Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  Even so, he himself dreaded filming the sleepwalking scene in case of uncontrollable repercussions, so the reason he was leaving it until the very last was not altogether altruistic.

  He closed the set on the last day to all but those immediately involved in its making, the two actors playing the Doctor and the Gentlewoman in waiting to Lady Macbeth, Elizabeth herself and a skeleton technical crew. Elizabeth refused to rehearse the scene except for her designated moves, which she walked through saying nonsense in place of the text.

  ‘I want to shoot all your stuff, from the moment you appear with the taper,’ Jerome said to her privately, ‘I want to do it all in one take, right up until what’s done cannot be undone – to bed, to bed, to bed. I’m just going to be on you for the master, and then once we see what we’ve got, I can decide afterwards on the close-ups or two shots of the Doctor and the woman, and on where to go closer on you. So just pretend you’re on-stage, Bethy. Play the whole scene like you’d play it on-stage and think of nothing else but what has gone before.’

  ‘What has gone before,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Yes, Bethy,’ Jerome replied. ‘What is locked in Lady Fruitcake’s mind.’

  ‘What has gone before,’ Elizabeth repeated, as her make-up girl moved in for the final repair, and wardrobe adjusted the drape of her nightgown. ‘What has gone before.’

  Jerome then banished all those who weren’t required, disappeared into the darkness behind the camera and called for quiet.

  ‘Sound running,’ someone said and the clapperboy snapped his board shut to mark the scene and the point on the soundtrack, but Elizabeth heard nothing. Elizabeth was deep in character, thinking of what had gone before.

  There was no problem with the hand-washing. Jerome stood to the side of the huge film camera, in the dark, hardly daring to look, but when he did he saw Elizabeth was being brilliant, making magic, making the moment real, so real and disturbing that Jerome felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

  ‘Yet here’s a spot,’ she said, almost too lightly, taking an enormous risk, as if she was about to laugh at the blood she imagined on her hands. But then when she wished it away, when she saw the murkiness of hell, when she remembered how much blood the old man had in him, the lightness vanished, and the ensuing anguish was almost too much to bear.

  Yet Jerome still held his breath because he had seen the look in Elizabeth’s eyes, and he knew all was not well. Because the look in her eyes had suddenly changed, from a skilfully feigned dread to what Jerome knew was the real thing, to sheer terror, and predictably on her next line, there was silence. Jerome waited, but the silence seemed interminable. He waited in case Elizabeth recovered and could continue, but she just stood there in her key light, washing her hands over and over and over again in an agony of silence.

  Jerome was about to call for the camera to cut, when suddenly Elizabeth came back to life, tears coursing silently down her beautiful white face.

  ‘The Thane of Fife had a wife,’ she whispered, her voice breaking, ‘where is she now? Where is she now? Where is she now!’

  The last question arrived as a scream, out of a whisper of fear seamlessly to a scream of terror, and as Jerome shouted Cut! Elizabeth turned from the camera and ran out into the darkness off the set.

  Jerome ran in pursuit, unsure at first where she had gone. They were on the first floor of the castle and she could have gone any way, either up or down the spiral stone staircase, or away down one of the endless corridors. Where she had disappeared there were no bystanders, the castle was deserted, so there were no witnesses to her flight.

  Then he heard her shoes somewhere above him, on the stairs, and he sprinted up after her, taking the stairs two at a time, hurling himself round the corners as he hung on to the rail. He caught her on the battlement, as she was running for the edge.

  ‘Elizabeth!’ he shouted, catching her by the arm as she seemed about to try and leap over the parapet. ‘What in hell do you think you’re doing!’

  ‘The Thane of Fife had a wife!’ she hissed up at him as he took firm hold of her, ‘where is she now! Nobody knows!’

  There was a small windowless room at the top of the stairs which was unlocked, and into which Jerome gently guided his still weeping wife.

  ‘Nobody knows, you see, Jerry,’ she was saying. ‘Not even you.’

