Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘No?’ Jerome asked, slipping his right arm round her waist.

  ‘You dance rather well.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Jerome had taught himself to dance in Carriagetown, at parties inside the converted carriages, or outside on the beach, before honing his technique to near perfection at drama school.

  ‘But then you would,’ Pippa added after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Would what, Miss Nicholls?’

  ‘Dance well, Mr Didier. People like you should dance well. Because you obviously get asked to lots of dances.’

  ‘People like me?’

  ‘Who go to lots of dances. Deb dances.’

  ‘I’m an actor, Miss Nicholls,’ Jerome sighed. ‘Not a socialite. Actors rarely get asked to dances, at least not in my experience.’

  Pippa smiled, and then frowned, as she began to concentrate on her dancing in the same way that she had concentrated on her croquet. Jerome found this oddly touching, as he found everything about the girl in his arms, from her hand-me-down clothes, and her great tousle of hair which appeared to have a life of its own, to the optimism which seemed to shine in her oddly coloured grey eyes, as if she expected life to be an eternally interesting challenge, one to be undertaken with the same determination she had shown on the croquet lawn, and was now showing again on the dance floor.

  There was something else about her, which Jerome couldn’t specify, which made him long to talk to her, to sit down somewhere quite alone, and tell her all about his family and his childhood, about Terence Vaughan, National Service in the RAF, why and how he went to drama school, and what had happened to him since. But the more he thought about talking to her, the more silent he became, and he found himself instead just looking into a face full of such sweetness, feeling just the very lightness of her young slim body in his arms, and through the fabric of her dress the warmth and firmness of her small round breasts.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and Jerome frowned. He hadn’t even noticed the band had stopped playing. He hadn’t even noticed what the band had been playing.

  ‘That was lovely,’ Pippa continued, retightening the sash around her waist in another effort to get her dress to hang properly. ‘Now I’m sure you want to dance with somebody else. And I think perhaps I’d better as well.’

  ‘Why?’ Jerome asked.

  ‘Because,’ Pippa replied patiently, as if addressing a child, ‘we have just danced three dances on the trot, that’s why.’

  ‘So why not four, may I ask?’

  ‘Because it’s bad manners.’

  She looked up at him, smiling, and as she did, the smile vanished and was replaced by a sudden, puzzled look, a look which seemed to say that she didn’t quite understand what was happening to her. And then that look also vanished, and was replaced by the smile, although this time the smile was a little less certain.

  The band began to play a waltz, and Pippa turned away to listen.

  ‘We haven’t danced a waltz,’ Jerome said from behind her, leaning closer so that he could whisper it in her ear. ‘Let’s just dance this waltz, and then I’ll hand you back to the heathens.’

  Pippa turned back, about to dance with him, when the young guardsman returned and cut in.

  ‘My dance I think,’ he said, giving Jerome one brief but hard stare. ‘Pippa?’

  He gave her his arm and led her on to the floor, while Jerome stood watching helplessly, unable this time to think up some ready ruse. Instead he went and fetched himself a drink, and stood by the bar watching Pippa being danced by the tall, upright soldier. Finally he could take it not one moment longer, and having downed his champagne, he fought his way across the crowded dance floor until he was once more at Pippa’s side.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, cutting in.

  Bodell gave a glance to see who it was, and seeing it was Jerome, his face hardened.

  ‘Look,’ he said coldly. ‘Sorry, but this is not an Excuse-me.’

  ‘I never said it was,’ Jerome replied equally coldly, taking the bewildered Pippa by the arm. ‘I simply said excuse me.’

  He marched Pippa off the dance floor holding her by the arm, as if she was a child who had just committed some social solecism. He marched her right through the crowd until they were out of the marquee and across the far side of the moonlit lawns, under the long shadows cast by a line of tall conifers.

  ‘I don’t think Rodney took that very well,’ Pippa said, looking back to the tent.

  Jerome groaned.

  ‘Now what’s the matter?’

