“It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Helen, suddenly.

  “Me too,” said Cassidy.

  “To think it was once free . . . a living, wild thing . . .”

  Cassidy at once took up her argument. It was indeed a most tragic and affecting sight, he would write to the Greater London Council the moment he got back to the office.

  Thrilled by the similarity of their separate responses they hurried home to share their feelings with Shamus.

  “Let’s all go down there one night,” Cassidy suggested. “With picks, and set it free!”

  “Oh do let’s,” said Helen.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Shamus and went to the lavatory, ostensibly to be sick.

  Later he apologised. An unworthy thought he said, forgive, lover, forgive. He had had visions of Christopher Robin, all wrong, all wrong.

  But when Cassidy, leaving for home, made his way down the steel steps, he was met by a shower of water that could only have come from the bedroom window; and he remembered Lipp’s restaurant in Paris, his baptism and Shamus’ pain.

  The cloud, it seemed, had passed, until one day—a week later, perhaps two—Hall’s gym closed. Cassidy and Shamus went down on a Monday and found the iron door locked against them and no lights burning in the air-raid-glass window.

  “Gone to a fight,” said Shamus, so they played football instead.

  They went down again on the Thursday and the door was still locked, now with a crowbar and a curiously official-looking padlock with sealing wax over the hook.

  “Gone on holiday,” said Cassidy, thinking of Angie Mawdray, who had left for Greece the day before with a ticket bought by the Company. So they went for a run round Battersea Park and played on the seesaw.

  The third time they went, there was a notice saying “Closed,” so they rang the bell at Sal’s place until she answered it. Hall was in stir, she said, very frightened, he had clobbered an American bosun for being fresh, he was doing three months at the Scrubs. She had a bruised eye and one hand bandaged and she shut the door on them as soon as she had told them the news. But there was a smell of cigar in the parlour and the sound of a radio upstairs, so they reckoned the American bosun had not suffered irreparable harm.

  This news had a curious effect on Shamus. At first, he was incensed and, like the unreformed Shamus of old, made elaborate plans to effect his friend’s escape: to kidnap the American Ambassador, for instance, or sequester the bosun’s ship. He assembled an armoury of secret weapons: wire nooses, files, and pieces of bicycle chain attached to wooden handles. His plan was a mass breakout involving all inmates.

  This aggressive mood was followed by one of deep melancholy and disappointment. Why had Hall allowed himself to be captured? Shamus would commit a crime in order to be joined with him. Prison was the only place for writers, and he fell back on the familiar examples of Dostoevsky and Voltaire.

  But as the weeks passed and Hall was still not released, Shamus gradually ceased to talk about him. He seemed instead to enter a dream world of his own from which the excited accounts of his wife’s exploits with Cassidy no longer woke him. But he did not turn away from Hall; to the contrary, he drew closer, developing, in some way which Cassidy could not fully understand, an inner partnership with him, a secret union, as it were; to languish with him waiting for a certain day.

  Condemned still for hours at a time to the imprisonment of his novel, he even acquired, to Cassidy’s skilled eye, a prison pallor and certain prison mannerisms, a slough of the feet and shoulders, a furtive greed at table, and the habits of listless servility when addressed and of following them round the room with shut-off, unwatching eyes. In conversation, when he could be drawn, he was inclined to volunteer incongruous references to atonement, hubris, and the social contract, loyalty to one’s private precepts. And on one unfortunate occasion, he let slip a most damaging comparison between the sublime Helen and Hall’s bird Sal.

  It happened late at night.

  On Cassidy’s suggestion they had been to the cinema—Shamus also liked the live theatre, but he was inclined to shout at the actors—and they had seen a Western starring Paul Newman, whose features Helen had recently compared with Cassidy’s. Returning by way of a couple of pubs, they had linked arms as was their custom, Helen in the middle, when Shamus suddenly interrupted Cassidy’s spirited rendering of the film’s key scene with a cry of:

  “Hey, look there’s Sal!”

