The Naive and Sentimental Lover

  “We left the light on,” said Cassidy.

  “And it was me underneath?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “You see shooting him is the only way you can survive, that’s how he’s worked you out. You’ve got to shoot him, for your sovereignty. He’s the original, and you’re the imitation, that’s how he argues; so if you shoot him, you’ll become an original in your own right, it’s extremely classical. Then your genius will be liberated, but locked up in the prison so you can’t piss it away, and all that lovely discipline you have will be further enhanced by—”

  “I haven’t got any genius. I’m a buffoon. I’ve got big hands and big feet and—”

  “Don’t worry, Shamus is giving you some of his. After all whoever sleeps with me has to be a genius, doesn’t he? In Shamus’ book at least. I mean it can’t just be sordid and middle-class or there’s no art. Hey Cassidy, I wrote you a letter.”

  Opening her handbag she gave it to him, and waited while he read it. The envelope said: To lover. The page inside was lined, torn from one of Shamus’ pads.

  You have given me more in one night than anyone else in a lifetime.

  Helen

  “I thought it had rhythm,” she explained, watching him as he read it. “I worked on it a lot. I wanted to check it with Shamus actually but then I thought better not. After all, I’m not his creature, am I?”

  “Good God no,” Cassidy cried, laughing. “Rather the other way round I would have thought.”

  “Cassidy. Don’t knock him.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Well don’t. He’s your friend.”

  “Helen—”

  “We’ve got to protect him for all we’re worth. Because if he ever does find out it will destroy him. Totally.”

  The football ground was empty; the children had gone. It was a quiet day for the river too, a holiday perhaps, or a day of prayer.

  Nothing had changed, but the place belonged already to the past. His dinner jacket hung in the spare room still. A light powder, either human or mineral, greyed the shoulders. The kitchen smelt of vegetable; she had forgotten to empty the rubbish. The picture window was clouded with brown grime. The desk was just as the great writer had left it, except for the yellowed paper, curled by the sunlight, and the dust thick enough to draw in. Keats lay on the blotter. The beret hung on the corner of the chair.

  They embraced, kissing; kissing in the dull daylight, lips then tongues; Cassidy caressing her, mainly on the back, tracing her spine to its end and wondering whether she would mind if he continued. Lipstick tastes different in the daylight, he thought: warm and tacky.

  “Cassidy,” she whispered. “Oh Cassidy.”

  She took his fingers and kissed them and put them on her breast and glanced first at the bedroom door and then at Cassidy again, then sighed.

  “Cassidy,” she said.

  They had left it unmade, the sheets pulled back to air, the pillows heaped in the centre as if for one person. The Casa Pupo coverlet lay on the floor, tossed aside in a hurry, and the curtains were partly drawn on the side where the neighbours overlooked. In the poor light the blue was very dark, more black or grey than blue, and the flowered wallpaper had a dishevelled, autumnal look which had never been a problem with the nursery at Abalone Crescent. Stepping over the coverlet, Cassidy went to the window and drew the curtains.

  “I should have sent someone to clear up,” he said. “It was stupid of me.”

  Making love to her, Cassidy smelt the familiar smell of Shamus’ sweat, and heard the clip of carpets being beaten in the courtyard of the white hotel.

  Afterwards they drank Talisker in the drawing room and Helen began shivering for no reason, like Sandra sometimes when he talked to her about politics.

  “You haven’t got another love nest have you?” she asked.

  Over lunch at Boulestin, their spirits fully restored, they had a marvellous plan. They would use only sleazy boarding houses, like real illicit lovers.

