The Naive and Sentimental Lover

There was a slight pause before the answer came, and he thought he heard a second voice in the background as if Shamus were conferring with someone close to him.

  “In bed,” he said at last. “A Ladbroke Grove bed.”

  “Is Helen with you?”

  “No, lover, it’s just Daddy this time. Come and join us.”

  More consultation in the background, followed by a strange cajoling as between dog and master: “Say hullo to Butch . . . go on . . . say hullo to Butch.” And much louder: “Butch, say hullo to Elsie.” A soft rustle as the receiver changed hands. A girl’s shy giggle, thin as rayon.

  “Hullo Butch,” said Elsie.

  “Hullo Elsie. Elsie . . . is he all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right,” said Shamus. “Come round.”

  “I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

  “So am I.”

  “A Board Meeting,” said Cassidy. “It’s supposed to be my big day. They’re all waiting for me downstairs.”

  Shamus was unimpressed. “I’ve been trying to ring you all week,” he objected. “Didn’t anyone tell you? Hey and listen: who was that sexy bitch I spoke to?”

  “My secretary,” said Cassidy.

  “Not her, the other one.”

  “My wife,” said Cassidy offering prayers to God.

  “Lot of woman there boy. Very naïve. Fond of Russians too. Want to watch out for her.”

  “Shamus look, I was going to write to you . . . when can I see you?”

  “Tonight.”

  “It’s no good tonight. I’m leaving for Paris on Monday, there’s a convention on. We’ve got frightful problems with printers and God knows—”

  “For where?”

  “Paris.”

  “You going to Paristown?”

  “On Monday.”

  “To sell prams?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m coming with you. And bring the Bentley, we’ll need the back seat.”

  15

  The house was in darkness when he returned. It reminded him, as he groped his way upstairs, of the day Old Hugo’s father had died and the aunts had put the house into mourning. They had never had a death before but they knew exactly how to dress, both themselves and the house, where to find black and how far to draw the curtains, where there was religion on the wireless and what to do with all the smiling magazines.

  The bedroom door was locked.

  “She’s asleep I’m afraid,” Mrs. Groat called from the kitchen. “Uh-ha.”

  A towel was laid out on the nursery bed and his toothbrush beside it. Hugo was asleep. He undressed slowly thinking she might come in, then decided to shave to annoy his mother-in-law. The irritation dated from the birth of Mark, whom Sandra had had at home. Sandra had said there would be no pains—she had read books proscribing them—but her confidence proved unfounded. Soon the house had been filled with her sharp screams as she stubbornly rejected Pentothal and her mother sobbed in the kitchen reliving her own fights like a boxer retired from the ring. “Oh God you men,” she shouted at Cassidy as he boiled water for purposes he dared not contemplate. “God if only you knew . . .” Ridden by guilt but furious at what he considered to be an odious display of female self-indulgence Cassidy had exercised the one male prerogative left to him. He shaved.

  For similar reasons the same impulse overtook him now. Unbuttoning his shirt he rattled the razor in hot water, clanked the brush on the glass shelf, then needlessly shaved his amazingly youthful face.

  Sandra kept him waiting a long time.

  “I know you’re awake,” she said. “I can tell from your breathing.”

  She was standing in the nursery door, silhouetted against the landing light, and he imagined her face locked in the tension of uncomprehending resentment. She must have been there a good while for he had heard her first sigh ten minutes ago.

  “You are without nobility,” she continued quietly in her Ophelia voice. “You are without any scrap of decency or moral fibre or human compassion. You haven’t got one instinct that is remotely honourable. I know perfectly well you’re lying again. Why don’t you admit it?”

  Cassidy grunted and shifted one arm in a restless slumber but his mind was working fast.

  I’m lying. Yes. I’ve always lied to you and I always will, and however many times you catch me out I’ll never tell you the truth because you don’t know how to deal with it any more than I do. But this time, big joke, I’m lying because I’m beginning to discover the truth and the truth, my angel, is outside us.

  He waited.

  Silenzio.

