Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Both acts, Elizabeth,’ Oscar replied, wiping the lenses of his glasses with his fingers. ‘I thought it was great.’

  ‘Ah!’ Elizabeth sighed, putting her hands together under her pretty chin.

  ‘It looked like a kiss should look, Elizabeth,’ Oscar continued, ‘it looked very real. And very sexy.’

  ‘Yes. But even so—’

  Jerome raised his voice in interruption, before Derwent had time to collect his thoughts, and turned once again to Elizabeth, bending slightly forward and clasping his hands behind his back.

  ‘The point is—’ he said with great concern, ‘did Elizabeth mind me kissing her like that?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Elizabeth replied, factually, and professionally, but with just the merest hint of shyness.

  ‘That was another thing,’ Oscar recalled to Cecil over their second drink. ‘He took it right away from having anything to do with stagecraft, and made it a matter of chivalry, goddamit! The guy is not only a magic actor, Cecil. When he’s not working, the guy should be running the UN! You remember the smile he got in reward?’

  Elizabeth had smiled at Jerome, she had given him her best smile, her most intimate smile, the smile she had rehearsed from early puberty in front of the mirror, the smile reserved for special occasions. But Jerome did not return her smile. . He just nodded at her the once, before turning back to the now out-gunned director.

  ‘The consensus of opinion, Richard,’ he said pleasantly, ‘would appear to be that we got the kiss right.’

  ‘Dear heart—’ Derwent began, only to be once again interrupted by Jerome, but this time on a change of tack.

  ‘Even so, Richard,’ Jerome continued, ‘we will also do it your way, the way you advise, because then we may compare the two approaches. Just in case – you know.’ Jerome paused, to smile ingenuously. ‘Just in case, Richard,’ he concluded, ‘our – inexperience is showing.’

  Before Derwent could voice an objection, Jerome took Elizabeth by the hand and began to play the scene. By the time they had finished kissing as directed, the cast and the bystanders, with the exception of the director, were helpless with laughter.

  ‘You are wrong!’ he shouted. ‘And quite, quite mad! Bringing sex – so brazenly into a play like this! At this point!’

  ‘But surely?’ Jerome wondered politely, ‘isn’t that what this play is about, Richard? This play is not a drawing-room comedy. This is not a french windows, anyone for tennis and cucumber sandwiches play. This play is about love, and passion. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s about two people’s passion for each other. And how it consumes them. I don’t see how we can depict passion, Richard, in all honesty, by kissing each other on the chin.’

  Oscar started the round of applause, but he had barely clapped more than twice before the rest of the cast joined in enthusiastically. Jerome nodded to them all, with a grateful and graceful smile, and then the whole body of the assembled company turned to look at the director, awaiting his final judgement.

  ‘I think you’re quite mad,’ he said, but the day was won. And well won, because one of the reasons for the phenomenal success Oscar’s play was to enjoy was the passion with which Elizabeth Laurence and Jerome Didier played their love scenes.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jerome said to Elizabeth as they prepared to leave rehearsals.

  ‘You’re thanking me?’ Elizabeth laughed. ‘I’m afraid I played very little part in the triumph. The day very much belongs to you.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Jerome replied, hurriedly pulling on his coat and glancing again at his watch. ‘We both fight for the same cause. Truth. Now if you’ll excuse me – I shall see you tomorrow.’

  He hurried from the rehearsal room, in the way a person does when they are late for the person they have to meet. Elizabeth hurried to the window in case whoever it happened to be was waiting, and sure enough, sitting in the window of the café opposite, sat the figure of a girl, who got up hurriedly and left as soon as she in turn saw Jerome coming out of the building.

  She was a slim girl, with long brown hair, about the same height as Jerome who, with his mackintosh slung over his shoulders, was hurrying across the road to greet her. The girl was wearing a dark blue waterproof which was undone, revealing below it a matching dark blue cotton dress with small white polka dots. It was hard for Elizabeth to see from that distance how pretty the girl was, although as she hurried along the pavement to meet Jerome where he was crossing, Elizabeth saw she had exceptionally good legs, and moved with a natural athleticism.