  The Adastras Hotel in the neighborhood of Paddington Station, Cassidy wrote in his secret Baedeker, may be compared with a certain white hotel in Paris yet to be located by your chroniclers. It has the same elderly, unpretentious grace and many fine old plants long nurtured by the management. Terminus freaks will find a haven here; the bedrooms abut directly on to the shunting sheds, and afford an all-night, no-holds-barred spectacle of a little-known aspect of the British Transport system. The hotel is particularly favoured by illicit lovers: its fine, damp-consumed cornices dating from the nineteenth century, its marbled fire grates stuffed with yellow newspaper, not to speak of its outrageously impertinent waiters, who look to the unattached clientèle for the gratification of their sexual needs, all provide a background of desolate incongruity exceptionally conducive to high performance.

  “Shamus cramped me. He made me such a prig. Observing. Who the hell wants to observe? He’s not a schoolmaster, and I’m not his pupil. It’s over, all that stuff, and he’s got to realise it. Fie.”

  “Fie.”

  “Pshaw.”

  “Pshaw.”

  “Meeow.”

  “Meeow.”

  “You’re a bear, Cassidy. A big, wuffly bear. Cassidy, I want to be raped.”

  A Pailthorpe bear, thought Cassidy.

  Cheeribye, the porter had said, seeing them to their room, mind you get your money’s worth.

  Do stations never sleep? he wondered. Clang-clang, clang. You must dance but I must sleep.

  Got to be a lion tonight lover; mouse-time again soon.

  “Cassidy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I could make you the happiest man on earth.”

  “I am already.”

  “More, Cassidy.”

  “I can’t. That was the full menu. Honestly.”

  “Nonsense. Put your mind to it and you can do anything. You are suffering from a thoroughly unrealised potential.”

  An announcer was calling the night sleeper to Penzance. Departs at midnight, Cassidy thought; a little after; his eyelids were very heavy. Bright bands of railway light lay on the papered ceiling.

  “Promise?” Helen asked.

  “Promise.”

  “For ever and ever and ever and ever?”

  “And ever.”

  “I promise?”

  “I promise.”

  There was no blood available so they had Talisker instead.

  “What else is in that book?”

  “I told you. You write the great novel in prison.”

  “But how does he find out?”

  “Find out what?”

  “That they’re lovers, you and me.”

  “He read me that bit,” Helen said gravely. “It was very spectral.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was never really dramatised. It just happened.”

  “How?”

  “In the book, he’s called Balog. Shamus is. Gradually Balog came to suspect what he already knew. That his virtue had gone into his friend and his friend had taken Sandra for his lover.”

  Discovering in himself physical resources he had long given up for spent, Cassidy sat up abruptly in bed.

  “Sandra?” he repeated.

  “He rather likes the name. He thinks it suits me.”

  “But that’s absolutely disgusting. I mean everyone will . . .” He checked himself. Better to talk to Shamus directly on the matter. It’s really too much. I mean, I take the man to Paris, dress him, pay his rent, and the next thing he does is lampoon my wife, make a public show of her. “Anyway,” he said, in a nasty, academic tone, “how can you suspect something you already know?”

  There was a long silence. “If there’s one thing Shamus does understand,” said Helen firmly, “it’s the structure of the novel.”

  “Well it’s ridiculous, that’s my view. Comparing you with Sandra. I
t’s insulting.”

  “It’s art,” said Helen, and turning her back lay a long way from him.

  “You don’t think you should ring Lowestoft do you?” Cassidy suggested. “In case he’s back?”

  “What would we do if he was?” Helen asked tartly. “Invite him up to join us? Cassidy, you’re not afraid of him are you?”

  “I’m worried about him if you must know. I happen to love him.”

  “We both do.”

  Gently she began kissing him. “Grinch,” she whispered. “Grizzlebear, hellbeef.”

  Oxford, the announcer said. Your last chance to get aboard.

  But by then she had decided he was in need of the ultimate comfort.

  The day dawned very slowly, an internal dawn of yellow mist that gradually brightened under the sooty domes of the station roof. At first, watching through the window, Cassidy took it for the steam of locomotives. Then he remembered that locomotives had no steam any more, and he realised it was fog, a thick, venomous fog. Helen was asleep, cut off from him by the inner peace that comes with faith. No frown, no cry, no anguished whisper against the hellhound Dale: a deep repose, virtue is rewarded.

