Stardust Page 4

  The settings were perfect too, he observed, as he followed the butler through from a hall complete with family portraits and reproduction suit of armour and into a large eau-de-Nil drawing room furnished with chintz covered furniture and embellished with enormous Constance Spry flower arrangements. Even the gathered guests all looked perfectly costumed and cast.

  They also all looked at him, particularly the women. They were all far too well bred, of course, actually to stop talking and stare open mouthed, but a definite hush settled on the company as Jerome made his entrance, pausing at the doorway to light a cigarette before glancing up at his fellow guests with an open but quizzical look, which brought a blush to the cheek of several of the women, all of whom were convinced the look was meant for them.

  More looks followed him as he was led over to meet his hostess.

  ‘Mrs Manners,’ he said, half bowing over her proffered hand and deliberately kissing it, confident from what he had already seen of Cecil’s mother, with her slightly oversized jewellery, the somewhat overbright colour of her dress, and her quite definitely over-made-up eyes, that she was exactly the type of woman who would enjoy rather than be taken aback by the gesture.

  ‘Cecil has told me so much about you,’ Ursula Manners murmured, and she finally and reluctantly withdrew her heavily ringed hand.

  ‘There’s really so very little to tell,’ Jerome said with a smile, bending forward as if confiding a secret. ‘Alas, I am still waiting in the wings.’

  ‘But not for long,’ his hostess countered. ‘Cecil tells me it’s only a matter of finding the right vehicle.’

  Jerome smiled, but really the smile was for himself. Cecil’s mother, made it sound as though Jerome were in the motor trade.

  ‘Oh, for a muse of fire, Mrs Manners!’ Jerome dropped his voice, but the whisper carried, as it was trained to do. ‘And then watch! I shall ascend the very brightest heaven of invention!’

  At this moment, Cecil came into the room from the gardens, and looked around for Jerome. Jerome saw him, and noted that Cecil was wearing just the sort of casual and worn English clothes which in theatrical terms would be known as distressed, and which made the wearers all look as though they belonged to the same club. Seeing his agent so correctly attired, Jerome suffered a moment of sudden anxiety, for he knew his own clothes were wrong, not only because they were the wrong sort of clothes, but also because they were far too new.

  His discomfort was somewhat mitigated, however, by Cecil’s obvious embarrassment with his mother, who was by now positively gushing at Jerome. As soon as he could do so politely, he broke into their conversation, and with the excuse that he must introduce Jerome around, whisked him out of the drawing room and into the gardens.

  ‘Dear boy,’ Cecil said, leading Jerome down the stone steps. ‘How very good to see you. You found your way all right? Now come along, there are lots of people I want you to meet.’

  Jerome paused on the stairs, while his agent unwittingly wandered on ahead of him. This was something which Jerome was beginning to understand, the importance and style of one’s first entrance. So he hung back deliberately, turning his best profile to the group waiting below while he lit a cigarette. Then leaning his head back slightly, he exhaled a long plume of smoke upwards into the sunlight and, having made quite sure he had everyone’s attention, skipped lightly down the remaining steps to be introduced.

  ‘Sarah/Landen,’ Cecil said. ‘Jerome Didier.’

  A long legged, slim and typically English blonde took Jerome’s hand in hers and did her best to make as little as she could of Jerome’s dark and stunning and very un-English looks. But once Jerome met her cool blue eyes with his own dark brown ones, she was totally, and to her companions’ amusement, very visibly mesmerized.

  ‘Marguerite Dundas – Jerome Didier,’ Cecil continued, and Jerome, rather than letting go of the blonde’s hand, allowed it seemingly to just slip from his grasp before turning to meet the rest of the group.

  ‘Georgina Branscome – Jerome Didier. Toby Walters – Jerome Didier. Neil Cameron – Jerome Didier.’

  And so the introductions were effected, as Jerome turned from one to another, greeting the men with the same kind of mysterious disdain he used on the girls. And such was the impression he made on them, none of them ever forgot him, and would forever boast of how they met Jerome Didier once at a house-party when he was just Jerome Didier, a totally unknown actor.

