Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘You don’t seriously think it’s an inside job, Lizzie?’ he asked. ‘Much more likely it’s some batty old dame in that Agatha Christie sounding village.’

  Elizabeth picked up the sealed envelope from beside her, and tapped it thoughtfully on the table.

  ‘It was just a thought, darling,’ she replied. ‘Jerome is such a national heart-throb now, you know. I gather he was mobbed nightly at the stage door during his Romeo. That they tore the clothes off his back. That young girls fainted in the Gods.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘That they sent him their knickers through the post.’

  As usual, Oscar remained stone-faced, but inside he was astounded. It seemed such a contrary thing to do.

  ‘Do they enclose a covering note?’ he wondered. ‘You know, something along the lines of Dear Mr Didier, I really enjoyed your Romeo last evening. In all honesty I can say I have never seen a more poetic or spiritually inspired performance. Please find enclosed one pair of black lace panties. Yours sincerely, Jane Doe.’

  Elizabeth threw her head back and laughed, and then having smoothed her dark hair back in place, turned her famous green eyes on him.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, sighing. ‘All jokes aside, I suppose this will mean Jerome won’t even consider the play.’

  ‘I very much doubt it. Would you? If you were he?’

  ‘I’m going to surprise you by saying yes. Yes, Oz darling, yes I would. You see what poor sweet Pippa needs is a complete rest. From everything. And as we’re agreed, that apartment of theirs is the next best thing to Piccadilly Circus. When Jerome is home. But if Jerome wasn’t at home—’

  Oscar, who was finishing his Martini, looked up at this, and in doing so missed seeing the olive stick which caught him in the lip.

  He ran a finger over the little bruise which was already swelling and frowned at Elizabeth.

  ‘Better still surely,’ he asked, ‘if they both weren’t at home. If they took some time off. Went on a vacation.’

  ‘Yes.’ Elizabeth invested the adverb with sufficient doubt to make it sound most unaffirmative. ‘The trouble being that – or didn’t you know?’ Now she looked worried, as if she had only just realized something. ‘Did Cecil not tell you?’ Again the question was loaded differently. It wasn’t a curious question. Did Cecil not tell you? It was a you-mean question. You-mean Cecil didn’t tell you? ‘We’ve had to move everything forward, Oz darling. If I’m to do your play, it’s going to have to be now.’

  ‘What’s with the if, Miss Laurence?’ Oscar got up and then sat down again. ‘Come on – it’s never been a question of if. This play was written for you. With you, dammit! This whole new version is all your idea!’

  ‘I can’t believe Cecil didn’t say anything.’ Elizabeth carefully lit a Sobranie, and blew the smoke out uninhaled. ‘Darling, the on dit is Hollywood next stop. And this year.’

  Oscar got up again, asked if he could fix them both another drink, and when Elizabeth declined the offer on her behalf, he went over to the drinks table and mixed himself an extra stiff cocktail.

  ‘Jerome will never agree,’ he said finally. ‘No chance.’

  ‘I think he might,’ Elizabeth said carefully. ‘I think I might be able to persuade him.’

  ‘Sorry, Lizzie,’ Oscar disagreed. ‘Even given your quite unique charms, I don’t think anything will persuade Jerome to leave Pippa.’

  Elizabeth took a long pull on her cigarette, this time inhaling the smoke, before crushing it to a premature death in an ashtray.

  ‘Come along,’ she said, on the rise. ‘Let’s go and have lunch.’

  On their way out, Elizabeth handed her maid, who was also dressed to go out, her batch of letters to post, keeping back just one, the palely coloured envelope which she slipped unseen into her handbag.

  ‘Be a poppet and post these for me, Maggie,’ she said. ‘Here’s the money for the stamps.’

  ‘I won’t have time to get the stamps till I get home, Mrs Ferrers,’ the maid replied. ‘I’m only just going to make the station.’

  ‘I’m always doing this to you, aren’t I?’ Elizabeth laughed.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mrs Ferrers. As long as you don’t mind.’

