The Naive and Sentimental Lover

  Watch. Ha!

  He sits up sharply. Who is this? Mark’s headmaster, carrying a number-four iron, army waterproofs over his frightful suit, a Russian fur hat clapped over his hollow face, lollops through the frosty mists. The raindrops run off him as if he were a military monument, circling his zealot’s eyes and washing lighter lines over the bronze campaigner’s skin. You taught me too, cried Cassidy, and you were not one day younger even in those days!

  “Marazion’s a tough crowd. Always were. Pity your boy’s not playing.”

  “He is,” said Cassidy, used to these confusions. “I’m Cassidy, Mark’s boy,” he explained, meaning father but getting it wrong.

  Snow here, rain there. Battle rain, rolling across the football field in directionless, icy clouds, enveloping, not falling. Only the nearest players are visible, reeling and groping in the gas attack. A 1916 whistle blows; put on your gas masks, the Boche are coming over the top; hands on shoulders, boys, and follow me.

  “Think, Saviours, think!” the Headmaster bellowed. “Look at that fool Meadows. Meadows you’re a fool, a cretin, d’you hear? An imbecile. You’re not Meadows are you?” the Headmaster asked.

  “No,” said Cassidy. “I’m Cassidy. Mark’s father.”

  A fat child in a mud-soaked shirt hacked wildly at a sodden football.

  “Sorry sir,” he whispers, dying for the colonel, and rolls over, shot through the heart.

  “Use it!” the Headmaster yelled in a quite unsimulated frenzy. “Oh my giddy aunts, my gracious Lord, don’t kick it, use it, keep it! Oh my God, my God, oh God.”

  From somewhere the gas alarm sounded again and a thin burst of applause pattered wetly to nothing.

  “Was it a goal?” Cassidy asked, craning his neck to show enthusiasm, as a trickle of rain slid across his collarbone. “It’s very hard to see.”

  For some time an agonised exhalation was the only answer.

  “I do tell them,” the Headmaster whispers, turning to him wide-eyed with the pain of defeat. “They don’t understand but I do tell them. Can’t win without God. Goalie, referee, twelfth man, He’s all of them. They don’t understand of course. But one day they will, I’m sure. Don’t you think so?”

  “I believed you,” Cassidy assured him. “You used to say the same to me and I believed you. Look, I’m Cassidy, Mark’s father, I wonder whether I could talk to you for a minute about my son.”

  But the Headmaster is howling again, hopelessly, for God’s support, as out of the fog the baleful clapping of cold, wet hands issues once more.

  “Who did that? Who kicked it straight at their forward line? Who was it?”

  “Cassidy,” says someone.

  “It’s only because he’s smaller than the others,” says Cassidy. “He’ll kick it the right way when he’s bigger, I’m sure. Look, I’m going away for a bit, I wondered if I could take him out to tea.” “Keep at it hard! Attack, Saviours, attack! Buffoons! Oh you stupid little apes.”

  Once more the cavernous eyes turned to Cassidy, scanning him vainly for traces of divinity.

  “Send him to Bryanston,” he advised at last. “First class for broken homes, first class.”

  Turning his high thin back, the Headmaster loped forlornly into the fog.

  And we Cassidys, it is a maxim of our broken home, we always travel first class. Beyond the window, a clump of Haverdown conifers struck suddenly out of the mist; at their foot stood a dismal pagoda painted dark brown and dusted with old snow.

  “Unterwald,” he read aloud.

  And watched himself, seated in the locker room, smoking to defeat the smell; watching the ageing, vivid face of an elevenyear-old boy at the end of a long day’s fight.

  Mark.

  A continental little boy, this Cassidy, confiding and easily moved; fond of touching people while he spoke to them; Mark, my lover.

  “If I was a goalkeeper,” Mark murmured, numbly untying his boots, “I could wear gloves.”

  “You did jolly well,” said Cassidy, helping him.

  Seeing him again after so long, Cassidy was reminded how small he was, how slender his wrists. The other boys looked on with contempt, trying to catch the traitor’s actual words.

  “I loathe football. Why do I have to play it if I loathe it? Why can’t I do something gentle?”

