The Naive and Sentimental Lover (13 page)

I'd have put it better, he thought, if I'd held that opinion: a lot of hot air actually.

By the time he reached the outskirts of London he had come to certain useful conclusions. He would never hear from Helen or Shamus again; they were probably confidence tricksters and he was lucky to get away with his wallet; and whether they reappeared or not, they belonged with certain other phenomena to that area of Cassidy's world which for the general peace was best not revisited.

He would have dismissed them then and there, in fact, if a small incident had not forcibly reminded him of Shamus' disagreeably personal perceptions.

Parked in a lay-by, he was checking the pockets of his car for compromising souvenirs when he came upon a crumpled sheet of paper stuffed into a glove pocket. It was the menu from Bruno's restaurant in Bath on which, in his simplicity, he had believed that Shamus was writing immortal prose. Down one side of the back, done in pencil, was Shamus' portrait of Cassidy with words written at the side and arrows to show what feature they referred to. “Baby cheeks, good at blushing; noble brow, furrowed by vague agonies; eyes shaggy and very, very shifty.” Over the top of the head in capitals was the word WANTED and underneath a further description of Cassidy.

The other side of the menu contained a letter, addressed to LOVER.

What a
very
undergraduate communication thought Cassidy indignantly; how very embarrassing. Sighing, he threw the menu away. Talk about submerged proof . . .

Ever killed anyone lover?
a voice asked from inside him. Switching on the wireless, he turned south for Acton. Art is all very well, he thought, but sometimes it goes a damn sight too far.

 

His business in Acton was brief and useful. A wholesaler named Dobbs, notoriously difficult but an influential connection, had been objecting to the new leather-look strollers and was flirting with a rival manufacturer. Cassidy had never much cared for strollers, which he regarded as an unhappy cross between your mere pushchair and your full-scale baby carriage, but they were a useful stand-by in the spring when demand was capricious. Rightly he calculated that a personal visit would end the dispute.

“Well I didn't expect Himself I will say,” Dobbs confessed nervously. “What's happened to the rep then, horse?”

He had lost a lot of hair, Cassidy noticed; the second marriage is wearing him out. He was a very wasted man, always perspiring, and scandal attached to him.

“I like to check on these things myself, that's all. Where a valued customer complains,” Cassidy said not without a certain sternness, “I like to look into it personally.”

“Now look this isn't a complaint, Mr. Cassidy. The stroller's a very elegant job and your chassis does it credit, course it does. The making of it in fact. I sell a lot of them, swear by them, course I do, horse.”

“A complaint's a complaint, Andy, once it gets into the pipeline.”

“It's the
folding
they don't like, Mr. Cassidy,” Dobbs protested not with any real conviction. “They're doing their stockings on the links.”

“Let's take a look shall we, Andy?”

They climbed the wooden steps to the warehouse and examined links.

“Yes,” said Cassidy, kneeling to caress a particularly wellturned example, “I see what you mean.”

“Here, watch your trousers,” Dobbs cried. “That floor's filthy.”

But Cassidy affected not to hear. Stretching himself at full length on the unswept floorboards he ran a devoted hand along the underpart of the pram, touching with his fingertips the nipples, threads, and couplings of his earliest and most fruitful patent.

“I'm very grateful to you, Andy,” he said as they returned to the office. “I'll have my people look into it right away.”

“Only they do their nylons on them you see,” Dobbs repeated feebly as he brushed down Cassidy's suit. “They did on the last lot anyway.”

“Know what one nylon said to the other, Andy?” Cassidy asked casually as he unloaded the crate of sherry he had ready in the trunk. Sherry, they said, was what he drank.

“What's that then?”

“There's a fellow feeling between us,” said Cassidy. Their laughter covered the flurried transaction. “It's an Easter present,” Cassidy explained. “We're shedding a bit of the profits from the last financial year.”

“It's very decent I must say,” said Dobbs.

“Not at all. Thanks for putting us on to that link.”

“I get worried sometimes,” Dobbs confessed, seeing him back to the Bentley. “I just think I've been forgotten.”

“I understand,” said Cassidy. “How's the wife then?”

“Well, you know,” said Dobbs.

“I know,” said Cassidy.

Changing his mind, he went to the cinema. He liked best those films which praised the British war effort or portrayed with Fearless Honesty the Intimate Sex Life of Scandinavian Teenagers. On this occasion he was fortunate enough to find a double bill.

 

Sandra was out. She had left a
quiche Lorraine
on the kitchen table and a note saying she had gone to her meths drinkers' clinic. The hall smelt of linseed oil. Dust sheets and painters' ladders reminded him uncomfortably of Haverdown. Adding or subtracting? He tried to remember. The mouldings, he knew, were inferior and must be taken down. The fireplace perhaps? They had bought one at Mallets a month or two ago, pine, eighteenth century, three hundred quid and fine carvings over. The fireplace was a
feature,
their architect assured them, and features, God alone knew, were what their house most needed.

