Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  And yet she had forgotten his gift, his unopened present of the little gold cat. She had not only forgotten it, but she hadn’t even remembered to bring it with her from the theatre, so that she might open it later. She must have forgotten it in the heat of the moment, Sebastian decided looking up at her, and seeing once again the face of an angel. How could he, an ordinary man, a civilian indeed, how could he even begin to imagine what a night as she had just experienced could possibly mean? Under the circumstances he had just witnessed, anyone could be forgiven for behaving irrationally, or abnormally, let alone forgetfully.

  Which was why he had allowed her an escape route, because knowing his beloved Elizabeth the way he did, he knew there had to be a reason for her distraction. Knowing Elizabeth she would have been keeping his present until last perhaps, or until she was free to open it with him. And then in all that frenzy of excitement which followed the apparent triumph of the play, it had quite simply slipped her mind. Which is why he had placed it where he had, in her half-open little silver evening bag, along with her cosmetics and good luck charms, as if she herself had packed it away in order especially to open it in private with Sebastian.

  If Elizabeth was astonished to see it in her bag, she showed no signs of such an emotion at all. She simply put down her hair brushes and looked for a long time at Sebastian in her dressing mirror.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said finally, in a whisper, ‘I really don’t deserve you, you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  Sebastian laughed, doing his best to sound and look innocent, and failing miserably, because he had no talent for deception of any kind.

  Elizabeth did.

  ‘You thought I’d forgotten it, darling one,’ she said, still looking at him in her mirror. ‘You thought I’d left it behind, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ Sebastian protested. ‘It’s just—’

  Elizabeth put a finger to her lips to hush him, before coming to sit on the side of his bed.

  ‘I had forgotten it,’ she said, ‘but only temporarily. In all the excitement, with everyone coming and going. And then when I realized, just as we were finally leaving, I sent Muzz back for it, and it was gone! Can you imagine? Poor Muzz. She turned the place upside down, and was in such terrible tears when she rang me at Le Caprice. We all thought it had been stolen. And all because I was saving it. Because I wanted to open whatever it is, I wanted to open it with you, my darling one.’

  She leaned over and kissed him, softly and sweetly on the lips. Sebastian suddenly felt dreadful, as he realized what he’d done, and even worse, why he had done it. He had jumped to a conclusion. He had assumed Elizabeth had forgotten all about his gift, and because of his now obviously quite unwarranted presumption, even though he had later given Elizabeth the benefit of the doubt, he had caused two innocent people untold and perfectly unnecessary misery. He could well have even taken the edge off Elizabeth’s triumph.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Sebastian darling – it is beautiful! So beautiful! Oh, my darling – how can I thank you!’

  She thanked him by getting into his bed and by lying in his arms, holding in one small and slender hand the little gold cat with the emerald eyes, while lying across his chest, moving every now and then to kiss him again with her thanks, softly and sweetly on his mouth and his cheeks, but most usually on his cheeks.

  He once made a move in response, just an arm round her waist, and a kiss to return one of hers. But her response was just a regretful sigh, and putting her free hand to his cheek whispered to him to wait until morning, because she was so completely and utterly exhausted. Sebastian understood and apologized for being so insensitive, to which she told him there was absolutely no need for any apologies, kissing him once more and then slipping back to her own bed, where before she fell asleep she reminded herself not to forget to tell Muzz exactly what had happened so that she would back up her story.

  Jerome by now was very drunk, and sitting on the floor in a corner of Jimmy Locke’s apartment, which was where Cecil, who was beginning to sober up, found him.

  ‘Dear boy,’ he said, ‘I think you ought to go home.’

  ‘Home, dear boy,’ Jerome said, fixing him with a malevolent stare, ‘is where the heart is. And I can’t very well go there now, can I?’

  Cecil put out a hand to help Jerome to his feet, but Jerome pushed it rudely aside.

  ‘Can I?’ he repeated, staring at Cecil even harder. ‘I can’t very well go there, can I?’

