The Naive and Sentimental Lover
“Here,” he said, offering him a handkerchief, “Have this,” and returned to his newspaper.
Then it dawned on him that Old Hugo had no bone to chew, nothing to choke on but his shame, in fact; and lowering the newspaper stared at him, at the broken figure hunched to fit so small a space, and the massive shoulders shaking in loneliness, and the bald head mottled red.
To lift the newspaper?
To go to him?
“I’ll get you a drink,” he said, and fetched a miniature from the bar, running all the way and crashing the queue.
“You took your time,” the old man said, dead straight, when Cassidy returned. He was reading his Standard, the greyhound page had caught his interest. “What’s that?” Eyeing the miniature.
“Whisky.”
“When you buy whisky,” the old man said, turning the little bottle in his enormous, steady hand, “buy a decent brand, or nothing.”
“Sorry,” said Cassidy. “I forgot.”
“Lover.”
“Yes, Shamus.”
An hour had passed, perhaps a day. The sun had disappeared, the road was dull and dark, and the trees were black against an empty sky.
“Look at me very closely. Are you looking?”
“Sure,” said Cassidy, his eyes still closed against Old Hugo’s shoulder.
“Deep into the innerest recesses of my irresistible eyes?”
“Deeper.”
“While you look at this picture, lover, thousands of brain cells are dying of old age. Still looking?”
“Yes,” said Cassidy, thinking: this conversation came earlier actually; this is what made me think of my father.
“Now. Now. Bang! Bang! See that? Thousands dead. Spread over the cerebral battlefield. Coughing out their tiny lives.”
“Don’t worry,” said Cassidy consolingly. “You’ll go on for ever.”
Long embraces under the warm blankets.
“I wasn’t talking about me,” Shamus explained, kissing him. “I was talking about you. My cells get a lovely time. It’s yours we’re worried about. I’m writing that down too, if I remember it.”
Partly, Cassidy thought, this is an inward journey. Earthbound Aldo Cassidy, en route to Monte Carlo, relives his life in the company of his nomadic familiar.
“Lover.”
“Mmh.”
“Never go back to Paristown, will we, lover?”
Shamus’ voice has a note of anxiety. Not everything is play on this journey.
“Never.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Liar.”
Cassidy, sobering, revisits the question. “Tell me Shamus, actually, why don’t you want to go back to Paris?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? We’re not going.”
Partly however, as recorded, an outward journey; for when he woke again the police were keenly disputing the horse’s possession.
They were near a private airfield, in a lay-by between two blue vans; a small biplane was circling to land. Everyone was talking; however, the coachman, who had arrived separately by bicycle, was talking loudest. He was an old, grey man in sailcloth trousers and a long overcoat from the war, and he was kicking the grey’s front legs and cursing it for infidelity. The coachman, who shared the view of the police that Shamus was in no way to blame, would not take Cassidy’s traveller’s cheques so they went to a bank and the police kept guard while Cassidy signed his name ten times along the dotted line.
How did I ever cash a cheque at dawn?
“Shamus,” said Cassidy, thinking of Bloburg and Meale and letters from Abalone Crescent, “isn’t it time we went back?”
“Blow,” said Shamus.
They blew. From the pile of twigs a thin smoke rose, but no flame. Their suits lay beside them on the shingle like dead friends; beyond them a dried-up river, just a shallow stream where they had bathed, and cracking clay imported from the moat at Haverdown. Beyond the river, the fields, beyond the fields a wood, a railway line, and a bank of Flemish sky that reached for ever.
“You’ll never do it without paper,” Cassidy objected. He was feeling cold and rather sober. “I could ring for a taxi if you’d let me dress.”
A train passed over the viaduct. There were no passengers but the lights were lit in the carriages.
“I don’t want a taxi.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t, so piss off. I don’t want to go to Paris and I don’t want a taxi.” He blew again, shivering. “And if you try to dress I’ll kill you.”
“Then let me get some paper.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Shut up! Sodder! Shut up!”
“Meeow,” said Cassidy.
The last bottle was empty so they put it on a stick and broke it with artillery fire, ten stones each, fired alternately. And that was when the boy appeared. Mark’s age but younger in the face. He carried a fishing rod and a rucksack and he was sitting on a Dutch bicycle of which Cassidy owned the United Kingdom concession. First he compared their genitals, one blond one black but otherwise little to choose, then he picked up a stone and threw it hard and straight at the post where the bottle had stood.
Cassidy wrote out a shopping list and gave him twenty drenched francs.
“And mind how you cross the road,” he warned him.
“You see my view is,” said Cassidy cautiously, pulling the cork with his teeth—the boy, a resourceful child, had persuaded the shop to draw it halfway—“that if we called a cab—”
“Lover,” Shamus interrupted.
“Yes.”
Encouraged by several editions of the Paris press, the twigs were burning with conviction. Farther down the bank, the boy was casting for fish.
“Lover do you reckon this is a clash of egos?”
“No,” said Cassidy.
“Ids?”
“No.”
“Ego versus soul? Ibsen?”
