The Naive and Sentimental Lover (15 page)

“Take your time,” he told the driver.

Cassidy's feelings about his father varied. He lived in a penthouse in Maida Vale, a property listed among the assets of the Company and let to him rent free in exchange for unspecified consultative services. From its many large windows, it seemed to Cassidy, he followed his son's progress through the world as once the eye of God had followed Cain across the desert. There was no hiding from him; his intelligence system was vast, and where it failed, intuition served him in its place. In bad times, Cassidy regarded him as undesirable and made elaborate plots to kill him. In good times he admired him very much, particularly his flair. When younger, Cassidy had made copious researches about Old Hugo, interviewing lapsed acquaintances in clubs and browsing through public records; but facts about him, like facts about God, were hard to come by. In Cassidy's early childhood, it appeared, Old Hugo had been a minister of religion, most likely in the nonconformist cause. By way of corroboration, Cassidy could point to the Cromwellian connection and certain memories of a pine pulpit on a cold day, Old Hugo wedged into it like an egg into an egg cup and the tender child alone on a forward pew a mute Christ among the elders. With time however—a very variable factor in Old Hugo's incarnations—the Lord had appeared to His shepherd in a dream and counselled him that it paid better to feed the body than the mind, and the good man had accordingly put aside the cloth in favour of the hotel trade. The source of this information, not unnaturally, was Old Hugo himself, since no one else except God had been party to the dream. Often, he insisted, he regretted his divinely inspired decision, at other times he recalled it as an act of courage ; and occasionally, lamenting his misfortunes, he deeply resented the years he had wasted on the Word.

“There I was, trying to teach those cretins wisdom, and what did I get? Four old nellies and a lollipop man.”

At some point in his life, he had also been a Member of Parliament, though Cassidy's enquiries of the Clerks of the House of Commons had failed to confirm the claim; and he had stood in no election that any Party Headquarters could recall. Nevertheless, the initials M.P. followed him everywhere, even on his bills; and were done in heavy ink on the nameplate below his doorbell.

It was a day for buying the Savoy Hotel.

“You can't go wrong,” Old Hugo insisted. “What's a hotel, then, tell me that?”

“You tell me,” said Cassidy admiringly, for he knew the answer too well.

“Bricks and mortar, food and drink, that's what a hotel is. Your basic elements, your basic facts of life. Shelter and sustenance; what more do you want?”

“It's perfectly true,” said Cassidy, secretly wondering as always in these conversations how, if his father knew so much about business matters, he had managed to be penniless for twenty years. “There's a lot in what you say,” he added with obedient enthusiasm.

“Forget fastenings. Fastenings are dead. So's prams. All dead. Look at the pill. Look at Vietnam. Are you going to tell me, son, that this world of ours today is a world in which men and women are going to breed their babies the way your mother and I did?”

“No,” Cassidy agreed pleasantly, “I suppose not,” and wrote him a cheque for a hundred pounds. “Will that do you for a bit?” he asked.

“Never forget,” his father remarked, reading the words as well as the figures. “The sacrifices I made for you.”

“I never could,” Cassidy assured him. “Truly.”

Carefully arranging his dressing gown over his bald white knees, Old Hugo shuffled to the window and surveyed the misted rooftops of Dickensian London.

“Tipping,” he burst out in sudden contempt, seeing perhaps, among the chimney pots, descending generations of unpaid waiters, Cypriots from the Waldorf in Yarmouth, Anglo-Saxons at the Grand Pier in Pinner. “Tipping's
funk,
that's what tipping is. I've seen it time and again. Any fool can tip if he's got ten bob and a waistcoat.”

“It's just that I know you need a little extra now and then.”

“You'll
never
pay me off.
Never.
You've got assets no man can put a price on, least of all you. Where do they come from? They come from your old man. And when I'm judged as judged I shall one day surely be, as surely as night follows day, son, make no mistake about it, I shall be judged
solely and exclusively
on the many wonderful talents and attributes I have passed on to you, although you're worthless.”

“It's true,” said Cassidy.

“Your education, your brilliance, your inventiveness, the lot. Look at your discipline. Look at your religion. Where would
they
be if I hadn't done you right?”

“Nowhere.”

“A delinquent, that's what you'd be. A pathetic delinquent, same as your mother, if I hadn't paid those boys down at Sherborne a towering fortune to put virtue and patriotism into you. You've got all the opportunity in the world. How's your French?”

“Good as ever,” said Cassidy.

“That's because your mother was French. You'd never have
had
a French mother if it hadn't been for me.”

“I know,” said Cassidy. “I say you don't know where she is do you?”

“Well keep it up,” Old Hugo urged. His bloodless palm described a magisterial arc, as if it would stop the sun from moving. “You can get anywhere with languages,” he informed the cosmos. “Anywhere. Still say your prayers do you?”

“Of course.”

“Still kneel down and put your hands together like a little child then?”

“Every night.”

“Like hell you do,” Old Hugo retorted stoutly. “Say the prayers I taught you.”

“Not now,” said Cassidy.

“Why not?”

“I don't feel like it.”