  The men remembered equally as well as the women, although they would sometimes try and dismiss the recollection with the rider that Didier even then was very much the actor chappie. The girls never forgot him, and certainly never tried to make less of the impact Jerome had made, preferring rather to exaggerate, leading their audience to believe that Jerome had singled them out with one of his famous dark looks, or paid them that extra and secret bit of attention.

  While on the other hand, Jerome forgot them all. Not in time, but from the moment he glanced over Cecil’s shoulder and saw a slender girl with a mane of dark unruly hair that kept falling in her eyes, as she bent over her croquet mallet to line up her shots. She was completely absorbed in her game, paying the group by the steps not even the slightest attention, including Jerome.

  Cecil noticed Jerome’s sudden and prolonged stare, and called to the girl.

  ‘Pippa? Come over here and meet Jerome!’

  Even then, she didn’t even look up. She just pushed the hair from her eyes and relined up her shot.

  ‘I am trying to rescue you, Cecil!’ she called back in a deliciously husky voice. ‘You’ve got so far behind!’

  ‘That is Pippa,’ Cecil said finally, and just a little hopelessly. ‘Pippa Nicholls.’

  They waited while with one old gym shoed foot she rolled her red ball against the black before roqueing the black yards up field out of play into some bushes on the edge of the lawn.

  ‘There!’ the girl exclaimed, before running across to join them. ‘That’ll teach them to bash us into the bushes!’

  ‘Pippa,’ Cecil said patiently, as if addressing a restless child. ‘This is a new client of mine, Jerome Didier. Jerome, this is a neighbour of mine, Pippa Nicholls.’

  Jerome stared at her. She had grey eyes, a face full of tiny freckles, and in direct contrast to the rest of the guests, she was dressed most unconventionally, even for a weekend and casual house-party. Besides her faded gym shoes, she wore a pair of even more faded boys grey shorts, and an old white aertex shirt, which Jerome could only assume to be an elder brother’s cast-offs. But whoever’s they were or had been, the faded grey shorts showed the girl’s slim brown legs off to perfection.

  ‘Be careful of Miss Nicholls,’ Cecil said, half jokingly but also half seriously, having noted the look on Jerome’s face. ‘She is quite heartless. That is if she’s not on your side.’

  Pippa frowned and shook Jerome’s hand briefly.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, as if he hardly existed, and then turned back to Cecil. ‘Come on, Cecil,’ she urged. ‘It’s still my go, and we can win now, thanks to my roqueing Charles. And if you’d only put your mind to it. Come on.’

  Once the game re-started, Jerome sat on the stone wall along the lawn’s edge, and made polite conversation with the other girls to whom he had been introduced, all of whom seemed most anxious to talk to him. Girls had always fallen for him. Ever since he was fifteen, the year after he had moved to Carriagetown with his mother, girls had been fascinated by him. He had noticed, of course, but he hadn’t been in the least interested. All he still wanted to do was fish and swim. And while he liked girls well enough, and would go swimming with them, or play beach tennis when his friends weren’t available, girls couldn’t take the place of boys, friends like Charlie Willcox or Sam Hoskins. Girls didn’t like fishing, and Jerome could outswim any girl by miles.

  And then one day, not long after his seventeenth birthday, he went for a long swim with a girl who had just moved to Carriagetown. She was called Trix, she was pretty and blonde and a
thletic, she could swim almost as fast as Jerome, and sometimes even outrun him. After their swim, they lay in the hot sun-drenched sand dunes, and Trix kissed him, and with her kiss, and the other, longer kisses that followed, Jerome stopped being a boy and became a young man.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon kissing, so that by the time Jerome got back for his tea in the converted railway carriage which overlooked the English Channel and was his home, his mouth was reddened and his neck covered in love bites, which Jerome did his best to hide under the buttoned-up collar of his shirt, while his mother sat in eloquent silence.

  Six weeks later, in the same dunes where he had tasted his first kiss with Trix, he lost his virginity to her, although strangely the only image that remained of that particular afternoon was not the loss of his chastity, but rather his memory of the sight in the skies above him of a squadron of Spitfires flying full throttle to intercept the incoming German bombers.

