Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  Elizabeth opened the window behind the driver once more and gave him their new destination.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Pippa began.

  ‘Ssshhh,’ Elizabeth stopped her. ‘You can thank me when we’re finished, when you see how wonderful I’m going to make you look.’

  ‘I’m really perfectly happy with the way I am, Elizabeth,’ Pippa insisted.

  ‘Yes, darling, I’m sure,’ Elizabeth replied. ‘But Jerome isn’t. And Jerome does love you, you know. He wants you by his side all the time. Everywhere he goes. But I’m afraid – and I tell you this as a friend, darling. Believe me. I’m afraid if you won’t go along with Jerome, and he is so proud of you. If he doesn’t have you right there by his side – well. Darling. There are an awful lot of people who would be only too delighted to come forward and take your place.’

  ‘You mean surely,’ Pippa frowned, ‘to try and come forward and take my place?’

  ‘No, darling,’ Elizabeth sighed, slipping her arm through Pippa’s, ‘I mean will. In this wretched business we’re in, absence most definitely does not make the heart grow fonder.’

  The following night, Jerome and Pippa attended the première of The Greatest Gift at the Odeon, Leicester Square. Pippa’s hair had been beautifully cut and remodelled, swept above her ears and pulled round the back of her head into a small low-slung bun worn in the nape of her neck. Besides the jewellery Jerome had bought her, inch-and-a-half long pendant earrings and three gold bangles of different shapes and sizes worn on one wrist, everything else on her was either silk or satin, silk stockings and underwear, satin shoes and an exquisite suit of simple white satin made by Chanel.

  After they had arrived, to the usual frenzied adulation from the huge crowd, as they mingled with the other stars and guests, someone tapped Pippa on the shoulder.

  ‘Darling!’ said an unknown voice.

  Pippa turned round to see who it might be, and found herself staring at a totally strange young man.

  ‘My mistake,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought you were Elizabeth Laurence.’

  10

  In the spring of the following year, Pippa asked for a place of her own. Jerome was taken aback, worse – he was affronted by such a suggestion, completely misunderstanding Pippa’s meaning. She laughed when she saw how slighted he was, and explained that all she wanted was a room of her own, somewhere she could have to herself, somewhere to go rather than having to hide in the kitchen or the bedroom when Jerome was being interviewed or photographed.

  ‘You don’t have to hide!’ Jerome said, frowning his most perplexed frown. ‘What are you talking about, darling girl? People want to take your photograph as well. Particularly now—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Pippaaaa—’

  ‘Particularly now that I’m presentable.’

  ‘You’ve always been presentable, Pip! What nonsense you’re talking today! It’s just now that you look even more astounding than ever, and when people see how marvellous you can look—’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I meant it as a compliment, Pip! You’re the talk of the town! No-one can get over how beautiful you are! When people ask to photograph me, they insist – they make it a condition – that you are included!’

  Pippa sighed and smiled, and came and sat down beside Jerome on the button back leather chesterfield. She took one of his hands, and turned it palm down on one of hers, so that she could look at and stroke his long, square-nailed fingers, while she explained what she meant. At first Jerome tried to interrupt her constantly, but Pippa wouldn’t let him. She asked him to hear her out in silence, otherwise he would only once again misunderstand her. She explained that she had no life of her own. By that she didn’t mean that she wanted a career, or that she was envious in any way of Jerome’s astounding success. She wasn’t. On the contrary she was inordinately proud of Jerome, and only wanted him to go from strength to strength.

  ‘I shall,’ he said, ‘as long as I have you.’

  ‘Ssshhh,’ she replied. ‘No interruptions.’

  Pippa’s problem was that she had always been active, even if her activities had been confined to riding or walking, playing tennis or simply just gardening at home. She had never been able to sit still and watch others do it, and now she was restless. Not bored, simply restless. She could tolerate the frills and the fripperies of being a rising star’s wife, she didn’t really mind having to go out dressed up like a fashion dummy, just as long as there was somewhere she could go of her own, somewhere private where she could let her newly fashioned hair back down, put on her old clothes, be herself and paint.

  ‘Paint?’

  ‘Paint.’

  ‘Is that all you want?’ Jerome laughed. ‘You just want somewhere you can paint?’

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Pippa asked, pinching Jerome on the leg at the same time. ‘What’s so hilarious about that?’

  Jerome took hold of her upper arms and pinned her back in the corner of the sofa.

  ‘I thought you wanted a place of your own for a quite different reason,’ he whispered. ‘I thought you wanted a place where you could take your lover.’

  ‘I have a place where I can take my lover, you fool,’ Pippa replied, struggling to get free. ‘It’s called our bedroom.’

  ‘Then take me there now.’

  Jerome had her held hard, despite Pippa’s energetic struggle to be free.

  ‘Only if you let me have somewhere I can paint,’ she said.

  ‘I shall let you have somewhere you can paint, only if it doesn’t have a bed in it.’

  ‘You don’t trust me?’

