He sat in the dark. He had put out the lamp by the sofa so that the only light came from the bedroom and, indirectly, through the open bathroom door.
“Cassidy, I know you’re listening.”
Lucky I bought the place then, really. Now that I’ve got to live in it. The basic essentials of life, Old Hugo said. Food, drink and now this. Lucky the market was looking the other way.
“Did you have lots of girls in Paris?” Helen asked, over the gentle splashing of water.
“No.”
“Not even one or two?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“I would if I were a man. I’d have all of us, bang bang bang. We’re so beautiful. I wouldn’t ask, I wouldn’t apologise, I wouldn’t care. To the victor the spoils. Fuck!”—she must have banged against something. “Why do they put the door handle on the door?”
“Carelessness,” said Cassidy.
“I mean take Sal. Moronic. Totally. So why not be a whore? It’s fun, it’s profitable. I mean it’s nice to do one thing well, don’t you think? Cassidy.”
She was getting out, one leg, two legs; he could hear the rubbing of the towel.
“Yes.”
“What do you want most in the world?” she asked.
You maybe, thought Cassidy; maybe not.
“You,” he said.
There was a knock at the door. The floor waiter wheeled in the trolley. A middle-aged man of great courtesy.
“In here, sir?” he asked, ignoring the figure on the sofa. “Or next door?”
“In here, if you would.”
He set it parallel to Shamus, a hospital trolley waiting for the surgeon. Signing the bill Cassidy gave him a five-pound note.
“That’s all right. That covers everything else we may need. For tips I mean.”
The waiter seemed unhappy.
“I have got change, sir.”
“All right, well give me three pounds.” Transaction. “They still dancing down there?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“What time do you get off?”
“Seven o’clock, sir. I’m the night waiter, sir.”
“Tough on your wife then,” said Cassidy.
“She gets used to it, sir.”
“Any kids?”
“One daughter, sir.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She’s up at Oxford.”
“That’s fine. That’s great. I was there myself. Which College?”
“At Somerville, sir. She’s reading zoology.”
For a moment Cassidy was on the brink of asking him to stay; to sit down with him at a long ritual dinner, to share the wine with him and eat the steak, and gossip with him about their different families and the intricacies of the hotel trade. He wanted to tell him about Hugo’s leg and Mark’s music, and hear his views on cantilevered extensions. He wanted to ask him about Old Hugo and Blue; whether he’d heard rumours, was Old Hugo still a name?
“Shall I draw the cork, sir? Or will you be doing it yourself?”
“You haven’t got a toothbrush, have you, Cassidy?” Helen called from the bathroom. “You’d think they’d provide them, wouldn’t you, for people like us?”
“Just leave the corkscrew here,” said Cassidy, and once more opened the door for him.
“The head porter will have a toothbrush, sir; I can send you one up if you wish.”
“It’s all right,” said Cassidy. “Don’t bother.”
World population’s going up seventy million lover. Lot of people to tip, lover; lot of people to tip.
“Is yours tough?” asked Helen.
“No it’s fine. How’s yours?”
“Fine.”
They sat on opposite sides of the bed, eating steak, Helen in a bath towel and Cassidy in his dinner jacket. The towel was very long, pale green, with a rich woolly nap. She had combed out her hair. It lay in smooth auburn tresses down her bare white back. She looked very childish without her make-up; her skin had that luminous innocence which in certain women comes with the experience of recent nakedness. She smelt of soap, a nutty masculine soap, the kind that Sandra liked to put in his Christmas stocking; and she sat just as she had sat at Haverdown, on the Chesterfield in the morning twilight.
“By want,” she said, “do you mean love?”
“I don’t know,” said Cassidy. “It was your question, not mine.”
“What are the symptoms?” Helen pursued, being helpful. “Apart from lust which, while we know it’s lovely, doesn’t really last the whole drink through, does it?”
Cassidy poured more wine.
“Is that claret?” she asked. “Or Burgundy?”
“Burgundy. You can tell by the shape. Square shoulders are claret, rounded are Burgundy. You’re all I want. You’re witty and beautiful and understanding . . . and you like men best.”
“You mean we have that in common?” Helen enquired.
He wished very much that he had Shamus there to say it all again. Helen is our virtue; that part he remembered, that part he believed: Helen will go where her heart is, she knows no other truth. Helen is our territory; Helen is . . . Also there was a formula. Shamus had drawn it for him on the wallpaper, at a drinking in Pimlico the same night he told him about the Steppenwolf, who from the spaces of his wolfish solitude loved the security of the little bourgeois life. The formula had a fraction; why could he not remember it, Aldo Cassidy the inventor of gadgets, fastenings, and couplings? Cassidy divided by Shamus equals Helen. Or was it the other way round? Helen over Cassidy equals Shamus. Try again. Cassidy over Helen . . .
Somewhere in Shamus’ law of human dynamics, his love for her was inevitable. But where?
“Cassidy, you still love Shamus too, don’t you? I’m only trying to diagnose you see. Not prescribe.”
“Yes. I love him, too.”
“You haven’t ratted?”
“No.”
