The Naive and Sentimental Lover (17 page)

“Will they?”

“Of course they will; if I go on trying hard enough. And you encourage me enough. We got jolly close to it in Bristol, after all.”

If you believe in God, he argued, surely you can believe a few simple lies like mine? Sandra, you
need
faith, scepticism ill becomes you.

“Any way,” she said. “The war will hardly be averted by a playing field, will it? But still.”

“Well what about you? Biafra . . . the meths boys . . . Vietnam . . . Oxfam . . . look at that Greek petition you signed . . . you must be doing
some
good. . . .”

“Must I?” she asked of the misted window as the tears began running down her childish cheeks. “You call that
doing?
”

Somehow he had crossed the room, squeezed past the piano, and taken her unfamiliar body in his arms. Bewildered, he held her as she wept, feeling nothing but a sadness he could not change and an emptiness he could not fill, like the hunger of the screaming child on the piano.

“Take him to any specialist you like,” she said at last, rolling her head on his shoulder as the tears still fell. “I don't care. Take him to the whole lot. It's you that's sick, not him.”

“It's all right,” Cassidy whispered, patting her. “The specialist was no better than John Elderman. Truly. Just a silly old dodderer, that's all he was. John will look after him. John will. He'll do just fine, you'll see.”

For a while longer he held her until, gently releasing herself, she walked from the room, drawing her skirts after her like chains. As she opened the door, the sound of her mother's radio swept in past her, dance music from between the wars. The animals watched her leave.

Next morning trying at breakfast to keep the shadow from Sandra's eyes, he invited her to accompany him to Paris for the Trade Fair.

“It's only business,” he said, “but we might get a
bit
of fun.”

“Fun is what we need,” said Sandra, and kissed him absently.

W
aiting.

A time for flowers.

 

“In
principle
I'm all for it,” Lemming insists piously. “No one more so, I dare say. But it's the details that worry me, to be frank, the details.”

And it was the details which, with the cunning of an old campaigner, he was now proceeding to assault.

A Monday, balmier if possible than the last Monday, balmier than the Monday before that; Mister Aldo's prayer session, all present and correct; a day when waiting is to dream; to believe in Nietzsche and J. Flaherty.

“Nice buttonhole, Mister Aldo,” said Faulk.

“Thank you, Clarence.”

“Get it off a barrow?” asked Lemming coarsely.

“Moyses Stevens,” said Cassidy, reminding Lemming of his membership of the Many-too-Many. “In Berkeley Square, or haven't you heard of them?”

The topic however is not flower shops but the Paris Trade Fair, now two weeks away. Lemming loathes the French more than any living thing, and next to the French he loathes exports, which he regards as synonymous with the most reckless managerial malpractice. A golden sunlight is falling in strips across the liquid surface of the eighteenth-century table and the dust rises through it in tiny stars. Miss Mawdray, dressed like a summer flower, is serving coffee and fruitcake and Lemming's lugubrious monologue is an offence against the beauty of the day.

“Take your new prototype all-aluminum chassis right? Now I admire that chassis. Properly handled I believe that chassis is going to sweep your home market. But what
I'm
saying is this: it's not going to sweep
any
ruddy market while it's lying in pieces all over the workshop floor.”

And slaps the table, not too heavily, leaving pads of sweat on Mrs. Croft's Antiquax.

“Oh come on,” Cassidy protests. “Of course it will be ready, they've been tinkering with that thing for months; don't be bloody silly.”

Lemming's piety, Lemming's objectivity, Lemming's status do not take kindly to this rebuke, so he pulls back his chin and puts on his Trade Union Leader Voice.

“I am assured
both
by Works
and
by the Engineers,” he announces in a fighting, ungrammatical statement approved by fourteen committees, “that they see no hope
whatever
at this point in time of putting together that chassis prior to last date of shipment. Thanks, dear.”

And takes some more fruitcake from Miss Mawdray's ample store.

The rose in Cassidy's buttonhole smells of paradise, and freckled girls in green, arboreal overalls.
“And you can throw this in for me,” says Gaylord Cassidy, the well-known West End beau, signing a cheque for other purposes. “I'll fetch you a pin,” says the freckled girl in green.

“Well that settles it,” pipes queer Clarence Faulk, much under Lemming's influence these days, and does a
thing,
as he would say, with his hair. Kurt's thing, a sudden limp-wristed correction to an arrangement which only exists in the mirror. “Oh I
am
sorry Mister Aldo, I interrupted you.”

“Did you?” says Cassidy. “I don't think so. Mr. Meale, what have
you
got there?”

“A rather depressing report on the sealed absorbers I'm afraid, Mister Aldo. It seems
they've
shown up badly on the testing floor too.”

“Better let's have it,” says Cassidy with an encouraging smile. “Take your time now.” For Meale is still inclined, in conference with the great, to gabble his words and lose the sense.

Meale takes a deep breath.

“The Cassidy Easy-Clean Shock Absorber,” he begins, starting rather quaintly with the title, “housed in its own PVC container and designed for all strollers and small carriages. Patent pending, fifty shillings, trade only.” He stops. “Shall I read it
all?
” he asks in some embarrassment.

“If you please, Meale.”

If you please Meale. Your voice, Meale, is not half as offensive as you suppose and a great deal more congenial than the voice of the prole Lemming or the sodder Faulk. There is hope in it you see, Meale. There is life, there is tomorrow, Meale. Continue with our blessing.

“The action of the spring, confined to an airtight case, has caused overheating and in one instance actual combustion. Subjected to a simulated velocity equivalent to five m.p.h.—that is, the maximum allowable pedestrian rate—the spring was observed to burst
through
the housing, whereupon a rapid deterioration of the plastic also ensued. . . .”

