Instead of answering immediately, Elizabeth tightened the grip on his arm and walked him on, across the street and on towards the hotel which was now within sight. She waited until they had passed a milliner’s, with, she noted, some rather pretty hats, before she slowed to a halt and turned to Jerome, to J.
‘I know what our trouble is, darling,’ she said. ‘In fact I know exactly.’
‘What?’ Jerome didn’t, she could see that from the anxiety in his eyes. Either that or he did! she suddenly thought triumphantly. He did and he was frightening the pants off himself! But the fear wouldn’t be a cold fear. Elizabeth knew what this particular fear was like. It wasn’t a terror, it didn’t take the breath from your body, and make your blood run cold. This was a pleasurable tingle, a sense of excited panic that started somewhere in you, somewhere that it shouldn’t and rose until it dried up your mouth and made your limbs weak. And drained the colour from your face, just as it was draining J’s.
‘What?’ he asked again, putting his other hand on her other arm. ‘What?’
She went to tell him, made as if to say, then withdrew, a look of private pain crossing her face fleetingly, as she slipped her hand into his.
‘I think we both need a drink,’ she said, and led him up the steps of the hotel. He could wait to find out until Manchester. That was the date Elizabeth had set provisionally. By which time he would be on his knees and begging.
Oscar did his best to help Jerome, but there is only a certain amount a director or anyone for that matter can do for an actor who has, as they say, gone off the map. Oscar got drunk with him, he stayed up all night with him. He walked on the Moors with him, he played endless games of bar billiards with him. They sang together, with Oscar at the piano, they played Gin Rummy, they got drunk again, they even cried. But when the play opened in York, Jerome was still off the map, and not lost just somewhere in the next county, he’d gone abroad. He was in another country altogether. People walked out. For the first time in Jerome’s young life he heard the dreadful sound of the seats going up and the conversation of the deserters. He learned yet another of those terrible theatrical truths, namely that when people walk out on a show they do it so that you notice. They do it not in the interval, but just after, so that you see them and hear them, because they always talk. I’ve had quite enough of this, they say. Come on, this is terrible. This is rubbish. Get your hat, come on, let’s go and have a drink, for God’s sake. I’ve never seen such rubbish. No-one leaves without being noticed, because they’ve paid good money for this rubbish, and they want you to know it before they bang their seats up, and go out the wrong exit.
It happened in York, and it happened in Nottingham. They played Oscar’s beautiful play either to silence or to the crashing of upturned seats and the slamming of brass-barred exit doors. By the middle of the second week in Nottingham, even Oscar was about ready to concede.
‘Heck I’m sorry, buddies,’ he said in the bar afterwards, to one, two, three, four, five dejected faces. ‘Sure, I know you haven’t got there yet, but you know, you know maybe there isn’t any place to go. Or if there is, who knows? Maybe it’s really not that interesting. Maybe I’m saying you haven’t got there, we haven’t got there when it’s just not true. Maybe I never got there, team. Maybe I’m the one who didn’t find the truth and get to tell it, because maybe they’re right. This really is just some soft-edged piece of goddam whimsy that I’ve kidded me and I’ve kidded you is something else, when it really isn’t. Not one person who’s seen it so far has liked it, or at least not one person who’s seen it so far has said they liked it. Everyone has hated it, and I mean hated. A guy after the show last night wanted to hit me. Why? I mean if you don’t like something – OK, you don’t like it. But violence? This is England, everyone, where failure is everyone’s prerogative. But this guy went for me. When he found out I was the author, he said first – first he said I had to be a pansy. Because only a pansy could write such soppy rubbish. And even when I denied it, when I said no, I didn’t happen to be a Viola tricolor, but look I did wear glasses, he still tried to punch me on the nose, and I’d have been dead meat, I mean it – seriously. If his wife hadn’t pushed him over. So listen, you guys, and you dolls – don’t laugh, because I’m serious. If you want out now, you say it. You don’t have to stay on board. All hands may leave the deck in the lifeboats, and allow the captain and his colander to go in a dignified silence down right to the very bottom.’