  Someone was running up the stairs after him, his first assistant who was calling out if everything was all right. Jerome assured him it was, to go back down and call a break, and they would both be down in a few minutes. Then he shut the door of the turret room and locked it behind him.

  ‘What’s the matter, Bethy?’ he asked. ‘Would it help if you told me?’

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked rather harshly.

  ‘I said would it help if you told me what the matter was, Bethy?’

  Jerome used his abbreviation of her name deliberately, as Appleby had taught him to do at such times, at times when he thought it was Elizabeth who had the upper hand, and sure enough after a long moment, after a long silent time when she just sat staring at him, her tears staining her make-up as they dried, Elizabeth slowly disappeared, and someone else stared out of that beautiful face, someone altogether softer and more sweet, someone who suddenly laughed, but who laughed very lightly, as if what she was about to say wasn’t very important. Which of course it was, because once she had tucked her small lace handkerchief away, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead, Bethy now proceeded to tell Jerome in great detail everything that horrid Elizabeth had done to poor Pippa and why.

  By the time she had finished, she had talked well through the lunch hour, so Jerome took her back downstairs and into make-up where they set about repairing the damage done by Elizabeth’s hysteria. Then together Jerome and she returned to the set where throughout the afternoon they filmed the entire sleepwalking scene without another hitch. Nobody said a word as they set about their work, nothing which wasn’t necessary, because the handful of people present knew that what they were witnessing was work of pure genius. It was inspired acting, it was faultless, it was sublime, and to the minds of all those who watched and to those who later saw the film there was no doubt at all that this notoriously difficult scene would never be equalled let alone bettered.

  At a little after seven o’clock when the last shot was in the can, and Jerome had called the wrap, for the second time in the actress’s illustrious career, the entire crew and cast broke into a spontaneous ovation. In response, Bethy stood there smiling her sweetest smile before blowing everyone a marvellously theatrical but deeply felt and grateful kiss. Then she turned and walked away. They still clapped her, all the way into the darkness far out beyond the set, a set where Bethy left the best work she had ever done, Jerome and her marriage all behind her.

  They remained together for just six more months, and then in name only. Once the film was premièred and the plaudits gathered, the nation’s most illustrious acting partnership announced their separation, due to irreconcilable differences.

  23

  ‘Look at this,’ Oscar said, waving a letter from London.

  ‘I can’t look,’ Pippa said, who was busy varnishing a canvas. ‘Read it.’

  ‘But only if it’s good news,’ Jenny said who was helping her mother. ‘Not if it’s one of those you’ll-never-guess-who-they’ve-offered-my-new-film-to litanies of woe.’

  ‘It isn’t, Picasso,’ Oscar replied, ‘so just zip up and listen. They’re going to revive Tatty Gray.’

  ‘Oh wow,’ Pippa said, setting the varnished landscape to one side. ‘Why should we listen to that? Tatty Gray’s become one of those statistics, hasn’t it? Once a day at some time on this globe someone somewhere is performing Tatty Gray.’

  ‘You think you’re kinda sassy, right?’ Oscar said, waving the letter under Pippa’s nose. ‘Just because you married the greatest writer ever to come out of Little Woodsville, Vermont. But you just listen here, Mrs Greene. I didn’t say they’re goi
ng to do Tatty Gray, did I? I said they’re going to revive it. In London. They’re going to revive the old girl, they want me to rewrite it, and for guess who? They want me to rewrite it for the first Mr Greene.’

  ‘I take it by that you mean the first Mr Nicholls,’ Pippa said.

  ‘I take it by that you mean my first father,’ said Jenny.

  They discussed it over Sunday lunch, which they ate outside in the old orchard. Jenny, who was home on holiday before her last term at art college, wanted to hear all about a play which she knew only by repute, having never seen or read it, while Pippa wanted to know what on earth the thinking was behind wanting it revived and rewritten for Jerome.

  Having answered Jenny’s question first and briefly, and with typical modesty, Oscar turned to Pippa’s.

