Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  The small woman took the safety pin out of her mouth, asked Sebastian to wait, and then closed the door. Sebastian waited, feeling most uncomfortable and ridiculous having to do so, since he could think of no good reason why a husband should be kept out of his wife’s dressing room by a total stranger.

  After a minute or so, the door was reopened and Sebastian was admitted. Elizabeth, who Sebastian now noted was wearing a long, pale-pink silk dressing gown which he couldn’t remember seeing before, turned to him and smiled, before floating across to him, with both slender arms outstretched.

  ‘Darling one,’ she said, taking his hands, before moving her head quickly away. ‘No!’ she said. ‘No kisses, darling one. I’m made-up.’

  Sebastian felt himself colour, embarrassed by his gaffe, and by the presence of what seemed to be Elizabeth’s personal theatrical maid, who was now sitting on the sofa sewing, paying him no attention whatsoever.

  ‘Dearest,’ Sebastian began, and then to make his point, inclined his head with a frown in the small woman’s direction.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about Muzz!’ Elizabeth laughed, for some reason finding his concern amusing. ‘The dear thing’s seen and heard just about everything, haven’t you, darling?’

  ‘In one way or the other, yes, I suppose I have, dear,’ her dresser replied, biting the thread with which she was sewing in half. ‘In one way or another.’

  Elizabeth smiled again at Sebastian, and then returned to her dressing table where she began the final stage of her preparation.

  ‘Darling one,’ she said, via the mirror, ‘I don’t want to be horrid, but they have called the Half.’

  ‘I won’t keep you, dearest,’ Sebastian said, searching his pocket for the small gift-wrapped box. ‘I just wanted to give you this.’

  He handed the box to her, which Elizabeth took over one shoulder.

  ‘A present! Oh, darling one!’ she exclaimed. ‘How – sweet!’

  ‘How will you know?’ Sebastian smiled at her reflection, ‘until you open it? Whether it’s — well, something you like, or don’t – as the case may be.’

  He was dying for her to open it, but instead Elizabeth put the package down beside her on the dressing table, and patted it once with one hand.

  ‘I shall leave it there,’ she said. ‘Until after. I couldn’t bear to open it now, my darling. In case it’s something beautiful, and I might cry.’

  ‘Which would never do, Miss Laurence,’ Muzz said, through a new mouthful of pins, and giving Sebastian a look. ‘Not when you’ve just made-up. Not just before you go on.’

  For some reason Sebastian felt that he had committed another frightful gaffe which in actual fact unwittingly he had, one of which he was totally ignorant, one which Elizabeth put him right about as she rose and eased him gently towards the door.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she said as she half closed the door behind her. ‘It was dear of you to come round, really. And to bring a present. But you obviously didn’t know. How could you? It’s frightfully bad form. To come round before curtain up.’

  She mouthed a kiss at him, pursing her lipsticked mouth, crinkled her eyes a little at him, but not too much in case it spoilt her make-up, and then blew a farewell kiss at him, making sure her hand didn’t quite touch her lips.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

  ‘And I love you,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘No!’ she almost screamed in return, startling Sebastian so much that he whipped back round in case something dreadful had happened.

  ‘What is it?’ Sebastian asked, seeing that he had upset her just when nothing should upset her. ‘What is it, dearest? Now what have I done?’

  ‘Darling one,’ she said, recovering her poise. ‘You don’t come round before the show, darling, but that’s as maybe. But what you never, ever do is wish an actor good luck.’

  She smiled at him, briefly, for a moment, but there was none of the usual warmth in her smile, Sebastian noted, it was just a token smile, one to placate him before she disappeared back into her dressing room, leaving Sebastian no alternative but to make his way round to the front of the theatre to join the other civilians. And as he did so, even before he had reached and taken his seat in the auditorium to watch the curtain rise on what was to prove to be an unforgettable night in the history of the theatre, he knew that she had gone. Sebastian Ferrers knew that he had lost his Elizabeth for good.

