The Naive and Sentimental Lover Read Free Page A

Outlawed for felony. The House passed to his younger Son whereafter no Tenancy is recorded until 1760 when Lord ALFRED returned from Foreign Parts to rebuild the Home of his Forebears, probably after Catholic Persecutions had temporarily dispersed them. The Gardens are conceived on the CLASSICAL English Pattern of containing Nature without undue Formality and are in need of upkeep all enquiries
    SOLELY THROUGH ABOVE NAMED
REFER JR/P MR. GRIMBLE
    Carefully replacing the prospectus in its stand and detaching a light cashmere overcoat from its ingenious hanger beside the rear window, Cassidy happened to glance backwards past the baby seat and the silk balls of the blind, and was subjected to a remarkable hallucination. The drive had vanished. Thick walls of green, pierced with dark tunnels, had closed upon his route and cut him off from the outside world. He was alone in a magic cave of dark green; at the pantomime, his father’s guest; in childhood, thirty years ago....
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    Afterwards, he was well able to explain this optical illusion. A strand of vapour, he assured himself, such as lay upon the moor, had settled below the level of his immediate vision, and by some trick of light assumed the colour of the foliage. It had been raining (as indeed it had) and the moisture on the drive, aided by the low sun, had set up a green shimmer which gave it the appearance of high grass. Or he himself, by the quick movement of his head after the long drive, had transposed upon his own vision images from other places . . . a natural coincidence therefore, such as mirages are made of.
    Nevertheless, for an instant, and perhaps for much longer in terms of the interior experience of Aldo Cassidy, he had the sense of being caught up in a world that was not as controllable as the world he was accustomed to: a world, in short, capable of dismaying metaphysical leaps, and although a second examination soon restored the drive to its rightful position in the scheme of things, its agility, or rather the remembrance of it, caused him to remain seated for a moment while he collected himself. It was with some distrust, therefore, as well as a lingering sense of disconnection, that he finally opened the door and cautiously lowered one well-shod foot on to the capricious surface of the earth.

    â€œAnd enjoy yourself,” Sandra, his protective spouse, had warned him at breakfast in her army officer voice. “Don’t let them browbeat you. Remember it’s you who are doing the giving.”
    â€œI’ll try,” Cassidy promised with an English hero’s smile.
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    His first impression, far from pleasurable, was that he had stepped into an air raid. A fierce evening wind had come up from the east, battering his eardrums and crashing like gunfire into the elms. Above him, recklessly swirling rooks dived and screamed at his intrusion. The house itself had already been hit. It groaned from every door and casement, waving its useless limbs in outrage, slapping them in agony against its own defenceless walls. At its base lay the débris of masonry and tiles. A fallen cable passed close over his head and ran the length of the garden. For one disgusting moment Cassidy fancied, looking up at it, that he saw a dead pigeon hanging from its frayed binding, but it was only an old shirt left behind by a careless gypsy and wound upon itself by a careless wind. Odd, he thought, recovering his composure: looks like one of mine, the kind we wore a few years back, striped, with stiff collars and a generous width of cuff.
    He was extremely cold. The weather, which had looked so gentle and inviting from within the car, now assaulted him with a quite unnatural venom, inflating his thin coat with barbarous drafts and lashing at the cuffs of his tailored lightweight suit. Indeed so sudden and so fierce was the first impact of reality upon his internal reveries that Cassidy was actually tempted to return then and there to the safety of his car, and