“What are we going to do for excitement this afternoon, Moses?”
“What would you like to do?”
“Maybe there’s another Arctic nut with rotten teeth lecturing at the ICA?”
“Would you settle for tea with Hymie, if he’s free?”
Sir Hyman seemed delighted to see them, but they had no sooner settled in when the butler interrupted with a whispered message.
“Really,” Sir Hyman replied. “I wasn’t expecting him today.”
A tall gangly man with a tight little mouth sailed into the room. Sir Hyman introduced him as the Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute and the Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.
Though Sir Hyman pleaded with them to stay, Moses made his excuses and led Lucy out, but he wasn’t ready for another night incarcerated in her flat in Belgravia. “Why don’t we go to the Mirabelle for dinner?”
No answer.
“I shouldn’t be alienating you from all your old friends.”
“What do you do in that room all day? I never hear your typewriter any more.”
“I am pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight.”
“Edna found an empty bottle of vodka hidden in the bottom of the cupboard.”
For all their bickering, she came to depend on him. Her anchor, she thought. Somebody who could dissect a script, or explain a character that she longed to play, in a manner that allowed her to dazzle many a director with her insights. But she, too, had begun to find their evenings together in the flat unendurable. Even so, she wasn’t going to treat him to a night out until she heard the hum of his typewriter again. So she began to lie, pretending that she was working late with a girlfriend on a scene when she was actually at Annabel’s, and he, grateful for some solitude, began to sneak drinks in earnest, topping the Scotch and cognac bottles with cold tea when Edna wasn’t looking. Then one morning she returned from her agent’s office flushed with excitement. One of the proliferation of new young directors had seen her in something on TV and had invited her to audition for a small but telling part in a new play by a writer whom even Moses had said was not utterly without merit. Her audition was scheduled for the afternoon but it was midnight before she returned to the flat, kicking over an end table, sending a bowl of pot-pourri flying. “He told me I was perfection. Born to the role. Why, he wouldn’t even bother auditioning anybody else.” Then, she said, he asked if she would find it too boring to join him for a light supper. Harold drove them to Boulestin’s.
“Oh, isn’t this fun,” the director said, rubbing his chubby little hands together. “It calls for a proper celebration. Wouldn’t you say, my dear?”
“Yes.”
“We could start with masses of beluga and a bottle of Dom Perignon unless you object?”
“Certainly not.”
He told her wicked stories about Larry and Johnny G. When admirers stopped at their table he introduced her as his latest discovery. “What would you say to lobster?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“Good girl.”
“Oh, and we’ll have to give Vincent a warning right now if we want the baked Alaska.”
“Wonderful idea.”
He called for a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet. Finally, when he was into his second snifter of armagnac, she said, “Forgive me if I’m being pushy, but when do we begin rehearsals?”
“Glad you asked me that because there is a wee problem.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s nothing, really,” he said, deftly shifting the saucer with the bill on it closer to her place, “but we do have to raise another fifteen thousand quid before we plunge ahead.”
“Is that all?”
“I knew you’d understand.”
She asked him if he’d like another bottle of bubbly.
“Well, do you think your driver would be able to take me home, or is that too much to ask?”
“Of course he will.”
“It’s in Surrey, actually.”
“So?”
“Damned good of you too.”
Then Lucy told Moses, “Once Mario had popped the cork, I yanked the bottle out of his hands, pressed my thumb against the lip, pumped it three or four times, and let him have it right in his fat face. Then I fled the restaurant, shouting at Vincent to mail me the bill. And now if you don’t mind you can pour me a cognac and you might as well have one yourself. I know what’s going on here. Let’s not pretend any more.”
They drank through the night and well into the next afternoon. Between crying jags Lucy told him tales of Mr. Bernard, Henry, and her mad mother. Mr. Bernard, she said, had turned against Nathan when he discovered that his son, then only seven years old, had run away from a fight at Selwyn House. “I’m going to phone the Jewish General Hospital right now,” he had said, “to see if they’ll exchange you for a girl.”
But the call had been unsuccessful. “I’m stuck with you. They don’t take cowards.”
And then, Lucy said, when they had still been allowed to play with the other Gursky children, Mr. Bernard had told them that when he was a boy jumping into a corral churning with wild mustangs was nothing for him.
“And look at the Gursky children now,” Lucy said, “every one of us a basket-case. Except for Lionel. A worse son of a bitch than his father. Henry’s God-crazy. Anita buys a new husband once a year. Nathan’s afraid to cross a street. Barney has broken my Uncle Morrie’s heart, he won’t even talk to him, and will probably end up behind bars one of these days. I don’t understand Morrie. The more my Uncle Bernard rubs his face in the dirt, the more devoted he is to the old pirate.”
After Solomon had been killed, Lucy said, when his airplane had exploded, a weepy Mr. Bernard had come to the house to assure her mother that he would be their father now. “I swear on the grave of my saintly mother that I will treat Solomon’s children like my very own.”
“Murderer,” she had cried. “Get out and don’t you dare come here again.”
“Murderer?”
“To the day of her death she believed the explosion was no accident. But the truth is my father didn’t deserve her loyalty. He married my mother because she was pregnant and when she miscarried he took that as licence to come home only when it suited him.”
“Why didn’t she divorce him?”
“Well they didn’t in those days. Or she might have if Henry hadn’t come along. Or me. Oh, my father was such a bastard. She once told me that he would leave his journal on his desk where she could read about his other women.”
“Solomon kept a journal?”
“Yes. No. So what?”
“What happened to it?”
“It’s none of your business. Morrie, that creep, has it maybe.”
“Would you like to get your hands on it?”
“You and Dr. Hersheimer. Some pair. No, I wouldn’t. I know more than enough about him as it is.”
“But he was your father.”
“And you’re so fond of yours, right? Remember the first time we met?”
“Yes.”
“And there was that blank space for a picture on the wall—the portrait of that lady with the eyes of a different colour—the one that was stolen.”
“Yes.”
“It was a mistress of his, obviously, and he had it hung where my mother could see it every day.”
Finally Lucy and Moses fell asleep, wakening to a breakfast of Bloody Marys and smoked salmon. Lucy was violently ill and consumed by remorse. “I lied to you,” she said.