“Hi,” he said again. “What gives?”
Her concentration deepened. She was a slight, hard-bodied girl with brown, male eyes and, like the house, she wore a wistful, uninhabited look which somehow discouraged trespass and yet lamented loneliness. Something had been planted there and withered. Regarding her, and waiting for the storm to break, Cassidy had the uncomfortable feeling that that something was himself. For years he had tried to want what she wanted, and found no external reason to want anything else. But in all those years he had never quite known what she wanted. Recently, she had acquired several small accomplishments, not for herself, but to pass on to her children before she died. Yet her children wearied her, and she was frequently unkind to them in little spiritual ways, the way children are unkind to one another.
The darkness falls at Thy behest.
“You’re getting on fine,” Cassidy volunteered. “Who’s teaching you?”
“No one,” she said.
“How was trade?”
“Trade?”
“Down at the clinic. Many turn up?”
“You call that trade?” she asked.
The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.
“No one turned up,” she said.
“Perhaps they’re cured,” he suggested, his voice slowing to the rhythm of the music.
The darkness falls at Thy behest.
“No. They’re out there. Somewhere.”
The metronome ticked slowly to a halt.
“Shall I wind it up for you?”
“No thank you,” she said.
The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.
Awkwardly, not wishing to disturb the Afghan, he balanced one buttock on the winged chair. It was very uncomfortable and the original embroidery pricked his tender skin.
“So what did you do?”
“Baby-sat.”
“Oh. Who for?”
The darkness falls at Thy behest.
“The Eldermans.”
She spoke with an infinite patience, in sad acceptance of an unfathomable mystery. The Eldermans were the doctor and his wife, a hearty, treacherous couple and Sandra’s closest allies.
“Well, that was nice,” said Cassidy, genially. “Go to the flicks did they? What did they see?”
“I don’t know. They just wanted to be together.”
Very stiffly, she played a descending scale. She finished very low and the Afghan growled in discomfort.
“Sorry,” said Cassidy.
“What for?”
“About Hugo. I just got worried.”
“Worried what about?” she asked, frowning. “I don’t think I understand.”
The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.
In his heart, Cassidy was prepared to confess to anything—human crimes had no logic for him, and he readily assumed he had committed them all. Outward confession, however, was painful to him, and offensive to his notions of deportment.
“Well,” he began reluctantly, “I deceived you. I took him to a specialist. I pretended I was taking him to High Noon and instead I took him to a specialist.” Receiving not even a reply, let alone absolution, he added more crisply, “I thought that was what we’ve been quarrelling about for the last eight days.”
The darkness falls at Thy behest.
With a noise like slopping water the Afghan began chewing at her forepaw, trying to get at something deep in the skin.
“Stop that!” Sandra bellowed; and to Cassidy: “Are we quarrelling? I’m sure we’re not.”
The Afghan paid her no attention.
“Oh well that’s fine,” said Cassidy. And being close to anger, let the hymn soothe him, both lines.
“Where’s Heather?” he asked.
“Out with a boyfriend.”
“I didn’t know she had one.”
“Oh, she has.”
The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.
“Is he nice?”
“He cherishes her.”
“Oh well that’s fine.”
The hole in the wall gave into what was once a study. The plan was to link the two rooms, which they agreed had been the original architect’s original intention.
“What did the specialist say?” she enquired.
“He took another set of X-rays. He’ll ring me tomorrow.”
“Well let me know, won’t you?”
“I’m sorry I deceived you. It was . . . emotion. I care very much for him.”
She played another slow scale. “Of course you do,” she said, as if accepting the inevitable. “You’re very fond of your children. I know you are. It’s perfectly natural, why apologise? Have you had a good year?” she asked politely. “Spring’s the time you count your money, isn’t it?”
“Useful,” Cassidy replied cautiously.
“You mean you’ve made a lot of profit?”
“Well, before tax, you know.”
Folding away her music she went to the long window and stared at things he couldn’t see.
“Goodnight darling,” her mother called reproachfully from upstairs.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” Sandra said. “Did you buy an evening paper?”
“No, no I’m afraid not.”
“Or hear the news by any chance?”
He thought of telling her about Flaherty but decided against. Religion was one of the subjects they had agreed not to discuss.
“No,” he said.
She said no more but only sighed so finally he asked:
“What news?”
“The Chinese have launched their own satellite.”
“Oh my Lord,” said Cassidy.
The political world meant nothing to either of them, Cassidy was convinced of it. Like a dead language it provided the opportunity for studying at one remove the meaning of their own. If she talked America she was objecting to his money and Cassidy would reply in kind with a reference to the falling value of the pound; if she talked world poverty she was harping upon their early days when a slender budget had forced upon them an attitude of selfless abstinence. If she talked Russia, a country for which she professed the profoundest admiration, he knew that she longed for the plainer, passionate laws of a more vigorous sex life, for a never-never land in which his own sophistries could once more be subjugated to urges he no longer felt for her.
It was only recently however that she had entered the field of Defence. Uncertain of her meaning he selected a jovial tone.
“Was it yellow?”
“I don’t know what colour it was I’m afraid.”
“Well I’ll bet it was a flop,” he said.
“It was a complete success. Jodrell Bank has confirmed the Chinese bulletin.”
“Oh Lord well that’ll stir things up I suppose won’t it?”
“Yes. I forgot how much you enjoy sensation.”
She had moved closer to the window. Her face so near the glass seemed to be lit by darkness and her voice was as lonely as if she were talking of lost love. As if the day Thou hast given her, Lord, was ended.
“You do realise don’t you that the Pentagon assessment of war risk foresees an annual rise of two per cent per annum?” With the tip of her small finger she drew a triangle and crossed it out. “That gives us fifty years at the most.”
“Well, not us,” he said still striving for a cheerful note.
“I meant civilisation. Our children in case you’d forgotten them. It’s not much fun is it?”
Under the piano, two cats who had till then slept peacefully in each other’s arms woke and began spitting.
“Perhaps it’ll change,” he suggested. “Perhaps it’ll go down again; it might. Like the stock market.”
With a shake of her dark hair she dismissed all chances of survival.
“Well, even if it doesn’t there’s not much we can do about it, is there?” he added injudiciously.
“So let’s just go on making money. It’ll be nice for the children won’t it, to die rich. They’ll thank us for that, won’t they?” Her
voice had risen a key.
“Oh no,” said Cassidy, “I don’t mean that at all. God, you make me out to be a sort of monster . . .”
“But you don’t propose to do anything do you? None of us does.”
“Well . . . there are the boys’ clubs . . . the playing fields ... the Cassidy Trust . . . I mean I’m sorry they haven’t happened yet, but they will, won’t they?”
“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.
10
Waiting.
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?”