Not guilty. She would own up.
Four . . .
Help! I accuse Old Hugo, satanist, worker of spells, possessor of an evil eye! Staring out of the penthouse window, sipping a nice touch of brandy and ginger, the old wizard deliberately carved the air with a familiar gesture of his hand and set up waves of disturbance which found their way to Abalone Crescent and so destroyed the instrument of time!
“Father I need a bed.”
“Then go home, it’s waiting for you, isn’t it?”
“Father, put me to bed. Please.”
“Go home! You’ll be a delinquent if you don’t remarry that bitch, get out, get out, get out!”
The tunnel continued; to dance but not to sleep.
“Angie I need a bed.”
Angie Mawdray, standing at her own front door, was dressed in a light bedwrap which did not conceal one side of her body.
“It’s no good, Aldo,” she said. “Honest.”
“But Angie I only want to sleep.”
“Then go to a hotel, Aldo, you can’t come here, you know you can’t, not now.”
“But Angie.”
“I’m married,” she reminded him, rather sternly. “You remember, Aldo, you organised the whip-round.”
“Of course,” said Cassidy. “Of course I did, I’m sorry. Good evening Meale, how’s it going?”
From under Che Guevara’s uncompromising stare, the pallid face of Meale nodded respectfully to his master. He would have stood up no doubt, but his nakedness was against him.
“Good evening, Mister Aldo, step in, sir, do. Sorry about the mess.”
“Come in the afternoons,” Angie whispered. “I’m only working mornings, aren’t I, silly?”
Went to Kurt’s? Or stayed at Angie’s after all? Certainly he felt a limpness round the loins, a sense of after rather than before. Did he then after all enjoy the very skilled embraces of Miss Mawdray the well-known top secretary, while Meale’s apologetic eye turned sensibly away for the visit of the Chairman?
“You’ve been very good to us Mister Aldo, we don’t know how to thank you, I’m sure.”
“Think nothing of it,” says the old boulevardier, nicely lodged among the dewy folds. “You young people need a start in life.”
A howl from the engine. Daylight soon? Not in Kurt’s grey, uncomfortable rooms; even the windows are smoked against the sun.
“Kurt, I need a bed.”
Kurt had no one in his apartment, not Angie Mawdray, not Lemming, not Snaps, not Blue, not Faulk, not even Meale. He wore a grey Swiss dressing gown of best Swiss silk, and when Cassidy was tucked unsafely in the ever-prepared spare room he came to see him with a long white cup of Swiss Ovomaltine.
“No, Kurt.”
“But Cassidy my dear fellow you know you are one of us. Listen. One, you prefer the company of men, correct?”
“Correct, but—”
“Two your physical encounters with women have been totally without satisfaction. Cassidy, look here I mean my God I can tell. I can see it in your eyes, anyone can. Three—”
“Kurt honestly, I would if I wanted, I promise. I’m not ashamed any more. I wanted to at school but that’s just because there weren’t any girls about. That’s the truth. I’ve got too much sense of humour, Kurt. I think of you lying there with nothing on, holding it, and I get the giggles. I mean what for . . . do you see what I’m getting at?”
“Goodnight Cassidy.”
“Goodnight, Kurt. And thanks.”
“And look here, one day we climb the Eiger, right?”
“Right.”
Dozing, he quite hoped Kurt would come back: exhaustion erodes the moral will as well as the sense of humour. But Kurt didn’t. So Cassidy listened to the traffic instead, and wondered: does he sleep, or dream of me?
Daylight, and another warning scream from the small, incorruptible engine. The train has stuck. The doors hiss and fall open. The porter is calling Sainte-Angèle.
He called it in the patois, it could have been Michel Angelo or England. He called it loud, above the three-toned clanging of the mountain bell; he carolled it for Christmas past or coming, in a voice of male dominance which echoed over the empty station. He called it straight at Cassidy through the smeared white window of his first-class carriage; and if you want to go farther you must change. He called it as if it were Cassidy’s own name, his last walk and his last stopping place. The porter was a bearded man and wore a badge of office on his smock. His eyes were masked by heavy black brows, and by the black shadow of his black peaked cap. Answering the summons, Cassidy got up at once, stepped blithely on to the empty platform, his overnight bag swinging in his strong hand.