  Cecil was about to make one last effort to get his client up and out of the party which was finally dying in the first light of dawn, when Jimmy Locke, still as immaculate as he had been when he welcomed his first guest, brought over yet another early edition.

  ‘Another rave,’ he said to Cecil, handing him the folded-open newspaper. ‘“The Best Romantic Comedy Locke’s have given the West End since Spring In The Park.” And wait till you hear what he calls Elizabeth.’

  As Locke searched for the relevant quote, Cecil tried to steer him away from the corner where Jerome lay slouched, but to no avail. Jerome had heard every word and was slowly pulling himself to his feet with the help of the back of a sofa.

  ‘And what now, Jimmy?’ he asked. ‘And what precisely is Miss Laurence to be called now that the last half dozen or so hacks have not called her? Yes?’

  If Jimmy Locke was surprised by Jerome’s appearance from behind the furniture, he certainly didn’t show it. Instead he tapped the paragraph for which he had been searching and then handed it to Cecil.

  ‘They’re very nice about you too, old love,’ he said, smiling at Jerome, while privately hoping the young actor was not just about to throw up all over his newly upholstered chesterfield. ‘“Wonderful good looks” – isn’t that what it says, Cecil?’ he looked over Cecil’s shoulder. ‘“Wonderful good looks” . . . I was right, yes, and there you are – “whose wonderful good looks complemented a thoroughly well-rounded performance.”’

  Jerome’s eyes, which only a moment ago had been dim and unfocused, suddenly became concentrated and glittered dangerously. Snatching the paper from his agent, he spread it along the back of the sofa and studied the latest notice.

  ‘“A divine beauty,”’ he read, ‘“and a talent to match. I cannot recall seeing such a breathtaking and sublime début on the West End stage in all my many years as this paper’s dramatic critic. And I prophesy that Miss Elizabeth Laurence will be no passing fancy but a true celestial being. She is no meteor, no shooting star, no sudden flash of brilliance in our theatrical skies, a light to take our eyes and distract us briefly before disappearing for ever into the void. No, the exquisite Miss Laurence is a fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Miss Laurence is a star.”’

  Jerome looked up, about to say something, about to pronounce on the inequality of all life, but when he did the faces in front of him swam, the room swam, the floor beneath his feet suddenly sloped sharply downhill, and he only just made it to the bathroom before being sick.

  A long time afterwards, when everyone had stopped knocking on the door to ask if he was all right, as he sat on a chair with a soaking wet towel to his face, Jerome once again saw the empty seat. He knew he should have known better than to look, but since the seat in question was in the middle of the front row, it was practically impossible not to notice it at some point. Unfortunately, Jerome had noticed it at once.

  The moment he walked on-stage he saw it. He couldn’t fail to see it, it was as obvious as a missing front tooth. At first he thought it was Cecil who was missing, but no, he saw at a second, swiftly taken glance that Cecil was safely in place, and that so was everyone else in row A. There was just this one empty seat, right next to Cecil.

  His next thought was that she was late. She had a long journey, trains were trains, and she could easily have got held up. There was no other explanation possible, because if anything else had prevented her from getting to his first night, Pippa would have rung and told him. Or
even if she hadn’t been able to reach him personally, she would have left a message for him. So that was it, Pippa was late.

  It took him no more than a second to work this out once he had walked out on-stage and seen the empty seat in the stalls, and there was no risk in either the taking of his sideways glance, or the reaching of his conclusions. He had time to spare before his first line, since the action of the play demanded that he wait, somewhat impatiently, to be introduced to the other occupants of the drawing room. So because he was meant to be playing impatient, it was perfectly in character for him to glance at his surroundings, which in this instance he allowed to include the first row of the stalls, and which that night was his undoing.

  For by doing so, and remarking on what he saw, Jerome allowed reality to intrude, and to enter his subconscious, so much so that although he felt completely at ease with his performance, and believed he was playing with his usual confidence and assurance, in fact he was not. He thought he was running on all six beautifully balanced cylinders, when at best he was only firing on five, because all the time at the back of his mind he was thinking about Pippa and where she was, rather than concentrating totally on being the character he was meant to be being. Jerome Didier had come on-stage with him, when there should have only been the fictional Charles Danby.

