“Fine,” said Cassidy. “Just fine. Why don’t they clean these curtains?” he asked, tugging at the net.
“They’ve just been done,” said Angie with spirit. “You know very well they have. You were only complaining last week they’d been taken down.”
Cassidy did not care for that kind of reply.
“Tell me,” he said casually, his back still turned towards her, “what’s happened to your engagement ring?”
He would not have asked, but for her retaliation. “Your engagement ring,” he insisted, turning now and pointing to the extra quarter-inch of nakedness. “You haven’t lost it, have you, Angie? That would be very bad.”
“I’m just not wearing it, am I?” she said in a small voice, and though she must have known that he was still facing her, did not lift her head.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to pry.”
Hangdog, he returned to the window. A scene, he thought glumly, we’re going to have a scene. I’ve been an oaf again and now she’s hurt. The last scene had involved Meale, he remembered; Angie had wanted Cassidy to provide an excuse for her not to accept an invitation from him and he had declined.
“You must get out of it for yourself,” he had told her, Cassidy the champion of plain dealing. “If you don’t like him, tell him. He’ll only go on asking you if you don’t.” Well now he had made a second, equally unfortunate sally into her private life, and he was about to pay the price.
He waited.
“I wear it when I feel like it,” said Angie at last, to his back. Her voice was still quiet, but it was already breaking with anger. “And if I don’t feel like it I won’t bloody bother, so sod it.”
“I have apologised,” the Chairman reminded her.
“I don’t mind if you have or not. I’m not interested in apology am I? I’ve gone off him, that’s all, and it’s none of your business.”
“I’m sure it’s just a tiff,” Cassidy assured her. “It’ll blow over, you’ll see.”
“It won’t,” she insisted, furious. “I don’t want it to blow over. He’s rotten in bed and he’s rotten out of it, so why should I marry him if I don’t want to?”
Not quite certain whether to believe the evidence of his ears, Cassidy remained silent.
“They’re too young,” said Angie, smacking her book on her knee. “I get bloody sick of them. They all think they’re marvellous and they’re just babies. Fucking selfish, silly babies.”
“Well,” said Cassidy stalking the safety of his desk. “I don’t know about that,” and laughed, as if ignorance were a joke. “Angie, do you often swear like that?”
She rose in a single movement, taking his cup with one hand and tugging at the hem of her skirt with the other. “Not unless I’m goaded, do I?”
“How was the dentist?” he asked, hoping by small talk to restore a certain formality.
“Smashing,” she said, with a sudden very tender smile. “I could have eaten him alive, honest.”
Cassidy’s dentist; part of a private health scheme for the staff. A man of forty-five; married.
“Good.”
He made the next question even more casual: “Any messages at all . . . nothing out of the way?”
“A daft parson rang, that’s all. Wanting free prams for orphans. I put a note on your desk. Irish.”
“Irish? How do you know?”
“Because he spoke Irish, silly.”
“He didn’t leave a message?”
“No.”
Warmer. “He didn’t leave his number?”
“Look, he was daft, I told you! Lay off.”
She gazed at him, her hand resting on the door handle, an angel of puzzled compassion.
“If you’d tell me what it is, Aldo,” she said at last very quietly, “I’d know what to look for, wouldn’t I?”
The resentment, the aggression had all gone. Only a childish supplication remained. “I’m dead safe, honest, Aldo. You can tell me anything, they wouldn’t drag it out of me, no one would. Not if it’s about you.”
“It’s personal,” said Cassidy at last, his tongue clicking awkwardly on the dry roof of his mouth. “It’s something very personal. Thanks.”
“Oh,” said Angie.
“Sorry,” said Cassidy, and returned to his curtained window on an unresponsive world.
And still waiting, went to a crucial dinner at the unstately home of Dr. John and Somebody Elderman.
