The Naive and Sentimental Lover

  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.

  Must rush now. Promised to pay my fortnightly visit to Grandpa, then home to Mummy. Wonder what she’s got for supper, don’t you? Hey Mark—I had a thought: isn’t it funny to think that one day, sitting at this very desk, you may be writing these very same words to your beloved son? Well, cheerio. Remember that life’s a gift and not a burden, and that you are still barely at the stage of opening the wrapping.

  Dad

  P.S. Incidentally, did you read the extraordinary case of this Irishman Flaherty, in County Cork, who goes round claiming he is God? I am sure there is nothing in it but one never knows. I imagine you missed it, I know you only get the Telegraph down there, despite your mother’s letter to Mr. Grey.

  “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.

  “We should, shouldn’t we? It’s the silly English thing, I’m afraid. Regulations are part of our tradition. We make them, then we fall in love with them.”

  The expression held Kurt still for several chronometric seconds. “Fall in love?” he repeated.

  “Figuratively.”

  Kurt saw him to the door. “Please give her my regards.”

  “I will. Thanks. I say, I don’t know whether you read the English papers but there’s a southern Irish man who’s announced he’s God. Not the new Christ, apparently. God.”

  Kurt’s frown was as faint as a pencil line after the rubbing out.

  “Southern Ireland is Catholic,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I am sorry. I am evangelical.”

  “Goodnight,” said Cassidy.

  “Goodnight,” said Kurt.

  For an hour, perhaps longer, he took taxis to places. Some smelt of Old Hugo’s cigars, some of the scent of women he loved but had never met. It was dusk by the time he approached the Crescent and the lights were on in the houses either side. Stopping the cab he walked the last hundred yards and the Crescent was like the night they had first seen it, a treasure chest of pastel doors and antique coaching lamps, bound books, rocking chairs, and happy couples.

  “You can have any one of the three. This one, this one, this one.”

  “Let’s have them all,” said Sandra, holding his hand as they stood in the rain. “Lorks, Pailthorpe—” using their game words and giving his hand a squeeze “—whoever will we get to fill so many rooms?”

  “We’ll found a dynasty,” said Cassidy proudly. “We’ll be the Greeks, the Minoans, the Romans. Masses of little Pailthorpes, fat as butter. So.”

  Woollen gloves she wore, and a woollen headscarf soaked through, and the rain lay on her face like tears of hope.

  “Then there won’t never be enough rooms,” she said proudly. “Cos I’m going to have litters of them. Ten at a time like Sal-Sal. Till you trip over them on the stairs. So.”

  Sal-Sal was a Labrador bitch, their first, now dead.

  She had drawn the curtains early, as if she were afraid of each day’s dying. When she was young s
he had enjoyed the evenings, but now the curtains made an early night of them, and the twilight was left outside. The house stood in darkness, a dark green column, six floors of it, one corner stuck like a prow on to the pavement and chipped at handlebar height where the tradesboys passed. He hardly noticed the scaffolding any more, it had been there so long. He saw the house like a face under the hair of it, changing only where the masons changed it as they replaced the wooden lintels with hand-turned stone.

  We’ll make it perfect. We’ll make it just as it would have been in the eighteenth century.

  And if you do decide to go into the Church, said Sandra, we’ll let it to a boys’ club for peanuts.

  Yes, Cassidy agreed, we will. So.

  Ducking under the scaffolding he unlocked the front door and stepped inside. Bundles of Oxfam clothing in the hall, a plastic lifeboat for putting pennies in.

  Music.

  She was practising a simple hymn; just the tune, no attempt at harmony.

  The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.

  He looked for Heather’s coat. Gone.

  Christ, he thought; not a witness, not a referee. It’ll take them a month to find our bodies.

  “Hi,” he called up the stairs.

  The music continued.

  Sandra had her own drawing room and the piano was too large for it. It stood between her doll’s house and a crate of bricà-brac she had bought at Sotheby’s and not yet unpacked, and it looked as though it had been dropped there from above like a lifeboat and no one knew where to sail it. She sat very upright before it, manning it alone, one light burning for help and the metronome ticking out a signal. On its bow, where it finally tapered to a halt, stood a pile of dusty circulars about Biafra. From under the words “Biafra the Facts,” a black baby, terribly emaciated, screamed soundlessly into the crystal chandelier. Sandra wore a housecoat and her mother had put up her hair for her as if to say it wouldn’t be needed any more that night. There was a hole in the wall behind her, jagged like a shell hole. Builders’ dust sheets covered the floors, and a very big Afghan hound watched her from the depths of a Queen Anne winged chair.