  ‘I think the career’s gone into hold,’ Oscar said. ‘You know, ever since the split, Jerome hasn’t really kept up the good work. All this deliberately turning his back on the classics. I mean he’s a classical actor. Sure, he’s a fine comedy actor, but then to be a really great actor you have to be able to play comedy. And it’s not as if he’s ever done that. He’s chosen to do all this modern work, which would be fine if it was good modern work, but that it ain’t. Not judging from what I’ve seen on my trips to London. I mean this last play – The Garden Wall. The one thing Jerome can’t play, at least this is in my reckoning, the one thing he’s actually bad at being is ordinary. Yet here he was again. And not only trying to be ordinary yet again, but extraordinarily ordinary. You know what people are saying.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Pippa said, peeling an apple.

  ‘Yes you do, because I told you. They say maybe she got custody of the talent.’

  ‘I saw her in Separate Beds,’ Jenny said, ‘and she was awful. The people in the row behind us said she was drunk.’

  ‘OK,’ Oscar agreed. ‘She does the odd dog, agreed. But then what about her Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard? Probably never been bettered since Olga Knipper created the part in Moscow in 1904.’

  ‘You wouldn’t remember that,’ Pippa said straight-faced to her daughter. ‘But to your stepfather it’s as fresh as yesterday’s paint.’ Jenny laughed, taking the piece of apple on offer at the end of her mother’s knife. ‘So come on, Oz,’ Pippa continued, ‘are you or aren’t you?’

  ‘I think that’s rather up to you, sweetheart,’ Oscar said. ‘If you’d rather I didn’t—’

  Pippa stopped her teasing, and looked very seriously at Oscar.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s a play, and he’s an actor. That’s all.’

  ‘It’s not as if I have to get involved,’ Oscar continued to defend himself. ‘I can do the rewrites and just send them over.’

  ‘You weren’t listening, Oz,’ Pippa said. ‘I said it’s a play—’

  ‘I heard what you said, Pip. And thanks. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind having a shot at it. I think it might work even better with the artist older, with him around about the age Jerome is now. And I think the play still has something to say.’

  ‘It must do you chump,’ Pippa smiled. ‘Or else they wouldn’t keep doing it everywhere. What about the girl? Will you make her older?’

  ‘Oh no, no I don’t think so,’ Oscar replied. ‘In fact most definitely not. Tatty’s whole thing is being a sprite. You can’t very well have middle-aged sprites.’

  Pippa smiled and poured them all some more coffee. He had long since explained who Tatty was and why, and Pippa had long since forgiven him. (It had taken all of two minutes on her part, after a whole evening of explanation from Oscar.) And she was glad that he wasn’t going to change Tatty. She’d never seen the play, only read it, but she loved it and she wouldn’t want one word changed.

  Jenny drove into Tours with Oscar the following morning, leaving Pippa behind to continue packing up her canvases for her first ever show in Paris.

  ‘Can we meet for lunch?’ she asked en route. ‘Or are you tied up?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything nicer,’ Oscar said. ‘I’ll be through at the bank at twelve, so let’s say half-past, at La Petite Maison Blanche.’

  Jenny was early, deliberately so. She’d finished what she had to do in plenty of time, so she settled in at the table in the window, ordered an anis, and then reread as much as she could of the copy of the play she had found in Oscar’s room just to make sure.

  ‘I take it Maman knows?’ Jenny asked her stepfather, when he had agreed halfway through the meal the character of Tatty was based entirely on her mother.

  ‘Yes, Sherlock,’ Oscar replied. ‘She knows now. In that I didn’t tell her at the time. I don’t know whether she’d have guessed or whether she wouldn’t if she’d seen the original production, but your father wouldn’t let her till he considered he’d got it right.’

  ‘She didn’t see the original production?’ Jenny jumped in, picking up Oscar’s inadvertent error.

  ‘No,’ Oscar said, cursing his strict upbringing and wishing he wasn’t quite so much like George Washington. ‘I guess I thought you knew that.’

  ‘How could I? We’ve never discussed this in detail before, any of us.’

