Her father couldn’t believe it. Jerome refused to accept it. He had paced his drawing room in the small hours of that long night which had now become morning giving Jenny every reason why she couldn’t stop acting, why she mustn’t, not someone with her tremendous gift, not someone with her prodigious talent, and although Jenny knew she was hurting him by not accepting her inheritance, this wasn’t a game, this was all part of telling the truth. Still Jerome wouldn’t let go. He had begged and beseeched her to do just this one play, trying to persuade her that if anyone had been born to play Tatty Gray it was her. And such were the powers of her father’s persuasion that Jenny had very nearly weakened and given in, when she saw how much it meant to him, to have discovered that not only had he a daughter, but that the daughter he had had inherited his talent.
Nevertheless, Jenny had held out, and the reason she had been able to do so was because she wasn’t doing it for herself, but for her father.
‘Who shall I get instead?’ he’d asked hopelessly as dawn began to break. ‘Who can I possibly get to play it now? Nobody, nobody could possibly measure up to you.’
‘OK, Papa. So far you’ve done most of the talking. Now let me tell you a thing or two,’ Jenny commanded.
Whereupon she’d sat him down in his favourite chair and explained exactly where and how he had gone wrong.
‘You’ve always seen this play as Tatty’s play,’ she’d said, holding up her hand to stop him interrupting. ‘No interruptions,’ she’d made him promise, ‘or I won’t go on. OK? OK. Now I know you’ve always thought of it as the girl’s play because Oscar told me, and if anyone knows about this play, it should be the man who wrote it. He said you were always overcome by Tatty, firstly because you convinced yourself the play was initially written around her, and then when Elizabeth was so brilliant in it, it seemed to underline your argument. But according to Oscar what you’ve always conveniently forgotten is how brilliant you were in the play as well. And exactly how many people thought that not only were you brilliant, but that you were even more brilliant than Elizabeth – no interruptions! Oscar told me, Papa! He said you always let Elizabeth talk about the play as if it was hers, which Oscar says is nonsense. Oscar says – and I agree with him now that I’ve had a chance to see it from the inside – Oscar says your part is the much, much harder one, which is why – although he pretended only to be half interested in what happened to it this time round – that’s why sooner or later Oz would have wanted to know who was playing the girl. Because his bet was that you’d do it all over again, that you’d let yourself be overpowered, because you were convinced Sam comes after and below Tatty in importance.’
‘Oscar was right,’ her father had suddenly agreed, getting up and walking the room again. ‘Oscar is always right, damn him! I’ve made this blasted play into a hair shirt!’ And here he had started to laugh, taking his daughter by the hand and leading her gracefully around the room. ‘And how funny, my darling!’ he’d laughed. ‘How very, very funny! Because I very nearly made the same stupid damned mistake again with you!’
After that it had been easier. Once her father had accepted that not only had he equal footing in the play, but there was actually a very real chance the play belonged in fact to Sam, Jenny had sworn later to her mother she could actually see his confidence returning. It was as if Tatty Gray had been his Pilgrim’s Hump, and that he’d finally cast it off. Furthermore, Jenny was convinced and she convinced her father too, that as long as he could find the right girl for Tatty, and by that she meant an actress who wasn’t quite up to the part, not anyone like Elizabeth—
‘Or anyone like you,’ her father had interposed.
‘Forget about me, Papa. The point is – and this isn’t me talking, this is still Oscar. He says you don’t have to try and discover somebody new and brilliant, but instead you should cast a good, experienced actress, one whose limitations you know, so that you can be free to play it against someone who doesn’t threaten you, against someone who’ll be so grateful for the part they will be wonderful – which they’re bound to be because the part is almost foolproof – without being sensational, then you’ll be playing the play he wrote. And this, remember Papa, this is from the horse’s mouth.’
Her father had listened to this advice intently and he had acted on it, after duly deliberating with his management, going ahead and casting an established young actress called Marty James in Jenny’s place, a girl who had all the necessary expertise and none of the troublesome inspiration.