  Helen is our virtue; Helen is eternal.

  Helen can sleep.

  Rising late, they spent the day visiting their favourite places but the gibbons took no pleasure in the fog, and the bust of Mussolini had been removed for cleaning.

  “Probably stolen by Fascists from Gerrard’s Cross.”

  “Probably,” Cassidy agreed.

  They did not go to Greenwich.

  In the afternoon they saw a French film which they agreed was fabulous, and when it was over they went back to the Adastras for another exchange of views.

  Afterwards, in the intimacy of shared repose, she told him with little prompting how she and Shamus had parted.

  “I mean it was so easy, Christ. I just said, I think I’ll go to town and do some shopping and see how Sal is, and tidy the flat and check on Dale and see lover, and he said fine, off you go. I mean he does it, why shouldn’t I? Anyway he was perfectly happy. I said I’d ring him, and he said don’t bother, how long would I need? I said a week and he said fine. Well that was all right, wasn’t it?”

  “Fine,” said Cassidy. “Of course it was. Absolutely fine. Have you ever done it before?”

  “Done what?” Helen asked sharply.

  “Gone shopping. To London. To see Sal and people. On your own.”

  She thought for a long time before speaking.

  “Cassidy, you have to try to understand. There is one edition of me, and one only. It belongs to you. Part of me belongs to Shamus, it’s true. But not your part. Have you any questions?”

  “No.”

  To please him however she put through a call to Lowestoft, but there was no reply.

  Sandra, on the other hand, answered the telephone at once.

  “They’ve offered me Lowestoft,” he told her.

  “Oh.”

  “Aren’t you pleased?”

  “Naturally. Very.”

  “How are the invitations going?”

  For the party; the celebration. Whatever we’re celebrating.

  A hundred sent out, twenty so far replied, said Sandra: “We hope very much you’ll be able to come.”

  “Thanks,” said Cassidy, making a joke of it. “So do I.”

  31

  During this exacting period of Cassidy’s life—the next morning perhaps, the morning after—there occurred one of those small incidents which had little bearing upon the central destiny of the great lover but nevertheless illustrated with unpleasant force the sense of approaching reckoning which was overtaking him. Arriving at the office at about midday on one of his rare visits from the greater stage on which he had elected to perform—an unbreakable engagement, he had told Helen, a political thing and rather high level—he was met once more by the insolent gaze of the receptionist and a mauve envelope addressed to him in Angie Mawdray’s handwriting.

  He found her in bed, in a state of high fever, Lettice on her lap and Che Guevara on the wall.

  “How do you know?” he insisted, holding her hand.

  “I just feel it, that’s all.”

  “But feel what, Angie?”

  “I can feel it growing in my tummy. It’s like wanting to go to the lav. I can feel its heart beating if I lie still enough.”

  “Listen Angie, love, have you seen a doctor?”

  “I won’t do that,” she said.

  “For a check, that’s all.”

  “Feeling is knowledge. You said that. If you feel something it’s true. My horoscope says it too. All about giving my heart to a stranger. Well if I have a baby I do give it a heart don’t I, so sod it.”

  “Look,” said Cassidy, urgent now. “Have you been sick?”

  “No.”

  “Have you . . .” he tried to remember their euphemism. “Has the Chinaman been?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know!”

  “Sometimes he hardly comes at all.” She giggled, pulling his hand down under the bedclothes. “He just knocks and goes away. Aldo, is she really your mistress? Truly, Aldo?”

  “Don’t be daft,” said Cassidy.

  “Higher up,” she whispered. “There, that’s it . . . now . . . only I love you, Aldo, and I don’t want you fucking other ladies.”

  “I know,” said Cassidy. “I never will.”