  Or take the academic approach shall we since you have no degree? If I am without the qualities you enumerate and for the sake of argument I will largely concede that I am, why should I have the nobility, decency, and moral fibre to admit it?

  Silenzio.

  “I suppose you’re taking A. L. Rowse,” she suggested nastily, “instead of me.”

  Pulling up the blankets Cassidy did his swan act, swaying his head in the muddied water of Something Lock.

  “Who was that Russian who rang you?”

  I don’t know.

  “Who was that Russian who rang you?”

  Lenin.

  “Aldo!”

  A business contact. How the hell should I know?

  “Actually,” said Sandra sadly, “he sounded rather fun.”

  Actually, thought Cassidy, he is.

  Go. Grow. Stay.

  “You’re a complete child. Which is exactly what homosexuals are. You can’t take menstruation or babies or death or anything. You have absolutely no sense of reality. You want the whole world to be pretty and tidy and full of love for Aldo.”

  She became grim.

  “Well the world isn’t like that, and that, my boy, is something you’ve got to learn. But still. Aldo?”

  Meeow.

  “The world is a tough, bitter place,” she continued using her father’s tone, elbows and feet apart. “A damned tough and bitter place. Aldo, I know you’re awake.”

  I believe in Flaherty, the Father, the Son, and the little Boy.

  “I’m going to leave you Aldo, I’ve decided. I’m going to take the children to Shropshire. Mummy has found a house near Ludlow. It’s simple but it will do us perfectly well if you’re not going to be there. We all live much more frugally when you’re not with us. As for the children they must have father substitutes. I shall look for them in Ludlow. Thisbe and Gillian will go to kennels till we have moved.”

  Thisbe and Gillian were the Afghans. Bitches of course.

  “I’m very sorry for you,” she continued. “You know nothing about love or life and least of all women. But still.”

  Under the blankets Cassidy vigorously concurred. That’s why I’m going to Paris, you see. That’s why I’m not taking you. I’m going to look for what you always say you’ve got, so fuck it. But still.

  “John Elderman says you have taken a subconscious vow to avenge yourself on your mother. You hate her for sleeping with your father. For this reason you also hate me. But still.”

  Jesus, don’t say you’ve been having it off with Old Hugo. Well, well, well, this is a dirty house.

  “So I’m very sorry for you,” she repeated. “It’s not your fault, there’s nothing you can do. I’ve tried to help you but I’ve failed.”

  That’s it, he thought, mentally raising one hand. Keep it there. You have totally failed. You have failed to read my mind, my expressions, and my considerable distress in your company. You think you’ve got a monopoly of the metaphysics in this house but I tell you mate you wouldn’t recognise God if He punched you on the jaw.

  Annoyed, apparently, that he still had not spoken, let alone contradicted her, she became more specific.

  “Your responses are entirely homosexual,” she declared, returning to an earlier charge. “Both towards your father and towards your sons. You don’t love them as relatives—”

  Relatives to what? Why can’t you say relations? Why do
you end all sentences with but still? Quite soon young lady you will tax me too far and I shall be obliged to fall fast asleep.

  “You don’t love them as relatives you love them as men.”

  But still, Cassidy thought, you hang around don’t you?

  “Meanwhile you lie to me about those stupid charities. I know you’re lying, Mummy knows you’re lying, everyone knows. They’re just a stupid excuse. Bristol! Do you really think Bristol needs a playing field from you? They wouldn’t look at it if you gave it to them. Footbridge. Pavilion. Levelling. Tchah!”

  She returned to her room.

  Blank, he repeated.

  Blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. Brainwash myself. Cassidy washes blankest. No lies, no truths, only a condition, only survival, only faith. Flaherty we need you. “If I wasn’t blank,” he thought, shading his eyes from darkness with his cupped hands, “I would call you an inexorable bore. You block me. I could be a writer if it wasn’t for you. As it is I’m stuck in bloody prams.”

