The Naive and Sentimental Lover (51 page)

“I mean it was so easy,
Christ.
I just said, I think I'll go to town and do some shopping and see how Sal is, and tidy the flat and check on Dale and see lover, and he said fine, off you go. I mean
he
does it, why shouldn't I? Anyway he was perfectly happy. I said I'd ring him, and he said don't bother, how long would I need? I said a week and he said fine. Well that was all right, wasn't it?”

“Fine,” said Cassidy. “Of course it was. Absolutely fine. Have you ever done it before?”

“Done what?” Helen asked sharply.

“Gone shopping. To London. To see Sal and people. On your own.”

She thought for a long time before speaking.

“Cassidy, you have to try to understand. There is one edition of me, and one only. It belongs to you. Part of me belongs to Shamus, it's true. But not your part. Have you any questions?”

“No.”

To please him however she put through a call to Lowestoft, but there was no reply.

 

Sandra, on the other hand, answered the telephone at once.

“They've offered me Lowestoft,” he told her.

“Oh.”

“Aren't you pleased?”

“Naturally. Very.”

“How are the invitations going?”

For the party; the celebration. Whatever we're celebrating.

A hundred sent out, twenty so far replied, said Sandra: “We hope very much you'll be able to come.”

“Thanks,” said Cassidy, making a joke of it. “So do I.”

D
uring this exacting period of Cassidy's life—the next morning perhaps, the morning after—there occurred one of those small incidents which had little bearing upon the central destiny of the great lover but nevertheless illustrated with unpleasant force the sense of approaching reckoning which was overtaking him. Arriving at the office at about midday on one of his rare visits from the greater stage on which he had elected to perform—an unbreakable engagement, he had told Helen, a political thing and rather high level—he was met once more by the insolent gaze of the receptionist and a mauve envelope addressed to him in Angie Mawdray's handwriting.

He found her in bed, in a state of high fever, Lettice on her lap and Che Guevara on the wall.

 

“
How
do you know?” he insisted, holding her hand.

“I just feel it, that's all.”

“But feel
what,
Angie?”

“I can feel it growing in my tummy. It's like wanting to go to the lav. I can feel its heart beating if I lie still enough.”

“Listen Angie, love, have you seen a doctor?”

“I won't do that,” she said.

“For a check, that's all.”

“Feeling is knowledge. You said that. If you feel something it's true. My horoscope says it too. All about giving my heart to a stranger. Well if I have a baby I
do
give it a heart don't I, so sod it.”

“Look,” said Cassidy, urgent now. “Have you been sick?”

“No.”

“Have you . . .” he tried to remember their euphemism. “Has the Chinaman been?”

“I don't know.”

“Of course you know!”

“Sometimes he hardly comes at all.” She giggled, pulling his hand down under the bedclothes. “He just knocks and goes away. Aldo, is she
really
your mistress? Truly, Aldo?”

“Don't be daft,” said Cassidy.

“Higher up,” she whispered. “There, that's it . . .
now
. . . only I love you, Aldo, and I don't want you fucking other ladies.”

“I know,” said Cassidy. “I never will.”

“I don't mind you fucking your wife if you've got to, but not Beauties like that one, it's not fair.”

“Angie, believe me.”

After much argument he persuaded her—a day later? two days?—to let him send a sample of her water to a place in Portsmouth that advertised on the back of Sandra's
New Statesman.
She wouldn't send much—about a miniature, no more—and she wouldn't tell him how she had got it in there. He enclosed a seven and sixpenny postal order and a stamped envelope addressed to himself at the works. The envelope never came back. Perhaps they hadn't sent enough, or perhaps—an appalling vision—the bottle had broken in the post. For a time, a part of him worried about little else; scanned the office mail for his own handwriting the moment it came in, rummaged in the package room on the pretext of having lost his watch. Gradually the danger seemed to recede.

“They only tell you if it's positive,” he explained to her, and they came to agree that she probably wasn't pregnant after all.

But now and then, unawares, he surprised himself, during his moments of great passion elsewhere, by visions of Angie's pathetic offering slowly darkening on the shelf of some backstreet laboratory or, still with its lemon and barley label, bobbing out to sea past the Duke of Edinburgh's yacht.

“
L
ook thy last on all things lovely,” Helen announced, “every hour.”

“Why? What's happened?”

They were shopping in Bond Street; Helen needed gloves.

“Shamus rang.”

“Rang? Rang where? How did he reach you?”

A friend, she said vaguely; he had rung the friend's house and she had happened to be there.

“Just like that?”

“Cassidy,” she said wearily, “I am
not
a Russian spy.”

“Where is he?”

“In Marseilles. Collecting material. He's going on to Sainte-Angèle. I'm to meet him there at the weekend.”

“But you said he was in Lowestoft!”

“He got a lift.”

“To Marseilles? Don't be ridiculous!”

Irritated by this interjection, Helen devoted her interest to a shop window.

“Sorry,” said Cassidy. “What else?”

“He's decided to set the book in Africa instead of Ireland. He thought of getting a boat and going straight there. He changed his mind. He'll take the chalet instead.”

Inside the shop a girl attendant measured her incomparable hand.

“Did he talk about me?”

“Sent you his love,” she said, laying the glove against her palm.

“How did he sound?”

“Collected. Sober, I'd say.”

Cautiously, she slid her fingers into the black mouth.

“Well that's great. He's probably writing hard. What else?”

“He said please buy him a dressing gown, a black one with red piping round the collar. So we can do that now, can't we?”

“We'll take them,” Cassidy told the girl and gave her his credit card.

 

In the street again, she added very little. No, he didn't usually go abroad without telling her; but then he wasn't a very usual person was he? No, he hadn't said anything which suggested he was suspicious; he was most insistent she should enjoy herself in London; but the week was up and she should come to him.