  ‘Mind, Maggie? I actively prefer it! You know that! You just can’t trust the post in London any more. Now off you go, enjoy your afternoon, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Oscar got a cab, and was giving the driver instructions when Elizabeth got in.

  ‘I don’t know where I’d be without Maggie,’ she said as the cab pulled away from the house. ‘She’s such a sweet girl, you know. An absolute treasure. Always goes home to mum ’n dad in the country on her half day. It’s terribly sweet. They run a little village Post Office just outside Haslemere.’

  The mail, which included a brown enveloped letter once again addressed to Pippa in the original childish block writing, and a large pale lavender enveloped letter addressed to Jerome in a loopy backward sloping hand lay waiting to be collected by Miss Toothe in the wire catch basket on the back of the front door. It was twenty-five to nine in the morning, and the secretary was not due in to start her duties until the hour. No-one else was allowed to touch the incoming mail, those were Jerome’s strict orders, until Miss Toothe had sorted through it, sifting the personal from the business and the bills, and keeping a strict eye out for any of an immediately suspicious nature. The telephone number of the apartment had been changed the day after Pippa’s collapse, as indeed had the number for her Chelsea studio, as a precaution.

  Jerome and Pippa were still in bed, Jerome asleep, Pippa wide awake, feeling for the first time in a long time that she couldn’t sleep another minute. After her collapse, which Pippa knew to be only a faint, and correctly described it as such, Jerome nevertheless insisted on advice privately taken from both Elizabeth and Cecil that Pippa be examined by a Harley Street neurologist, who pronounced her to be suffering from a nervous breakdown. Pippa had insisted that this was not the case, that she had merely fainted, something she had often done as both a child and a teenager, and that the faint or syncope (she remembered the correct term from Dr Weaver who had often treated her for it) had been brought about as might be expected by emotional causes and a lack of proper nutrition. For obvious reasons Pippa hadn’t eaten properly or regularly in months.

  Mr Sessions, the specialist, a tall, pompous and rapidly balding know-it-all (Oscar called them swell-heads) had smiled benignly but briefly at Pippa before continuing to talk to Jerome as if she wasn’t there. The patient he advised would need a long bed rest and absolute quiet. Again, Pippa had interrupted him, raising her voice so that the specialist might pay her some attention while she had repeated what in her opinion was wrong with her, and that all she needed was some sleep and a couple of good square meals. And once again the specialist had refused to acknowledge her, informing Jerome instead that such outbursts were a typical symptom of nervous breakdowns, and he must expect other indications, such as sudden tearfulness, loss of temper, marked social withdrawal, and even an overt concern for the patient’s own state of health, which as Pippa later remarked to Jerome covered just about everything, particularly for someone who was still in grief, and particularly if that someone was female.

  Mr Sessions had left Jerome with a long list of the medications he considered vital for the patient’s recovery, which included prescriptions for nerve tonics, brain foods, vitamin complexes, particularly thiamine and riboflavin, tranquillizers, sleeping tablets and a revolting sounding diet based mainly on steamed fish, nuts and undercooked liver, all of which Pippa chose to ignore completely.

  She had been out of bed and dressing when Jerome had returned after seeing the doctor out.

  ‘If anyone needs treatment,’ she had told Jerome in a rising voice, ‘it’s not me, it’s that over-dressed horse-doctor! I am not going potty, Jerome! I am not having a nervous breakdown! I am not going round the bend!’

  Jerome had sat her patiently down on the bed, mistaking the exas
peration in her voice for hysteria, and had tried to talk her down gently, reasoning with her that it couldn’t do her any harm to spend some time in bed, just resting, and sleeping, and being waited on hand and foot. Nancy would look after her, Nancy the maid and Miss Toothe, they would see to her every need if he was working, and if he wasn’t working he wouldn’t move from her side. Then the moment she was quite well again, they would take a holiday. They would go off to France, or even better, they would go to Florence – which was the moment when Pippa really despaired.