  “I don’t mind you fucking your wife if you’ve got to, but not Beauties like that one, it’s not fair.”

  “Angie, believe me.”

  After much argument he persuaded her—a day later? two days?—to let him send a sample of her water to a place in Portsmouth that advertised on the back of Sandra’s New Statesman. She wouldn’t send much—about a miniature, no more—and she wouldn’t tell him how she had got it in there. He enclosed a seven and sixpenny postal order and a stamped envelope addressed to himself at the works. The envelope never came back. Perhaps they hadn’t sent enough, or perhaps—an appalling vision—the bottle had broken in the post. For a time, a part of him worried about little else; scanned the office mail for his own handwriting the moment it came in, rummaged in the package room on the pretext of having lost his watch. Gradually the danger seemed to recede.

  “They only tell you if it’s positive,” he explained to her, and they came to agree that she probably wasn’t pregnant after all.

  But now and then, unawares, he surprised himself, during his moments of great passion elsewhere, by visions of Angie’s pathetic offering slowly darkening on the shelf of some backstreet laboratory or, still with its lemon and barley label, bobbing out to sea past the Duke of Edinburgh’s yacht.

  32

  “Look thy last on all things lovely,” Helen announced, “every hour.”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  They were shopping in Bond Street; Helen needed gloves.

  “Shamus rang.”

  “Rang? Rang where? How did he reach you?”

  A friend, she said vaguely; he had rung the friend’s house and she had happened to be there.

  “Just like that?”

  “Cassidy,” she said wearily, “I am not a Russian spy.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Marseilles. Collecting material. He’s going on to Sainte-Angèle. I’m to meet him there at the weekend.”

  “But you said he was in Lowestoft!”

  “He got a lift.”

  “To Marseilles? Don’t be ridiculous!”

  Irritated by this interjection, Helen devoted her interest to a shop window.

  “Sorry,” said Cassidy. “What else?”

  “He’s decided to set the book in Africa instead of Ireland. He thought of getting a boat and going straight there. He changed his mind. He’ll take the chalet instead.”

  Inside the shop a girl attendant measured her incomparable hand.

  “Did he talk about me?”

  “Sent you his love,”
she said, laying the glove against her palm.

  “How did he sound?”

  “Collected. Sober, I’d say.”

  Cautiously, she slid her fingers into the black mouth.

  “Well that’s great. He’s probably writing hard. What else?”

  “He said please buy him a dressing gown, a black one with red piping round the collar. So we can do that now, can’t we?”

  “We’ll take them,” Cassidy told the girl and gave her his credit card.

  In the street again, she added very little. No, he didn’t usually go abroad without telling her; but then he wasn’t a very usual person was he? No, he hadn’t said anything which suggested he was suspicious; he was most insistent she should enjoy herself in London; but the week was up and she should come to him.

  “Rather as if that was my ration of you. There’s a place called Alderton’s, do you mind? In Jermyn Street. You haven’t reconsidered your investment, have you, Cassidy?” she asked in the cab.

  “What in?”

  “Me!”

  “Of course not. Why?”

  “I would very much like you to hug me. That’s why.”

  At Alderton’s, both very quiet, they selected a dressing gown and Cassidy consented to try it on.

  “May he?” asked Helen. “He’s exactly my husband’s size.”

  They went together up a winding steel staircase. The cubicle was along one wall, behind a curtain, in what seemed to be someone’s drawing room. A faded portrait of Edward VII hung beside a fox’s brush. Taking him gently in her arms, she stood against him, head down, the way he remembered her at Haverdown, at the Savoy, the way he had danced with Sandra at Oxford long ago. Her body felt suddenly very weak through the mohair of the dressing gown, and her passion was no longer his enemy. She took his hands and folded them against her breast, and finally she kissed him, lips closed, for a long time. They heard the salesman’s footsteps coming up the iron staircase, and Cassidy thought of prison again, nothing to say except we’ve still got five minutes.