  ‘Oh – fiddle!’

  A husky voice from below on the lawn focused Jerome’s attention once more on the freckle-faced, tousle-haired girl below him on the lawns.

  ‘What did I do wrong, Cecil?’ she appealed to her partner. ‘That’s the easiest hoop of all!’

  Jerome hopped down from the wall and wandered over the grass.

  ‘You’re not swinging the mallet back far enough,’ he told her as he reached her side.

  ‘Of course I am!’ she retorted, without even looking up at him.

  ‘No, really,’ Jerome insisted. ‘You need more backswing.’

  But before he could show her what he meant, Pippa had played the shot and the ball curled towards the hoop and clean through it.

  ‘See?’ she asked gleefully, pushing back yet another long strand of curling hair from her eyes. ‘You don’t know this lawn. Too much backswing on this side, and it won’t take the borrow.’

  She walked on beyond the hoop to where her ball lay, and then surveyed the state of the game.

  ‘Oh blast,’ she sighed, hooking the errant strand back over one pretty little ear. ‘I suppose I’d better go back for poor Cecil. Honestly, he’s hopeless.’

  Her partner’s ball lay two hoops behind, and Jerome watched as Pippa lined the impossibly long shot up, and stared intensely from mallet to ball, and back again.

  ‘You really will need a lot of backswing for this,’ Jerome murmured, but Pippa just ignored his advice except for rewarding him with a brief glare, before striking the ball with a long sweet stroke, which carried it all the way back down the lawn to take another hidden borrow and kiss the yellow.

  ‘Hurrah!’ she cried, charging across the grass while Jerome watched, enthralled by a feeling he had often tried to act out in class but had never before felt. ‘I’ll put you through, Cecil!’ she shouted to her partner. ‘And then I’ll come back for Sarah!’

  Jerome sat down alone on the bottom of the flight of steps, as the object of his growing adoration cannoned her partner’s ball through the hoop, and then came back to knock the blue ball right up to the other end of the lawn. Within minutes the game was concluded, victory going to the home team, due, Cecil had to admit, entirely to the skills of his long brown-legged and tousle-haired partner.

  ‘Tea, Mr Didier!’ a voice called from up above him, and Jerome turned to see Ursula Manners waving at him from the top of the steps. ‘We’re taking it up here on the terrace!’

  Jerome stood up, brushing some moss from his trousers, and by the time he looked back up, the girl was gone. Or rather going, for he could still just see her, strolling off against the sun towards the copse at the end of the lawn. She had her hands deep in the pockets of her shorts, and a freshly picked long grass in her mouth. For a moment she stopped, combing her long mane of dark hair back with one slender brown hand, as she stared up into the trees at a bird calling above her, before disappearing through a wicket gate at the side of the woods.

  ‘Et tu, Brute?’ Cecil said, as he stood on the steps behind Jerome, following the young man’s gaze. ‘You shouldn’t, you know, really. For your own sake, dear boy. Not at this point in your career.’

  ‘I was just thinking what a perfect Juliet she’d make, as a matter of fact,’ Jerome lied.

  ‘No, no,’ Cecil laughed. ‘Not Pippa’s style at all. The moment Romeo began all his nonsense from below Pippa’s balcony, she’d send him on his way with just a look from those extraordinary eyes.’

  Jerome looked round and seeing the expression on Cecil’s face, half raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I see,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Cecil sighed. ‘I’m afraid I fell for her the first moment I saw her, winning the bending race on that mad pony of hers.’

  ‘And how does she feel about you?’ Jerome enquired, over-politely. ‘Is your picture on her piano?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, dear boy, she treats me like an uncle. Probably my thatch, or rather my lack of it. Heigh ho.’

  Cecil ran his fingers through his prematurely thinning hair and sighed again.

  ‘Is there anyone else’s picture on her piano?’ Jerome enquired.

  ‘No-one,’ Cecil replied. ‘There is no-one else in Pippa Nicholls’s life except her mother and her dog. And they’re both murder to get past.’