Elizabeth so very nearly gave in at this point. Like everyone in the company she loved Oscar, and she could see behind all his so-called world-weariness how much it was hurting, so much that she wanted to sit on his knee, wrap her arms round his lovely neck with all that thick dark hair showing over the top of his vest and whisper in his ear that he mustn’t worry, because the play was beautiful, it was going to be just how he imagined it when he wrote it except even more so, and that all he had to do was wait until Manchester. But she didn’t. She hardened her heart and looked brave and sad like the rest of the company, and like the rest of the company pledged her allegiance to HMS Tatty Gray who was not going to the bottom of the seas, and even if she did, she’d be there as well, on the bridge with the rest of them – saluting.
Then they all got maudlin drunk and sang defiant songs until a weary hotel management told them it was way past the time they should have gone to bed.
Jerome rang Pippa every day, or if he didn’t, Pippa rang Jerome. She wanted to come up but he wouldn’t let her. Come home then, she suggested, when you finish at Nottingham come home. He couldn’t. If he could he would, but he couldn’t see it happening, because they only had two more days to play, and if the miracle didn’t happen they were to travel to Manchester straight after the show Saturday night so that they could rehearse all Sunday and Monday. You must be tired out, she said. Let me come up. I could come up to Manchester and at least we’d be together. But he said no, no that wasn’t fair. This was his disaster, his failure, and he didn’t want her to see him like this. He wanted her to see him when he had found it, when he had got there, and just talking to her was helping. She could talk to him in Manchester, she said. She was so much better, in fact she was completely OK, because she’d gone down to Sussex and seen Dr Weaver. And he’d said that she was one hundred per cent. So what had been wrong with her? he asked. There must have been something wrong with her. After all, Mr Sessions was no fool. Mr Sessions looked after half the profession. Pippa laughed and said that was probably the trouble. She wasn’t an actress, and she wasn’t a socialite. And Mr Sessions had diagnosed what he always diagnosed for people like that, while what someone like Pippa needed was a bit of sleep, granted, which she’d had more than enough of thank you, and some fresh air, which she’d also been taking by the bucket. So why couldn’t she come up?
He so nearly said yes, he so very, very nearly did, because he wanted her with him so much. But something inside him said no, and not for the reasons given. Something somewhere inside him remembered that uncontrollable tremor of excitement he had felt when Elizabeth had looked at him in the rain and said she knew what was wrong with them, it was a sensation he couldn’t put out of his mind, it was more than a sensation, it was a sense of anticipation, an anticipation of something so intoxicating he got drunk on it every time he thought about it.
So he said no. ‘No, don’t come up yet, darling girl,’ he said, ‘I really don’t want you part of this, not if it’s a failure. I’m too proud, you see. Too proud not of myself but of the way you love me, and I don’t want to let you down. Which you will be if you see me being as absurd as I am at the moment. But just talking to you has helped. And I feel refreshed and strengthened by it, Pickle. Strong enough and loved enough now to stop fiddling around and start looking for what it all really means. And when I’ve found it, Pickle, my darling, darling girl, I promise you, you will be the very first person to know.’
It was as pure and as simple as that. No, a denial, no, I don’t want you to see me now, no, I don
’t know that person, thrice no no no, a rejection which was to rob him of the rest of the life that was rightfully his. As he put the telephone receiver down, Jerome knew, somewhere inside, somewhere where those other dark feelings lay hidden, that what was already only a thought might just as well already be a fact.
The trouble as seen from Oscar’s point of view was that both actors were too respectful of each other. He wanted to get up and draw them together, bring them physically closer, because the way they were it was as if they were acting at either end of an empty space, or as if there was an invisible wall between them. Jerome seemed over-awed by Elizabeth, even though he had acted opposite her so often. The thought of her brilliance seemed to knock him off his balance, with the result that he panicked, and over-acted monstrously. For her part, Elizabeth appeared ill at ease, as if she hardly dared do what she knew she was capable of doing, in case by doing so she might blot Jerome out. Oscar had seen her do it before, of course, in All That Glitters, but it hadn’t mattered so much then because basically the play had been a vehicle for Elizabeth alone and Jerome never had a chance of matching her, from the moment Oscar had first set pen to paper.