  For a moment she assumed, or perhaps more accurately hoped that the girl was a relation of Jerome’s, maybe his sister, or a cousin. She did after all, Elizabeth decided, look a little too unsophisticated to be anything more to someone as dashing and talented as her new leading man.

  The moment Jerome arrived at the girl’s side, Elizabeth knew she was wrong. She could tell immediately from the way Jerome kissed the top of her tousled hair, and the way he put his arm through hers and, even from her vantage point two floors above the street, from the way he smiled at her. They were not relatives, nor even just friends. They were lovers, or lovers-in-waiting.

  After a moment, Elizabeth collected her things together and turned to see who was left in the rehearsal room. In the far corner she saw the person she wanted, Oscar, who was busy packing his script into a blizzard of loose papers already stuffed inside his battered old briefcase. Elizabeth smiled to herself and then walked over to him.

  ‘Oscar dear,’ she said, ‘are you dashing off, too? Or do you have time for a coffee?’

  ‘A coffee? At this hour?’ Oscar peered at Elizabeth through finger-printed eyeglasses. ‘You have to be kidding. Anyway, much as I’d love to take you for a drink, I’m already spoken for.’

  ‘You go on ahead with Elizabeth,’ Cecil said, overhearing. ‘I still have one or two things to do here.’

  ‘OK,’ Oscar smiled to Elizabeth. ‘Let’s go and get out of our wet things and into a Dry Martini.’

  The actress waited until they were in the bar and seated with their drinks in front of them before setting about her self-appointed task. But first she smiled at him, her best kitten’s smile.

  ‘Oscar?’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

  ‘Anything,’ Oscar replied, searching his pockets hopelessly for his cigarettes, which he had already placed most carefully on the table in front of them. ‘You may ask me anything, just so long as it doesn’t involve a rewrite.’

  ‘You know I love your play,’ Elizabeth replied, with just the right amount of hurt in her voice. ‘I wouldn’t have you change a word of it. Your play’s wonderful.’

  ‘It might be now,’ Oscar agreed, accepting one of his own cigarettes from the packet Elizabeth was holding beneath his nose. ‘It has a chance of being something now you and Jerome Didier are doing it.’

  ‘It would be a wonderful play with anybody doing it, Oscar,’ Elizabeth assured him. ‘Jerome and I are very lucky people.’

  ‘Oh shucks,’ Oscar said, ‘as they say in all the best comic strips.’

  Elizabeth smiled, and then picking up Oscar’s battered old Zippo lighter, lit both their cigarettes, before flipping the lighter back shut.

  ‘I love American things,’ she said. ‘Animate and inanimate.’

  ‘And so what can this rather inanimate American do for you?’ Oscar enquired.

  ‘I don’t remember saying I wanted you to do anything for me, Oscar.’

  She gave him another kittenish smile, but this one said you-clever-old-thing.

  ‘Sure,’ Oscar nodded, swizzling the olive in his drink a little too vigorously so that he nearly spilt the entire cocktail. ‘I’m a writer, as you probably recall. So I get to work out plots in advance.’

  ‘And so what’s this plot, Mr Writer?’

  ‘You tell me, ma’am. If it’s good and I use it, I might even cut you in.’

  ‘It isn’t a plot,’ Elizabeth whispered, ‘I just want some advice. Not
just for my own good, but because I think it will help make your play even more wonderful.’

  ‘How can I resist?’

  Oscar couldn’t, he knew that. This was a girl for whom he would walk on red-hot coals, fly to the moon and go to the end of the earth all rolled into one. Not that he was in love with Elizabeth as a person, because he wasn’t. But as an actress, as an instrument for his work, he gave thanks every minute of his waking life for the day she was born.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, lighting his cigarette again even though it was still alight. ‘Try me. Let Auntie hear your agony.’

  ‘It’s Jerome,’ Elizabeth confessed. ‘I think he’s wonderful, and I think we’re going to be good together.’

  ‘Good?’ Oscar frowned deeply, as if she was mad. ‘Good? They haven’t a word to say what you two are going to be.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Oscar.’ Elizabeth grew very serious, and then fell silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know how to put this.’

