“Moon?” Cassidy repeated in bewilderment, and the thing was out.
Before addressing herself to Cassidy’s heresy, Helen cast a fearful glance across the table to make certain Shamus was still busy with the menu. Her voice sank to a whisper.
“You mean you didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
“The Moon by Day. That was Shamus’ first novel. Shamus wrote it.”
“Good Lord! . . .”
“Why?”
“But that was a film. I remember!” Cassidy was very excited. “A film,” he repeated. “All about university, and being in our prime and how rotten it was to have to go into commerce . . . and about this undergraduate and his love for this girl, who was all he had ever dreamed of, and—”
Helen waited, pride and relief reflected equally in her solemn eyes.
“I was his love,” she said. “I was the girl.”
“Good Lord,” Cassidy repeated, his exhilaration gathering. “He really is a writer! Good Lord. And it was all him?”
He gazed at Shamus, studying his profile in the candlelight, and watching with a new respect how the master’s pencil slipped smoothly across the menu.
“Good Lord,” he said yet again. “That’s wonderful.”
The revelation was of great significance to Cassidy. If there had been, until that moment, any tiny cloud of reservation in his mind concerning his new-found friends, then it was on this very matter of credentials; for while Cassidy was far from being a snob, he had not for several years been comfortable in the presence of the unsuccessful. And though not by nature cynical, he had never quite managed to overcome the prejudiced belief that the renunciation of property was a gesture reserved to those who had nothing to renounce. To learn therefore in a single stroke that Shamus was not merely a household name—the title had been much in circulation during Cassidy’s last year at Oxford, and he even remembered a nagging envy for a contemporary who had made his name so soon—but that his eccentricities were backed by solid achievement, this was a matter of great and rare joy to Cassidy which he was quick to impart to Helen:
“But we’ve all heard of him! He was brilliant, everyone said so. I remember my tutor raving about him . . .”
“Yes,” said Helen. “Everyone did.”
At this point Cassidy recalled that it was now eighteen years since he had left Oxford.
“What’s he been doing since?”
“Oh the usual things. Film scripts, television . . . even a ghastly pageant, once. For Abingdon if you please.”
“Novels?”
“The ghouls all wanted him to write Moon again,” she said. “Son of Moon, Moon at Easter, Moon Rides Out.... Well of course he wouldn’t do that would he? He wouldn’t repeat himself.”
“No,” said Cassidy doubtfully.
“You see he won’t be vulgar. He refuses absolutely. He’s got that kind of integrity. Virtue,” she added glancing at him, and Cassidy somehow knew that virtue, the word as well as the concept, was a part of their profound complicity.
“I’m sure he has,” he said reverently.
“So in the end he just put a bomb under the whole lot.” With a show of brightness, Helen opened her hands, revealing the obvious solution. “Just took off. Like Gauguin, except that I went with him of course. That was . . . years ago.”
“But good God, what happened to all the publishers and people, the ghouls . . . didn’t they come after him?”
Helen dismissed the question.
“Oh I told them he was dead,” she said carelessly.
It was right that Cassidy should pay; patronage formed a large part of his aspiring soul, affording not only protection and justification for his wealth, but also the pleasure of a public sacrifice. Calling for a settlement, using the practised gesture of the rich—which consists of passing an imaginary pencil over an imaginary writing pad—he discreetly summoned his cheque book from an inner pocket and waited in a slightly crouched position to pounce upon the bill and conceal its total before Shamus (should he prove to be that kind of guest) had a chance to object.
“God I envy him,” he said, but following the waiter with his eyes.
“It needs courage at first of course,” said Helen. “To be free. But then courage is what he’s got. And gradually . . . you realise, well you don’t need money, no one does. It’s just a complete trick.”
Still waiting, Cassidy shook his head at his own absurdity.
“What good did it ever do me?” he asked.
“We even gave up our flat in Dulwich.”
“What,” said Cassidy sharply. “All to be free?”
“I’m afraid so,” Helen admitted a little doubtfully. “But of course we’ll be rolling once the new book comes out. It’s fabulous, it really is.”
The bill came and Cassidy paid it. Far from disputing Cassidy’s rôle of host, however, Shamus seemed quite unaware that the transaction had taken place. He was still busily writing on the menu. They sat and watched him, too tactful to disturb the flow.
“It’s probably about Schiller,” said Helen in a low aside.
“Who?”
Still waiting for her husband’s mood of inspiration to pass, Helen explained.
Shamus had developed a theory, she said, which he had worked into his latest book. It was based on someone called Schiller who was a terrifically famous German dramatist actually but of course the English being so insular had never heard of him, and anyway Schiller had split the world in two.
“It’s called being naïve,” she said. “Or being sentimental. They’re sort of different kinds of thing, and they interact.”
Cassidy knew she was putting it very simply so that he could understand.
“Which am I?” he asked.
“Well Shamus is naïve,” she replied cautiously, as if remembering a hard-learned lesson. “Because he lives life and doesn’t imitate it. Feeling is knowledge,” she added rather tentatively.