  ‘Dear lord – he would have to be called Rodney, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘What’s wrong with Rodney?’ Pippa asked, starting to pull some of the pins out of her hair, and putting them in her mouth. ‘Someone has to be called Rodney.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘My hair,’ Pippa replied. ‘It doesn’t seem to want to stay up.’

  ‘I don’t blame it,’ Jerome said, putting his hand on her arm. ‘Leave it down. It’s so much prettier.’

  ‘You don’t like my hair up?’

  ‘I like your hair up, but I like it even more – down.’

  Pippa stopped rearranging her hair for a moment and looked at Jerome. Then she sighed.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit of a mess.’

  ‘Of course you aren’t,’ Jerome replied quickly, and valiantly.

  ‘Of course I am,’ Pippa insisted. ‘I mean look at this dress.’

  ‘It’s a lovely dress. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the dress.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘You look lovely, I promise you. So how can there be anything wrong with the dress?’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a little – a little old?’

  ‘That is probably—’ Jerome smiled and paused, as he bent slightly towards her, ‘half its – charm.’

  Jerome was secretly pleased as he heard himself. He had, he realized suddenly, recaptured precisely the painfully sensitive and strangely intense character he had given Eugene Marchbanks so successfully in the drama school production of Shaw’s Candida.

  But Pippa seemed to be still too concerned with her appearance to notice, giving yet another sigh as she pulled the straps of her dress back up on to her shoulders.

  ‘It’s my grandmother’s, if you really want to know,’ she said. ‘Which probably makes it pre-First World War.’

  She looked at him, awaiting a response, but Jerome had fallen silent, choosing just to stare at her with a slight frown. While they stood there in silence, an owl called in the woods beyond them, while across the lawns came the distant sound of the band playing.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ Pippa asked finally.

  ‘Oh yes I think so,’ Jerome replied, dropping his voice dramatically. ‘Yes I think there most definitely is.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You must know,’ Jerome insisted. ‘I saw it on your face while we were dancing. I saw it on your face after we had danced. I saw it on your face a moment ago.’

  Now it was Pippa’s turn to frown.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘You know,’ Jerome whispered.

  ‘No I don’t,’ said Pippa, contradicting not only Jerome, but something inside herself, something in the way she was beginning to know she felt. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I really must get back.’

  ‘Of course you mustn’t,’ Jerome replied dismissively. ‘Sit here and talk.’

  ‘We can talk back there.’ Pippa indicated the house and marquees across the lawns. ‘We can talk on the way back there.’

  ‘Pippa.’

  This time Jerome managed to make the whisper into a sound of anguish, as if the very act of saying her name caused him pain.

  ‘You’re very serious, aren’t you?’ she said curiously, turning back to face him.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pippa studied him for a moment, before continuing,
finding herself momentarily startled by quite how good looking Jerome was. ‘Are you going to be a very serious actor?’ she asked.

  Jerome laughed, showing a row of perfect and straight white teeth.

  ‘I’m going to be a very famous one,’ he replied.

  He preferred it now that she was teasing him, because now that she was teasing him it meant she was at least taking notice. And teasing was a type of intimacy, a sort of foreplay almost, although from the look in Pippa’s eyes Jerome sensed she was still trying to find the best way to approach him, which now made him suppose that the teasing might rather be a form of self-defence, to keep him at arm’s length emotionally, because she was not yet ready for any wholesale emotional intrusion into her life, preferring to stay as she was, a single entity.

  To test her, he reached out his hand and tried to take hers, but she withdrew, stepping back and away from him.

  ‘No,’ she said, although considerably less firmly, Jerome was happy to note. ‘We really should get back.’

  ‘Very well,’ he replied, rolling the r around his mouth. ‘If you must. But not I. I do not wish to go back.’

  He wanted to surprise her, to wrongfoot her by his waywardness, but all he did was make her laugh.