  What made it even more unbearable for Sebastian was that once the curtain had finally fallen to tumultuous cheering, to an acclaim which established beyond all reasonable doubt that Elizabeth Laurence had been launched into stardom, and that once all the nervous tension from which Sebastian concluded she had so obviously been suffering before she went on-stage had gone, Elizabeth was her old adoring and adorable self. Not once did she leave Sebastian’s side at dinner afterwards, nor during the first heady couple of hours at the party Jimmy Locke threw for the company at his vast apartment overlooking Grosvenor Square. Elizabeth stayed by her husband, despite the fact that the rich, the powerful and the famous were all busy lobbying both Jimmy Locke and Cecil Manners to bring her over and introduce her to them at once, if not sooner. Instead Elizabeth insisted, politely but firmly, that whoever wished to meet her must meet her husband too, and at their table, so that Sebastian was never left stranded in the company of people who either didn’t know who he was, or if they did, most certainly didn’t care, nor was he made to follow Elizabeth everywhere like some embarrassing appendage. At dinner at Le Caprice, she sat with one leg secretly entwined around one of Sebastian’s under cover of the tablecloth, or with her hand carefully out of sight on his knee, while at the party she made sure they were always either hand in hand or arm in arm.

  And yet Sebastian knew he had lost her.

  Whatever she did, whatever she said, she no longer belonged to him. She had ceased being his from the moment she had walked on-stage, and the audience had collectively claimed her. And although Sebastian had tried to anticipate this moment, knowing that when everyone saw his beautiful wife in the flesh they could not help but be captivated, nothing he could have mentally rehearsed could have prepared him for the reality of the actual moment the door opened and the barefooted Elizabeth, dressed in a simple, white, summer dress, and with her dark hair loose, stepped on-stage and the audience audibly gasped. The shock of the moment made Sebastian’s head spin. It made his senses reel, and he never recovered them for the duration of the play, which he watched semi-dazed, half-conscious, as if, as he was later to recall, he had just been in the boxing ring with Rocky Marciano, rather than sitting in the stalls of a West End theatre.

  He could make no sense of anything he saw for the next two and a half hours. He tried to forget that Elizabeth was his wife and did his best to see her as everyone else was seeing her, as someone called Emerald Glynn, but he couldn’t. All he could see was Elizabeth, his Elizabeth, at home in Chelsea, sitting in front of the fire with her feet tucked up under her and Medusa on her lap, or in their bedroom, wrapped up in her thick, white bath robe with a towel round her freshly washed hair as she stood sorting out a dress to wear for their dinner à deux, or with him in the spring sunshine, picking bunches of daffodils from their country garden, walking back with armfuls of the bright yellow and white flowers which she loved to arrange in every room of the cottage, and then lying in silence in the evening, on the old sofa in front of the fire, with her black hair fallen across her beautiful pale-skinned face.

  However hard he tried, he just couldn’t see her as everyone else was now seeing her, as this other person, laughing and flirting with this other man, allowing this other man to embrace her, to put his arms round her, and stroke her hair and kiss her, exactly the way she might allow Sebastian to hold her and to kiss her, and stroke her dark shiny hair, while all the time being watched by hundreds of pairs of eyes, the eyes of other people who, as they watched their new heroine, became seemingly one person, someone who was falling head over heels and hopelessly i
n love with this ravishing, raven-haired, green-eyed girl who was his, who was Sebastian’s, who was his wife. Sebastian could hardly bear it. As he felt the audience taking Elizabeth to its corporate heart, it was all he could do not to get to his feet and claim her publicly as his and his alone.

