‘You’ll be OK, kid,’ Oscar said. ‘Your mother is.’
Pippa knew it the moment Oscar ambled into her studio, she knew something had happened.
‘What was it?’ she said, pouring him some wine. ‘You have words?’
‘Words,’ Oscar wondered. ‘Sure we had words, Pip. All we did was talk.’
‘What about?’
‘You know. I can see it on your face, and you can see it on mine.’ Oscar sat down, looking rather crumpled. ‘I wish it had been you who’d have told her,’ he said. ‘I guess it would have sounded better coming from you.’
‘I don’t think so, Oz,’ Pippa said, sitting beside him on the old studio sofa. ‘I’d have sounded too sorry for myself.’
‘Oh sure,’ Oscar said. ‘That’ll be the day. I’ve never once heard you indulge in the smallest amount of self-pity. You don’t know the meaning of the word.’
‘How did she take it?’
‘Let’s say I don’t think she’ll be taking in too many Jerome Didier movies for a while.’
‘Do you think she had to know, Oz?’
‘You tell me, Pip. I’m just a writer. I just make things up.’
‘I think perhaps she did. She’d always have wondered otherwise. And you can do more harm that way, to yourself, I mean. I think really she had to know sooner or later.’
Oscar sighed and curled up beside her on the sofa, putting his head in her lap, a big weary bear.
‘Sooner or later,’ he repeated. ‘Yeah. Well, as my old grannie used to say at times like this, later’s plenty soon enough for me.’
Jenny cooked them all dinner, serving them one of her favourite dishes, Poulet au Fromage, a chicken cooked in wine, mustard and cheese sauce, served with Gâteau de Pommes de Terre, Purée de Fenouil and accompanied by a well-chilled white burgundy. She was in high spirits throughout the meal, which, as was usual from spring-time onwards, they ate outside.
When Oscar disappeared inside to brew the coffee and fetch the Armagnac, Pippa asked her daughter if she was all right, or if there was anything more she wanted to talk about.
‘Not a thing, Maman,’ she assured her with a squeeze of her hand. ‘We talked it all away, Oz and I, really. So stop looking so worried. I understand everything now.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Totally positive.’ Jenny cut herself an extra slice of cheese and then turned to stare out into the dusk. ‘Have you any idea when they’re planning to revive Tatty Gray?’ she asked.
‘Why?’
‘If you really want to know, Maman, because I’d like to see it. I’d love to see you, or rather the young you on-stage. Not many children could claim that privilege.’
Pippa laughed. ‘That’s true, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I think they’re hoping to get it in production for the autumn. Oscar doesn’t see why the rewrites should take more than a month.’
‘The autumn,’ Jenny reflected. ‘What, sort of September?’
‘Sort of September,’ Pippa agreed. ‘But where are you going to be? You’ll have finished at college. Have you thought what you’re going to do?’
‘I was going to go to America,’ Jenny said. ‘Oz said he’d get me some introductions over there. But in fact I don’t think I’ll actually go until the spring now.’
‘Any particular reason?’ Pippa couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something that was worrying her, a difference in the tone of her daughter’s voice, or a difference in her determination.
‘No. No particular reason.’
‘Have you decided how you’re going to use this talent of yours more importantly. Whether you’re going to be a painter plain and simple, or whether—’
‘You know what we were discussing the other day, Maman, and I’m sorry for interrupting. But you know when we were discussing various possibilities.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now that Oscar’s come up with some really useful contacts over the pond—’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I thought why not? I mean it’s in the blood. I thought why not stage design? Why not be a designer? What do you think?’
‘Yes,’ Pippa replied, with a smile, thinking she now had found the reason for the change in her daughter’s determination. ‘Why not? How funny.’
‘How funny, Maman? I don’t understand. Why?’
‘Because when I met your father, that’s exactly what I was hoping to be. A set designer.’
