Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  Oscar held the photograph away from him, as if unable to believe the actor’s good looks.

  ‘He looks even better than that, Oscar,’ his agent assured him, holding his arms out straight in front of him, so that he could shoot his immaculate white cuffs. ‘He is the very best looking young actor I have ever seen. And I’ll be very surprised if you don’t like him.’

  ‘You mean I’ll be very surprised if I don’t like him.’ Oscar grinned, and tossed the photograph down on Cecil’s desk. ‘If I don’t like this guy, I’ll be looking for a new agent.’

  Cecil Manners rose, smoothing his double-breasted dark blue pinstriped suit, before crossing to look down at the scene in the street two floors below them.

  ‘You have to like him, O.G.,’ he said, placing his hands which were manicured daily on to the window sill. ‘Even more so, since Derwent seems to have got to Elizabeth first.’

  Oscar looked out of the window and saw Derwent paying off a taxi on the opposite side of the road, while Elizabeth stood gazing in a dress shop window.

  ‘What else is there but to like him?’ Oscar asked hopelessly. ‘Come on, I only wrote the play. So what does it matter whether the guy is right or not? Just so long as I like him.’

  ‘You can always have another of Jimmy Locke’s protégés if you’d rather,’ Cecil said, coming away from the window. ‘You could have Clive Willett. And don’t imagine we haven’t been threatened with him, because we have.’

  ‘I like Jerome Didier,’ Oscar announced, holding up his hands in self defence. ‘I love the guy. Don’t even bother to introduce us.’

  Elizabeth was first through the door. Dressed in a simple but expensive yellow silk coat and dress, she was the first day of spring. Cecil as always was rendered speechless, while Oscar looked at her, and then slowly mistimed lighting his cigarette, burning the end of his nose instead.

  ‘So what will happen to poor Lewis?’ Elizabeth asked, ingenuously, but almost before she was seated. ‘The poor dear.’

  Oscar shook his head and smiled privately at Elizabeth’s consummate acting skill. She had managed to make her idle curiosity sound like very real concern.

  ‘That’s Locke’s responsibility,’ said Richard Derwent, who had just pulled up a chair by Cecil’s desk. ‘We leave all that to Jimmy.’

  ‘But what will he say?’ Elizabeth persisted. ‘I mean to someone like Lewis. It’s not as if he’s exactly unknown.’

  ‘Leave it to Jimmy,’ Derwent repeated, helping himself to a cigarette from the silver box on the desk. ‘It’s really nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about.’

  ‘Come on, you guys,’ Oscar said, having finally managed to light his cigarette. ‘Tell the little lady the truth. Forewarned is forearmed, right?’

  ‘Oscar—’ Cecil said warningly.

  ‘They have this guy, Miss Laurence,’ Oscar continued, deliberately formal. ‘Locke’s have a special guy to do their dirty work. It’s done very well.’ Elizabeth was looking round at him, enthralled. ‘A man, very correctly dressed, in a black bowler hat, and a black coat and striped trousers comes round backstage to your dressing room. You’d never suspect a thing about him. He looks as though he’s just come straight from work in the City. And after an exchange of pleasantries, he takes you out to dinner, somewhere good and expensive, and having filled you with the best food and wines, he explains that Locke’s have made a dreadful, terrible mistake, and it’s all their fault. You can’t possibly come into town with this show. It would be the end of your career, they must find you something new, something better for you. At once. But whatever you do, you mustn’t come in with this play. And you’re happy. You agree. You don’t even know you’ve been sacked. You feel you have left this disastrous play just in time, and you are thrilled. To pieces. You leave the show thinking what philanthropists these guys of Locke’s are! I mean what Locke’s care about is your career!’

  ‘Oscar—’ Cecil made one last half-hearted attempt to stop Oscar, but it was far too late. The beans had been spilt.

  ‘Listen,’ Oscar told him. ‘This is good. This is all part of Miss Laurence’s theatrical education. You see it’s a great tactic, Miss Laurence. You leave the show, Locke’s gets to re-cast—’

  ‘And nobody’s feelings get hurt,’ Elizabeth put in.

