Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Excuse me, won’t you?’ he asked when the head waiter had gone. ‘I had to make sure they’ve given me my usual table. It’s a corner table, so I can sit with my back to the room, and they can’t stare at me. And where we can safely sit and talk.’

  ‘So what do you really want to talk about?’ Jenny asked, after they had finished their drinks and been shown to a beautifully laid table in the far corner of the dining room. They had only exchanged the smallest of talk before they had sat down at table, idle chatter about absolutely nothing in particular.

  ‘I could have told you that earlier,’ her father said, spreading out his linen napkin on his knee, having refused the waiter permission to do it for him. ‘If you’d asked me as I was walking round Hanover Square this afternoon what I wanted to say to you, or if you’d asked me during the taxi ride I had back to my house, I could have given you a full and very detailed answer. But now you are here, sitting opposite me and you ask me, I cannot think of one thing.’

  ‘Would you like me to do the talking?’ Jenny said. ‘I could tell you all sorts of things. I could tell you all about my childhood, where I grew up, about my family—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about your family,’ her father interrupted, wrong-footing her. ‘I don’t need to. I know all about your family, Jane Greene. I know about your father, and I know about your mother. I know all about them.’

  Jenny did her best not to stare open mouthed at him. Instead she slowly lowered her head and pretended to adjust her own table napkin. She felt her cheeks colour deeply, and she knew if he saw a blush, if he saw any sign of weakness, she was lost.

  ‘What do you know about my family?’ she asked, still looking down at her lap.

  ‘Your mother was, I should think still is – a most beguiling woman. A beautiful, kind and sensitive creature,’ he said, ‘full of forgiveness and love. I should imagine you have her looks, although that’s a presumption. For all I know you could look like your father. But I would say you probably have your mother’s looks and your father’s character.’

  That was the moment Jenny was sure he knew, and she was about to say what she had to say there and then, blush or no blush, she was about to tell him what an unforgiveable bastard he was and how much she hated him and to hell with the sepulchral quiet of the famous dining room, when her father continued.

  ‘I would think your mother gardens very well,’ he said. ‘I should imagine she has a way with plants like she does with people, that she can make parsley grow – did you know that was the sign of a real gardener? If you can make parsley grow? Oh, I should imagine parsley grows for your mother, and roses too. While your father, who I imagine to be a countryman – something to do with horses perhaps. Yes, a distinguished trainer, a breeder of fine hunters, but he’s a quiet man. Strong, very obviously good looking, but taciturn. And not a man with whom one should ever truck. Tell me, Jane Greene, am I right?’

  Jenny looked up at him now, her composure returned, the blush gone. He had simply been playing games, he had been amusing himself, he had perhaps even been poking fun.

  ‘Am I right?’ he repeated.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re absolutely and completely wrong.’

  ‘Of course I am.’ Her father smiled at her, gently and rather sadly. ‘But don’t be so angry. I was only trying to be light-hearted, Jane Greene. Which I promise you is far, far removed from the way I really feel.’

  ‘Why? What is it? Are you worried about the play?’

  ‘I shall answer the second part of your question first, and the first part of your question second. No, I’m not worried about the play. The play is wonderful. Oscar Greene, your namesake—’ He smiled. ‘Oscar has done a wonderful job, but then he is a wonderful writer. And I’m not worried about you. You are going to be quite and utterly – brilliant. I am, and I’m sure you’re not in the least surprised to hear it, I am, however, more than a little worried about me, aye – and there is the rub.’

  The waiter arrived with their first course, and Jerome fell to silence while the dishes were placed before them, staring implacably down at his plate.

  ‘Why are you worried about you?’ Jenny asked when the waiter had gone. ‘Isn’t your problem just a question of familiarity? The fact that even though the part has been rewritten, you’re going over old ground? And that the character of Sam hasn’t changed at all, not really, not from the original draft. The changes are just changes of reference more than anything. They don’t mark any real changes of character.’

  She stopped, knowing she’d gone too far. She could tell that by the look in his eyes. He was staring at her very intently. All that about changes of reference, real changes of character, that was Oscar verbatim, and she knew Sir had spotted it, he’d certainly spotted something.

  ‘The original,’ he mused. ‘You certainly can’t have seen the original, so am I to believe you read it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What edition? I’d be most interested to hear, Tatty Gray, in which edition you learned the original you.’

  ‘Why are you calling me Tatty Gray?’

  ‘Because that’s who you are, aren’t you? You’ve always been here. I just haven’t seen you.’

  There was silence. Neither of them had touched their first course. Jenny picked up her fork and made a start on hers, but more by way of a diversion than from any real interest.

  ‘I read it at school,’ she said, in a blind wild guess.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘French’s.’

  She looked up at him, and the look must have been a giveaway. She saw that, too.

  ‘French’s Acting Editions,’ her father said, as if addressing an idiot. ‘The editions published for Amateurs, for Drama Societies. Repertory companies.’

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Yes. I think it was French’s.’

  Her father looked at her longer, and then started to eat his first course. Jenny breathed quietly out, the moment of danger seemingly past.

