“For God’s sake, lover,” Shamus insisted. “Why screw up a friendship like ours for the sake of a bit of cunt?”
His lips stayed, their breath trembling on the membranes of his ear. Shamus’ jaw was pressed against his head, and Shamus’ hands were linked at his neck. Pushing Cassidy gently away from him at last, he surveyed him in his own familiar way, reading (it seemed to Cassidy) his whole life there, all its paradoxes, its evasions, and its insoluble collisions. For a moment, the sky cleared for Cassidy, and he saw the hilltop where they had flown the gliders. And he thought: Let’s go back there. From the hill I can understand it all.
Then Shamus smiled: the broad, untrustworthy smile of a victor.
“Well?”
“There’s no point,” said Cassidy.
“What do you mean? No point? You’re here because there is a point! There’s got to be a fucking point! I had you, and I’m giving you to her. I had her and I’m giving her to you!”
“I mean there’s no point in trying to talk me out of it, I love her.”
“What was that?” said Shamus very quietly.
“I said I loved her.”
“And still do?”
“Yes. More than you.”
“More than you love me, or more than I love her?”
“Both,” said Cassidy numbly.
“Again, say it again,” Shamus urged, seizing him.
“I love her.”
“Shout it out! Her name, everything.”
“I love Helen.”
“Aldo loves Helen!”
“I Aldo love Helen. I Aldo love Helen. I Aldo love Helen!”
Suddenly, without Cassidy understanding why, the rubric, the rhythm of the words took hold of him. The louder he shouted, the brighter, the more excited Shamus’ smile: the louder he shouted, the larger the room became, the more it filled and echoed. Shamus was pouring water over him, Lippstyle, a jugful, purifying him in the name of the Few, Helen was kissing him, sobbing and asking why it took him so long. The sound rose; some children were clapping but one was crying, as in the eye of his imagination Cassidy saw his own drenched, stupid body upright in a pool of holy water, shouting love at a laughing world.
“I Aldo love Helen! Can you hear? I Aldo love Helen!”
John Elderman was standing, beating his hands together; his wife was holding her string gloves to her chin, weeping and laughing.
“This is it,” John Elderman was crying. “My God this is the big league. I’ll never aspire to this, never.”
“If only more people could see it,” said Mrs. Elderman.
But they can, Cassidy shouted, they can. Why don’t you turn your head you fool? Sandra’s family was packing the pews behind her, Mrs. Groat dressed in fruit and flowers, escorted by her several sisters and lady cousins; Snaps in beige velvet, her cleavage uselessly exposed. From the other side of the aisle came the tearful coughing of the Abandoned One and the plain sobs of Old Hugo, standing beside the empty place for A. L. Rowse. The strains of an organ were filling the room, “Abide With Me” and “Sheep May Safely Graze.”
“I Aldo love Helen. I Aldo love Helen. I Aldo love Helen.”
“Oh love, oh love,” Helen sobbed; she was drying him with a tea towel; her bruise was bright again where her tears had washed away the make-up. “And he didn’t stand in our way,” she sobbed. “Oh Shamus, darling.”
“You see lover,” Shamus explained, “you’re the only one I ever had. I mean Christ had twelve, didn’t he, eleven good, one bad. But I’ve only got you, so you had to be right, didn’t you?”
The lights had gone on. Shamus was passing around Talisker. Helen, very proud and quiet on Cassidy’s arm, was receiving the congratulations of the guests. Well they had met in the West Country actually, she said; about a year ago; they had really been in love ever since, but they had agreed for Shamus’ sake to keep it a secret. The speeches were short and to the point, no one became boring or untimely. Shamus, drinking heartily, the colour high on his cheeks, was the very soul of contentment: if they had children they must be brought up Catholic, he said, it was the only condition he had made.
“He’s a writer,” Beth Elderman was telling the girls, her face flushed with maternal pride. “That’s a very special kind of person, that’s why he knows all about the world. You must never, never compromise, do you understand? Sally listen, what did Mummy say?”
