Stardust Read online

  ‘Agreed!’ Jerome shouted back. ‘At once! Tomorrow in fact! And even better, Oz! Come and have lunch at home! I want you to meet my wonderful wife!’

  Oscar agreed, saying how delighted he would be, wished them both adieu, and turned to go, having noted with interest the strange, cold gleam that had come into Elizabeth’s now famous green eyes.

  In fact lunch was cancelled, or rather postponed, Jerome calling the next morning to explain apologetically that he had completely forgotten he had to lunch with Roderick Mann who was proposing to do an interview with him for the Sunday Express, and to enquire if the day after tomorrow would be an acceptable alternative. Oscar assured him it would be perfectly fine, only too happy in fact to recurl up in his comfortable hotel bed and go back to sleeping off the excesses of the previous night.

  The day after tomorrow was cancelled as well, and the day after that, all because of Jerome’s meteoric rise to stardom. Suddenly it seemed he was wanted everywhere, and all at the same time. Oscar kept insisting if that was the problem why not just meet for a drink? A drink would do just fine, but no, Jerome was adamant they must lunch because they had so much to talk about. If Jerome had only known what was going to come out of that fateful lunch, and out of all the talk, he would have kept on cancelling indefinitely.

  Of course Oscar knew who she was the moment she opened the door, and his first reaction, which with hindsight he was later to consider would have been the correct one, was to leave, to pretend he had called to the wrong house, mumble an apology and go. After all, she didn’t know who he was because she didn’t know what Oscar Greene looked like, and there was no sign of Jerome who could positively I.D. him, so Oscar could be just anybody. In fact and in all fairness, he tried it, he tried to bolt. He made a vague and nondescript gesture in the air, muttered something incomprehensible about British house numbers, and turned to go, knocking over the empty milk bottles outside the door as he did, and sending them in a rolling and clattering cascade across the cobblestones.

  ‘Oh heck,’ he said, ‘look, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Pippa said, retrieving the rolling bottles, ‘I’m always doing it. And you must be Oscar.’

  Oscar knew he had gone bright red, just as he knew there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘I guess I must be, mustn’t I? This kind of thing is my visiting card.’

  He took the bottles from her and carefully replaced them by the door, in the hope that if he took enough time his blush would fade. It didn’t.

  ‘Please come in,’ Pippa said, pushing the front door open again. ‘I’m afraid Jerome’s not back yet.’

  Still Oscar hesitated, knowing that once he entered the house there would be no going back. Once he crossed the threshold of this pretty little doll’s house whatever happened and however it happened, Oscar knew their two lives would somehow become inextricably interwoven.

  She was asking him something, but he didn’t catch it, not first time round. He got it on the repeat.

  ‘I said is something the matter?’

  Oscar knew he was staring, but he couldn’t help it, because he couldn’t get over the hand fate had dealt him, that Jerome’s wife should be the girl on the train. Except when he considered it further, he wondered why in actuality he should find it so extraordinary, because when she had sat opposite him on the train back from Oxford, she had obviously been to Oxford to see Jerome in the play. She was Jerome’s girl, she’d been to see Jerome act, caught the train back to London, and had sat opposite Oscar. So where was the big deal in that? Furthermore, Oscar reasoned, if she was Jerome’s girl and Jerome had got married, it was only logical for him to marry his girl. And if only God would help him find his tongue.

  ‘I’m out of cigarettes,’ he said, patting his pockets. ‘I’d better go buy some.’

  ‘Jerome has masses. You really needn’t bother.’

  ‘Sure. But I only use Luckies.’

  ‘I know. Jerome told me. I went out and bought some this morning. And I made meat loaf for lunch.’

  ‘You made meat loaf?’

  ‘We have meat loaf and chilled beer.’ Pippa smiled as she told him. ‘The beer’s English I’m afraid, but at least it’s chilled.’

  Oscar frowned, tongue tied once again.

  ‘That’s what matters, I gather,’ she added, sensing his discomfort. ‘Not the nationality, just that it has to be chilled. Do come in.’

