The Naive and Sentimental Lover (22 page)

Loosening the card from its sodden envelope he read his own words:

Afterwards his telephone number in London.
Do please reverse the charges.

 

There was a place he knew, a green hill far away in Kensal Rise, he had found it five years ago, waiting for news of Mark's operation. It lay between a graveyard and an infant school and was known as the Valhalla. No single impulse had pointed him the way, only a sense of emptiness, of blank, contactless availability, had with God's good help guided the driven father's footsteps. He had telephoned the hospital from Marble Arch: call again at seven, they would know at seven whether the operation was a success.

Walking he had found himself in a cemetery, crouching from stone to stone in a quest for buried Cassidys. And thus searching became conscious of a drift, even of a positive direction, in the movement of the crowd. Young men dressed in their Saturday uniforms, hitherto aimlessly posted in groups, glanced at their watches, formed ranks, and walked away. Not long afterwards a portly man in a mauve dinner jacket alighted from a taxi and hurried after them carrying what seemed to be a blunderbuss in a black leatherine box.

Then a miracle happened.

Barely had the mauve jacket vanished through the small wicker gate than a flock of young girls, flouncing and trembling on long uncertain legs, bright as tropical birds in their thin blouses and bell skirts, stockingless, knickerless perhaps, fell tittering from the open heaven and landed at his feet, brushing past him on the same mysterious path. Enthralled, Cassidy followed, his fantasy vaulting from one wild vision to another. What ritual, what ceremony was here observed? A hanging? A prophet? Or an orgy on the Teenage Scandinavian pattern? Time, place, even caution had deserted him. He sensed only the proximity of fulfillment drying his tongue and tantalising his soft loins. He was floating. A sexual vertigo conveyed him over the municipal tarmac. Trees, ponds, fences, mothers; in a single blur they skimmed the merest edges of his vision, guided him along the secret line.

Peritonitis was forgotten; Mark was cured.

He lived only ahead of him in the coloured squadron, in the lifting quarters and the plumed haunches, in the waft of baby powder that followed in their wake. Once he stumbled, once he heard a dog snap at him, once an old man yelled “Hey watch out” but by then he was inside, the three-shilling ticket lying like a wafer in his palm. Round him coloured stars were coursing the unwindowed church. From a raised sanctuary swaying priests pounded music he could almost hum.

He was dancing.

 

Dancing at arm's length with speechless girls. In small circles round their grounded handbags. Shuffling fairy rings in the French chalk. He never learned their names. Like nuns sworn to silence they took him, comforted him with the dispassion of a higher devotion, and relinquished him for other sufferers. A few, not many, rejected him on grounds of age; some abandoned him because he was clumsy or when a more favoured partner intervened. Still he did not mind: their rejection was a discipline, attaching him closer to their impenetrable community.

“Here,” said a brunette. “What's that long face for then?”

“Sorry,” said Cassidy, and smiled.

These were the girls he could love. The girls who passed him in buses and dressed shop windows, worked for him as secretaries, peered at him from pavements as he sat in taxis, these were his nurses, his figureheads, agelessly beautiful on a changing sea.

“You can take me home if you like,” said a blonde, “if you give me a nice present.”

But Cassidy declined. In the world they inhabited for him, such girls had no home but this.

 

He drove there now. Drove there straight from Haverdown, three and a half hours looking through a windshield. He drove there to cure himself, the same cure that had worked for Mark. He drove there without a break, without a meal, thinking of nothing because there was nothing left. He parked at a meter and walked past the last two hundred yards. Unknown, even to himself.

The Valhalla had gone. Not requisitioned. Not bought by university or a great department store. Bombed. Eradicated. Cleaned down on both brick sides by a demolition contractor, picked away like meat from the bone by their yellow wrecking machines, and not even a doorstep left for the roses.

