The Naive and Sentimental Lover

  “They laugh when your father says it,” her mother replied when the applause ended; and blushed.

  “Coming up,” said John Elderman, as a pillar of smoke shot from the overheated pan. “Who’s number one?”

  Ignoring him, his nameless wife rolled on her massive hip and, jamming a bottle into the mouth of an adjacent baby, raised the subject of South East Asia. Had they all had the news? she asked, naming a country Cassidy had never heard of. They had not. Well the Americans had invaded it, she said, the local government had requested intervention. They had marched in at five that morning, the Russians were threatening to retaliate.

  “Up the Marines,” said Cassidy, but not loud enough this time for anyone but Heather to hear.

  “Hey you,” Heather said softly, laying a cautionary hand on his knee. “Ease off, you’ll frighten the game.”

  At the same moment Hugo asked his question. He had played no part in the proceedings till now, so his intervention had at least the advantage of novelty.

  “Why can’t you love snow?”

  His thumb was still wedged in his mouth and his brows were drawn hard down over his grey unblinking eyes.

  A concentrated silence preceded the volley:

  “Because it melts!” Prunella Elderman shouted. “Because it’s too cold, because it’s all white and wet.”

  The other sisters joined in. A baby was screaming. A child was banging a spoon on the table, another was jumping on a chair. Seizing the carafe of nettles, Cassidy replenished his glass.

  “Because it’s not alive!” the velveted sisters screamed. “Because you can’t eat it! Why then? Why, why, why?”

  Hugo took his time, shifted his plaster leg, turned a page of his newspaper. “Because you can’t marry it,” he announced gravely.

  In the general groan, Shamus made his appearance.

  He could not have been further from Cassidy’s mind. His thoughts, he afterwards recalled with clarity, had drifted momentarily to the distressing implications of Hugo’s riddle: whether it betrayed a hidden preoccupation with domestic tension, whether the pains of a fractured leg had temporarily unhinged the tender child’s reason. If he had anything else in mind at all, then it was Ast’s hand: was it a restraining hand? Did she know it was still on his knee; had she left it there like a handbag? Was it an olive branch after her earlier, unprovoked irascibility? Seeking perhaps the comfort of a male ally in this moment of sexual uncertainty, Cassidy transferred his attention to John Elderman, mentally selecting as he did so a topic of mutual interest, a football match, John’s fascinating old van; and was therefore surprised to find in his place Shamus, not standing but suspended in the steam stirring the evil-smelling pudding with Elderman’s wooden spoon, his black eyes fixed upon Cassidy across the candlelight, his moist face glowing with impish complicity.

  “Hey lover,” he was saying. “Isn’t it a bloody bore? Urban proles having compromisers’ orgy.”

  Simultaneously or perhaps a fraction before, since psychic experience has no equivalent in time, he heard Shamus’ names, Christian name and surname both, spoken out recklessly from his left side.

  “Such a pity he died so young,” Ast declared, her hand a trifle higher on his thigh. “After all, who else can one read who’s modern?”

  Then John Elderman gave him his pudding and he burnt his mouth.

  In retrospect, of course, Cassidy was better able to understand what had happened. His senses, taken up by Hugo’s riddle and Ast’s understanding hand, had failed to remark that a second, independent conversation was going forward between the women to either side of him: that is to say between Ast and the Sea Plant. For some while, as he afterwards realised, they had been exchanging murmured intellectual commonplaces drawn from Sunday newspapers, no doubt upon the subject of the modern novel. Thus the abrupt, unheralded mention of Shamus’ name, violently intruding upon an unprotected corner of his mind, had caused him in his confusion to imagine in the vivid frame of Elderman the features of his banished friend. It was also true that the four large whiskies at the Audley Arms—not to mention a recent visit to the lavatory where Bear had consumed a little something from a clandestine bottle—had lingered somewhat with the monotony of the evening.

  Also he had drunk a lot of nettles.

  But such insights came to him too late, for while his natural discretion implored him to be silent, he had already overcome his first experience of a ghost and was launched into a sprightly, if injudicious, argument about the great author.