  ‘I don’t trust other men.’

  ‘If I’m not allowed a bed, and I allow you in, where are we going to make love?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Jerome wondered. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. All right, Mrs Didier, you can have a bed. But it will have to be a lockable bed, to which I shall have the only key.’

  Pippa smiled and stopped struggling. Jerome smiled and loosened his grip. He brushed one of her cheeks with the back of his hand, then he ran a finger over her lips. Pippa caught the finger in her teeth and held it, increasing the pressure gradually.

  ‘Ow,’ Jerome moaned softly. ‘Ooh-ouch.’

  He ran his free hand over the outline of one of her breasts, until he had caught her nipple between his first and second finger.

  ‘Ow,’ Pippa whispered. ‘Ooh-ouch.’

  ‘Your move,’ Jerome said.

  She moved, very quickly, not even running her hand up his thigh, just dropping it straight down to hold him, which she did, hard.

  ‘Ah,’ Jerome said thoughtfully. ‘Playing dirty, are we? I see.’

  Pippa closed her legs, pressing her knees together as hard as she could, while still keeping hold of Jerome. But Jerome was in no hurry. He just let things rest for a moment, while his eyes met hers, smiling slowly. But when he moved, he moved fast, letting go of her nipple and grabbing her doublehanded by the waist, hitting the spot at once.

  ‘No!’ Pippa screamed with laughter as he began tickling her. ‘No! No – please don’t!’

  Unable hardly to breathe let alone keep her legs together, Pippa fell backwards, trying to escape from Jerome but too weakened by laughter to do so. He at once took advantage, moving one hand from her waist at the most opportune moment and sliding it between her stockinged knees. He was halfway up her silk lined skirt and she was begging for mercy and promising to do anything when the knock came on the door.

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe it!’ Jerome whispered through his laughter. ‘Who the hell—?’

  ‘Mr Didier?’ came Miss Toothe’s measured tones. ‘It is a five to three – and the gentlemen from Life are here!’

  ‘Would you believe it,’ said Jerome, which only reduced Pippa to an even greater state of helpless laughter as she struggled to make herself respectable. ‘There is always a forgotten thing! And love is not secure!’

  ‘It will be,’ Pippa whispered with a kiss as she took he
r leave. ‘When I have a place of my own.’

  Jerome wasn’t the only visitor to Pippa’s studio once she was settled in to the large purpose built room in Sydney Mews. Her other regular caller was Elizabeth Laurence.

  Ever since their shopping expedition Elizabeth seemed to have taken a proprietary interest in Pippa, and now that Pippa had a quiet place of her own to which she could escape from the daily bustle of Park Lane, Elizabeth, who, of course, lived nearby, began to drop in first once or twice a week, and then almost daily. At first she never stayed longer than it took to drink a cup of Pippa’s freshly ground Blue Mountain coffee, to which Pippa was addicted, or she would stop by just before lunch to see if she could persuade her new friend to come and eat with her, and then perhaps do a little shopping, for herself, Elizabeth insisted, not for Pippa. Soon they were friends, good enough friends, Elizabeth considered, for her to extend the length of her visits, until they would cover either most of a morning or an afternoon.

  ‘If I’m the slightest bit of a nuisance, or a distraction,’ she had insisted, ‘you must kick me out, expel me, lock me out. It simply will not do to have me putting you off.’

  ‘Off what?’ Pippa had asked. ‘This is only really a sort of voyage of discovery. To see if I really can paint.’

  ‘May I see?’

  ‘If you want to.’

  Elizabeth had looked at the painting in progress, an impression of the South Downs, drawn from memory only, without any artificial aids.

  ‘You can paint,’ she had said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Pippa had disagreed. ‘But I think I might be able to. Constable always said you have to serve a long apprenticeship, to be a painter. Because painting is mechanical as well as intellectual. Which is why there are no and never have been any real child artists.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Elizabeth had replied, not really giving it a second thought as she was far too busy studying Pippa studying the painting. ‘Absolutely fascinating.’

  Pippa had allowed Elizabeth to prolong her visits because Elizabeth turned out to be the perfect visitor. She seemed to know instinctively when to talk and when to be quiet, and when she talked, she was wonderful company. It was so good for her to have a friend outside the theatre, Elizabeth insisted, so they never talked about Jerome’s and her business, but rather about every other sort of thing, the sort of things girls discuss best between themselves, without having to pay undue heed to a male point of view, which Pippa found most refreshing, because besides Jerome, and Oscar, of course, she had no other friends at all, particularly no girl friends.

