“It’s Prince Henry the Navigator.”
Startled, Moses turned around to find that Sir Hyman had come up behind him once again.
“How old are you now, Moses?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Well now, in 1415, when Prince Henry was twenty-one, he severed all connections with the court and became the Navigator. He retired to Cape Vincent, Portugal’s Land’s End, and from that promontory he sent out ships to chart the coast of Africa, but, above all, to seek the legendary Kingdom of Prester John. But you must be familiar with the story.”
“Sorry, no.”
“Ah, the mythical kingdom of the just, a veritable earthly paradise. A realm of underground rivers that churned out precious stones and the habitat of an astonishing breed of worms that spun threads of the most exquisite silk. It was purported to lie somewhere in the ‘Indies’, and it was said that Prester John combined military acumen with saintly piety and that he was descended from the Three Wise Men. It was anticipated that he would help to conquer the Holy Sepulchre as well as defend civilized Europe from the Anti-Christ, the hordes of cannibals to be found in the lands of Gog and Magog. News of the kingdom was first circulated in a letter supposedly written by Prester John in 1165 and sent to the Byzantine emperor of Rome. Unfortunately the letter proved to be a forgery. There is no just kingdom, but only the quest for one, a preoccupation of idiots for the most part, wouldn’t you say?”
An agitated toothy Lady Olivia cantered into the library. “There you are, Hymie! Everybody’s asking for you.”
“Coming, my dear.” He paused at the door and turned back to Moses. “I’m sure you appreciate that Lucy is a troubled young lady. Do be kind to her.”
TO BEGIN WITH, they were actually kind to each other, playing house together, tended to by Edna and Harold and provisioned by Harrods, Paxton and Whitfield, Fortnum & Mason, Berry Bros. & Rudd.
Looking after each other was a game they came to cherish. Lucy, for her part, astonished that she could be concerned for anybody else’s welfare and Moses gratified that somebody gave a damn. Teasing, cajoling, abstaining from wine, she seduced him into abstinence. After he had gone without a drink for a fortnight, lying to her, pretending he didn’t miss it, she pleaded with him to resume work on his study of the Beveridge Plan and the evolution of the British Welfare State.
Out with Harold one afternoon, flitting from Harrods to Asprey’s to Heal’s, she purchased a box of the creamiest bond paper available; an electric typewriter; file cards that came in a darling velvet case, each drawer with a brass pull; a leather armchair; and an antique desk with a tooled leather top. Then, while Moses was out for an afternoon stroll, counting each pub he passed, his own Stations of the Cross, she had her sitting room made over as a study. He found it all more than somewhat pretentious, but he was also pleased, especially by the Fabergé humidor filled with Davidoff cigars. There were, he figured, only two things missing. A portrait of M. Berger, Esq., pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight, and of course cork lining for the walls.
Lucy, he discovered, had come to London (on the first overseas flight anywhere out of Idlewild with her lucky seat number five available) immediately following the breakup of her affair in New York with a South American Grand Prix driver. Her next lover, a beautiful boy encountered at the bar in Quaglino’s, absconded with a necklace of gold, diamonds, and pearls that had once belonged to Catherine the Great. RADA wouldn’t have her, neither would the London Academy, so Lucy stitched together a school of her own. She took acting lessons from a dotty disciple of Lee Strasberg, dance and movement from a drunk who had once performed with Sadler’s Wells (a bitchy old queen, whom Moses enjoyed having lunch with occasionally) and singing from a one-time tenor with La Scala, who claimed to have fled Mussolini, but more likely, Moses thought, scathing reviews. A McTavish Distillery executive arranged for her to be represented by a reputable agency before he realized that she was not Mr. Bernard’s daughter, but Solomon’s, and that he needn’t have bothered.
The morning of an audition Lucy would waken convinced that she looked a total wreck, which was usually the case considering how poorly she had slept. She would patch herself together and hurry off to Vidal’s, her analyst, her masseuse, and her voice teacher, though not necessarily in that order. Then, clutching her portfolio of photographs by David Bailey, regretting that she didn’t look as good as Jean Shrimpton or Bronwen Pugh, she would join the other girls, also clutching portfolios, on the bench outside the sleazy rehearsal hall, waiting for the oily fat man with the clipboard to call her name. Why Lucy, with all that money, humiliated herself, going to market determined on the dubious prize of a bit in some mediocre movie, utterly confounded him. He wished, for her sake, that everybody would turn her down, bringing her to her senses. But unfortunately she was tossed a misleading bone from time to time, sufficient to inflame her fantasies of stardom. Say, the part of a sassy secretary in a Diana Dors vehicle. Or in yet another movie the gum-chewing long distance operator in a call put through to America by no less than Eric Portman or Jack Hawkins. Moses tried to reason with her. “It’s not as if you’re being offered Masha or Cordelia. What do you need this for?”
“Oh, go read a book, you prick.”
Those were actually their sunshine days together. A time when staying at home with him, rather than dashing off to Les Ambassadeurs or the Mirabelle or the Caprice every night, offered her a chance to play a Celia Johnson role. Most evenings he seemed content to settle into the sofa with a book. She tried it herself, but her attention span was short, so she made do with magazines, jigsaw puzzles, or flicking from one TV channel to the other. All the while doing her utmost to squelch an inner voice that kept protesting these were to be your salad days and here you are, wasting in a cave, growing older with a morose reformed drunk, not much good in bed, the real fun elsewhere. No, no, she corrected herself. He will write something stupendous and everybody will point to her, like Aline Bernstein, that voluptuous Jewess whom her college instructor had said made it all possible. Yeah, sure. The trouble is Thomas Wolfe was a big tall goy and Moses, let’s face it, is a little Jewy intellectual with pop eyes and thick lips. Of Time and the River is a classic, it’s in the Modern Library, but a study of the Beveridge Plan with graphs and charts? Forget it.
What she failed to understand was that he loathed staying in every night, reading on the sofa, a habit not answering some dearly held predilection of his but born of penury. A good part of her attraction for him was that she could take him to Les Ambassadeurs or the Mirabelle, a world he longed to experience but couldn’t afford. However, having ventured out with him two or three times she swore never again. Moses, insecure in opulent surroundings but absolutely adoring it, coped with the contradiction by indulging in snide remarks about the glittering couples at the other tables. He embarrassed her in fine restaurants where her arrival had once been treated as an occasion, the maître d’ strewing flatteries like rose petals in her path, by never settling the bill before checking each item as well as the addition.
Bored, he laid his book aside one night and said, “Tell me about Solomon.”
“I was only two years old when he died.”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you anything?”
“He drove her mad. What more is there to say?”
Her clothes, acquired at the Dior boutique or from the Rahvis sisters, were strewn everywhere, left for Edna to retrieve. Lying on the sofa, absorbed in the latest issue of Vogue, she was given to absently picking her nose. Even more disconcerting, her thumb might find its way into her mouth and she would suck it avidly, unaware of what she was at. Her appalling table manners were explained, he thought, but hardly pardoned by the mad mother, the absent father. For all that, she had a way of teasing him out of his bouts of depression, increasingly frequent now that he was supposed to make do without drink.