Whereupon, Meale, it was a free spring, burst as you rightly suggest from its unnatural housing. A bouncing jolly, vibrant spring, a liberated spring with a life to lead and a heart to give.

“Miss Mawdray.”

“Yes, Mister Aldo.”

Caught, you bitch.

Cassidy might have tweaked her, she turns so sharply. She had her back to him. Was stooping, generously stooping, bless the child, to freshen Meale's cup, a treacherous operation considering his own was empty, and her breasts had nudged perilously downwards almost to his neck, when Cassidy's summons recalls her to loyalty. Is that the cause of her surprise? Is that the reason she has turned to him full face, full chest, skirt tautly rucked across her pelvis, eyebrows finely raised, tongue slack upon the lip? Was there an unconscious note of urgency in his voice, of jealousy not withheld, as he saw the sunlight narrow between the two lush tips and the callow boy's hard shoulder?
Only teasing Mister Aldo.

“Miss Mawdray—forgive me Meale—Miss Mawdray, the mail. That was
all
the mail. You're sure?”

“Yes, Mister Aldo.”

“There was nothing . . . personal. No personal material?”

Like a rose, for instance?

“No.”

“You've checked in the package room?”

“Yes Mister Aldo.”

Back. Back to waiting. We have time to wait, time to wait.

“Well that rules the spring out, doesn't it?” said Lemming with satisfaction, jabbing one overpaid finger at Meale's report.

“Not entirely,” said Cassidy. “Meale, will you continue?

Slowly Meale, we have all the time in the world.

 

Waiting.

Waiting, he languished like an Edwardian girl, in flower gardens of his own remembering. Walked in morning parks and watched the first tulips open to the restive sun; wore other roses in his buttonhole, slept in the Savoy under the pretext of a charitable errand, bought Sandra several expensive gifts, including a pair of long black Anna Karenina boots and a plain, wrapover housecoat which became her adequately but not more. Waiting, he dawdled guiltily outside bookshops, teetering but somehow never daring; till one day he sent Angie out to buy a copy and put it in a drawer of his desk, and locked the drawer against his own invasion. Waiting, he took Hugo to the zoo.

“Where does
Heather
live?” Hugo asked as they rode on the waterbus under hanging beeches. He was sitting on Heather's lap, his broken leg dangling negligently between her large thighs.

“In Hampstead,” said Heather. “In a teeny-weeny flat next to a milkshop.”

“You ought to come and live with
us,
” said Hugo, reprovingly, “because you're my friend, aren't you Heather?”

“I almost
do
live with you,” said Heather, and cuddled him closer against her soft, loose body, while she munched a red apple from a bag.

She was a warm, blond creature, fortyish, once the wife of a publisher. Now she was divorced and the godmother to other marriages. Hugo seemed to prefer her to Sandra, and in a way so did Cassidy, for she possessed what he called a decent quiet, a pastoral repose to her broad, comfortable body. Sandra said divorce had broken her heart, that she wept a lot, and was given to outbursts of great anger, mainly against men, but Cassidy found no sign of this in her company.

“Look,” said Heather. “Herons.”

“I like herons,” said Hugo. “Don't you, Daddy?”

“Very much,” said Cassidy.

Heather smiled, and once more the sunlight made a gold downy line along her cheekbone.

“You're so
good
Aldo,” she said. “Isn't he, Hug?”

“He's the best daddy in the world,” Hugo agreed.

“You do so much for others. If
only
we could do something for you.”

“I want to make people happy,” said Cassidy. “That's all I care about.”

From a call box within sight of the gibbons, he consulted the office switchboard. Nothing, they said. Nothing but business.

“You have the instructions?”

“Yes, Mister Aldo, we all have.”

“It's the export drive,” he explained to Heather emerging from the kiosk. “We're waiting for an urgent shipment.”

“You work so hard,” said Heather, whose smile shone straight as the sun.

 

And still waiting, went to Sherborne, where Old Hugo had bought him his polish and his learning.

Sat in the Abbey under the shell-torn flags of disbanded country regiments reading the names of great battles, Alma, Egypt, Sevastopol, and Plassey, and loving passionately the heritage he had never had.

And sitting thus, prayed.

And attended a Rugby match on the first fifteen field and cheered for his old school, thinking of Sandra and wondering whether he had sinned against her, fearing the answer yes. There, vaguely scanning the home team for the kind of boy he might have been, he encountered Mrs. Harabee, one of a small army of women who had tried to teach him music.

“Why it's Doubtful,” cried Mrs. Harabee, a little brown lady with short hair and a beret. “Wearing a buttonhole! Doubtful, how on earth are you?”

Doubtful because he was a doubtful volunteer to music, and had remained so until she had despaired of him.

Doubtful because Old Hugo had made them an offer on the fees and scandalised the Bursar. The offer had comprised a second mortgage on a commercial hotel in Henley, but the Bursar was no friend of catering. Doubtful because . . .

“Hullo, Mrs. Harabee,” said Cassidy. “How are you?”

And it came back to him that she had also been his mother, and housed him in a red-brick bedroom on the Yeovil Road at a time when he was in mortal conflict with Old Hugo.

“How did it all work out for you?” she asked, as if they were meeting in Heaven.

“Not too bad Mrs. Harabee. I went into advertising first, then I invented things and formed a company.”

“Well done,” said Mrs. Harabee in the tone she used for applauding an easy phrase of music. “And what became of that foul father of yours?”

“He died,” said Cassidy, feeling it was easier to kill Old Hugo than explain him. “He went to prison and died.”

“Poor lamb,” said Mrs. Harabee. “I always had a
very
soft spot for him.”

They walked slowly down the lane, carried by the stream of tilting straw hats.

 

“You can come to tea if you want,” said Mrs. Harabee.

But Cassidy knew he was too old for her.