Mrs. Elderman was a sublimated graduate and the leader of the local dramatic set; while to her husband fell the important rôle of Cassidy’s medical advisor. The Cassidys had not so much met the Eldermans as descended to them, gone back to them, as it were, when brighter social hopes had been extinguished. John Elderman was a small man physically, and though meticulously faithful to his general practice, was known to read widely on the subject of the mind. Some years back, he had written a paper called “Positive Divorce,” and the tear-sheets were still generously displayed in every avant-garde room. Since then, the Eldermans had been much consulted in the Crescent, not only by the Cassidys, and they enjoyed a great reputation in the field of marriage guidance, and in all matters relating to love. Their principle, where Cassidy had met it, was to urge self-expression in the interests of self-discipline; no one, they insisted, was obliged to be unhappy; love was a gift, derived from flowers and rock.
The obscurity of this advice was deepened by the figure of Mrs. Elderman, a very big woman who wore gowns of brown hemp and ran a tangled garden on lines laid down by Rudolph Steiner. Her hair, which was mainly grey, similarly flourished. Separated rather than parted, it was bonded with flax on either side, like two enormous eggtimers made of steel wool. Loathing her, Cassidy had permanently forgotten her first name.
Even before they arrived there, the occasion had taken on for Cassidy a quality of dream-like frightfulness. He had come home late, by way of the Audley Arms, after a long and exceptionally tiresome meeting of his Export Ginger Group, and Sandra accused him of smelling of drink.
“How many did you have?”
“One. But it was meths.”
“How can you be so cheap?”
“Have one yourself. Plenty in the broom cupboard.”
“You wouldn’t find it in you, would you, to tell me what on earth is making you so bad-tempered?”
“Spring,” said Cassidy, scrubbing his teeth. From the main drawing room came a sudden burst of machine-gun fire. “What the hell’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That hammering. Who’s at the gates for Christ’s sake?” He knew very well what it was.
“The workmen are putting up a moulding. An eighteenth-century moulding which Heather and I bought two months ago from a breaker’s yard for ten shillings. I’ve told you about it fifty times; but still.”
“Ten bob!” He used his Jewish rag-trade voice. “Ten bob for the moulding, fine. Ten bob I can afford. But Christ Almighty what about the labour already?”
“Do you mind speaking properly?”
“It’s after five o’clock, those lads are getting about twenty guineas an hour!”
Sandra chose silence. He returned to his East End Jewish.
“So will somebody tell me what the hell’s the point of an eighteenth-century moulding in a nineteenth-century house? Everyone knows this place is Victorian except us, ask a rabbi.”
Still she chose silence.
“I mean Christ,” Cassidy demanded of the bathroom mirror, in which, like a female sentinel before the doors of Downing Street, Sandra waited vertical and motionless.
“Christ,” he repeated, in an Irish brogue he had been working on for several days. “I mean why the hell can’t we live in the twentieth century for a change?”
“Because you’re not to be trusted with it,” she snapped, and Cassidy secretly awarded her set and match. “And there’s no post,” she added nastily, “if that’s what you’re bothered about.”
Cassidy, studiously applying lather, o
ffered no reply.
“Anyway, why isn’t Hugo in bed?” he asked, knowing that answer also.
“He’s been invited.”
“What to?”
“The Eldermans’. As we have. As you know. If there’s any point in going still,” she added looking at her watch.
The Eldermans had squadrons of children and dined early so that their guests could have the benefit.
“Bloody silly. Dinner for a kid of seven! Needlessly exposing him to danger: that’s what it is. A doctor, I ask you. A fully fledged paid-up medic, even if he does come from Gerrard’s Cross. What if Hugo falls over? What if he stubs his toe? What if he gets kicked? Hugo hates those children, you know he does. So do I. Otiose little prigs,” he said.
“You know what I think.” Sandra’s mother, hovering thinly at their bedroom doorway, in blue-tinted glasses and a dress of little-girl yellow, gave a titter of terrified goodwill. “I think mercy and truth are married together.”
“Shut up, Mummy,” said Sandra.
“Come on, darlings,” her mother begged. “Kiss. I would at your age.”
“Mummy,” said Sandra.
“Darling, shouldn’t you give something to the workmen?”