  “I loathed it too,” said Cassidy to encourage him. “Always, I promise. At every school I went to.”

  “Then why make me do it?”

  Following his naked son to the shower room, Cassidy thought: Only the smell is warm. The fetid, sour smell of football vests and Dorset mud, and battle dresses drying in tomorrow’s sun. Mark was much thinner than the other children and his genitals were less developed: cold and shrivelled, a very jaded sex. The boys crammed in together, shorn prisoners, the whole team under one disgraceful jet.

  “Mummy says she hasn’t given me enough love,” said Mark, over tea in the Spinning Wheel.

  “That’s something silly Heather said to her,” said Cassidy.

  The boy ate in silence.

  “I’m going to Switzerland,” said Cassidy.

  “With Heather?”

  “Alone.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I’d try and write a book,” said Cassidy at random.

  “How long will you be?”

  “Few weeks.”

  “I don’t miss Mummy. I miss you.”

  “You miss us both,” said Cassidy.

  “What’s it about?” Mark asked suddenly, as if he knew already, had a hunch.

  “What?”

  “The book.”

  “It’s a novel.”

  “Is that a story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell it me.”

  “You can read it when you grow up.”

  The tea shop sold homemade sweets, fudge and chocolates with varied centres. Cassidy gave him ten shillings to make his own purchases.

  “That’s miles too much,” said Mark hopelessly and gave him five back.

  The boy waited at the gatepost, a slender, balancing creature, hugging himself in his grey pullover as he watched the warm Bentley glide towards him down the drive. Cassidy lowered the electric window and Mark kissed him, his small lips full upon his father’s, crumby from tea, and cold from the wait in the evening air.

  “I’m just not suited for this kind of education,” Mark explained. “I’m not tough and I don’t improve by being bullied.”

  “I wasn’t suited to it either.”

  “Then take me away. It’s pointless.”

  Mark has only a quantum of courage, he thought; I am using it up for him, spending it before he is old enough to spend it for himself.

  “Here, have this,” he said, and gave him his gold pencil, sixty guineas from Asprey’s, a private indulgence from another life.

  “What’ll you write with?”

  “Oh a pen or something,” said Cassidy, and left him, still at the gate, working the lead in and out, fair head bowed in concentration.

  Sometimes it was too much for me to bear, that face, Cassidy thought, gazing back on a dead life; it was too hung in grief, too yellowed by pain and by the effort of understanding. Therefore I gave him things to turn his face away from me: gold or money, or something miniature to make him stoop.

  Or perhaps, thought Cassidy consolingly, wiping the tears from the window, perhaps it wasn’t Mark at all.

  Perhaps—since objectivity at times of crisis is still the Managing Director’s greatest single asset—perhaps this child was Aldo, back at Sherborne, the day Old Hugo called to see me on his way to Torquay; the day he ran the Great Bike Race for all comers, a nice quid for the winner and a nice ten bob note for second place.

  To this moderately cohesive, moderately earthbound vision of his leavetaking, as he continued to climb the mountain, Cassidy proceeded to add others more fragmentary and less capable of verification; and in the course of this put to himself questions of a quite metaphysical nature.

&n
bsp; Had Christmas passed, for instance? Sometimes a shadow crossed the sterile white window, closing downwards from the left corner like a drop of blood upon his field of view, and he smelt the winter evenings drawing in, and glimpsed the spectral outline of a dusk-lit pine tree frosted on its windward side, the way they grew at Christmas in the wide bow-windows of the Crescent. At Mittelwald, still pondering this question, he was not surprised to observe the face of Granny Groat appear before him, drawn and sleepless, and took it as further proof that the feast was past: for only Christmas could strain her so severely. Her head was not framed centrally—she had got it wrong in some way—and she was waiting stubbornly on the wrong side of the track, so that he felt her presence behind him and had to turn to make the recognition. Her wide, witless eyes, doubled and vulnerable, washed blue by her tinted spectacles, were bright and frightened, but the dabs of fur at her collar and the rouge at her cheeks announced quite clearly that she was on her way to church. Also, she wore a paper hat; a festive yellow creation, mannishly grotesque.

