‘Since Elizabeth Laurence perhaps,’ her father interjected calmly.
‘Why not? If you say so. I’m your most exciting discovery since Elizabeth Laurence, and you have every confidence in my ability, but what you’re not really sure about is my temperament. Will you or won’t you get me to post?’ (Thanks again, Oscar.) ‘Just think of the mileage. You can keep the story going until we open.’
‘And if we close?’ Jerome asked. ‘Say the day after we open?’
‘You can put me back down on the floor to help train the new puppy,’ Jenny said.
She looked at him, and she smiled at him, and her father was enchanted, not realizing it was the smile on the face of a tiger.
‘Good,’ he agreed. ‘Very good. Not only are you an exceptionally talented young actress, my dear child, you are also a formidable entrepreneur.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I just wish I could remember where I’ve seen you before.’
‘You haven’t,’ Jenny said, getting up to go. ‘Don’t worry.’
The scam worked. Jenny disappeared, every paper ran the story, and the popular ones kept running it right the way into the rehearsal period, during which time they tried to break it. But Jerome had organized his forces well, and the identity of his new and rumoured to be brilliant discovery was successfully kept secret.
In the end, it was in fact a surprisingly easy enterprise, once a few false trails had been laid as to where rehearsals were being held. It was almost as if the Press didn’t really want to know, at least not until around the time of the first night, when it would either make a sensational story, or just peter out into a squib. They kept running teasers every now and then, to keep up the public’s interest, and somebody even leaked a list of the auditionees to one of the popular papers. But even that backfired, as rather like Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters trying to fit their feet into the glass slipper, many of those actresses who had tried and failed either became incredibly coy about what they were engaged in working on, or simply went to ground, hoping that if someone somewhere really believed they were the missing discovery, fiction might become fact and they would wake up one morning to find themselves starring opposite Sir Jerome Didier.
Meanwhile, in an inner room in a secret location somewhere off Tottenham Court Road, rehearsals for The Tale of Tatty Gray were well under way. Or to put it more accurately, rehearsals were under way but all was not well. Because if there was a case of someone disappearing, that someone wasn’t Jane Greene. The person who was lost was Jerome Didier.
At first it was thought that all that was wrong was the fact that Jerome had chosen not only to star in the play but also to direct it. At the end of the first week of rehearsals the management in the shape of one Andrew Black, the latest in the line of whizz-kid entrepreneurs who seemed to have taken over the West End, suggested bringing in an outside director, one who while sticking religiously to Jerome’s ground-plan for the play would nonetheless be able to cast an objective eye on matters and see where he was going wrong. Jerome resented the suggestion, but finally had to concede when he realized quite how far out to sea he was.
They brought in a very skilled theatreman, one Douglas Davis, a no-frills and no-flannel expert who had directed name cast plays all around the world. When asked for his candid but private opinion by Andrew Black at the end of his third day at work, Davis replied that if it was anybody else other than Sir he would fire him.
‘But what do you think it is?’ Black asked, doing his best to conceal his ulcerating worry. ‘I mean what’s the trouble? It’s not as if we’re not quite sure whether the guy can act or not, is it.’
‘It’s the girl,’ Davis said. ‘She’s brilliant, and Sir’s pressing too hard. He’s scared sick he won’t be able to match her.’
‘Well, tell him then. Tell him, Duggie, if that’s the case.’
‘I’ve told him, Andrew. I tell him every day, six times a day.’
‘And what does he say?’
‘An obscenity which varies according to his mood.’
Davis’s next move was to work on Jenny and try and get her to rein back, to come back to a level of performance which Jerome would have no trouble matching, which once he did would then allow him to re-establish his confidence. Jenny at once agreed, apparently appalled to think that she could be the cause of the great man’s trouble, and immediately started rehearsing like someone who had never even read out loud before let alone stood up and tried to act. The effect on Jerome was devastating.