  Following the direction of his gaze, they looked across the road at a middle-aged woman standing alone on a street corner, under a lantern, in the classic posture of a prewar tart. Irritated by their interest, she scowled at them, turned, and toppled a few ridiculous steps along the pavement.

  “Nonsense,” said Helen. “She’s far too old.”

  “You’re not though, are you? You’ve got a few years in you, haven’t you?”

  For a moment no one spoke. To look for Sal they had drawn to a halt, and were standing, still linked, outside what was probably Chelsea Hospital. The windows were lighted and uncurtained. A complex of pale shadows ran outwards from their feet. Cassidy felt Helen’s arm stiffen inside his own, and her bare hand turned cold.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  “Jesus,” Shamus muttered. “Jesus.”

  Breaking away from them he hurried into a side street and returned to the flat late and very pale.

  “Forgive, lover, forgive,” he whispered, and having kissed Cassidy goodnight, put his arm round Helen and guided her gently, reverently to the bedroom.

  On the next day the incident at football occurred.

  It was for both of them conclusive. Shamus was overworked; abstinence had gone too far.

  In the absence of Impact, football had become their main recreation. They played it twice a week: on Tuesdays and Fridays. It was a fixture, always at four. On the stroke of the clock, Cassidy would roll his trousers to the knee, toss his jacket on to the blue bed, kiss Helen goodbye, and run off across the road to the playground to reserve the goal. A few moments later, dressed in the inevitable deathcoat, Shamus would descend the iron steps and after a few preliminary exercises on the swings take up his position either as striker or goalie according to his mood. A rigid points system was applied, and Shamus kept all manner of records in a drawer of his desk, including diagrams of intricate manoeuvres he had performed. He even spoke of publishing a book on method football; he would talk to Dale about it, the sodder. Generally he was better in attack than in defence. His kicking had a wild, undisciplined brilliance to it which frequently lofted the ball far over the railings, and once into the river, for which he claimed a prize, an afternoon exchange of views with Helen. As a goalie he tended to rely on nerve tactics, which included shrill Japanese war whoops and many exotic obscenities on the subject of Cassidy’s bourgeois nature.

  On the day in question, it was Shamus’ turn to attack. Taking the ball quite close to the goal mouth, he dug a mound, set the ball on it, then stalked slowly backwards preparatory to a self-awarded free kick. Since the ball was no more than five yards from him, and the line of Shamus’ run appeared to direct it at his head, Cassidy decided on a defensive charge, which he executed without difficulty, clearing the ball to the other side of the ground, where it was intercepted by an old man and kicked back. The next thing Cassidy knew was that Shamus had hit him on the nose, very hard, and that a stream of warm blood was running over his mouth and that his eyes were watering profusely.

  “But it’s the game,” Cassidy protested, dabbing his face with his handkerchief. “That’s the way it’s played for God’s sake!”

  “You buy your own fucking ball!” Shamus shouted at him, furious. “And keep your fucking hands off mine. Sodder.”

  “Here’s to no rules,” said Helen, back in the Water Closet, quietly observing them over her Talisker.

  “Here’s to my rules,” said Shamus, not at all mollified.

  “Well I wish you’d tell me what
they are,” said Cassidy, still smarting.

  “It’s the book,” Helen assured him, as he left. “It’s right on the brink. He always gets like this at the end.”

  “I think you’re absolutely wonderful,” said Sandra, her eyes bright with excitement as she staunched the wound that same night. “You haven’t hurt him badly have you?”

  “If I have, I have,” Cassidy retorted irritably. “If they want their politics rough, that’s what they must expect.”

  Next day Helen and Shamus disappeared.

  26

  Waiting again.

  Visiting Birmingham to discuss the Common Market with the local Liberal Party, Cassidy took Angie Mawdray, ripened by Greek suns, to dinner in Soho.

  “You know what I demand of a woman?” he asked her. “A pact to live fully.”

  “Gosh,” said Angie. “How?”

