Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  She was going to play St Joan in the annual school production. She hadn’t won the part by declaring her real name, because she had decided to keep her real name a secret. She had won the part by taking her chance like everyone else at the auditions, which made Pippa’s concern all the greater. If somehow Jenny had been given the role as some sort of favour, since it was her last year, or if they had found out she was Jerome’s daughter and cast her for that reason, Pippa would have paid little heed to the event, and while she would have enjoyed seeing Jenny attempt the role, she wouldn’t have had the worry she now had, which was that Jenny might be seriously contemplating becoming a professional actress, the very last thing Pippa wanted for her. She had seen enough of the theatre and met enough of its incumbents to know that this was not the world in which she wanted her daughter to live and work. She had got to know Jenny so well, she had got to know how bright and clever Jenny was, and she knew such an intelligence could and would only be blunted in the world of the theatre.

  Previously, all Jenny had been interested in doing was painting, a subject at which she excelled, her interest in art growing profoundly since her teens. Pippa had converted one of the old barns into a huge studio for them both, where they spent much time together when the work was done on the farm, or when Jenny was on holiday, or at weekends when sometimes there was nothing else to do but paint. Pippa considered her daughter to be so much more talented than she herself was, but left that for her teachers to say, knowing full well that such remarks from a parent only sounded like flattery, and carried no real weight. Happily Jenny’s teachers were even more enthusiastic than Pippa privately was, with the result that Jenny’s work was always the centrepiece of the yearly exhibitions at the lycée and there was already talk of a scholarship to Paris or to London, whichever Jenny would prefer.

  In fact Pippa and she were just preparing a portfolio of Jenny’s work for both the nominated art colleges when Jenny broke the news she was going to play St Joan.

  ‘What about your painting?’ Pippa asked. ‘What about the chance of these scholarships?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t going to apply for the scholarships, Maman,’ Jenny replied. ‘All I said was I was going to play St Joan. It’s only at the lycée. It’s not at the Sarah Bernhardt.’

  ‘You’ll neglect your studies, Jenny,’ Pippa said. ‘Painting’s a discipline—’

  ‘So you always say, Maman,’ Jenny interrupted her. ‘But don’t worry. I won’t stop painting.’

  But she did. The deeper she became involved in rehearsals, the more she neglected her work, until she finally stopped painting altogether. All this was only over the space of a few weeks, but it was long enough and the change in Jenny was profound enough to cause Pippa concern.

  What caused her even more concern was her daughter’s performance. Naturally Pippa was allowed nowhere near rehearsals, and while she heard Jenny practise her lines, these were just repetitions to consign the part to memory, and from listening it would have been impossible to guess either how good or how bad Jenny was going to be in the part.

  She was neither. She was in truth astounding. She was defiance and she was humility, she was strength and she was frailty, she was the peasant girl and she was the martyred saint. Jenny captured everything there was to capture of the Maid, her confidence, her faith, her appeal and her rebellion. At the curtain calls, the packed audience threw their hats in the air, stood on the benches and cheered her to the rafters. That night she was without a shadow of any doubt her father’s daughter.

  Pippa sat while around her everyone stood. She sat not knowing whether to laugh or to cry, and then finally as the cries of Bravo! echoed all around her, she too rose to her feet, climbed on her bench, and cheered her brilliant, talented daughter until she was hoarse and her tears had finally run dry.

  There were only five performances, but even that number was one more than intended, the fifth performance being hastily programmed for the Saturday afternoon in response to the demand for tickets. From Wednesday to Saturday night, there wasn’t a seat to be had, nor a standing space to be found which wasn’t taken an hour before curtain up. Jenny’s performance was the talk of Tours and its environs. Had the play been mounted in a professional theatre, everyone said it would have run for months. As it was, those who saw it counted themselves lucky, and swore they would never forget the experience.

  ‘So,’ Pippa said, after all their Sunday lunch guests had gone, after all the parties and all the celebrations were over. ‘You know, I don’t know what to say.’