‘I see what you’re doing, you bastard, Douglas!’ he roared. ‘And I won’t have it! I will not be bloody well patronized! I will not bloody well be patronized by some rookie bloody actress and some hired-gun old director! If everyone was doing their jobs properly round here! Instead of standing around with their mouths agape! Like a lot of spare dicks at a wedding! I could get on with my job, you jackanapes! And I do not need – thank you – a lead down to the starting post like some nervous two year old! And if I did need a lead, which I do not, I would most certainly not choose to take it from someone who is still so green and so wet behind the ears that she has chosen to play this wonderful part of Tatty as a sort of lobotomized Peter Pan!’ He turned and glared his very hardest glare at Jenny, who decided the time had now come for some tears, and some really good ones at that. So she crumpled up her pretty little face in horrified anguish, clapped both hands to it over her mouth and over her nose, and ran from the rehearsal room not quite muffling her little but (she hoped) quite heartbreaking choking and gasping cries.
‘Well done, Jerry,’ Andrew Black sighed. ‘Now with a bit of luck we’ll have lost the one decent performance we did have.’
Jerome left that instant. He picked up his things, coat, script and case in one broad sweep and stormed black-eyed out of the room.
‘Go after him,’ Black asked Davis.
‘He can go to hell,’ the director replied. ‘I’m going back to Brighton. At my age this is the last thing I need.’
Jenny remained locked in the Ladies for the best part of half an hour, passing the time reading her new paperback, while making dreadful racking sobbing noises every time Edie the assistant stage manager called at the door to see if she was all right. When she finally emerged, her face powdered white and her unswollen eyes hidden behind her heavy dark glasses, Andrew Black apologized to her profusely and drove her home personally in his six-week-old Rolls-Royce.
Jerome on the other hand walked as much of his way home as possible, trying hard to exorcise whatever it was that now had taken refuge inside him. He knew he was trying too hard, he knew poor old Duggie Davis was right, and he would telephone him and apologize to him unconditionally as soon as he got home. He would even offer the wretched director the unencumbered chance to direct the very next play Jerome did, but in the meantime he had to discover how to pull back. It had happened before to him with Elizabeth, he could remember those times all too well. So what had he done then? What had they done then? They had worked privately together, they had talked their problems through, on All That Glitters he had sorted her out, and on Tatty Gray, she had sorted out them both.
Jerome stopped on the corner of where Newman Street joins Oxford Street as he remembered exactly what Elizabeth had recommended they do when they had found themselves cast-away and drifting so helplessly in the self-same play. But no, he thought, no, no, no, this couldn’t be the same sort of instance, a similar sort of case, surely not? With this child, this girl? He almost laughed. Why, he was old enough to be her father. The reason why he was not finding his performance, why he was nowhere near the truth was nothing to do with any chemistry which there might or there might not be between the two of them. All this girl did, between cleaning him in rehearsals, was to mock him, and tease him or simply to ignore him. She was just a typical actress. She might not be a very experienced one, but oh yes – yes she certainly had all the markings of being nothing other than a typical bloody actress, regardless of her quite stunning and o
riginal talent.
He walked on, crossing Oxford Street on to the south side, as far as Oxford Circus and then across Regent Street into Princes Street and on round Hanover Square, and the further he walked the further he knew he was from the truth. He didn’t believe a word of what he was telling himself, not one word of it. The reason why he could not recreate Sam was because of the girl, not because of her brilliance, but because of her. Because he was enthralled by her, and had been since the moment she had walked on stage in that white tennis shirt, that faded blue skirt, her black canvas shoes, with her long, brown, beautiful legs and her tousle head of thick brown hair. She even had a smudge of freckles across her nose. Christ! he thought and almost laughed. Christ, she could almost have been her! She could have been the girl on the lawn, the girl on the Downs, the girl on the swing, oh Christ, yes, it could almost have been her!