  ‘Let’s talk about you instead,’ Oscar suggested, trying to change tack. ‘This is your last term, right? Hey – how time flies.’

  ‘I want to talk about the play, Oz,’ Jenny replied. ‘If it’s all the same to you. Because there’s something I don’t understand. Maman knows that Tatty Gray is her? That your most successful play—’

  ‘It’s not my best.’

  ‘I said your most successful play in a way owes it all to her—’

  ‘That’s kinda true, but—’

  ‘Yet she never saw it?’

  ‘I only said she never saw the original production.’

  ‘Did she ever see it?’

  ‘Nope. Come on – let’s dish some dirt. Tell me the rude things you all draw when teacher’s not looking.’

  ‘She couldn’t have ever seen it, could she?’ Jenny persisted. ‘Because she left my father before the play had premiered in London. And he wouldn’t allow her to see it on tour. So how did it happen?’

  ‘You got me, Jen. How did what happen? I can’t tell you how something happened if I don’t know what that something is. You know what we used to do at High School when the teacher wasn’t looking?’

  ‘Oz, please. This is important. Because I sense something here.’

  ‘You artists. All you’re after is the truth. It’s much easier being a writer. Writers can make up the truth.’

  ‘I want to know how it happened. How my mother and father broke up.’

  ‘Don’t you think you maybe ought to ask your mother? After all, I’m not part of the original cast.’

  ‘I’ve asked my mother. And she said I’d find out one day, in my own way.’

  ‘So there you go.’ Oscar raised his glass. ‘Here’s to that day.’

  ‘This is it, Oz,’ Jenny said. ‘This is my way of finding out.’

  Oscar didn’t actually get round to telling her the whole story until they were driving home. Over the rest of lunch he talked mainly about the play and how he had drawn the character of Tatty Gray and why. He felt it was important that Jenny should know just how madly in love with her mother Oscar was when she was married to her father, as if by doing so in some way he could take some of the blame. But while Jenny was interested in what he had to say about Tatty, she saw no harm in what Oscar had felt during that time because he had done nothing. He hadn’t even professed his love for her mother.

  ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, you dig?’ Oscar said.

  ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ Jenny replied. ‘You dig?’

  Jenny was bright, like her mother, and Jenny was persistent too, just like Pippa. She managed to wheedle it all out of Oscar by the time they were halfway home. When he told her, he told her the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, just as Pippa had told him, and Jenny listened to him in total
silence, never interrupting him once.

  ‘The bastard,’ she said, but not until he’d finished. ‘The bastard.’

  ‘The bastardess,’ Oscar said. ‘I mean surely.’

  ‘Look – Elizabeth is just wicked, obviously,’ Jenny replied. ‘And she’s probably nuts as well. But my father. To do that to someone like Maman. He must have been mad. I mean seriously. The bastard.’

  ‘It is a form of madness certainly,’ Oscar agreed. ‘That good old ass’s head.’

  ‘The ass’s head symbolizes love. That wasn’t love. That was just sex.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as just sex, Jen. No-one ever got off by pleading they didn’t mean any harm, all they were having was just sex.’

  ‘The bastard,’ Jenny repeated, looking out of the car window. ‘Of all the people to do it to. I mean can you imagine? Of all the people in the world to hurt like that. To do something like that to.’

  ‘I know,’ Oscar said. ‘I agree.’

  Jenny turned to him, her eyes flashing.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘You’re just going to rewrite the bloody play for him!’

  ‘Touché.’ Oscar nodded. ‘Your round.’

  ‘Well why, Oz? Why are you doing it?’

  ‘Literary vanity. A playwright’s conceit. Allied to incipient greed. I did, however, ask permission of your mother.’

  ‘My mother’s a saint,’ Jenny said, and then looked back out of the window. They drove the rest of the way in silence, before Jenny asked Oscar to stop the car and let her out.

  ‘I’m fine, Oz, really,’ she said in answer to his expressed concern. ‘I’ll walk from here. I’d like to walk. I need to walk.’

  They were only a mile or two from the farm, where the country road forks into the beginning of another road which later turns into their lane.