“I meet so much of it,” John Elderman said shrewdly through his grown-up pipe. “Every blasted day in the surgery, three, maybe four cases, you’d be astonished. So much of it could be avoided,” he told Shamus very confidentially, “if only they had help.”
“And of course how he put up with the other one for so long,” Beth Elderman said to anyone who would listen, “God alone knows. I mean that was total disaster.”
38
The guests gathered on the doorstep, children at the front, grown-ups behind. The festive toboggan lay ready, Mark’s again; John Elderman and Shamus had lashed the luggage to the prow. A light, sharp wind had sprung up from the north. The fog had gone for good, the rain had turned to snow, a fine, hard-driven snow that was already settling on the window sills.
For her going away, the bride wore a fitted sheepskin coat which she had found in Sandra’s wardrobe, and a charming white fur hat which Mark called Mummy’s rabbit’s ears.
“Isn’t it funny,” she said in her excitement, “how everything fits me, just like that?”
Her boots were sealskin, though she did not approve of killing seals. She kissed the girls lavishly and counselled them to be good and kind, and to grow up lovely wives.
“Which you will, I know,” she said, crying a little. “I just know you will.”
To Beth Elderman, she imparted some last-minute domestic advice. The oil system was impossible to understand, the best thing to do was kick it.
“And there’s cold duck in the fridge and extra milk on the sideboard. For God’s sake don’t buy the Co-op butter, it’s no cheaper and it’s absolutely foul.”
“We think you’re doing the right thing,” said Beth.
“We know you are,” said her husband.
“So long,” said Shamus.
He had placed himself, modestly, at the end of the line, in the shadow of the others; he was holding a torch in one hand and a glass in the other; he was barefoot, and the skirts of his dressing gown could have been a curtain borrowed from the window in the hall.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” said Helen at last. “So long?”
“Watch out for rabbit holes.”
“I’d like to kiss you,” said Helen.
“Kissin’ don’t last,” said Shamus, in a Somerset accent which Cassidy had not heard before. “Cookin’ do.”
Rather hopelessly, she turned to John Elderman.
“Don’t worry,” said the great psychiatrist. “We’ll bring him round.”
With a somewhat ungainly hoist of the skirts, and a last look at Shamus, she boarded the toboggan, sitting well forward with the luggage so that Cassidy could manage the more responsible rear position.
“Are you getting divorced?” asked a little girl.
“Be quiet,” said Beth Elderman.
“Hugo says he is,” said the same little girl.
“Aldo,” said Beth Elderman, with her plant and rock smile. “Give us a ring. We’re in the book.” She kissed him, smelling very slightly of ether. “Remember you’re a friend as well as a patient,” she added.
Her husband gave him a manly hand.
“Godspeed, Aldo. Don’t overdo it. We admire you.”
About to say goodbye to Shamus, Cassidy appeared to remember something.
“Crikey,” he said, all boyish. “Hang on a sec.” And darted past them into the house.
Hugo’s room was very cold. He tested the radiator. On, but icy. Must be an airlock in the heating. His toys were put away; only a red anorak, the wet-look for this season, hung like a doll’s suit from the painted hanger.
Mark’s room was lined with pictures cut from magazines, mainly advertisements. The largest was a centre-fold spread of a whole family smiling into the camera while they loaded fishing kit into a Range Rover. That’s how he wanted us, Cassidy thought, studying the bronzed, untroubled features of the father. Mr. and Mrs. Britain sporting by the river.
“Lost something?” Shamus asked from the doorway, offering him his whisky glass. He was very relaxed. The gun, broken like a shotgun, hung vaguely over his forearm, and he had put the powder puff behind his ear like a Tahitian maiden’s flower.
“My watch actually. It must be in the bathroom.” He returned the glass, empty.
“Lover.”
“Yes.”
“Look er . . . I know you’re going to keep her in the style to which you’re accustomed. But don’t er . . . don’t let her get her hands on a lot of money. You know.”