  Jenny laughed as she helped clear away.

  ‘You don’t have to say a thing, Maman,’ she said. ‘I’m the one who has something to say.’ She put the pile of dishes down by the sink and then having carefully wiped her hands on her apron, came back to her mother to hug her very hard and to kiss her. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Thank me, ma petite? What on earth for?’

  ‘Oh – nothing.’ Jenny smiled again, and then hugged her mother once more, laughing as she did so. ‘Just for being such a wonderful mother, that’s all. For being you. For not asking me why? Or are you sure? Or saying I shouldn’t, that you didn’t want me to.’ She held both her mother’s hands and stood away slightly, her expression now grown serious. ‘I know what you’ve been thinking. I know you’ve been worrying. But don’t. There’s no need to. It’s just something I had to do. It’s something I had to find out. And what better way? I might never have got the chance otherwise, and I’d have wondered, I’d have wondered for evermore. Which is why I love you more than ever, and which is why I say merci, merci, merci beaucoup, Maman.’

  The very next morning when Pippa arose, she saw a light already on in the studio, and when she looked in, she found Jenny already hard at work preparing her portfolio. It was not yet seven forty-five.

  At exactly seven forty-five, having filled his hired Mercedes up with gasoline, and thrown his suitcase in the trunk, Oscar Greene got in, fired the ignition, and drove off from Cannes.

  On the fourth day of his leisurely progress through France, Oscar left Bordeaux, drove up along the Gironde estuary as far as Royan where he lunched, then rather than going on to Nantes straightaway which had been his plan, he decided instead to go east cross country through Saintes and Cognac and then further east to Limoges. He stayed overnight in Limoges, in a city famous in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for its porcelain and enamel, exploring it, sightseeing and buying some presents for his family before leaving on the next leg of his journey which was to take him north across country through Lussac and on to Poitiers and thence to Tours, his next designated overnight stop. Such are the vagaries of fate.

  Such indeed are the vagaries of fate that if he had stuck to his original itinerary he would have missed Tours out completely and instead gone as planned to Nantes, on up to Brittany through Châteaubriant, Rennes and finally to Cherbourg for the ferry. Of course, had he done so, had he missed out on Tours, had he not seen the painting, this story would have ended with Jenny taking up one of the two scholarships which predictably enough she won, and with Pippa living peacefully and working alone (except for Nancy and Frizzle, her new dog) at the farm in the Loire Valley, her life well ordered and herself content.

  Oscar’s meanderings would mean a quite different conclusion. Oscar’s vacational wanderings, and his last minute change of directions would totally alter everyone’s plans, and not just their plans, their very lives. The road north from Bordeaux is marked in two quite different directions, one road to Nantes and one to Tours. But it is pointless wondering what might have happened if Oscar had taken the left fork rather than the right and had gone to Nantes instead of Tours, because he didn’t. Because he obviously wasn’t meant to do so. Oscar was fated to turn right, change direction, and go to Tours instead. That was also something that was written in the stars, and not in anyone’s self, not anybody’s.

  21

  The picture, the only painting which hung in the window of the
gallery, was of a small, simple, sunlit farmyard. In the right foreground a beautiful dark-haired child barefoot and dressed in a plain, faded, blue smock was sitting on her haunches feeding the chickens which had gathered round her, while behind her a slim and deeply sun-tanned woman in a plain black dress, her feet in open sandals, her bright red hair swept away from her face and tied at the back of her head by a large green ribbon, was sweeping out an empty stable. The occupant of the stable, a bay cob with a bull neck on him and a big white blaze stood in a rope bridle loosely tethered to a hitching post feeding from a haynet, the dapples on his summer coat shining in the bright, clear sunlight, while outside the yard door of the stone-built and red-tiled farmhouse with its blue painted woodwork a nearly black dog lay fast asleep, his head in his chest, and one paw curled over his muzzle. Beyond the yard and the house lay the hills and forests of the valley, a background of greens which in the distance became blues, under the light of an azure summer sky. It was oil on canvas, about 24″ × 18″, signed indecipherably in the bottom right hand corner, absolutely exquisite, and Oscar knew he had to have it.