“Tomorrow,” said the porter consolingly, “we get plenty snow.”
“Ah but tomorrow doesn’t often come, does it?” Cassidy replied, never at a loss to cap a pleasantry.
The weather which greeted Cassidy at Sainte-Angèle was like a meteorological extension of the confusion which had recently taken possession of his mind. The best of holiday resorts has its uncongenial seasons, and not even Sainte-Angèle, famed though she may be for her dependable and temperate character, is exempt from nature’s immutable laws. In winter, as a rule, her snowclad village street is a jubilant carnival of bobble-hats, horse-sledges, and brilliant shop windows, where Europe’s affluent swains rub shoulders with the girls of Kensal Rise, and many insincere contracts of love are closed in the surrounding forests. In summer, their less pecunious teachers and elders stride vigorously into the flower-laden slopes and refresh themselves beside Goethe’s ebullient streams, while children in traditional costume chant age-old songs in praise of chastity and cattle. Spring is a sudden and lovely time, with impatient flowers bursting through the late snow; while autumn as the first snows fall brings back forgotten hours of breathless, churchlike quiet between the bustle of two hectic seasons.
But there are days, as every alpine visitor must know, when this pleasing pattern is without apparent reason violently shattered; when the seasons suddenly tire of their place in the natural cycle and, using all the weapons of their armoury, do violent battle until they have reached exhaustion. In place of winter’s magic the village is assailed by querulous rains and morose, unheated nights, when thunder alternates with hybrid sleet and neither stars nor sun can pierce the swirling cloud banks. Worse, a foehn may come, the sick south wind that strikes the mountains like a plague, rotting giant slabs of snow and poisoning the temper of both the villagers and their guests. And when at last it takes itself away, the brown patches on the hillsides are laid out like the dead, the sky is white and empty, and the birds have gone. This foehn is the mountains’ curse; nowhere is safe from it.
The first symptoms are external: a sourceless dripping of water, a mysterious departure of air and colour. With this depletion of the atmosphere comes a gradual draining of human energy, a sense of moral listlessness, like a constipation of the mental faculties, which spreads gradually over the whole psychic body until it has blocked all outlets. At such times, waiting for the storm, a man may smoke a cigar halfway down the village street and the trace of it will be there tomorrow, the smoke and the smell lingering in the dead air at the very place where he stood. Sometimes there is no storm at all. The lull ends and the cold returns. Or a hurricane strikes: a black, raging Walpurgisnacht with winds of sixty, seventy miles an hour. The high street is strewn with broken sticks, the tarmac is showing through the snow, and you would think a river has slid by in the darkness on its way from the peaks to the valley.
It was the foehn which ruled now.
The sight reminded Cassidy of a wet day at Lord’s cricket ground. The village’s two porters stood together like umpires, clutching their smocks to their middles and agreeing it was impossible. Above him, but very close, the superb twin peaks of the Angelhorn hung like dirty laundry from the grey sky. The snow was mostly gone. The clock said ten-fifteen, but it might have been stuck for years. Making his way towards the restaurant he thought: This is how we
die, alone and cold and out of breath, suspended between white places.
“Hullo lover,” said Shamus quietly. “Looking for someone are we?”
“Hullo,” said Cassidy.
35
Haverdown woodsmoke lingered in the damp air, antlers loomed along the brown walls. A group of dark-faced labourers sat drinking beer. Away from them, at their own sad place, the waitresses read German magazines, secretly panting from the foehn like patients in a doctor’s waiting room.
He was sitting near the bar, in an alcove, at a big round table all to himself, under the crossed guns of the Sainte-Angèle shooting club. A silk flag, stitched by the ladies of the community, proclaimed the village loyalty to William Tell. The alcove had a Flemish darkness, homely and confiding; the pewter glinted comfortably, like well-earned coin. He was drinking café crème and he had lost weight. A streak of white light from the window ran down the deathcoat like a recent shock. He wore no hat and no beard; his face looked bared, and vulnerable, and very pale. Cassidy moved in beside him, holding his overnight bag in his arms like Hugo’s beach crocodile, then shunting it down the polished bench, then dumping it on the floor between them with a sloppy thud.