T
he day of the Annual Informal Meeting dawned with all the ominous tension of a first night when half the costumes are still with British Rail. Once, these meetings had been Cassidy's treasured innovation, an entirely new concept in company Management, aimed at the improvement of relations between Shareholders and Directors. Once, as from his father's pulpit, the adroit executive had addressed his faithful elders: first quarterly, then six-monthly, cleansed their souls of doubt, and refreshed them with new faith. Other companies, he had argued, gave as little information as possible; Cassidy's would reverse the trend. But time, as so often, had institutionalised the revolution: now the meeting took place once a year, an unwieldy blend of Board and Annual General, and more trouble, in Cassidy's revised opinion, than the two of them together.

By two o'clock the first arrivals had been sighted in the area of the ground-floor boardroom and report of them was brought to Cassidy by a succession of Shakespearean newsbearers. The firm's Earl, a retired steel magnate flown from Scotland, had sat for half an hour in the waiting room before being recognised, and was now in the Informal Conference Room drinking water from the carafe. Meale (good for his polish, the mawkish pup) was despatched to converse with him informally. A retired trade unionist named Aldebout, retained to pacify shopside disputes, had been seen testing the tea in the canteen.

“I told him to have it on the house,” Lemming said proudly. “Those buggers'll do anything for a cup of tea.”

Two brown-coated ladies from Shepton Mallet had had their mini towed away by the police.

“They tore the front bumper off too,” said Angie Mawdray, who had watched the manoeuvre from her window.

A stockroom clerk was ordered to collect it and pay the fine.

 

Behind the scenes a condition of barely controlled chaos reigned. Today was Friday. The Fair opened on Monday. The new ceespring chassis, finally assembled, despite Lemming's attempts at sabotage, had gone ahead air-freight to Le Bourget but the French shipping clerk telephoned to say it had been rerouted to Orly. An hour later he rang again. The chassis had been confiscated by French customs on suspicion, the shipping clerk thought, of being an instrument of war.

“Then
bribe
them!
Bribe
them for Christ's sake!” Cassidy shouted into the telephone, his maternal French having quite deserted him. “B . . . r . . .” and to Angie who was standing by with a dictionary, “What the hell's the French for bribe?”

“
Bri-ber,
” Angie suggested promptly.

“Corrupt them!” Cassidy yelled. “
Corruptez!
” but the clerk said they were corrupt already.

Soon afterward the line went dead. A desperate telephone call to Bloburg, the Paris agent, produced no result. It was the feast of Saint Antoine of All Cities; Monsieur Bloburg was observing the local custom. By three o'clock when the meeting opened there was still no further word from the crisis front. Elsewhere in the building a battle was being waged with the revised brochure. The first edition, hurried through the printers at the last minute after prolonged haggling between Export and Promotion, was out of register and had to be sent back. While the second edition was still anxiously awaited, Cassidy discovered to his fury that it contained no German.

“For pity's sake!” he shouted. “Do I have to remember everything myself?”

Who spoke German? Lemming had fought them in the war and remembered them only with black hatred. He refused to cooperate. Faulk, desperately willing, had no German, but would a little Italian help? A translation agency in Soho sent a lady with blue hair and no English who was at that moment closeted in the copy room while Angie Mawdray, loving the crisis, combed the Public Library for a German-English technical dictionary.

 

To no one's surprise therefore the proceedings began late. Fighting to introduce a sense of calm Cassidy opened with minor matters of routine. Mrs. Aldo Cassidy sent her apologies. Apologies had also been received from General Hearst-Maundy in Jamaica. They had all been sorry to learn of the untimely death of Mrs. Bannister, a longstanding and loyal member of the Board. Mrs. Allan, after seven years' service, had accepted a senior post with another firm; Cassidy moved the customary bonus of one month's pay for every complete year served. The motion was carried without comment. Only Lemming, who had achieved her dismissal after months of venomous intrigue, muttered, “Great loss to us all, very gallant little lady,” and appeared to brush a tear away.

It was almost half past three, therefore, before Aldo Cassidy, son of the distinguished hotelier, the Reverend Hugo Cassidy M.P. and bar., was able to deliver his long-awaited Chairman's address on the subject of Exports. Speaking fluently and without notes, he sounded a battle cry that would have chilled Prince Rupert's heart.