  ‘Part two of your question,’ he said. ‘Concerning how I feel. What is it? you asked, by which I take it to mean you want to know why I am thus distemper’d. Why I’m so heavy of heart.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Oh, Jane Greene,’ he sighed. ‘I am, I am. I who am old enough to be your father.’

  Jenny just caught her wine glass as she all but knocked it over.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, and then put her shaking hands in her lap. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ Jerome laughed. ‘Good God – why should you understand, child? I don’t understand, God damn it. I only once ever felt like this before. And I have a memory it was just exactly like this.’

  ‘Yes?’ In a way, Jenny didn’t want to hear any more, because this was not what she had planned, not at all, not one bit. She had known he would be a skilled player. He was one of the greatest players the world had ever seen. She thought she had catered for his skills, and she had known or thought she had known how and where he would use them. If so, if that had been the case, then the rest of it would have been easy as the beginning, as easy as the baiting of the hook had been. She would have heard him out, listened to his self-pity, apparently sympathized with his dilemma, while wondering how they could possibly work it out, the two of them in concert, how together they could get his performance back on the rails. She would have appeared to have been as worried as he was about it, and she would have tried certain things in rehearsal, which wouldn’t have worked because she wouldn’t have let them work, because she knew she had the upper hand, a hand that had him held tightly by the throat.

  She had listened as well, she had listened carefully and unostentatiously to what everyone else was saying, and she had heard the whispers. It’s history repeating itself, they’d said. She’s going to walk away with it, just like Elizabeth Laurence did in All That Glitters. It’s going to be just like Elizabeth Laurence all over again, you wait, you’ll see. He’s going to flop, then he’s going to throw himself on her mercy,
and that’s how it’ll be. She won’t be able to resist it, it’ll be Elizabeth Laurence all over again, because Sir now believes he can’t go it alone. He can’t do it without someone. His nerve has gone. He’s convinced himself he needs another Elizabeth. You just wait and see. And he thinks he can get back up there with this one, because she’s brilliant. He’s got to get up there with her, or else she’ll walk away with it.

  But it wasn’t going to be just like another Elizabeth Laurence, not this time round. The plan was so simple, and yet so effective if it worked, and it was working so far, it was up and running beautifully. Jenny walks away with it, that part was right, because given her proven ability to act, she was bound to do, because Sir wouldn’t be able to see the wood for the trees. He didn’t stand a chance. He would confuse her with Elizabeth, and with her mother. He wouldn’t be able to see straight by the time Jenny had reproduced her mother, because this time it would be an even more accurate and telling portrait of the woman he had loved, because it would be painted by someone who still loved her, and who knew her even better perhaps than he had. Jenny would see to that. She had planned it all. She would stun him from the moment she walked into his life to the moment she walked out, a moment she had fixed to be after all the hands had been declared, after he had fallen in love with her, after she had triumphed on the first night, after she had captured all the notices, after he had discovered he was back sitting in second fiddle’s chair, after all the celebrations and the hidden disappointments, after he had woken up on the day after the first night and decided that he was best in partnership, and that thank God he had found the perfect new partner, after that she would disappear, like her mother had done, like Tatty Gray was said to do. Before the second night she would vanish, slipping out under the door, or through that crack in the window. Or maybe this time even blown away with the cobwebs. Because Jane Greene was Tatty Gray.

  And that was her undoing.

  Jenny discovered it now, too late for her own good, as she sat opposite her father, and saw through all the play-acting, and the vocal effects, the mannerisms and the inflexions, she found out who Tatty Gray was and what Oscar had meant by her as the man across the table stopped make-believing and told to her the truth. For now she saw what really was in his eyes, what that look really was, a look of real pain and of love. It had been all very well in the abstract, it had been all so very, very easy. In the abstract she could have killed him. She could have shot him dead. She could have stabbed him through his heart and left him to bleed to his death. But here in the light of reality he was her father, and nothing was even remotely as she had so blithely imagined it. They were father and daughter, she was his flesh, she was his blood, and the look that was now in his dark brown eyes made her want to reach out to him, to take his hands and put him out of his agony.

  Instead, they again sat in silence while the waiter took their half-eaten food away, and then served them with their second course. While he did so, carefully placing the food on their plates, arranging the perfectly cooked vegetables, and while another waiter poured a different wine out into the larger glasses, a fine claret with a brownish tinge, Jenny knew what she had to do, although she was dreadfully uncertain as to whether she could in fact do it. She knew what she had to do because she understood Tatty Gray. Before, she had just seen the part as a means to an end, but now she understood the part she really had to play. Tatty Gray wasn’t a Fury, she wasn’t Megaera, the avenging spirit. Tatty Gray was the undivined truth, Tatty Gray was the bringer of light.

  ‘Yes?’ she found herself asking, picking up the conversation. ‘It was just like this you were saying. But just like what? What did you mean exactly?’

  Or perhaps what do any of us mean? as Tatty asks him in the play.

