Turning, he studied her from far away, but his shape was so black against the window that Cassidy could not have told, if he had not known, whether he was facing them or not.
“Jesus,” he said, in the extraordinary quiet. “That eye of yours: it’s bloody disgusting. Can’t you hold a bit of steak against it or something? Cassidy’s very squeamish.”
At this point, the doorbell rang; a three-toned chime not unlike the joyful summons to worship.
“Thank God,” Shamus whispered. “Flaherty’s arrived at last.”
Opening the door at pistol point—note the impeccable fastenings, the hand-sawn hinges, locks lathe-turned—Cassidy saw many people of his acquaintance, beginning with Mark and Hugo, who had made independent travel arrangements, and ending indeterminately with McKechnie of Bee-Line and the Swiss Chief of Police. But the sight of the Eldermans, physical, not imagined Eldermans, laden with parcels, weary from the station path, and iced up round the eyebrows, surprised him very considerably.
I’m certain I put them off, he thought. He had telephoned: John, old man, trouble at the crossroads, can you possibly make it another time or will it break the kids’ hearts? He had written a letter: Circumstances beyond my control, the chalet has been burnt down, no one is sorrier than I. He had cabled: Chalet destroyed in avalanche. Evidently, however, he had done none of these things, for there they were on the doorstep, the whole tribe of them, dressed in matching woollen hats like a family of softball supporters, the little girls covered in chocolate and the parents carrying the luggage. They stood in the beam of the outside light, smiling expectantly as if he were the photographer, their twelve cheeks red with cold.
“Aldo, old man,” said John Elderman.
“We knew you were home from the light,” said his wife, nameless once again. And added, using one of her coarse expressions intended to put her on a footing with the Men: “That’s why we pressed the tit.”
“He’s got a gun,” one of the children announced, seeing Shamus in the background. “Can we play, Mister?”
They were on the doorstep still, and a host has his duties.
“Come on in,” said Cassidy with a show of heartiness, and made to help them with their luggage.
Behind him, raised by a head, Shamus was standing on the bottom stair, pressed into a corner, covering them with slow arcs of the revolver while he watched their every movement.
“Who are they?” he demanded, as they crowded in from the icy, wet air.
“A doctor and his family,” said Cassidy, forgetting in his confusion Shamus’ great hatred of the medical profession. “Friends.” And took some luggage from the wife.
“Your friends?”
“Sandra’s.”
“Hullo,” said Mrs. Elderman, smiling jovially to him across the hall. “What a gorgeous gun. Having a kid’s party?” she enquired, noticing also the dressing gown and damask stole. “You look exactly like the Dalai Lama,” and gave a most injudicious laugh.
“Piss off,” said Shamus.
“That’s Shamus,” Cassidy explained. “He’s staying here too.”
And busied himself with roped boxes and the usual luggage of the very mean.
“Hullo old man,” said John Elderman with great cheerfulness, climbing out of his duffle coat.
Mrs. Elderman was still staring at Shamus, and neither of them had moved.
“We’re a bit crowded just at the moment,” Cassidy murmured confidingly, to her husband, aside. “I’ve had a bit of a visitation. If you wouldn’t mind taking over the top floor, just for this evening . . . then tomorrow we’ll sort something out.”
The very unemotional voice of Mrs. Elderman cut short their conversation.
“Darling,” she said, “it’s a real gun,” and they all looked at Shamus.
“I’m afraid it is,” said Cassidy.
The children, experts in sidearms, had also remarked the gun’s authenticity. They were standing round it in an admiring group; the smallest was playing with the powder puff. With a disgusted gesture, Shamus waved them back and rose hastily another stair.
“They’re foul,” he whispered. “They’re absolutely terrible.”
“Oh I don’t know,” said Cassidy, embarrassed.
“They’ll kill us all, lover. Jesus, lover, how can you speak to them?”
“We were having a sort of wedding,” Cassidy explained to his new guests. “That’s why he’s wearing those clothes.”
