The Naive and Sentimental Lover

  “You know . . . ,” Sandra began gratefully one night.

  “What do I know?”

  “Even if it were all a lie, the whole thing . . . the Paper, the Party, the safe seat . . . I’d still love you. I’d still admire you. Whatever the truth was.”

  But Cassidy was asleep, she could tell by his breathing.

  “The truth is you,” she whispered. “Not what you say. You.”

  29

  Time out; borrowed Time; a past unlived, too long imagined, belatedly made real; a cashing-in before the final settlement; an ascent of the emotional scale; a claiming of his rightful dues; a renewed search for the Blue Flower: who cares? Cassidy stripped, stood in the fountain, and felt the edges of his existence.

  “You know what I wish, Aldo?”

  “What do you wish?”

  “I wish all the stars were people and all the people were stars.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Because then our faces would be lit up with smiles all the time. We’d twinkle at each other and never be miserable any more.”

  “I’m not miserable,” said Cassidy stoutly. “I’m happy.”

  “And all the people we don’t like would be masses of miles away, wouldn’t they, because they’d be in the sky instead of the stars.”

  “We’ve got all night,” said Cassidy. “I’m not tired or anything. I’m just happy.”

  “I love you so much,” said Angie. “I wish you’d grin.”

  “Make me,” said Cassidy.

  “I can’t. I’m not clever enough.” She kissed him with placid, expert sensuality. “I never will be.”

  He grinned. “How’s that?”

  “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good for a beginner.”

  Tasting of snail garlic from the Epicure, watched by a white dog called Lettice, they lay in naked mutuality on the thin, bony bed of her attic flat in Kensington, next to the stars. Lettice was born under the sign of the bowman, she said, and Bowman was the sexiest sign out.

  “It means cock,” she explained. “Julie told me. Everything’s phallic really, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is,” said Cassidy.

  A Che Guevara poster hung on the wall beside a tapestry woven by Cretan primitives.

  “Lettice loves you too,” said Angie.

  “And I like him.”

  “Her,” said Angie. “Silly.”

  Yesterday he knew nothing about her; today everything.

  She believed in the Spirit and wore rows of mystic beads against her bare and extremely beautiful bosom. She believed in God and, like Shamus, hated the fucking clergy more than any other living thing; she was a vegetarian but thought snails were all right because they couldn’t feel and anyway the birds ate them; she had loved Cassidy from the day she joined the firm. She loved him as she loved no one in the world; Meale was a stupid bugger. She had identified the actual stars which determined Cassidy’s fortune, and gazed at them for nights on end. She had broad, hard thighs and her fleece grew downwards very neatly from the upper line, she called it her beard and liked him to keep his hand there, she couldn’t get enough. Her right breast was erogenous, she disapproved of abortion. She adored children and hated her fucking father. As a rule, Cassidy disliked swearing in women and had been hoping, at a suitable moment, to check it in Helen. But there was a hardy familiarity to Angie’s obscenities, a sublime indifference to their connotations, which somehow disinfected them of sensation.

  She was twenty-three. She adored Castro but her greatest single regret was that she had not fucked Che Guevara before he died; it was for this reason she had him nearest to her bed. Greece was fabulous, and one day when she had made lots of money she was going to go back and live there and have lots of babies: “All by myself, Aldo, little brown ones that play bare on the sand.”

  He knew also that naked she was very beautiful and neither shy nor afraid; and it amazed him beyond words or comprehension that she had lived so long fully dressed within his reach, and that he had not put out his hand to unzip her.

  “Listening?”

  “Yes,” said Cassidy. “Don’t let go.”

  “Pisces, right? That’s Latin. Two fishes, joined by the astrological umbilical cord, one swimming upstream and the other swimming downstream.”

  “Like us,” Cassidy suggested humbly.