  “Dead?” he repeated as soon as he had emptied his glass. “Dead? He’s not dead. He’s just been kicked around so much he did a bunk. Can’t blame him for that, can you? As a matter of fact I happen to know he’s just about to turn in a new book—”

  “I hate this pudding,” Hugo loudly interjected but no one paid him any notice.

  Ast’s hand had reached, it seemed to Cassidy, a point at which no woman, however absent-minded, can unconsciously arrive. Abruptly, it was now withdrawn.

  “—which by all accounts,” he concluded confidently, “will knock all his other books into a cocked hat. Moon included.”

  How, so soon after the shock of Shamus’ ghostly reappearance—or as now seemed possible, his reincarnation—Cassidy found the courage to speak up so boldly was a mystery he never solved, though he did wonder in his more playful moments whether Shamus belonged to a small élite known only to himself, of ghosts who had the gift of imparting confidence rather than alarm.

  “He died in sixty-one,” said Ast, articulating very clearly for the benefit of the deaf. Her wide breasts, roused with anger, had lifted against their seam of harvest twine.

  “He’s been in hiding,” said Cassidy.

  “How do you know?” Sandra demanded. “You’ve never read a novel in your life.”

  “It’s got petrol in it,” said Hugo and with a clatter pushed his plate into the middle of the table.

  “Shut up,” said Sandra.

  “I love it,” said Prunella Elderman and put her tongue out at the Anglo-Portuguese.

  At this point, Cassidy was reminded of Heather Ast’s husband, a reedy, bow-tied man who, she said, had woken up one morning and decided he was queer. He thought of him very specifically in pyjamas and a nightcap, sitting up with a jolt as the tea came in. “Heather,” he says, “news for you. I’m a poof.” This imaginative portrait set him giggling for some time so that Sandra was beside herself with rage.

  “Just know,” he said, at last recovering his composure. “Just keeping a finger on the literary pulse.”

  “Ooh,” said Sandra, fists clenched.

  “I want more pudding,” said Prunella Elderman, undeterred.

  “Then eat Hugo’s,” yelled Somebody Elderman from the safety of the floor.

  “He died in France,” Ast resumed, in the low tremulous voice of a woman martyred by patience, and laying her errant hand firmly on the scrubbed table, imprisoned it with the other.

  “What did he die of then?” Cassidy asked with a distinctly patronising smile. “What’s the diagnosis, eh John boy?”

  “Of TB I assume,” snapped Ast. “Isn’t that what they all die of?”

  “Meeow,” said Cassidy, and the children at once took it up: “Meeow, meeow, meeow.”

  Ast’s precarious calm was fast deserting her. Within its sprawling tent of blond hair, her face, emaciated by pointless intelligence, now suddenly darkened.

  “You haven’t the least idea what they go through have you? You’re so damn rich you don’t even realise what it means to die abroad, penniless . . . to be denied a decent burial by some idiotic Catholic priest . . . to rot in some shallow common grave . . .”

  “No,” Cassidy agreed cheerfully. “It’s true I haven’t made that experience. However,” he continued, slipping into his smoothest boardroom tone, “I’m afraid you’re wrong. My information is incontrovertible. It may be true that he was given out for dead. It is also possible that he deliberately inspired the rumour. The reason
is simple”—he let them wait a moment. “He was driven to distraction by the publishing profession.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw the once-coveted shape of Ast stir and then hold still. “Whom he describes as ghouls and Gerrard’s Crossers, and anything else that comes into his head. They hounded him until he could hardly think straight, let alone write. He was their golden goose and as usual they tried to kill him. Escape was the only answer,” helping himself to more nettles. “Thank God he made it, says I,” he added, emptying his glass. “The Queen, God bless her.”

  Only the Niesthals joined the toast.

  “The Queen,” the old man muttered. They drank looking down, a private communion.