  ‘I’m no good at writing dialogue,’ Oscar said, ‘unless I have the motivation.’

  ‘I want us to be so good, Oscar. I can’t tell you how much I want it. And I know we can! It’s just – it’s just.’ She stopped and looked at him across the table, then put her hand on his. ‘I don’t know whether Jerome will let me get close enough.’

  Oscar nodded, as he saw the picture, and he knew that if ever there was a time to keep his mouth shut, this was it. But she had her hand on his, and she was looking with those strange hypnotic bright green eyes into his, and she was so goddam beautiful he really did want to help her, even though he knew it was going to cost him dear.

  So much against his better judgement he told her exactly what she wanted to hear, and he knew even as he was doing it that he was busy making himself into his own executioner.

  Meantime Jerome was falling ever more deeply in love with Pippa as they dined over bacon, egg and french fries in a Lyon’s Corner House.

  ‘I wish I had the money to buy a Rolls-Royce,’ he sighed, putting down his knife and fork.

  ‘Is that your ambition?’ Pippa asked. ‘To own a Rolls-Royce?’

  Jerome shook his head as he wiped his mouth on his table napkin, but Pippa could see that he was smiling, because it was in his eyes.

  ‘I don’t want a Rolls-Royce, Pippa Nicholls,’ he replied, still from behind his napkin, while arching both his eyebrows. ‘I just wish I had the money.’ He leaned forward and put a finger to her lips as Pippa laughed. ‘No,’ he warned her. ‘Don’t laugh. If I had the money, then I could take you somewhere. Somewhere more – glamorous.’

  ‘I’m happy here,’ Pippa said. ‘I like Lyon’s Corner Houses.’

  ‘You’ll like the Ritz even better,’ Jerome informed her. ‘When the play has opened, to ecstatic notices, on the second night I shall take you to dine at the Ritz.’

  ‘Supposing it opens to terrible notices?’ Pippa asked.

  ‘If it does, I shall kill myself.’

  ‘Of course you won’t.’

  ‘I most certainly shall, Pippa Nicholls. I promise you. And the reason why I can promise you that, is because the notices will be ecstatic.’

  ‘You’re very confident, aren’t you?’ she asked him. ‘It doesn’t occur to you that it might fail.’

  Pippa looked across at him, with a deep frown. In return, Jerome pursed his lips, and tapped them with the end of one finger. Then he shook his head.

  ‘You would need to have been there today, Pippa,’ he said. ‘You see, I am good. It’s not a conceit, it’s a fact. I have a talent, a God-given talent, like Elizabeth Laurence, who is also very good. Very, very good. Individually, we are both very, very good. But together, together we are going to be – sensational.’

  ‘You know this after just one day’s rehearsal?’

  ‘As I said, you’d need to have been there, Pippa. It was extraordinary. It was like being in the middle of an electric storm. You could have lit the Albert Hall from the amount of electricity that was generated. The light – and it was a light – it actually shone in everyone’s eyes. And on everyone’s faces.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it,’ Pippa said with a frown, carefully putting down and together her own knife and fork before looking back up at him. ‘Was it awfully exciting?’

  ‘No,’ Jerome said, sotto voce. ‘Compared to being with you, it was nothing.’

  Halfway through the second week of rehearsals Elizabeth suddenly and totally lost her performance. For a day or so nothing was said, and everyone carried on as if nothing had happened.

  ‘This sort of thing happens all the time,’ Richard Derwent sighed to Cecil. ‘All the time. Probably better if you hadn’t come in today, really. This sort of thing happens all the time.’

  ‘She asked me to come in, dear boy, crying on the telephone at two in the morning. Even her husband was worried.’

  By Friday her director was too. Not only had Elizabeth lost her performance, by the end of the week, for some extraordinary reason she seemed to have lost her memory too, and was back rehearsing play script in hand.

  ‘Heart?’ the benighted director kept reminding her. ‘We open in Oxford in a week. Remember? One week, heart of oak. But we can’t the way you’re going, unless we get Oscar to rewrite this whole play as a frigging pantomime!’

  Elizabeth’s eyes welled full with tears. Richard Derwent turned away from the now all too familiar sight.