“A wedding,” Mrs. Elderman echoed, on whom fell all the burdens of the obvious question. “Here? At this time of day?” And before he had even time to answer, had he wished, “Nonsense. Whose wedding?”
“His,” said Shamus, indicating Cassidy. “He’s marrying my wife.”
John Elderman took his pipe from his mouth. He screwed his infantile face into a creaseless grin.
“But old man,” he objected, after quite a long silence, “old Cassidy’s married already, aren’t you, Aldo?”
“To Sandra what’s more,” said Mrs. Elderman, and looked accusingly at Shamus. “Aldo, he’s not hijacking you, is he? He looks manic to me.”
“Hugo says his Mummy and Daddy are divorced,” a larger girl announced, and offered Cassidy a toffee, part used.
“Be quiet,” said her mother, and made to smack her.
If Shamus knew fear at all, this was the nature of it, these people its object. Pale and wary, he had taken up a position of extreme defensiveness at the top of the stairs, where he crouched, huddled into the dressing gown, the damask tablecloth thrown round his neck like a college scarf. They were all watching him, waiting for him to order them, but it was quite a time before their attention summoned him to action. Standing abruptly—his legs under the dressing gown were bare, Haverdown legs, and no hint of white among the higher shadows—he made a cursory wave of the gun barrel in the direction of the upper rooms.
“All right. Up here, the lot of you. One at a time, hands on your head, march. You!”
“Me?” John Elderman asked, grinning terribly.
“Get rid of that fucking pipe. Not going to have you smoking in church.”
And thus within seconds had shooed them, parents, luggage, and children, upstairs to the drawing room. It was not only the gun which won him their obedience; he seemed to know them perfectly: how to command them, how to silence them, what foods to give their children. Within minutes, their luggage was neatly stacked along the landing wall; their children watered, fed, and relieved; and the whole family sat in descending order on the sofa, in the front pew facing the altar.
“This is absolutely disgraceful,” said Mrs. Elderman, looking very critically at Helen. “Goodness, whatever happened to her eye? John—”
“Shut up,” Shamus ordered her. “Camel driver’s gourd! Yahoo! Shut up! You’re a witness not a fucking referee!”
John Elderman, seated in the direct line of the gun, seemed disinclined, despite his wife’s entreaties, to exercise his calling.
“It’s damned odd,” was all he would say, in the tone of one making an anthropological study. “It explains a lot of things.”
He had put his pipe in his pocket.
Helen, meanwhile, left alone, had not altered her posture. She sat where they had left her, wearing an unclouded bridal smile, as if contemplating in the faded posy of flower heads still resting in her hand the sweet shocks of passion which the future held for her. Her other hand lay still and open, awaiting her groom’s return. With the entry of the Eldermans she had risen distractedly to greet them, but her mood was reserved and aloof, as became her on her Day.
“Ah yes,” she said, hearing the name, “Aldo has spoken about you.”
She left the seating arrangements to her husband. Only the children caused her expression to change.
“How nice,” she remarked to their mother. “How very sweet.”
37
The presence of the larger congregation had had a remarkable effect on Shamus. Whatever doubts had till now assailed him, whateve
r mysteries and confusions stayed his hand, the unexpected invasion of his enemy, his sworn, archetypal enemy, had swept them all aside. Till now, it had seemed, his pastoral duties hung heavily on him. At moments, even, he had appeared to question his own faith; while his erratic changefulness of style and his frequent recourse to the revolver had much reduced the impact of his words. No more. Now, a fever of activity overtook him. The devil was in the house; Shamus needed herbs, and searched the kitchen cupboards till he came upon a box of thyme which he sprinkled liberally over the improvised altar. Candles, more candles; the Dark One was encroaching, Shamus needed light to hold him at bay. Receptacles were hastily assembled, and while the Eldermans looked on in sullen amazement a box of Price’s Household Candles—Sandra’s provision against a power cut—was quickly distributed. Soon the room was filled with the smell of burning wax; the dining table a lighted barrier behind which Shamus could take refuge from the terrors and infections of bourgeois mediocrity.