“It’s not a clash at all. I want to get back, you don’t. I want a bath and a change and you’re prepared to live like a troglodyte for the rest of your life—”
The stone hit him on the side of the head, the left side just behind the ear. He knew it was a stone all the way, saw it coming as he fell, saw the map on it, mainly of the Swiss Alps, the Angelhorn massif leading. The distance to the ground was much farther than he expected. He had time to throw the bottle to one side before he landed, and time to get his arm up before his head hit the shingle. Then Shamus was holding him, kissing him, pouring the wine between his teeth, forgive lover, forgive, weeping, choking like Old Hugo in the train, and the boy was pulling a small brown fish out of the water, a child’s fish for a child’s rod.
“What the hell did you do it for?” Cassidy asked.
Shamus was sitting apart from him in self-imposed purdah, the beret pulled over his eyes for remorse, his bare back cut in two by the grimy watermark of the depleted river. He said nothing.
“It’s a bloody odd way to behave, I must say. Specially for a master of words.”
The boy threw back the fish. Either he had not seen the incident, or he had seen many such incidents already, and blood did not alarm him.
“For Christ’s sake stop hitting yourself with that stone,” Cassidy continued irritably. “Just tell me why you did it, that’s all. We did everything you wanted. Froze in the bloody river to feel our identities, ruined our new suits, caught pneumonia, and all of a sudden you stone me. Why?”
Silenzio. Very slightly the beret moves in rejection.
“All right, you told me: you don’t want to go back to Paris. Fine. But even great lovers can’t camp beside a dried-up river all their lives. Well why don’t you want to go back? Don’t you like the hotel? Are you fed up with cities all of a sudden?” A pause. “Is it something to do with Dale? With your book?”
This time the beret does not move at all, not in rejection, not in acceptance; the beret is as still as Sandra at the door, when she is cross
with him for not being cosmic, for not providing her with the tragedy she was groomed for.
“Shamus for God’s sake. One moment we are halfway to being pooves, the next you’re trying to kill me. What the fuck’s the matter with you?”
As if shaken by the wind, the bare back sways. Finally the penitent lifts the bottle, drinks.
“Here,” said Cassidy, crouching beside him. “I’ll have some of that.” Putting out his hand he received not the wine, but the battered carnation from Shamus’ buttonhole. Gently lifting the beret, Cassidy saw how the tears had collected on the rim.
“Forget it,” he said softly. “It didn’t hurt, I promise. I don’t think you even did it. Look. Look, no lump, no throbbing, nothing. Feel, come on, put your hand there.”
He lifted Shamus’ muddy hand and put it against his head.
“You’ve got to love me, lover,” Shamus whispered, as more tears came. “I need it, honest. That’s nothing to what I’ll do to you if you don’t love me.”
His hand was like a second Confirmation, light and full of feeling, trembling on Cassidy’s scalp.
“All of you, you’ve got to give me all of you. I do. I’ve given you a blank cheque, lover. Real.”
“I’m trying to understand,” Cassidy promised. “I am trying. If only you’d tell me what it was.”
“Fucking little bourgeois,” said Shamus hopelessly. “You’ll never make it. Jesus!” he cried suddenly. Relinquishing Cassidy’s hand he bounded into the air. “My identity! It’s ruined!”
He was pointing at a patch of scrub grass where his passport lay face downward. A dead butterfly, wings spread hopelessly for takeoff. The blue dye oozing over the grass.
“Bleeding to death,” he whispered, lifting it with both hands. “Lover, get me an ambulance.”
At the village post office, fully dressed, they bought a French envelope and sent their carnations to Helen. The gum tasted of peppermint and the carnations were no longer young.
And two gliders to bring them closer to Flaherty. And a kite for despatching prayers.
And a notebook because on the way back to Paris Shamus was going to start a new novel, on the theme of David and Jonathan. Also, he had lost the old one in the river, and did not hold with the past.
Roads to Paris, Cassidy wrote in his private Baedeker, in the florid prose which was yet another of Old Hugo’s countless gifts, are long and various, often doubling back upon themselves. Some are bordered by great hills from which kites and gliders may be flown and avocations made to Irish gods, some by factories filled with sad proles and the Many-too-Many mounted on brakeless bicycles; some again by inns where whores banished from the city provide great writers with mediocre glimpses of the infinite. But all these roads are slow roads, made for the dragging of feet; for Paris is no longer popular, it is menaced by the mystery of Dale.
Lying in the barber’s chair, covered in choirboy white, the weary chronicler fell asleep while being shaved, and dreamed of naked Helen standing on the beach at Dover, two dead carnations at her breasts while she launched small sailing ships in races round the world. When he woke the barber was cutting his hair.
“Shamus I don’t want it cut!”
Shamus was sitting on the bench, writing in his notebook.
“It’s good for you, lover. New life as a monk,” he said vaguely, not looking up. “Necessary sacrifice.”
“No!” said Cassidy, pushing the man away. God in Heaven, how to face Trumper’s now? “Non, non, non.”
Shamus continued writing.