  ‘I mean what I think I feel for you seems to go back into the past,’ her father said, ‘and please don’t laugh. I’m not being fey. I’ve thought this out very carefully. There were all sorts of things I had planned to say to you, all sorts of things I was going to suggest that we do, things we could do to find an understanding in the play, things we could do to make me work, things we could do to get my character right. Ways to establish intimacy. Tricks. And worse. Oh, I was going to go through with them, too, and I probably would have been able to convince you. I seem to be able to convince most people. But that was all very fine and large, because that was all just theory.’

  Just like hers, just like Jenny’s.

  ‘And theory went out of the window, the way it always does when reality intrudes. The way it intruded this evening, the moment you walked through that door, out there, in the lounge this evening, looking like that, like the way you do. I knew then there wasn’t one thing I could do but to tell you the truth. The truth, mind, not a version of it. And the truth is that once before in my life, there was this one moment which I can recapture right now, I can feel it exactly as I felt it, and as if it were yesterday. The moment I walked out into the sunshine of an English garden and there was this girl. She was just like you. She was dressed in an aertex shirt – you probably don’t know what aertex shirts even are, your generation—’

  ‘Yes I do,’ Jenny said. ‘My mother has some.’

  ‘Well then.’ Her father smiled at her. ‘This girl was wearing an aertex shirt, a pair of what looked like her brother’s old shorts, tennis shoes, she even had hair like you. Freckles on her face, over her pretty nose. And I had a coup de foudre. Do you understand what I mean by a coup de foudre?’

  ‘Ah mais oui, certainement,’ Jenny shrugged, by force of Gallic habit. ‘Je comprends exactement ce que vous voulez dire par un coup de foudre. Vous voulez dire love-at-first-sight, quelque chose qu’en France nous appelons parfois le regard rouge.’

  ‘What beautiful French you speak,’ her father said, with a very deep frown.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Jenny replied. ‘It’s second nature. I’m bilingual. What I was saying was—’

  ‘I know what you were saying,’ her father nodded. ‘And I was saying that I had a coup de foudre, or suffered le regard rouge, because that is exactly what happened. I fell in one moment wildly, madly, insanely and passionately in love. This was my first wife, and I don’t know whether or not you know—’

  He stopped and sighed, not for effect but because he needed to do so. While he stopped, Jenny looked at him and nodded.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It should never have happened but it did. I loved her so much, you see. She was called Pippa, and I loved Pippa more than life itself, and she loved me in precisely the same way. We were so happy, and truth to tell, I don’t think I’ve known a moment’s happiness since. Since she left me and disappeared. Not one moment of true happiness, not that is until I saw you, Jane Greene. I don’t even know what happened to her, you know. To Pippa. Cecil, my agent, he heard from her – I didn’t, not ever. But then why should I? But old Cecil heard from her and so we knew she was alive, thank God. But where, oh God only knows!’

  Her father stopped and looked down, dabbing with his napkin at the tablecloth at a non-existent spot or crumb. Then he drank a deep draught of the almost brown wine before looking up at Jenny over his glass, and smiling.

  ‘Please don’t think I’m asking for sympathy, or trying to win your heart by melodramatic heroics. I’m not. I just want you to know the truth. I don’t know why. Yes I do. I do. And the truth is I didn’t deserve her, I didn’t deserve Pippa. Anyone will tell you that. She was far too good for me, and her mother was right. Everyone said the same thing about her, and you would too, if you had known her. You would say she was the most wonderful and the sweetest natured person in the world, and what did I manage to do with such a girl? I managed to break her heart. So there you are.’ He stopped and again brushed at the imagined crumb. ‘You know, I have to say,’ he said, with another look up at her, ‘that I’ve never really talked like this to anyone before.’

  ‘I think you have. In fact I feel sure you have.’

  ‘No, n
o. I’ve never ever talked about this with anyone. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘I know. And I mean I’m sure that you’ve talked in this way to someone before. With total honesty. Telling the absolute truth. I’m sure you must have talked to – talked to your first wife like this.’

  ‘Yes,’ her father said. ‘You’re right. Of course. But she was exceptional. She was the one person I could ever really talk to, with whom I could be my actual self. I never talked to anyone else in such a way. That is, until now.’

  ‘And you think you can talk to me.’

  ‘I know I can talk to you. I’m talking to you now, can’t you hear me?’

  ‘But why do you think that is? I mean have you any idea?’

  ‘Not really,’ her father replied. ‘I just feel I can. Because in some strange way I feel that I know you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny nodded. ‘And so you should. Because you see, I’m your daughter.’

  25

  There was nothing in the play which could prevent Jenny performing it. Jenny had noticed that when she had first started out on her plan of revenge, that Tatty Gray was not a love story. There was no physical contact of any kind in it between the painter and his genius, so it was a piece that could quite safely be played by a father and a daughter, albeit a father who did not know that the girl playing opposite him was in fact his child.

  Nonetheless, nothing that Jerome could say could persuade Jenny not to resign. He said that she was far too brilliant not to be seen, and that it would make her name overnight, but Jenny had to tell him that wasn’t what she wanted. She had to explain that she didn’t want to act, but without giving the exact reason why, namely that she sensed being just an actress would finally bore her. That would have been too cruel, and an unnecessary slight on her father’s profession. She told him the truth, that she wanted to paint, to be a set designer, and having apologized for it, said they would have to leave it at that.