  She had seen the look in Jerome’s eyes, a look of such pity and concern that she knew he believed the specialist, that he thought she really was cracking up. It was (again as Oscar would say) a no-win situation. If she fought it, if she raised her voice in protest, it would be taken as a symptom of her diagnosed disorder, while if she didn’t, if she just took to her bed and slept and ate and did as she was told, that would equally be read as proof that she was ill. And so she had cried, not because she was really ill, but because she wasn’t. Pippa was not in the least neurotic, and she never had been. What she had been for as long as she could remember was a fainter. As she was growing up, she had fainted not frequently, just enough to cause her mother and Dr Weaver concern, although happily it was found there was nothing seriously wrong with her beyond a common overactivity of the vagus or parasympathetic nerves.

  ‘A faint is just a reflex action,’ Dr Weaver had told her. ‘All you’ve got to do if you start feeling faint is just lower your head below the level of your heart, which will soon restore the flow of blood to your brain.’

  Unfortunately, the day she had collapsed at the table with Jerome, she had been so upset she hadn’t noticed the warning signs in time, so when she had tried to get to her feet it had been too late, with the result that now everyone, including Jerome, thought she was suffering a breakdown.

  Which was why when she saw that look in his eyes, she cried, uncontrollable tears, unstoppable tears, sudden tears, which as she did she realized was, of course, a typical symptom of a nervous breakdown.

  Pippa remembered all this, she sifted all the facts backwards and forwards through her head that winter morning as she lay in the half-light with Jerome still fast asleep beside her, while the letter which was to change her life lay as yet uncollected in the wire basket. Oddly enough, even though she knew she was not broken down or even breaking down, the enforced rest was doing Pippa good. She would never have believed she could sleep as much as she had. Once she had started to sleep in, having been made to entrust Bobby’s walks to either Jerome or Nancy, she found to her astonishment that she could sleep right through the morning with no trouble.

  Jerome was delighted, not because he thought it proved him right that Pippa was suffering from some form of crack-up, but because he maintained that people’s bodies told them what they needed, and half the modern world’s troubles stemmed from people not listening to their bodies. Pippa needed the sleep, her body was telling her that in no uncertain terms, so sleep she must.

  ‘Innocent sleep,’ he had smiled as he settled her back on her pillows. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher of life’s feast.’

  So Pippa had slept, she had given in to the remorseless fatigue she realized she had felt, and the longer she had slept, the more the wound healed.

  She could think sensibly about the play now. When before her collapse Jerome had first mentioned it, worried as always (worried more than ever, Pippa recalled) about the implications and the ramifications and the connotations of what They were once again asking him to do, Pippa had found herself for once irritated by the amount of importance Jerome gave the matter when there seemed to be matters more worthy of their concern. Jerome had been oblivious to this, and had worried the issue of Oscar’s new play much as Bobby worried his rubber play-bone, endlessly, noisily and at all the wrong times, until surprising herself and surprising Jerome even more Pippa had told him once but in no uncertain terms that there was no point whatsoever in seeking her advice because there was only one person’s advice Jerome ever took and that was the person who stared back out at him every morning in his shaving mirror.

  ‘Is this our first fight, Mrs Didier?’ Jerome had laughed. ‘Is it separate bedrooms tonight? Oh, alas – alack-a-day!’

  She hadn’t been allowed to read the play in bed, because Jerome knew that would only lead to a long discussion about its merits and its suitability, which he feared would tire the patient unnecessarily. In fact since her faint, the subject of Oscar’s new play had never been brought up again, at least not in front of her. Pippa had heard it discussed briefly and in the distance, whenever Cecil called round, and during certain telephone calls if the bedroom door had been left ajar. Jerome was at his most doubtful, and the more Pippa lay in her bed thinking about it, the more she was inclined to agree with him. From what she could gather it seemed Oscar had once again written the play primarily for Elizabeth, with Jerome very much as an afterthought, and from what she overheard from the snatches of conversation, Elizabeth’s part was a brilliant creation, almost guaranteed to steal the thunder. So what, she wondered, was in it for Jerome?

  Second best, from the way Jerome had described his role, that of a failed painter who becomes obsessed with a strange girl he finds one day when he comes to open up his long locked studio, a beautiful but elusive sprite who becomes his model and his mistress, only finally to vanish as mysteriously as she appeared, from the locked studio just after the painter has completed a portrait of her which is hailed as a masterpiece. The cards were all well and truly stacked in Elizabeth’s favour.