It wasn’t though. It was just some girl in her early twenties who read like someone inspired and who was now proving she could act like someone inspired too. It was an actress pretending to be her, just as Oscar had intended the part should be played, and he mustn’t be fooled by it, he mustn’t allow himself to be seduced again by falling for the paste instead of the pearl, by ordering the mock rather than the real, or by mistaking Granada for Astbury Park.
And yet, and yet, and yet. He knew that wasn’t the reason this time, he knew that wasn’t what was dragging him down, what was giving him this dull, dull heartache. It was that something about this particular girl’s eyes, about her pretty little mouth, something about her very presence that made him feel she belonged to him, that gave him the feeling he must claim her as his. She only had to look at him and he was lost. That was the truth of the matter. He couldn’t ever get any further than the very first lines of the play before he was gone, hopelessly lost, swept overboard, and not waving, but drowning, drowning, drowning. What the hell are you doing here? I’ve always been here. You just haven’t seen me.
That was as far as he got daily, to ask her that, what she was doing there, and then he was in the water and he had forgotten how to swim. All she needed to do was look across at him from where she sat on the stool and catch his eyes holding them fast with hers, those strange lovely speckled grey eyes that looked at him in a way only one other person had ever looked at him, and then she would smile at him, a smile which would stretch that pretty mouth and turn it up at the corners, a smile which stopped his heart, a smile which turned him instantly into a nonsense. It would turn him from being a man of sublime skill into a ranting, noisome, foolish nonsense, while she just looked and talked, and laughed and smiled, and cried and listened, just as someone else once had, just as the girl who Tatty really was had once upon a long time ago.
Unable to bear the ache and the anguish any longer, Sir Jerome Didier hailed a cab and told the driver to head as fast as he could back to Montpelier Square.
She knew who it was the moment the telephone rang, but she didn’t answer it. After all, that had been the plan. To bait the line, to leave it out, to wait till the float bobbed and flipped over on its side, just like it did when she and her mother fished the Loire, and then to strike. She had struck that day. She knew the exact moment. She had seen the look in his eyes as she had pulled and the hook had gone home, deeply into his heart, embedding itself there. It had happened after he had turned on her, and berated her so feebly, yelling at her not to give him a lead, and insulting her ability. The insults would have been sufficient evidence, but she had wanted more so she had looked at him, first with a stare of blank bewilderment, and then with a look of such anguish (so brilliantly pretended) she had frightened him, and he had dropped his defences. She knew then by the look of him and the look he had given her that he was hers. He had taken the bait and swallowed it, along with the hook, the line and even the very sinker.
So now she could play him, she could let out some line and let him thrash around while she sat in the sunshine on the riverbank and hoped that in his agony he would remember the dreadful pain he had inflicted on the one and only person who had ever truly loved him, on the person who had never wronged him for one moment, or even for a half a second of one moment. She sat on the riverbank and listened while the telephone rang, knowing that it was him, knowing that he thought he had found out what was wrong, knowing that it was him out there, deep in the dark waters, thrashing helplessly and hopelessly and agonizingly around.
Yet somehow Jenny kept getting this feeling that it had been all too easy. It seemed not for one moment had her adversary stopped to think or to look where he was going. From the moment she walked on stage in her carefully chosen outfit and from the moment he had walked out of the shadows to look at her the way he had looked at her, she had known then not that it was only a matter of time, but that it might merely be a matter of a moment.
The telephone rang again so rather than sit and be irritated by its persistent ringing, Jenny got up and went out to the shops. She had some shopping to do anyway, so she went up the King’s Road and bought a very pretty but simple sort of dress, the sort of dress she thought her mother might have bought at her age and if she had been about to go out on an all important date. The dress was dark red, a damask red, made of a sort of crushed velvet, open in a square at the bodice, and with a beautifully cut skirt. She also bought some very sheer stockings, a pair of shoes to match the dress, and a ribbon for her hair. Then she caught a bus back down to World’s End where she now lived, where she had lived since her last term at art college.
No sooner was she in the door than the telephone rang again. For all Jenny knew, it might have been ringing constantly all the time she was out, but now the time had come for her to answer it.
