Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘It’s this business of girls with their mothers, you see. It’s something I don’t understand.’

  ‘And something I’m afraid I can’t really help you with.’

  Elizabeth had smiled her helpless smile, as Jerome had looked deep into her eyes.

  ‘Tell me about you and your mother,’ he’d suggested. ‘What sort of relationship do you have with your mother?’

  ‘Jerome darling,’ Elizabeth had sighed, ‘I don’t. My mother left me, us rather. She abandoned my brother and I when we were quite tiny. She upped and left us with a kind of aunt, you know. And she and Father just swanned back to their tea plantation in Ceylon, and never gave us another thought.’

  ‘What? She left you both behind? She never sent for you? She must have come and seen you, they must have come back to see you some time, surely?’

  Elizabeth had laughed, lightly, mockingly, a laugh she made a note she must learn to reproduce again. It was that good.

  ‘Never once, Jerome darling. I have never seen either her or my father again.’

  ‘So what about now? I mean how do you feel about them, particularly your mother, how do you feel about your mother now?’

  ‘Jerome, my sweet, I don’t. She might as well never have had me. So, don’t ask me, please. Particularly not what I feel about my mother, darling. Because I have no feelings.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘If you don’t mind, darling, I’d rather not talk about it any more. My parents, as far as I’m concerned have never existed.’

  Jerome had frowned here, still looking into her eyes, holding her gaze with his deep brown eyes that were so full of hurt.

  ‘Of course,’ he had agreed. ‘It’s just that with Pippa—’

  ‘I know, my sweet,’ Elizabeth had murmured, squeezing his hand, but only lightly, as lightly as she had laughed. ‘Heaven only knows how your poor little wife must feel.’

  ‘Sometimes, Bethy,’ Jerome had replied gravely, ‘and I know it’s all very recent and fresh in her mind, but sometimes, Bethy, when I look into her eyes, when I hear her tears at night, when I think of what it all implies, sometimes I imagine she will never get over it.’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth had softly agreed, slipping her hand from his, taking the initiative from him, ‘no, my darling, I don’t suppose you do.’

  And neither did Elizabeth, although sometimes, usually late in the night, when she was lying in the dark, thinking and plotting how the future must be made to go, she would suddenly curl up with fear at the thought that her adversary might be made of sterner stuff than she had so readily supposed. But not this particular March morning, as she turned on her side to ring the bell for the maid to bring her up some coffee and the Daily Express. This particular morning having slept well and apparently dreamlessly, Elizabeth felt utterly confident that no-one, however resilient they may seem, no-one could get over such a hammer blow, particularly a young and innocent girl, barely twenty, and married for a mere fortnight. It just wasn’t possible.

  The young lovers marry and go off on their honeymoon, and then – then on the very eve of the lovers’ first visit back home as husband and wife, the bride’s mother inexplicably kills herself.

  As she lay back on her pillows to await the arrival of her maid, Elizabeth sighed deeply from happiness, and rejoiced in the Bumpkin’s plight, a plight from which Elizabeth hoped there would be no remission.

  On that very day, and at that selfsame time, had she known what Elizabeth was thinking Pippa would undoubtedly have agreed with her, despite her courageous efforts to fly in the face of her adversity. Since her mother’s death, all days were bad days, but this the first Wednesday in March was a particularly bad one, since Pippa was returning to her childhood home for the first time since the funeral.

  She had come down to collect some necessary papers and documents and, now that Mrs Huxley had departed, to shut the house up until probate was declared and her brother and she had decided what to do with their joint bequest. She had been dreading the visit, secretly hoping that Jerome might be able to accompany her, but his shooting schedule on the film was relentless, and since the lawyers were insisting they must start getting her mother’s affairs in some sort of order, Pippa had grasped the nettle and taken the train down to Midhurst by herself.

