The Naive and Sentimental Lover (54 page)

 

Hugo white, not crying, clutching a Pan Am flight-bag filled with the few things he would need: a gramophone record, a new string for his toboggan.

Hugo very hot under the arms as they embraced once more on the doorstep.

Hugo white, and still not crying.

“Come along Hug,” says Mrs. Groat. “Mummy wants you.” At the fifth floor, Sandra's own now, John Elderman's silhouette; valium for a broken heart.

 

Heather Ast is hammering at the carriage window.

“I won't hear you,” Cassidy assures her through the electrically closed glass of the Bentley. “I just won't. I never want to see you again, Heather. It's as bad as that.”

The glass is too thick, she hears nothing.

You'll be a Groat in ten years, Heather; you'll all be Groats. Dust to dust, groat to groat, it's a woman's destiny, she has no other.

 

Mercifully, he has entered a tunnel, the change distracts him. At its end, five minutes away, lies Oberwald, the upper forest. After Oberwald comes Sainte-Angèle of the Peaks; there is no halt between them.

With the tunnel, a moment's dark before the lights go up. Wooden palings, painted cheap yellow by the overhead bulbs, crowd the once-white window, flick past in a bewildering curve, like the splinted fingers of a smashed hand waved across his passive face. The sounds are magnified in this long cave. History, geology, not to speak of countless set-texts from mediaeval faculties at Oxford, all deepen and intensify the underground experience. Minotaurs, hermits, martyrs, miners, incarcerated since the first constructions, howl and clank their chains, for this is under ground, where old men scratch for knowledge, gold, and death. Once, a few years ago, looking through the same window at the same dull timbers, Cassidy found himself staring into the black, patient eyes of a chamois crammed against the tunnel wall. Reaching the village he at once made representations to the station master in the interest of the local wild life. There was nothing to be done, the official said, when he had listened very carefully to the good man's case, the chamois had been dead for several days.

 

These yellow lights are dull; they make me sleepy.

 

How long since he had slept?

Was there a record of how many nights? Mr. Lemming, you might consult the Minutes.

Or was it
one
night doled out among different beds and floors? The screaming now—be forensic—where did the screaming fit in as she held my foot, Sandra my longstanding wife, to keep me in the bedroom? Held it against her head, lying full length on the tasteful curly Wilton, wetting Christ's ankle with her tears? Was that
one
incident of an eventful night, or a
whole
night by itself? Put another way, in Sandra's Women's Army voice:
Who broke the clock?
That grandfather clock.
Who broke it?
Four hundred quid's worth of sixteenth-century inlay toppled from its hall stand?
Own up! It's perfectly natural to break a clock I simply want to know who did it. I'll count five, if no culprit volunteers I shall not finish the sentence.

The first suspect (class has
much
to do with crime) is Snaps' libidinous visualizer, preaching free love over the bannisters in his corduroy claret suit. The resentful fellow gave the clock a push, it was his way of closing the generation gap.

But wait, Snaps has fled her lair, taking her visualizer with her. Hied herself to Bournemouth, pregnancy the cause, she likes to have them by the sea, water being ever preferable to air.

Who else? Quick, who else?

Granny Groat, putative mother-in-law, sometime mother of the accused, floundering through dark corridors to save the electricity:
she
did it . . .

Not guilty, alas. Decisive gestures are not her style, not even by mistake.

Very well:
you
did it! Sandra herself, wet-bibbed from crying, no strength left to sleep; Sandra, in her last exhaustion, lurched into the clock, toppled it, before she fell herself?

Not guilty. She would own up.

Help! I accuse Old Hugo, satanist, worker of spells, possessor of an evil eye! Staring out of the penthouse window, sipping a nice touch of brandy and ginger, the old wizard deliberately carved the air with a familiar gesture of his hand and set up waves of disturbance which found their way to Abalone Crescent and so destroyed the instrument of time!

 

“Father I need a bed.”

“Then go home, it's waiting for you, isn't it?”

