The Naive and Sentimental Lover (14 page)

Cassidy sighed. Sandra's walk.

Should he ring her?

Much of their relationship was conducted on the telephone. It was a conceit of Cassidy's, indeed, that with time all they would need for a successful marriage was two functioning telephone boxes....

No, this was not an occasion for the telephone.

Send her flowers, then?

“Dear love please forgive me, it was well meant, I only want your happiness, Aldo.”

Or the bullying tone? “Smile or get out.”

Or beg?

“Sandra, you're making holes in my heart.
Please, please, please
. . .”

Please whom? What can she do that will please
me
any more?

As to himself,
what?

Glumly, the unfinished letter still before him, he made the reckoning. Four weeks had passed since his visit to Haverdown. He had conducted meetings, read the trade press, composed A Word From Your Chairman on the forthcoming Paris Trade Fair, taken out new policies for private medication, retirement, and sudden death, sat with accountants over the April figures for the outgoing financial year, drafted speeches for the Annual Informal Meeting of Shareholders. He had lunched with high officials of certain charities, to whom—tentatively—he had offered large sums upon obscure conditions. He had dined with the Nondescripts and repeated, with considerable success, his nice joke about what one nylon had said to the other. He had dismissed a works foreman on suspicion of industrial espionage and by adroit diplomacy averted a walk-out. He had opened a spares depôt in Amsterdam and fought and won a savage battle with the Exports Credit Guarantee Department. He had attended a matinée spectacular in one of the smaller Soho theatres, and continued his long and costly correspondence with Somerset House about his genealogy. The discussion turned on a Cassidy who had fought at Marston Moor in Cromwell's great charge against Prince Rupert's Horse; but it appeared that the effort had exhausted him for he had never been heard of since. After six years, it now seemed to Cassidy, the correspondence threatened to become as long and fruitless as the Civil War itself. He had taken the Bentley to Park Wards and left it there while the mechanics respectfully pursued an illusory rattle in the offside door. He had played golf with his competitors and squash with his graduate trainees. His competitors had sneered at the quantity of his clubs and the graduates said “Sorry sir” and told him how Oxford had changed. He had dictated letters to his secretary, Miss Mawdray, and quizzed her youthful shape over the rim of his unnecessary spectacles. (These spectacles were not at all to be compared with those of Sandra's mother. Cassidy's spectacles were there to give him power; Mrs. Groat's to advertise her frailty.)

His frown deepened.

There, he would admit, certain pleasurable tremors had been recorded on the Cassidy seismograph. Miss Mawdray was a trim, desirable girl, dark like Sandra but taller, with a swimmer's body and a great passion for Greece. On Fridays she wore a poncho with goat's wool tassels, and on Tuesdays she read him his horoscope, knees pressed together like little buttocks, the tips of her ears pointing through her long brown hair.

“What beastliness have you got lined up for me this week, Angie?” he had asked her yesterday morning, burying his lust in an attitude of fatherly indulgence, and listened attentively to her bold prophecies from a newspaper below his station. She had recently acquired an engagement ring, but resisted all enquiries about its origin. Fellow's probably married, Cassidy concluded with lofty disapproval; these girls are all the same nowadays.

Worse still, she had taken the day off.

 

On one other occasion only during this entire period had Cassidy been conscious of
impact.
Attending an ordinary meeting of his manufacturing association the distinguished member had launched, for no reason he could now determine, a searing and undeserved attack on the Board of Trade. The speech was widely considered to be out of place and for several days he had contemplated suicide. Happily, good sense prevailed and he treated himself to a great luncheon instead. He had discovered a new restaurant in Lisle Street where they made
mille-feuilles
with a chocolate cream, and he had two helpings with his coffee.

 

What have I felt? he asked himself, gazing morosely out of the window. What have I
learned?
In what way had he benefitted mankind? More important still, in what way has mankind benefitted
me?
The answer: nothing. A vacuum. Cassidy lives in a vacuum. Poor Cassidy. Poor Bear. Poor
Pailthorpe
Bear.

And it is probably in order to fill this vacuum, Cassidy reflected, that I have now sinned. Grossly sinned. Mother, against Heaven and against Thee. Against Sandra, and (he would confess) against his own flesh too....

 

It was too much for him. Banishing the shameful memory of his most recent and provocative marital transgression, Cassidy resumed his tribute to wise fatherhood.

Hugo is in the pink, though of course he looks forward very much to joining you at Hearst Leigh next year. The other day I took him to the cinema. We rang the manager first and he was very good and arranged for a Bath chair in the aisle. We saw
High Noon
. Hugo loved the shooting but got very impatient with the love scenes.

“Come in!”

A knock at the door. His stomach froze in panic. Telegram from Sandra? I HAVE LEFT YOU FOR EVER SUPPER IN THE FRIDGE SANDRA?

Visit from an Inland Revenue Inspector: spot check sir, if you don't mind, here's my warrant.

Her mother, Mrs. Groat, has called, tapping her way down the corridor with her fake white stick. Hullo darling, giggle, giggle, I'm afraid she's dead, isn't she?

It was Meale, an overqualified trainee, hovering at the threshold. A goatish, unappetising boy poached from Bee-Line, their principal competitor. An author of endless schemes; charmless but thrusting. Large in the field of business studies. New. Well, Cassidy would be fair to him. Meale had had few advantages of the undefinable sort and Cassidy must make allowances. Nor did he begrudge Meale his betterment. Where would Cassidy be, after all, if he had not insisted on taking the most that the market would stand? Also, he was a distraction, and distraction was what Cassidy needed.