  Also, she carried a Christmas cracker in her twitching hand.

  Ah but for what ceremony? A funeral?

  Is she wearing black for instance? The Chinese are known to loose off firecrackers for the dead.

  The train lurched forward, Groat was gone.

  Well, it was not so improbable; he might very well be dead; others were. Such an explanation had been in the air for several days and very many nights. A lot of people are dead and it’s perfectly natural, but still. Nor had he far to look for the cause of death. Suppose Old Hugo’s green hand grenade, contrary to Cassidy’s impression at the time, had after all exploded and removed him to another life?

  To this life, in fact?

  And that instead of merely travelling to Sainte-Angèle, he was ascending to heaven; and the railway guards were angels, hence the village name?

  Momentarily stirred to optimism by this small hope of nonexistence, Cassidy closed his heated eyes and with each hand lightly touched the other, determining its outlines. A don experiments upon his own body, the Haldane tradition, I’ll get a knighthood yet. Then in an upward movement to the face—akin to washing, such gestures are made often by men in motion—with both hands together glumly located his nose and ample eyebrows, tip of tongue and youthful forelock; confirming, if confirmation were still needed, that though his spirit might be climbing, it was still attached to its terrestrial frame.

  And that Old Hugo’s hand grenade, for all his loud assurances, had been, like the rest of his father’s armoury, a dud.

  This incident involving War Department explosives was not, for security reasons, shown upon the white screen, but conveyed to Cassidy by the intimate smell of wet clover as he lay in the field somewhere in England, face downward, tampering wretchedly with the pin. Also it may have been—but only may have been—a dream; this much your Chairman will concede. Mr. Lemming, you may add that to the Minutes.

  To reconstruct: this grenade is a gift, no father can do more. This grenade, Old Hugo has assured him, freeing it of its oily rags and bringing it to the lightest window in the penthouse, this poorly painted grenade, dull green but chipping even under wraps, is not only a gift, a truly wonderful gift, it is one of the finest grenades ever manufactured.

  “They don’t make a grenade like that today. You can scour London, I’m telling you, Aldo: a grenade like that is totally unfindable, isn’t it, Blue?”

  The grenade is also the climactic of a father’s many endowments to his son:

  “I’ve given you the final freedom, d’you hear? Look at that then: life and death, you owe them all to me. That’s the most fantastic sacrifice any father can make, and I’m making it, right, Blue?”

  But here is the nub, here is the curse of the Cassidys, they succeed in all but the consummation: the pin has rusted into its housing, the weakly boy cannot loosen it.

  “Pull. Jesus Christ All Ruddy Mighty, Blue, after all I’ve done for him, after all the fantastic sacrifices I made for him, look at that! He can’t even pull the stupid pin!”

  “But he’s not a lion, dear, is he though, not like you,” Bluebridge whickers, handing him the flask. “Go on Aldo dear,” she begs, calling to him sotto voce where he lies. “Try, Aldo, for your Daddy’s sake, please. Try.”

  “I am trying,” Cassidy retorts churlishly, but still there is no apocalypse.

  Thoroughly disenchanted, the family drives home in a temper, conversation zero till they reach the penthouse.

  For a while to his great relief he thought of nothing. The train paused at certain intermediate stations, names were shouted and ignored. These stations offered no passengers, and received none in return. They were stages, formalities of religious progress as the little train continued its pilgrimage up the white hill.

  Reaching a plateau, the engine relaxed its exertions and a sense of ease replaced the frenzied clatter. I am in the Bentley, Cassidy thought; I am in Superpram.

  It is the Bentley which has subdued the clanging couplings and damped the eager vibrations of the cushion springs under the thin velveteen; the Bentley’s English calm which has muffled the hysteria of the foreign guards.

  I am inviolate.

  Barely had he formulated this pleasing notion however than his sense of security was shattered by the entry of little Hugo (grandson of the great hotelier) who, undaunted by costly fastenings of his father’s manufacture, had forced open the door and settled himself in the passenger seat. Lifting the child free, Cassidy carried him back to the house.

  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 agains
t 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.

  One . . .

  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.

  Two . . .

  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.

  Three. I’m warning you . . .

  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?