  The tears were back, slipping through his fingers. He named them one by one: remorse, fury, impotence, the Holy Trinity. I baptise thee in the name of apathy. He’d a good mind to go and show them to Sandra, that was what she did after all, waited till she’d got a good head of steam, then bled it all over him drip drip and boo-hoo. “I hate your fucking tears,” he would shout. “Look at mine.”

  “Goodnight, Daddy,” said Hugo.

  At breakfast as usual after such scenes Sandra made herself extremely agreeable. She kissed him maternally, vouchsafed him glances of great complicity, kept her mother in bed, and gave him tea instead of coffee, which she normally considered low.

  “About what John Elderman said,” Cassidy ventured as she cuddled him from behind.

  “Oh don’t worry about that, I was just in a bad mood,” she replied lightly and kissed his head.

  “Did you have a good night otherwise?”

  “Fine, did you?”

  “Sorry about Paristown.”

  “Paristown,” she repeated with a smile. “What a baby you are.” Kisses again. “It’s going to be a real fight for you isn’t it?”

  “Well maybe.”

  “Don’t be silly, I know it is. You can’t fool me you know.” She kissed him again. “Women like fighters,” she said.

  But Cassidy had not yet finished with John Elderman.

  “You see the truth is, Sandra, I don’t have motives.”

  “I know, I know.”

  More kisses. Cassidy consolidated his position. “I mean not even subconscious ones. I mean I could set up all those arguments so that they read absolutely differently.”

  “Of course you could,” she said. “It’s just John showing off. And you’re much brighter than John, as he perfectly well realises. But still.”

  “I get into a fix and I react. It’s got nothing to do with being queer.”

  “Of course it hasn’t. And it was sweet of you to lend all that money to him,” she added generously. “It’s just that sometimes I don’t understand your motives. And of course I believe in your football fields. It’s just I wish those foul people would say yes for once.”

  “But Sandra, they’re so corrupt.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “It takes years to wear them down . . .”

  Skilfully he set up his operational defences. I’ll be out day and night . . . The Embassy’s sending a car for me to the airport . . . After that anything can happen . . . Don’t ring me, let me do it on the Company . . .

  “So they should send a car,” she said. “All their cars. Have a motorcade just for Aldo. Poop poop like Toad.”

  By the time he left, the charwomen were already arriving, some by taxi, some driven by their husbands. In the hall, dogs were barking, the telephone was ringing on several floors. The builders had already begun; the mason was making tea.

  “I’ll ring if it gets easier,” he promised. “Then you take the next plane. Not the one-but-next, the next.”

  “Goodbye, Pailthorpe,” she said. “Lover.”

  Turning out of her sight he glimpsed her mother standing behind her hovering like a senile nurse ready to catch her if she fell. Nearly he turned back. Nearly from a call box he rang her. Nearly he missed the plane. But Cassidy had been near to things all his life, and this time, come what may, he was going to touch them.

  In Paristown.

  PART III

  Paris

  16

  Love affairs, Cassidy had always known, are timeless, and therefore elusive of sequence. They occur, if at all, beyond the branches of our customary trees, in certain half-lit clouds from which day creatures are excluded; they occur at moments when the soul, in some unfathomable way, is more sublime than the loveliest environment, and all that the eye perceives illustrates the inner world.

  So it was with Paris.

  Haverdown was a night, the Paris Fair (according to the Pramsellers Association, Cassidy was never able to obtain independent corroboration) lasted four days. Yet each commanded for Cassidy the same compelling rhythm: the same fumbling first encounter, the same blind walk from the predictable to the unimagined; an inward walk to the closed-off places of his heart; outward to the closed-off places of a city. Each hung at first upon an instinct of failure; each was crowned by the same triumphal climax; each instructed him, and left him more to learn.

  They met, it was arranged, at number-two terminal, in the departure lounge. The Many-too-Many were everywhere but Shamus had found a place to himself, a corner reserved for bath chairs. It was some time before Cassidy discovered him and he was beginning to panic. Shamus sat crookedly in the steel frame, as if twisted by a terrible injury, and he was wearing dark glasses and a beret. His powerful shoulders were hunched forward inside the familiar black jacket and he carried nothing but an orange which he was quietly rolling from one hand to the other as if to bring the life back to his limbs. He spoke in a cracked whisper. It was Elsie, he said; Elsie had made demands. Also she drank formaldehyde, which dissolved the glottal stop and caused spasms of the vertebrae. It was the first time Cassidy had seen him by daylight.

