached the edge of the woods, he raised one hand in farewell before disappearing into the darkness.

  What Pippa did after he was gone, Jerome never knew. He never knew that as she watched him vanish into the night, she gave a sudden deep sigh, nor did he know that she stood at the little wicket gate for a full half an hour after he had vanished.

  4

  Oscar’s new play was in trouble. It had been in trouble from the word go, right from the initial read-through, but nobody would face up to it, except Oscar. Everyone else was going around with that dewy-eyed optimism so peculiar to the theatre, which makes playwrights despair, and long to throw themselves headlong into the nearest bar. Which is how Oscar felt at the end of each day as he sat in the rehearsal room, head in hands, longing for the director to send them home, so he could go and plunge into a Dry Martini.

  He was not alone. Elizabeth Laurence knew the play was heading for the rocks, and while she played along in rehearsals with the corporate optimism, when they broke to go home, she would privately seek out Oscar, following him at first to the bar where he drank, and on in after him. Here they would meet every evening after everyone else had left, and talk over the impending tragedy. For that’s how Elizabeth saw it, in tragic terms, because she genuinely loved Oscar Greene’s play, not because he had written it specially for her, but because Elizabeth knew instinctively that it was a very special play.

  ‘Who shall we blame today, darling?’ Elizabeth asked him one night, as Oscar set up her orange juice and his Martini. ‘Are you still determined to brutally murder my leading man?’

  ‘No, no,’ Oscar corrected her. ‘Lewis Paine is not a leading man, Elizabeth. Lewis Paine is a misleading man.’

  Elizabeth laughed, and took a sip from her drink, as Oscar took a swig from his.

  ‘No,’ the writer continued, ‘I’ve had it with Lewis Paine-in-the-ass. I’ve nothing left to say about him. I think it’s time to savage that fool of a director. You heard the latest, I guess? He’s now blaming the failure of Act Two, scene two on my insistence that it should be played against the rain? I mean would you believe that? He says it creates a feeling of misery. While I insist it creates a feeling of sexy.’

  Elizabeth laughed again, this time at Oscar’s deliberate misuse of words, then swizzling her drink with a cocktail stirrer gave a deep sigh.

  ‘We all know what’s wrong, Oscar darling,’ she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I can’t say anything, sweetheart,’ Oscar said in his best Raymond Chandler voice. ‘I’m only-the-writer.’

  ‘I could say something to Cecil, I suppose,’ Elizabeth ventured, turning her green eyes on Oscar. ‘I’ll tell him they’re murdering your play, and he won’t stand for it. He loves the play as much as I do.’

  ‘Uncle Cecil wouldn’t know a good play if it ran for ten years,’ Oscar sighed, and then proceeded to drop hot cigarette ash down the inside of his open necked shirt. He jumped to his feet and pulled the front of his shirt out of his trousers.

  ‘Oh-my-God,’ he intoned slowly. ‘One day I’m going to set my chest on fire.’

  ‘Oscar, darling,’ Elizabeth insisted. ‘I’m serious. Cecil won’t have it. Cecil really cares.’

  ‘My dear, beautiful Elizabeth,’ Oscar replied, signalling to the barman for a refresher. ‘The only thing Cecil cares about is how near to the kerb his chauffeur parks his goddam car. I mean you really have to worry about Cecil. Hell, the guy’s not yet thirty, and he has a car rug. You know something else? He has tissue paper in the sleeves of his suits.’

  ‘Well, if Cecil doesn’t care, Oscar darling, I do,’ Elizabeth said, putting an elegant hand on Oscar’s. In fact Elizabeth cared greatly. Chances to play heroines like Oscar’s Emerald Glynn came along once in a lifetime, if at all. So Elizabeth was utterly determined to get her way, and persuade the management to get rid of the conceited ass who was playing opposite her, by whatever means she had at her disposal.

  ‘Don’t worry, Oscar,’ she reassured the writer, ‘I shall rescue your precious play.’

