Seder, Sir Hyman informed his captive audience, seemingly indifferent to their growing restiveness, literally means programme, which applies to the prescribed ceremonies of the Passover ritual. Raising the pewter matzoh platter, he proclaimed first in Hebrew and then in English: “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
“Hear, hear!”
“Goodo!”
It was now nine P.M., and though Sir Hyman’s guests had begun to arrive as early as six, there had—much to their chagrin—been no hors-d’oeuvres served. Not so much as a wizened olive or peanut or blade of celery. Stomachs were rumbling. Appetites were keen. Sensing his guests’ impatience, Sir Hyman hurried through the reading of the Haggadah that necessarily preceded the feast, skipping page after page. Even so, he had to be aware of the shifting of chairs, the fidgeting that verged on the hostile, the raising of eyebrows, the dark looks. It did not help matters that each time the kitchen doors swung open the dining room was filled with the most tantalizing aromas. Steaming chicken broth. Lamb on the sizzle. Finally, at ten P.M., Sir Hyman nodded at an increasingly distressed Lady Olivia, who promptly jiggled her little bell.
Ah.
There were gasps of pleasure as a huge, wobbly, gleaming mound of beluga caviar was set down on the table. Next came an enormous platter of pleasingly moist smoked salmon. The salmon was followed by a silver salver heavy with baked carp and a surround of golden jelly. Everybody was set to pounce, but Sir Hyman, his smile gleeful, raised a restraining hand. “Wait, please. There is one more protocol of Zion, as it were, to be observed. Before indulging ourselves we are obliged to eat the bread of affliction. The matzoh.”
“Let’s get on with it, then.”
“For God’s sake, Hymie, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse.”
“Hear, hear!”
Sir Hyman nodded and a servant removed the pewter matzoh platter, piled it high with the bread of affliction, and returned it to the table, covered with a magenta velvet cloth.
“What we have here,” Sir Hyman said, “are not the tasteless, massproduced matzohs you might expect to find on the tables of tradesmen in Swiss Cottage or Golders Green, their eyes on the main chance. These are the authentic matzohs of ancient and time-honoured tradition. They are called Matzoh Shemurah. Guarded matzoh. Baked behind locked doors, under conditions of the strictest security, according to a recipe first formulated in Babylon. Brought from there to Lyons in the year 1142, of the Christian era, and from there to York. These were made for me by a venerable Polish rabbi I know in Whitechapel.”
“Come on, Hymie!”
“Let’s get on with it.”
“I’m starved!”
Sir Hyman yanked the magenta cloth free, and revealed was a stack of the most unappetizing-looking biscuits. Coarse, unevenly baked, flecked with rust spots, their surfaces bumpy with big brown blisters.
“Everybody take one, please,” Sir Hyman said, “but, careful, they’re hot.”
Once everybody had a matzoh in hand, Sir Hyman stood up and offered a solemn benediction. “Blessed be God, who brings food out of the earth. Blessed be God, who made each mitzvah bring us holiness, and laid on us the eating of matzoh.” Then he indicated that they were free to dig in at last.
The West End impresario, his eyes on the caviar, was the first to take a bite. Starchy, he thought. Bland. But then he felt a blister in the matzoh burst like a pustule and the next thing he knew a warm fluid was dribbling down his chin. He was about to wipe it away with his napkin when the actress, seated opposite him, took one look and let out a terrifying scream. “Oh, my poor Hugh,” she cried. “Hugh, just look at you!”
But he was already sufficiently discomfited merely looking at her. A thick reddish substance was splattered over her panting ivory bosom.
“My God!” somebody wailed, dropping his leaky matzoh shemurah.
The fastidious Cynthia Cavendish cupped her hands to her mouth, desperate to spit out the warm red sticky stuff, then took a peek at it trickling between her fingers and subsided to the carpet in a dead faint.
Horace McEwen, smartly avoiding the sinking Cynthia, stared at his rust-smeared napkin, his lips trembling, and then stuck two fingers into his mouth, prying for loose teeth.
“It’s blood, don’t you know?”
“Bastard!”
“We’re all covered in ritual blood!”
The Rt. Hon. Richard Cholmondeley knocked back his chair and, convinced that he was dying, began to bring up bile and what he also took for blood. “Tell Constance,” he pleaded with nobody in particular, “that the photographs in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk are not mine. Noddy gave them to me for safekeeping when he got back from Marrakech.”
The cabinet minister’s plump wife vomited all over his Moss Bros. dinner jacket before he could thrust her clear, sending her reeling backwards. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said. ‘‘Just look.’’
The sodden novelist slid to the floor. Unfortunately he was clutching the antique Irish lace tablecloth at the time and, consequently, brought down some priceless wine goblets as well as the platter of smoked salmon with him. The impresario, with characteristic presence of mind, grabbed the other end of the tablecloth just in time to secure the sliding tureen of caviar. Torn between anger and appetite, he snatched a soup spoon and lunged at the caviar once, twice, three times before demanding his coat and hat. The Polish count, his face ashen, leaped up and challenged Sir Hyman to a duel.
Sir Hyman startled him by responding softly in fluent Polish. “Your father was a swindler and your mother was a whore and you, dear boy, are a ponce. Name the time and place.”
Lady Olivia sat rocking her face in her hands, as her guests scattered, raging and cursing.
“You will pay dearly for this outrage, Hymie.”
“You haven’t heard the end of it!”
“Tell it not in Gath,” Sir Hyman said, “publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.…”
The last departing guest claimed to have heard a stricken Lady Olivia ask, “How could you humiliate me like this, Hymie?”
He purportedly replied, “There will be no more assignations with that squalid little Polack. Now let’s eat the lamb before it’s hopelessly overdone.”
“I despise you,” Lady Olivia shrieked, stamping her foot and fleeing to her bedroom.
There was only one account, its accuracy dubious, of that infamous evening’s aftermath. It appeared in Through the Keyhole: A Butler Remembers, a truncated version of which was serialized in The News of the World, the full text available only from Olympia Press, Paris. In a steamy chapter about his employment by Sir Hyman, Albert Hotchkins—remembering that Passover seder—wrote:
“After the Top People had fled faster than an Italian from the battlefront, and a tearful Lady Olivia had retreated to her bedroom, the old cuckold sat alone at the table, happy as a Jew at a fire sale, having himself a proper fit of giggles. Then he summoned the non-U people, including this yobbo, out of the kitchen and insisted we join him in a nosh. We were in there faster than the proverbial fox into a chicken coop. Caviar, smoked salmon, roast lamb. Now I knew Sir Hyman enjoyed his libations, but this is the first time I saw him pickled as a dill in a barrel. He was a veritable one-man Goon Show! He entertained us with side-splitting imitations of every one of his guests. He also did Churchill for us and Gilbert Harding and Lady Docker. He sat down at the piano and sang us one of ye olde time music hall songs. (Pardon me, Queen Victoria, I know you’re not amused!!!)