The Naive and Sentimental Lover (4 page)

“Look here,” he said quite strongly. “I don't want to intrude, I can perfectly well come back another time. Assuming you
want
to sell of course,” he added, to give extra sting.

The voice did not hurry to console him.

“
You're
not intruding, lover,” it said at last, as if passing a considered verdict. “You're
gorgeous,
that's my view. In the first position. No fooling. We haven't had a bourgeois for years.”

The beam descended. In the same moment a ray of red sunlight, reflected from the upper window of the chapel, broke like a tiny dawn over the interior of the porch and provided Cassidy with a first sight of his examiner. He was, as Cassidy had already suspected, very handsome. Where Cassidy curved, his examiner went straight. Where Cassidy was weak, his examiner was resolute; where concessive, zealous; where Cassidy was fluid, the other was rock, and where he was pale and fair, his examiner was dark and sudden and eager. From a handsome face dark eyes shone with the greatest animation; a Gaelic smile, at once predatory and knowing, illuminated its features.

So far so good. Still seeking, however, to assign him to one of the social categories into which the world is naturally divided, Cassidy transferred his concentration to the man's attire. He wore a black coat of the kind favoured by Indian gentlemen, midway between a dinner jacket and a military blazer, but cut with a decided oriental flair. His feet were bare and his lower body was encased in what appeared to be a skirt.

“Good Lord,” Cassidy said involuntarily, and was about to offer some further apology such as: “Oh my God, you were in the middle of your bath”; or: “Oh look here this is monstrous of me I've got you out of bed,” when the lantern turned sharply away from him and shone upon the car.

There was no need for the lantern at all—the pale coachwork stood out excellently against the half-light, a safety factor which Cassidy was well aware of—but the examiner used it all the same, less to observe, perhaps, than to stroke the pure outlines in slow caressing movements of the beam, much as a moment earlier he had studied its owner.

“Yours is it, lover?”

“Yes it is actually.”

“Your very own? All of it?”

Cassidy laughed easily, presuming a veiled reference to hire purchase, a form of payment which (since he had no need of it) he considered one of the ills of his generation.

“Well yes. I think it's the only way really, don't you?”

For some while the examiner made no reply but remained in deepest concentration, his body motionless, the lantern swinging gently in his hand, his eyes intent upon the car.

“Jesus,” he whispered at last. “Jesus. There's a hearse for a Nondescript.”

Cassidy had watched people admire his car before. He had even encouraged them. He was perfectly capable, on a Saturday morning for instance, returning from shopping or some other semi-recreational errand, and finding a small group of enthusiasts gathered along its elegant length, of offering them some account of its history and properties, and demonstrating from a stationary position some of its more unusual modifications. He considered this democratic open-heartedness to be one of his most likeable characteristics: life had wrought its distinctions true enough, but when it came to the fellowship of the road Cassidy counted himself little better than the next man. His host's interest however was of a different sort. Once again it appeared to be an examination in principle, a fundamental questioning of certain unstated values which were inherent in the car's existence, and it only added to Cassidy's unease. Did he consider it vulgar? Was it inferior to his own? The upper classes, he knew very well, had strong views on the display of wealth, but surely the car's
specialness
put it beyond the reach of such superficial charges? Somebody has to own it, after all. Just as they have to own Haverdown, ha, ha. Perhaps he should say something, offer some deprecatory phrase? There were several which in other circumstances he might have ventured: “It's only a toy really . . . well I think of it as a sort of man's mink coat . . . of course I couldn't begin to run it without the Company . . . present from the taxpayer I'm afraid . . .” He was still considering such a move when he felt his left arm seized in a grip of unexpected force.

“Come on, lover,” the voice said, beguiling. “Get your cork out, I'm freezing.”

“Well, if you're sure it's not inconvenient—” Cassidy began as he almost stumbled over the rotting threshold.

He never discovered whether it was convenient or not. The heavy door had closed behind him. The lantern had gone. He was standing in the total blackness of an unknown interior with only his host's friendly grasp to guide him.

Waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the light, Cassidy endured many of the hallucinations which afflict the temporarily blinded. He found himself first in the Scala Cinema at Oxford, edging past rows of unseen knees, trampling apologetically on unseen feet. Some were hard, some soft; all were hostile. There were seven cinemas at Oxford in the days when Cassidy was privileged to receive his higher education, and he had got round them nicely in a week. Soon, he thought, the grey rectangle will open before me and a dark-haired girl in period costume will unbutton her blouse in French to the appreciative whistles of my fellow academics.

Before any such delight was afforded him, however, he was abruptly translated to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington whither one of his stepmothers had threatened to consign him as a punishment for self-abuse. “You're no better than an animal,” she furiously assured him. “So you'd best go and join them. For ever.” Though his vision was by now clearing, he found much evidence to support the nightmares: prickly upholstery redolent of cinemas, the pungent smells of moulting fur and formalin, the amputated heads of elks and wildebeests which glared down on him in the glazed terror of their last agony, looming mammoth shapes draped in white dust covers.

Gradually, to his relief, more familiar images reassured him of human habitation. A grandfather clock, an oak sideboard, a Jacobean dining table; a stone fireplace armed with crossed muskets and the pleasingly familiar crest of the de Waldeberes.

“My goodness,” said Cassidy at last in what he hoped was a voice of awe.

“Like it?” his companion asked. Retrieving the lantern from Cassidy knew not where, he carelessly flicked the beam over the uneven flagstones.

