Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Not bad?’ Boska wondered, eyes widening. ‘Not bad? You’re talking about Johnny Gielgud Meets The Wild One? Pah! It had shoes of lead on, Jerry. Shoes of lead.’

  ‘Mason was very good I thought,’ Jerome said. ‘I remember being most impressed by James Mason at the time.’

  ‘Pah!’ Boska wasn’t interested in what Jerome thought critically, he was too busy remembering and savouring the film’s pre-publicity. ‘You remember how they bill it? It’s magic. Greater than Ivanhoe! you remember? Thrill to ruthless men and their goddesslike women in a sin-swept age! Thrill to traitors and heroes, killings and conspiracies, passion and violence in Rome’s most exciting time! You tell me – whoever thought up such things!’

  Jerome roared with laughter, having quite forgotten the utter absurdity of Hollywood’s publicity machine.

  ‘It was like Lust for Life, Bossy, yes?’ Jerome recalled. ‘The story of Vincent Van Gogh, or Van Goe as they call him over there. Do you remember? This man doesn’t kiss – he crushes!’

  Both men had overlooked the main topic of their conversation and were helpless with laughter as they recalled more and more absurdities from various publicity departments when Elizabeth opened the heavily studded oak door and stared into the dining room.

  ‘Are you two children going to stay in here all night?’ she asked. ‘Because if you are, I shall lock the door.’

  ‘We’re just coming, Bethy,’ Jerome told her, swinging round and turning his back on Boska so that their guest couldn’t see the go-away-and-leave-us-alone frown Jerome was giving Elizabeth. ‘We won’t be a minute.’

  ‘You’d better not be, Jerry,’ Elizabeth warned. ‘I’ve persuaded darling Rozzie to sing, and Walter’s going to do his impersonation of Charles Laughton impersonating Alfred Hitchcock.’

  ‘We shall be with you, Bethy—’ Jerome said, leaning further towards her and narrowing his eyes, ‘in five minutes.’

  ‘You had better be,’ Elizabeth replied, brandishing the huge iron doorkey. ‘Because look what Bethy’s got.’

  She went, banging the door deliberately hard so that it echoed across the huge room.

  ‘Lizzie looks fine,’ Boska said, drawing on his cigar. ‘She looks as good as she’s ever done.’

  ‘She is fine, Bossy,’ Jerome assured him. ‘What is it now? It’s over six years – nearly seven.’

  ‘And no repercussion,’ Boska said, as a statement of fact rather than as a question.

  ‘Christ, man!’ Jerome laughed, but his eyes didn’t. ‘You’ve seen what she’s done in that time? You’ve seen all the work she’s done!’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Boska smiled casually, ‘but me – I’m not the one what live with her. That’s you. You know how she really is. So you want to tell me?’

  That was the last thing Jerome wanted to do. If he told Boska the truth, not only would they never get to make the film, he doubted if Elizabeth would ever work again. There were rumours, of course, there were always rumours, but rumours need to be substantiated when they concern stars of Elizabeth’s magnitude, and so far, Jerome thanked God, his wife and partner had always behaved impeccably in rehearsal, on the set, and in performance. In fact never once in public had she shown any signs that all was still not entirely well with her, thanks to Jerome’s careful monitoring of her condition, and the skill of her extremely private doctors.

  It helped considerably, of course, that all of Elizabeth’s treatment was now carried out at Sainthill, in the greatest secrecy and under the tightest possible security. The whole operation was so well organized that Jerome doubted if anyone except those immediately involved with the medication had any idea at all of what was going on, not even Miss Toothe, or the omnipresent Miss Page. Elizabeth would certainly not have confided in anyone. She was far too concerned with the keeping up of appearances, and had been well and truly warned that one indiscretion could mean the end of her illustrious career.