  ‘Right. And you never get to work for Locke’s ever again.’

  Oscar took his glasses off, and tugging part of his shirt free from his trousers, proceeded to wipe the lenses clean while Elizabeth stared at him wide-eyed.

  ‘It isn’t true!’ she whispered.

  To show her that it was, Oscar drew one arm of his spectacles across his throat like a razor, before tucking in his shirt.

  Which was where the discussion ended as Miss Jeans appeared at the door with a hankie to her nose, to announce the arrival of Mr Jerome Didier.

  It was love at first sight. The moment the dashing and handsome young man came into the room, Elizabeth lost her heart. As he took her hand in his, holding it all the while as he gazed into her eyes, Elizabeth felt as if she was looking at a twin soul. Her surroundings vanished, and with them all sound, leaving her with the momentous feeling she was about to fulfil her destiny. Jerome released her hand, but Elizabeth was still enthralled, even though the only words they had exchanged were those in greeting.

  And yet they were already a couple.

  Everyone noticed, and fell silent, finding difficulty in exchanging even the lightest theatrical banter. There was hardly any conversation at all, and what little there was, was strained as Cecil and Richard Derwent began to organize the reading of the play.

  Finally they began to read, and when they did the atmosphere became recharged, but this time with electricity. Even Oscar, whose habit was normally to want to hide under his chair or in a closet whenever actors began to read his work out loud, sat wide-eyed and breathless, an unlit Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth, as at last, at long, long last he heard his play coming properly to life. Jerome Didier was everything Cecil had promised. He was sensational. And even more so when matched against the sublime Elizabeth Laurence. Oscar sat back and beamed at the ceiling. The play couldn’t now fail.

  Everyone knew it. By the time Elizabeth and Jerome had finished reading even the first scene, the people in the room knew the play was a smash. And by the time the two actors closed their manuscripts shut and the reading was finished, in the joint imagination of everyone there the curtain was rising and falling, and rising and falling to the sound of continuous cheering.

  This was why they had all gone into the theatre. This was the moment they had all dreamed about. This was the once in a lifetime moment, when you had a hit. And nothing could ever take the feeling away. Not all the failures in the world could ever snuff out the light of a palpable hit.

  The silence in which they all now sat, unlike any other silence the writer, the director or the manager had ever previously known, was finally broken by Jerome.

  ‘Ah,’ he said with a sigh, having quickly consulted his watch, ‘if that really is the time, I have to be going.’

  He rose, smiling at them all, while he carefully rebuttoned his jacket.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr Greene,’ he said. ‘This is a wonderful play. Wonderful. And a privilege to have read it for you. And thank you, Miss Laurence. So nice to meet you.’

  Elizabeth was silent, but Cecil wasn’t. He was on his feet, hurrying round his desk.

  ‘You can’t go yet, dear boy!’ he cried. ‘We have so much to talk about!’

  ‘I’m sure you would really rather talk about all you have to talk about, Cecil, amongst yourselves first,’ Jerome replied, with the most courteous of smiles, first to his agent, and then to the others in the room. ‘Telephone me when you’re free, about that other thing, remember?’

  Jerome was as cute as a barrel of monkeys, Cecil thought, as he watched him prepare to take his leave. There was no other ‘thing’, but the young actor was learning fast how
to play the game.

  Finally, at the door, he turned the magic of his smile on everyone, without favour to anyone in particular, and then he was gone. Everyone fell to talking all at once, everyone except Elizabeth, who first sat staring silently at the door, at the place where Jerome had been last, before rising and crossing to the window which overlooked the street below.

  She saw him come out of the building and get into a little red sports car. Before he pressed the ignition, he turned the driver’s mirror to himself to check his appearance, riffling his hair with his fingers, and then drove off, at high speed.

  Elizabeth watched him all the time. And if any of the other three present had been paying her attention, instead of talking animatedly amongst themselves, they might have seen her bright green eyes glitter in the sun, and then narrow, the way cats’ eyes do when they spy a bird which they intend to devour.

