Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  He didn’t dare talk to her. For all his official world-weary cynicism, for all his drollery, for all his so-called hard-nosed opinions, outside the world of the theatre, away from the playground, Oscar was a shy and diffident man, the very last sort of man to open a conversation with a complete stranger, particularly a tousle-headed, grey-eyed, speckled-face, long-legged creature who really was most probably, Oscar decided, like a manifestation in a Frank Capra movie, something heaven-sent to this earth in order to test his morality.

  Besides, she was all wrapped up in herself, Oscar decided, judging by the way she was sitting half curled up in the window seat, pretending to watch the night-time go by when he could plainly see from the reflection of those wonderful eyes in the window glass that her look was turned inwards, that she was thinking of something which had just happened, rather than of something which might be going to happen. Once or twice when she shifted position, or made a desultory attempt to read the book on her lap, the girl glanced at Oscar, but whenever she did Oscar made sure he was back, busy scribbling away on his manuscript.

  But he never once could put her out of his mind. Oscar was too much of a writer to allow such a beguiling creature to sit opposite him all the way back to London without inventing a whole history for her, and by the time the train was approaching Paddington, he had written her entire story, of the lonely childhood in India, her cruel stepmother who had stolen the love of her weak father, of her ambition to be a ballerina until those wonderfully shaped legs grew too long, and now of this fearfully unhappy love affair in which she was in the throes, with a man obviously older than she, perhaps even a man who was married, a shocking fact the grey-eyed neophyte angel only discovered after she had become involved with the son of a bitch. As she put her book away in the pocket of her coat, and retied her head scarf when the train began to pull into the terminus, Oscar had even identified her lover. He was an Oxford don, a surrogate father figure, whom the girl had just visited in order to try and say goodbye for ever, which explained her sad countenance, the wistful look in her extraordinary eyes, her entire aura.

  Once the train had stopped, Oscar opened the carriage door for her and stood aside, his one moment of near contact throughout the length of the journey. The grey-eyed girl smiled shyly at him in thanks but said nothing. She just alighted from the train and disappeared into the crowd and the dark of the night.

  Oscar stood and watched her go. He died to follow her, to overcome his shyness and introduce himself, and take her somewhere for a late night coffee, somewhere warm and comforting where he could sit and listen to her while she spoke of her unhappiness. But he didn’t. He could have started a conversation on the train with her, as the people in his plays often did, but he hadn’t. He could have offered to share a cab with her, just like other characters in his plays often did, but he didn’t. He could run after her now, and explain his reticence, introduce himself to her and tell her the sort of things his make-believe people sometimes told each other, that of all the people in the whole wide world, they surely were meant for each other, that he couldn’t let her go without talking to her, without telling her she was the most beguiling creature he had ever seen, but he couldn’t. Instead he watched her go, and let her go, and then wandered off to find a cab himself once the crowd had swallowed her up, unmindful of the fact that into that warm summer night had disappeared the girl who was later to become his greatest and best loved heroine, the girl upon whom he was to base his world famous creation, Tatty Gray.

  6

  It was the sight of his wife in another man’s arms which brought the reality home to Sebastian. There she was, there they both were, larger than life and for all the world to see. And all the world was seeing. Sebastian was not alone as he stood looking at Elizabeth kissing her lover, indeed a small crowd had gathered round to stare along with him at the picture of this beautiful couple embracing. But it was Sebastian who was staring the hardest.

  He hadn’t been allowed to see the play on tour. Elizabeth had forbidden him to visit, her reason being that she wanted the play and her performance to be at their best by the time he sat among the audience, and Sebastian had concurred. In fact he had been so busy with his work, a timetable which included two short trips to France, that he had more or less put the play out of his mind, attributing no more importance to it than Elizabeth’s previous foray into the world of drama, what she described as her little ‘cameo’ in Made In Heaven.

  He gave it no more importance, that is, until he saw the photographs, and once he did, once he set eyes on the array of pictures of his beautiful and beloved wife in various intimate poses with someone who was undoubtedly one of the best looking young men he had ever seen, Sebastian revised his opinion with regard to what precisely his wife was doing.