Affecting a small
moue
of surprise, the Chairman and Managing Director woke from his weighty deliberations.

“Ah, who's that? Meale. Good morning, Meale, sit down. Not there, over here. Coffee?”

“No thank you sir.”

“I'm having some.”

“Well thank you very much. I wondered whether you had had a chance to read my projection programme sir.”

Manners first, Meale, manners first, I expect you to drink with me.

“Sugar?” Cassidy enquired pleasantly.

“Yes sir.”

“And milk?”

“Afraid so, sir.”

To the box: “Coffee, Miss Orton, will you? Milk and sugar, and the usual for me.”

Switch her off. Adjust spectacles. Finger confidential papers. Squint at costly reproduction chandelier. And not find it in his heart to disappoint any man who came to ask his counsel.

“I
like
it, Meale. I think it's
good
, and I think it's
right
.”

“Do you really, sir?”

“Yes. Jolly
good
. You ought to be
jolly
pleased with yourself. I am. I mean pleased with you, ha ha, not
me
.”

A hiatus; a cloud of discontent, suspicion, “I say—” reaching once more for Miss Orton's provoking little button “—you don't prefer tea do you?”

“Oh
no
sir!”

“Ah.”

Rearrange the hands in judicial-benevolent posture, see our photograph in
The Times
eighth March this year:
Swift but Sound. Aldo Cassidy
en poste
in his Audley Street Premises.

“So let's go ahead with it, shall we, Meale?”

 

The door closed.

Nothing.

Not even a depression on the black hide chair to mark where the grateful boy had sat. Or—hm hm—perhaps had not sat? Not visited, not spoken?

 

With a low-burning smile of winsome superiority, Dr. Aldo Cassidy, D. Phil. and bar., Fellow of All Souls and the Chairman and Managing Director's most frequent familiar, put the proposition relating to the unvisit of the man Meale:

“There are philosophers, dear boy, and no doubt psychiatrists and mystics as well, who loudly refute any notion of a distinguishing line between our wishes and their external counterparts. That being so, dear boy: does their doctrine not also extend to people? Thus: if those we meet are unmet by an act of forgetfulness, does it not follow, dear boy, that those we retain are kept in being by acts of
remembering?
Our acts? And this in turn being so—I fear I overburden the thesis?—and this in turn being so, does not such a system impose upon each one of us a most distressing responsibility for his creations? Hm? Hm? I mean what if
you
forgot
Sandra,
would
she
exist?”

Losing the thread, Cassidy drained his cold coffee and continued, in his literary persona, his
tour d'horizon
of the domestic scene.

Here at home.

He cast a sodden gaze round his room. Once,
this
had been his home. My
dulce domum,
my sanctuary, my refuge. His compensation for all the disagreeable rooms of his childhood. Here I administered, I dispensed, I praised; and here he received in return that glow of motherly security which no woman of Cassidy's acquaintance had come within shouting distance of providing. Once, even to approach the building had been to know peace. The brickwork, with its dull, dark red of internal flesh; the frilly wooden gables painted cream, like anonymous lifted petticoats awaiting his penetration; the glistening brass plate on the rosewood front door, brighter than any woman's smile, all these things had tantalised him with favourable sensations of purchase, conquest, and expansion. “You've got so
much,
” they said to him. “And you handle it so
well.
” While Miss Mawdray's murmured “Good morning, Mister Aldo,” issuing, it seemed, from the depths of her youthful breasts, had reminded him of the many assets he had yet to turn to cash. Here—whatever else he left behind at 12 Abalone Crescent—
here
in this sweet deep casket, seven hours a day and five days a week, he was at peace. He could recline or sit upright. He could scowl, smile, take a drink or a bath with equal privacy and, thus cossetted, freely deploy his many God-given talents of leadership, drive, and charm.

And now it is my prison.
Pitiful
Cassidy.
Abject
Toad.
Poor
Pailthorpe.

We should have stayed in Acton, he thought, yawning after his heavy luncheon—Boulestin wasn't bad actually, he must go there more often, they were one of the few places that looked after you if you went alone—we should never have become a public company. We were pioneers then; merchant adventurers, dreamers, strivers. Lemming, the chief lieutenant, now a portly man, was then a greyhound, lithe, swift, and tireless. Faulk, his advertising manager, today a balding, flagrant queen, was in those days the sharp-tongued visualizer of unlikely stunts. Now, with recognition behind them and public audits before them, a slackening of pace, a settling of the commercial digestion as it were, had tacitly replaced their youthful frenzy. Six months ago, he himself had been the first to praise this mellowing.
Retrenching
he had called it in a lengthy interview;
steadying down
and by his own deportment set the tone.
The battle is over, we have entered the smoother waters of a long and prosperous peace,
he had assured his shareholders at last year's meeting. Great. And when you have retrenched? And when you have settled down? Then what do you have? The memory, and damn all else. “Remember the night we welded up that first prototype?” Cassidy would say to Lemming at the Christmas party. “In that old bike shed round behind the toyshop? Remember how we ran out of juice and had to knock your missus out of bed, eh Arthur?”

“Lord alive,” Lemming would reply, drawing on his cigar while the young ones waited for his words. “And wasn't she bloody mad, and all?”

Oh, how they laughed at yesterday.