Stardust Page 9

  ‘Look, it’s wonderful news, dear boy,’ he told him, after taking a long, deep breath. ‘Derwent definitely wants you.’

  ‘Good,’ Jerome replied, sounding to Cecil for all the world like someone who has just been told their car was ready for collection from the garage.

  ‘Good?’ Cecil repeated, unable to keep the astonishment from his voice. ‘Do you realize what this means, Jerome? This play is going to be a very big hit.’

  ‘No please, Cecil,’ Jerome replied. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m delighted they want me. Really.’

  And so he should be, Cecil thought at his end of the line. Straight out of drama school without a credit to his name, and here he was being offered the lead in a brand new play opposite the most exciting and beautiful young actress in London, and all he could say was good. Cecil sighed, and rued the fact that he had been born a gentile. Jews made so much better agents. At times like this Jewish agents told their whippersnapper young clients exactly how they should be, while all Cecil could do was to express his pleasure that Jerome was at least delighted.

  ‘I just don’t think we should get carried away,’ Jerome continued. ‘We have to consider this play in exactly the same way we shall have to consider every play that I’m offered. Is it right for me?’

  ‘You said so yourself!’ Cecil protested. ‘You said so to Oscar Greene! You said—’

  ‘I only read two scenes, Cecil,’ Jerome interrupted. ‘I haven’t read the whole play. And there’s something else. What do you know about this girl?’

  ‘This girl?’ Cecil stuttered, reaching across the desk for his Mappin & Webb cigarette box. ‘This girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jerome replied, over-investing the word with far too much patience. ‘This girl.’

  Cecil told him what he knew about the girl everyone was speaking of as the most exciting discovery in London. He told him exactly what he knew, and this time he made less effort to keep the exasperation out of his voice. But by the time he had finished telling Jerome all about Elizabeth Laurence, instead of being suitably chastened, the young actor simply laughed.

  ‘Cecil, my dear,’ he sighed when he no longer found the subject of further amusement, ‘that is not what I meant. It is I who they want for this play. I shall be the person up there on-stage every night, doing my best to make sense of what is written. Not anyone else, least of all anyone in management or representation, or whatever. So what I want to know, dear boy, is not what you all think of this girl, or who you all think she may be, the next Sarah Bernhardt, or Mrs Pat, or whoever. What I want to know is, is she – difficult?’

  Once again, Jerome let drop one of his telling pauses, which gave the chosen word a particularly distinctive emphasis.

  ‘I am assured,’ Cecil replied, ‘that Miss Laurence, besides being undoubtedly the most talented young actress to be discovered in a decade, is in every way a perfect lady.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. And not only that, but she was extremely impressed with you.’

  ‘I have to say that she read well,’ Jerome agreed.

  ‘You should also know that she too is under contract to Dmitri Boska,’ Cecil added, as his coup de grâce.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that unless we are all crazy, those of us who were privileged to hear you both read this morning, to see you both as a couple—’ Cecil paused.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ Jerome finally prompted.

  ‘Unless we are all completely without judgement, dear boy,’ Cecil concluded, ‘after this play the next step will undoubtedly be straight into films.’

  This time it was the actor’s turn to pause, which he did to good effect, so much so that Cecil momentarily thought he had over-baited his hook.

  ‘Very well,’ Jerome said finally, when he thought Cecil had sweated long enough. ‘Have them send me round the play tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Good,’ Cecil replied, not knowing whether to admire or despair at the young man’s self-assurance. ‘I’ll see to it first thing.’

  Cecil put down the telephone and considered the conversation he had just had. Jerome had been in high spirits, before he had received the good news, and as Cecil had suspected all day, there can have been only one reason for those high spirits. Jerome had just come back from Pippa.

