“Chippie, chippie,” said Cassidy.
His last sight of Shamus was of him sitting in the bath wearing the black beret and studying stock prices in the Herald Tribune. He must have used the whole bottle of Cassidy’s bath essence; the water was a dark green and the carnations floated on it like lilies on a stagnant pond.
The British Minister (Economic) was one of those fastidious, small, very rich, unworldly men whom, in Cassidy’s experience, the Foreign Office invariably appointed to deal with trade. He cringed at one end of a long room in the shelter of a powerful wife, beside a marble fireplace stuffed with red cellophane, and he received his guests one by one after a butler had thinned them out at the door. Cassidy arrived early, second only to McKechnie of Bee-Line, and the Minister shook their hands very separately as if he would referee their fight.
“We know some Cassidys in Aldeburgh,” the Minister’s wife said, having listened carefully to his voice and found it phonically acceptable. “I don’t expect they’re any relation are they?”
“Well we are a pretty big tribe,” Cassidy admitted, “but we do all seem to be related in some way.”
“What does it mean?” the Minister complained.
“I’m told it’s Norman,” said Cassidy.
McKechnie, who had not been favoured with such intimacies, stood off glowering. He had brought a wife. Cassidy had met her in the tent that morning, a freckled red-headed lady in yellow and green, and she looked like all the wives he had ever met since he had begun in prams. “You stole our Meale,” she had said to him, and she was getting ready to say it again. She had put her hair up and bared one shoulder. Her handbag had a long gold chain to it, enough for at least one prisoner, and she held her elbow wide in case she needed to jab anyone.
“How’s the Fair going?” the Minister asked. “They’re having a Fair,” he said, for the benefit of his wife. “Out near Orsay, where poor Jenny Malloy used to walk her dog.” It was more an objection than an explanation. Fairs, his tone suggested, had replaced dogs, and the change was not for the better.
“We’ve taken ten thousand quid in eight hours,” Mrs. McKechnie said straight at Cassidy. She came from near Manchester and did not care for side. “We’ve not a graduate on the books, have we Mac?”
“I thought they’d all arrive together,” the Minister said hopelessly. “In a charabanc or something. It is extraordinary. What about drink?”
“Two up,” his wife warned. The butler announced Sanders and Meyer of Everton-Soundsleep.
“Norman did you say?” the Minister enquired. “Norman French, that kind of Norman?”
“Apparently,” said Cassidy.
“You ought to tell them that. They’d like it. We get by because she’s half a Lamey, it’s the only reason. They loathe the rest of us like poison, always did. They loathe us too, really, except she’s half a Lamey.”
A pack of junior diplomats entered through another door.
“Can we tempt you to a drink?” they asked of Mrs. McKechnie, picking by training on the plainest woman present. One held canapés on a government tray and another asked whether she would have time for pleasure.
“She’s laying it on a bit about the ten thousand,” McKechnie told Cassidy aside. “It’s more like two.”
“There’s plenty of room for both of us,” said Cassidy.
“She’s loyal, mind.”
“I’m sure she is. Where are you staying?”
“Imperial. Here, have you had the Japs in?”
“They came this morning.”
“It’s got to be stopped,” said McKechnie, and to Sanders who had just joined them, “I was saying to young Cassidy here, we’ve got to do something about the Japs.”
“Japs?” said Sanders, mystified. “What Japs?”
McKechnie looked at Cassidy and Cassidy looked at McKechnie and they both looked again at Sanders, this time with pity.
“I expect it’s just the big firms they go for,” said McKechnie.
“I’m sure it is,” said Cassidy and moved away as if in answer to a call.
They were about twelve in the room, fourteen perhaps including their hosts, but reinforcements were arriving fast. Their topic was transport. Bland and Cowdry had shared a taxi; Crosse had walked and the tarts had nearly eaten him: “Lovely some of them were, just kids, nineteen or twenty, it’s a disgrace.” Martenson had almost decided not to come as a protest against the Ambassador whom he thought should have been at the Opening. As soon as he returned to Leeds, he said, he proposed to complain to his Member of Parliament.