Jenny read the play again that night, twice. She read it every night (and always at night, never during the day) until she left the Loire to return to London, by which time she knew and understood the part of Tatty Gray perfectly.
24
Jenny had laid her plan well and was equally meticulous in its execution. The beauty of it was that if she failed, even at the final hurdle, no-one except herself would be any the wiser, while if she succeeded the account would be squared, and she would have given measure for measure.
Initially, there were only two problems and both of them logistical. The first one, where and when, Jenny overcame by the judicious manipulation of her stepfather. Whenever she wrote or called home, she made sure to enclose a separate note to Oscar or to talk to him directly on the phone. That way she kept herself fully abreast of all the developments. Once the time and the place were fixed, and she had learned them, the rest was up to her.
The second problem, that of union membership, was a bigger worry since it seemed to be a Catch 22 situation – she couldn’t enter the shop without a ticket, and she couldn’t get a ticket without being in the shop. There was no-one she could ask for advice either, not without revealing her intention, or at least not without arousing suspicions. She had to work that wrinkle out herself, and after a long private debate she decided the only thing to do was to brazen it out, a decision she reached when she remembered something Oscar had once said.
‘The great thing about movies, and about show business in general,’ he’d told her, ‘is that nobody ever checks. Most of the time the game you’re playing is a game of bluff. So you play along. You bluff ’em. And if you succeed, and they want you, by the time they check you out, it’s either too late, or it’s irrelevant. The great thing about this business is that anything is possible. And if it isn’t, you find a way round it.’
The first diversion she created was round the woman in charge of the appointments.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said when a secretary put her through to a Miss Stanway. ‘This is Abigail, darling, from Leslie Stone’s office.’ Jenny had got the agency name from a doorway in Soho. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, darling,’ she continued, ‘but I’m just checking on the calls for tomorrow.’
‘Who in particular, darling?’ a rather tired voice answered. ‘I’ve a list as long as your bloody arm. If you ask me they’re seeing every girl under twenty-five in the whole of bloody England.’
‘It’s a new client, darling,’ Jenny continued, in her best blasé voice. ‘Greene. Jane Greene.’
‘Got a Sara,’ the woman replied. ‘Got a Helen. Got a Susan. No Jane, darling, sorry.’
‘Oh Christ,’ Jenny sighed. ‘I thought this might have happened. It’s this wretched temp we’ve got. You can’t entrust anything to her. Leslie wants you to see this girl, because he’s just taken her on, and he thinks she’s very right.’
Jenny had gleaned the terminology from listening to Oscar over countless wonderfully funny lunches and dinners shared with her mother in the sun filled gardens at the farm. She hadn’t made a conscious effort to memorize the patter. It had just apparently seeped into her memory by some form of osmosis, and was now there to be called upon, when and if required.
‘It’ll have to be the day after tomorrow, darling,’ the woman said. ‘Wednesday at a quarter-past four.’
‘At the Apollo.’
‘At the Comedy, darling.’
‘I’ll get something right in a minute,’ Jenny laughed.
‘Jane Green, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s ri
ght, darling. With an E. Bless you darling,’ she said. ‘Bye!’ And hung up quickly before the woman was reminded to ask again exactly from which agency it was she was calling.
She dressed very carefully and simply, in an old but clean short sleeved white tennis shirt, a well-faded denim skirt, and a pair of black canvas beach shoes, leaving her still sunburned long legs bare. She did nothing to her face, nor to her hair, just running her fingers through it to tousle it the moment she was called.
Which was the only moment she’d been truthfully dreading. Oscar, again inadvertently, had taken her through this moment countless times in the course of his stories and his anecdotes, but Jenny was wise enough to know that nothing could prepare her for the actuality. She could learn the ritual from listening to Oscar, and by such study she could prepare herself for the ordeal by knowing what the people out there were thinking, and what they were looking for, and how they set about finding it. But nothing could prepare her for this stomach churning moment as she stepped out from the shadows and into the glare of the overhead lights which prevented her from seeing little beyond the first row of seats.