  Rising with a sigh from behind his desk, he went and poured himself a whisky, and then went and sat back down to review the prospect which now lay ahead. Elizabeth Laurence was quite utterly stunning, of that there was no doubt in Cecil’s mind, let alone the mind of anyone who had come into professional contact with her. Even Jerome Didier had not been immune, Cecil decided as he sipped his drink. Jerome may have tried to underplay the impact of their meeting, but Cecil could swear he had seen the young actor taking several long, sideways glances at Elizabeth, long before they started reading the play, as if he couldn’t quite believe his own eyes, while for her part Cecil had observed that Elizabeth Laurence couldn’t take her eyes off Jerome.

  As a pair, if not actually made in heaven, they were definitely heaven sent, Cecil decided. But they were definitely a pair, quite definitely. They fitted each other sublimely, and enhanced each other’s talent incredibly. Everyone present had seen and felt their immediate rapport, and were all holding their corporate breath to see what the divine Miss Laurence and the stunningly handsome Jerome Didier would make of Oscar’s play, a play, Cecil noted with quiet satisfaction, which was a love story, a love story which contained several passionate love scenes, and involved Elizabeth Laurence and Jerome Didier hardly ever being on-stage without each other. Cecil leaned back in his chair and permitted himself a smile. He knew what that meant. Everyone in the theatre knew what that meant. Everyone in the theatre knew what ultimately happened when plays like this went into rehearsal, and subsequently when they then went out on tour. Because of a fear of the unknown, the cast were thrown together in an enforced intimacy, particularly the leading players, and most particularly the leading players in a romantic drama who, as was so often the case that some people believed it to be an inevitability, entered into an affair, simply because they were no longer able to differentiate between what was fact and what was fiction.

  So the odds were heavily in favour that long before the play reached London, Elizabeth and Jerome would have been unable to stay out of each other’s beds.

  On the strength of his conclusions, Cecil fetched himself a second whisky, which was most unlike him. But he felt he had earned it this evening, particularly in the light of his final conclusion, which was that all the time Jerome and Elizabeth were being forcibly closeted together by the needs of the production they were part of, Pippa would be safe, safe and free from Jerome. Pippa would be at home, looking after her mother at Bay Tree Cottage, walking her little dog, doing the shopping and running the household like she normally always did.

  And as the play moved out on to the road, to play dates more and more distant from Sussex, Cecil would drive home for the weekends, just like he always did, and he would keep asking Pippa over for lunch and the inevitable croquet match, while Jerome would be up in the north of the country somewhere, caught in the throes of the inevitable extra Sunday rehearsals which the casts of new plays being tried out away from London invariably had to endure.

  Cecil would make it his personal business to see that Pippa was weaned off Jerome, not because he thought that by doing so he would strengthen his own chances with her, but for altruistic reasons, because Cecil knew that someone like Jerome was neither good nor right for someone like Pippa. Cecil didn’t even mind if later Pippa turned on him, and blamed him for interfering, because it would have been worth it. Cecil would have rescued her from a liaison which by rights could only be a catastrophe.

  Cecil finished his drink and set the empty glass back on the tray which his secretary set out religiously each midday and late afternoon, before turning off the lights and leaving his office feeling considerably less disturbed than he had been feeling half an hour earlier.
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  As things turned out, he would have been better locking himself in his office and getting blind and hopelessly drunk.

  On the day before he began rehearsals, Jerome telephoned Pippa early in the afternoon, a time he knew it was safe to call her, since Pippa had told him that her mother rested every day between two and four o’clock. The first and only thing he wanted to know was when he might see her again.

  There was a short silence before Pippa replied, and when she did, Jerome noted that she sounded almost surprised with herself.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I’m coming up to London tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow!’ Jerome could barely keep the unalloyed joy out of his voice.

  ‘I told you, if you remember,’ Pippa continued, very levelly. ‘I had to come up some time for some shopping. There are some things I have to get my mother.’

  ‘But what time do you have to get back?’ Jerome asked. ‘You know I’m rehearsing all day.’

  ‘Well no, I didn’t,’ Pippa confessed. ‘I didn’t know when you started. Or what the hours were, or are, rather. I could meet you when you finish though. Because I can always catch the later train.’

  ‘How much later is the later train?’

  ‘I could catch the half-past nine. I mean my mother’s not going to be alone. There’ll be one of our neighbours here. As usual.’