  ‘Now what’s funny?’ he demanded. ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pippa said. ‘It was just—’ She stopped, and did her best to look serious. ‘I’m sorry but you did sound like something straight out of a play.’

  She was smiling again, and because of it Jerome felt himself growing increasingly infuriated.

  ‘Go on,’ he ordered her. ‘Go on – back to your dance. Go on.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Her tone managed to infuriate Jerome even more, because she sounded not in the least bit concerned, but merely curious. So hoping to madden her in return, he just gave a shrug and turned to walk away into the moonlit woods beyond.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she called after him, still not sounding in the least bit anxious.

  ‘Never mind me!’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Please! Go back to your dance!’

  His voice echoed rather thrillingly in the woods, Jerome thought as he walked away, tempting him to cry out once more. But he resisted the temptation, and waited instead for the summons he felt must surely come from Pippa for him not to be so foolish, and to return.

  But nothing came. The only sound was that of twigs snapping beneath his feet as he headed ever deeper into the darkening woods.

  Finally he could bear it no more, and turned back to see if she was at least still waiting for him. But when he got to the edge of the woods he saw the lawn where they had been standing was now deserted, and there was no sign of Pippa anywhere. She had let him go.

  She had allowed him to go, deeper and deeper into the woods, further and further from her side, and had returned to the dance, and the party, and most probably that tall idiot of a guardsman – damn it! he thought. She must have gone at once! As soon, in fact, as he had turned and headed for the woods – because it was a long way back across the lawns, and if she had stood hesitating, waiting and wondering whether or not to go after him, she could not have made it back to the marquees. She would still be crossing the lawns, a slender figure in a strange old-fashioned dress.

  Instead she had gone, vanished back into the party, not bothered by his refusal to return there with her, abandoning him, leaving him utterly alone under a bright full moon, heartsick and dismayed.

  Jerome stood and lit a cigarette. He smoked half of it, practising precisely how to exhale with the maximum of effect, before growing bored. He was bored with feeling heartsick and dismayed, bored with being abandoned, bored even with his cigarette.

  So he threw it away into a flowerbed, and straightening his bow-tie, turned and walked back to rejoin the party, no longer feeling bored, just merely slightly ridiculous.

  He found her number easily enough the following morning, in Ursula Manners’s telephone book on the hall table.

  ‘Jerome Didier,’ he said when he heard her voice on the other end of the telephone. ‘And before you say anything, I’m sorry about last night.’ Which he wasn’t at all, in fact he felt that she should be sorry, particularly since when he had made the sacrifice and returned to the dance, he couldn’t find her, and later discovered she had long since gone home.

  ‘Sorry?’ her husky voice said in his ear. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Jerome,’ he said, stifling an impatient sigh. ‘Jerome Didier.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was a short pause, and then: ‘Hello.’

  ‘I was ringing to say sorry,’ Jerome repeated.

  ‘Why?’ she asked him. ‘What on earth for?’

  Now Jerome really sighed, unable to help it. The sound of that lightly husky voice made him instantly go weak.

  ‘Because,’ he said slowly, while studying his reaction in the oval mirror above the hall table. ‘I behaved appallingly. I really don’t know what came over me.’

  He left a little pause, knowing she wouldn’t answer, hoping that she wouldn’t. ‘No, that’s not true,’ he continued, pleased with his reading of the scene so far. ‘I know perfectly well what came over me. But that was still no excuse for my shockingly bad behaviour.’

  ‘You really don’t have to apologize for anything,’ said the husky little voice. ‘I don’t see what there is to apologize for. Unless—’

  ‘I shouldn’t have walked off like that,’ Jerome interrupted. ‘And left you. That was very rude.’

  ‘Not really,’ she laughed. ‘I mean not as rude as interrupting poor Rodney’s dance.’

  ‘That –’ Jerome announced firmly, ‘I am not sorry for.’

  ‘You should be,’ Pippa replied. ‘I mean if you want to apologize for anything—’

  ‘I don’t want to apologize for that,’ Jerome reiterated.