  Oddly enough it was Elizabeth’s much detested third floor at Sainthill which provided her salvation. During the summer after her release from The Hermitage, and upon the advice of her doctors, while the staff were on holiday Jerome had arranged for four of the rooms on the third floor to be converted into a private nursing suite, complete with treatment and recovery rooms. He had been persuaded of the wisdom of such a move by Sir David Appleby, Elizabeth’s specialist, who was of the opinion that Elizabeth’s condition could be kept in check only with regular therapy, and if this was the case then it must be carried out in private obviously, because if his patient was constantly readmitted to clinics well known for the treatment of mental disease, there would naturally be no possible chance of concealment.

  So instead a private nursing home was built under the eaves of Sainthill, where if needs be Sir David Appleby and his staff could carry out any further courses of electroconvulsive therapy. Since it was now the practice lightly to anaesthetize patients before applying the electric shocks to their brains, proper facilities had to be inbuilt into the suite of rooms, so that Elizabeth could be both safely treated and her recovery properly monitored. The electric shock treatment had been deemed necessary because of the profound nature of Elizabeth’s depression, and although Jerome had been aghast initially when he discovered what was proposed, he had to admit that the three courses Elizabeth had been obliged to undergo over the period of six years had removed practically all traces of her seriously depressive tendencies.

  Elizabeth’s diagnosed schizophrenia had, however, been a different matter, and occasioned far greater use of the private suite in the attics. Because the schizophrenia was allied with very positive manic-depressive symptoms, Sir David Appleby was confident that not only was the patient treatable but that there was a very real chance of her total recovery, provided she endured the prescribed treatment. Early on in her medication, Elizabeth, or rather the other Elizabeth, had fought like a wildcat both with her doctors and with her nominated psychotherapist, but once they had managed to get her on a regular course of anti-psychotic drugs, in this case chlorpromazine administered through a series of long-acting depot injections, Elizabeth had started a remarkable recovery, one which was deemed by her doctors to be proceeding so successfully that she was allowed to return to work exactly one year after her calamitous collapse in America.

  There had been setbacks, of course, occasional reappearances of the other Elizabeth, one or two bungled attempts early on in the treatment at self-mutilation, and one horrific but ham-fisted attempt at suicide (Jerome had woken up one night to find Elizabeth trying to hang herself from their four poster bed with his dressing-gown cord), but once the anti-psychotic drugs had begun to work fully, despite some unpleasant side-effects caused by the uneven release of the chlorpromazine into her blood stream, the other Elizabeth disappeared, and the old Elizabeth re-emerged, bright, energetic, impulsive and mischievous, Bethy reborn in fact, seemingly mended and whole.

  Sir David had warned Jerome that the case would never altogether be closed, because Elizabeth’s behaviour needed to be monitored regularly. However, if all went well, a time would come when Elizabeth could be taken off the drugs altogether and allowed to try and lead a normal life without medication. And this was the time they had arrived at now, the time Jerome was approaching Dmitri Boska with his suggestion, a time when except for her psychotherapy, Elizabeth had been off all medication and treatment for six months without the occasion of one undue incident.

  ‘You want to know if she can cope?’ Jerome asked Boska. ‘If she can hold out to the end?’

  ‘The role’s a real ballsbreaker, you know that,’ Boska said. ‘It’s driven totally sane people monkey nuts.’

  ‘Bethy’s not insane,’ Jerome retorted, annoyed. ‘She never has been. She suffered a breakdown, that’s all. She’s a very highly strung person, she always has been. Ever since I met her, she pushed herself to her limits, as if it’s a sort of challenge. To see just how hard and just how far she can stretch that prodigious talent. But insane – no. No, no, no
madder than the rest of us. Because we are all mad, Bossy. That’s what a lot of people have maintained, from Samuel Beckett to Mark Twain. Mark Twain said it’s only when we remember we’re all mad that the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.’

  ‘That don’t answer my question, clever-dick,’ Boska replied, tapping an inch of smoked Havana into the saucer of his coffee cup. ‘Suppose we do the film, suppose I get the money—’

  ‘You’ll get the money, Bossy, on our names alone.’