‘Because you are my daughter,’ he concluded at dawn that famous morning, ‘I shall embrace you, and because you are my daughter I love you, and as soon as Harrods is open I shall take you over the road and buy you anything you want.’
‘I don’t want anything, Papa,’ Jenny told him. ‘And I don’t want for anything now either.’
‘I’m not that unselfish, I’m afraid,’ Jerome replied, straight-faced. ‘Even though I reciprocate the feelings, I shall want one more thing from you.’
‘Yes, Papa? And what –’ Jenny wondered, ‘is that?’
‘I shall want you to be there on the opening night.’
The chance to attend the opening night of the revival of The Tale of Tatty Gray was an event few Jerome Didier fans would have forsworn, and Jenny who now counted herself firmly among their number was no exception. She promised her father that nothing could shake her determination to be there when he rang each day to make sure she was still coming.
‘I won’t be able to do it unless you’re there,’ he warned her on his final call, the night before the opening.
‘Oh nonsense, Papa! It’ll be like falling off a log.’
‘You sound just like your mother when you laugh like that,’ her father said suddenly and hung up.
Jenny had left plenty of time to get to the theatre so it certainly was through no fault of hers that her seat was still untaken when Jerome checked through the spyhole five minutes before curtain up.
‘She’s probably in the bar,’ Wilkie said, when Jerome arrived back in his dressing room, his handsome face clouded with anxiety. ‘Stop worrying, Sir. Believe me, she’s out there somewhere.’
‘Out where, Wilkie?’ Jerome asked, leaning over the back of his chair, like a man at a basin about to be sick. ‘Out where – out there in the crowd? Or out somewhere there?’ He pointed to the window, without looking up. ‘I won’t be able to do it, you know,’ he stage whispered. ‘Not if she isn’t here.’
By then, Jenny was running down Piccadilly, having abandoned her taxi in the Hyde Park underpass where it had been stuck in an unmoving traffic jam for the last twenty minutes. Piccadilly was jammed solid as well, so she decided there was no point in trying to get another cab. She might as well run for it and run all the way. She looked at the clock above Fortnum & Mason as she sprinted past. Four minutes past. Four minutes late already.
At Jerome’s request they held the curtain for as long as possible, until the audience showed signs of becoming restless.
‘We can’t wait any longer, Jerry,’ Andrew Black told him. ‘We’ve waited over eight minutes. And if you want any notices in the morning—’
‘Very well,’ said Jerome, after one last look through the spyhole and seeing the seat in the second row still empty. ‘Take it up.’
He made his way to the wings, to the outside of the door he was to open in ten seconds time. Through the sugar glass window he could see the outline of the girl on the stool in the shadows of the darkened set as she made a last adjustment to her costume and to her hair, and as a voice behind him prepared them all to stand by.
‘Merde,’ someone whispered from the dark.
‘Thank you,’ Jerome whispered back, and then closed his eyes tightly to pray.
She was in the theatre now, hurrying across the foyer with some other latecomers and then down the stairs which led to the stalls. Someone barred her way at the door, a large usherette who hissed at her to be quiet because the curtain had risen.
> ‘I have to get through!’ Jenny whispered back. ‘I have to get to my seat!’
‘Management orders,’ the girl hissed back. ‘All latecomers to stand until the end of the first scene.’
‘You don’t understand!’ Jenny replied sotto. ‘I have to be in my seat!’
‘You should have thought of that when you were going to be late,’ the usherette retorted, standing firmly across the doorway.
‘I’m Jerome Didier’s daughter,’ Jenny said finally. ‘Now please let me through.’
The usherette stared at her, and then sniffed.
‘Very well,’ she muttered almost under her breath. ‘If you’re who you say you are, you can stand at the back.’
She was just in time to hear the opening lines of dialogue, just in time to hear Jerome as Sam ask the girl what the hell she was doing there, and just in time to hear Tatty’s now famous reply.
‘I’ve always been here. You just haven’t seen me.’
But judging from the sudden silence that followed the line, Jenny knew she was too late.