  Being a gentleman, Sebastian naturally let none of this show in the aftermath of that famous first night. In fact he vowed never to make any mention of it, or ever refer to how he had felt as he watched her début. Instead he blamed himself entirely for his misfortune. He had been too lackadaisical altogether about the business of Elizabeth acting. He had no doubt that she had been talked into it, by being made to look upon it as only a ‘bit of fun’, because that would have been typical of Elizabeth. She was so lighthearted and blithe. It would never have occurred to her that her fun could turn into something quite the opposite, something so serious that it could, if not monitored, threaten the very stability of their marriage, which was why Sebastian truly believed he only had himself to blame. He should have adopted an altogether more responsible and mature attitude at the very beginning, he should have had more foresight, he should have used his imagination. He should have discredited the idea when it was initiated, and forbidden his beautiful and adored wife from having anything to do with the notorious and shallow world of the theatre.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, dear boy,’ Cecil Manners said, coming to sit beside him on the one occasion Sebastian found himself briefly detached from Elizabeth at Jimmy Locke’s party. ‘You’re wondering what the devil you can have been thinking allowing such a wonderful creature as your beautiful wife to get mixed up in this caper.’

  Cecil gestured with his cigarette holder at the crowd in the smoke filled room before them.

  ‘You’re thinking you must have been mad,’ he went on. ‘You think your wife belongs at home, that she should be at home having babies and being a wife, and that now, now life won’t ever be the same. Well, I’m sorry to tell you, dear boy, first that I’m a bit drunk, and I’m sorry. But then how many times, if indeed ever, do you have a first night like this? Do you see acting like that? Like we have both, like we have all just seen?’

  Sebastian shook his head and said that he didn’t know, that he had no idea. But what he really hadn’t had an idea about was exactly how good an actress Elizabeth was. That was something else to which he had never properly addressed himself. He had simply assumed she had a fancy to give acting a ‘go’, and that she would either be terrible, or at the most – passable. It had never for one moment occurred to him that she might have even a modicum of talent.

  ‘I should imagine you never imagined,’ Cecil continued, having poured them both some more champagne, and now reading his thoughts, ‘not in your wildest imaginings could you have done, could you have imagined for one moment, how incredibly gifted Elizabeth was. Did you? You couldn’t possibly, dear boy. And who could blame you? Apparently all you ever saw her do, all she ever did in fact, in the way of acting, was playing charades at Christmas! And now – now . . .’

  Cecil broke off and shook his head in wonder.

  ‘Yes?’ Sebastian asked him. ‘Now what? Please tell me, because believe me, I’m most interested.’

  ‘I was going to tell you something else,’ Cecil said, reordering his thoughts. ‘First I must tell you what it was

  I was going to tell you, and then I’ll answer your other question. What the devil was it I was going to tell you?’

  ‘You were talking about life,’ Sebastian reminded him. ‘You were saying one’s life might never be the same again.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Cecil nodded. ‘Because that’s what – and I could see it all over your face, dear boy. Because that’s what you’ve been thinking. Ever since the entire audience got to its feet and cheered, and cheered, and cheered – you’ve been having very serious second thoughts, and wondering whether or not this was the best move. And whether or not your life is ever going to be what it was. Well, let me tell you, dear boy, it’s not. And that’s that. It is never going to be the same again, dear boy, because your wonderful wife – your beautiful, talented, brilliant wife – is going to be one of the biggest stars this country has ever seen. And your life – both your lives – your lives will never, ever be the same, boring, mundane old lives they were before! Because Elizabeth is going to be world famous, and you are going to be rich. Richer than you ever dreamed you could be.’

  ‘Cecil!’

  Cecil looked up, smiling, and when he saw who it was his smile grew ever more beatific.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he sighed, taking both her hands and kissing them. ‘My darling.’

  ‘Cecil.’ This time it was a reprimand, not a tease. ‘Cecil,’ Elizabeth said, withdrawing her hands, ‘I do believe you are tipsy.’

  ‘Yes, darling Elizabeth,’ Cecil admitted, leaning back on the sofa, ‘I am extremely tipsy. And you – are a star.’

  Elizabeth eyed her agent, who now showed signs of falling asleep.

  ‘Come along,’ she whispered to Sebastian, bending down and kissing his cheek. ‘Time for us to go home.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to wait for the newspapers?’ Sebastian said as he took her proffered hand.

  ‘Fiddle the newspapers,’ Elizabeth laughed. ‘You have to work in the morning.’