They weren’t sitting in the first row of seats, of course. She knew they wouldn’t be, because Oscar had often reported the ploys which were wilfully used at these times, little tricks and ruses designed to disconcert but not to deter. It was the light which unsettled her most, not being yet able to see the faces behind the voices, not being able to see him. But she resisted the temptation to put a hand up to shield her eyes against the light, because she remembered in time Oscar’s story about the ingénue who had done so, and immediately inspired the shout of Ship Ahoy! from someone in the stalls. Jenny didn’t want any such barracking. At this particular moment a chance remark or joke could destroy even the most assured of confidences.
‘Name please!’ someone called from the dark beyond. ‘We seem to have lost count!’
‘Jane Greene!’ she called back. ‘That’s Greene with an e!’
‘Now there’s a thing.’ He appeared now, from the darkness to lean on the back of a seat in the front row, but she still couldn’t see him clearly because of the lights. She just heard this wonderful voice, and felt his presence. ‘Greene,’ he said slowly, relishing the word. ‘With an “e”. Like our revered playwright. Like the writer of this piece. Are you by any – chance a relative?’
There was the famous gap, the pause taken in the place you least expect it. For a moment, bewitched by the voice and its sorcery, Jenny almost allowed herself to be thrown by the question, she very nearly took it at face value and only just recovered herself in time.
‘Wasn’t Oscar Greene an American?’ she asked guilelessly.
‘Wasn’t?’ He laughed. ‘Isn’t, dear girl, isn’t he an American! The dear pensmith is still very much alive – I trust! And kicking!’
There was then a silence, during which Jenny calmly looked down to where he was standing, half in and half out of the shadows. But all she could see was the glint of his glasses.
‘Have I seen you before?’ he suddenly asked. ‘Have I seen you before in something?’
‘I don’t think so, Sir Jerome,’ she said, from nerves nearly forgetting to call him by his recently bestowed title. ‘I’ve only just come to London.’
‘From where, dear girl?’
‘From the country.’
There was another silence, and then he turned his back on her and announced perhaps to the other people hidden out there, or perhaps just out loud to himself, ‘I feel certain that I have seen her – in something.’
Now someone else appeared at the orchestra rail, a youngish man, with thin brown hair that fell into his eyes, and a cadaverous face. He handed her up a script.
‘Act Two, scene two, page two, two, twenty-one.’
‘That’s page two for Act Two,’ the stage manager said leading her back to a chair centre stage. ‘Small two for scene two, page twenty-one for twenty-one of the scene. You have five minutes to read it through.’
‘Only five now mind you, Wilkie!’ Jerome called from the stalls, barely having to raise the famous voice. ‘We are running most dreadfully – behind!’
‘If you are running behind,’ Jenny called back, ‘I really don’t mind sight-reading.’
Another silence, furnished with just a few distant whispers.
‘Very well, dear girl!’ he called again. ‘Then let you sight-read!’
Jenny turned the script on to the totally wrong page. She didn’t need the words, because she knew them, and she didn’t want to see the right words in case they threw her. So she found a blank page at the end of the play, bent the manuscript around so no-one would notice, cleared her throat and began.
‘You don’t see my point,’ she said. ‘You really don’t see the point at all. You have to look in your own heart, Sam. That’s the place you have to search. It’s really no good, no good at all always trying to lay the blame elsewhere, to make the excuse that other people aren’t up to you, or as you like to put it, not in your emotional league. Look inside yourself, Sam. See what you can find there. I’ll bet what you find lacking in others is the very thing you’ll find lacking in yourself.’
‘I’m most intrigued,’ the stage manager read. ‘And what do you think that particular thing might be, Tatty?’