“Rather as if that was my ration of you. There's a place called Alderton's, do you mind? In Jermyn Street. You haven't reconsidered your investment, have you, Cassidy?” she asked in the cab.

“What in?”

“Me!”

“Of course not. Why?”

“I would very much like you to hug me. That's why.”

At Alderton's, both very quiet, they selected a dressing gown and Cassidy consented to try it on.

“May he?” asked Helen. “He's
exactly
my husband's size.”

They went together up a winding steel staircase. The cubicle was along one wall, behind a curtain, in what seemed to be someone's drawing room. A faded portrait of Edward VII hung beside a fox's brush. Taking him gently in her arms, she stood against him, head down, the way he remembered her at Haverdown, at the Savoy, the way he had danced with Sandra at Oxford long ago. Her body felt suddenly very weak through the mohair of the dressing gown, and her passion was no longer his enemy. She took his hands and folded them against her breast, and finally she kissed him, lips closed, for a long time. They heard the salesman's footsteps coming up the iron staircase, and Cassidy thought of prison again, nothing to say except we've still got five minutes.

“Did I give it you, Cassidy?” she asked at the airport.

“What?”

“Faith.”

“You gave me love,” said Cassidy.

“But did you believe in it?” she asked, crying in his arms. “Stop patting me, I'm not a dog.
Tell me.
” She held him away. “Tell me: did you believe in it? What do I say to him if he asks?”

“I did. I did believe. I still do.”

The air hostess helped her to the departure gate. She used both hands, right arm across Helen's back to help her go along and left arm short to keep her vertical. Reaching the barrier, Helen neither waved nor looked back; just joined the crowd again, and let them take her.

 

The party had a disjointed quietness. As if the Queen had died, thought Cassidy; part of a national dismay. On the top floor behind closed doors Snaps, in churlish non-attire, was playing sultry gramophone records to selected friends. She appeared seldom, and then only to fetch more champagne and return peevishly to her unseen entertainments. In the kitchens Sandra and Heather Ast, too busy to be present, prepared hot canapés which found no distribution; while the children, for whom costly musical instruments had been set out in the basement, made no sound whatever.

“Leave them to
themselves,
” Ast urged him with a sanity only given to the childless. “They'll be all right, you'll see.”

The Eldermans had stayed away. Large parties were against their principles, they discouraged an intimate exchange.

Such guests as had arrived were stuck at the centre floors like the victims of a faulty elevator, sheepishly waiting to go up or down.

“You've given them too much drink too soon,” Sandra hissed at him, storming past with a Jonathan Cafe salver piled high with
vol-au-vents.
“As
usual.
They're
drunk, look
at them.”

Over her shoulder, Heather transmitted an emphatic smile.

“It's all
gorgeous,
” she assured him when Sandra had gone, and tipped his elbow with her fingers. “Gorgeous,” she repeated.

Several of Heather's friends had arrived; mostly men and mostly in publishing; they were distinguished by the brightness of their clothes and they had taken over the nursery, where they were admiring Hugo's paintings. Heather, in flying visits, explained the background. Yes, Hugo was amazing for his age; well so was Mark actually, they were on a par. She was looking forward enormously to having them to herself while Sandra and Aldo were on holiday. While she spoke, her solicitor sidled over to him, the one who had managed her divorce. His name improbably was Pitt, and Oxford had made him great.

“You're so lucky,” he said, “having Heather.”

The largest group, however, surrounded Mrs. Groat, who was quite drunk on bitter lemon. The familiar patches of red had appeared low down on her cheeks, and her eyes were swimming wildly inside their blue lenses. She was leaning back, flapper-style, on a low Regency chair, her hands linked round one raised knee, and she was talking to the new cornice, with which she was already on coquettish terms. A black walking stick rested against her chair and her foot was bandaged against cramp. Her theme was the goatishness of all men, and the offences which they had committed against her mysteriously hardy virtue. Worst of all was Colly, a childhood friend with whom she had recently passed a weekend:

“So anyway Colly had this Hillman Minx, why he bought a Hillman I shall
never
know but of course your father had a Hillman and Colly always
wanted
to live up to him, of course.” Her dialogue was addressed to her daughters, though neither was present to hear it. “Not that your father was much to live up to, not like that, but still. So anyway, we were having a perfectly ordinary nice weekend at Faulkland Saint Mary, not marvellous but what can you expect, it was a place his mother took him to when he was a child or something, only a pub with rooms of course, but still. So Colly was being perfectly reasonable, dull but quite
nice,
and we'd had
quite
a nice dinner, not Claridges but still, and my dear I was in my room writing to Snaps when in Colly waltzes, asking whether I'm warm enough and grinning all over his face. Me in well just a wrap. Ready for bed. But
Colly
of course, wearing our
mulberry
dressing gown, my dear, right down to our feet, looking
just
like your father or Noel Coward or someone but more ashamed of it. ‘What
do
you mean
warm
enough,' I said. ‘It's midsummer and absolutely stifling.' He knows I loathe the heat. And so my dear, he just stands there, hovering and puffing. ‘Well,
warm
enough,' he says. ‘
You
know,' and my dear he
points
to it through his dressing gown, like a beastly soldier or a tramp or something. ‘
Warm
enough,' he says. ‘Warm enough. Down below.' And my dear, he was
quite
drunk, I could tell by the way he leered although I can't see a thing but still. I wouldn't have minded if he'd been able to carry it off, that's a different thing altogether, I
quite
agree with the younger generation there, I'm sure. Not with everything, but I do there.”

The improbable frankness of this narrative drew no one out; only Storm, Cassidy's accountant, was moved to comment.

“What a
marvellous
woman,” he whispered. “She's like Dietrich, better.”