  ‘Oh God,’ he muttered hopelessly. ‘God preserve us from all female actresses.’

  Of course, had Oscar Greene been there to ask, the playwright would have been able to explain exactly what was going on, but because of the way Derwent worked, Oscar had been asked to stay away until Derwent considered the play was ready for him to see. Which, of course, Elizabeth knew, and which, of course, explained her perfect timing.

  Not unnaturally, Jerome had become extremely worried by his co-star’s apparent disintegration, but had been advised by his director not to bring attention to it lest his concern precipitated an even more catastrophic decline. But finally, at the end of this particular day’s rehearsals, which ended as all recent ones had done with Elizabeth in a welter of tears and semi-hysterics, Jerome could bear it no more, and caught up with Elizabeth in the street as she searched in full flight for a taxi.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said, catching her arm.

  ‘Why?’ Elizabeth asked, biting her lip until it started to turn scarlet. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Taxi.’

  Jerome caught the first passing cab and swung open the back door.

  ‘Please,’ he said to Elizabeth. ‘We should have done this ages ago. I don’t know what I can have been thinking.’

  He took her to the Ritz, although he had so little money he had to turn away and count it before they went through the doors. He sat her in the corner of the bar, and persuaded her very much against her wishes to order a brandy, which she didn’t drink.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, searching her handbag for a handkerchief. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me.’

  Neither did Jerome. But he thought he did.

  ‘You’re afraid,’ he said, very gently.

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth agreed, equally sotto. ‘But I’m afraid that’s all too obvious, wouldn’t you say? I seem completely to have lost my nerve.’

  She smiled at him, bravely, over the top of her immaculately laundered hankie.

  ‘You haven’t lost your nerve,’ Jerome frowned, leaning towards her. ‘You have lost your performance – temporarily, for one reason, and for one reason alone. You got there too early. And that is what frightened you.’

  ‘I – I don’t understand,’ Elizabeth lied. ‘Please explain.’

  ‘There was nowhere left for you to go, darling, it happens all the time,’ Jerome told her, sitting further forward in his chair and putting both his hands on the edge of the table. ‘Nowhere. At least not when I joined the cast. Perhaps with Lewis – perhaps you’d found it all a mite t
oo easy? And you had got your performance—’ Jerome snapped his finger and thumb to illustrate his point. ‘Like that. And so then – where was there to go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Elizabeth demurred. ‘I don’t think it’s just that.’

  Elizabeth fell to silence.

  ‘Yes?’ Jerome prompted, almost below his breath. ‘So what then? What do you think it is?’

  Elizabeth looked down at the handkerchief clasped between her hands.

  ‘If only I could believe it was as easy as that,’ she murmured.

  ‘It is!’

  ‘If you were me – perhaps. If this was you, if this had happened to you—’ She shook her head sadly, and looked down. ‘I’m afraid it goes deeper than that.’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Jerome commanded, and Elizabeth looked back up at him, showing surprise at the authority in his voice. ‘You know about holding back. Surely you were told, were you not, never to give it all too early? You have to hold back so that you may build, just like a painter builds a picture, from sketches, and outlines – long before he paints it. And even then, then he still leaves room for repainting. Which is what you must do. You must make the canvas blank again, and start again from scratch. Until you arrive organically – at your performance.’

  Word for word Jerome was parroting Terence Vaughan, advice he had always followed at drama school, where he had found it never to be lacking. Others loved to rush headlong into their performances, showing everybody every trick they had all at once. But Jerome had learned how to surprise them. He would show brilliance at the read through, even early on in rehearsals, so they might catch a glimpse of his armoury. Then he would shut the door and go back to scratch, slowly and seemingly painstakingly crafting his performance, while all the time knowing if the truth be told and he was called on suddenly to produce the finished goods, they were there ready and waiting, where they had been since he had first read the part.

  To Elizabeth, however, there was no scent of trickery about Jerome’s advice, at least so it seemed from the way she had decided to react, which was to show nothing but trust on her beautiful but still melancholy countenance, while letting her eyes travel slowly like a camera over Jerome’s. Then she sighed and she frowned, once more.