The Naive and Sentimental Lover (10 page)

“Is that what Schiller says?” Cassidy asked again, now thoroughly confused. “Or the other one?”

“And Shamus,” Helen continued, avoiding his question, “being
naïve,
part of nature in fact, longs to be like
you.
It's the attraction of opposites. He's natural, you're corrupt. That's why he loves you.”

“Does he?”

“I can tell,” said Helen simply. “You've made a conquest, Cassidy, that's all there is to it.”

“What about you, then,” Cassidy enquired, only partially succeeding in hiding his gratification. “Which side are you on? Shamus' or mine?”

“I don't think it works for women,” Helen replied at last. “I think they're just themselves.”

“Women are eternal,” Cassidy agreed as finally they got up to leave.

In return, at the pub, he told her about his accessories.

 

That conversation alone, in retrospect, would have made his evening unforgettable.

Even if he had never set eyes on Helen before walking into the saloon bar; if he had never seen her again after he left it, if he had simply bought her a double whisky and chatted to her in the garden, he would have counted his visit to Bath—that timeless exchange would stand for all time—among the most amazing experiences of his life.

The pub was higher up the hill—the slope of tension as Cassidy now thought of it—a leafy place with a verandah and a long view of the valley lights. The lights reached to the edge of the earth, melting together in a low haze of gold before joining the descending stars. Shamus had made straight for the public bar and was playing dominos with the naïve classes, so the two of them sat outside looking into the night with eyes made wide by wisdom, mutely sharing the infinite vision. And for a moment, it seemed to Cassidy, a kind of marriage was made. For a moment, he would swear, before either one of them had spoken a word, Cassidy and Helen discovered secretly in the motionless night air a joining of their destinies and their longings, of their dreams and their enchantments. So strong was his sense of this, in fact, that he had actually turned to her in the hope of catching in her devout expression some evidence of the shared experience, when a gust of coarse laughter, issuing from inside the pub, reminded them of their companion.

“Shamus,” Helen sighed, but not at all by way of criticism. “He does so adore an audience. We all do really don't we? It's no more than the warmth of human contact, when you think about it.”

“I suppose it isn't,” said Cassidy, who had never supposed till now that any excuse could be found for showing off.

“Ever since I've known him,” she said dreamily, “he's been the complete enchanter. When we were rich it was the maid, the garage man, the milkman. And when we decided to be poor again it was . . . just anyone. Proles, Gerrard's Crossers, he magicked them all. It's the loveliest thing about him.”

“But it's always been
you,
” Cassidy suggested. “Rich or poor, you were his real audience, weren't you, Helen?”

She did not immediately accept the notion, but seemed to dwell on it as if it were new, and perhaps a fraction facile for her reflective nature.

“Not always. No. Just sometimes.
Sometimes
it was me. At the beginning perhaps.” She drank. “In the beginning,” she repeated bravely.

“But you must help him
enormously
with his work,” said Cassidy. “Doesn't he lean on you an awful lot, on your knowledge, Helen? Your
reading?
”

“A bit,” Helen said, in the same airy, questionable tone. “Now and then, sure.”

“Tell me: what did you
read
at Oxford? I'll bet you're
covered
with degrees.”

“Let's talk about you,” Helen suggested modestly. “Shall we?”

And that was how it happened.

 

Deliberately, to begin with, he had emphasised the human aspect of his products, the
mother appeal
as they called it in the trade. After all, there was not a reason on earth for her to be interested in the technical side: none of his other female customers was. Cee-springs, suspension, braking mechanisms: you might as well talk to a woman about pipe tobacco as try to explain all that to her. So he had begun by telling her in simple narrative terms, albeit apocryphal, how the idea had come to him in the first place. How he had been walking one Saturday morning, in the days when walking was about the only recreation he could afford—he had just started in advertising though he had always been a meddler, if she knew what he meant, gadget-minded so to speak, handy with a screwdriver if she followed him—and he was vaguely thinking of a drink before lunch (“Thank you,” said Helen. “Just a single will be lovely”) when he spotted a mother trying to cross the road.

“A
young
mother,” Helen corrected him.

“How did you know?”

“Just guessed.”

Cassidy smiled a little ruefully. “Well, you're right actually,” he confessed. “She
was
young.”

“And pretty,” said Helen. “A
pretty
mother.”

“Good
God
how did you—”

“Go on,” said Helen.

Well of course, said Cassidy, there were no zebra crossings in those days, just the studded lines with Belisha beacons at either end, and the traffic was pretty well nonstop: “So she began probing.”

“With the pram,” said Helen at once.

“Yes. Exactly. She stood on the curb sort of
testing the water
with this baby, lowering the pram into the road and pulling it out again while she waited for the traffic to stop.
And all there was between that kid and the traffic was this . . . this one footbrake.
Just a rickety bit of rodding with a rubber grip on the end,” he said, meaning the foot-brake still.

“Rodding?” Helen repeated, unfamiliar with the word.

“Low-grade alloy,” Cassidy replied. “Virtually no stress. Metal fatigue ratio zero.”

“Oh my God,” said Helen.

“Well that's what I felt.”

“I mean, Christ, risk your own neck if you must, but not well, God, not a child's.”

“You're absolutely right. That's
precisely
what I say. I was horrified.”

“You felt responsible,” Helen said gravely.

Yes that was precisely what he had felt. No one had put it to him like that before, but it was true: he had felt
responsible.
So he didn't have a drink, he went home and did a spot of thinking. Responsible thinking.

“Where's home?” asked Helen.

“Oh Christ,” said Cassidy, hinting at the long road and unrevealed hardships. “Where was anywhere in those days?”

And Helen nodded to show that she too understood the vagaries of an aspiring male life.