  Allowing the focus of his eyes conveniently to mist, Cassidy saw Somebody Elderman’s massive fingers close round her beads, which were brown and shrivelled like nuts, and her husband put down the Marc de Bourgogne. At the same moment, Sandra’s mother began talking about the rain in Nebar, how it fell much more than people realised and cleansed nothing.

  “Really the smells seem to thrive on it, I don’t know why.” The only place was the hills, but the Brigadier her husband had not cared for heights. “So I had to have her all alone,” she said. “Just a nurse and this dreadful drunk doctor sent up by the Commissioner. He kept dogs I remember, there was moulting hair all over his sleeves, you wouldn’t do that, would you, John? She was such a funny little thing,” she added when no one spoke. “All red and angry. Hugo was just the same, weren’t you Hug?”

  “No,” said Hugo.

  Sandra had evidently decided it was time to put Hugo to bed. Taking him by the wrist she marched him to the door.

  “Look after him,” John Elderman advised, holding her in the enveloping embrace he vouchsafed to all afflicted women. “He seems to be under a spot of strain.” He was talking about Cassidy not Hugo. “Give him one of your valium now and then, calm him down. Doesn’t matter if he drinks.”

  “Sawbones,” said Cassidy. “You think you’re a great big butch specialist but you’re just a rotten little leech. Sodder.”

  “Sleep it off, I should,” said Elderman, smiling sportily. “Old man.”

  “Flaherty is God,” said Cassidy in a valiant pre-trial gesture. “Flaherty rules the earth. A man is what he thinks he is.”

  And threw his buttonhole to Ast.

  13

  The nursery was also full of flowers: he slept among them often, banished there for cheek. Floppy blue flowers in different shades of pastel. Mark’s bed was very narrow, no more than a mattress laid on the linoleum and draped in a soft woollen coverlet: monkish, he liked to think, conducive to sombre thoughts. Mark’s toy chest was locked and that was where Cassidy kept his paperbacks, recipes for a secret culture. Some were on ancient Greece, some were on the German High Command; others were on skills he proposed one day to acquire, how to sail, how to cook for one, how to service his own car or conduct an ideal marriage. Safely contained within the bed’s narrow walls, the coverlet pulled high, Cassidy selected Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and turned to the passage on love.

  “Daddy,” said Hugo drowsily from his cot.

  “Yes.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes, Hug.”

  “If Mummy goes away, do I go with you or her?”

  It was a very practical enquiry.

  “No one’s going away.”

  From upstairs, they heard her telephone Auntie Snaps in Newcastle and offer to pay her fare to London.

  That’s right, he thought, raise a posse.

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Be Shane.”

  Cassidy made his Wild West voice: “I’m the sheriff around these parts and these yere’s mah deputies.”

  Nonsense. Sandra was saying. He hasn’t even heard of the man. He certainly hasn’t read him. He couldn’t anyway, he’s far too lazy to read a book.... Nonsense, he’s not under strain at all. His parasites run the office, I run the house, and every time he wants to run away he makes up some silly lie about his charities. He did it to annoy Heather, and Beth and Mary and . . . Of course he loathes women, that’s not his fault, it’s his upbringing, I realise that, but still.

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes Hug.”

  “You have heard of him, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest.”

  “I knew you had. Goodnight Dad.”

  “Goodnight old fish.”

  “Dad.”

  “Yes Hug.”

  “Do Sturrock.”

  Western again: “Okay Sturrock, you low-down lyin’ Yankee, git off mah plantation.”

  “Bang,” said Hugo.

  “Bang,” said Cassidy.

  Another ping of the telephone.

  John I’m most dreadfully sorry, said Sandra, I mean I really don’t know what to say . . . really . . .

  Well, reality is also a problem. Not to you of course. To me. The Eldermans. I fuck myself of the Eldermans. Who lent them six thousand quid interest free to get rid of their sitting tenants? Who lent them the chalet last year for their foul kids to rip to pieces? Who—

  Martial footsteps approaching.

  “It’s Mummy,” Hugo explained, and getting up gathered together his few necessaries.

  Pogrom, thought Cassidy and dived under the bedclothes.