“So I’m the other thing.”
“Yes. You’re sentimental. That means you long to be like Shamus. You’ve left the natural state behind and you’ve become . . . well part of civilisation, sort of . . . corrupt.”
“Isn’t he?”
“No,” said Helen decisively.
“Oh,” said Cassidy.
“What Nietzsche calls innocence, that’s what you’ve lost. The Old Testament is terrifically innocent, you see. But the New Testament is all corrupt and wishy-washy and that’s why Nietzsche and Shamus hate it, and that’s why Flaherty is such an important symbol. You have to challenge.”
“Challenge what?” asked Cassidy.
“Convention, morals, manners, life, God, oh I mean everything. Just everything. Flaherty’s important because he disputes. That’s why Shamus challenged him to a duel. Now do you understand?”
“Is that what Schiller says?” Cassidy asked again, now thoroughly confused. “Or the other one?”
“And Shamus,” Helen continued, avoiding his question, “being naïve, part of nature in fact, longs to be like you. It’s the attraction of opposites. He’s natural, you’re corrupt. That’s why he loves you.”
“Does he?”
“I can tell,” said Helen simply. “You’ve made a conquest, Cassidy, that’s all there is to it.”
“What about you, then,” Cassidy enquired, only partially succeeding in hiding his gratification. “Which side are you on? Shamus’ or mine?”
“I don’t think it works for women,” Helen replied at last. “I think they’re just themselves.”
“Women are eternal,” Cassidy agreed as finally they got up to leave.
In return, at the pub, he told her about his accessories.
That conversation alone, in retrospect, would have made his evening unforgettable.
Even if he had never set eyes on Helen before walking into the saloon bar; if he had never seen her again after he left it, if he had simply bought her a double whisky and chatted to her in the garden, he would have counted h
is visit to Bath—that timeless exchange would stand for all time—among the most amazing experiences of his life.
The pub was higher up the hill—the slope of tension as Cassidy now thought of it—a leafy place with a verandah and a long view of the valley lights. The lights reached to the edge of the earth, melting together in a low haze of gold before joining the descending stars. Shamus had made straight for the public bar and was playing dominos with the naïve classes, so the two of them sat outside looking into the night with eyes made wide by wisdom, mutely sharing the infinite vision. And for a moment, it seemed to Cassidy, a kind of marriage was made. For a moment, he would swear, before either one of them had spoken a word, Cassidy and Helen discovered secretly in the motionless night air a joining of their destinies and their longings, of their dreams and their enchantments. So strong was his sense of this, in fact, that he had actually turned to her in the hope of catching in her devout expression some evidence of the shared experience, when a gust of coarse laughter, issuing from inside the pub, reminded them of their companion.
“Shamus,” Helen sighed, but not at all by way of criticism. “He does so adore an audience. We all do really don’t we? It’s no more than the warmth of human contact, when you think about it.”
“I suppose it isn’t,” said Cassidy, who had never supposed till now that any excuse could be found for showing off.
“Ever since I’ve known him,” she said dreamily, “he’s been the complete enchanter. When we were rich it was the maid, the garage man, the milkman. And when we decided to be poor again it was . . . just anyone. Proles, Gerrard’s Crossers, he magicked them all. It’s the loveliest thing about him.”
“But it’s always been you,” Cassidy suggested. “Rich or poor, you were his real audience, weren’t you, Helen?”
She did not immediately accept the notion, but seemed to dwell on it as if it were new, and perhaps a fraction facile for her reflective nature.
“Not always. No. Just sometimes. Sometimes it was me. At the beginning perhaps.” She drank. “In the beginning,” she repeated bravely.
“But you must help him enormously with his work,” said Cassidy. “Doesn’t he lean on you an awful lot, on your knowledge, Helen? Your reading?”
“A bit,” Helen said, in the same airy, questionable tone. “Now and then, sure.”
“Tell me: what did you read at Oxford? I’ll bet you’re covered with degrees.”
“Let’s talk about you,” Helen suggested modestly. “Shall we?”
And that was how it happened.
Deliberately, to begin with, he had emphasised the human aspect of his products, the mother appeal as they called it in the trade. After all, there was not a reason on earth for her to be interested in the technical side: none of his other female customers was. Cee-springs, suspension, braking mechanisms: you might as well talk to a woman about pipe tobacco as try to explain all that to her. So he had begun by telling her in simple narrative terms, albeit apocryphal, how the idea had come to him in the first place. How he had been walking one Saturday morning, in the days when walking was about the only recreation he could afford—he had just started in advertising though he had always been a meddler, if she knew what he meant, gadget-minded so to speak, handy with a screwdriver if she followed him—and he was vaguely thinking of a drink before lunch (“Thank you,” said Helen. “Just a single will be lovely”) when he spotted a mother trying to cross the road.
“A young mother,” Helen corrected him.
“How did you know?”
“Just guessed.”
Cassidy smiled a little ruefully. “Well, you’re right actually,” he confessed. “She was young.”