  Fun was how she had described it, he remembered, still unable to tear himself away from the photographs, it was just going to be fun. But fun for whom? Elizabeth certainly looked as if she was enjoying herself, but Sebastian was not at all sure as to how he himself felt. He felt a fool, that at least he knew, in fact he had never felt quite so foolish as he did this moment, standing among a crowd of men who were strangers to him, and yet who were all ogling his wife, some of them daring even to make personal remarks.

  ‘She’s got a fair old body,’ said a slack-jawed young man who was standing close to a single photograph of Elizabeth. ‘I wouldn’t kick ’er out of bed.’

  ‘Yeah?’ his mate scoffed. ‘A lardy tart like that? You’d be lucky if she let you bring the bleedin’ coal in.’

  They laughed and wandered off, leaving Sebastian clutching the handle of his umbrella as tightly as he could, lest he let fly with both fists at the impertinent youths. But then a voice inside him reminded him that if he was going to continue to allow Elizabeth her fun, then this was the sort of experience he would have to learn how to endure. It was the sort of experience he would have to learn to expect not just from the rank and file of strangers, but from friends and intimates, who having seen Elizabeth in her latest bit of fun, would feel bound to discuss her amongst themselves or worse, even with Sebastian, as if she were a commodity, a person in the public domain.

  I saw Lizzie in Something or Other, he could imagine them saying. And I must say, old man, I didn’t half fancy her!

  Appalled with the notion, and deciding that this latest adventure of Elizabeth’s was to be her very last, Sebastian turned away from the publicity display outside the theatre where All That Glitters was due to open that evening, and looked for a taxi. As he did so, a couple in their late middle age came out of the theatre, and paused where Sebastian had just been standing, in front of the photographs of Elizabeth and Jerome.

  ‘I am so looking forward to this,’ the woman told the man. ‘I simply cannot tell you, James. Prue saw it in Brighton and she said it is quite, quite enchanting.’

  ‘I must say,’ her husband replied, leaning forwards the better to see the single portrait of Elizabeth. ‘This gel is dashed pretty.’

  ‘She’s beautiful, James,’ the woman sighed. ‘Prue says she is the most beautiful gel she has ever seen.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Her husband took a closer look at the subject of their conversation, and then slipped his arm through his wife’s. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘she reminds me of you.’

  ‘Oh, what nonsense!’ his wife laughed as they began to walk away, but Sebastian saw the look on her face, and saw how charmed and flattered she had been.

  In answer to his raised arm, a cab pulled up at the kerb. But just before he climbed into it, Sebastian turned and took one last look at the array of publicity photographs, before reading the names in lights as yet unlit in the sign above the theatre entrance:

  ELIZABETH LAURENCE and JEROME DIDIER

  IN

  ALL THAT GLITTERS

  BY

  OSCAR GREENE

  Then he got into the taxi and ordered the driver to take him to Bond Street.

  ‘Anywhere in particular, guv?’ the cabb
ie enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ Sebastian replied. ‘Asprey’s.’

  He had intended to go straight to his club for lunch once he had picked up his ticket for the first night, particularly after he had seen the photographs on display for all to see outside the theatre. The effect on him of seeing Elizabeth like that had been devastating, and he had been so taken by surprise at first he hurried away from the theatre without even calling at the box office.

  But then a compulsive curiosity had drawn him back, and he had stood as described and stared at the blown-up portraits of his wife, in the company of passers-by, trying to come to terms with the effect such an exposure was having on him. As he sat back in the cab and remembered, he blamed himself, because he had never given the matter sufficient consideration, he had never thought the matter through. Elizabeth’s fun had seemed to be just that, and as long as she had been happy having her fun, then Sebastian had been happy. What he had not realized, was that while Elizabeth was having her fun, she would belong to other people, people who didn’t know her, but who felt they knew her, well enough to decide whether or not they would like to make love to her.