But The Tale of Tatty Gray was different. Certainly Oscar had written the play around his inspiration, around the girl he had imagined on the train, so logically it should have been another solo vehicle for Elizabeth. But somehow, and he still didn’t know quite how, her character in the play had come to resemble the fictional Pippa less and the real one more, and as it did so the nature of the play changed. Tatty Gray became an infinitely more interesting character as a result of the reshaping and the rewriting, the play had developed organically, and there was now more room for the character of Sam, the painter, thus giving the play a proper balance, and Jerome a chance this time of achieving parity. Yet he hadn’t seized the opportunity, and nor had Elizabeth helped him do so. This time Jerome needed her brilliance in order to match it, which Oscar knew this time he could, because he had given Jerome the right raw material, but it simply wasn’t happening, which was all the more frustrating for Oscar because he knew it was right there, lurking just below the surface, for both of the actors. He had seen it, as the rest of the company had, during one of those rare flashes of Elizabeth’s unique brilliance, to which Jerome would at once respond, so that there they were, for all to see and hear, point and counterpoint, her a descant to him the theme, moments of such sublimity that they could only be likened to music, to the liquid beauty of a clarinet dancing above a cello, or the mystic delicacy of a flute hovering over a piano line, a butterfly of notes over the blue of a buddleia.
And then it was gone, and the silence which followed the moment was more cacophonous than the clash of a hundred cymbals. Then Elizabeth would recriminate, weeping or just silently resting on Oscar’s shoulder while Jerome paced the room, smoking a cigarette, wreathed in a film of blue smoke as he paced the room in despair, silhouetted against windows lit by the afternoon sun. Dammit! he might cry, Will someone – Oscar! – will you please for God’s sake tell me what I’m doing wrong!
But Oscar couldn’t. No-one could. Because Jerome wasn’t doing anything wrong. The person who was doing something wrong was Elizabeth, who knew it, and who loved every minute of it. In fact Elizabeth was beginning to find holding out on them and particularly on Jerome all strangely exciting.
Pippa had been left well attended. Nancy, their maid, had been ordered to move into the spare room so that Pippa would have someone in the apartment at all times, Miss Toothe requested to see to her daily requirements, and Lalla, for whom for once there was no part in the play, had been suggested by Elizabeth as a companion, someone with whom Pippa could go to the theatre or cinema, or simply out shopping and to lunch. Pippa had privately resisted the idea, explaining to Jerome that she was self-sufficient, and would be much happier alone, but Jerome, who was not yet convinced that Pippa had recuperated either well or long enough to be left to her own devices, insisted that Lalla either called her or called in on her once a day. Elizabeth was delighted, because the whole idea was to have a spy in the camp, and she could think of no-one better qualified than Lalla.
At first Pippa was irritated by the conditions Jerome had imposed, since she considered herself now fully recovered from what to her had been simply a bout of exhaustion, physical as well as mental, but she quickly realized that any undue resistance on her part could easily be interpreted by the over-anxious Jerome as neurotic behaviour, with the result that he might confine her totally to the apartment, a restriction which Pippa wouldn’t be able to bear. So she played along with Jerome’s notions, knowing full well that once he was away and fully immersed in rehearsals, she would find no difficulty in shaking off the attentions of Lalla, and would be able to lead a solo existence, doing the things she wanted to do when she wanted. She would reopen her studio and paint again, she would take Bobby out and go walking again, and tomorrow, she decided having consulted the appointments diary, she would go to Cork Street, and attend the opening of an exhibition of paintings to which she and Jerome had been invited, which next to marrying Jerome, was the most fateful decision Pippa was ever to take in her life.
