Stardust Read online

  ‘He’s my mother’s dog really,’ Pippa replied, only half answering the question. ‘But because of her arthritis, she can’t walk him. You know – and look after him really.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jerome said, which made Pippa frown.

  ‘You can’t really be sorry about that,’ she replied. ‘It’s hardly your fault.’

  ‘I meant—’ Jerome corrected her. ‘I’m sorry for your mother.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Pippa said. ‘She can’t stand people feeling sorry for her.’

  She stopped and looked round for her dog, who seemed to have disappeared. Then a moment later the air was rent by a piercing whistle which Pippa had concocted by sticking her first two fingers in her mouth. Jerome roared with genuinely surprised laughter.

  ‘Bravo!’ he cried. ‘Please – you have to teach me how to do that!’

  For the next twenty or so minutes, as they strolled towards the Downs, Pippa tried to teach Jerome how to whistle in like fashion, but he was a hopeless pupil, and between fits of helpless laughter, all he could manage was a sound like a train letting off steam.

  ‘I’ll get this if it takes all day,’ he swore, trying once again. ‘I have to. I might need to do this one day in a film. And just think—’ he tried once more, only to fail once more. ‘Just think,’ he continued. ‘You might see the film, and you’d be able to say – to whoever you’re with – I did that. I taught Jerome Didier to whistle.’

  Pippa laughed, and threw the stick again for the dog.

  ‘You’re quite certain you’re going to be famous, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing it unless I was. I should imagine acting might be more than just a little silly if you weren’t famous.’

  ‘And when do you plan to start being famous?’

  ‘Thursday,’ Jerome grinned. ‘Now that’s enough about me. I want to hear all – about you.’

  ‘What?’ Pippa stared at Jerome as if he were demented. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to tell!’ she exclaimed, and then started to laugh as if the idea of telling somebody about herself was the funniest notion in the world.

  ‘Every town has a story,’ Jerome intoned in his best radio voice. ‘And why even this quiet-seeming little town of ours has plenty of strange tales to tell.’

  ‘There’s nothing strange about my tale, I’m afraid,’ Pippa laughed. ‘My life’s been really rather ordinary actually. Apart from my father being killed in the war, but then there’s nothing really out of the ordinary in that either, is there? When you think how many people were killed in the war.’

  ‘Was he killed in action?’

  ‘Yes. He was a fighter pilot. Well, a squadron leader actually. He was shot down over Germany. Which meant Mother brought us up, us being my brother and I. Which I don’t suppose can have been easy for one minute, since there’s never been much in the kitty. Of course, in one way it will be easier when she has me off her hands—’

  ‘When you get married, you mean?’

  ‘No.’ Pippa rounded on him, and looked at him sharply. ‘I meant when I start earning my living. I want to paint. Well I do paint, so it’s not a question of wanting to, and what I’d really like to do is set design. My art teacher at school thought that’s what I should do as well. And Cecil says he’ll help me get started. Because he has all the right contacts.’

  Pippa suddenly stopped talking and stared into the distance, except this time she wasn’t looking for her dog.

  ‘Penny for them,’ Jerome prompted her, wondering whether Pippa had any feelings for Cecil which were at all like the ones Cecil so obviously had for her. ‘Are you thinking about Cecil?’

  ‘Cecil? No, I was thinking of something quite different, actually,’ Pippa replied.

  ‘What?’

  Again she looked at him, surprised by the blunt enquiry.

  ‘We’re not going to get to know each other,’ Jerome said, ‘unless we tell each other everything about ourselves.’

  ‘Who said anything about getting to know each other?’

  ‘I did,’ Jerome replied with a slow smile, ‘just now. Didn’t you hear? So what was the different thing you were thinking about?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Pippa walked on. ‘It was something about my mother if you really want to know.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jerome agreed. ‘You were wondering how – or indeed if, more like – if and how your mother could cope if you did ever leave home. Of course,’ he continued, sensing that Pippa was about to interrupt him. ‘Of course, you could paint – professionally – at home, and still look after her. But then a time might come when you might have to leave home for quite a different reason.’