“Superb. Quite superb.”

 

They were in the Great Hall. Chinks of grey light marked the tall outlines of the shuttered windows. Pikes, assagais and antlers adorned the upper levels; packing cases and mouldering books were strewn over the floor. Directly before them hung a gallery of dense black oak. Behind it stone arches mouthed the openings to dismal corridors. The smell of dry rot was unmistakable.

“Want to see the rest?”

“I'd adore to.”

“The whole thing? Warts and all?”

“From top to bottom. It's fabulous. What date is the gallery by the way? I should know but I've forgotten.”

“Oh Jesus, some of it was made from Noah's Ark, no kidding. So they tell me anyway.”

Laughing dutifully Cassidy could not fail nevertheless to detect, above the familiar smells of antiquity, the fumes of whisky on his host's breath.

Ha la,
he thought with an inward smile of recognition. Les aristos. Slice them where you will, they're all the same. Decadent, devil-may-care . . . but actually rather marvellous in an other-worldish way.

 

“Tell me,” he asked politely, as they once more turned a corner into darkness, “is the furniture for sale too?” His voice had acquired a new Englishness as he offered it for the aristocrat's consideration.

“Not till we've moved out, lover. Got to have something to sit on, haven't we?”

“Of course. But later?”

“Sure. Have what you like.”

“It would only be the smaller things,” said Cassidy cautiously. “I've quite a lot already, actually.
Put by,
you know.”

“Collector, eh?”

“Well a bit, certainly. But only when the price is right,” he added on the same defensive note.
If there's one thing your English gentleman does understand, it's the value of money.
“I say do you think you could shine that light a little higher? I can't see a thing.”

The corridor was lined with portraits of gentle soldiers and murderous civilians. The beam revealed them only capriciously, and this was unfortunate, for Cassidy was sure that, given the chance, he could have identified in their varied features traces of his eccentric escort: the brilliant erratic smile for instance, the pirate's eyes lit from within, the crop of black hair that fell so nobly over the powerful brow.

The lantern descended what appeared to be a short staircase, leaving him again in the deepest darkness.

“It's interminable,” Cassidy said with a nervous laugh, and then: “I'd never have done this alone. I'm rather afraid of the dark to be honest, always have been. Some people don't like heights, I don't like the dark.” In point of fact, Cassidy did not care for heights either, but there seemed no point in spoiling the analogy. “Have you been here long?” he asked, receiving no absolution for this confession.

“Ten days.”

“I meant your family.”

The beam shone briefly on a rusted iron coat hanger, then sank to the floor. “Oh Christ . . . for ever, man, for ever.”

“And it was your father who . . .”

For an uncomfortable moment Cassidy feared he had again trodden upon too delicate ground: a recent death, after all, is not a subject one discusses in the dark. There was quite a delay before he had his answer.

“My uncle
actually,
” the soft voice confessed, and gave a small revealing sigh. “But we were very close.”

“I'm sorry,” Cassidy murmured.

“He was gored by a bull,” his guide continued in a more cheerful tone which reinforced the brogue. “So at least it was quick. None of your ugly lingering, I mean, the peasants dropping in with gruel.”

“Well that's some consolation,” said Cassidy. “Was he old?”

“Very. And I mean that bull—”

“Yes?” said Cassidy, puzzled.

The lantern appeared to shake in a sudden paroxysm of grief. “Well the bull was
terribly
old himself. I mean it was kind of death in slow motion. Come to think of it, I don't know how they caught each other up.”

Comedy had evidently dispelled tragedy, for now a wild boyish laughter rose to the unseen roof, the beam swayed merrily in time to its peals, and a strong hand descended on Cassidy's shoulder.

“Listen it's great to have you. Great. You're doing me a power of good, and that's the honest truth. Jesus, I've been so bored: reading John Donne to the chickadees. Imagine. Great poet, mind, but what an audience. The way they look at you. Jesus. Listen I've had a wee drink, you don't mind that now?”

Very much to his surprise, Cassidy felt a definite tweak on what the law courts call the upper thigh.

“Like a drop yourself now and then, eh?”

“Indeed yes.”

“Specially when you're lonely, or down on your luck a mite?”

“And at other times too, I promise you.”

“Don't do that,” the stranger said shortly, with a sudden change of humour. “Don't promise a thing.”

They descended two stairs.

“Who the hell do you meet round here anyway?” he resumed in his jocular tone. “Even the bloody gypsies won't talk to you. You know, Christ, it's class, class all the way.”

“Oh dear,” said Cassidy.

The hand still guided his shoulder. As a rule Cassidy did not like to be handled, particularly by men, but the contact disturbed him less than he might have expected.

“What about all those acres?” he asked. “Don't
they
keep you busy any more?”

The smell of woodsmoke which Cassidy had hitherto admired for its rural fragrance became suddenly oppressive.

“Ah, fuck the acres. Who the hell wants land any more? Form-filling . . . rabies . . . pollution.... American air bases. It's over, I'm telling you. Unless you're in mink of course. Mink are great.”

“Yes,” Cassidy agreed, somewhat confused by this idiosyncratic description of the farmer's problems. “Yes I hear mink can make a
lot
of money.”

“Hey listen. You religious at all?”

“Well half and half . . .”

“There's this fellow in County Cork calling himself the one true living God, have you read about him? J. Flaherty of Hillside, Beohmin. All over the papers it was. Do you think there's anything in it at all?”