“Which means,” she remarked contentedly, “we both love him. That’s excellent. We must get marks for that. You see, Cassidy, I’ve never had a lover apart from Shamus. Nor have you, have you?”
“No.”
“So I think a certain amount of forethought is advisable. Is that coffee?”
He poured it for her, adding cream but no sugar. He poured the cream Sandra’s way, spoon upside down over the surface to prevent it from penetrating too far.
“Do you think a fair test would be: what we would give up?” Helen suggested. “Would I give up Shamus, for instance? Would you give up the bosscow and the two veg? You see, Cassidy, we are talking about ruin as well as love.”
Cassidy was suddenly, if cautiously, conscious of a deep protective urge. A child might as well have talked about the world economy just then, as Helen about ruin; for she imposed a peace on him that was like a rest of arms after a long war. He perceived in her a potential honesty of companionship which till now, in all his isolated wandering, in all his attempts to live for himself, had seemed impossible. The laughter he had shared with Shamus was not gone; but in Helen he could possess it, trust it, rid it of its violence. She was smiling at him, and he knew he was smiling in return. Looking at her he knew also that it was the past that was a ruin, not the future: and he saw the empty autumn cities, the tarred warehouses, the bare road before the hood of his car, and he knew them only as the places where he had searched in vain for Helen.
“I love you,” said Cassidy.
“Excellent,” said Helen briskly. “I feel exactly the same.”
The trolley squeaked as she pushed it. Fastening the towel more securely round her, she guided the tricky wheels skilfully through the open doorway to the drawing room.
Sitting alone on the bed, waiting for her return, Cassidy was victim to many conflicting moods. Mainly, however, they ran in the direction of terror.
First, Old Hugo addressed his Divine Employer.
Good morning Lord, he said cheerfully from the pine pulpit some
where in England, his enormous hands folded in athletic piety. How are you? This is Hugo Cassidy and his flock reporting from the Zion Tabernacle of East Grinstead, Sussex, offering up the prayers of our hearts this lovely Friday midnight. Look down in your goodness on young Aldo here will You, Lord? He is very much confused between sin and virtue just at the moment. My view, for what it is worth, Lord, is that he has put his hand into a snake’s nest, but only Thou, oh Lord, in Thy wisdom can give a final ruling on this one; and so be it.
There was still time. If he played his cards right, stalled a little, pleaded a small illness perhaps, such as a headache or a gastric disorder, he might very well get out of this yet. Some tricky talk perhaps to begin with—well he was good at that—some friendly kissing and making up and then get dressed, shake hands, and laugh about it later as a silly mistake they both nearly made.
Never regret, never explain, never apologise. . . .
Would she return? A sudden hope gave him solace.
She’s bolted. She looked at him, got the guilts, and decided to run . . .
In a towel?
Logic is my enemy, thought Cassidy; I should never have taken a degree.
He heard the door close softly and the latch slide; he heard her go back to the bathroom and he knew she was hanging up the towel because she was tidy. Suddenly, seized by panic, he imagined the total failure. He saw another Cassidy twisting, humping, recoiling, wrestling with his unrisen manhood; he heard Shamus’ laughter ringing through the wall, and Helen’s, Sandra’s muffled grunt of irritation at his inadequacy.
The big decisions are taken for us; I have no part in this. I swim, I cannot affect the stream.
The bathroom light had gone out; Helen had put out the bathroom light. He saw the pale rectangle die on the wall before him. Economy; Jesus, does she think I pay the electricity here? I didn’t really buy the place, you know.
Er, Sandra, Helen, whatever your name is, there’s something you ought to know, I’m afraid: I have absolutely no expertise. If you think I can do anything for you that Shamus can’t do, well (as Sandra would say) I can’t finish the sentence. I don’t know how you’re made: that’s the truth of it; none of you. I have absolutely no picture of how you’re made or what gives you satisfaction. May I be absolutely specific here?
She was in bed. Cassidy had not moved, had not looked; he was preparing a speech for the Annual General Meeting:
“Now many of you have come here with the highest expectations. I know that. Many years ago I myself had similar expectations of the same act. There are certain things however that you should know, and to save you unnecessary time and trouble I will be very frank. As a lover, your Chairman is a non-starter. Sorry but there it is. His sexual encounters with his wife have always been essentially of the formal kind, confined to what is known within the trade as the English missionary position. Many of them, so to speak, never got off the drawing board. Your Chairman is aware that there is a distance to descend and a point at which to enter. And also, that any attempt above or below that point gives rise to discomfort and criticism. Practice has done nothing to enrich his knowledge; indeed you should know that after fifteen years of sporadic congress your Chairman can still cause Mrs. Cassidy quite unreasonable pain by entering a wrong channel, so that she has been known, not infrequently, to cry out in indignation, rearrange herself with unfriendly care; and thereafter to make no sound, but to accept your Chairman’s gaucherie as the lot of every woman married into the trade.”
Break. The intimate tone.