  Knowing this was it, Oscar did, and she followed, shutting the door behind him. He was glad of the dog, whom he had only very vaguely noticed barking, but who was now jumping with joy up and down against Oscar’s legs, as if he, Oscar, were an old friend.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind dogs,’ Pippa said, directing him through into a large, white-painted sitting room.

  ‘I love dogs, it’s just fine,’ Oscar replied, still keeping all his attention on the dog while he tried to make just the slightest sense of his thoughts.

  ‘He certainly likes you, which makes life a bit easier. Sometimes he can be awfully silly with strangers. He sits under the table and tries to stare them out.’

  Oscar straightened up and felt brave enough now to take in his surroundings.

  ‘This is a great room. Sort of like a ground-floor garret.’

  ‘It is a bit,’ Pippa agreed. ‘Most of the houses in the mews still have their garages here. Or rather what used to be coachhouses, or stables. On the ground floor I mean. And you live above them. But one or two have been converted, like this, and we got one, luckily.’

  ‘I love it,’ Oscar nodded. ‘If you were a painter, you could starve to death here in real comfort.’

  They chatted some more, or rather Pippa chattered on some more while she fetched them both a beer, then offering Oscar the sofa, she sat down opposite him, curling both her long legs up under her.

  ‘Jerome won’t be long,’ she assured him. ‘He just had to go and see someone at rather short notice.’

  As it happened, at that moment Oscar didn’t care if he never saw Jerome Didier again as long as he lived, provided he could spend the rest of his own life in the company of this wonderful girl, now he had found her again. He had only seen her that once on the train, but even so he had never once forgotten her. He had thought about her constantly, picturing her in his mind’s eye, so much so that he could remember her as if that train journey had taken place only the night before, he remembered everything about her, her beautiful grey eyes, her swash of freckles, her umber cataract of hair, and more than anything, what he always saw when he turned in his dreams, her fabulous face.

  The telephone rang, startling Oscar and making him spill his beer down his tie. She frowned in sympathy, offering to sponge it for him, as she reached for the telephone. Oscar loosened his tie while she took the call, half turned from him, profiled against the September sun, while her dog took the opportunity of carefully washing one of the feet which she had slipped out of one shoe. Oscar watched her stroke the dog’s head while she listened to the caller, fondle his ears, and tickle his chin, while in turn the dog now turned his attention from his mistress’s foot to take one of her hands in his mouth, as gently as a gun dog does when retrieving a bird, pretending to chew it while rolling his tongue around the soft palm of her hand.

  ‘That was Jerome,’ she said with a frown, as she replaced the telephone and turned back to him. ‘Look, he’s terribly sorry but he’s been held up with this producer, he has no idea how long he’ll be, and says that we’re to start without him.’

  Oscar’s heart leaped and his head began to swim, at one and the same time, so to steady himself, he grabbed both arms of his chair and sat as still as he could.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he heard her ask. ‘You’ve gone a bit white.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Maybe a bit of asthma.’

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘Nothing, really. Perhaps if I could have a cigarette.’

  He fumbled in his pockets before rem
embering that he was out.

  ‘Should you smoke?’ she asked. ‘If you have asthma?’

  ‘It’s not really asthma. Not as such. At least not the sort of smoking that’s affected by asthma. The sort of asthma that’s affected by smoking.’ He saw a pack of Lucky Strikes lying on the desk and reached for them. ‘May I?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. They were bought for you.’

  She brought him a box of matches, and lit his cigarette for him, the way his kid sister used to light their father’s, very carefully and earnestly, watching while she did it, before shaking not blowing the flame out.

  ‘It’s more of an allergic type of asthma,’ Oscar continued with his lame explanation. ‘Like – you know – brought on by ah – by blossom.’

  ‘Really?’ She frowned at him, uncertainly. ‘But surely not this time of year? Not in September?’

  ‘No,’ Oscar shook his head. ‘No, what I meant was it’s particularly bad at the time of year when there’s blossom.’

  Privately he wanted to disappear through a hole in the floor. No doubt next he’d be hearing music.

  ‘Ow,’ he said instead.

  ‘What’s the matter? What have you done?’