‘Honesty in its hardest shape, Sam. The honesty we all pride ourselves in having, practically every day of our lives. Honesty about our self. We boast about it all the time. Now the one person who should know about that is me! we say. Come on! You’re teaching your grandmother to suck eggs! Who do you think you’re kidding! Who are you to tell me that! I’ll be the best judge of that! And so on and so forth! And it’s just not true. Because we’re all afraid of looking inside ourselves, afraid of what we really might find out! Look at you! Everything you have done, and most of all everything you haven’t done – it’s all the fault of others! Never once in all this time I’ve known you—’
‘All what time, Tatty?’ the stage manager finally interrupted, after far too long a pause. Jenny didn’t mind. She knew this speech backwards, sideways, and most importantly forwards, and nothing was going to throw her off her stride now she was into it. So she paused back, after the stage manager had fluffed his interruption. She made a moment of it, sly-eyeing the stage hand, and then sighing wistfully.
‘For a moment I thought you’d dropped off to sleep, Sam,’ she improvised, and was delighted to hear a roar of approving laughter rise from the stalls, as well as one loud handclap. ‘The time I’ve known you, Sam Buxton, is for all time. I was there the moment you were born, and I shall be there when you go. No – no there’s no good in looking like that. I’ve told you it’s no good pretending I’m something that I’m not, something which you can categorize and then pigeon hole the way you do with everyone who comes before you, with those who stand up to you. Oh she’s just a nuisance, that one. That one’s a scold, that one just is after me for her own purposes, that one thinks she can reform me, this one is some figment of my imagination – well, I’m not. I’m as real as the moment, as all the moments we have shared, and even though I may be gone with the day, gone with the light, nothing more than a memory, an angry buzz fading to a faint echo in that furious head of yours, I shall still be here. I am always here. Because I shall always be a part of you, like I am a part of all people. But before that time, before I slip out under the door, or away through a crack in that window, or perhaps this time even blown away with the cobwebs—’
‘No. No!’ This time the interruption came well on time, and was said with great meaning.
‘Then listen to me, Sam. Before I go, you’re going to do what you should have done when she left you. When Lucy walked out. You’re going to do what you’ve refused to do since then, what you’ve refused to do all of your life. You’re going to look into your heart, a long hard look and you’re going to find out who you really are and where you went wrong. And then at last and at long, long last! Then maybe you will start asking th
ose questions which you should have asked before of yourself! Questions which will begin to illuminate the world around you! Questions which will become the key to your experience of others – of all the people around you and when they do – you will have begun the process of understanding! Put away your “shoulds” and your “should-haves”. It’s no good saying you know what you should do unless you do it! Like it’s no good doing it, unless you know what it is you should be doing! And the only way you will find out what those things are is by searching way down deep inside yourself. It won’t matter if you fail, if you fall short of achieving the final bliss. As long as you fight, and fight bravely – with the marks of your battles before! Not on your back – but borne proudly on your front! But you won’t fail, you won’t, believe me, Sam. Not if you judge your chances properly, and really come to terms with your capabilities. You won’t fail, I promise you that you won’t. You will not fail.’
Jenny closed the script and looked out into the pitch darkness beyond the bright light. There was silence. There was no movement, and there wasn’t a word exchanged. Jenny could feel her heart beating faster now, now that she’d stopped being Tatty, but she took a slow, and well-concealed deep breath, straightening the playscript out carefully before handing it back to the stage manager who she found was staring at her intently.
‘Thank you!’ she called out to the still silent auditorium, and then turned to go. So far it had all worked out perfectly, but she knew the next few moments were the really crucial ones.
‘No wait!’ It was, him who called, she was pleased to hear, Sir Jerome, her father. She turned back and waited, not even bothering to try and peer into the gloom. ‘Wait – don’t go!’ He appeared at the orchestra rail and stared up at her, his eyes, behind a nondescript pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, fixed on hers, and on her face.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘We want to know what else you have done, please. That was very good. Very, very good.’
‘Why do you want to know what else I have done?’ she asked. ‘Is it particularly relevant?’
Stardust Page 56