They tried both bathrooms, but the watch was not in either of them.
“And er . . . on the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“The other thing, you know.” He bucked his pelvis. “What we did in Paris, you know. Watch her. She’ll do anything to get pregnant, anything. We’d a flat once up in Durham, we had the builders in. She went through the whole lot of them just on the off chance. Painters, plasterers, masons, the lot.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Cassidy.
They returned to the front door.
“You didn’t hit me though, did you?”
“What will you do?” Cassidy asked after rather a long silence. “Now.”
“Get pissed. Have a little drink with the Elderberries.”
“Hurry up!” Helen called. “For Christ’s sake, we’ll miss the train!”
“You just can’t alter him,” they heard Beth Elderman say. “He’s always been a ditherer, he always will be. He drove Sandra mad.”
“That’s why Mark’s so wet,” said the largest girl.
“Great people,” said Shamus. “I love them all. Honest, straightforward. Might play Fly with them. Teach the kids.”
“And the new book’s all right, is it?”
“Finished,” said Shamus, without expression. “It’s all about you, actually. And immortality. The eternal survival of Aldo Cassidy.”
“I’m glad I provided the material.”
“I’m glad I did.”
“Cassidy!” Helen called, very angry.
“I’ve got to go now,” said Cassidy, taking Helen’s point, “or we’ll miss the train.”
“Attaboy. Be brave.”
“Goodbye.”
“Chippie chippie,” said Shamus in his poofy voice. “Love to the Bentley. Er lover.”
“Yes.”
“Not to miss the train but er let us in on something, will you? That waitress down at the station buffet there, the one with the tits.”
“Maria,” said Cassidy automatically.
“Tell us, does she oblige, do you know? I had the definite feeling yesterday that she was fumbling my hand when I gave her the coffee money.”
“Well they do say she’s a bit fast.”
“How much?”
“Fifty francs. Maybe more.”
Shamus’ hand was already outstretched.
“It’s for when I’m on my own you see. I’m going to need a spot of distraction.” Cassidy gave him a hundred. “Thanks. Thanks very much indeed. Pay you back, lover. Promise.”
“That’s all right.”
“And—er—on the general theme.”
“Which one?” Cassidy asked, definitely not thinking of the train, which he definitely intended to catch, but definitely. The general theme of God, perhaps? Of the union of souls? Of Keats, death, taking and not giving? Of kites, or Schiller; or the threat of China to the pram trade? Or something more personal perhaps, such as the slow atrophy of a loving soul worn down to very little any more?
“Money,” said Shamus.
At first, Cassidy could not recognise his smile. It belonged to other faces; faces not present, till then, in the worlds which he and Shamus had explored together. Faces weakened by need, and failure, and dependence. It was a smile that accused even while it supplicated; that haunted with its first dawning, imparting without change both allegiance and contempt; a smile from loser to winner, when both had run the same financial race. “Aldo old boy,” it said. “Cassidy old man. A thousand would see me right.” A shifty, sandy smile worn with a good suit fraying at the cuffs, and a silk shirt fraying at the collar: “After all old boy, we were neck and neck once, weren’t we, before you hit it lucky?”
“What do you need?” Cassidy asked. His custom, till then, had been to establish the minimum and halve it. “We’ll have to be quick actually.”
“Couple of thousand?” said Shamus, as if it were nothing to either of them really; just a thing that friends arranged between themselves and forgot.
“I’ll make it five,” said Cassidy, and wrote him a cheque, quickly because of the train.
He did not look at Shamus as he gave it him, he was too ashamed; and he never knew what Shamus did with it, whether he folded it away, Kurt-style, like a clean handkerchief, or read it after the lesson of Old Hugo, from the date to the signature, and then the back, in case. But he did hear him mutter the one word Cassidy was praying to God he wouldn’t say:
“Thanks.”
And he knew he had seen his first dead body, it stood for all the rest he would ever see; dead dreams, lives ended, no point.
