The Naive and Sentimental Lover (20 page)

“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 cooking, 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.

“They laugh when your father says it,” her mother replied when the applause ended; and blushed.

“Coming up,” said John Elderman, as a pillar of smoke shot from the overheated pan. “Who's number one?”

Ignoring him, his nameless wife rolled on her massive hip and, jamming a bottle into the mouth of an adjacent baby, raised the subject of South East Asia. Had they all had the news? she asked, naming a country Cassidy had never heard of. They had not. Well the Americans had invaded it, she said, the local government had requested intervention. They had marched in at five that morning, the Russians were threatening to retaliate.

“Up the Marines,” said Cassidy, but not loud enough this time for anyone but Heather to hear.

“Hey you,” Heather said softly, laying a cautionary hand on his knee. “Ease off, you'll frighten the game.”

At the same moment Hugo asked his question. He had played no part in the proceedings till now, so his intervention had at least the advantage of novelty.

“Why can't you love snow?”

His thumb was still wedged in his mouth and his brows were drawn hard down over his grey unblinking eyes.

A concentrated silence preceded the volley:

“Because it melts!” Prunella Elderman shouted. “Because it's too cold, because it's all white and wet.”

The other sisters joined in. A baby was screaming. A child was banging a spoon on the table, another was jumping on a chair. Seizing the carafe of nettles, Cassidy replenished his glass.

“Because it's not alive!” the velveted sisters screamed. “Because you can't eat it! Why then? Why, why, why?”

Hugo took his time, shifted his plaster leg, turned a page of his newspaper. “Because you can't marry it,” he announced gravely.

In the general groan, Shamus made his appearance.

He could not have been further from Cassidy's mind. His thoughts, he afterwards recalled with clarity, had drifted momentarily to the distressing implications of Hugo's riddle: whether it betrayed a hidden preoccupation with domestic tension, whether the pains of a fractured leg had temporarily unhinged the tender child's reason. If he had anything else in mind at all, then it was Ast's hand: was it a restraining hand? Did she know it was still on his knee; had she left it there like a handbag? Was it an olive branch after her earlier, unprovoked irascibility? Seeking perhaps the comfort of a male ally in this moment of sexual uncertainty, Cassidy transferred his attention to John Elderman, mentally selecting as he did so a topic of mutual interest, a football match, John's fascinating old van; and was therefore surprised to find in his place Shamus, not standing but suspended in the steam stirring the evil-smelling pudding with Elderman's wooden spoon, his black eyes fixed upon Cassidy across the candlelight, his moist face glowing with impish complicity.

“Hey lover,” he was saying. “Isn't it a bloody bore? Urban proles having compromisers' orgy.”

Simultaneously or perhaps a fraction before, since psychic experience has no equivalent in time, he heard Shamus' names, Christian name and surname both, spoken out recklessly from his left side.

“
Such
a pity he died so young,” Ast declared, her hand a trifle higher on his thigh. “After all, who else
can
one read who's
modern?
”

Then John Elderman gave him his pudding and he burnt his mouth.

In retrospect, of course, Cassidy was better able to understand what had happened. His senses, taken up by Hugo's riddle and Ast's understanding hand, had failed to remark that a second, independent conversation was going forward between the women to either side of him: that is to say between Ast and the Sea Plant. For some while, as he afterwards realised, they had been exchanging murmured intellectual commonplaces drawn from Sunday newspapers, no doubt upon the subject of the modern novel. Thus the abrupt, unheralded mention of Shamus' name, violently intruding upon an unprotected corner of his mind, had caused him in his confusion to imagine in the vivid frame of Elderman the features of his banished friend. It was also true that the four large whiskies at the Audley Arms—not to mention a recent visit to the lavatory where Bear had consumed a little something from a clandestine bottle—had lingered somewhat with the monotony of the evening.

Also he had drunk a lot of nettles.

But such insights came to him too late, for while his natural discretion implored him to be silent, he had already overcome his first experience of a ghost and was launched into a sprightly, if injudicious, argument about the great author.

“Dead?” he repeated as soon as he had emptied his glass. “Dead? He's not
dead.
He's just been kicked around so much he did a bunk. Can't blame him for
that,
can you? As a matter of fact I happen to know he's just about to turn in a new book—”