The Naive and Sentimental Lover (18 page)

“I've got to get back I'm afraid,” he said. “We've got a big deal coming off with America. I have to be on the end of a phone.”

Before they parted, she became quite strict.

“Now Doubtful have you got boys?”

“Yes, Mrs. Harabee. Two. Mark and Hugo.”

“Have you put them down for Sherborne?”

“Not yet, Mrs. Harabee.”

“Well you must.”

“I will.”

“Otherwise
however
can we go on? If the Old Boys aren't loyal, who will be? And after all, you can obviously afford it.”

“I'll do it next week,” said Cassidy.

“Do it
now.
Run up to the porter's lodge and do it now, before you forget.”

“I will,” Cassidy promised and watched her up the hill, a steady pace and a healthy stride.

 

Walking again as the evening came, he found the narrow streets behind the Digby, and smelt the woodsmoke and the damp embracing smell of English stone; caught from the windows of schoolhouses scraps of woodwind music from half-instructed mouths; remembered the pain of loving and having no one to love; and envied Mrs. Harabee that her love could be at once so single and so diffuse.

And searched the darkening faces for the policeman's daughter.

Bella? Nellie? Ella? He no longer knew. She was fifteen, Cassidy sixteen; and since then his tastes had never seriously progressed, neither beyond her age nor the experience she gave him. Her breasts were irrepressible, her hips plump as cottage bread, and her hair was long and blond. He had her on weekdays in the summer after cricket, in the remoter bunkers of Sherborne Golf Course, lying side by side, hands only. She had never allowed him to enter her. For all he knew she was virgin to this day, for she had a terror of pregnancy and the most exaggerated notion of the agility of semen.

“They
walk,
” she assured him once, as they lay in their tiny dune, her green eyes wide with sincerity. “They find the way by smell and
walk
there.”

Despite these restrictions, he had never possessed anyone so fully, nor wanted anyone so urgently. She caressed him as skilfully as he caressed himself; in return he touched her as he pleased, lingered for hours over the gifts of her flesh. Her full, creaseless body was at once adolescent and maternal; her moist ovens, strained through membranes of cheap silk, were the incubators of his life and lust; as to her aweful susceptibility to his own progenital seed, it served only to deepen their relationship. As she had borne him, so she could conceive by him: mother and daughter had assumed him equally. And thought of Sandra again, and whether he had ever loved her that way, perhaps he had, perhaps he hadn't.

 

In the pub, the television made its own blue firelight and a small dog barked for bacon-flavoured crisps.

“Zero,” said Angie on the telephone. “Not a word.”

“Not a hope,” he told Sandra, pretending to call from Reading, where he had pretended to go on a pretended errand of charity; pretence being his only means of earning praise, and privacy. “Not a hope,” he repeated with conviction. “The National Playing Fields Association have bagged the only possible site.”

And drank six whiskies, Talisker, recently his favourite.

And bought a half-bottle of a blended malt, the flat shape, to fit into his pocket.

D
ear Mark, he wrote in bed that night, in an old hotel in Marlborough, in the make-believe pages of his drunken fantasy. So that you never have to wonder who your parents are, or how you came to life, I am going to give you a brief rundown of how it all happened, so that you can decide for yourself how much you owe the world, and how much the world owes you.

Mummy and Daddy met in Dublin at a dance. Daddy was wearing his first dinner jacket and Grandpa Cassidy was the headwaiter....

He began again. Not Dublin: Oxford. Why the hell had he thought of Dublin?
Nothing Irish about us old son, the Cassidys are English to the core.
Oxford. Oxford because Sandra was studying domestic science in a dark house in Woodstock. Oxford, that was it, a May ball, five guineas a single ticket, Old Hugo was not even on the horizon.

Mummy was a haunted, spindly girl, but very pretty in a death-wish sort of way and she wore a Cinderella dress that sometimes looked silver and sometimes seemed to be covered in ash....

Hating her parents, pressing her head against his puckered shirt front as they moved to their parents' music.

Daddy gave Mummy the benefit of his conversation to which Mummy listened with melancholy intensity and later, when Daddy left her in order to dance with someone jollier, she sat in a chair and declined all other invitations. When Daddy returned, Mummy rose to him with unsmiling obedience. Early in the morning, partly out of politeness, and partly out of a sense of occasion, and partly perhaps to challenge such evident integrity, Daddy took Mummy on a punt (which is a flat boat you push along with a stick) and explained in a succession of pleasantly apologetic sentences that he had fallen in love with her. He chose a confessive style modelled on a very romantic French film star named Jean Gabin whom he had recently seen at the Scala: it was a style which leaned on a sense of loss rather than of gain. It was nothing she need worry about, he assured her, she should feel no guilt or obligation, he was a man after all and would find his own way of dealing with it. Before Daddy had quite finished, Mummy seized him in a refugee's embrace and said she loved him too, and so they lay in the punt exchanging kisses, watching the sun rise over Magdalen Chapel while they strained their ears to hear the choir singing from the tower. Because you know, every first of May the choir all stand on the top of the tower and sing a song, but all
Daddy
heard was the early lorries rumbling over the bridge and the laughter of upper-class undergraduates throwing bottles into the water.