Jerome had tried not to look down in case the seat was still unoccupied, just as it had been once before, just as it had been his first night in London, when her mother had failed to make it, when Pippa hadn’t shown.
‘What in hell – what the hell are you doing here?’ he had asked, looking at the girl playing Tatty, but not seeing her, not taking her in, his mind elsewhere, his inner thoughts on whether or not she’d arrived. And he’d heard the girl answer back. He’d heard Tatty’s reply all right, he heard her say she’d always been there, that he just hadn’t seen her, and he knew exactly what he was to say next. But then someone moved, someone down there in the hush of darkness had moved, someone was taking their seat, and so he looked. No-one in the audience would have noticed his eyes, so skilfully did he disguise his sideways glance, but he managed to look as he pretended to sweep a lock of hair from his eyes, he looked and he could see the seat, and the seat was still empty.
‘I’ve always been here. You just haven’t seen me.’
Jerome heard the girl repeat the line and wondered vaguely what the point was because he’d heard her well enough the first time, so why she should want to repeat it, he couldn’t for the life of him imagine.
So he turned his eyes back round to her and told her.
‘It’s perfectly all right,’ he said. ‘I heard you.’
‘Perhaps you want to know how I got here,’ Tatty replied, feeding him with his own line.
‘No,’ Jerome said, shaking his head slowly. ‘No, no.’ No that wasn’t his concern. It was what someone was not doing there that concerned him.
You see, Cecil really should have told him that she wasn’t coming. At the very least he should never have shifted his top coat and put it on her seat, to show that he knew she wasn’t coming. If he hadn’t done one or both or either of those things all that time ago, Elizabeth might not have won, she might not have overpowered him as she had that famous first First Night, and had she not done so, who knows? He might very well still be married to Pippa.
‘This place has been locked up for five years,’ someone prompted him from behind. ‘No-one’s been near it in all that time.’
‘In a minute,’ Jerome said. ‘I’m just trying to remember something.’
‘He’s trying to remember his lines,’ a woman muttered rather loudly in the last row of the stalls, just in front of Jenny. ‘Someone said he’d lost his touch.’
Sensing an impending disaster, the audience had at first grown restless before falling into an ominous silence, and as they did, in the moment they fell silent, Jenny knew what she must do. She pushed the large usherette out of her way and drawing as much attention to herself as she could, she hurried down the aisle and made her way to her seat, drawing them off, laying a false trail as she saw the audience looking round at her, away from her father who was now looking down on her from the stage.
‘Sorry,’ Jenny said in a loud whisper as she eased herself past people half-standing to make way for her in the row her seat was in. ‘So sorry. Sorry.’ Then she looked up at the stage and deliberately caught her father’s eye. ‘Sorry,’ she said almost out loud, for his benefit, although everyone took it to mean them.
Jerome looked back down and smiled. The seat was taken after all. She had arrived, she was there and he could see who she was. The audience was still utterly silent, however, still holding its communal breath as they waited and waited as one to see whether or not it was really true, whether or not Jerome Didier had actually lost his touch.
But Jerome was now back in place, back in the studio, back where he should be. He looked over to Tatty, and this time he saw her, this time he could see her quite clearly, he could see she was dressed in an old white aertex shirt, a pair of boy’s shorts, her legs were bare, she wore old white tennis shoes on her feet, and her head was a wonderful cascade of tousled brown hair. He looked at the sprite sitting smiling at him on the stool and he smiled back, because the person who was sitting there in his studio, the sprite of light, that person was Pippa.
‘I don’t know how you can have got in here,’ he said. ‘This place has been locked up for years. And years. No-one’s been near it in all that time.’
And when he spoke, as he said it, he had his hand upon his heart.
Reprise
There is very little else to relate. Jerome enjoyed what was in retrospect his first single triumph, and a triumph it certainly was. The critics and the public alike enjoyed the revised version of Tatty Gray even more than the original one, and it played to capacity for over three years, Jerome playing the first nine months, before bowing out for Paul Britten to take over.