  Jerome held the cold and soaking towel tighter against his face, allowing the water to drip from it down his neck and inside his evening shirt. Someone knocked once more on the bathroom door to ask after him, and from within the wet towel he called for them to go away, and continued to do so, long after whoever it was had gone. Then he turned his slowly clearing mind once more to the events of the evening, and tried to recall when precisely he knew he had gone.

  His laughs were all in place, he remembered getting his laughs, particularly in the second scene, although they weren’t as strong as he had expected. But then he had been warned, both Cecil and Richard Derwent had warned him not to expect the best from a first night audience in the West End. It was not at all like opening a good date out on tour, where people were disposed to liking you. This was the amphitheatre, and they were the Christians being thrown to the lions. They had to fight to win their survival. It was far from being a cakewalk.

  But the audience had been on their side almost immediately. He remembered that distinctly. He remembered Elizabeth coming off after the first scene and squeezing his hand in the wings.

  ‘We’ve got them!’ she whispered. ‘We’ve got them, darling!’

  And they had. They had got them. Derwent had also tipped him the wink as they hurried off to make their change. He had grabbed Jerome’s arm as he made for the quick-change room, and whispered how marvellous he was being. So where had he gone wrong?

  He had believed them, that’s where he had gone wrong. In the solitude of Jimmy Lock’s marble bathroom in Grosvenor Square, as a damp dawn broke over London, Jerome began to come to terms with the size of his folly. He had believed what they were saying, that he was carrying all before him, when in fact if he had listened to the voice inside his own head, he would have realized he was behind, he was lagging behind, and even worse – he wasn’t carrying all before him, he was being carried.

  He was being carried by the strength of the play, and more than anything by the sheer brilliance of Elizabeth. Elizabeth Laurence had found the big wave, and when she first appeared, she was already on the crest of it. For an absurd moment, when she materialized in the doorway, barefooted and in her simple white dress, Jerome had thought she was going to get a round. Even though to this audience she was totally unknown and untried, the impact of her entrance and her first appearance was such that Jerome could sense that the audience wanted to applaud her, before she had spoken even one word to them.

  Elizabeth sensed it as well. Jerome saw it, he saw the sudden light that came into her eyes, and he heard it in the half-stifled gasp she gave as she spoke her first line, a line she took just that little bit earlier than she normally took it, as if modestly to stifle any feeling there might still be to applaud her mere appearance. At this moment, Jerome remembered suddenly, and vividly, at this moment he picked up, got his balance, and they were a team, he and Elizabeth, they were equals.

  Dammit! he could still feel the sensation! He could still feel that thrust! That surge of previously untapped power! He threw the soaking towel down into the basin and let himself out of the bathroom. There was no-one around, everyone seemed to have gone home. The drawing room was empty when he made his way back in there, so he walked straight to the french windows and out on to the wrought-iron balcony.

  He retraced his thoughts. They were three-quarters of the way through the first scene, and it was a duet. They were in perfect harmony, and neither of them was getting away or ahead from the other one. You could sense the feeling of excitement in the auditorium. It was like a glow, an inaudible buzz. Jerome had never felt anything like it before. This was the real thing. This was the transport of joy. This was incomparable.

  He would have been all right, he knew it now. He would have made it without ever slackening his grip, he would have made it and Elizabeth and he would have come home in a blanket finish. He was fine, he was flying, he was there on top of it, right up until the moment Cecil shifted his coat, and Jerome caught sight of him doing it. If he hadn’t done that, who knows? Jerome wondered, as he stared down at the square below the balcony where he now stood, at the beginning of yet another London day. Anything might have happened if Cecil wasn’t such an old woman, and hadn’t wanted somewhere safe and clean to place his precious topcoat. Something could have happened later and thrown Elizabeth. Elizabeth was easily thrown, Jerome knew that. She had lost it before, badly, so badly she’d had to come to Jerome for help. So just suppose. Just suppose Cecil hadn’t moved his topcoat. Just suppose.