  ‘Mind you,’ Jerome had said once he had outlined the play, ‘it sounds corny, the whole play sounds corny, but then what play doesn’t when you describe it? Try describing Hamlet, and I guarantee you’ll be rolling on the floor by the time poor Polonius gets stabbed in the arras. But of course it isn’t in the least corny. Oscar is a wonderful writer. He can take the most mundane sounding theme and stand it on its head. It is a simply marvellously written play. Witty, full of twists and turns, dramatic, and – I have to say it – finally heartbreaking. But there you are.’ Jerome had gestured helplessly. A quick circling move with one raised hand. ‘It is a vehicle for Didier and Laurence. Or rather more perhaps one should bill this one Laurence and Didier.’

  By the time Jerome was bathed and shaved that morning, and padding wrapped in a thick, white, towelling robe barefooted like a cat across the bedroom to draw the big, expensive curtains, Pippa’s mind was made up. Jerome must not do the play. Jerome was launched. Jerome had just been acclaimed the finest Romeo in living memory. Jerome Didier was on his own way. So if asked, Pippa would agree with him. Yes, it would be wrong, very wrong to do the play. No, he certainly must not do it.

  Unfortunately the letter lying in the wire basket was going to make up Jerome’s mind long before Pippa got round to him. In fact the contents of the letter lying in the wire were such that Pippa’s opinion would not even be sought.

  Miss Toothe had all the mail sorted out by the time Jerome was dressed. She brought all the personal letters through to him at the breakfast table, as was the agreed habit. She had placed the brown envelope with the childish writing at the top of the pile, again a part of the agreed procedure. Jerome frowned as he slit the letter open with a long-bladed paper knife, puzzled as to why the anonymous writer should have suddenly reverted to her original form of inscription, and as he noticed when he unfolded the letter, back to her original cheap lined blue notepaper. The message was even more cryptic than ever. It read:

  GOD HAS NOT FORGIVEN MOTHER.

  ‘She’s losing her touch,’ Jerome muttered before screwing the letter up and consigning it to a waste basket which Miss Toothe had as usual placed beside him. ‘What else?’

  Jerome sifted through the post, seeing if he could recognize any familiar handwriting, or put
ting to one side any which bore the stamp of any theatrical managements or film studios. This morning there was just one, the expected letter from Locke’s, which he cut open, discarding the envelope but leaving the letter unread and still folded beside his plate. He knew more or less what the letter would say, and his eye had been more taken with the pale lavender coloured envelope, the one addressed in the oddly looping and backward sloping hand. He frowned at this one too, though not this time from irritation, but from curiosity. The letter spoke to him, it asked to be seen, it demanded to be read first.

  Jerome picked it up, glanced at the London postmark, and then read it, first dismissing Miss Toothe, who departed taking with her the waste basket full of the day’s envelopes, and the crumpled anonymous letter, which she would retrieve and read, as part of her own procedure, before consigning it finally to the dustbin.

  There was no address on the top of the letter, just a name, written in the same oblique hand:

  SYBIL DODONA

  At first Jerome considered it might be a letter from an actress, hoping for work. Since Lady Anne his mailbag contained many such pleas, and they all were consigned to the waste basket. It wasn’t that Jerome was callous, on the contrary. It was simply that he believed if he met and saw one actress and subsequently helped get her work, then he would be obliged to do the same for them all, or rather he would at least have to go as far as interviewing them all. It was an all-or-nothing choice, and Jerome had chosen the nothing option.

  This letter, however, was from neither some aspiring nor some failing actress. It was from an astrologer. Jerome immediately put down his half-drunk cup of coffee and leaned forward so that he sat practically on the edge of his chair. Ever since he had been told the story by Elizabeth of the young actress whose dying day had been predicted by a well-known fortune-teller, and who had wished all her friends goodbye on the nominated day before climbing into her bed and dying, even though there was proved to be nothing medically wrong with her, Jerome had become fascinated by the art of astrology.