“Now I am perfectly conscious of these deficiencies. In my time I have read books, studied photographs, doodled on telephone pads, attended, during national service, army lectures; I have even, in rare moments of mutual frankness with Mrs. Cassidy, delved surreptitiously with my fingers among the perplexing folds. Yet the terrain persistently eludes me. In my imagination, it has the whorls and curlicues of a fingerprint: no two examples, the brochure reads, are ever wholly identical. I am perfectly conscious, here, of a cross fire of psychological interpretations—Dr. John Elderman, our medical consultant, will happily give you a handbook on the subject—and I have fought hard over the years, together with your other Directors, for a clearer orientation. In vain. Now you may very well feel that a younger man, less—I believe the fashionable word is inhibited is it not, Mr. Meale?—less inhibited might serve you better. If so, well, let me assure you that you will have the fullest and the most wholehearted cooperation of the entire Board, and no bad feelings shall be allowed to interfere with a healthy, a satisfactory . . .”
Still standing before an attentive if absent audience—a rug’s width, in fact, from the edge of the double bed—he felt her gaze on him, and heard the silence of her contemplation.
“You’re not very good at it, are you, Cassidy?” said Helen quietly.
“No.”
“Well we’re just going to have to put a lot of work in, aren’t we?”
“Yes, I suppose we are.”
“You can’t do it in a dinner jacket,” she said.
He undressed.
“Now what you do next is: you kiss me.”
He kissed her, leaning across her, so that their lips met at a right angle.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to get nearer,” she said. And as if it were an inspiration: “Hey, how about getting into bed with me?”
He got into the bed.
“It’s called foreplay,” she explained. “Then there’s consummation—” rather in the tone with which she had ordered dinner “—and then there’s afterglow.”
Swedish.
Just a Swedish episode. She probably doesn’t even realise she’s naked, a lot of people don’t make anything of nudity at all these days, hardly know whether they’re dressed or not. That was one of the things he liked about the films at the Cinephone, actually; you could look at them in their wild state. Might drop in there tomorrow, actually; see what they had running. Actually.
Tentatively, still listening for sounds from next door, he made the first reconnaissance. Her skin, he noticed, had a curiously flaccid texture, a cloying liquidity to the touch which he suddenly found unappealing. Her breasts particularly, which in repose largely assumed the requisite shape—and clothed were most distinguished—yielded too easily to his hand, betraying the hard bone underneath. Also, she was too white, with a whiteness that was not luminous so much as vegetable, moreover a vegetable grown underground, and entirely contrary to his appetites. Momentarily revolted by a body so shadowless and obscenely, whitely naked, he moved away from her and busied himself with the bedside light while he tried to think of something to say.
“You’re not putting it out, are you?” Helen asked crisply in the same tone which had earlier reminded him of Sandra.
“Of course not.”
It’s her purity, he told himself; this is what you feel when you sleep with a total woman.
“You’re thinking aren’t you?” Helen said sympathetically.
“Yes.”
“What about?”
“Love, life . . . us, I suppose,” Cassidy replied cautiously and lowered his head on to the pillow with a half-concealed sigh. “Shamus,” he added, in a despairing appeal to her conscience.
“Would you feel better if you hated him?” she asked.
“Well it would be more Old Testament, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s what he thinks. What do you think?”
“Well . . . no.”
“You haven’t got the guilts have you, Cassidy? Because he’s your lover and my husband?”
Cassidy might not understand everything, but he did know that between Shamus and Helen moral scruple was not a plea which would be accepted in evidence.
“Of course not.”
“Then what is it? Touch me.”
“I did.”
“Touch me again.”
“I am touching you.”
“Only my hand.”
“I love you, Helen,” Cassidy said, allowing his t
one to give the impression that this was only one side of an inward argument.
“But you don’t want me,” Helen suggested. “You’ve changed your mind. I must say you’ve picked a bloody good time.”
Cassidy smiled. “God if only you knew,” he said, with a poor shot at world-weariness.
“Is it really so difficult to take?” Helen asked. “After all the lessons we’ve had?”
Receiving no answer, she evidently decided to renounce the initiative and they lay in silence again for quite a long time, while Cassidy took advice from those closest to him.
“Dad.”
“Yes, Hug?”
“You know, Dad.”
“What do I know, Hug?”
“I like this lady.”
“Good.”
“She’s not as nice as Heather, though, is she?”
“It’s just that you know Heather better. And Heather knows us better too.”
“Heather’s not so pushy. Dad.”
“Yes Hug.”
“I like Angie better too. Dad.”
“Yes Hug.”
“Has Angie Mawdray seen your pennier?”
“Certainly not. Why on earth should she have seen it?”
“Mummy has.”
“Mummy’s different.”
“Has Snaps?”
“No.”
“Mummy’s lovely,” said Hugo. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight Hug.”
“A lot of people do it,” said Sandra, standing at the door in the darkness and sighing to wake him up. “And it’s perfectly natural. Just because you don’t enjoy it, it doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t, but still.”
“I know.”
“Well get on with it.”
“It’s just that I’m impotent.”
“Nonsense, you’re lazy and you eat too much. It’s all those ridiculous Conservative dinners. No wonder you’re bloated. Socialists don’t have dinners. They have tea and sandwiches.”