The Naive and Sentimental Lover (52 page)

“Yes,” said Cassidy.

 

It was old Niesthal. His wife, in lovely black, was nodding brightly over his shoulder. His long, kindly face was wrinkled with concern.

“Now my dear,” Mrs. Groat was saying, noticing Sandra's approach. “I was merely telling them about Colly, I'm not flowing white raiment whatever they may think, I'm flesh and blood my dear, it's only fair, I have my own life to lead, it's time you knew. Darling these aren't very
hot,
or is it the stairs? Still I never did hold with hot plates did I? Colly proposed to me, so there. He wanted me to leave your father and run away with him.” She was appealing to the company. “But of course I couldn't, could I? Not with Snaps and Sandra to look after.”

“That poor fellow, Cassidy, we were so
worried,
so
very
worried.”

His wife added her concern. “He was like the face of a wild man.” She turned to Sandra, accepting a
vol-au-vent.
“Dancing on the table,” she told her, evoking pity with her eyes. “Shouting, screaming like he was being
murdered
and the waiters not knowing how to take him. And so
brave
your husband, just like a policeman—”

“Phone,” said Ast.

“Thanks,” said Cassidy.

“Jesus lover,” said Shamus, with no accent except his own bewitching voice. “You don't half put a strain on friendship.”

 

Next door, the children had begun to play the drums.

T
he enshrinement of a part of Aldo Cassidy's identity—not to speak of a part of his fortune, illicitly yielding a tax-free four per cent from Kantonal gilt-edged—in the remote but fashionable Swiss village of Sainte-Angèle was a matter upon which, in less turbulent times, he would freely have dilated. “It's my bit of aloneness,” he liked to say with a world-weary smile. “My
special
place.” And would paint a stirring picture of the Chairman and Managing Director—was he also still President? he forgot—of Cassidy, anyway, clad in rough alpine tweeds trekking from valley to valley, conferring with shepherds, whispering with guides in the bazaars, as he penetrated ever deeper into the interior of uncharted Europe on his lonely quest for seclusion from the hurly-burly of big business. “It's where I keep my books,” he would add, leaving with his questioners a vision of scattered cow huts and one rough-built chalet where Cassidy, the scholar
manqué,
caught up on his Greek philosophers.

To Helen, stretched beside him in the luxurious comfort of the Adastras Hotel, he had emphasised the cultural and historic appeal of his chosen section of the Alps. The beauty of Sainte-Angèle was
fabled,
he said, quoting a brochure he had recently read in praise of his investment. Not a poet, not a member of the Few but had experienced profound movements of the artistic spirit upon contemplating its incomparable peaks, its dizzy waterfalls, its noble if rude domestic architecture. Byron, Tennyson, Carlisle, and Goethe, to name but a handful, all had paused here in breathless awe to sing their praises of the apocalyptic cliffs and the uncompromising sheerness of the valley walls: Shamus would be no exception.

“But is it
dangerous,
Cassidy?”

“Not if you know your way around. You have to get your mountain legs, mind.”

“Well, shouldn't we go bicycling first or something? To prepare?”

As to the evils of modernity, he assured her, they had barely encroached upon the place. Balanced upon the upper basements of the great Angelhorn massif, Sainte-Angèle could only be reached by a single-track railway. There was no road. Jaguars, even Bentleys, must be left at the lower station.

“In a way, it's symbolic. You leave your troubles in the valley. Once you're up there, you're on your own. The world doesn't matter any more.”

“And you're leaving it all to
us,
” Helen breathed, reminding him that he must put off the Eldermans or they would clash. “But I mean what do we do about . . . food and things? I suppose we just manage on cheese.”

“Frau Anni will look after you,” Cassidy replied cheerfully, omitting to mention, in his evocation of a faithful foreign retainer, the dozen food shops which served the fifty hotels and countless tourists who for the four winter months crammed the fairy-lit streets in search of rare souvenirs not available in the cities.