  Elizabeth Laurence, the name on the unlit marquee had said. She wasn’t even his any more, at least not in public. She was unmarried, a single woman, a woman to be scrutinized, lusted after, remarked at, quantified and qualified. After tonight, she would no longer be his, his private property, his angel to be worshipped and carefully, most carefully seduced, his love and nobody else’s. After tonight, if the play was a West End hit, which Cecil Manners had assured him it was going to be, then Elizabeth would be public property, a property so public that people would wonder what she wore in bed and what she ate for breakfast.

  And yet.

  Yet Sebastian realized he was no longer horrified by the reality of the situation, appalled by the sudden and unexpected publicity, but in fact that he rather revelled in it. Even more than that, he felt proud.

  It wasn’t just the pleasure the middle-aged woman had received being favourably compared by her husband to the young and semi-divine Elizabeth which had changed Sebastian’s thinking on the matter, although that had both touched and charmed him, it was the realization that although others, masses of others, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of other men might want his wife, might lust after her, might harbour dark and passionate thoughts about her, none of them, not one of them would possess her. Because Elizabeth Laurence, the divine, ethereal, and exquisite Miss Laurence belonged only to him, because the divine, ethereal and exquisite Miss Laurence loved only him.

  She told him so each day and every night they were together. She would whisper to him how much she loved him, how kind and understanding he was, how sweet and gentle, and how she would always and forever love him, and if she ever stopped loving him, even for a moment, he must take a dagger and plunge it through her unfaithful heart. She told him how faint she felt with love for him, how helpless she felt away from him, how warm and wonderfully secure she felt when she was once again with him.

  ‘“Age cannot wither you,”’ she would breathe softly in his ear, ‘“nor custom stale your infinite variety.”’

  The fact that they made love only infrequently didn’t worry Sebastian, firstly because he was uncertain of quite how frequently other young couples made love, since it was a subject which was never discussed, and secondly, aware of what Elizabeth referred to as her rather delicate nature, he was deliberately undemanding as far as his rights were concerned, happy enough just to be with his beloved wife, content just to have her with him, and to be able to talk to her and to admire her perfect beauty.

  So although he had felt pangs of the very worst sort of jealousy and outrage when he saw Elizabeth so prominently displayed outside the Globe Theatre, he had now recovered himself entirely, due solely to the knowledge that Elizabeth was his and his alone. Everyone else might admire her, some might even love her, but he was the one she loved, and she was the one who was loved by him. Which was why instead of going straight to his club for a stiff gin and lunch with one of the other junior partners in the firm, he was going to Asprey’s, to buy Elizabeth a first night present which she would treasure for the rest of her life.

  ‘It has to be gold,’ he told the assistant, but without explaining why. ‘And I think a brooch, possibly. Oh yes – and if possible . . . I wonder – do you have a cat? A little gold cat would be absolutely the thing.’

  Asprey’s had the very thing, a small gold cat on a clasp, a cat couchant, a cat with emerald green eyes, a most exquisite artifice which Sebastian could ill afford, but which he was utterly determined to buy. It sat in his pocket all through lunch, gift-wrapped in a dark blue box, and it sat on his chest of drawers early that evening as he changed into his dinner jacket, and it sat in his inside pocket as he journeyed from Chelsea to Shaftesbury Avenue.

  He had left plenty of time, as he wanted to see Elizabeth before curtain up. Naturally she had left the house well ahead of him, in fact according to their maid Maggie she had gone to the theatre just after lunch, so that she would have sufficient time to prepare herself. Elizabeth hated to be hurried, and she hated people hurrying her or hurrying around her, particularly when she was nervous.

  Therefore Sebastian was more than a little concerned when he arrived backstage to find near chaos reigning. Curtain up was less than forty-five minutes away, and yet no-one seemed to know what they were doing or where they were headed. Delivery boys were rushing in off the street, with arms full of flowers, chocolates, or boxed bottles of wine, messenger boys and telegram boys were arriving one after the other, with greetings and good luck messages which they handed in sheafs to the stage door-keeper over the top of his half-door, actors, half dressed and half made-up, jostled past each other on the stone stairways, calling for wardrobe, stage management, the director, their dresser, each other, or just vaguely and helplessly for someone, anyone to do something – anything – before it was too late.