  ‘No,’ Sebastian said, as firmly as he could.

  ‘Darling,’ Elizabeth pleaded, as she stepped out of her silk slip.

  ‘I really can’t, Elizabeth,’ her husband insisted. ‘It really is none of my business.’

  ‘I’m none of your business?’ Elizabeth opened her eyes as wide as they would go, stripping down finally to nothing except her silk stockings, and then dropping to lie down on her front on the quilted bed, with her chin supported by her two small clenched fists.

  ‘I don’t often ask you favours,’ she whispered.

  ‘This acting business—’

  ‘I’ve told you, darling, it’s just fun. Please don’t let’s go through all that again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but you gave me the impression—’ Sebastian began, only to be interrupted once again.

  ‘Darling,’ Elizabeth said, but this time the endearment contained a note of warning. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be so much fun.’

  This was the line she had adopted and pursued, and was holding to remorselessly, to pretend it was all a whim, that acting was just fun, a game from which she could extricate herself at any time she so desired. She looked up once more at her husband, and shook out her long black hair.

  ‘Please?’ she begged, deliberately childlike. ‘Pretty please?’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Sebastian relented, sitting on the bed and reaching for the telephone, knowing perfectly well he was the luckiest man alive, to be married to one of the most exquisite women ever born. ‘What’s the wretched chap’s number?’

  Cecil listened carefully to what Sebastian had to say, and then having replaced the receiver, picked it up again immediately and dialled Richard Derwent.

  ‘Richard, dear boy,’ he groaned. ‘Trouble.’

  They met for dinner at the Garrick Club.

  ‘He wasn’t my idea,’ the director complained, ‘just for the wretched record.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cecil replied. ‘If something isn’t done, Elizabeth Laurence will leave.’

  ‘Locke’s will sue. She does have a contract.’

  ‘What’s a contract? Noth
ing, dear boy, not when a play’s in trouble. Elizabeth can get “pregnant”, she can go down with suspected appendicitis, or she can simply get a fishbone stuck in her throat and lose her voice.’

  Derwent glared at Cecil, but reluctantly had to agree. There were all sorts of well-known diplomatic excuses which an actor or an actress could employ in order to leave a cast when they were unhappy, usually the very same excuses managements gave when dispensing with the services of any actor or actress with whom they were unhappy.

  ‘You don’t want to lose Elizabeth,’ Cecil continued, opening out his stiff linen table napkin. ‘She’s giving a wonderful performance. Despite – the lack of support.’

  Cecil had heard this from everyone concerned. He also knew that she was arriving at her performance without any help from the director whatsoever.

  ‘She needs a lot of direction,’ Derwent said, as if reading Cecil’s thought. ‘It’s not as if she’s a natural. I can’t tell you the work I’m putting in.’

  ‘You don’t have to, dear boy,’ Cecil assured him. ‘Elizabeth tells me everything.’

  ‘Look,’ Derwent said, dropping his voice so as not to be overheard, ‘I don’t give a toss what you do about Lewis. Just so long as we have it on record that he was not my idea. He was Jimmy Locke’s idea. I never liked him. He’s tedious, a slow study, a moaner, and a typical bloody actor, he can’t wait to blame the play.’

  ‘I have a – very untypical bloody actor I would like you to see,’ Cecil said importantly, pushing his soup bowl two inches from him with perfectly manicured hands. ‘He’s under contract, like Elizabeth, to Boska. You won’t know him. But soon everyone will. He’s called Jerome Didier.’

  ‘Never heard of the guy,’ Oscar said, staring at the photograph with which Cecil had presented him. ‘But I sure like his looks. In fact I like his looks so much I’d like them for myself.’

  ‘Be serious, Oscar,’ Cecil said, glancing at his watch. ‘Just for once.’

  ‘I am being serious, Cecil!’ Oscar protested. ‘I’d give my goddam writing arm to look like this guy! If I looked like this guy, just think! I could wear my spectacles shaving! Maybe he doesn’t look this good in the flesh.’