  ‘I suppose Cecil told you that my mother needs care.’

  ‘No. You did.’

  ‘I did? I don’t remember saying any such thing.’

  ‘You didn’t. Not in so many words.’ Jerome sunk his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘It’s what in rehearsal we call the subtext,’ he added.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s not so much what you say,’ Jerome explained, ‘but rather what you don’t say.’ He gestured one handed, as if producing something from his chest. ‘What you feel.’

  ‘Why don’t you have another go at whistling?’ she asked after a moment spent staring ahead. ‘You never know, you might get it.’

  As Jerome obliged, putting his fingers up to his mouth once more, Pippa stopped him, taking his hand and looking at his second finger.

  ‘Did you break this? It’s terribly crooked.’

  ‘I broke it when I was in the RAF. Fooling around.’

  ‘You were in the RAF?’

  ‘Only for my National Service.’

  ‘Did you learn to fly?’

  ‘I wanted to be a full-time pilot.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  It was Jerome’s turn to talk, and he talked easily because he found that to Pippa he could. He talked far more easily and more honestly than he had ever talked with anyone before, including all the girls with whom he’d had affairs at drama school, who had always wanted to know everything about him, and because they had been so insistent, he had found he could hardly even begin to talk to them.

  But Pippa was different. She didn’t pepper him with questions, or put an interpretation on things, she just listened, which as he had found out at drama school in class when another student listened to him, improved the level of his performance dramatically, which was precisely the effect Pippa was having on him. Jerome was telling her things about himself he had never told anyone before, he was even admitting things he had never even admitted to himself.

  They must have walked miles that midday, high on the Downs where he learned Pippa walked or rode whenever she had the chance. With the breeze ruffling both their hair, he remembered out loud the ugly red brick house where he had been born, and where he had spent the first twelve years of his life. Situated in a Kentish village not five miles from RAF Hawkinge, it was hardly surprising his abiding passion as a boy had been for aeroplanes, and for as long as he could remember all he wanted to be was a fighter pilot.

  ‘I watched the Battle of Britain daily,’ he told her, ‘in the skies above my head. I’d watch it from the top of my favourite tree, or sitting alone in the cornfields. I’d see Spitfires engaging the enemy fighters, and Hurricanes attacking their bombers. And I wished – oh, how I wished I’d been born those five years earlier, so I could be up there with them, fighting the Battle for Britain!’

  ‘You’ll be awfully good as Henry V,’ Pippa said, in answer to the way Jerome had raised his voice in a fine crescendo.

  Jerome laughed and took her arm, and then encouraged because she didn’t remove it, continued up a gentle slope in the Downs.

  ‘And then my life changed suddenly, totally,’ he continued. ‘One night, when I was fast asleep, my mother woke me, and told me not to say a word. She had packed our suitcases, and without telling me why, she took me and walked out of the house deep in the mid
dle of one dark winter night.’

  ‘Where did you go?’ Pippa asked, as Jerome lapsed into silence, stopping on the side of the hill as he remembered the event of that night long ago. ‘And why the middle of the night?’

  ‘That I didn’t find out until later,’ Jerome replied. ‘When it happened, I was much too muddled at first, then excited, and then bewildered to ask why. When you’re that age—’ He shrugged, and looked to Pippa for agreement. ‘You know,’ he continued. ‘You might want to know things, but you don’t always know how to ask them. Or even if you should. So for a long time I never actually knew what the cause of it all was, why my mother who was such a quiet and loving person, should suddenly and inexplicably leave my father. And my father was such a quiet, ordinary man. Or so it seemed. His life was like clockwork. In and out of the house the same time each day, out twice a week to his meetings, you literally could set your watch by him. He only suffered one setback apparently, which emerged to be the all important one, and that was failing his army medical for some trifling little infirmity. And he took it very badly. That I did realize at the time, because I remember walking with him the day after he had failed, along the foreland at Dover, and he fell behind when I was playing aeroplanes or some such nonsense. And when I ran back to him, he was crying. Real tears. Right down his face. It’s oddly frightening, you know, for a boy. To see his father crying. I didn’t ask why. I couldn’t. I just took his hand – and we walked home in silence. My mother told me the reason later. About the medical.’