  ‘But it is sold, monsieur,’ the patron informed him most regretfully. ‘You do not see the small red dot, no? Ah yes, it is sold, and we could have sold him more than twenty time.’

  ‘You don’t sound exactly overjoyed it’s sold,’ Oscar said. ‘And I have to tell you, I feel exactly the same.’

  ‘No, no, monsieur. I like him to be sold. My regret it is these artists are so slow. So slow. This artist – I could sell six a day! I could! Oh yes!’ The owner of the gallery laughed, and with a shrug pointed to all the paintings on the walls. ‘You see?’ Oscar hadn’t. He’d been too busy examining the painting in the window. Now he turned and saw all the other paintings on exhibition. ‘Every one sold, monsieur. Every single one.’

  Oscar stared at what must have been a collection of at least two dozen oils, and a dozen or so pencil or pen and ink drawings. ‘You mean it?’ he said. ‘Every single one?’

  ‘The day of the private view—’ the owner shrugged his shoulders, pursed his lips and then exhaled emphatically. ‘I sell them all.’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Oscar went and walked round the gallery, quickly at first to make sure they were indeed all sold, which they were, and then slowly, to examine each and every exhibit. Oscar had started collecting paintings in earnest after the success of Tatty Gray, mostly the works of little-known English and French painters from about 1920 to around 1950. He only ever bought what he loved. He never bought anything he was advised to buy, nor anything that was fashionable. He simply looked for paintings which had he been able to paint, he would have painted, and when he found such paintings, he bought them.

  Every one of these exhibited works fell into that category. Most of the drawings were of one particular child, the child in the farmyard, and Oscar could understand why because the girl was so enchanting, with her mop of dark hair, her wide, honest eyes, and the smudge of freckles which ran over her pretty nose. There were studies of the girl when she was a baby, some lying on her mother’s bed while the red-haired woman in the farmyard painting was dressing her for bed, or drying her after her bath, or simply just playing a game with the baby, and there were studies of the child from what looked like its first uncertain steps, holding on to a hand belonging to an unseen and unportrayed person, to sketches of her bending down to stare at a baby chick, of her curled up asleep on an old sofa in the corner of a sunny room, of her sitting at a kitchen table with a glass of lemonade, and an absolutely exquisite study in pen and brown ink of the child aged about five, Oscar guessed, standing between the mighty front legs of the big bay cob, while the horse looked down curiously and tenderly, his white-blazed nose just nuzzling the top of the child’s mop of curly brown hair.

  The paintings were mostly landscapes, of either the countryside where the artist lived, or of the surrounding villages. There were some interiors but these were in the minority, although Oscar considered they were probably the best of all the paintings, particularly one of a simple, sparely furnished café, inhabited by just three men and the patron, the men standing at the bar in the uniforms of their work, a postman, a workman in his dusty blue overalls, and a railway employee, while behind them le patron stood sideways, reading his daily paper. It was an immensely atmospheric painting, and the artist had precisely captured a moment in a day, and the light of that day, a sunlight which had been filtered down to a bluish haze through the smoke of the men’s cigarettes. Oscar stood staring at this painting longer than at any of the others, with the exception of the little masterpiece in the window, totally absorbed by it, drawn into its depicted world, and into the actual moment the painter had so brilliantly captured for all time.

  ‘You have good judgement, monsieur, if I may say it,’ the gallery owner murmured behind him, ‘if, as I think, you think this the best.’

  ‘I’d say it was outstanding,’ Oscar replied. ‘But then the entire collection is remarkable. Do you really have nothing else by this artist? I simply have to buy some of his work.’

  ‘No, monsieur.’

  ‘You have nothing else?’

  ‘No, I have nothing else, and no, the artist is not a he. The artist is a woman, monsieur.’

  Oscar gave him a look of surprise and then leaned forward in another attempt to decipher the signature.

