The Naive and Sentimental Lover (48 page)

“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—”

“He can't just
lie.
”

“He doesn't quite do that, it's just he comes up with these bland answers you somehow can't get round.”

 

And then mysteriously, over the
baklava,
she left him.

 

He ran on, giving of his best, but she slipped further and further away from him. A shadowed silence descended on her from within, causing her features suddenly to age, and sadden, her eyes to find an object to her left, and her cuffed hands to join like troubled friends before a common dread.

He played for laughs; he did his voices; he populated the political stage with a carnival of exotic personalities. Old So-and-So was a kind of Carnaby Street Hemingway, acting tough and attending his wife's deliveries, but deep down he was just a puff-ball, Cassidy had fixed him in ten minutes. Someone else was always stealing the tea out of the canteen; the secretaries walked in fear of So-and-So, he was a pincher and pounced on them from doorways. He tried to play on her concern; very few really knew how grave was our economic situation. What was the Government to
tell
us? There came a moment when by telling the truth you made the truth more real and more terrible: “I mean God, we all know
that
problem.”

“Yes,” said Sandra, still in her own dark place, “we do.”

 

“And what about the people farther away?” she asked, still distracted. “Up north, or wherever you went? How were they? Also fools and knaves?”

“Oh, the Trade Union barons. Well they're
really
tough. They were a real eye-opener, believe me. I mean if you like realism, those are the boys who know what it's all about.”

“I'm glad somebody does,” said Sandra, still looking away from him.

Only promises remained to him.

“Look,” he said. “Now it's done, finished—”

“What is?”

“The Report. The Paper. It's off my hands. I told you. That's why we're here.”

“I know. I do know. You told me.”

“I thought we'd take a holiday. Up sticks and away. Dump the boys with John and Beth—” for once he remembered her name “—and
go.
Wherever you like. While we're still young.” To himself, he sounded like television. How did he sound to her? He could not tell.

“Just you and me,” he said.

 

And brought her back.

 

Not all the way perhaps but far enough. Slowly, not all at once, the shadows withdrew from her face and a puckish, rather gallant smile took possession of her homeless features. A laugh escaped her, mocking none but herself, and she took his hand, touched it rather, sliding the tips of two very pretty fingers up and down the back.

“We could take a castle in Spain,” she suggested. And then, to his considerable concern, for he was not in any mood that night to deal with weighty matters: “You're God really, aren't you, Aldo? After all, if we don't believe in you, what
do
we believe in?”

 

“Listen. First we'll have a party. As soon as they've finished the drawing room. Then we'll go. Next day. Take off. Now when's the drawing room promised for?”

Details now, details gave reality. Whom they would ask: just people they liked, no one official, least of all Trade and Politics. Maybe a few of Heather's friends to brighten it up. John and Beth of course, maybe a separate room for the kids.... Yes, said Sandra, it would be fun to have a children's party going at the same time.

Now, about the holiday. Problem one:
Where?
All right, if she'd gone off Tito how about the Bahamas, he would even stand the cost of a trip to Bermuda.