  ‘So, supposing I do. Will she hold out?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jerome came back and sat down again opposite Boska. ‘Yes she’ll hold out, I’ll stake my life on it, Bossy. And not only that, she will be the greatest Lady Macbeth ever.’

  Boska looked at Jerome, and looked at him hard. Then he nodded and rose.

  ‘So, OK,’ he said. ‘So now we go and join the party.’

  20

  When Le Parc was to be shown in Tours, Pippa considered it time to tell her daughter more about her father. When Jenny had been four Pippa had explained in the simplest terms the reasons why unlike her friends, her daughter had no father. You have a papa, she said, of course you do. But your papa doesn’t live here in the farm with us because he lives in another country with another lady. Of course you’ll meet him one day, darling, she’d said as the child sat on her knee by the fire, when you’re bigger, when you’ve grown up I’m sure he’d love to see you, and see what a beautiful girl you are. But not now, ma petite, because he’s very far away, in a far, far away land, and he’s very busy.’

  There was no point then in telling her daughter anything more, because there was nothing more a child that age could understand. As Jenny got a little older, so some of the gaps were filled in, such as how Jenny’s père et mère had met when they were young and fallen headlong in love, but how perhaps because they were too young they were impetuous and had made a mistake. This often happened, Pippa explained, lots of people’s parents married too young or too quickly and when they realized it was a mistake, they stopped being married so that they wouldn’t go on hurting each other. That was all. Marriage was like all things, mistakes could be made, and it was better to realize when you’d made a mistake and call it a day, particularly when there were no children involved.

  When Jenny was old enough she asked why that should be so. She said some of her friends at the lycée had parents who were not happy together but they stayed married because of their children. Pippa agreed this was possible, that some people would endure an unhappy marriage for the sake of their family, particularly in Catholic countries such as France where every effort was made to save a marriage rather than to abandon it. But when Pippa had left Jenny’s father, she was living in England, she wasn’t Catholic, and Jenny hadn’t been born. Did that mean her father had never seen her? Jenny had wanted to know. No, her father had never seen her, Pippa had replied, without telling her that her father didn’t even know she existed, that he had no idea whatsoever that when Pippa had left him she was in fact pregnant.

  Time passed, and there was little further curiosity on Jenny’s behalf. She seemed to know all she needed to know, that her father and mother had once loved each other, that they’d made a mistake and parted and that it was better, much better, that they had, because her mother was happy now, and fulfilled, and her father was married again and he, too, was happy. Jenny was happy, too. She loved her mother, she loved where they lived, she was happy at school, she had many good friends, and really she wanted for nothing. Growing up she had never really missed having a father, because just as they say, what you never have you never miss. Her friends used to ask her how she felt having only a mother, having never known her father, and Jenny would tell them the conclusion she had long ago reached, that it would have been much, much harder if she had known her father, and if he’d left her mother and her when Jenny could have remembered him. As it was, he simply didn’t exist, and because he didn’t exist, there was no sense of loss.

  ‘Non, non! Pas du tout!’ she would exclaim when it was inferred by some of her friends that Jenny was deceiving herself. ‘Ma mère est sensas! Ma mère et moi, on est copines!’ Which was true. As Jenny had grown up, so the bond between Pippa and her had strengthened, until by the time Jenny was sixteen, they were more like sisters than mother and daughter. They went everywhere together, did everything together, argued together, cooked together, tended their little farm together, swam in the river together, fished together, bicycled together, and even learned together. Both were totally bilingual, able to think and speak in both French and in English, both were slender, both were wiry and strong, strong from all the hard work they did together on the farm, fit and strong from their brisk swims all the year round in their fast flowing stretch of the Loire and from their long, hard bicycle rides into the local towns and countryside, both had heads of brown tousled hair and beguiling freckled faces, and both were determined that life should never best them, Pippa because once it had so nearly done so, and Jenny because instinctively she knew that since her mother had left her father she had needed to fight every inch of the way, and so in return she was going to make her mother proud of her, somehow she would one day repay the debt she owed her mother, for giving her against all odds such a wonderfully happy and secure upbringing.