“He did,” Sandra snapped. “He gave them five pounds. He’s utterly gross.”
They left in procession, five yards between each along the pavement, Cassidy carrying Hugo in his arms like a casualty of war, and Sandra’s mother bringing up the rear, jingling precariously in her cowbell jewellery.
“At least he’s a doctor, darling,” she called enticingly to Cassidy over her daughter’s head.
“Aldo hates doctors,” Sandra retorted. “You know he does. Except specialists of course,” she added nastily. “Specialists can do no wrong, can they? Specialists are absolutely perfect, even if they do charge fifty guineas for an X-ray.”
“Why’s Mummy cross?” Hugo asked from inside the blanket.
“Because Daddy’s been drinking,” Sandra snapped.
“She’s not cross,” said Cassidy. “It’s just Granny getting on her nerves,” and pressed the bell marked “House.”
“Bet you’ve got the wrong evening,” said Sandra.
“Greetings old man!” John Elderman cried. Perhaps to augment his height, he wore a chef’s hat. From beneath it pinkfringed eyes of palest blue regarded Cassidy with innocent sagacity. He stood very straight, thin shoulders braced, but the effort did him little good.
“Sorry we’re late,” said Cassidy.
“Smashing buttonhole,” said Elderman.
“He’s been wearing them all week,” said Sandra, as if she were giving him in charge.
She’s been briefing them, thought Cassidy; and now they’re going to observe me.
Heather Ast had already arrived. He could see her kneeling in the doorway, her agreeable rump lifted towards him while she played with the Eldermans’ foul children.
“Hi, Heather!” he cried cheerfully.
“Oh hullo, Sandra,” said Heather, ignoring him.
“Hi, Ast,” said Cassidy, but found no audience.
He was in a menagerie, he noticed, of human apes. Posturing witless apes. He had not seen the Eldermans in quite that light before, but now he realised that they were not people at all but gibbons and their children were emerging gibbons, coming on fast. The Niesthals alone escaped his censure. They were an old, stately couple dressed in black and they ran musical evenings for friendly Gentiles in a very valuable house in St. John’s Wood. Cassidy loved them because they were hopeless and kind. The Niesthals had come a little late because the old man did not close his Old Master gallery till seven; and they stood among the warring children like benefactors visiting a workhouse.
“Who is this one?” Mrs. Niesthal cried, bravely handling a junior Elderman. “Ah naturally, it is a Cassidy, see Friedl, you can see it from the eyes, it is a Cassidy.”
“I say John old boy,” said Cassidy.
“Yes, old man.”
“Those Niesthals hate kids, you know.”
“Never mind. Give ’em supper and shove ’em all upstairs.”
Not Hugo you won’t, butcher.
“Been refreshing ourselves I hear,” said Heather nastily, out of the corner of her mouth. “Who’s the buttonhole in aid of, anyway?”
“Meeow,” said Cassidy, rather more audibly than he intended; and two Elderman girls, picking up the note, repeated it very loud: “Meeow, meeow.”
“Like a cat,” Mrs. Niesthal explained to her husband, and they trooped into the dining room, stepping over several dogs which scavenged at the door.
Cassidy was feeling sick, and no one cared. He was sure he looked pale, and he knew he had a fever, but no one comforted him, no one lowered his voice in his proximity.
He had eaten boiled tongue, which reminded him of the Army, and he had drunk homemade wine which reminded him of nothing he had ever tasted in his life. Nettles, they made it of, apparently, foraged in Burnham Beeches and transported in their proudly disintegrating van.
“God it’s alcoholic,” one woman said. “I mean honestly John, I’m feeling so tipsy.”
“Has it got cinnamon in it?” asked another—Mrs. Groat, in fact, for whom cinnamon was an objection, it loosened the stomach.
“No,” said Cassidy, and won an embarrassed silence.
At the stove, John Elderman was adding Marc de Bourgogne to a pudding nobody wanted.
