Of Cassidy himself it was known that he had a great aversion to snow. The Swiss house was not spoken of; probably it was sold.
Mark and Hugo grew up to be increasingly distant. With time they fell in love, and became objectionable.
Did Cassidy ever think of Helen and Shamus? Specifically and by name?
At first, fragments of news came to him, though he never went to look for them. From Angie Meale, née Mawdray, with whom he occasionally cohabited on the pretext of attending a heart specialist, he learned that Shamus had an avant-garde play running at the Royal Court; but corroboration was not forthcoming. The play was neither reviewed nor advertised. At about the same time a crate of champagne arrived at Haverdown, and a copy of a novel entitled Three for the Road. Both appeared to have come from Shamus’ hand. He never read the novel, and when Christmas came he sent the champagne to the police station as a small insurance against persecution. “You know young Cassidy of Haverdown?” the Chief Constable was heard to ask of the County. “Remarkable fellow. Flourishing business in London, gave it up, came down here, and sent us all champers at Christmas. . . .”
And in winter, when the fire burned dully in the familiar grate, at dinner perhaps, cut off from Sandra and Heather by the fine silver and old Worcester, he occasionally imagined Helen standing in the chestnut ride in her Anna Karenina boots, staring down the avenue of trees at the lighted windows of the house. Or Sandra would play Beethoven on the piano—she played nothing else these days—and he would remember, through the bone of his unmusical ear, the transistor radio in the pocket of her housecoat as she stole downstairs that first morning to bring him breakfast on the Chesterfield. Occasionally, after such moments of recollection, nightmares assailed him; a stock-whip lashed over his skull; he was being forced to drink high-octane gasoline. Or the streets of Paris had split, and the steams of Hades were belching out of them.
As to Shamus, with time Cassidy forgot him entirely.
Forgetting him became first an exercise, then an achievement.
Shamus did not exist.
Not even on the lonely homeward drives across the moor, when the puffs of mist blew towards him down the long hood of the Bentley; not even when his name was directly mentioned at the dinner tables of County ladies with pretensions to the arts, did Cassidy own to knowing Shamus, the taker and challenger of life.
For in this world, whatever there was left of it to inhabit, Aldo Cassidy dared not remember love.
John le Carré, The Naive and Sentimental Lover
(Series: # )
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