“He’s mad,” said Beth Elderman.
“Quiet, darling,” said her husband nervously. “He may just be overwrought.”
“Stop them!” Shamus screamed. “You know their language, reason with them!”
“Please be quiet,” Cassidy said politely. “It upsets him.”
Outside, the fog had temporarily lifted. In the darkening sky, the revealed peaks of the Angelhorn glittered like giant diamonds. The first lights were going on in the village; but the peaks had their own sun still, and shone with incongruous daylight over the twinkling darkness of the valley.
The thin chimes of a servant’s handbell proclaimed the ceremony begun.
“Before we resume,” Shamus began, “I have one or two announcements to make. Sit still,” he told a little girl, with a monitory wave of the gun. “Just settle down and stop fidgeting.”
Her mother tugged at the child, arranging it hastily, then faced Shamus again, herself more upright.
“First,” he continued, in the unctuous, pseudo-intellectual tones of a fashionable West End parson, “let me say how happy I am to be able to welcome children to our service. It is one of the pleasing signs of the abiding power of religion, that parents”—here an indulgent smile at the Eldermans—“should bring their little ones to this place. It does credit to the children and to the parents.”
He glanced at a piece of paper in his hand. “The next announcement, for those who have not yet heard the tragic news, concerns a holocaust in the neighbourhood of Thailand. Last night, owing to an oversight in one of the American strategic bases, four million Asians were eliminated.”
He waited, plate in one hand, gun in the other.
A short, puzzled silence was broken by the chink of a coin as Mrs. Elderman opened her handbag and distributed small change to the girls.
“Any currency will do. Thank you. Thank you my dear. You are a Christian, I trust?” he murmured to Mrs. Elderman, accepting her offering.
“As a matter of fact I’m a humanist,” she replied. “I’m afraid my husband and I find it impossible to accept the existence of God.” And stuck out her jaw. “On scientific grounds and psychological grounds,” she added.
“You obviously have modern views,” Shamus prompted indulgently.
“Well they’re obviously not as modern as yours,” said Mrs. Elderman with spirit.
“How long have you known the groom?”
“Ooh, longer than I’d like to say,” she squeaked, making a nervous joke about her age, which was thirty.
“Good, good, good, good. The third announcement,” Shamus resumed, addressing himself to the bridal pair, “concerns your travel arrangements. There’s a nine-forty connecting with the night sleeper from Spiez. So don’t fucking well miss it. Get that Cassidy?”
“Yes of course.”
“Will you all stand?”
Helen and Cassidy were sharing the leather chair, which Shamus had pulled to the centre of the long room in order to make extra space for the newcomers. Helen was on the arm and Cassidy on the seat, but the difference in their levels made communication difficult. This arrangement had not been uncongenial to Cassidy. The extra darkness afforded by Helen’s body, the opportunity to imagine himself in other places, had provided him with a temporary ease from which he was now summoned by Helen’s hand drawing him gently to his feet.
“Aldo,” said Shamus.
“Yes.”
“Helen?”
“Yes.”
“Before joining you, Aldo, and you, Helen, in holy wedlock, I feel it incumbent upon me to venture one or two general observations”—a smile to the Eldermans—“on the service you are about to witness.”
In the simple terms becoming to a short address, Shamus briefly explained to the newcomers the difference between social marriage, which was the Elderman kind of marriage, rightly devised for the containment of the Many-too-Many, and real marriage which was something very rare and had nothing whatever to do with them. He told them about Flaherty and self-appointed divinity, and about the difference between wanting to die together, which was New Testament marriage, and wanting to live together which was Old Testament marriage. This done, he chanted a few phrases of the Nunc Dimittis and bowed several times to the Bartlett print that was hanging over the fireplace.