“Just coming,” he called to Helen.
“Pay you back one day lover.”
“No hurry,” said Cassidy, though actually there was a hurry in a way because Swiss trains are punctual.
He climbed on to the toboggan.
“It’s on your wrist,” Shamus called after him, meaning his watch.
He could not possibly have seen it, for Cassidy had pulled his cuffs right down, in the style of Christopher Robin.
“Whatever were you up to?” Helen demanded. “I’ve been sitting here freezing for hours. Look at my hair.”
One of the children had found a bag of rice, and was flinging it at them in handfuls. The snow was falling steadily, the flakes thicker.
“I lost my watch,” said Cassidy.
“I’d have thought you could have done without it for once,” she said. “Seeing that it’s made us miss the train.”
The next moment, a dozen willing hands propelled them into the darkness, the children’s merry screams of “Good luck” faded behind them, and the happy pair was hurtling ever faster down the hill, already blinded by the icy streams of racing snowflakes.
The station was empty and very cold and the train was quite indisputably gone.
The next one could be late, the guard said, there was a lot of snow higher up.
“There’s a lot down here too,” Cassidy replied jovially, still brushing himself clean—clean also of the guilt of dawdling—but the guard did not care for jokes apparently, nor was he of the tippable class. He was a big, rugged man, not unlike Alastair a thousand years before him, but his rocky face was set against all pleasantries.
“Well ask him how late,” Helen told him.
“How late?” Cassidy asked, in French.
The guard made no gesture at all, neither of answering nor refusing to answer. But after staring at Helen for quite a long time, silently closed the hatch on them and locked it from the inside.
“How late?” Helen shouted, hammering on the little door. “The bugger, look at that.”
They had fallen several times on the way down: Cassidy reckoned five. The first time they agreed it was funny; the second time, the suitcase came undone and Cassidy had to stumble like an Arctic explorer through the falling snow, looking for Sandra’s clothes. After that, the falling was not funny at all. Helen said it was a lousy toboggan and Cassidy said you couldn’t really blame it. Helen said she had thought he knew how to drive it, otherwise she would not have consented to come on it; she would
have walked and at least remained dry. Real toboggans were wooden, she said, she had had one as a child. She hammered again, shouted “Bastard” through the chink, so Cassidy suggested they have a drink and try again in a few minutes.
“We can always go to Bristol,” he said.
“To where?”
“It was a joke,” said Cassidy.
“Dithering like that,” said Helen contemptuously. “If you’d wanted to go away with me you’d never have dithered.”
But still.
In the buffet, a group of English ladies in blue-banded pullovers was sitting at the English Table. Seeing Helen and Cassidy enter, a beautiful, thin lady with a deaf-aid beckoned them over.
“You old devil,” she said cheerfully to Cassidy, taking his wrist in her thin, dry hand. “You never even told us you were coming. You’re a devil,” she repeated, as if he, not she, were deaf. “Hullo Sandra, dear, you look absolutely frozen.” But men were her preference. “Darling,” she asked him confidentially, “have you heard what Arnie’s trying to do with the Championships this year?”
In a black rage, Helen accepted a glass of hot wine and drank it very slowly, staring at the clock.
“He wants a giant slalom at Mürren, my dear, can you imagine. Well I mean you know what happened last time we went to Mürren . . .”
Breaking away at last, Cassidy went back to the ticket office. It was still closed, there was no one in sight, and the snow was falling much harder, masking the village lights and casting a deep silence over the whole white world.
“They say about half an hour,” he told Helen, who had moved to an empty table. It seemed inappropriate to give her bad news, so he had invented a small hope. “They’re working flat out but at the moment it’s almost beating them.”
He ordered more hot wine.
“Got your passport all right?” he asked, trying to cheer her up.
“Of course I haven’t. Shamus burnt it.”
“Oh.”
“What do you mean: oh. You can get a duplicate. Any consulate or legation will provide one. We can go to Berne. Once the train comes, if it ever does.”