That was on Sunday afternoon, late, a time while Pippa lay on a sofa listening to a concert on the radio while outside the spring sunshine tried to break through low clouds which hurried across the sky as if in a dream. The programme was Busch playing Mozart, the twenty-second Piano Concerto in E flat, every phrase lovingly shaped, the music wholly sensuous and magical sounding. Pippa lay listening to it, staring at the ceiling and then at the clouds passing by.
While she was listening, Jerome walked with Elizabeth from the stage door of the Theatre Royal, Manchester, where they had just concluded yet another rehearsal designed to attack the play from yet another angle, and which had yet again failed lamentably, leaving the performers at their very lowest ebb.
‘God knows it was bad enough yesterday in Nottingham,’ Jerome observed, turning the collar of his black overcoat up against the wind and seemingly incessant rain. ‘No-one at the matinée, and the bird in the evening.’
‘I marginally preferred the matinée,’ Elizabeth said, putting up her umbrella. ‘I would much rather die in silence than to the sound of upturning seats and catcalls.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ Jerome asked, as they walked along the street. ‘We’ve got three hours.’
‘Go back to the hotel,’ she replied very firmly, ‘and go to bed.’
‘Good idea,’ Jerome agreed. ‘Not to sleep, of course. I don’t think it’s good to sleep just before a performance.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of sleeping,’ Elizabeth said, slipping her arm through his.
‘What were you thinking of?’
‘What were you?’
She didn’t even look at him as she said it, she looked instead in a shop window, at some shoes, and then on to the next shop where she looked at a dress.
‘I said, what were you?’
Jerome hadn’t answered. He knew the question could have been perfectly innocent, should have been perfectly innocent, but it hadn’t sounded that way. Had Elizabeth thrown it away, as if to suggest she was going to bed to read, or just to lie there resting, like a soldier on the eve of battle, he would have responded in kind. No, he would have said, I was thinking of perhaps just reading, or simply lying down, like a soldier on the eve of battle. And she might have sighed in return, yes that was what she had been thinking of, too.
But she hadn’t thrown it away. She had inflected it quite purposefully. Jerome knew Elizabeth’s vocal tones too well now to have mistaken what she had intended. I wasn’t thinking of sleeping, she had replied, before looking in the window, the intimation being she was thinking of going to bed for the very opposite reason, which was why Jerome had caught his breath, and been unable to answer, as he had become immediately gripped by that same delicious terror which had gripped him before, when Elizabeth had said she knew exactly what was wrong with them.
&nb
sp; ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, turning her away from the second shop window. ‘Bethy.’
‘No, not here,’ she replied, factually, not in warning, but rather as if this was something they had already agreed. ‘Wait till we get back to the hotel.’
They went to her room, again as if part of a pre-agreed arrangement. Jerome saw no-one in the foyer, no-one at the desk as Elizabeth and he collected their keys, saw no-one on the stairs as he tried not to hurry, he saw no-one at all anywhere in the hotel because he was hoping that no-one had seen him. If they had, he knew they would have known, they would have known by looking, by his face, by his eyes, by the look he couldn’t possibly hide however hard he tried. As he walked up the staircase one step behind Elizabeth he knew he might as well have been naked already.
‘No, don’t look up and down the corridor, J,’ she said, again not in a whisper, in a perfectly normal voice. ‘That’s what some of your trouble is, you don’t really think things out. Just look ahead at the door, take my key and open it, as if this was something you and I did every night of our lives. And then no-one will even notice us. That’s right. Now those people down the end of the corridor who were coming towards us. I’ll bet if they had to go to court they would swear the corridor was absolutely empty.’
Once he had shut the door, he had expected Elizabeth would either fall in his arms, or do as he was doing, lean against the door with her back, waiting to recatch her breath. She did neither. She walked very calmly across the room, undoing her coat and taking off her gloves, shaking some rain from her hat as she peeled it off one-handed from the front, putting her umbrella away in the bathroom, re-emerging without her raincoat, smoothing down her jumper and her skirt, running a hand down her hair, a thumb curled under the braid, checking it was shaped in place, before turning her full gaze on him, as he still leaned against the door, the last drop of rain from his own hair slowly trickling down the back of his neck.
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