  “Never to apologise, never to regret. To drink whatever life provides”—they had had a lot of retsina, Angie’s favourite. “To take whatever is offered, never counting the cost.”

  “Why don’t you?” she asked softly.

  “I want to share,” he told Heather Ast at Quaglino’s the following night, a Tuesday, returning from Birmingham by way of Hull. “To cherish, to be cherished? Yes,” he conceded. “But never to . . . live on my second stomach like a cow. A couple of glimpses of the infinite, that’s all I ask. Then I’ll die happy. You know what the Italians say: one day as a lion is worth a lifetime as a mouse.”

  “Poor Sandra,” said Ast quietly. “She’d never understand.”

  “It’s virtue,” Cassidy insisted. “The only virtue, the only freedom, the only life. To make wanting the justification. For everything.”

  “Oh Aldo,” said Ast, wistfully touching his hand. “It’s such a journey, such a lonely journey.”

  “The ordinary hours are not enough,” Cassidy declared to Sandra on Wednesday, driving back from a late dinner through empty streets. “I’m sick of enough. I’m sick of making convention an excuse for being bored.”

  “You mean you’re bored with me,” said Sandra.

  “Christ of course I don’t!”

  “Don’t swear,” she said.

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean it, darling,” said her mother from the back. “All men do it.”

  “What’s eating you then, all of a sudden?” Snaps murmured as, ladies first, she went upstairs to bed. “You’re like a bloody bitch in heat.”

  “We’re back,” said Helen, calling him at work. “Did you miss us?”

  “Certainly not,” said Cassidy. “I have unlimited substitutes.”

  “Liar,” said Helen and kissed him down the telephone.

  Hall was out: that was the occasion. Not sprung, as Shamus would have had it, not swapped for the American Ambassador, but out, honourably liberated with the full co-operation of the Wormwood Scrubs authorities, after remission of sentence for good conduct. His release had coincided almost to the day with the return of Shamus and Helen: valid causes both for celebration.

  But surely not at the Savoy?

  At the Bag o’Nails, yes. At the Victoria Palace, at one of the drag pubs which Helen liked, across the river in Battersea or Clapham. But not—in Cassidy’s book at least—never for such a purpose, his beloved Savoy.

  Was it Helen’s idea? Cassidy doubted it.

  Helen, for all her fearless virtue, had a considerable sense of decorum.

  Shamus then? Was it Shamus’ idea?

  The finger pointed strongly in his direction. Much enlivened by his journey to the country—a tiny lapse, Helen said vaguely, he was cracking a bit under the book, best not refer to it—he had come back full of suggestions as to how they should celebrate. His first was a dockside firework display, the biggest London had ever seen, bigger than that of the Great Exhibition; all Cassidy’s money should be devoted to it. But Cassidy claimed to remember having seen oil tankers at Egg Wharf, so that plan was dropped in favour of a dancing. Not an ordinary dancing, but a great ballet, written by Shamus to celebrate the virtues of passionate crime. Everyone would have a part, they would take the Albert Hall and forbid entry to Gerrard’s Crossers.

  To this plan, Helen had the sternest objections. He should finish the centre pages, she said, before he even thought of writing anything else. Moreover, he knew no choreography. If Shamus wanted to dance, why didn’t they go somewhere where dancing was already available . . . ? And from there somehow, they agreed on the Savoy.

  Therefore it was most likely, but not proven, that Shamus had started the movement, and that Cassidy and Helen, as so often, joined it once it had begun.

  The matter settled, it was at once their principal, indeed their only, concern. Whatever reservations Cassidy and Helen might secretly have shared were at once set aside in favour of the excitement of preparation. They planned for it, they lived for it. While naïve Shamus put on his beret and settled, naked again, before the open window, the sentimental Supporters’ Club took up residence in the kitchen and wrote out menus and place cards.

  “Oh Cassidy, what will it be like? I’ll bet it’s absolutely peachy. Cassidy, can we have caviar? Say we can? Oh Cassidy.”