“Don't feel like it. Christ. Don't feel like it.”

He was drinking, steadying himself on the steel window frame.

“Hotels,” he repeated. “That's your line. Same as it was mine; your manners alone are worth five thousand a year, you ask Hunter. Don't
feel
like it!”

Hunter was a source, now dead. Cassidy had met him secretly in the National Liberal Club, but learned nothing. Both father and son had attended his funeral.

“They're
your
manners,” said Cassidy courteously.

The old man nodded approvingly and for a while seemed to forget his son altogether, giving himself wholly to his profound contemplations of the London skyline.

“There's a man in County Cork who says he's God,” said Cassidy, with a sudden smile.

“It's a con,” Old Hugo replied, with that prompt certainty which Cassidy adored in him. “The oldest con in the world.”

Discovering the cheque still in his hand Old Hugo reread it. That's all he reads, thought Cassidy, it's all he's ever read, evening papers and cheques and a few letters diagonally, to get their drift.

“You hang on to her,” Old Hugo said at last, still reading the cheque. “You'd have been a delinquent if you hadn't married a bitch.”

“But she doesn't
like
me,” Cassidy objected.

“Why the hell should she? You're a bigger bloody liar than I am.
You
married honesty, not me. Live with it and shut up.”

“Oh I've shut up all right,” said Cassidy with some spirit. “We haven't spoken for a week.”

The old man rounded on him.

“What do you mean,
haven't spoken to her for a week?
Jesus, I went months with your stupid mother.
Months.
All for
your
rotten sake, because I'd given you life. You wouldn't
exist
without me. Hear?” He returned to the window. “Anyway, you shouldn't have done it.”

“All right,” said Cassidy meekly, “I shouldn't have done it.”

“Bitch,” Old Hugo declared at last, dully, but whether he meant Sandra or some other lady, Cassidy could not tell. “Bitch,” he murmured yet again, and leaning the vast lilac torso as far back as it would go, poured the rest of his brandy into it as if he were filling a lamp.

“And keep away from the queers,” he warned, as if they too had let him down.

Kurt was Swiss, a neutral, kindly man dressed in cautious greys. His tie was dull brown and his hair was dull honey, and he wore a pastel-shaded ruby on his pale, doctor's hands, but the rest of him was cut from slate, off-season skies, and his shoes were trellised in matt grey leather.

They sat in a plastic office beside a plastic globe, discussing great climbs they would make this summer, and studying brochures for rucksacks, crampons, and nylon ropes. Cassidy was very frightened of heights but he felt that now he owned a chalet he should come to grips with the mountains. Kurt agreed.

“You are made for it, I can tell by your shoulders you see,” he said, his eyes appraising them with pale pleasure. Kurt and Cassidy would start on the smaller ones and work upwards. “Then maybe one day you climb the Eiger.”

“Yes,” said Cassidy, “I would like that.”

Cassidy would pay, he said, if Kurt would do the arranging.

A small silence intervened. Time for business? Kurt's job had never been defined for Cassidy, but his function was undisputed. He handled money. Money as an end, a commodity, a product. He received it in England and returned it abroad, and somewhere over the Channel he took a small commission for defying tiresome English laws.

Time for a drink.

“You would like a kirsch?”

“No thank you.”

“Got to get in training.”

“Yes,” Cassidy said. And laughed shyly, trying to anticipate the Alpine consummation. He can't want
me,
he thought; he's just
generally
queer, it's nothing local I'm sure.

“How is it?” Kurt enquired, lowering his voice to match the intimacy.

“Well . . . you know. Up and down. Down at the moment actually. She's learning the piano again.”

“Ah,” said Kurt. A short deprecating
ah.
A puppy has messed on my Wilton. “She is competent?”

“Not very.”

“Ah.”

A tiny Swiss light winked from his desk. He blew it out.

“It's just . . .” Cassidy went on. “It's just, we never talk. Except about charities and things. How about
my
charity . . . ? You know.”

“Sure,” said Kurt. The smile slit the pale cushions of his jaw. “My God,” he remarked equably. “The piano huh?”

“The piano,” Cassidy agreed. “How is it with you, Kurt?”

“Me?” The question puzzled him.

In Switzerland, Cassidy thought, they have a lot of suicides and divorces, and sometimes Kurt seemed to be the explanation for them all.

Kurt had a silver ballpoint pen. It lay like a polished bullet on his fibreglass desk. Lifting it, he peered for a long time at the tip, examining it for engineering defects.

“Thank you I am fine.”

“Great.”

“Is there another way I can help you, Cassidy?”

“Well if you could manage five hundred?”

“No problem. At ten to the pound okay? We rob you a few centimes.”

“I'll give you a cheque,” said Cassidy and wrote it out to cash, using Kurt's pen.

“You know,” said Kurt, “I don't like to criticise your government but these are crazy regulations.”

“I know,” said Cassidy.

Old Hugo left cheques open, ready for immediate presentation, but Kurt folded them, handled them the way a card player handles cards, assuming them into the palm and emitting them through the finger and thumb.

“Then why don't you change them?” he asked.