  ‘That damn fool thing with my cigarette. I’m forever doing it. You know—’ Oscar rubbed the inside of his index and second finger with his thumb. ‘When the goddam thing sticks to your lips and your fingers slip to the end. Ouch.’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ she replied. ‘So I don’t know. But I imagine it must be jolly painful.’

  ‘It is,’ Oscar agreed, blowing on the burn. ‘Listen – tell you what. How about if I went out and came in all over again?’

  They laughed most of the way through lunch, or rather Pippa did, since Oscar did most of the talking, keeping his hostess regaled with a constant stream of anecdotes, and every time she laughed the beat of Oscar’s heart accelerated. He loved everything about this girl, from the way she looked to the way she listened, to the way she laughed, so infectiously, the way a child does when it senses the absurd. But, of course, he said nothing to her that could remotely reveal his feelings. He never would, he would make sure of it. The girl with the large grey eyes and the delighted laugh of a child belonged to someone else.

  In fact the thought of someone like him trying to steal a girl like her from a man like Jerome made Oscar smile, while he sat waiting for the coffee Pippa had gone to make in the kitchen. And then it made Oscar sigh, and wonder why it was he always had to fall in love with the unobtainable. Maybe because it’s easier, he thought, because that way you don’t run any real risk of being hurt, but whatever, that’s how it had always been. From the hatcheck girl at the plush restaurant where his father used to take him to lunch once he had entered his teenage, to Rita Hayworth, for whom he carried a torch right until this present day, a torch which had been lit the moment she appeared on screen in Only Angels Have Wings, and who had danced into his heart in You’ll Never Get Rich.

  And now there was this girl, someone else’s wife, a girl with a wonderful mane of hair, such a slender but shapely frame, and large don’t-hurt-me eyes, and who was as unobtainable as the girl who had checked his father’s hat, and the girl whose feet never touched the floor when she danced.

  ‘A penny for them,’ Pippa said, putting a cup of coffee in front of him.

  ‘For my thoughts, you mean?’ Oscar asked, to his intense irritation feeling the blood rise once more to colour his cheeks. ‘Listen, I’d be robbing you.’

  ‘You were miles away,’ Pippa informed him, sitting down opposite him once again. ‘You were also humming something.’

  Oscar was horrified. He’d probably been humming ‘Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye’.

  ‘What was I humming?’

  Pippa laughed. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said. ‘I have the greatest difficulty recognizing the National Anthem. Under all this hair are a pair of totally tin ears. I’m only allowed to sing if Jerome’s out, and not just out of the house, out of town.’

  ‘Do you have any Irish blood?’ Oscar asked, taking a spoon of sugar and stirring it into his coffee before taking another and turning the sugar brown. ‘Heck, now look what I’ve done.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Pippa told him, spooning out the damp patch of sugar with her dry spoon, and then feeding it to her dog from the palm of her hand. ‘And no, I don’t think I have any Irish blood.’

  ‘Maybe some Latin?’

  ‘Amo, amas, amat,’ Pippa grinned mischievously. ‘That’s all the Latin I have.’

  ‘And I don’t speak it. What does it mean?’

  ‘Amo, amas, amat?’ Pippa enquired. ‘It means I love, you love, he loves.’

  Oscar regretted the question at once, and to cover his further confusion, started to drink his coffee while it was still far too hot.

  Pippa took her cup and then sat back happily, for the first time in months feeling completely at her ease. Oscar was just the company Pippa saw she needed at this moment in her life. With the obvious exception of Jerome, since her mother’s death there was no-one with whom Pippa could relax and behave naturally. All their friends and acquaintances treated her with almost excessive respect, due, Pippa suspected, to the embarrassment they felt over the circumstances of her mother’s death, but now with Oscar, someone who less than two hours earlier had been a stranger except by reputation, Pippa found she could once again be herself, that she could laugh, and talk, and make light of things once more.