  ‘And when did you find out why she left him? When did she tell you that?’

  ‘Oh, a long time after. But it all stemmed from that day. The day he failed that wretched medical. Because it was from that moment he started to lead a double life. He was a bigamist, you see, my father. It was as if because the Army had turned him away, he had to prove himself twice the man he was. And so he found himself another wife.’

  They had reached a turning point, a small wood at the top of the long hill they had climbed, and from which when they both turned round, catching the freshening breeze in their faces, they could see Cecil’s home far below, and another house nestling in a fold of fields and woodland nearby, which Pippa pointed out as hers.

  For a while they sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, Pippa making daisy chains, and Jerome smoking a cigarette.

  ‘My God,’ he breathed, ‘England is such a beautiful country. A fortress built by Nature for herself against infection, and the hand of war.’

  Pippa put the long chain of daisies round the neck of her little dog, who sat panting at her feet.

  ‘Where did your mother take you?’ she asked. ‘Where on earth did you go that night?’

  ‘We went to the most extraordinary place, a place I must take you one day,’ Jerome said, getting up and stretching. ‘It’s a settlement of obsolete railway rolling stock, and it’s called Carriagetown. Or rather that’s what it was called by everyone who lived there. And it was the most wonderful place you can imagine. And for kids – well, it was paradise. No official school. Just the sea, and the beach, no conventions, and this collection of wonderful people! All runaways, vagrants like ourselves, mostly, I have to say, women who had run off from their drunken, or violent, or unfaithful husbands to live in this settlement of abandoned railway carriages right on Denge Beach.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Denge Beach. The end of the line near Lydd, where I suppose they used to just take the old rolling stock and dump it. They made the most marvellous homes once they were converted, much more solid and comfortable than caravans. We were known as the Railway Gypsies, we owned nothing, and we were owned by nothing. All we had were three sets of clothes, like the Chinese. One set on, one in the wash, and one set to spare. It was such a happy place. I think everyone was happy there, once they got there. We were, the kids I mean. Imagine, we had the sea, we fished, we swam, we played games on the beach, it was heaven.’

  ‘You must have had some schooling,’ Pippa wondered. ‘You’re hardly an illiterate.’

  ‘As a matter of fact we had a very good schooling,’ he explained. ‘The women saw to that. There were some men there, not many, some who’d failed their army medicals, some who objected to the war and whom the authorities were content to let “disappear”, and some older men who wished to live alone for private unspoken reasons. They taught us our three Rs. And some of the mothers did too. Between them all they managed to give us a very good education. I should imagine our teachers were the best you could find anywhere, because they all had souls, you see. Particularly Terence Vaughan.’

  Jerome stopped talking, not for effect this time, but because the memory of Vaughan was suddenly too much for him. So he walked on ahead, and threw yet another stick for Pippa’s little dog, who bounded after it across the springy old turf, barking for joy. Pippa hurried after them both, and catching up with Jerome, slipped her arm through his.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jerome said.

  ‘What for now?’

  ‘I’ve been banging on about myself, I’m terribly sorry.’

  ‘Who was Terence Vaughan?’

  ‘I really have talked far too much about myself,’ Jerome sighed. ‘Come on, let’s hear a bit more about you.’

  ‘Not until you’ve told me about Terence Vaughan,’ Pippa replied. ‘He must have been important, because your voice went all funny.’

  ‘All right,’ Jerome said, exhaling deeply. ‘Terence Vaughan was perhaps the finest actor who never was.’

  ‘You’re certainly going to have to explain that conundrum,’ Pippa said.