Her mother was in her room. From several flights above, he heard the mellifluous tones of John Gielgud reading Héloïse and Abélard on her gramophone for the blind. The sound moved him at once to a trembling fury.
Idiot, braying idiot,
she can see perfectly well when she wants to.

Very softly he went to the nursery and by the glow of the uncurtained window tiptoed to Hugo's bedside, picking his way through the litter of toys. Why had he no night light? Cassidy was convinced he was afraid of the dark. The boy slept as if dead upon the blankets, his plastered leg shining palely in the orange light and his pyjama jacket open to the waist. On the floor beside him lay the egg whisk which he used for frisking up his bubble bath. One by one Cassidy fastened the pyjama buttons, then gently laid his open palm on the child's dry brow. Well, at least he was not overheated. He listened, studying him intently through the speckled twilight. Against the sleepless boom of traffic the boy's breath came and went in small, regular sips. Nothing wrong there apparently, but why did he suck his thumb so? A child of seven doesn't suck his thumb, not unless he's deprived of love. Inwardly, Cassidy sighed. Hugo, he thought, oh Hugo, believe me son, we all go through it. Kneeling now, he minutely examined the outer surface of the plaster, searching for the telltale ridges which might betray a second parting of the fractured bone within; but the light from the window was not enough, and all he could make out were graffiti and pictures of houses done in felt-nibbed pens.

A lorry climbed the hill. Quickly standing, he drew the curtain and closed the window against the pollution of its engine. The boy stirred, laid his forearm across his eyes. A key turned in the front door.

 

“Hi traveller,” Sandra called.

A prepared speech, reaching for modern humour.

“Hullo,” said Cassidy.

Her footsteps stopped.

“Is that all you've got to say?” she asked, still from the hall.

“What else am I supposed to say? You said hi, I said hullo. I think he should see a specialist, you don't.”

He waited. She could stand like that for minutes at a time; the loser was the first to move. Losing, Sandra, wife to Aldo, went slowly upstairs to her mother.

The letter hung on him like a damp cloud. Flat, nonvisual; an after-lunch letter, reaching for sustenance he did not want. A letter of the liver, rather than the heart.

The paper was headed 12 Abalone Crescent, but he wrote from South Audley Street for peace. Cassidy's office was not unlike Cassidy's car: a mahogany bastion against the non-negotiable hazards of terrestrial existence. In Audley Street he was neither Aldo nor Cassidy, but
Mister Aldo,
a Christian name treated with Christian respect. In Audley Street no foot was laid upon the ground, no door closed upon its frame but cunning pads reduced the impact. Even the several telephones on his rosewood desk had been disarmed; instead of the raucous woman's scream which from childhood had so unsettled him, the instruments emitted only a grateful purr of sexual contentment, inviting not anger, not panic, but a caress along their white, submissive spines.

A bundle of solicitors' documents caught his eye, green borders and pink ribbon. Without a pause he made a second paragraph and wrote:

Having read through what he had written, Cassidy sighed, laid down his gold pen, and stared absently through the lace curtains at the pageant of smartly dressed pedestrians and shining limousines. Did Mark
care
about equities? Did he know about them? Was it even desirable that he should? Vaguely, not at all a memory man when it came to the detail of his early life, Cassidy tried to establish whether he himself had been informed about such things at the age of eleven. At eleven, most likely he was still boarded with an Aunt Nell, a gross, noisy lady with a bungalow near Pendeen Sands. Had
that
child studied the financial pages? Was the lady of a sort to encourage him to study them? He remembered only her undergarments as she waded out to sea, dragging him after her to certain death: soiled petals pink and black, flapping over sunless thighs. If he was not with Aunt Nell, he was with the Spider, a discarded mistress of his father's who kept him in bed to protect him from germs.

No. His case had no relevance to Mark's.

He put down the pen.

Ridiculous.

Tear up the letter.

Here I sit, bored stiff and what do I do? Summarise the leading articles of the
Financial Times.
Business has corrupted me: I have no relationship with my son.

A few years back he would have drawn him bears and piglets—he even kept a set of Swiss crayons handy in his desk for that very purpose. But Mark had outgrown piglets, and it was very difficult to know what else was likely to give him pleasure. Perhaps money, after all, was the answer. A promise of security never came amiss. Even if he doesn't understand in detail, the
notion
will remain with him; comfort him on dark nights when the parental world bewilders him.

Hearing a lighter tread on the warm pavement outside, he looked up again hopefully, but his vigilance was rewarded by a redhead, and redheads alarmed him. Also, she had a determined walk; to hear it was to know already she was not easily deflected. A heel-to-toe walk, requiring a good rotary action of the elbows and a vindictive moral purpose.