“About what?”
“The champagne in his fat face. I wanted to do it, but I didn’t have the guts. But I did leave him stranded in the restaurant.”
Lucy phoned her agent and was told he was in a meeting. She called again at noon. Her agent was out to lunch. She and Moses moved on to Scotch and Lucy called her agent again at five. He was unavailable.
“There are other agents,” Moses said.
She fled the flat and didn’t return until noon the next day. “I got in touch with the director,” she said, “but I’m too late. He found the money elsewhere.”
Only then did she notice Moses’s packed suitcases.
“You can’t walk out on me now. I’m going crazy. Look, you can drink as much as you want. I won’t say a thing. Stay. Please, Moses.”
In the morning she hurried to a gallery on New Bond Street to buy Moses a Hogarth etching he had once admired and, in another shop, a first edition of Sir John Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea. She fired Edna the same afternoon.
“But I thought you adored her,” Moses said.
“I did. I do. But haven’t you read about the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, you shmuck? Everybody’s talking about that Martin Luther King now. I found out people are saying it’s just typical of Miss Moneybags to have a black maid. I had to let her go.”
“I hope you told her why.”
“She’s so thick, that one, she’d never understand.”
A couple of days later Lucy rented an office on Park Lane, hired a secretary and a script reader and began to option novels and plays and to commission hacks to turn them into film scripts in which she could play the lead. Soon avaricious agents and inept writers began to beat a path to her door, shaking the legendary Gursky money tree. She was consulted. She was listened to. All she had to do in return was scribble cheques. Fifteen hundred pounds here, twenty-five hundred there, two thousand somewhere else. It was amazing how little it took to satisfy them. Baffled, she asked Moses, “How much does a writer earn?”
“One of your screenplay spivs or a real one?”
“Okay, a real one.”
He told her.
“Boy, am I ever dealing with a bunch of jerks.”
But one of them, a former juvenile lead in more than one West End farce, caught her eye. Jeremy Bushmill, in his forties now, was trying to carve out a place for himself as a writer and director. The first draft of a screenplay that she had optioned from him actually attracted the attention of Sydney Box’s story department. Lucy, armed with the notes that Moses had fed her, invited Jeremy to dinner. To her delight, he insisted on paying the bill. They carried on from Wheeler’s to the Gargoyle Club, which wasn’t the same, he said, now that poor Dylan was gone. But a sodden Brian Howard was there and Jeremy told her that he had been the model for Ambrose Silk. Lucy didn’t get home until two in the morning. Moses, pretending to be asleep, didn’t stir. But when he heard her pouring herself a bath he understood. He switched on the bed lamp and went to find himself a drink and a cigar and then waited for her to emerge from the bathroom. “Have fun?” he asked.
“He’s a bore.” She fetched herself a drink and sat down on the floor. “What if we got married and had children together?”
“I’m an unredeemed drunk. I also think you ought to complete your own childhood before thinking of taking on kids of your own.”
“Who was Ambrose Silk?”
“A character in one of E.M. Forster’s novels.”
“Which one?”
“Captain Hornblower.”
In the week that followed, Moses found himself a satisfactory flat in Fulham, but it wouldn’t be available until the first of the month. Lucy was absent a good deal, usually coming home late and slipping into her tub. Later she clung to her side of the bed, careful that their bodies didn’t touch anywhere, her thumb rooted in her mouth. Then one evening, even as she was applying her makeup in the bedroom, the bell rang. It was Jeremy, tall and handsome in his deerstalker hat and Harris tweed coat; Jeremy bearing roses.
“I’m afraid she’s still getting ready. Shall I put these in a vase, do you think?”
“Bloody awkward, isn’t it?”
“How goes the scriptee?”
“She’s a marvel. Her notes are always bang on.”
Lucy came home earlier than usual. “I have something to say to you,” she said.
“You needn’t bother. I’m moving out tomorrow morning.”
She wanted him to join her production company as script editor for an annual retainer of ten thousand pounds. “We would have lunch together every day.”
“Lucy, you continue to amaze me.”
“I hope that means yes.”
“Certainly not.”
“Oh Moses, Moses, I’ll always sort of love you. But I need him. It’s the physical thing.”
“I understand.”
“I have something else to tell you.” As no director, she said, would give her a chance, she had decided to mount a showcase production of her own and invite a selected group of directors and producers and agents to see her. She had acquired the rights to revive The Diary of Anne Frank for three performances only and had rented the Arts Theatre for that purpose. Jeremy was going to direct, play Mr. Frank himself, and put together the rest of the cast. “What do you think?”
“I think you should hire an audience as well and pay them to applaud.”
“I want you to come to rehearsals and make notes and tell me what I’m doing wrong.”
“The answer is no.”
“Will you at least come to the opening performance?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“We’re always going to be friends.” She snuggled into his lap, cuddling. But he could tell that something was still troubling her.
“Moses, who wrote Mr. Norris Changes Trains?”
“P.G. Wodehouse.”
“Should I read it?”
“Why not?”
SIR HYMAN KAPLANSKY came to the opening night. So did some producers, directors, and a surprising number of performers at liberty. Some had come out of curiosity, others because they were pursuing Lucy’s production company for outlandish deals; there was also a Bushmill claque, but still more were there in a perverse spirit of fun, anticipating the worst. Bushmill played the mushy Dutch condiments dealer, Otto Frank, as if he had wandered into the doomed attic out of a Tory garden fête. The other performers were competent at best. But Lucy was intolerable. A natural mimic, but clearly no actress, she played her scenes like an overwrought Shirley Temple with a disconcertingly gay Peter Van Daan. When that didn’t work, she switched to the Elizabeth Taylor of National Velvet.
Moses wandered into the theatre dangerously drunk, but determined to behave himself. Unfortunately the excruciatingly banal play outlasted his resolution. Nodding off briefly in the first act he was confronted by Shloime Bishinsky in his mind’s eye. “What I’m trying to say, forgive me, is that such princes in America are entitled to their mansions, a Rolls-Royce, chinchilla coats, yachts, young cuties out of burlesque shows. But a poet they should never be able to afford.” Or a theatre. Or an audience. “It has to do with what? Human dignity. The dead. The sanctity of the word.”
They were being noisy up there on stage, which wakened him to the troubling sight of an attic and its denizens trebling themselves. Poor Bushmill, emoting about something or other, now had six weak chins stacked one on top of another and maybe twenty-two eyes. Moses shook his head, he pinched himself, and the stage swam into focus again. Damn. It was that maudlin Hanukkah scene, overripe with obvious irony, wherein the pathetic Mr. Frank Bushmill seated with the others at the attic table—all of them hiding from the Gestapo—praises the Lord, Ruler of the Universe, who has wrought wonderful deliverances for our fathers in days of old. There were no latkes, but insufferably adorable Anne (the bottom of her bra stuffed with Kleenex) came to the table armed with touchingly conceived pressies. A crossword-puzzle book for her sister. “It isn’t new. It’s one that you’ve done. But I rubbed it all out and if you wait a little and forget, you can do it all over again.” There was some hair shampoo for the horny Mrs. Van Daan. “I took all the odds and ends of soap and mixed them with the last of my toilet water.” Two fags for Van Daan’s oafish husband. “Pim found some old pipe tobacco in the pocket lining of his coat … and we made them … or rather Pim did.”