 

A lorry changed gear; the ceiling rocked in the half-darkness. Watch that Heaven, Flaherty.

 

“I love you,” Mummy said, closing her eyes and breathing the words inward like a drug.

“I love
you,
” Daddy assured her. “I've never said that to anyone before,” which is supposed, for some reason, to make it extra true. Putting his hand inside the Cinderella dress Daddy felt the frozen pips of Mummy's bosom and it was like touching an orphan somehow, touching himself, only a lady. Then he saw the light of eternity shining in her virgin eye and was
very
gratified to think that so much animal energy was exclusively available to himself.

 

Flaherty was drifting round the room chanting Old Testament slogans through glistening alcoholic lips. Opening his eyes wide, Cassidy successfully despatched him.

Throughout the term, so far as I remember, we met regularly. Mummy seemed to expect it and Daddy (naturally a very polite person) was of course quite ready, when time allowed, to receive anybody's admiration, as we all are. So we met on Sunday mornings at Something Lock after Mummy had been to church, and on Wednesday evenings at the Something Restaurant after Daddy had been to the cinema. Sometimes Mummy brought one of her lovely picnics made in the domestic science kitchens. Daddy did not tell Mummy he went to the cinema because he thought she might disapprove, so he told her instead that he went to All Souls for tea with
Rowse.
Now A. L. Rowse is a very grand historian and also something of a popular name so naturally Daddy thought he would be a good person to be protected by. Rowse had taken him up, he explained, as a result of a few essays he had written, and might very well be sponsoring him for a
Fellowship,
which is something every undergraduate thinks he ought to have.

“Aren't they all
bachelors
at All Souls?” Mummy asked.

“It's changing,” said Daddy, because of course bachelors aren't married, and Mummy and Daddy had to be married to have you and Hug, didn't they?

Now you may well wonder what Mummy and Daddy talked about. Well, they talked about
their
Mummy and Daddy. Grandpa Groat was in Africa (where he still is) busy completing his time. The mere mention of him made Mummy extremely angry. “He's so
stupid,
” she said stamping her foot on the towpath. “And Mummy's stupid too,” meaning Granny. Most of all she despised their values. Grandpa Groat, she said, cared only for his pension and Granny Groat cared only for her servants and neither of them had ever stopped to wonder what life was really all about. Mummy hoped they would stay in Africa for ever, it would serve them right for going there in the first place.

Not to be outdone, Daddy told Mummy about Grandpa Cassidy, how all his life Daddy had camped in places and never lived in them, fleeing before the wrath of Grandpa's creditors; how his housemaster at Sherborne had told him that Grandpa Cassidy was the devil, and how Grandpa Cassidy had said very much the same about his housemaster; and how Daddy had found it very hard to know whom, if either, to believe.

“I mean
God
what a way to bring somebody up,” Daddy protested.

“Specially you,” said Mummy and it was understood between them that their own children would get a better chance, which is you and Hug. So you see, Mummy and Daddy were child martyrs to a grown-up world and that is what I will never let you be if I can ever prevent it, I promise. They wanted to be
better
and in a way they still do. The trouble is, they never discovered how, because you can't really spread much love around unless, in a funny way, you love yourself as well. Sorry to preach, but it's true.

So Mummy and Daddy watched each other very, very closely, each waiting for the other to revert to the follies of his parents, so in the end we did, both of us, because we're inheritors, like everyone else, and because sometimes the only way to punish our parents is to imitate them. But all that came later.

So anyway.

Well, one day, Granny Groat turned up with a big trunk, all the way from Darkest Somewhere, looking not at all like the little old lady in the Babar books, which is how she looks now; oh no. She arrived with that mute, declining beauty which Daddy has always mistaken for great intelligence, and immediately Daddy loved Granny Groat, loved her more than Mummy in fact because she wasn't cross, and appointed her a Life Mother, which was very, very unwise. Mummy knew it was unwise but Daddy wouldn't listen to her, because he wanted love all round him even if he couldn't have it close. And of course, Granny got very excited because she had never had a son, and she was
specially
pleased that Daddy was blond after all the black children she'd had to look at for so long.

“You're quite
sure
you want to marry her?” she asked him with a terribly intelligent giggle. “She's such a
funny
little thing.”

“I love her,” said Daddy, which when you're young is a sort of snobby thing to say, and makes you feel better, particularly when you're not sure you do.

“Get out, Flaherty.”

Flaherty refused to move.

“
Get out!
” Cassidy sat up sharply. Someone was banging on the wall.

“Get out!” he yelled a third time, and the figure withdrew.

 

Mark; contrary to all you may have heard the wedding was not a success.

Mummy wanted the Church of Saint Somebody of Somewhere, beside the lock where she and Daddy had talked so much of love. She wanted no one for herself except a seedsman called Bacon who lived in Bagshot and had been her gardener when she was a little girl, and she wanted no one for Daddy but A. L. Rowse and just ordinary witnesses brought in from the fields. Finally we were married in Bournemouth where Granny Groat had taken a flat, in a moorish red-brick church bigger even than Sherborne Abbey, with a very old organist playing “Abide with Me.” I'm afraid Mr. Bacon never came. Perhaps he couldn't leave his seeds, perhaps he was dead, we never knew.