‘Hello?’ she said very carefully in a French accent, as the management had advised her to do in case it was the Press. ‘Who is this please?’
‘Dear girl,’ said a voice, but not at all theatrically, sounding instead as if it belonged to someone who had just suffered a tragedy. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Is that you, Sir Jerome?’ Jenny asked, sitting down in an armchair and trying to keep a Cheshire-cat like smile from her face.
‘If you don’t know my voice by now, Jane Greene, I may as well give up,’ her father said. ‘Look. I owe you an apology, but I’m not going to make it over the phone. The telephone is a damnable instrument at the best of times, and it certainly wasn’t invented for the regretful acknowledgement of faults and failures.’
‘What are your faults and failures, Sir Jerome?’ Jenny enquired. ‘Besides your rudeness and bad temper.’
‘I shall tell you when I see you,’ Jerome replied. ‘If you will allow me to see you. And for God’s sake, I’ve told you to drop the blasted sir. You’re to call me Jerome.’
‘Very well, Jerome. Look, if you want to make a formal apology—’ Jenny made it sound as if she hadn’t got much time, as if she possibly was in a hurry to get changed and go out, at least that was the subtext she was enacting. ‘I take it you’ll be in to rehearsal tomorrow?’
‘I have to see you before tomorrow, Jane Greene,’ her father replied after a pause. ‘I want you to have supper with me.’
‘Oh,’ Jenny paused. ‘I was going out.’
‘This is more important than your damned social life,’ her father insisted. ‘Can’t you cancel? I really do have to see you.’
‘You sound upset.’
‘That is because I am upset.’
‘Still?’
‘Still! Dear God – what’s so blasted remarkable about that?’
‘Nothing. All right, look – I’ll cancel what I was doing, it wasn’t that important. Where shall I meet you?’
‘I want to go somewhere we can talk,’ her father said. ‘Not some damned noisy Tratt or beastly Bistro. Meet me at the Connaught, in an hour.’
After she had put the phone down, Jenny hung up her new dress, unpacked her shoes and stockings, and selected her most expensive underwear, the set her mother had brought her back from Paris in
celebration of the success of her first show there. Next she had a bath, washed her hair, powdered herself lightly, and put on just a little scent, about the same amount her mother always wore, and then she dressed very carefully and very precisely, because she knew she must look just right, and she must feel just right, just as if she was going to appear on stage.
The dress was perfect. She was very glad she had bought it, even though it had cost a little more than she had planned to spend. However, she knew she would have to buy something good, because she knew her father wouldn’t want to take her to some noisy Tratt or beastly Bistro. She had guessed he would most likely choose a hotel, she guessed he would choose somewhere exactly like the Connaught.
He was waiting for her in the lounge with well-concealed impatience, impatient because she was twenty minutes late. He rose when he saw her through the open door, and the moment he saw her he wanted to die. He felt he would die when he looked on her, she was so beautiful, the colour of her hair and her fair skin set off so wondrously against the dull laky red of her crushed velvet dress.
‘Hello,’ she was saying, ‘I’m sorry if I’m late, but then you didn’t exactly give me much notice.’
Jerome couldn’t speak. He was neither able to speak, nor could he find anything to say, so he fell back on the use of mannerisms, a slow closing of the eyes, a raising of the eyebrows, a thoughtful purse of the mouth, and then a slight shrug of the shoulders as he pulled a chair round for her to sit down.
‘I’m drinking champagne,’ he said. ‘Will you?’
‘No, I’ll just have an orange juice, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Strict training. In this play you need to have all your wits about you.’
She would have loved a glass of champagne, but tonight she wanted to keep a very clear head.
‘Very well,’ he said, and summoned a waiter over to take his order, without looking for one, without snapping his fingers, simply it seemed by thinking about one. Then moments later he summoned the head waiter over to whisper something in his ear, again it seemed to Jenny, simply by willing the attendant over.
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