Sitting down, he saw the gun.
It lay on Shamus’ lap, a sleek pet, the barrel towards Cassidy. It was essentially a military weapon, and probably an officers’ issue from the First World War. Only a full-grown officer could have worn it, however, because the barrel was about twelve inches long. Or it might have been a target pistol from the days when you steadied your weapon on your left forearm, and the range sergeant yelled “Well shot sir” when you hit a man-sized target. A lanyard was fastened to the butt. From the free end dangled a pink powder puff.
In the kitchen, the wireless was broadcasting a Swiss time signal, a very war-like noise.
Cassidy ordered coffee, café crème, like the gentleman’s. The waiter remembered him well. Mr. Cassidy who tips. He brought a gingham tablecloth and spread it with affection. He laid out cutlery and Maggi sauce and toothpicks in a silver box. And the children, the waiter enquired, they were well?
Fine.
They were not, for instance, suffering from the English habit of wearing short trousers?
Not noticeably, Cassidy said.
And they were hunting, hunting the foxes and the chamois?
At present, said Cassidy, they were at school.
Ah, said the waiter, pursing his lips, Eton: he had heard that standards had fallen.
“She’s waiting,” said Shamus.
They set off up the hill.
Pulling with all his strength, Cassidy found that the tape was cutting his shoulder. If he had not been wearing his camelhair coat, in fact, it would have broken the skin. The tape was of nylon, six foot of it and bright red, he held it with both hands, one at the chest and one at the waist, making a harness of it as he strained forward. Twice he had asked Shamus to walk, but received no useful answer beyond an impatient wave of the gun barrel, and now Shamus was sitting upright with Cassidy’s overnight bag across his knee, throwing out the things he didn’t like. The silver hairbrush had already gone, sliding like a puck backwards down the icy path, bobbing and spinning over the half-frozen eddies of snow and ice. He had thought he was fit: squash at the Lansdowne, tennis at Queen’s, not to mention the stairs at Abalone Crescent. But his flannel shirt was drenched by the time they left the railway line, and his heart, unaccustomed to the change of altitude, was already thumping sickly. Fitness is relative, he told himself. After all, he’s at least my weight.
Even taken downwards, the path was unsuitable for tobogganing.
From the chalet, it wound at first through scattered woods where snow barely covered the boulders, and jagged tree trunks awaited the careless navigator. Crossing an avalanche gully, it descended by way of two steep bends to a poorly fenced ramp which, being much in use by pedestrians, was strewn with grit which tore at the runners and slewed them off course. If other, hardier children ignored these hazards, Cassidy’s did not, for it was one of his recurring nightmares that they would have an accident here, that Hugo would skid under a train, Mark would crush his head against a signal post, and he had entirely proscribed the route on pain of punishment. Uphill, though no doubt safer, the path was even less attractive.
Shamus had chosen Mark’s toboggan, probably because of the crazy daisies which were glued to its plastic base. It was a good toboggan of its kind, a prototype sent up by a Swiss correspondent for possible exploitation on the English market. At first the design had told in its favour. But soon the broad keel was dragging heavily in the slush, and Cassidy was obliged to lean far forward into the hill in order to get enough purchase. His leather-soled London shoes slipped with every step; occasionally hauling at the tapes, he slid backwards into the bow of the toboggan, grazing his frozen heels against the plastic point; and when this happened Shamus would urge him forward with a distracted oath. The night case had gone. There was nothing in it, apparently, which Shamus thought worth keeping, so he had thrown it overboard to improve the unsprung weight, and now he was aiming the gun distractedly at whatever offered itself; a bird on the roof of a hotel, a passing pedestrian, a dog.
“My dear Mr. Cassidy, how are you?”
Introductions; sherry on Sunday, come round after church. Shamus bows and waves the gun; shrieks of merriment. A Mrs. Horegrove or Haregrave, a senior senator of the Club.