  Jerome drove straight down to Sussex. He had thought of ringing Pippa first, but then it occurred to him that her mother might answer, and be unable to tell him, as mothers so often were, precisely where her daughter might be. He had seen the look in Mrs Nicholls’s eyes when Pippa had introduced them. It was a look which as a young and good-looking actor, he had seen all too often on the faces of the mothers and fathers of girls who had taken him home, a mixture of fear and disdain, a look which up until now had always amused him.

  But the look on Mrs Nicholls’s face he knew he had to take seriously, because mixed with the usual fear and disdain, he could sense an implacable resistance. So he decided against ringing, and for arriving unannounced. And if he should find Pippa out when he arrived, then he would simply wait outside in his car until she returned. Whatever happened, he would not be deterred, simply because he could go no longer without seeing her. It had surprised him quite how much he had missed her, even though he had mentally prepared himself for their separation. But he had actually been astounded by how he finally felt when he got back to London and found she was no longer within reach. He had felt quite simply wretched, and with the exception of reading against Elizabeth Laurence that day, everything that had happened to him between leaving Pippa and the chance of seeing her again had been without any importance.

  He also wanted Pippa to be the first person in the world to know that he had landed a plum part. No-one had, of course, told him officially, and he knew it would still be some time yet before they finally decided to do so, but he had known the moment he had begun reading the play with Elizabeth Laurence that not only was he right for the part, but that he was right for Elizabeth and she for him.

  He arrived at Bay Tree Cottage just in time to meet Pippa walking down to the gate on her way to the shops. She stopped stone dead when she saw him, and stared first with amazement and then with delight.

  ‘Jerome!’ she called, and then hurried to the gate.

  ‘Splendid,’ Jerome said, hopping out of his car to hold open the gate. ‘At least you remembered my name.’

  She ignored the jibe, and continued to stare at him, as if he wasn’t altogether real.

  ‘Why didn’t you ring?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t you remember what I told you about Terry Vaughan?’ he said. ‘Always surprise your audience.’

  ‘Is that what I am?’ Pippa enquired, coming through the open gate. ‘Part of your audience?’

  ‘No,’ Jerome said, taking one of her slim brown hands. ‘That’s the very last thing you are, Pippa Nicholls.’

  ‘You look different,’ she ventured. ‘As if something has happened.’

  ‘It has!’ Jerome cried. ‘And you’re brilliant!’ He took her other hand, and dropped his voice back to its normal pitch. ‘I am about to be offered the part of a lifetime – and I wanted you to be the first to know.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pippa said with a frown, ‘but I don’t understand. How do you know you’re “about” to be offered the part? I don’t know how these things work. Does that mean that you know, but it isn’t official, or something?’

  ‘It means I know,’ Jerome replied, a little too sharply, piqued by Pippa pulling his surprise to pieces.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, ‘but as I said, I don’t know how these things work.’

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ Jerome said expansively. ‘If I don’t get this part, I will buy you anything you want. I’ll buy you a fur coat.’

  ‘I don’t really want a fur coat.’

  ‘Then I’ll buy your mother one.’

  ‘She wouldn’t want one either.’

  Jerome leaned back against the car and regarded her. ‘You don’t appear terrifically pleased to see me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Pippa said, with an anxious and tell-tale glance back at the house. ‘You really should have telephoned.’

  ‘Oh, I think you know, we both know,’ Jerome replied, ‘why I didn’t. Now come and have some tea.’

  Again Pippa hesitated, and then whistling for her little dog, put him on his lead and got into the car.

  ‘It will be all right,’ Jerome reassured her, as he got in the driver’s seat. ‘I take it from the basket on your arm you’re meant to be going shopping?’ Pippa nodded. ‘Well,’ Jerome continued, starting the car. ‘Having tea with me, by car, is hardly going to take you any longer, is it?’

  He looked at her, overdoing his conspiratorial frown in the hope of making her smile, but Pippa just frowned, and settled down deep into her seat, as if afraid of being seen.