  ‘All right,’ Pippa said and Jerome could almost hear her shrugging her shoulders. ‘Well, if you don’t want to apologize for that—’

  ‘Look,’ Jerome came in quickly, in case Pippa suddenly got it into her head to conclude the conversation. ‘I have to see you again.’

  ‘Have to?’

  ‘I would like – to see you again.’

  ‘Not want to?’

  She was back to teasing, and Jerome smiled, tilting his head back slightly.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed quickly, on the breath. ‘I want – to see you. All right? Will you come for a walk?’

  ‘Very well,’ she agreed, but only after a very long pause. ‘After church,’ she said, after what seemed like an enormous pause, a wait which made Jerome once more grow desperate. She seemed so poised, and so distant. Was this because this was the way she had decided to play it? Detached and disinterested? Or was it, he thought with a rising hope, perhaps because someone else was standing there listening to her conversation? Like her mother? Cecil had said he would have to get by her mother. So perhaps that was who was listening, and why Pippa couldn’t betray any interest in his call.

  Or was it perhaps because she simply wasn’t interested in him? He would find all this out on the walk, he determined, once and for all.

  ‘Where shall I meet you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. By the wicket gate on the far side of Cecil’s tennis court. At about quarter-past twelve.’

  Jerome saw her first, because he had been waiting for her, half hidden away in the changing hut beside the tennis court. She arrived at the gate exactly on time, a dog lead hung around her neck, and her hair falling in a tumble down her back, but perhaps because it was Sunday, today there were no old faded grey shorts to show off the slim brown legs, just an old pale blue cotton dress and a pair of sandals.

  Jerome stayed hidden for a moment, watching her, as she swung on the gate while her small black and white mongrel dashed in and out of the woods chasing what were either real or imaginary rabbits. He watched her with what he realized was a growing sense of dismay, for half of him had hoped
that when he saw her again she would turn out to be nothing at all out of the ordinary, that on this the second day of their acquaintance she would prove to have been an emotional mirage, leaving him to wonder why and how he could have felt as impossibly heartsick as he had felt the day before, and as helpless as he had felt that very morning at just the thought of her. But as he looked at her, as he watched her, he knew that the half of him which had hoped her to be a will-o’-the-wisp was now doomed to disappointment. Looking at her he realized he felt even more heartsick and utterly helpless than ever.

  Her face with its myriad of freckles, its inquisitive and mischievous grey-green eyes, and its pretty and perfectly proportioned mouth which turned up just very slightly at the corners, had haunted him all night, so much so that now he saw it again he wanted nothing more than to cup it in both his hands and kiss it to pieces.

  ‘Hello!’ he called as he appeared in front of her, having slipped quietly out of the hut and made his way unnoticed round the court. ‘I hope you haven’t been waiting! Blasted telephone!’

  He caught hold of the gate Pippa was swinging on, and smiled at her, and his heart leapt when he saw her smile back. Then the little black and white mongrel dashed from out of the woods and hurled itself at Jerome, barking excitedly, while jumping up and down against his legs.

  ‘How odd,’ Pippa said with a frown. ‘Bobby likes you.’

  ‘That’s odd?’

  ‘He doesn’t usually like boys.’

  ‘How is he with men?’

  Pippa brushed some hair out of her eyes and turned to look at Jerome rather thoroughly.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said after a moment. ‘I meant men.’

  ‘And I’m sorry about last night,’ Jerome said, happily falling into step beside Pippa as she began to walk off ahead of him.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Pippa said. ‘Rodney’s a bit of a drone, as a matter of fact.’

  She smiled at him, and the warmth of her smile prevented Jerome from remonstrating any further about what he felt the need to apologize for and what he did not. Instead he bent down and finding a stick nearby, threw it for her dog.

  ‘What a great dog,’ he said, brushing some of the mud it had left on his immaculate trousers. ‘Have you had him since a puppy?’