  ‘Good,’ Jerome said, hardly able to believe how overjoyed he felt.

  ‘That is,’ Pippa added hesitantly, ‘I mean that is if you still want to see me.’

  ‘I cannot think, Pippa Nicholls, at this moment in time,’ Jerome replied, closing his eyes slowly and dreamily, ‘of anything I want more.’

  Then having instructed her when and where to meet him, Jerome went off to rehearsals as if it was the first day of spring where, with the first real show of his prodigious talent, he proceeded utterly to confound and astonish the assembled company, but most particularly Miss Elizabeth Laurence.

  He astonished her even before rehearsals began. On his way there, Jerome had stopped at a small but expensive florist’s and bought a dozen of the best red roses, which upon his arrival he presented to his leading lady. Elizabeth was privately annoyed at how unprepared she was for the gesture, since the night before she had resolved that she would not let Jerome Didier past her guard twice. Yet here she was again, speechless, and with the breath catching in her throat, as Jerome presented the roses to her mock-gallant, bowing formally to her, while allowing himself a small, and quizzical smile. For her part Elizabeth went through the motions she had so carefully practised, laughing at his tongue-in-cheek dalliance, and allowing herself to be captivated by his easy charm, while hoping against hope to herself that she was skilled enough to carry off the deception. She hoped dearly that she was, because everyone was watching her, and she prayed her face was not betraying any sign of the utter helplessness she felt.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Oscar sighed to Cecil, as they wandered over to pour themselves a coffee from the urn, ‘and her a married lady.’

  ‘Oh nonsense,’ Cecil laughed, ‘they’re actors! This is just part of their ritual.’

  ‘Sure,’ Oscar said, filling a cup with coffee. ‘Let’s just hope they both remember that out in the sticks. Or we have had it.’

  ‘You’d rather they didn’t get on?’

  ‘I’d rather they just stayed actors,’ Oscar sighed, overfilling his cup disastrously so that he flooded the saucer. ‘Goddamit,’ he continued, shaking some hot coffee off his hand. ‘Didn’t you see her face when he came into the room? Long before he even gave her the flowers? Oh boy, actors. All they want is to be loved. Why can’t they just settle for the affection of the audience. But they can’t. They never can. And believe me, Cecil, if and when Juliet loves Romeo for real, it’s a five alarm fire, I’m telling you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cecil rejoined feebly. ‘But I’d rather the cast all got on any day.’

  He was rewarded with one of Oscar’s most withering looks, but happily the playwright’s worries proved to be short-lived, because as the day’s rehearsal grew longer, it became abundantly clear that off the set Jerome was profoundly disinterested in Elizabeth as a woman. What Jerome was interested in, like almost any other leading actor, regardless of his talent, was not in seducing his leading lady but simply outshining her.

  In rehearsal proper, it was a quite different story. From the moment they started the usually mundane task of just blocking their scenes, there was a chemistry between them, but by the time they began to act in earnest that had given way to a palpable electricity. The atmosphere in the rehearsal room fairly crackled, and everyone watching knew they were seeing something very much out of the ordinary. The two young actors were immediately empathetic, giving to and taking from each other as if they had been doing it all their professional lives. Quite obviously they were unique, and so much so that time and time again Oscar noticed that their fellow actors, when they were not required, instead of wandering off to do the crossword puzzle, or have an idle gossip outside in the corridor, remained instead on the sidelines, watching Elizabeth and Jerome in an almost reverential silence. Because they knew they were watching a sort of theatrical history, a moment of fusion, the moment when an exceptional partnership is born.

  But as soon as they stopped rehearsing, the moment they returned to the real world, there was a powercut, and as far as Jerome was concerned, the lights went out. Jerome simply walked off to study his text, and never gave Elizabeth a second glance until their next call.

  Then just before they broke for the day, they rehearsed their first kiss, and when they did everything fell apart.

  ‘I’ll never forget it,’ Oscar said to Cecil later, as they sat recovering over their drinks. ‘I will never forget that look on Elizabeth’s beautiful face. I mean one moment she’s taking a glance at her script, right there in her hand, and then – wham. Next moment, she’s picking herself off the wall.’