“Father, put me to bed. Please.”

“Go home! You'll be a delinquent if you don't remarry that bitch, get out, get out, get out!”

The tunnel continued; to dance but not to sleep.

 

“Angie I need a bed.”

Angie Mawdray, standing at her own front door, was dressed in a light bedwrap which did not conceal one side of her body.

“It's no good, Aldo,” she said. “Honest.”

“But Angie I only want to sleep.”

“Then go to a hotel, Aldo, you can't come here, you know you can't, not
now.
”

“But Angie.”

“I'm
married,
” she reminded him, rather sternly. “
You
remember, Aldo, you organised the whip-round.”

“Of course,” said Cassidy. “Of course I did, I'm sorry. Good evening Meale, how's it going?”

From under Che Guevara's uncompromising stare, the pallid face of Meale nodded respectfully to his master. He would have stood up no doubt, but his nakedness was against him.

“Good evening, Mister Aldo, step in, sir, do. Sorry about the mess.”

“Come in the afternoons,” Angie whispered. “I'm only working mornings, aren't I,
silly?
”

Went to Kurt's? Or stayed at Angie's after all? Certainly he felt a limpness round the loins, a sense of
after
rather than
before.
Did he then after all enjoy the very skilled embraces of Miss Mawdray the well-known top secretary, while Meale's apologetic eye turned sensibly away for the visit of the Chairman?

“
Think nothing of it,
” says the old boulevardier, nicely lodged among the dewy folds.
“You young people need a start in life.”

A howl from the engine. Daylight soon? Not in Kurt's grey, uncomfortable rooms; even the windows are smoked against the sun.

 

“Kurt, I need a bed.”

Kurt had no one in his apartment, not Angie Mawdray, not Lemming, not Snaps, not Blue, not Faulk, not even Meale. He wore a grey Swiss dressing gown of best Swiss silk, and when Cassidy was tucked unsafely in the ever-prepared spare room he came to see him with a long white cup of Swiss Ovomaltine.

“No, Kurt.”

“But Cassidy my dear fellow you
know
you are one of us. Listen.
One,
you prefer the company of men, correct?”

“Correct, but—”

“
Two
your physical encounters with women have been totally without satisfaction. Cassidy, look here I mean my God I can
tell.
I can see it in your eyes, anyone can.
Three
—”

“Kurt honestly, I would if I wanted, I promise. I'm not ashamed any more. I wanted to at school but that's just because there weren't any girls about. That's the truth. I've got too much sense of humour, Kurt. I think of you lying there with nothing on, holding it, and I get the giggles. I mean
what for
. . . do you see what I'm getting at?”

“Goodnight Cassidy.”

“Goodnight, Kurt. And thanks.”

“And look here, one day we climb the Eiger, right?”

“Right.”

Dozing, he quite hoped Kurt would come back: exhaustion erodes the moral will as well as the sense of humour. But Kurt didn't. So Cassidy listened to the traffic instead, and wondered: does he sleep, or dream of me?

 

Daylight, and another warning scream from the small, incorruptible engine. The train has stuck. The doors hiss and fall open. The porter is calling Sainte-Angèle.

 

He called it in the
patois,
it could have been Michel Angelo or England. He called it loud, above the three-toned clanging of the mountain bell; he carolled it for Christmas past or coming, in a voice of male dominance which echoed over the empty station. He called it straight at Cassidy through the smeared white window of his first-class carriage; and if you want to go farther you must change. He called it as if it were Cassidy's own name, his last walk and his last stopping place. The porter was a bearded man and wore a badge of office on his smock. His eyes were masked by heavy black brows, and by the black shadow of his black peaked cap. Answering the summons, Cassidy got up at once, stepped blithely on to the empty platform, his overnight bag swinging in his strong hand.

“Tomorrow,” said the porter consolingly, “we get
plenty
snow.”

“Ah but tomorrow doesn't often come, does it?” Cassidy replied, never at a loss to cap a pleasantry.