  Sebastian was carried along in the tide of bodies, and trapped against a wall at the end of the ground-floor corridor while a party of stage hands heaved an enormous hamper past him and on down a flight of stairs that was signposted private and to the stage only. There were a few other civilians (as Elizabeth had learned to call non-members of the theatrical fraternity), in evening dress like Sebastian, but they were there, so it seemed to Sebastian, with a purpose, since every so often some would grab and greet actors en passant, while others would shout purposeful orders to members of an army which was constantly on the move up and down the flights of stairs. The ones who were not giving orders, but who were familiar with each other Sebastian assumed to be agents, as they kept kissing actresses and shouting endearments (it was far too noisy for any intimate conversation) or embracing actors while being careful not to get make-up on their dinner jackets. An exhausted looking man in a half-buttoned and tie-less evening shirt kept appearing from and disappearing into various dressing rooms, with a sheaf of pencilled notes in his hand, while down the stone stairs from rooms high above clattered more of the militia, carrying carefully ironed articles of clothing, men’s suits or women’s dresses which they delivered to hands outstretched from half-open dressing-room doors.

  ‘Half an hour please!’ a boy began to call from somewhere downstairs, far below Sebastian. ‘Act One beginners half an hour, please!’

  This warning brought another sudden flurry of activity and hysteria, flattening Sebastian once again against the wall as he tried to fight his way back to the stage door-keeper’s booth, only to discover upon finally reaching it that it was deserted. Looking around he saw a pretty girl in an oriental dressing gown taking a telephone call in a booth nearby, and excusing himself for interrupting her, asked where he might find Elizabeth Laurence. The girl indicated one flight up without breaking off her own rather fraught conversation, leaving Sebastian to fight his way up the indicated flight of stairs and along the dark, shiny-green painted corridor. As he looked for the right room, from ano
ther door along a man in only his trousers and singlet appeared, unmade-up and with soaking wet hair. Yet even in that state he was astonishingly handsome, and immediately recognizable as Jerome Didier, and also, amidst all the panic and confusion, able immediately to command attention, by the sheer force of his personality.

  ‘Can somebody please tell me?’ the actor demanded, hands on hip, calling those around him to his immediate attention. ‘Where on God’s earth our blasted director has got to now?’

  A girl in a long shapeless cardigan, and holding a handkerchief to her nose, was trying to wriggle her way past Jerome, but he caught her by the arm and dragged her back to him, half playfully, half deadly earnest.

  ‘Kathy dear,’ he said. ‘Where – is R-R-R-R-Richard?’

  The girl muttered something back at Jerome, pointing to her watch and struggling to get free, while Sebastian watched transfixed, mesmerized by the almost palpable force of the young actor’s presence.

  ‘Well if you – don’t know where he is, Kathy!’ Jerome cried, his voice echoing off the stone walls, ‘then find me somebody who does!’

  And with that he released the girl and swept back into his dressing room, slamming shut the door. Sebastian, deeply impressed by the moment which, he thought, could have come straight from some classical tragedy, was about to ask the baggy cardigan girl who was trying to squeeze her way past him which was his wife’s dressing room, when he saw her name in a card holder, under a big red star, under the number One. Miss Elizabeth Laurence.

  A small, pretty, middle-aged woman with oddly piercing blue eyes came to the door in answer to his knock. She had a safety pin in her mouth, and a pair of stockings draped over one arm.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, without opening the door more than a foot.

  ‘Mr Ferrers,’ Sebastian said. ‘Miss Laurence’s husband.’

  Even with the door only that far open Sebastian could see Elizabeth, or rather more correctly he could see her reflection. As soon as she heard his voice, she looked up, and he could see her eyes clearly in the glass, only they didn’t look delighted, or even remotely pleased. They looked in a flash full of angry surprise.