  “Not us; me, silly. I’ve got a dual personality. That’s what dual personality means: two whole different people inside one head. I’m not one fish, I’m two, that’s the whole point, silly.” She continued reading. “Decisive events await you this week. Your greatest desire will come within your reach. Do not flinch. Seize the opportunity but only before the ninth or after the fifteenth, Christ what’s the date?”

  I love you, he thought. I love the way your ears point through your long brown hair; I love the sheerness of you, the spring and ease of your young body, I want to marry you and share the Greek beach with your babies.

  “The thirteenth,” he said looking at the date window of his gold watch.

  “I don’t care,” said Angie resolutely. “They’re not always right so sod them.”

  She lay flat on her back, pensively studying Che Guevara.

  “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t fucking care,” she repeated fiercely, staring the great revolutionary in the eye. “It’s a cloud. One day the wind will come along and puff it away and I still won’t care. Do you do it a lot, Aldo? Do you fuck lots of girls?”

  “It’s just the way I’m made,” said Cassidy and gave a traveller’s sigh, hinting at the lonely road and the wandering, and the rare moments of consolation.

  “Come off it, Garbo,” said Angie.

  Naked, she made him cocoa, a foulmouthed goddess clattering plates in the tiny galley; a child, backlit by the orange glow from the window, preparing a dorm feast. And afterwards, she promised him, they’d do it again. She loved him, he could do it whenever he liked. Her breasts moved with her, not a tremor; her long waist had the authority of a statue. She straddled him, knees spread, making a sand castle. Bending forward, she kissed him over and over while she stirred him slowly into the thick basin of her hips.

  “He was such a sod, my Dad,” she said afterwards, still in awe, her round cheek pressed gratefully against his shoulder, her hand still lightly holding him. “But your kids really love you don’t they, Aldo?”

  “I love you,” said Cassidy, not finding it, for once, at all difficult to say.

  Ast, an older lady a good three years Cassidy’s senior but not yet wholly infirm, lived nearer to the ground but in greater affluence. In bed she was very large, about twice her dressed weight he reckoned, thinking vaguely of Cassius Clay; and when she leant on her side to talk to him her heavy elbow staked him to the mattress.

  The walls of Ast’s room were hung with unframed canvasses by painters yet to rise; her windows faced a museum, and her interest in Cassidy, after the first round, was essentially of the historical kind.

  “When did you know?” she asked, in a voice which suggested that love could be proved by research. “Frankly, Aldo. When did you have the first inkling?”

  Frankly, Cassidy thought, never.

  “Was it,” she suggested, prompting his memory, “that night at the Niesthals’, at the harpsichord concert? You looked at me. Twice. You probably don’t even remember.”

  “Of course I do,” said Cassidy politely.

  “October. That gorgeous October.” She sighed. “God, one says such corny things when one’s in love. I thought you were just a boring . . . lecherous . . . merchant.” Cassidy shared her amusement at this ridiculous misconception. “How wrong. How utterly wrong I was.” A long, meaningless silence. “You love music, don’t you, Aldo?”

  “Music is my favourite thing,” said Cassidy.

  “I could tell. Aldo, why don’t you take Sandra to concerts? She’s so frightfully anxious to understand the spirit. You’ve got to help her, you know. She’s nothing without you. Not
hing.” The significance of her words suddenly appalled her. “Oh God what have I said! Forgive me, say you forgive me.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Cassidy assured her.

  “God what have I said?”—She rolled on to him—“Aldo, please, don’t cut me off, please. I forgive you. Say I forgive you.”

  “I forgive you,” said Cassidy.

  Peace returned.

  “And then you went for me at the Eldermans’. I could hardly believe it. No one had spoken to me like that for months. You were so fluent . . . so sure. I felt like a child. Just a little girl.” She laughed at the pleasurable memory. “All we stupid women could do was look insulted while you lectured us. My mouth went dry and my heart was going inside and I thought: he’s right. He cares about the artist. Publishers,” she snorted. “What do they know?”

  “Nothing,” said Cassidy, thinking of Dale.