“Bloody peacock I’ll have his bloody balls off. We earn it, he spends it. Look at the size of this room THEN! One man from Commerce: that’s all you need. One man. You could close the whole bloody Embassy apart from him.”
It was while listening to this piece of intelligence that Cassidy heard the butler call an unfamiliar name. He did not catch it precisely but it sounded like Zola; it was certainly Conte et Contessa, and he turned to watch them enter. Afterwards he said he had had an instinct; only instinct, he argued afterwards, could explain why he had freed himself from Crosse and Cow-dry and stepped back a full pace to get a clearer view of Shamus bowing courteously over his hostess’ hand.
He was wearing his rue de Rivoli suit and a pale salmon shirt belonging to Cassidy, a coveted garment which he had been keeping in reserve for a special occasion. A dark-haired girl waited at his side, one hand lightly on his arm. She was serene and very beautiful and she stood directly beneath the light. From his point of vantage Cassidy noticed, with the acuteness of perception which accompanies sudden shock, the bold imprint of a love bite on her lower neck.
“You’ve not had trouble from him?” asked McKechnie, who had joined him again. “My wife says he’s queer as two left shoes.”
“Who?”
“Meale.”
“I’m sure not,” said Cassidy. “In fact I think if anything he’s too much the other way.”
“It’s frightfully enterprising of you,” the Minister’s wife was moaning, “to keep your own man in Warsaw. What does he do all the time?”
“Oh we have quite a lot of trade with them actually,” Cassidy confessed modestly. “You’d be surprised.”
Never hold him back, Helen whispered. Promise you never will.
Shamus had charmed them all. Stately and subdued he moved graciously from group to group, now talking, now listening, now gently deferring to the girl as he offered her canapés and whisky. His gestures, to those who knew him, might have seemed a little slurred; his Polish accent, where Cassidy could hear it, occasionally yielded to a faint Irish intonation, but his magic had never been more compelling.
The Minister was particularly impressed.
“If only more of you would look east,” he complained. “Who is she?”
“Great dignity,” the Minister’s lady agreed. “Make a marvellous diplomat’s wife, even in Paris.”
“She’s stoned out of her mind,” Shamus warned him en vol between two admiring wives. “If we don’t get her out she’ll fall flat on her arse.”
“Give her to me,” said Cassidy.
Receiving the full weight of her he walked straight out of the room.
“Here,” he heard McKechnie say, “that’s the fellow who kicked my stand. Bloody well kicked it and told young Stiles our canopies were crap. He’s not foreign, he’s Irish!”
“Tour d’Argent,” said Shamus. They were standing on the pavement watching the girl’s departing taxi. Shamus looked slightly dishevelled, as if he had been pushed by several people at once.
“Shamus are you sure?”
“Lover,” said Shamus holding his forearm in an iron grip, “I’ve never been hungrier in my life.”
“To the suit,” said Shamus.
“To the suit,” said Cassidy.
“God bless her and all who sail in her.”
“Amen.”
Once again the unpredictable had proved itself the rule. Cassidy had claimed hi
s corner table with the gloomiest foreboding. He did not know how much Shamus had drunk but he knew it was a lot and he was seriously wondering whether he could handle him without Helen’s help. He did not know whether anyone had played Fly in the Tour d’Argent before, but he had a pretty good idea what would happen if they tried. In the cab Shamus had taken one of his quick naps and Cassidy had been obliged to wake him under the eye of the commissionaire.
Now, against all expectation, they were in paradise: Old Hugo’s paradise, with food and waiters, the fragrance of angels and of heavenly flowers.