  It was all still so terribly unreal, she thought once again as the taxi headed out from the town towards the village and Bay Tree Cottage. She felt as if she were moving through a dream, with everything, including reality, just out of reach. It was such a convincing sensation that Pippa felt she would not have been in the slightest surprised if when she finally got to her old home her mother had opened the door to her and life had suddenly but not unexpectedly returned to normal.

  Because surely it must all have been a mistake, Pippa wondered yet again, as the taxi sped through a wet and wind-swept landscape. There was just no reason why her mother should have killed herself, not under the circumstances, not at that most particular moment in time. And so if it had been a mistake, perhaps like all mistakes it could be corrected. Or perhaps the whole thing was a dream. It felt so much like a dream, and the dreams that she had been having, where her mother was still alive, and doing normal things, such as coming into her bedroom at Bay Tree Cottage to say good night, and looking up from a chair by the drawing-room fire, a chair which only a few moments ago had been empty, and walking up the Downs with her and Bobby, without a stick, with hands not yet deformed by disease, with James and Pippa young again, running hand in hand ahead of their mother, perhaps those weren’t dreams as she supposed but moments of reality, despite their apparent dislocation. And so who could tell? When she got to the cottage, and knocked on the door, perhaps all this that Pippa accepted as real would all be shown to have been false, part of a dream, a passage in what appeared to be some terrible and prolonged nightmare but which in fact was being imagined in the length of time it took her to awake, and when she did all those fragmentary glimpses of happiness and normality would fuse into a whole, and life would return to what it was, to what it had been only the day before.

  So much did Pippa hope this that she waited until the taxi had gone before walking up to the front door. She hardly dared look at the windows, in case her mother wasn’t there, in case Bobby, whom in her dream she had left in London, wasn’t to be seen with his wet black nose pressed against the glass. There were no lights on, but then her mother never put a light on in the day, not even during days when the landscape all but disappeared in the dark of a sudden summer storm.

  But there was no answer to her knock, no sound of Bobby barking, no shouted reprimands at the dog from her mother as she made her way to open the door, no latch lifted and no face peering round the white painted front door anxious to identify the visitor. The door remained unanswered, and the house remained silent. Life was not a dream, and her dreams were not reality. Her mother was dead, her mother was gone.

  The house was filthy. There was a thick layer of dust on everything, the waste baskets were still full, and the grates unemptied. There were even unwashed dishes in the sink and a dirty milk saucepan on the stove. Mrs Huxley, who had left the day after the funeral, hadn’t even bothered to clear up after her last meal.

  Deciding that the clearing up of the house could be her last job, Pippa went back to the drawing room to search the desk for the stipulated documents. As she came into the room, the first thing that caught her eye were her postcards, stuck where her mother had always stuck any postcards, under the clips of the oval mirror above the fireplace. Except there were only two. The first two. One of the front at Brighton, and one of the beach at Sandyscombe. But they had sent three, or rather Pippa had, as postcards were already a running joke with Jerome, and he had refused to send anyone any.

  The third one had been of the pub where they had stayed for the second week, The Smugglers’ Arms, which Pippa had posted on the Thursday, to make sure her mother got it by the weekend. But although her mother had received it, a
s witnessed by Mrs Huxley, she hadn’t stuck it up on the mirror along with the others, which was very much out of character.

  Pippa knew it must be somewhere, because her mother never threw anything away, at least not anything personal and certainly not anything familial. She hoarded letters and postcards and even old birthday and Christmas cards, although Pippa doubted that she had ever once taken them out from the drawers or the boxes where they were kept in order to reread any of them. Perhaps she had just intended keeping them as some sort of record for succeeding generations.

  She began by looking in her mother’s old writing case, and then in the walnut bureau, her mother’s usual storage places, but she could find no trace of the missing card anywhere amongst all the jumble of recently received correspondence. She did start finding the bottles, however, beginning with the bureau, and graduating to hidey-holes all over the cottage.