The weather which greeted Cassidy at Sainte-Angèle was like a meteorological extension of the confusion which had recently taken possession of his mind. The best of holiday resorts has its uncongenial seasons, and not even Sainte-Angèle, famed though she may be for her dependable and temperate character, is exempt from nature's immutable laws. In winter, as a rule, her snowclad village street is a jubilant carnival of bobble-hats, horse-sledges, and brilliant shop windows, where Europe's affluent swains rub shoulders with the girls of Kensal Rise, and many insincere contracts of love are closed in the surrounding forests. In summer, their less pecunious teachers and elders stride vigorously into the flower-laden slopes and refresh themselves beside Goethe's ebullient streams, while children in traditional costume chant age-old songs in praise of chastity and cattle. Spring is a sudden and lovely time, with impatient flowers bursting through the late snow; while autumn as the first snows fall brings back forgotten hours of breathless, churchlike quiet between the bustle of two hectic seasons.

But there are days, as every alpine visitor must know, when this pleasing pattern is without apparent reason violently shattered; when the seasons suddenly tire of their place in the natural cycle and, using all the weapons of their armoury, do violent battle until they have reached exhaustion. In place of winter's magic the village is assailed by querulous rains and morose, unheated nights, when thunder alternates with hybrid sleet and neither stars nor sun can pierce the swirling cloud banks. Worse, a
foehn
may come, the sick south wind that strikes the mountains like a plague, rotting giant slabs of snow and poisoning the temper of both the villagers and their guests. And when at last it takes itself away, the brown patches on the hillsides are laid out like the dead, the sky is white and empty, and the birds have gone. This
foehn
is the mountains' curse; nowhere is safe from it.

The first symptoms are external: a sourceless dripping of water, a mysterious departure of air and colour. With this depletion of the atmosphere comes a gradual draining of human energy, a sense of moral listlessness, like a constipation of the mental faculties, which spreads gradually over the whole psychic body until it has blocked all outlets. At such times, waiting for the storm, a man may smoke a cigar halfway down the village street and the trace of it will be there tomorrow, the smoke and the smell lingering in the dead air at the very place where he stood. Sometimes there is no storm at all. The lull ends and the cold returns. Or a hurricane strikes: a black, raging
Walpurgisnacht
with winds of sixty, seventy miles an hour. The high street is strewn with broken sticks, the tarmac is showing through the snow, and you would think a river has slid by in the darkness on its way from the peaks to the valley.

It was the
foehn
which ruled now.

 

The sight reminded Cassidy of a wet day at Lord's cricket ground. The village's two porters stood together like umpires, clutching their smocks to their middles and agreeing it was impossible. Above him, but very close, the superb twin peaks of the Angelhorn hung like dirty laundry from the grey sky. The snow was mostly gone. The clock said ten-fifteen, but it might have been stuck for years. Making his way towards the restaurant he thought:
This is how we die, alone and cold and out of breath, suspended between white places.

“Hullo lover,” said Shamus quietly. “Looking for someone are we?”

“Hullo,” said Cassidy.

H
averdown woodsmoke lingered in the damp air, antlers loomed along the brown walls. A group of dark-faced labourers sat drinking beer. Away from them, at their own sad place, the waitresses read German magazines, secretly panting from the
foehn
like patients in a doctor's waiting room.

He was sitting near the bar, in an alcove, at a big round table all to himself, under the crossed guns of the Sainte-Angèle shooting club. A silk flag, stitched by the ladies of the community, proclaimed the village loyalty to William Tell. The alcove had a Flemish darkness, homely and confiding; the pewter glinted comfortably, like well-earned coin. He was drinking
café crème
and he had lost weight. A streak of white light from the window ran down the deathcoat like a recent shock. He wore no hat and no beard; his face looked bared, and vulnerable, and very pale. Cassidy moved in beside him, holding his overnight bag in his arms like Hugo's beach crocodile, then shunting it down the polished bench, then dumping it on the floor between them with a sloppy thud.