  But he had. The act was passed and over, it had been done. Cecil had moved his topcoat from his knee and placed it on the still unoccupied seat beside him, and Jerome had seen him do it out of the corner of his eye. And as he saw him do it, that was the moment Jerome knew Pippa would not be there, that Pippa wasn’t coming to his first night, and that by the act of placing his coat on the empty seat, Cecil showed that he knew it, too.

  That was the moment he let go of the rockface, just for a moment, just for a split second, but it was quite long enough. By the time he had regained his grip, Elizabeth was gone, higher and higher above him on the mountain, soon to be lost in the clouds shrouding the dizzy heights. Standing on the balcony in Grosvenor Square, eight hours or more after the event, Jerome could still recall it utterly, and as he did, as the feeling of complete helplessness overcame him, so once more his head began to swim and his senses reel. From that moment, the moment he knew Pippa was not going to be there to see him, Jerome lost it, he lost both his conviction and his timing, and with it the full description of his performance, depriving himself finally of at least a fair share in the triumph of the evening.

  ‘I trust you’re not contemplating anything permanent, dear boy,’ a tired voice said behind him. ‘By and large your notices were really most encouraging.’

  It was Cecil, red-eyed and exhausted, and for Cecil – very dishevelled.

  ‘I fell asleep,’ he said defensively, in response to Jerome’s hard stare. ‘Waiting for you.’

  The two men faced each other on the balcony in silence, until Cecil, with a long uncontainable yawn, made as if to turn and go back inside, which was when Jerome pounced, grabbing him by the lapels of his dinner jacket.

  ‘Why?’ he demanded, ‘why in hell didn’t you say?’

  ‘Look – we’ve been through all this, dear boy,’ Cecil replied, trying not to look as taken aback as he felt by Jerome’s sudden ferocity. ‘I told you over dinner, remember?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before, Cecil?’ Jerome moaned, rocking slightly on his heels. ‘Before I went on. I could have coped! It wouldn’t have mattered!’

  ‘Believe me, dear boy,’ Cecil insisted, ‘it
was for the very best reasons. And it wasn’t just me, you know. It was Pippa, too. When she found she couldn’t get through to you on the stage-door phone, she rang me because that way she was certain you’d get the message. And when I suggested it might be better to tell you afterwards, particularly vis-à-vis her mother’s accident, she thought it was better, too. She thought rather than you knowing before – I mean the last thing anyone wanted to do was throw you, dear boy.’

  ‘Well it did, dear boy!’ Jerome replied, suddenly full voice. ‘It did, and God damn it, look at the results!’

  He let Cecil go, pushing him back against the open windows, while he himself turned round once again to contemplate events in the square below.

  Cecil took a cigarette from his wafer-thin case, tapped it against a thumb-nail, and then lit it with his pocket Dunhill.

  ‘Of course in retrospect,’ he admitted, exhaling a plume of smoke, ‘I should have realized. I should have remembered our seats were in the very front row. But in the heat of the moment . . . It really was with the very best intentions.’

  ‘The road to hell, Cecil,’ Jerome replied, swinging his dinner jacket over one shoulder, ‘is paved with the damned things.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jerome,’ Cecil said, ‘if you think I acted foolishly. But I really did mean it for the best. I thought you would get upset if you knew in advance that Pippa wasn’t going to be there. Which really is why I didn’t tell you. Knowing that is exactly how you feel about Pippa.’

  Jerome eyed Cecil, darkly, without any forgiving warmth, then pushed his way past him into the drawing room, leaving Cecil to smoke the rest of his cigarette on the balcony and wish that he had been telling Jerome the exact truth.

  For while it was true to say that the reason Cecil hadn’t told Jerome in advance of Pippa’s enforced absence was indeed because he knew exactly how Jerome felt about Pippa, it wasn’t true in the way that Jerome would think it to be so. Cecil hadn’t told Jerome he knew precisely how Jerome felt about Pippa. Cecil hadn’t told Jerome about Pippa out of spite.