  ‘Good,’ Jerome said, and then drew the back of an index finger across his mouth, a habit which was to become a trademark. ‘Then all’s fair.’

  ‘What?’ Cecil said. ‘You said something.’

  ‘I was talking to myself,’ Jerome smiled. ‘Shall we go and join your mother for tea?’

  Later that evening, after a large, formal dinner party, the house party repaired en masse to a dance held in a large and rambling Tudor manor nearby. It was an elaborate affair, with flowers everywhere, silk-lined marquees on the lawn, two dance bands, and champagne at every turn. But to Jerome it might as well have been a hop in the local parish hall, until he saw Pippa.

  She was standing talking to a very tall, upright young man at the entrance of one of the marquees, wearing a long muslin evening dress which to Jerome looked distinctly old-fashioned and almost certainly a hand-me-down. It did nothing for her slim figure, and worse, she had put her hair up, which Jerome at once decided didn’t suit her. In a fit of pique and with quite unjustifiable possessiveness, he at once made his way to her side.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, unable to stop the greeting from sounding like an insult.

  Both Pippa and her escort turned to stare with surprise at the intruder.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Pippa said after a moment. ‘Should I know you?’

  Jerome saw from the expression on her face she hadn’t remembered him. He was so astounded further words failed him, and he felt a look of dismay which he couldn’t control come over his face. She had forgotten him. They had met only a few hours ago, and yet she had palpably failed to remember him. Him. Jerome Didier. The handsome, the beautiful, the irresistible. She could barely have even noticed him. Either that, or the girl was a consummate actress.

  He passed the back of one hand lightly along the top of his brow, against the edge of his dark hair, and smiled, his poise seemingly recovered.

  ‘We met earlier this afternoon, Miss Nicholls,’ he said. ‘At Cecil Manners’s. When you were playing croquet.’

  He spoke slowly, dividing the speech into a series of prompts, hoping that all he would have to say was that they had met earlier. But she didn’t pick up any of the prompts, and so Jerome realized he would have to carry on until the famous penny finally dropped.

  ‘I told you you weren’t taking enough backswing,’ he said as sweetly as he could, while seething internally. ‘But nonetheless you made the hoop. Along a right-handed borrow.’

  ‘Of course!’ she suddenly remembered, rewarding him with a deep frown rather than the smile for which he had hoped. ‘You’re that new client of Cecil’s.’

  Thankful that he had worked so hard on his breathing technique at drama school, for otherwise he would certainly have betrayed the depth of his ris
ing panic, Jerome managed a smile, as if grateful simply that Pippa had managed at least to recall him.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said after a moment. ‘You know I really can’t remember your name.’

  ‘Jerome Didier, Miss Nicholls.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied, as if she had never heard it before. ‘This is Captain Bodell. A great friend of my brother’s. Rodney, this is Jeremy Didier.’

  ‘Jerome, Miss Nicholls,’ he corrected her, as he shook hands with the tall elegant guardsman. ‘My name is Jerome.’

  ‘As in Three Men In A Boat?’ Pippa asked.

  ‘Precisely,’ Jerome replied, before turning back to the guardsman. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Did you say Bodell? Someone was looking for a Captain Bodell a minute ago. It appears you’re wanted on the telephone.’

  ‘Oh blast,’ the soldier said. ‘Really?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Jerome assured him, and then having watched poker-faced as Bodell excused himself from their company he turned back and found Pippa watching him with an equally straight face.

  ‘Did you learn that in a play?’ she asked him.

  ‘Most probably,’ Jerome replied, half smiling.

  ‘It can’t have been a very good play.’

  Before Jerome could reply, and indeed before he could even think up a reply, the band struck up a new tune, coming to his rescue.

  He turned to the bandstand, and then back to Pippa.

  ‘Would you like to dance?’ he asked.

  She looked at him a little dubiously.

  ‘I’m not a very good dancer, actually,’ she replied. ‘I don’t get much practice. My mother’s widowed you see, and she can’t afford to give me a proper sort of dance. And if you don’t give a dance, well, you don’t get asked to them much, I find.’