“I just thought for a moment it might have been your own wife you were watching,” she said casually, not at all in the tone of someone
accusing
him of marriage, but merely recognising his state and taking it into account.

“Oh Lord no,” said Cassidy, as if to say that even if he had a wife and that wife had a pram, he would certainly not waste time watching her; and plunged on with his story. So anyway, he'd had this idea: if he could build a brake, a really unbeatable, multi-systemed brake, that functioned on any pram—a brake that stayed the
hub
rather than just well Christ let's face it
dragged along the road
like your old chariot brake—

“A
disc brake,
” Helen cried. “You invented the disc brake! Cassidy!”

“That's an extremely good
analogy,
” said Cassidy after a slight pause, not quite certain whether analogy was what he meant.

“It was
your
idea,” Helen said. “Not mine.”

“Of course it was only prams,” he reminded her. “Not grown-ups.”

“Are children more important?” Helen demanded. “Or adults?”

“Well,” said Cassidy very surprised. “I hadn't thought of it that way, I must say.”

“I had,” said Helen.

Having fetched replenishments from the bar, Cassidy returned to Helen on the verandah and continued his narrative.

So anyway: over the next few days he had done a spot of research. Nothing explicit of course, nothing that gave the show away, just taken a few soundings among reliable people he happened to know. Vital question: would a quality footbrake be universally acceptable? A twin-circuit system, for instance; something one could attach to the hubs?

“You made your mark early, didn't you?” Helen said. “Like Shamus.”

“I suppose that's true,” Cassidy conceded.

Be that as it might, quite soon he came up with his answer. If he could build a brake that
really
held, a one-hundredper cent safety brake, based on a hub-retarding principle, then he would stir up such publicity, get so much support from the Road Safety League, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, not to mention the public media, “Woman's Hour” and all the other goof programmes, that he could get the financing and clean up a fortune overnight, just on the patent alone.

“And perform a fantastic service for society,” Helen reminded him.

“Yes,” Cassidy said reverently. “That above all. And once it caught on, of course, I took on chaps, we expanded, grew, diversified. A
lot
of people came to us with their problems and before long . . . Look here, am I being pompous?”

Helen did not immediately reply. She looked at her drink and then through the French doors at Shamus, and finally at Cassidy with the long, frank, fearless look of a woman who knows her mind.

“I tell you this,” she said. “If ever I need a pram, which I never will if Shamus has anything to do with it, it's going to be one of yours.”

For a moment neither spoke.

“Do you really mean never?” Cassidy asked, embarrassed but feeling he knew her well enough.

“Well
really,
” she said laughing. “Can you
imagine
Shamus going through all that? Wife and two veg, that's what he calls it. God he'd go raving mad in a week! How can an
artist
be tied to that?”

“God, you're so right,” said Cassidy, and once more covertly examined his watch.

Give it ten minutes and I'll make that call.

From there it had been but a step to the technical exposition. How they had expanded to become their own customer. (
What a brilliant idea,
said Helen.
You take the profit twice!
) How they had repeatedly ploughed back profits into research, exploring ever deeper the application of these same safety principles, until Cassidy's name had become a byword, from the great hospitals to the individual housewife, for comfort and safety in your world of infant transportation. Heaven knows, he had spared her nothing. From fluid flywheels and dual braking circuits he passed with hardly a breath to the intricacies of a twin-jointed push bar and the variable suspension. Helen never faltered. He could tell by the steadiness of the sombre eyes that she took in every word; nothing, not even the universal joint, clouded their perfect comprehension. He drew for her, sketched on paper napkins until the bar was like a drawing board: gravely she sipped her drinks and gravely nodded her approval.

“Yes,” she said. “You thought of everything.”

Or: “But how did the competition take it?”

“Oh, the Japs had a shot at copying us as usual.”

“But they couldn't,” Helen said, not as a question at all but as a positive statement there was no gainsaying.

“Afraid not,” Cassidy replied obligingly, preferring the spirit of the truth to the truth itself. “They put their best chaps on to it. Total failure.”

“Then how did
you
take it?”

“The sudden wealth, the fame, the recognition of your talents . . . didn't you go a
little
bit mad, Cassidy?”

Cassidy had met with this question often, and answered it, in his day, in many different ways, according to his mood and the requirements of the audience. Sometimes, principally within the hearing of his wife, he insisted that he was inviolate, that a natural sense of Values was too strong an answer to mere materialistic temptation, that the act of making money had shown him also its futility, he was impervious. At other times, to close male acquaintances, or strangers in railway compartments, he confessed to a deep and tragic change, a frightening loss of appetite for life.

“There's no
fun
any more,” he would say. “Having money takes all the joy out of achievement.”

While occasionally, in moments of great apprehension, he flatly disowned his money altogether. The British tax system was confiscatory; no honest man could keep more than a fraction of what he earned, whoever did so was on the fiddle, more should be done to control them. But in Helen's mouth the question was new, and fundamental to their relationship. Therefore, having rapidly considered many alternatives, he shrugged lightly and said, in a moment of the nicest inspiration, “A man is judged by what he looks for, Helen. Not by what he finds.”

“Christ,” said Helen softly.

For a long while she gazed at him with an expression of the greatest intensity. Cassidy, indeed, had difficulty in meeting it; he found his eyes drifting, or closing with the smoke of her cigarette. Until, taking a draft of whisky, she broke the spell.

“Anyway,” she said, indicating an obstruction to some unspoken proposition. “How did your wife take it?”

This question also he had faced on more than one occasion. Where does she shop
now?
Did you buy her a fur coat? Once again he found the greatest difficulty in replying. Get rid of her, was his first thought. I am divorced; I am a widower. My wife died a lingering and tragic death; she recently eloped with a great pianist. The reappearance of Shamus mercifully absolved him.