“Ideals are like the stars,” he told them—a favourite dictum of the great hotelier. “We cannot reach them but we profit by their presence. The Common Market—” almost ignoring the applause “—the Common Market—thank you!—the Common Market is a fact of life. We must either join it or beat it. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow shareholders old and new, Cassidy's are prepared to do both.”

Having painted a somewhat paradoxical picture of a Europe crumbling under the impact of his firm's assault, but mysteriously held together by its fastenings, he came at last upon the specific matter of the Fair.

“Now I make no apology for taking a strong, a very strong selling force to Paris. We've got the guns, and we've got the troops as well!”

More cheers. Cassidy lowers his voice.

“Now we shall be spending your money and we shall be spending a lot of it. No one ever did good business with a dirty shirt. There will be two teams. I shall call them Team A and Team B. Team B, under the distinguished leadership of Mr. Faulk, whose brilliant promotional record will stand us in good stead—” loud applause“—willsetsailtonight.It'sayoungteam—”anunfriendly glance at Meale, who had recently taken to wearing pointed shoes, and humming in the corridors “—it's a tough team. It is there to sell. Man the tent, demonstrate the prototype, stimulate interest, yes. But above all, it will
sell.
And I hope that by the time the Fair opens officially on Monday one or two order books will not be quite as empty as they are at this minute. The point is this. Many of these foreign buyers have limited resources. They arrive with so much to spend, they go when they've spent it.”

Lifting a folded sheet of blank paper he passed it across their enchanted vision.

“Furthermore we have done a little bit of spying. I have here a list of all the principal buyers attending the Fair, together with their addresses while they are in Paris. It seems to me, you see, that if these fellows haven't all that much to spend—” a nicely judged pause “—then the best thing they can do is spend it on Cassidy's, and
that
means before they spend it on someone else!”

As the laughter and applause gradually died, the Chairman's expression was seen to harden and his voice took on a more severe tone.

“Fellow stockholders, members of the Board, I leave you with these words.” Slowly one hand rose, the fingers half uncurled as if in benediction. “A man is judged—as judged we shall all be, my friends—by what he looks for, not by what he finds. Let it never be said that the House of Cassidy has been deficient on the score of enterprise. We shall seek and we shall find. Thank you very much.”

He sat down.

 

During the tea break the Earl as elder statesman took him aside. He was a decrepit, silvery man and he had lunched at the Connaught at Company expense.

“Listen to the advice of an old man,” he said speaking very slowly through the fumes of a rare whisky. “I've seen it in steel, I've seen it in deer. Don't burn yourself out. Don't try to run the whole course before breakfast.”

“I won't,” Cassidy assured him, laying a steadying hand on his shoulder. “I really won't.”

“What you do in your twenties you pay for in your thirties, what you do in your thirties you pay for in your forties . . .”

“Yes but look here—” they had reached the Directors' lavatory “—I've got all
you
people to worry about haven't I, sir?”

“You've not been drinking by any chance, have you?” the Earl enquired.

“Good God no!”

“You know,” the Earl continued, his head propped conveniently against the cistern, “I've been watching you. You're the most terrible bloody liar. Eh, tell us,” said the Earl, drawing closer and affecting to wash his hands. “You seem to be making a hell of a big profit. Do you need a dash more working capital by any chance? On the QT, you know. So's we don't have to bother the tax laddies,
you
know.”

 

The Informal audience had thinned a little after tea, and something of Cassidy's verve had also left him. Skating over the detailed function of the B team (responsible for the
logistics of the second phase
) he for a while drifted a little glumly round problems of creating new agencies and opening spares depôts.

“There is even a possibility,” he said, “I speak of course of the long term here, let's have no misunderstanding about this—that Cassidy's will eventually—I refer to the distant future—arrange for local, even
regional
manufacture of their product under licence and on the basis of part profit-sharing.”