  They drove into Midhurst and had tea at a café called somewhat inappropriately for West Sussex, The Mandarin. And Pippa refused to settle, spending the first quarter of an hour checking her watch every five minutes, and seeming not to pay full attention to what Jerome was trying to tell her. And when she wasn’t checking the time, she was popping outside to the car to make sure her dog was all right and hadn’t escaped through the somewhat flimsy roof. Finally Jerome lost patience, since this was not at all how he had imagined their first reunion was going to be.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pippa,’ he snapped suddenly. ‘Will you for pity’s sake just sit down and relax?’

  Pippa looked up at him, and her face softened.

  ‘I don’t blame you getting cross,’ she told him with what he now understood to be her usual candour. ‘It’s leaving my mother. She hasn’t been at all well today.’

  Jerome leaned back and then slowly forward, putting his face close to Pippa’s.

  ‘Then why on earth – didn’t you say?’

  ‘Because I wanted to see you,’ Pippa replied. ‘I couldn’t ask you in to tea, because of my mother. I mean how she is, I mean. But I wanted to see you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I should have rung.’ He bit his lip. ‘You must think me very heartless.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m sure that’s the last thing you are.’

  ‘Would you rather go home?’ he asked. ‘If you’re worried.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d rather be with you.’

  After that, Pippa relaxed, and Jerome relaxed, and they ordered some more tea and some fresh hot toast, and Jerome told Pippa all about the play and the reading.

  ‘I can’t wait to see it,’ Pippa said, when she had listened enthralled and in silence to the whole story. ‘It sounds wonderful. And I’m sure you’ll be wonderful in it.’

  ‘What makes you so sure, Miss Nicholls?’ Jerome asked with a smile.

  ‘Just from what you said,’ Pippa replied simply. ‘From what you told me, and the way you told me. I just think you will.’

  ‘I will be,’ Jerome assured her. ‘Now I have your belief.’

  He smiled at her, as their eyes met, and he rested both his square tipped fingers on the round oak table. Pippa refused to drop her eyes, and stared back at him levelly, over the top of her willow patterned tea cup.

  ‘Good,’ Jerome said. ‘Now when are you coming up to London?’

  ‘If my mother improves,’ Pippa replied, ‘actually I might be coming up next week. To do some shopping.
’

  ‘But what time will you have to get back? Because I shall be rehearsing—’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Pippa teased.

  ‘Certain,’ Jerome replied, raising his eyebrows. ‘So if I’m rehearsing all day—’

  ‘When I come up to London, or go anywhere for that matter,’ Pippa said, ‘there’s always someone with my mother. Like my aunt, or someone from the village. So as long as I’m not back too late—’

  She left the sentence unfinished, and put down her empty tea cup.

  ‘We could have dinner,’ Jerome suggested. ‘I should imagine we won’t rehearse later than six.’

  Pippa shook her head wonderingly.

  ‘You’re really certain you’ve got this part, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’ Jerome looked back at her as directly as she was now looking at him. ‘I’m as certain of it as I am of the fact that you and I are going to be married.’

  She didn’t look down, or away, but continued to look straight at him, although now she was no longer smiling. But neither was Jerome. Pippa thought he must have been joking, but now she saw that he was looking at her very seriously, without the suggestion of a tease in his dark brown eyes, resting his perfectly sculpted chin on the thumb and index finger of one hand.

  And for his part, although he didn’t show it, Jerome was delighted to see the look of blank astonishment which now clouded the pretty freckled face of the girl sitting opposite him, this extraordinary girl who had inspired in him such an extraordinary passion.

  At long last late that same evening Cecil finally got Jerome on the telephone.

  ‘Where have you been, dear boy?’ he asked, although he had his suspicions, thoughts he would rather not face. ‘I’ve been trying to raise you since tea-time. Didn’t your landlady pass on my messages?’

  ‘I’ve only just got back, Cecil,’ Jerome replied. ‘This minute. What is it? You sound frightfully – tense.’

  Cecil missed the tease. He was still trying to dismiss from his mind the thought of where he knew Jerome must have been.