  “How’s the book going?”

  “What book?”

  “The novel. You were bringing it to London. Did they like it?”

  Shamus knew of no novel. He wanted coffee and he wanted to be pushed round the lounge so that he could see healthy people and hear little children laughing. Over coffee—the attendants were assiduous, cleaned the table, removed unwanted chairs—Cassidy enquired after Alastair the railwayman and other characters of that great evening, but Shamus was not informative. No, he and Helen had not returned to Chippenham; the taxi-driver had gone out of their lives. No, he could not remember when they had left Haverdown. The sodders had cut the water off so they had headed for the East End of London, two friends called Hall and Sal, Hall was a boxer, the bread of life.

  “He hits me,” he added, as if that were a recommendation. And that was all.

  “Don’t hold with the past, lover, never did. Past stinks.”

  With quivering hands he drew the warm cup closer to his chest. Only the mention of Flaherty brought a spark to his lifeless eyes. The correspondence was flourishing, he said; he had little doubt that Flaherty’s claims were justified.

  They ate the orange in silence, half each. On the aeroplane, to which Shamus was assisted by burly stewards, he slept with his beret pushed up against the window like a cushion, and at Orly there was a small embarrassment. Firstly about another bath chair—the French had brought one on the runway, but Shamus indignantly refused it—secondly about luggage. Cassidy had purchased a new pigskin grip to match his globe-trotting camelhair coat, and he was watching the baggage chute fretfully because he knew what the French were. Having successfully recovered it, he found Shamus already at the barrier, emptyhanded.

  “Where’s yours?”

  “We ate it,” Shamus replied. A hostess, drawn by his compelling looks, scowled at him. “Bitch,” he shouted at h
er, and she blushed and went away.

  “Hey, steady on,” said Cassidy, embarrassed.

  “I loathe air hostesses,” said Shamus, and meeowed.

  A limousine assumed them and for a while both were silent, stunned by beauty. The city was bathed in perfect sunlight. It fired the river, shimmered on the pink streets, and turned the golden eagles into phoenixes of present joy. Shamus sat in his favourite place beside the driver waving very slowly to the crowds, and occasionally lifting his beret. A few people waved back and a pretty girl blew him a kiss, a thing which had never happened to Cassidy in his life. At the St. Jacques they were received with all the ostentatious tolerance which French hoteliers accord to homosexuals and the unmarried. The staff assumed at once that Shamus was in charge. Cassidy had taken a suite with twin beds to cover all eventualities and the manager had sent a bowl of fruit. Pour Monsieur et Madame, the card read. Avec mes compliments les plus sincères. Shamus ordered champagne on the telephone in French, calling it shampoo, and the telephonist laughed a great deal. “Ah, c’est vous,” she said, as if she had already heard about him. They drank the champagne warm because the ice had melted by the time it was delivered, and afterwards they walked down the rue de Rivoli where they bought Shamus a suit and three shirts and a pair of handsome lacquered shoes.

  “How’s the Bentley?”

  “Fine.”

  “Bosscow in the pink?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Nipper?”

  “Also yes.”

  “Leg?”

  “Leg fine. On the mend.”

  And a toothbrush, Shamus reminded him, so they bought a toothbrush as well, because Shamus had left his at Elsie’s in case her husband needed it when he came back from prison.

  “How’s Helen?” Cassidy asked.

  “Fine, fine.”

  In a minuscule flower shop, buying two carnations, Shamus kissed the girl on the nape of the neck, a salute which she received with composure. He appeared to have a way of handling women which caused them no offence, like Sandra with dogs.

  “Charm the lady buyers at the Fair,” he explained, as she pinned the buttonholes in place. “Worth a fortune.”