  What surprised Pippa more than anything, however, was that Elizabeth was immense fun. She delighted in finding things which amused Pippa and things which amused them both. They began to lunch regularly twice a week at the small French restaurant at the entrance to the mews, where over only the lightest of meals, since Elizabeth was on a permanent diet, Elizabeth would describe in the minutest detail her last purely social engagement, embellishing her accounts with wicked impersonations of her hosts and the other guests, until her mimickry and tart observations had Pippa all but crying with laughter. Alternatively, if it was a wet afternoon and Pippa had finished a painting but saw no point in going home because Jerome was rehearsing, Elizabeth, heavily disguised in vast dark glasses and swathed in at least two if not three headscarves for fear of being recognized, would take Pippa to see the very worst double feature they could find that was showing, where Pippa would sit with a hankie stuffed in her mouth while Elizabeth sotto voce either barracked the films or supplied the actors with alternative lines of usually fairly risqué dialogue.

  Worst of all were her practical jokes, which Elizabeth much preferred to call her larks. These were born either out of ennui, or simply from what Elizabeth called a passing attack of bad behaviour. Pippa was always shocked by Elizabeth’s larks, even after weeks of either enduring or witnessing them, because she worried lest the victims might suffer as a result of the perpetrated pranks, even though Elizabeth constantly reassured her that this couldn’t possibly be the case, since all her chosen quarry were fair game, a number which included the pompous, the greedy and the vain. It also included anyone unfortunate enough to ring Pippa’s number in mistake for another’s.

  ‘You can’t punish people for misdialling,’ Pippa would protest. ‘Everyone makes that sort of mistake!’

  ‘Not in my book they don’t,’ Elizabeth would answer, her green eyes narrowing. ‘Anyone who dials a wrong number does it because they’ve remembered the number wrong, or they’ve looked it up wrong, or they’ve simply dialled it wrong. And for that they must be punished.’

  She was utterly unscrupulous in her dealings with misdiallers, her tactics being not to scold them, but to wrong foot them or even encourage them in their folly. If someone called up to speak to someone called Lorraine, Elizabeth would very sweetly inform them that Lorraine was upstairs in her room with another customer and ask them to call back in an hour. Alternatively she would tell the caller if it was a man that whoever he was (wrongly) calling never wanted to see him again because of his disgusting habits, that she had moved in with whoever he was (wrongly) calling and they didn’t want him ringing any more, while her pièce de résistance, usually reserved for those who persistently got the number wrong, was to tell them at her most dramatic that the person he was (wrongly) calling had fallen downstairs and broken her leg and plead for them to bring a doctor over straightaway.

  Pippa threatened to have the telephone removed from her studio if Elizabeth didn’t stop, but Elizabeth dismissed this as nonsense, because while she knew she was shocking Pippa, she also saw how her telephone larks invariably reduced Pippa finally to a state of helpless laughter.

  ‘They don’t do any harm at all, Pippa,’ she would say. ‘In fact they probably do a little bit of good, brightening up otherwise excruciatingly dull little lives. I mean can you imagine what it’s like? Being a civilian? And it’s no good starting to look pettish – because we’ve long ago established you’re not a civilian, darling, because you married into the ranks. Besides, darling, you paint.’

  On days when Elizabeth was suffering from one of her more serious attacks of bad behaviour, the whole world became her playground. Unfortunately there was no way of Pippa recognizing the symptoms in advance because there were none. Elizabeth would behave perfectly normally and sweetly throughout an entire shopping trip until, if she was in such a mood, she spotted a possible victim, invariably some pompous over-dressed matron. Her favourite ruse with these women was to mistake them for shop assistants and either ask them to show her some particular and usually quite personal goods, or in her most inspired moments, to try physically to buy something off them. On one memorable occasion in Harrods she spotted a simply appalling fur-wrapped brute of a woman bullying an obviously very nervous young salesgirl. The woman was carrying a highly coiffured miniature poodle and both represented a prime target.

  ‘Your grace!’ Elizabeth cried in an impeccable French accent, indicating to Pippa the woman and her dog. ‘Look, look! But this is just what you want!’

  Whereupon she hurried over to the woman and demanded to know at once the price of the leetle dawg. The woman looked astounded, and inflating herself to her fullest size, grandly informed Elizabeth that the dog was not for sale.

  ‘Oh my apologies,’ Elizabeth sighed, still in broken English. ‘But I assume you are a salesgirl.’

  Of course, there was a price to pay for such entertainment, as Pippa discovered early on, long before she realized the actual height of the cost. In the early days of their relationship Pippa found that when someone was as expert as Elizabeth was at tomfoolery, it was difficult to know when precisely to take them seriously, and when not to do so. Not that Elizabeth ever involved Pippa directly in one of her larks. Whenever it was a lark pure and simple, Pippa’s role would be that of witness, whether suspecting or unsuspecting. For example, if Elizabeth chose to launch into one of her sudden fantastical confessions on the way up
or down in some department store’s lift, she used Pippa as her foil, not as her victim. But when they were alone in the studio, or lunching quietly somewhere, at certain moments Pippa would get the feeling she was the victim of a sly tease, and would challenge Elizabeth. Elizabeth would usually deny the charge vehemently, swearing that she never played her larks on her friends, but very occasionally, just every now and then and without ever admitting she had perpetrated a deliberate joke as such, Elizabeth would sigh, look contrite and apologize – as she put it – for going a little too far.