Diamonds surrounded them: hung in giant clusters in the window panes, pricked the orange night sky, were draped in the eyes of lovers and in the brown silk of women’s hair. Cassidy heard nothing but the sounds of love and battle, the whispers of longing couples and the far sharpening of a knife. Vertigo seized him, stronger than Haverdown, stronger than Kensal Rise. Of all the places he had ever been, this was the most exciting, the most intoxicating. Best of all was the company of Shamus himself. Something—the drink, the girl, his conquest of the Embassy, the magic of the city—something had freed Shamus, soothed and softened him and made him young. He was alight and yet at peace, he was miraculously sober.
“Shamus.”
“What is it lover?”
“This,” said Cassidy.
Shamus’ eyes were shadowed behind the candles, but Cassidy could see he was smiling.
“Shamus, it was wonderful what you did. It was just fantastic. They really believed in you . . . more than in me. You could have told them anything, just anything you wanted. You could run my whole business with your left hand.”
“Great. And you write my books.” They drank to that as well.
“I wish Helen was here,” said Cassidy.
“Never mind lover, woods are full of them.”
“What’s it like being married to someone like Helen? To someone you really love?”
“Guess,” said Shamus, but Cassidy, who had an ear for such things, sensed that he would be wiser not to.
Shamus talked.
Over linen, candles, chalices, and plate, he talked of the world and its riches. He talked of love and of Helen, and the search for happiness and the gift of life, and Cassidy, like a favoured pupil, listened to every word and remembered almost nothing but his smile and the beguiling softness of his voice. Helen is our virtue; we talk, but Helen acts. Helen is our constant; we rotate but she is still.
“I’ve never met a woman like her,” Cassidy confessed. “She could be . . . she could be . . .”
She is, Shamus corrected him. Helen has no potential; Helen is fulfilled.
“Does she mind about . . . Elsie and people, Shamus?”
Not as long as they are called Elsie, said Shamus.
Of the obligation to live romantically and feel deeply. He talked of writing, and what a feeble task it was beside the vocation to experience.
“A book . . . Jesus. Such a little thing, just a handful of days. Enoughs, that’s what a book is. Get pissed enough, get the guilts enough, get screwed enough, and suddenly . . . it’s a natural. Honest, lover.”
Creation was an act of moderation, but life: life, Shamus said, existed only in excess. Who wants enough for Christ’s sake? Who wants the twilight when he can have the fucking sun?
“No one,” said Cassidy loyally, and believed he spoke the truth.
He talked about inspiration, that much of it was genuine but useless, you left your soul out in all weathers, the birds shat on it, the rain washed it, but you had to leave it there all the same, there was no backing out, so fuck it. About equality, how there was none, and freedom, none either, it was crap, and the act of creation made it the biggest crap of all, whether God’s or Shamus’ creation. Because freedom meant the fulfilment of genius, and the existence of genius precluded equality. So the howl for freedom was New Testament crap, and the howl for equality was the howl of the Many-too-Many, Shamus fucked himself of them all. How he hated youth, it made an artist of every little pig who could afford a paintbrush; how he hated age, it retarded the genius of youth; how the world was in existence because Shamus witnessed it, it was certain to die without him.
And when Shamus had told him about life, he told him about Art as well. Not Vatican art, not history book art, nothing for School Certificate, attempt any two of the following questions.
Art as a destiny. As a calling and a lovely agony.
And out of the air, out of the undefined edges of Shamus’ magical conversation, Cassidy discovered that Shamus was chosen.
Fatally, wonderfully chosen.
That he belonged to a body of men who never met; of the gifted early dead; and their embrace was already on him.
Whom waiters loved although they never tipped them.
That he was one of a Pack, a Few against the Many-too-Many, but each hunted alone and none had help in time of need except the comfort of knowing.
“Knowing what, Shamus?”
That you belonged, and nothing more.
That you were best, and could only elect yourself; that Flaherty was the only true and living God, because Flaherty was self-appointed, and Self-Appointed Man was divine, and limitless, and out of time, like love.