  In the stage instructions, Oscar had simply written they kiss. He had envisaged it as a tentative kiss, a moment of speculation on behalf of the characters he had created. He had thought of it as a moment of tenderness, calm before the emotional storm which lay ahead. But Jerome had other ideas.

  ‘I tell you, I’ve never seen a moment like it,’ Oscar recalled in the bar afterwards. ‘First of all, it’s early days. Like the first day of his involvement. I was expecting something a little more hesitant, a touch more diffident. But oh, no. No, this was war. You saw for yourself, Cecil, Jerome didn’t merely try and kiss her. Jerome hit her, he hit Miss Laurence amidships. And boy – she was calling for the life-rafts.’

  Elizabeth Laurence’s distress, however, was short-lived. When she realized this was the way Jerome intended to play their first embrace, she gave every bit as good as she got. She kissed him back. Jerome had released her, and was about to pick his script back up off the table, when Elizabeth dropped hers, and throwing both her arms around Jerome’s neck, kissed him back, long and hard. And when she did, everyone stopped whatever they thought they were doing, and stood and stared, as if it was the very end of time.

  Suddenly the silence was broken by Richard Derwent springing to his feet, and clapping his hands together sharply. His eyes were practically standing out of his head.

  ‘Would one of you please kindly tell what the hell is going on?’ he asked with heavy sarcasm, as the actors parted. ‘That is, if it’s not an inconvenience. If – you can spare the time.’

  Elizabeth went to speak, but Jerome signalled her to be silent, then turned to stare at the director, his hand protectively resting on one of Elizabeth’s forearms.

  ‘I am kissing Miss Laurence, Richard,’ Jerome said, looking both puzzled and innocent. ‘Why?’

  ‘And that is what you call kissing, dear heart, is it?’

  Derwent advanced on Jerome, finally standing almost on the actor’s toes as he stared maniacally up at him.

  ‘Forgive me if I’m wrong here, Richard—’ Jerome glanced
down at the script in his hand. ‘But it does say, “Paul looks at Emerald for a long, difficult moment. And then unable to resist her any longer—”’

  ‘“They kiss,”’ Elizabeth quietly volunteered.

  ‘Children—’ Derwent hissed at them both, ‘they may kiss, but not – like that! That is not how we kiss on-stage, duckies!’

  ‘If I may say so, Richard—’ Jerome began, only to be immediately interrupted.

  ‘No, you may not say so, ducky!’ Derwent shouted. ‘You are still wet behind your pretty little ears, heart! So you will keep quiet – and I will do the talking! And what I have to say to you is this! On-stage, when we kiss, we give what is called a stage kiss, ducky! You kiss the little lady with your top lip on her bottom lip! Or even – with your top lip below her bottom lip, savez! What you just did looks perfectly disgusting! We do not want the dear old dears passing out in the stalls now, do we?’

  Jerome continued to stare at the director for a moment as if he was not quite sure of Derwent’s sanity, before turning to his co-star.

  ‘I’m sorry, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘We should, of course, have discussed this between us. I do hope I didn’t embarrass you – but I’m afraid – I’m afraid I was completely caught up.’

  Jerome stopped and sighed, brushing his mouth thoughtfully with the side of an index finger, as if recalling the moment and the very texture of the kiss.

  ‘The strange thing is,’ he went on, ‘it felt right.’

  On the last word of the sentence, on the word right, he turned slowly back and fixed their director with a cold and piercing look.

  ‘It didn’t look right,’ Derwent muttered, after a short but significant silence.

  ‘Why don’t we ask the writer?’ Elizabeth suddenly asked brightly. ‘Oscar?’ she called in her pretty, light voice.

  ‘Oscar is not directing this play,’ Derwent hissed. ‘I happen to be the director.’

  ‘Of course you do, Richard,’ Elizabeth purred. ‘And Oscar happens to be the writer. Oscar dear, did you see how we kissed?’