 

In a less romantic moment—eating alone, for instance, or driving on a secret errand—Cassidy would admit to more specific reasons for his affinity with the place. He would recall how old Outhwaite of Mount Street W. had happened to mention, the very day after Cassidy had made a big killing on the Stock Exchange, that he and Grimble were handling a Swiss property for a non-residential client; a snip at twenty-five thousand, mortgage available; how Cassidy had within minutes phoned his bankers and closed on premium dollars at eighteen per cent, which in the following week had risen to forty. Warming to the narrative, he would relive his arrival in the village to inspect his purchase; the long toil up the snowy hill, the magic moment when he first saw his own house raised against the Angelhorn, the rake of its gables perfectly answered in the angles of the peak behind it; and how, sitting on the balcony and gazing upwards at the great points and saddles of the Alps, he had recognised for the first time that a certain foreignness gave him comfort; and found himself wondering whether, after all, there had not always been a foreign corner to his heart, and whether his mother had not been Swiss. The mountains of Sainte-Angèle were appalling even on a perfect afternoon; they were also a shield, placing nature between himself and his fellow man, and reminding him of the larger relationships of his heart.

His conversations of the next day with local professional men, bank managers, lawyers and the rest, opened his eyes to another extraordinary feature of the mountain life. The Swiss
revered
commercial success! They admired it; saw it as the asset of a gentleman; stranger still, they not only held wealth to be forgiveable, but desirable, moral even. Its acquisition in their unclouded eye was a social duty towards an undercapitalised world. For the Swiss, Cassidy rich was positively more admirable than Cassidy poor, a view which in his own English circle found little acceptance and much derision.

Intrigued, he decided to remain for the weekend on the pretext of a local complication. He engaged rooms at the Angèle-Kulm, the chalet not yet being ready for his occupancy. And thus, alone, made other startling discoveries. That his father owned no hotels in Sainte-Angèle, and had no penthouse aerie overlooking the curling rink. That there were no meths drinkers in Sainte-Angèle to trouble a rich man's heart, that the chalet drawing room had no space for a grand piano. That in Sainte-Angèle, as long as a man paid his bills and tipped the delivery boys, his struggle for position was over before it was joined; that thereafter he would be known, saluted, and welcomed as a person in the tradition of the English tourist, as a patron of the Alps, collecting Bartlett prints and recalling the Empire connection.

Therefore Cassidy did not let the house, as he had intended—a small tax-free income on the Continent can do a man no harm—but left it empty. By the Tuesday of his departure he was causing diligent carpenters to fit sweet-smelling pine cupboards in the bedrooms; had bought furniture from Berne and linen from Interlaken; engaged a housekeeper and fastened nameplates to the doors, this room Mark's, this room Hugo's. And every winter from that day on, and every spring when Sandra allowed it, he had taken his family there, and walked his children in the evening pageant down the high street, and bought them fur boots and
fondue.
Sandra had not gone willingly at first; Switzerland was a millionaires' playground, the women had no vote. But gradually, on its neutral soil, they had formed a treaty of temporary coexistence. In Sainte-Angèle, he noticed, where she had him largely to herself, the world's agonies became markedly less pressing for Sandra; moreover the cold made her face pretty, she could see it in the mirror.

 