  ‘I could never have done it if it hadn’t been for you,’ Pippa would tell her, and Jenny would laugh it off dismissively. But her mother would insist, as always getting very serious at such times. ‘Mais non, Jenny,’ she would repeat, ‘tu ne comprends pas, chérie. Sans toi?’ And then she would shrug. ‘Rien. Sérieusement. Très sérieusement. Sans toi ma vie aurait été vide. Mais complètement vide.’

  It was true. It wasn’t that Pippa couldn’t have existed without Jenny, that her life would have been empty, the point she was making was that she would not have done. Often in those early years, when the money was running low, Pippa would lie awake at night, frightened and lonely in a country that was still so strange, and so real were her worries she thought seriously and regularly that she would have to concede defeat, sell up and return to England and some menial job in order to bring up her daughter. But then the next morning when she saw the sun rise over the Loire Valley, and rose to find her daughter and Nancy up as usual before her, Nancy letting the chickens out and feeding them, while Jenny collected the warm eggs up in her little apron, with Bobby at her side, barking and chasing his tail with delight as the farmyard came to life, all thoughts of failure went from her head and she would pull on her old dressing gown and hurry downstairs to breakfast in the sun-filled kitchen on home-baked baguettes and thick, sweet chocolate.

  ‘Au contraire, Maman,’ Jenny used to love to contradict her mother, ‘rien n’était possible sans toi. Rien ici! Tu as été mon inspiration.’

  In fact the reverse was the truth. It had all been possible because of Jenny. Jenny had been Pippa’s inspiration. She had been such a beautiful baby, Pippa had been inspired to draw and to paint her, and it was these early pencil sketches, pen and washes and then the subsequent oils of her daughter growing up in the charming little farmhouse in which Pippa had finally settled deep in the heart of the Loire Valley that proved their salvation. She had been persuaded to exhibit them in a local café by their postman, who was a friend of their neighbour Madame Theroux, and who fancied himself as a bit of an art connoisseur. Pippa was flattered to be asked, but also reluctant to show, since as she explained none of the pictures of Jenny were for sale.

  This not unnaturally exasperated le facteur, who over his morning coffee and croissant in the farmhouse kitchen went into a long tirade about the absurd attitudes of amateur painters, the best of whom were always the same – they would paint first class pictures and then refuse to sell them.

  ‘Because they don’t have to,’ Pippa had argued. ‘Because they are amateurs.’

  ‘But not you!’ the postman had growled. ‘You may be amateur, but you – you have to sell!’

  In the end they evolve
d a mutually satisfactory plan of action. Pippa would show the best of her work, but it would all be marked sold. This way she would create an advance reputation for herself, and if anyone wanted her work, she would take commissions. By the end of the second week of her first café show, Pippa had a book full of orders, her subject matters ranging from children to their parents’ prize bulls.

  And now her very first model and the start of her success as a professional painter was eighteen years old this week, and the very next week her father was coming to town. Pippa had seen the advertisements for the film in the local newspaper, where it had been given a lot of coverage because the French, deciding that for once the Americans had made an unusually sensitive and intelligent movie, had given it their seal of critical approval, despite the fact that it had been garlanded with Oscars for best script, direction and acting, Jerome winning his first Oscar, and Dorothy Brooks her second. As a result of the universal good notices in Paris, Encounter in the Park, retitled for French consumption simply Le Parc, enjoyed a record breaking run and was about to go on general release throughout the country.

  Of course, there was no need for Pippa to tell her daughter. There was no way Jenny could ever find out her father’s real identity, because no-one from Pippa’s past knew where or who she now was. She had been careful not to tell Cecil when she rang him even from which country she was calling, and where she and Jenny lived no-one called unexpectedly. Besides, now that she was accepted as a local, no-one referred to her any more as English. To the inhabitants of the village, the town and the countryside around, Pippa was simply Madame Nichole, a local smallholder and professional painter.