  They were all gin bottles, of various shapes and sizes, full size, halves and even quarters, and the more Pippa looked the more she found hidden. At the beginning of her search they were easy to find, at the back of drawers, behind books which stuck absurdly out from their shelves, albeit high-up ones, on the top of cupboards, and even in the bottom of the two log-boxes, but by the end of what proved to be an exhaustive search Pippa was finding them in the most bizarre places, taped under pantry shelves, stuck in the webbing underneath chairs, under loose floorboards and even in the cisterns of the WCs. By and large they were empty, but certain of them, most particularly the ones best hidden, were sometimes still a quarter or even half full. Pippa collected them all, every one she could find, and lined them up along the kitchen dresser.

  She then made herself a cup of black coffee, and sat down opposite the long row of empty bottles to count them. All told there were seven full bottles, twelve halves, and eighteen quarter bottles, making a total of seventeen and a half bottles of gin altogether.

  ‘There were thirty-seven green bottles,’ she said to herself, ‘up against the wall.’

  Then as she realized the level of her concern, she put her head slowly in her hands and stared down at the top of the kitchen table. These had to be Mrs Huxley’s bottles since her mother only drank sherry and the very occasional whisky, and she had warned her mother that she had heard it rumoured that Mrs Huxley drank, yet she had let her mother laugh her out of it, and left it at that.

  She likes a drink when she’s playing cards, her mother had assured her. Of course, because she’s a woman who likes a drink, she’s a drunk, while if she was a man, she’d be a jolly good chap.

  So that’s how much Pippa cared. Instead of finding someone else to look after her mother, someone more responsible, it had been yet another example of what her mother always used to call her basic weakness.

  ‘Heaven help us if you ever joined the police,’ she used to say. ‘It would simply be a matter of you arresting whoever was nearest.’

  In fact all Pippa’s faults according to her mother were tarred with this particular brush, a love of convenience. She was always, according to her mother, inclined to go on first impressions, rather than waiting and seeing. She would rush to judgement rather than evaluate the arguments, she was too eager to please, too easily pleased, and too accommodating. And now because of this, because of what her mother had dubbed her hopelessly quixotic nature, her mother was dead because Pippa had not exercised sufficient judgement in the choice of a companion. She had left her mother quite wilfully in the care of a woman who was a drunk, while she had rushed off in typical Pippa fashion – according to her mother – to marry someone she barely knew. Anything could have happened being left in the charge of such a person. Anything had happened. Now as a result, Pippa knew she would find it harder than ever to forgive herself.

  Fetching the first old grocery box that came to hand in the pantry, Pippa put it on the table and prepared to load it with the empty bottles, which was when she saw it. If she had picked any of the other half a dozen or so cardboard boxes, she would never have known, but somehow fate had seen to it that she chose this particular one and not any of the others. Even so, it was remarkable that Pippa spotted it, one small fragment amongst so much waste paper, one torn up shred.

  But it was unmistakeable, unmistakeably her hand-writing, and the word she had written was equally unmistakeable – Jerome.

  Carefully she tipped the box up and sorted through all the old rubbish, the yellowing local newspaper, empty envelopes stained with discarded tea leaves, lipsticked stubs of Mrs Huxley’s Craven As, potato peelings, and all sorts of other household detritus, until she thought she must have found every missing piece. Then having fetched some adhesive tape from the desk, she carefully stuck it all together, applying the tape to the side with the black and white photograph, until she had reassembled the last and until then the missing postcard.

  Turning it over, she studied the back and thanks to her skilful reconstruction, found the message surprisingly legible. It read:

  Weather still extraordinarily mild, and

  Sandyscombe heaven, as is The Smugglers’

  Arms – terrific board and lodging. We

  shall be home Saturday, and with you

  Sunday for lunch as arranged, but I’ll

  probably call you as soon as we’re home.