Lastly—though it took Cassidy a year or two to discover this—Sainte-Angèle was English. Was administered by an English government-in-exile, with an English cabinet recruited largely from the area of Gerrard's Cross, a government that was both legislative and executive, and met daily at a reserved table in the most popular bar, calling itself a Club, and moaning about the discourtesy of the natives and the rising value of the franc. In spirit, it was a military government, colonial, imperial, self-appointed. Its veterans wore campaign medals and decorations for valour; its young the uniform pullovers of English regiments. These people took decisions of immense import. True, the governed were not even always aware of the existence of their governors; true, the good Swiss continued to go about their lives in the sweet illusion that they ran their own community, and that the English were merely tourists like any others, except a little louder and less affluent. But in terms of history it was written for all who cared to see: the skill and power which once had bound all India, Africa, and North America into a single Empire had found a final enclave on this small and beautiful alpine ledge. The village of Sainte-Angèle was the last proof-rock of the English administrative greatness, of the super-race of clerks and merchants. They came here every year to own and to mispronounce it; and little by little they had added Cassidy to their ranks. Not all at once, and never noisily. Cassidy's desire for quiet, his un-English deference towards the local inhabitants, his stated wish to avoid controversy, all dictated that his function be subdued; and so it was. On their printed lists of officebearers, in their announcements of annual honours and awards, his name either did not appear or was hedged about by qualifying adjectives:
co-opted, ex-officio, honorary.
At senate evenings on Tuesday, Council evenings on Wednesday, Praesidium conferences on Thursday, Get-Togethers on Saturday, at English Church on Sunday, his influence passed largely unacknowledged. Only when a great matter was in hand—the recruitment of a new member, the raising of advertisement rates in the Club magazine, or the purchase of a new piece of furniture for the gracefully disintegrating clubroom—would a small nocturnal troop of cabinet ministers and their retinue, muffled against the cold, wend its way up the narrow path for punch and wisdom at the Cassidy chalet.

“He's so awfully generous,” they said, “and
such
a good committee man.” Many were ladies. “He's so
rich,
” they said and spoke of quite large contributions made in francs.

In the tearooms and afternoon dance-bars, in the little groups that huddled round the English notice-board at the end of the day's skiing, his prowess as an alpinist was deferentially admired. A Renaissance man, they said; an all-rounder of the alpine sports; he had climbed the Matterhorn in winter; he had won the
quatre pistes
at Val d'Isère, he had held the bobsleigh record at St. Moritz, he had taken part in night ski-jumping in a dinner jacket and beaten all the Swiss; he had done the
haute route
with A. L. Rowse. These feats were not recorded, and Cassidy himself was too humble to own to them. But from year to year, humility or no, he had become a small monument to their collective greatness. And if he had not climbed the pedestal of his own accord, neither had he so far found reason to dismount.

 

Such, till now, the nature of Cassidy's foreign haven. A mountain fastness, preserving at high altitude and low temperature many of the harmless visions which comprised his aspiring English soul; an extra life, not unlike its English fellow, but rendered innocent by the vastness of the scenery which contained it. Yet on that cold, blank morning of a nameless, sunless month, crouched in the rear compartment of the tiny train, Cassidy found neither pleasure nor comfort in the prospect of revisiting his mountain self.

Outside, the scenery was white and listless. What was not white was black, or chalked by cloud and squalls of gritty snow which glanced the leaking window he faced. The fog had drained the mountains of their colour; and something had drained Cassidy also, paled him, attacked the last optimism which till now had always somehow vanquished in his features. He rose because he was lifted, but his body was without motion, sketched in complementary greys against the high white desert of the sky and hills. Sometimes, as if obeying an unheard command, he intoned a note of music; and catching himself, lowered his eyes and frowned. He wore gloves; his railway ticket was stowed in the left palm, recalling a habit he had learned from a mother while travelling on trolley buses in coastal towns. He had shaved early, probably near Berne, and to himself he smelt of the many-too-many other people who used the same night sleeper from Ostend.

W
here had he been, for how long, when?

These questions had concerned him off and on throughout the journey. They were not an obsession but much remained to disentangle, and Cassidy had a nasty feeling, particularly just before food, that he might already be dead. On the white screen of the window as it carried him indifferently upwards, a formless array of visions played before his largely uncritical eye. These pictures were his mind; his memory no longer served him, it had joined his fears. I am outside my own experience, he thought; I watch it through this window. A carriage whose name is Cassidy, peopled by empty seats. Outside me lies the desert, my destiny.

He sits up sharply. Who is this? Mark's headmaster, carrying a number-four iron, army waterproofs over his frightful suit, a Russian fur hat clapped over his hollow face, lollops through the frosty mists. The raindrops run off him as if he were a military monument, circling his zealot's eyes and washing lighter lines over the bronze campaigner's skin. You taught me too, cried Cassidy, and you were not one day younger even in those days!