“He wants it longer,” he explained to the barber with whom he was on terms of closest friendship. “Il le veut plus long.”
“Shamus what do you believe in?”
At the world’s edge the red sun rose or sank behind the swollen grid lines of a factory. Lights lay on the fields, and the gliders were wet with dew. “What is the light at the end of the pier?”
“Once I believed in a whore,” said Shamus, after long thought. “She worked Lord’s cricket ground. I never knew anyone who loved the game better. She kept all the batting averages in her handbag.”
“What else?”
He hated clergymen, he said. Hated them with the passion of a zealot.
“What else?”
He hated the past, he said, he hated convention, he hated the blind acceptance of restriction and the voluntary imprisonment of the soul.
“Isn’t that all rather negative?” Cassidy said at last.
“I hate that too,” Shamus assured him. “Essential to be positive.”
They were on stolen bicycles, one side of Cassidy’s head now much colder than the other. And that, said Shamus, was Cassidy’s problem.
Meeow.
19
Who would be Shamus? Cassidy wondered, watching him write at the inn.
The city was not far away now; perhaps that was why he was writing; to arm himself against whatever threatened him in Paris. A pink glow waited at the end of the avenue, and the evening air hummed like a boiler. They sat at a table beside the road, under an umbrella advertising Coca-Cola, drinking Pernod to clear their heads. The taxi waited in a lay-by, the driver was reading pornography.
Who would live with his own recording angel, life after life recorded, distorted, straightened and rounded off? Who would be Shamus, daily chronicling his own reality? Always attacking life, never accepting it; always walking, never settling.
“Will it really be a novel?” he asked. “A full-length one, like the others?”
“Maybe.”
“What about?”
“I told you. Friendship.”
“Read it,” said Cassidy.
“Piss off,” said Shamus and read: “Reality was what divided them, reality was what put them together. Jonathan, knowing it was there, ran away from it; but David was never sure, and went looking for it every day.”
“Is it a fairy tale?” Cassidy asked.
“Maybe.”
“Which of us is David?”
“You, you stupid sod, because you’re fair. David was a great sceptic, for he loved the present world and all its riches. Jonathan defamed the world, and was therefore the prophet of a better one; but David was too thick to understand that, and Jonathan too proud to tell him. David’s world was one in which the ideals of the herd were realised, because he was of the herd, the best of the Many-too-Many. Jonathan had naïvety of the heart, but David had rococo of the soul. . . .”
“But what does it mean, Shamus?”
“It means you need a drink,” said Shamus, “before I stone you again for being a heretic.”
To iron a passport—it is a truism of which Cassidy had not till then been sufficiently aware—you need a whore, whores have the most sensitive fingers.
“They’re the best ironers in the world,” Shamus explained. “Famous for it. And when she’s ironed the passport,” he added, with the pride of a time and motion expert, “you can fuck her. It’s time you lost your hymen.”
So they went to the Gare du Nord, a terminal of great attraction, to find a pair of hands.
Their return to the city had not been, could not be perhaps, as triumphal as their flight from it. Cassidy had assumed they would go at once to the St. Jacques. He had even worked out a system for getting in without going through the hall—to cross the doorman’s palm and slip in by way of the staff entrance, as becomes an hotelier’s son—for their suits, though moderately dry, were shrunk and not at all debonair. Also he had fences to mend; the Fair was becoming an anxiety; how about his mail and the phone calls?
Shamus would have none of it. The city had already darkened him; his mood was sharper and less kind.
“I’m sick of the fucking St. Jacques. It’s a rotten little death cell. It’s full of fucking bishops, I know it is!”
“But Shamus you liked it before—”
“I hate it. Fuck you.”
He’s running away, thought Cassidy suddenly: I know that look, it’s mine.
“What a
re you afraid of?” he was going to ask; but learning prudence, abstained. So they went to a place that Shamus knew, somewhere off the rue du Bac, a white courtyard house near an embassy; the street was lined with diplomatic cars. Inspired by the cars perhaps, Shamus insisted on signing their names as Burgess and Maclean.
“Shamus are you sure?”
Of course he was bloody sure; Cassidy could mind his bloody business or do the other thing, right?
Right.
Good hands are not plentiful at the Gare du Nord, even at commuting time on a sunlit evening. There are hands that hold luggage, hands that hold umbrellas, and tender hands that are linked to lovers and cannot, alas, be parted. Being already tired from their exertions, the two friends sat on a bench and, emptying their crumpled pockets, fed remnants of bread to French pigeons. Shamus, morose, barely spoke. Cassidy’s head was aching painfully and his kneecap, till recently quiescent, had started to play him up again after the cycling.
“Good,” said Shamus, when he told him.
To ward off the encroaching despondency, therefore, Cassidy began singing. Not so much singing: droning. A lyric of his own invention, rendered in a modulated French monotone, a very passable imitation of Maurice Chevalier.
Which was how they found Elise, the well-known anagram of Elsie.
Ze leedle birds of Paris
Zey ’ave a lerv’ly time
Zey ’ave a lerv’ly time,