  Jerome sends his love, as do I. From us

  both, The Didiers (!) xxxxxxxx

  Pippa stared at the card until she couldn’t focus any longer, wondering all the while how such an innocuous message could prompt such a savage reaction, because her mother must have been in a fury not only to have thrown away the card, but to have torn it into such small pieces before doing so. Yet it was so much out of character for her mother. If there had been anything on the card she hadn’t liked, she’d have kept it to wave under Pippa’s nose. Pippa knew her mother. She loved to take issue over something which might have inadvertently upset her, not maliciously, but gleefully. It was part of the family fabric.

  But what could have upset her about this particular card and its simplistic message? Agreed, her mother might not have exactly warmed to Pippa signing it The Didiers, and knowing this, Pippa had deliberately included in brackets an exclamation mark, to remove the sting as it were. But there was no way, Pippa reasoned, that her signing who they properly and legally now were could throw her mother into such a rage that she would all but shred her card and throw it out with the tea leaves and the potato peelings.

  Nor could the fact that Pippa had neglected to telephone her that Saturday evening have caused her to behave so illogically. Pippa knew her mother too well. Whenever she was away, which hadn’t been that often in recent times, if she forgot to call when she had said she would, her mother would either ring her and berate her, or shake a finger under her nose when she returned home. But it was always soon forgotten. Underneath it all her mother understood perfectly well how easy it was to overlook things, which was why one of the family agreements had always been not to make anyone promise anything, because it was agreed that the best way to keep your word was not to give it. A missed telephone call would mean nothing, not in light of the fact that they were to be reunited the following day. This was just not typical of her mother. Pippa knew that, because Pippa knew her mother.

  Except did she? Pippa suddenly thought, sitting and staring again at the message on the card. If she knew her mother like she thought she did, why was her mother lying inexplicably dead? If Pippa knew anything about her mother, she could at least begin to reason why this might be, but she could think of not one, not one possible explanation, or rather at least not one that she was willing to face.

  For there was one, Pippa admitted to herself, and not for the first time. There was one explanation and if admitted it could be the only one, namely that her mother hated Jerome. Her mother hated Jerome and was passionately opposed to the marriage, as passionately as Pippa was determined to go through with it. But then why had she suddenly given in so completely? If she was so opposed to their union, the mother Pipp
a thought she knew would have fought on, she would have fought to the end rather than just surprisingly, and surprisingly tamely, conceding? So why? Why? Why? Why?

  She began to clear up the house, starting right at the back, in the guest bedroom, and working her way down until she finished with the kitchen, in an attempt to purge her mind. But the longer and the harder she worked the more the questions came to her. Had her mother taken the decision to end her life before she and Jerome were married? Had her mother, a good Christian, really stood there in the house of God, watching her daughter getting married while contemplating her imminent suicide? What had she meant by what she had said to Pippa just before she left to go away – you’ve got what you want, Pippa, now all we must hope is you want what you get? Did she still think Jerome was a very different person to the one he really was? Or did she think that killing herself was her last refuge, the only way she was certain that she could blight their happiness? And if so, why? Her mother and she had always got along, they weren’t inseparable by any means, and her mother never made a display of her affections, but even so – would she really take her own life just because she disapproved of Jerome? It simply didn’t seem possible.

  But then why had she given Pippa that strange, lingering look as she was about to leave on honeymoon, a look which Pippa had thought was as if she had never seen Pippa properly before, but which Pippa now realized was more the look someone might give you when they were looking at you for what they thought was the last time. All of which began to make sense, when Pippa recalled how her mother had wished her goodbye. How she had kissed her so tenderly and wished goodbye to her darling Pippa.

  Normally, Pippa thought as she sat in the train heading back to London, such a goodbye could be ascribed to a moment of sheer sentimentality, to the sudden rush of affection a mother must feel when her daughter gets married, however unsentimental the mother in question might usually be, which was how Pippa had interpreted their embrace. But now, in light of what had happened since, that interpretation was no longer credible. With her mother now dead, Pippa knew that the look in her mother’s eyes as she had reached up to kiss her goodbye, had the look of finality.