Cassidy was seated between two divorcées, a class of women the Eldermans encouraged. To my left, Heather Ast, normally congenial to me, but tonight abhorrent, having been corrupted by the Abalone Women’s Liberation Front. To my right, weighing in at about four stone one, an emaciated sea plant called Felicity, also a wine brewer, also divorced, also of the Unaligned Left, star of the Abalone Rep and famous in voluptuous rôles. The conversation however is being hogged by a Foreign Office couple; they have been brought by a child which speaks only Portuguese, it sits on one side of Hugo dressed in earrings and national costume. The wife is an improbable veteran of remote trouble spots, and very disenchanted. Who will teach Libby English? she moans. It was the price for going native; the English school in Angola was too reactionary.
“Oh, she will pick it up,” said Mrs. Niesthal confidently. “Listen we also had that problem.” The Niesthals laugh to one another, the rest of us are too progressive to admit that European Jews are not descended from Oliver Cromwell.
“It’s such a joy,” said Ast, admiring Elderman, “to find a man who can really cook.”
“So many are just frauds,” the Sea Plant agreed from his other side, waving in a slow current.
“We all are,” said Cassidy.
“Frauds?” cried old Niesthal, making a joke of it. “Don’t talk to me about frauds my God, I am buying them every day two dozen.”
A friendly laugh went up, led by John Elderman.
“Friedl says terrible things,” Mrs. Niesthal declared cheerfully.
“So does Heather,” said Cassidy, regretting it too late. The children had been put at the far end of the table and Hugo was reading the Evening Standard, his thumb wedged into his mouth like a pipe. Two Elderman girls, supine with food, clutched each other in a grimy embrace.
“Warsaw,” John Elderman proposed through the steam of his concoction, referring to an earlier conversation about the Free East. “That’s the place. Never seen medicine like it.” He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and his arms were thin and silky like a girl’s. “Drink deep,” he exhorted, throwing back his head. “Drink deep. Be merry.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Groat, ever anxious to show that she was attending. “Well, not too deep,” and giggled through the blue windows of her unnecessary spectacles.
“Well, well,” said Cassidy, and Sandra shot him a glance of loathing. “Well, well, well, well, well.”
The Elderman wife said she wished we could abolish private medicine. She was sitting not at the table but on the floor, half lying, a casualty of her husband’s co
oking, and as she spoke she pulled at her long, frizzy hair in frightful imitation of a mediaeval princess. She had recently taken up with art nouveau and wore a buckle of unpolished lead.
“Particularly specialists,” she added, not looking at Cassidy. “I think it’s so disgraceful that anyone can go in and buy specialist medical attention at the drop of a hat provided he’s rich. It’s so against the sense of it all. So unorganic. After all, if there is natural selection, it’s not going to be done by money is it?”
Her face had reddened with the nettles.
“Quite right,” said Sandra, and closed her mouth quickly, ready for the next round.
“Darling are you sure?” her mother asked with a frightened lowering of the jaw. “We could never have managed without in the Tropics.”
“Oh Mummy,” said Sandra in a rage.
“Sandra was born there,” said Cassidy encouragingly. “Weren’t you, Sandra? Why don’t you tell them about it Grans, they’d like that. Tell them about the doctor who was plastered.”
Hugo, turning a page, snorted into his fist.
“We were in Nebar,” Mrs. Groat immediately began explaining to the Sea Plant. “It used to be the Gold Coast, then it was Liberia—is it Liberia, darling, I never remember these new names?—or is Liberia the old name?—well of course there wasn’t any Liberia in our day!—” rather as if there wasn’t penicillin either “—so it had to be the Gold Coast really, didn’t it? We didn’t have Liberia,” she declared loudly with an arch smile to advertise the joke. “We had the Army instead.”
“You see,” Sandra hissed triumphantly to her mother, “nobody finds it funny. Aldo, shut up.”
She was too late; Cassidy was already applauding. It was not a deliberate provocation. Rather, it was as if his two hands, bored with lying on the table, had decided to get up and do something of their own; not till afterwards, uncomfortably reliving the moment with Sandra, did Cassidy secretly recall a different pair of hands applauding Helen at the restaurant in Bath.