  It took the best part of half an hour for Elizabeth to make her exit, a delay which Sebastian took with his usual good humour and grace, standing aside while the final accolades were heaped upon his wife, and practically everyone in the room kissed her and hugged her. And then just as a maid had presented them both with their coats and they were finally about to leave, Elizabeth was spirited away from him by his host Jimmy Locke and the tall, mesmeric Polish exile to whom Sebastian had been introduced some time earlier, to a small room where they remained closeted for five or so minutes.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my darling,’ Elizabeth said to him as the lift dropped them to the ground floor. ‘Jimmy and Dmitri just wanted one last, quick word.’

  She slipped an arm through his as they crossed the marble-floored hall, and out into the night, her other arm holding the top of her fur coat closed, as if she felt a sudden chill. But Sebastian had already seen what she was trying to hide. He had seen her reflection in the hall mirror as he waited for her, as she re-emerged from the ante-room with their host and the tall Polish emigré. He had seen the necklace before Elizabeth had pulled her coat tightly together, and come back to his side so that they might take their leave.

  ‘Forgive me, won’t you, darling?’ she pleaded as they waited for a taxi. ‘Please.’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive you for,’ Sebastian said, telling her the first lie he had ever told her. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Of course there is,’ Elizabeth sighed, tightening her hold on his arm, ‘I’ve kept you impossibly late, and you have to go to work in a few hours, you poor dear.’

  ‘So I do,’ Sebastian smiled, glancing at his watch. ‘Back to Civvy Street.’

  He let Elizabeth do all the talking on the way home in the taxi. She sat close to him, nestled up to him, one arm still through his, the other hand at the throat of her coat, as she recalled all the excitement of the evening, while Sebastian stared out of the side window and into the eyes of the night.

  She was in the house and halfway up the stairs before he had got the key out of the front door. As he went to hang up his coat, she called down from the landing and asked him to bring her up a glass of warm milk and honey, and then disappeared into their bedroom. Sebastian went into the kitchen and did as he was asked, knowing exactly why he had been asked. He waited for the milk to boil, with Medusa wrapping herself happily round and round his legs, while he fingered the small gift-wrapped box which was in his jacket pocket, the box he had noticed lying still unopened on Elizabeth’s dressing table as everyone prepared to leave for the celebratory dinner.

  Elizabeth was already on her way, standing outside in the corridor talking and laughing with the rest of the excited
cast, so Sebastian had been able to retrieve the box unnoticed. And now he waited as he heard Elizabeth run her bath, and for the bathroom door to be closed, before he slipped silently upstairs and into their bedroom, where first he placed the milk and honey on Elizabeth’s bedside table and then put the gift-wrapped box where she couldn’t help but find it, on her dressing table in her evening bag which lay open by her silver-backed hair-brushes. He knew she could not help but see it, because the last thing that Elizabeth did every night without fail was sit and brush out her wonderful hair.

  ‘I put a saucer over your drink,’ he said as she emerged from the bathroom. ‘In case it got too cold.’

  ‘You are an angel,’ Elizabeth said with a smile, which didn’t altogether hide the look on her face which suggested she had completely forgotten her request. ‘I really don’t deserve you.’

  ‘On the contrary, dearest,’ Sebastian said, turning a page in his book. ‘It’s I who don’t deserve you.’

  For a moment as she stood there by the end of his bed, Sebastian thought for the first time in their married life Elizabeth was going to get into bed without brushing her hair. And while he pondered that, he also wondered why she had chosen to wear the necklace when it had been given to her, and not just expressed her wonder and gratitude at such a gift before returning it to the case in which it was undoubtedly presented to her. Perhaps it was her vanity, he thought. Any beautiful woman would have wanted to see what such a piece of jewellery would look like round her neck, and against her skin, particularly against skin as fair as Elizabeth’s, or perhaps it was merely her good manners. Perhaps the donors had urged her to wear their token, and rather than upset them, she had obliged, meaning to take it off the moment she could do so decently, and without causing anyone, himself included, offence. That was the most likely option, Sebastian thought as he closed his book over his bookmark. Elizabeth was the last person in the world who would upset anyone deliberately.