As to what it was exactly that joined Shamus to the others, that, as Cassidy’s tutor would say, was concept rather than fact. The concept was to choose yourself very early, and to be precociously familiar with death: with premature death, romantic death, sudden and very destructive of the flesh. To live always testing the edges of your existence, the extreme outlines of your identity. To need water, not air; water defined you, there was a German poet always bathing in fountains; man is invisible until the cold waters of experience have shown him who he is, hence total immersion, violence, boxing with Hall, the Baptist church, and (somehow) Flaherty again.
Gradually, with the aid of a third bottle of wine and several names supplied by Shamus, Cassidy formed a picture of this wonderful band of brothers, this Few: a nonflying Battle of Britain squadron captained by Keats and supported by a long list of young men.
Not all of them were English.
Rather, a Free Europe Squadron, as it were, which included the pilots Novalis, Kleist, Byron, Pushkin, and Scott Fitzgerald. Their enemy was bourgeois society: the Gerrard’s Crossers again, the fucking bishops in drag, the doctors, lawyers, and Jaguar drivers who thundered towards them in black, mechanical fleets; while Somewhere in England, waiting for the last Scramble, they penned fraught elegies and made up peaceloving verses in writing.
Such men by definition survived more in the promise than in the fulfilment; and commanded most respect by what they had left undone.
Also they took a lot, because it was not long before they themselves were taken.
“Who can write about life and run away from it at the same time?” Shamus wanted to know.
“No one,” said Cassidy.
Of this squadron, Shamus was that night and for all the nights to come the one survivor. Cassidy believed that. He knew he would always believe it, because somehow that night and for ever Shamus had stolen into his childhood, and would stay there like a favourite place or a loved uncle. As to Cassidy himself, he was their squire, frying their bacon, carrying their helmets, and polishing their fur-lined boots; posting their last letters and giving their rings to their Helens, wiping their names off the blackboard when they didn’t come back.
“You know Shamus,” Cassidy said much later—they were rowing somewhere, one oar each—“I’ll always be there when you need me.”
He meant it. It was a promise, more real to him than marriage because it was an idea, and one that with Shamus’ help he had found for himself, that night, in the Tour d’Argent in Paristown.
“Why are you crying?” Cassidy asked, as they left.
“For love,” said Shamus. “You want to try it some time.”
“Who’s Dale?”
“Who?”
They had taken a limousine to the seventh
district, Shamus had friends there.
“Dale. You talked about him in your sleep. You said he was a bugger.”
“He is a bugger.”
Shamus’ head was very still against the window, but the lights from the street played over it like gold coins, raising him and pushing him back, so that his silhouette wore the passive look of a man not able to control what the outside did to him.
“Then why don’t you drop him down a hole?”
“Because he dropped me first, and they’re the ones you can’t beat.”
“Did he love you?”
“I suppose so.”
“As much as . . .”
Reaching out, Shamus took Cassidy’s hand in both of his. “No lover, not like you,” he assured him gently, turning his hand over and kissing the palm. “Not like you’re going to learn. You’ll be the best. Number one. In the first position. Honest.”
An instinct made him say it. A moment of profoundest empathy, of prophetic anxiety.
“Shamus . . . you’re the greatest writer of our time. I believe that. I’m very proud.”
The face was turned away from him, very beautiful and sudden against the night, against the running glitter of the street.
“You’ve got me wrong lover,” Shamus whispered, gently putting away his hand. “I’m just a failed businessman.”
Still in Paradise they went to Paris.
Not Cassidy’s Paris of hissing vacuum doors and bad American accents, but Shamus’ Paris of hydrants and cobblestone streets and rotten vegetables and doors with no name; a Paris which Cassidy had not dreamed of, not aspired to even, since it answered appetites he did not know he had, and showed him people he had not imagined; relaxed, gay people of unworldly wisdom who gravely shook Shamus by the hand and called him maître and asked him about his work. They went to the Sulpice, to a square full of bookshops, through a dark courtyard buoyant with music, to a door that led straight to a lift, and they emerged into a sea of chatter and laughing girls and men with bare chests and beads.