“The total passion,” he announced, in a strong Irish voice, quoting, Cassidy suspected, one of Flaherty’s brochures, “demands the total sacrifice—”
About to continue he was interrupted by a whispered “Amen” from Beth Elderman, followed by the higher, obedient whispers of her many daughters.
“Shut up,” he told her, in suppressed fury. “Keep quiet or I’ll shoot you. Jesus, lover—”
“She didn’t mean any harm,” said Cassidy.
Picking up the prayer book—it was held open by the weight of the gun—he read aloud:
“I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed—which is now actually, lover. Not tomorrow, not next day, not in Christopher Robin land, but now—yes or no?”
“Yes,” said Helen.
“I’m talking to him. I know about you, you whore, be quiet or you’ll get another hit. Him I mean. Cassidy. Our lover. Will you or will you not have this woman for your illegally wedded wife, whether sick, pissed, maimed, imbecile, however much she whores around? Will you, forsaking all others, including the bosscow, the veg, the Bentley, and”—he put down the prayer book—“and me, lover,” he said, very softly. “Because that’s the way it works.”
Helen’s hand was linked in Cassidy’s. From behind him he heard the loose, persistent cough of his French mother and the creak of pews echoing in the vaulted ceiling. Those kids, he thought; the Elderman woman; why don’t they do something? They’re my friends, not his.
“Lover.”
“Yes.”
“This gun is for shooting defectors, not lovers.”
“I know.”
“If you say no, I shall shoot you for sure, because I hate you quite a lot. That’s called jealousy, also an emotion. Right? But if you say yes and you don’t want her, believe me that is . . . that really is . . . not polite.”
Helen was looking at him and he knew her look because it was Sandra’s look, it covered everything, the whole contract to live and die.
“The point being, lover, that once you drag her off to your cave Daddy won’t be there to help you. You can have her, if you want her. But from that moment on you’ve got to find your own reason for living. I can’t do more for you and you can’t do more for me.”
“No.”
“What the hell do you mean: no?” Helen demanded, releasing his hand.
“I mean he can’t do any more. I agree.”
“You see,” Shamus explained, “although she’s a stupid little bitch, I love her. That’s why she’s so cheeky. She’s got us both. So I’m offering you all I’ve got and all I want: and naturally, I’ll be put out if you reject it. But you’ve got to decide. D
on’t let that bitch carry you. Love you, lover.”
“Love you,” Cassidy replied automatically.
“Then which is it? Yes please or no thank you?”
All this while Shamus had been watching him most intently through the candles, and sweat had formed on his face, which now ran like crooked tears over his shaven cheeks; but his eyes were black and steady, as if neither the pain nor the heat of his torture were relevant to his words. On Cassidy’s left, Helen was whispering, urging and complaining, but he heard only Shamus; it was Shamus, most definitely, who held his attention.
“Say yes, you fool,” Beth Elderman shouted suddenly from the back, and Shamus raised the gun and might well have shot her if Helen had not intervened. Instead, he came round the altar, took Cassidy by the arm, and led him into the furthest part of the room, to the corner where the table was before they moved it; to a place so dark they could barely be heard.
“She’s a heavy eater, boy,” he murmured. “Big grocery bills coming up. Dresses, cars; she’ll want the lot.”
“Cassidy!” Helen shouted, furious.
“She can have whatever she wants,” said Cassidy loyally.
“Why not just give her the money: you don’t have to put up with her as well. Five thousand should see her right.”
With a quick, conspiratorial glance at the congregation, Shamus had drawn Cassidy towards him so that Shamus’ lips were at Cassidy’s ear and Shamus’ lower cheek was pressed against Cassidy’s temple. Coming so close to him so suddenly, Cassidy smelt Paris again, and the drink, and the garbage in the street; smelt the woodsmoke from the fireplace lingering in his dressing gown and the sweat that was on him all the time; and whatever detachment he had found was gone, because this was Shamus, who had once been Cassidy’s freedom; and had loved him; who needed him and had leant on him; rested on him in his hopeless search; played with him by the river.