  So Jerome did. He told her all about the man who was his mentor, how he had trained to be an actor, and how the First World War had put a stop to his ambitions when he stood on an enemy mine and lost both his legs. And how after he was invalided out of the Army he became an English teacher at a school in a town not far from Lydd, and how one day when he was visiting an old pupil who had just moved to Carriagetown, he met Jerome’s mother, fell in love, threw over his job and moved into Carriagetown.

  ‘For some reason,’ Jerome said, ‘I became his star pupil. But I have to say the admiration was mutual. I absolutely worshipped him. He was strict, but kind, firm, but understanding, and he had a simply marvellous sense of humour. He was a brilliant teacher. He taught me everything I know. He taught me voice, he taught me how to move, how to speak verse, blank verse, where to breathe and how, how to take the breath where no-one else would, which is the essence of it all, to take a breath and carry on the line through, past the full stop, and somewhere into the next sentence. Best of all, he taught me the secret of surprise, how to do something on stage unpredictably, which he swore was the key to great acting. Always to be unpredictable. I would say that goes for most things, wouldn’t you, Pippa?’

  ‘Yes, I think I would, Jerome,’ Pippa agreed, letting go of his arm. ‘I think I agree with that entirely.’

  She walked alongside him for a while, detached from him, playing with her dog, and paying him no attention. Jerome glanced at her, but she was still involved with the dog and their game. And then just when he thought he had lost her, he felt her slipping her hand in his, and turned to see her smiling at him.

  ‘So when did you decide you were going to be an actor?’ she asked. ‘Rather than a fighter pilot?’

  ‘I never really gave it a thought,’ Jerome confessed. ‘I thought it was marvellous, learning all that stuff, but it was just a sort of game to me, you see. And because I adored Terry, and because he loved my mother, I went along with it because it was such fun, and to please them both, I suppose. And I didn’t take it very seriously, even though Terry was forever booming at me that I had the romantic power for Romeo, and the melancholy for Hamlet.’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘Until one day when we’d been out on a long fishing trip, and late in the day after we’d turned for home, I suddenly confided in Terry that what I really wanted to do more than anything else – still – was to be a fighter pilot
. He nearly fell out of the boat.’ Jerome assumed Terence Vaughan’s voice, changing to a deep booming basso profundo. ‘A fighter pilot? You cannot possibly be a fighter pilot, you ass! Those looks were not meant to be lost in some fire above the clouds! You were given looks like yours to make people gasp!’

  Pippa laughed, but it was true, and it was the first time Jerome had been made aware of his looks. Until that moment he had just leaped straight from his bed and into his clothes to go fishing, or into his bathing trunks to go swimming before breakfast. He’d never had either the time or the inclination to stop and look at himself in a mirror. Like so many exceptionally handsome children, he had been careless of his greatest asset.

  But that evening after supper, in the mirror of the old first-class carriage which was his bedroom, a yellowing glass which hung between advertisements for Players cigarettes and the Grand Hotel at Brighton, Jerome took a long good look at himself, and saw a dark-haired, dark-eyed, high-cheekboned face staring back at him, one with a hint of arrogance already around the mouth, and an air of brooding melancholy around the eyes. He looked at himself long and hard, and then asked himself the question.

  ‘To be, or not to be?’ he asked, before getting into bed and lying wonderingly in the dark.

  ‘Was that when you decided?’

  ‘I didn’t decide then, Pippa,’ Jerome told her. ‘But I seriously considered it. Although during my National Service in the RAF I went back to square one, forgot all about it, and seriously considered signing on for seven years. And I think I would have done, I know I would have done, if Terry hadn’t drowned.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Because he drowned—’

  ‘He drowned one day when I was home on leave,’ Jerome continued. ‘He’d been out fishing by himself, and his little white and blue dinghy came back empty. We were all sitting outside, having a picnic, and when we got to his boat, and pulled it in, it was empty. They found his body two days later.’

  ‘But if he had come back,’ Pippa wondered, ‘you’re saying you wouldn’t have become an actor?’

  ‘I think I became an actor for him,’ Jerome said with great simplicity. ‘I think it’s as simple as that.’