  News from Shamus’ agent gave them fresh cause to celebrate: he had been offered a lucrative if inglorious contract to visit Lowestoft for three weeks to write a documentary on trawlermen for the Central Office of Information. The Office would pay his expenses and a fee of two hundred pounds. Helen was delighted: sea air was just what Shamus needed.

  “And you will come and visit us, won’t you Cassidy?”

  “Of course.”

  They would leave on the morning following the party, settle in over the weekend; Shamus would start work on the Monday. Shamus called it his Codpiece and left the arrangements to Helen.

  “But won’t it interfere with his novel?” Cassidy asked, very puzzled.

  Helen was oddly indifferent.

  “Not madly,” she said. “Anyway I want to go, and for once he can damn well do something for me.”

  Which left them with the vital question of what Helen would wear.

  “Oh God, I’ll borrow something of Mummy’s, what does it matter?”

  “Helen.”

  “Cassidy, please . . .”

  So one afternoon, while Shamus was still working, they went back to Fortnum’s where, in a sense, they had begun. The choice was absurd, for she gave style to everything she put on.

  “Well you decide, Cassidy, you’re buying it.”

  “The white one,” Cassidy said promptly, “with the low back.”

  “But Cassidy, it costs a—”

  “Please,” said Cassidy impatiently.

  “That was the one I liked,” said Helen.

  From Piccadilly they went to the Savoy and selected a table for five and ordered a special cake with “Welcome Home Hall” in icing, a fruitcake because Helen said fruitcake would keep, they could take home what they didn’t eat. Sitting in the cab again Helen became suddenly very solemn.

  “Shamus must never know,” she said. “Never in his whole life. Promise, Cassidy?”

  “Know what?”

  “About this afternoon. About the dress. About all we did, the fun we had, the laughter, and your kindness. Promise.”

  “But God,” he protested, “this is us, this is friendship, it could be you two, or Shamus and me, or . . .”

  “All the same,” said Helen; and Cassidy, bowing to her superior knowledge, promised.

  “But how will you explain the dress?”

  Helen laughed. “God, you don’t think he counts things do you?”

  “Of course not,” Cassidy said, ashamed by his own vulgarity.

  27

  Suddenly it was Friday, and they were driving in the Bentley to the river entrance.

  The night was as warm as Paris; lighted candles waited on the table; the river bank was hung with white jewels palely mirrored in the stiff black water.

  “Look Shamus,” Cassidy breathed in his ear. “R
emember?”

  “Meeow,” said Shamus.

  Nothing in the fulfilment, it is said, matches the excitement of anticipation; yet as Cassidy took his place on Helen’s left, in the most effective position, as it happened, to admire the flowers he had sent her that morning, and the scent he had given her the day before, to study with fraternal reverence the long fall of her white neck and the discreet swell of her white breasts; to admire with but a turn of the head the sudden, handsome profile of his beloved Shamus, he was filled again with that unearthly joy, that elusive ecstasy, short-lived though it would always be, which had become since Haverdown the purpose, and the occasional prize, of all his striving. This is the moment, he thought; now it is all here, under one spell, this is what was missing in Paris.

  Sal seemed to have come unwillingly. She kept very close to Hall and trembled while she ate. Her choice was pale green, and a silver ring on her little finger. Addressed by any but Hall she seized the ring and turned it for a charm, but it brought her little luck.

  “Come on Sal. Aren’t you going to drink to Hall?” Cassidy asked in a jocular voice, coping well with the folk backstairs.

  Shrugging, she drank to her man; but did not lift her eyes.

  But Hall adored her. He sat beside her with a showman’s pride, holding his knife and fork like the handlebars of the training cycle, smiling whenever he looked at her. The dinner jacket made no difference to him. Hall was a boxer; he had been a boxer in prison, now he was a boxer in a dinner jacket; only a tiny twinkle in each hooded eye suggested that he was temporarily off duty.