  “As to those flowers . . . well, I just never had so many flowers in my life. Cassidy?”

  “Yes.”

  “What prompted you to send them?”

  “Paris,” Cassidy said, nimbly. “I suddenly . . . missed you. I looked everywhere . . . but you weren’t there.”

  He must have bolted overnight, Cassidy thought, peeking surreptitiously at the uncollected pieces, the clotheshorse for his suits, the leather reading chair for rejecting manuscripts. What a master. How did he do it? Write or ring? Or did he, the Hercules, tell her?

  They lay still, side by side, and between them a little chasm about ten thousand miles across.

  White dust sheets covered the bedroom floor in one corner, and a strong smell of linseed oil lingered in the blankets. Lying on their backs, Mr. and Mrs. Aldo Cassidy admired the newly painted ceiling.

  “It will be really lovely when it’s finished,” Cassidy said. “Like a palace or something.”

  “You ought to watch him,” said Sandra, referring to Mr. Monk the mason. “He’s so steady. So loyal and decent. He was in the sappers in the war.”

  “The sappers were a fine bunch,” Cassidy remarked shrewdly, their expert on military affairs.

  “He thinks he remembers Daddy. He’s not sure but he thinks so. He was on bridges for a while, in Bolton. Back in thirtynine.”

  “I forget which lot was stationed at Bolton,” Cassidy said, as if he had been wondering. They had recently seen Patton, and Cassidy was still enjoying a certain reflected prestige.

  “He keeps his men in order too,” said Sandra approvingly. “One of them has been making eyes at Snaps.”

  “I’m not having that,” said Cassidy sharply.

  “Shush,” said Sandra with a conspiratorial frown, looking upwards at the ceiling.

  “Well honestly I mean the way she tarts around—”

  “Aldo!”—quieting him with little kisses—“Grizzly Pailthorpe . . . Aldo . . . it’s only her age. She’ll get over it . . . anyway, she’s got a new boyfriend, a visualizer called Mel.”

  They both giggled.

  “Oh Christ,” said Cassidy. “Do we have to have visualizers?” More kisses. “How’s Grans taking it?”

  “Who cares?”

  They lay still, listening to the slow copulative beat of Snaps’ music.

  “He’s not up there is he?” Cassidy demanded on a sudden impulse.

  “Of course he isn’t,” she said, restraining him.

  He lay back once more, placated, the custodian still of a certain standard of virtue.

  A few days later, to celebrate Cassidy’s good news, he and his wife dined at the White Tower. Angie made the booking, two for eight.

  They liked duck best.

  They ate it crisp with a heavy Burgundy Cassidy had learnt to remember, and for a short time under the influences of meat and wine they remade the illusion of their love. First, like old friends reunited, they exchanged intelligence from their separate worlds. Sandra said Mark had asked for a new violin: the music master had written that he did not shine at the instrument but it was certainly too small. This discussion, though homely, was privately confusing to Cassidy, for he had recently once more lost his sense of time. Mark had been home last weekend, but whether from school or from some other activity Cassidy could not precisely say.

  “Let’s run to one more size,” he proposed and Sandra smiled her assent.

  “Maybe it’ll encourage him,” she said, fresh from the experience of the piano. “Any instrument’s a drag to start with.”

  “It would be super if the two of you could play together,” Cassidy said. “Hugo too,” he added and there passed through his mind a pleasing vision of a drawing room, all the holes filled in, and Sandra sitting at a much smaller piano while her young Haydns fiddled and piped for Father.

  “I’m sure I could learn to like music,” he said.

  “You just need to hear more. No one’s really tone-deaf, John said so.”

  Next on the Chairman’s informal agenda, the long-projected extension to the house. The present phase of reconstruction being almost over, it was time to consider where they should go next. An extension was the natural solution, particularly if Heather was really going to live with them permanently. Cassidy favoured a cantilevered design that left the garden unspoilt. Sandra said there would be too much shade.