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘I give up, I’m afraid. I can’t make it out at all.’

  The owner nodded, and then produced a catalogue from his pocket which he handed to Oscar.

  ‘Philippa Nichole,’ he said. ‘She is a local artist.’

  Oscar flipped through the catalogue in the hope of finding out some further information about the painter, but there was only the briefest of biographical sketches, and no photograph, nor any indication of where she lived and painted beyond saying it was in a small farm somewhere in the Loire Valley.

  ‘Look,’ Oscar said, handing the gallery owner back the catalogue which the owner insisted Oscar keep. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but I really have to buy something of this artist’s. Does any other gallery carry her work? Could you tell me where she lives? Do you have a phone number?’

  The owner smiled, and Oscar knew the smile, because he had seen it so often. It was the you-Americans smile, but Oscar had long since grown used to it, and it no longer infuriated him.

  ‘I’m a serious collector,’ Oscar added, instantly regretting doing so, because the remark simply earned an even more patronizing smile.

  ‘I’m afraid I cannot tell you Madame Nichole’s address,’ the owner said. ‘It is against the gallery’s policy. I could, perhaps, telephone her on your behalf? Yes? Although you must understand that any transaction would have to come through here. Through the gallery.’

  ‘Sure,’ Oscar said, deliberately allowing his impatience to show. ‘You bet. Now I have very little time here, so if you’d be so kind.’

  Again, the you-Americans smile. We know you, here today, gone today.

  ‘Of course, monsieur. If I could perhaps have your name?’

  ‘Sure,’ Oscar said, turning back to his favourite picture of the bar. ‘It’s Mr Greene.’

  The line was very bad, and Jenny could hardly hear what Monsieur Pinguet was saying as she wrote down the message, having told him her mother had gone to the village to collect her car from the garage.

  ‘No, no!’ she shouted back down the line. ‘Don’t make the poor man wait! My mother won’t mind – not at all! Please, Monsieur Pinguet – can you still hear me? Good! No – listen to me – send him out here now! Yes – today is fine! My mother will be back by the time he gets here – and I know she won’t mind! If you remember she has the St Cholet canvases! And all the sketches she did at Chaumont! At the fair! I know, monsieur! I know the arrangement! Don’t worry! I will remind her!’

  Nancy came in from outside, attracted by Jenny’s shouting.

  ‘Oh heck,’ she laughed. ‘It’s you on the phone! I thought you were
being strangulated.’

  ‘Fetch up some wine, Nancy,’ Jenny said on the move, ‘while I go and open up the studio. Some rich Yank’s on his way out here, who apparently will buy anything with Maman’s name on it!’

  ‘You don’t say, Jenny,’ Nancy replied, looking for the key to the cellar. ‘Who is he? Nelson Rockefeller, I hope.’

  But Jenny had gone, chased all the way across to the studio by Frizzle. So Nancy glanced at the paper with the details of the telephone message and saw their caller was alas not to be Nelson Rockefeller, but someone called plain Mr Gray.

  Oscar had never seen anywhere as idyllic. He had no idea of the climate of the Loire Valley, so he couldn’t imagine what winter in such a remote spot might be like, but even if it snowed solidly for six months Oscar knew he could take it. He could take anything to live in such a profoundly beautiful place. It was nothing but superb woods, forests, lakes and chateaux, and towns and villages of such inordinate charm that Oscar felt he could move into this part of France tomorrow, except when he saw the farmhouse, he realized that even tomorrow wouldn’t be soon enough.

  He had left his car at the foot of the track under the shade of an enormous chestnut tree and by a field full of wild flowers and songbirds, to walk the last hundred yards or so up to the house which he could see before him. As he stood to drink in the setting and the view, the red-haired woman in the painting appeared at a gate ahead, leading in two cows which were ready for milking. She didn’t see Oscar, as she walked into the farmyard in front of the cows which were ambling happily behind her, nor did she pay any attention to a white goat on top of a nearby wall, who seemed to be busy consuming what looked to Oscar suspiciously like an article of clothing.