  “Come along darling,” said Sandra. “Your father’s drunk.” And from the doorway, whence all her Parthian shots were launched, “How on earth you have the nerve to pretend you care about your children when all you do is get drunk in front of them and swear and make filthy-imputations-against-people-they-respect . . .” She dried up, exhausted by emphasis.

  “Come on,” Cassidy urged, through the tartan blankets. “Let’s have a main verb. Let’s have some bloody grammar around the house, shall we? Set an example to the children, shall we?”

  Sandra sighed and drew the door nearer to her as a shield.

  “Now tell me I’m worse than my father,” he suggested.

  “If his leg doesn’t mend,” she said at last, “it will be your fault entirely.”

  “Night, Sturrock,” said Hugo.

  “Night, Shane,” said Cassidy amiably.

  “And in the morning,” said Sandra, “I shall leave you.”

  Gradually the house dropped off. One by one the staircases creaked and fell silent. Her mother went to the lavatory. For a while he lay awake counting off the hours on Hugo’s cuckoo clock, waiting in case she came to him. Once, still dozing, he fancied he heard again the rhythmic thudding of the fourposter and the long sharp cry of Helen’s pleasure echoing down the fine curved staircase in the style of Adam. And once, struggling with the late effects of nettle wine, he discovered Shamus’ strong arms locked rugger style round his aching ribs, and Helen, voice off, explaining the assault.

  “You see Shamus loves people. It’s the difference between paddling and swimming.”

  “When love beckons to you,” wrote the Prophet, “follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.”

  He fell asleep, dreaming of Hell, and Old Hugo walking over Cassidy’s skull.

  “Anyway,” said Sandra in the morning, “I’m not going to Paris with you.”

  “Fine,” said Cassidy.

  “So you needn’t think I am,” said Sandra.

  “I wasn’t,” said Cassidy.

  “Don’t worry,” said Hugo. “You will won’t you Mummy?”

  Hugo is the blank slate, he thought; Hugo is me before I was written on.

  He touched ninety on the motorway before the police caught up with him. For some reason they believed him when he said he had never been so fast before.

  “It’s my mother,” he said. “She’s dying.”

  They believed that too.

  “She’s at Bristol hospital,” he said. “She’s English born, but she’s lived abroad all her life. She do
esn’t even speak English. She’s very frightened.”

  “You don’t own the road sir all the same,” the older officer replied, embarrassed.

  “What does she speak then?” the younger man asked.

  “French. She’s lived there all her life. She wanted to be here for the end.”

  “Well take it easy in future,” the older one said, with a brave show of no emotion.

  “I will,” said Cassidy.

  “What’s that dial then?” the younger one asked. “The one with the orange light on it?”

  “An ice-alert,” said Cassidy and was about to show them how it worked when the sergeant intervened.

  “Let him go, Syd,” he said quietly.

  “Of course. Sorry,” said the constable and blushed.

  He knew even before he reached the house that they had gone. The shirt was no longer hanging from the cable and the doves, hoping for food, fluttered restlessly on the portico. A tramp had left a chalk mark on the door, an arrow pointing downwards and two white crosses side by side. He pulled the iron bell and heard it clank in the Great Hall. He waited but no one came. Only the stables had word of them. A platoon of whisky bottles lay on the wet straw, shoulder to shoulder, set out by Helen’s tidy hand. He picked one up. The neck was sticky with candlewax; a film covered the mouth; at its centre, like a tiny bullet hole, a point of black carbon recalled the burnt-out flame.

  His flowers were lying at the back door. “If there’s no reply,” he had told the girl in the green overall, “leave them on the doorstep.” And there they lay, a fountain of wasted red wrapped in cellophane, big enough to commemorate a West Country infantry regiment, with the Moyses Stevens label from the lads who’d stayed behind. They must have been there a full fortnight, and the rain had kept them alive. Roses, he had told her, fine tight buds, three dozen of your very best—a dozen for each of us you see. Had written out the label with their scratchy, unwilling pen.

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