  “What’s the point of beds,” she pointed out, “if the sun never gets to them?”

  Alternatively, they could revise their original plan for the conversion of the basement.

  “What about a sauna?” Cassidy suggested.

  It was not a welcome inspiration. Saunas were a rich man’s toy, Sandra said sternly, saunas replaced abstinence and physical exercise. They agreed to consider the cantilevered extension.

  “Of course we could put a swimming pool under it,” Sandra said reflectively, “if we had more children.”

  “Children have to be foreseen,” said Cassidy quickly, playing upon Sandra’s recent excursions into family planning. A small lull followed this objection.

  A serious matter now, the parents confer. Mark’s last report: should they take it seriously, should he be punished? This was dangerous ground. Sandra believed in punishment as she believed in hell; Cassidy until recently had been sceptical of both.

  “I don’t quite see what he’s done wrong,” Cassidy began cautiously.

  “He’s shirking,” Sandra retorted, and closed her mouth firmly.

  But tonight was togetherness night and Cassidy would not be drawn.

  “Let’s give him one more term to settle in,” he suggested lightly, and by way of distraction brought her up to date with the news from South Audley Street.

  “I’ve decided to put a bomb under them.”

  “High time.”

  “Ever since Paris they’ve been completely out of hand. There’s no dedication, no . . . how can I say it? No sense of mission or . . . loyalty. God knows, they’re on a profit-sharing basis: why don’t they work, and share? That’s all I ask: devotion.”

  “You could sack that tarty receptionist while you’re about it too,” said Sandra, helping herself from the bowl of crudités.

  “Do you mind?” Cassidy said sharply.

  “Sorry.”

  Smiling roguishly, she put down her carrot and touched his hand to feel the anger.

  The sunny side. Despite the threat of apathy, he felt that the export drive was worthwhile, and indeed was making strides. Paris, contrary to his initial fears, had paid handsome dividends. Moreover it was an excellent way of opening the minds of his staff; moreover the national economy needed every penny.

  “They should spend less on arms,” Sandra interjected.

  Suspecting that they had had this discussion before, and alarmed by the prospect of another debate on the British defence posture, Cassidy returned hastily to the more encompassable problems of man-management.

  Faulk was becoming outrageous, always threatening to resign or cut his wrists, a real drama queen.

  “You must not discriminate against homosexuals,” Sandra said.

>   “I don’t.”

  “It’s perfectly natural.”

  “I know.”

  Meale was also a headache. Moody, brilliant, impossible; what was to be done with him?

  “Oh Meale,” said Sandra in a jocular voice. “There’s a hardy annual if ever I met one!”

  “He’s only been with us nine months,” Cassidy replied, not meaning to contradict her but lured in some way by the metaphor.

  “Ha, ha,” said Sandra, furious, and drank some wine, staining her mouth.

  “But you’re dead right: he really is a hardy annual, however long he’s been with us. I’ve never known anyone so temperamental. D’you know he spent his leave in a monastery?”

  Still scowling, Sandra took a mouthful of duck.

  “You don’t object to his being religious do you?”

  “Not if it makes him happy. But it doesn’t. He’s come back worse than when he left.”

  “Probably that secretary of yours been leading him a dance. Love takes people that way, you know.”

  “Nonsense,” said Cassidy, tersely, and returned to the more tranquil field of politics.

  Harold Wilson had impressed him, he said. The burdens of recent office had aged him certainly, as they age us all; but they had not blunted his intellect. In sum, Cassidy thought him an intelligent man, sincere and well informed, even if he was a bit Gerrard’s Cross. The Chancellor, on the other hand, was a type Cassidy found very hard to deal with: tremendously agreeable, and gives absolutely nothing away, which was no doubt a sound way of dealing with p.q.’s (he meant parliamentary questions), but not so well suited to off-the-record, non-attributable, roundtable get-togethers.

  “Then you must break him down,” said Sandra.

  “I know. The trouble is he’s so—”