  Not that she was blaming their friends. Pippa knew that the reason she had not been able publicly or even sometimes privately to be herself without feeling wretched and guilty as a consequence, was because of her inescapable sense of guilt. She still found it hard to laugh, even after six months, as if by laughing she would trivialize what had occurred. Even when they were alone, just she and Jerome, if they did find something to laugh at, their laughter seemed obscene, an act of betrayal. She knew Jerome found it hard as well, not because he mourned her mother’s passing, but he knew that through Pippa losing her mother, he might be losing Pippa, at least the Pippa he had met and with whom he had fallen so passionately in love.

  There had been nothing Pippa could do about it. She knew she was in danger of losing Jerome, she knew it every minute of the day, and of the night when she dreamed about it. She dreamed they would be walking along a path, a path which was always like one they had climbed on honeymoon, without ever being the same. They would both be walking at the same speed. That was something Pippa knew, that she was matching Jerome stride for stride. Yet he still forged ahead of her, relentlessly, while looking back every now and then, and calling for her to hurry, hurry. Pippa tried, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t get her legs which all at once felt heavy and weary, she couldn’t get them to move any faster, because all the strength had gone from them, leaving her trailing far behind, and out of breath, until the next time she looked Jerome had gone. The path was deserted and Pippa was alone on the top of the cliff, with just a sea breaking silently far, far below.

  They had stopped making love as well. Nothing was said, it was a tacit agreement, but for the first three months after her mother died, the most they ever did was lie in each other’s arms. Jerome had been a model of patience and understanding, as time progressed never once bringing the subject up, nor ever trying to turn their nocturnal embraces into something more passionate. Pippa knew how impatient he must have felt, particularly after the discovery on honeymoon about exactly how congruous they were, but as she kept trying to explain voluntarily to Jerome, she simply wasn’t ready yet in her mind.

  ‘Darling girl,’ he had said to her whenever she had tried to explain, ‘darling girl, we have the whole of the rest of our lives. Don’t – worry!’

  But, of course, she had worried. Pippa loved making love with Jerome, and she could hardly bear not to do so, but the shadow hung everywhere, on every wall of the house, but most of all in the bedroom.

  Yet now, this day, having had lunch and talked and laugh
ed with Jerome’s friend Oscar, Pippa at last felt the beginnings of a sense of liberation, as if a corner of the veil was finally lifting. There had to be a turning point somewhere along the line, and as she watched Oscar fumble for another cigarette and fail to light it on the first half a dozen attempts, Pippa decided that Oscar was it. She whistled to him, chucking him a box of matches, and did her best not to laugh as somehow Oscar managed to break a handful of them before finally lighting up, at one point even contriving to send the lit head of a match spinning in the direction of Bobby who with a yelp promptly took off and hid under the table.

  ‘You can see why I’d never have made it as an actor,’ Oscar had commented. ‘If I’d been required to smoke on-stage, I’d have burned the goddam theatre down.’

  Oscar was just what the doctor ordered, Pippa thought, as she pulled her legs up under herself once more in the chair, or rather Oscar was just what the doctor should have ordered, instead of bottles of pills and bromides about time being the great healer. What everyone who was in shock needed was another shock, Pippa concluded, the shock of someone quite new and quite different.

  So when Oscar turned the conversation round to her, Pippa found it as easy to talk to him as she had done to laugh with him, telling him everything he wanted to know. Not that Oscar pried, or was indiscreet. On the contrary he was the epitome of discretion, particularly when it came to the inevitable subject of her mother. He listened to Pippa in thoughtful silence, never prompting her, and never commenting. Because he was a writer, he was a good listener, although Oscar kidded himself that the actual reverse was true. But whichever the case, what mattered was that Oscar listened, and consequently Pippa talked, so much so that by the time she had finished talking Oscar probably knew more about Pippa than anyone else, with the obvious exception of Jerome.

  ‘I guess you’d like me to say something here,’ Oscar offered as they fell to silence. ‘I mean if I was writing this, I’d have me the visitor say something really illuminating and constructive, for which the heroine would be eternally grateful and the audience utterly stunned with my brilliance. But like all writers, when I need the words, they don’t come. What I don’t think you want me to say, is gee-how-sorry-I-am, because I don’t think sympathy’s your thing. Even though sure – I really do feel sorry for you, because what you’re going through, and what you’ve been through, it must truly be just terrible.’