“What a dangerous-looking burden!”
“It’s Hugo’s,” Cassidy explained, panting through his smiles. “We took it to be mended. You know what he’s like about guns.”
“My dear, whatever would Sandra say?”
About Shamus or the gun? Cassidy wanted to ask, for her eyes were moving from one to the other with mounting surprise.
“Go away,” Shamus screamed at her, suddenly losing patience, and picking up a convenient stick, threw it hard at her feet. “Prole. Get out or I’ll shoot you.”
The lady withdrew.
A heap of horse manure obstructed their progress. Cassidy took the left side, favouring the verge.
“Pull, you bugger,” Shamus ordered, still angry. “Mush, mush, pull.”
In the forest, the going was easier. The trodden snow, sheltered by the trees, had neither melted nor frozen; sometimes, for short distances, they even went downhill, so that Cassidy had to run ahead in order to remain covered by the gun. At such moments, Shamus became nervous and issued conflicting orders: lift your hands, put them down, keep left, keep right, and Cassidy obeyed them all, thinking of nothing, not even the hole in his back. The trees parted, giving a view of the brown valley and the banks of mist that rose like oil smoke from its narrow floor. They saw the Angelhorn in a fragment of perfect blue, its fresh snow glittering in the high sunlight.
And stopped.
“Hey, you,” said Shamus quietly.
“Yes?”
“Give us a kiss.”
His hands still above his head, Cassidy walked back to the toboggan, stooped, and kissed Shamus on the cheek.
“More,” said Shamus. And at last: “It’s all right, lover, it’s all right,” he whispered, pushing away the tears. “Shamus fix it. Promise. We’re big enough, lover. We can make it.”
“Of course we can,” said Cassidy.
“Make history,” said Shamus. “Be a great first, lover. We’ll beat the whole fucking system.”
“Will you walk now?” Cassidy asked, after more breathless hugs. “I’m a bit tired actually.”
Shamus shook his head. “Lover, I got to toughen you up, this is a very vigorous course, very vigorous indeed. Takes grip. Faith, remember? For both of us?”
“I remember,” said Cassidy, and picked the tape out of the snow.
The clouds covered them. They must have left the trees without his noticing, and walked blindly into the ambush of the fog. Sightless, Cassidy lost his balance and fell forward. Not even the path existed, for its edges were lost in the downward gust of wet mist, and hi
s hands, grasping the slope before him, were clutching an invisible enemy. He struggled forward again.
“Where are you?”
“Here.”
“Pull, lover,” Shamus warned. “Keep pulling, lover, or it’s shootibangs.”
As suddenly as it had descended the cloud cleared and the house stood clean and waiting on its own expensive patch of snowclad hillock, fifteen pounds a square meter, “Mr. and Mrs. Aldo Cassidy” framed beside the bell button and Helen wife of Shamus painted on the balcony.
Painted on the sized, white canvas of the drifting fog, in matt half-tones, a fraction out of register.
Tall, from where they looked up at her; wearing a head scarf of Sandra’s; hands set apart on the rail, face turned sharply towards the path, not seeing them but hearing their footsteps in the slush, and perhaps the zigzag echo of their voices.
“Cassidy?”
“She’s a bit blue,” Shamus warned in a whisper coming up beside him. “Where I belted her. Sorry about that, didn’t mean to damage the goods.”
“Cassidy?” she repeated, still blind but guessing at the sound.
For a moment longer, she scanned the path not realising they were there beneath her. Waiting, as all women wait. Using her body to catch the sound. Waiting for a ship, or a child, or a lover; upright, taut, vibrant.
“We’re just below you,” said Cassidy.
The bruise was on the cheekbone, the left one, he recorded; Shamus had hit her with his right hand, a hook probably; a hard wide one from the side, not at all unlike the mark on Sal that evening they had gone to her in Cable Street. By the time he had opened the door she was in the hall. She closed her eyes long before he touched her, the good one and the bad one, and he heard her whisper “Cassidy” as her arms came gently round him; and he felt her shaking as if she had a fever.