After the celebrations, Jenny returned first to France where she confessed all to her mother and stepfather. Oscar was delighted, hugely amused and finally very touched by the story, which he called the play within the play, while her mother sat and listened impassively. Jenny was worried in case what she had done had upset her mother, and she asked her if this was the case, to which Pippa replied the very opposite was true, and that in fact she was very proud of her daughter. Her only regret was that she and Oscar hadn’t known, which she realized, of course, would have been an impossibility, because she knew they both would have loved to have been there for the opening night.
Jenny later left France to travel to America and pick up on her stepfather’s many contacts. Six months later she got her first major commission to design a production of The Seagull on Broadway. She revealed an even more prodigious ability at design than she had as an actress, and at present she is working in London for the National Theatre. She goes back to the Loire whenever possible, with her fiancé Wilkie Maxwell, who is now Sir Jerome Didier’s personal assistant.
Oscar and Pippa hardly ever move from their farmhouse, both of them more than content to work as well as live there. Pippa always has been, of course, and Oscar always had in the back of his mind finally to refuse to travel in order to do the final rewrites or polishes on his films and plays. Shortly after the rebirth of Tatty Gray, which was later filmed (and very successfully so with Jerome and a young American actress called Jodie Street playing the leading roles), Oscar at last said boo to the goose and found to his great delight that doing just that thing didn’t stop it laying golden eggs. His most recent film was as you may remember the highly acclaimed The Moon in Vermont, a wry and self-deprecating look at his boyhood, while almost every important collection of contemporary paintings nowadays has at least one oil or drawing by Philippa Nichole RA. Her last exhibition, which was her first in New York, was like all her other recent exhibitions, a sell-out. Pippa’s happiness was finally made complete by a letter she received quite unexpectedly from a sick and remorseful Doris Huxley in which she confirmed everything the stranger had told Pippa that day in the art gallery.
Jerome remarried a year later, not an actress, but a concert pianist who promptly and willingly retired and bore him a son. Her professional name was H
elena Donlan, and she is a fine amateur tennis player, a tall, slender, brown-haired woman, with extremely long and shapely legs. Jerome and she and Pippa and Oscar have become great friends, being brought back together by Jenny and Wilkie one summer when the Didiers came for a long weekend at the farm and stayed for three weeks. Oscar and Jerome like nothing better than to spend their days angling and wrangling, while Pippa and Helena play very serious tennis on the lawn. Pippa and Oscar have now added to their family, but not by the addition of children. Instead they rescue stray or abandoned dogs, and the last head count showed the number to be a round dozen. Oscar has suggested that they leave it at that, while Pippa gives the dogs as the reason why they never take holidays, although everyone knows that if you live somewhere as beautiful as the Greenes’ farm in the Loire, you would never want to leave it even for a moment.
So finally, what of Elizabeth? When last heard of she was announcing her separation from Jerome. Her fans will know, of course, that she is alive and well and making films, but perhaps even they don’t know the full story. Briefly, immediately after her separation from Jerome, she left Sainthill (which was immediately put on the market), and went to America. There she heard about and later admitted herself into a private clinic in Northern California which was specializing in a revolutionary new treatment for schizophrenia, a treatment (now widely recognized) which had no use for ECT or anti-psychotic drugs. Instead it relied entirely upon analysis and therapy. Elizabeth was an in-patient for six months, and an out-patient for a year. During the last six months of her treatment she was pronounced well enough to begin working again which she did, sharing the lead in a small budget film called The Moment which proved in fact to be a box office sleeper, costing less than eight million dollars to make, and grossing well over twenty-five million dollars once it had come awake in the public’s mind. Then, pronounced totally cured of her illness, she returned to live once more in London, turning her back on the theatre and preferring to work instead almost entirely in films, which she found far less demanding than the repetitious work of the theatre. Both her physical and her mental health stayed good, and as far as it can be ascertained, since her treatment in America Elizabeth has never reappeared. But just in case, nowadays everyone is instructed to call her either Lizzie, or Lizabett. In private no-one in the know calls her by her proper Christian name, and no-one ever calls her Bethy, most particularly her husband Cecil Manners.
Stardust Page 60