“And pretty,” said Helen. “A pretty mother.”
“Good God how did you—”
“Go on,” said Helen.
Well of course, said Cassidy, there were no zebra crossings in those days, just the studded lines with Belisha beacons at either end, and the traffic was pretty well nonstop: “So she began probing.”
“With the pram,” said Helen at once.
“Yes. Exactly. She stood on the curb sort of testing the water with this baby, lowering the pram into the road and pulling it out again while she waited for the traffic to stop. And all there was between that kid and the traffic was this . . . this one footbrake. Just a rickety bit of rodding with a rubber grip on the end,” he said, meaning the foot-brake still.
“Rodding?” Helen repeated, unfamiliar with the word.
“Low-grade alloy,” Cassidy replied. “Virtually no stress. Metal fatigue ratio zero.”
“Oh my God,” said Helen.
“Well that’s what I felt.”
“I mean, Christ, risk your own neck if you must, but not well, God, not a child’s.”
“You’re absolutely right. That’s precisely what I say. I was horrified.”
“You felt responsible,” Helen said gravely.
Yes that was precisely what he had felt. No one had put it to him like that before, but it was true: he had felt responsible. So he didn’t have a drink, he went home and did a spot of thinking. Responsible thinking.
“Where’s home?” asked Helen.
“Oh Christ,” said Cassidy, hinting at the long road and unrevealed hardships. “Where was anywhere in those days?”
And Helen nodded to show that she too understood the vagaries of an aspiring male life.
“I just thought for a moment it might have been your own wife you were watching,” she said casually, not at all in the tone of someone accusing him of marriage, but merely recognising his state and taking it into account.
“Oh Lord no,” said Cassidy, as if to say that even if he had a wife and that wife had a pram, he would certainly not waste time watching her; and plunged on with his story. So anyway, he’d had this idea: if he could build a brake, a really unbeatable, multi-systemed brake, that functioned on any pram—a brake that stayed the hub rather than just well Christ let’s face it dragged along the road like your old chariot brake—
“A disc brake,” Helen cried. “You invented the disc brake! Cassidy!”
“That’s an extremely good analogy,” said Cassidy after a slight pause, not quite certain whether analogy was what he meant.
“It was your idea,” Helen said. “Not mine.”
“Of course it was only prams,” he reminded her. “Not grown-ups.”
“Are children more important?” Helen demanded. “Or adults?”
“Well,” said Cassidy very surprised. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, I must say.”
“I had,” said Helen.
Having fetched replenishments from the bar, Cassidy returned to Helen on the verandah and continued his narrative.
So anyway: over the next few days he had done a spot of research. Nothing explicit of course, nothing that gave the show away, just taken a few soundings among reliable people he happened to know. Vital question: would a quality footbrake be universally acceptable? A twin-circuit system, for instance; something one could attach to the hubs?
“You made your mark early, didn’t you?” Helen said. “Like Shamus.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Cassidy conceded.
Be that as it might, quite soon he came up with his answer. If he could build a brake that really held, a one-hundredper cent safety brake, based on a hub-retarding principle, then he would stir up such publicity, get so much support from the Road Safety League, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, not to mention the public media, “Woman’s Hour” and all the other goof programmes, that he could get the financing and clean up a fortune overnight, just on the patent alone.
“And perform a fantastic service for society,” Helen reminded him.
“Yes,” Cassidy said reverently. “That above all. And once it caught on, of course, I took on chaps, we expanded, grew, diversified. A lot of people came to us with their problems and before long . . . Look here, am I being pompous?”
Helen did not immediately
reply. She looked at her drink and then through the French doors at Shamus, and finally at Cassidy with the long, frank, fearless look of a woman who knows her mind.
“I tell you this,” she said. “If ever I need a pram, which I never will if Shamus has anything to do with it, it’s going to be one of yours.”
For a moment neither spoke.
“Do you really mean never?” Cassidy asked, embarrassed but feeling he knew her well enough.
“Well really,” she said laughing. “Can you imagine Shamus going through all that? Wife and two veg, that’s what he calls it. God he’d go raving mad in a week! How can an artist be tied to that?”
“God, you’re so right,” said Cassidy, and once more covertly examined his watch.
Give it ten minutes and I’ll make that call.
From there it had been but a step to the technical exposition. How they had expanded to become their own customer. (What a brilliant idea, said Helen. You take the profit twice!) How they had repeatedly ploughed back profits into research, exploring ever deeper the application of these same safety principles, until Cassidy’s name had become a byword, from the great hospitals to the individual housewife, for comfort and safety in your world of infant transportation. Heaven knows, he had spared her nothing. From fluid flywheels and dual braking circuits he passed with hardly a breath to the intricacies of a twin-jointed push bar and the variable suspension. Helen never faltered. He could tell by the steadiness of the sombre eyes that she took in every word; nothing, not even the universal joint, clouded their perfect comprehension. He drew for her, sketched on paper napkins until the bar was like a drawing board: gravely she sipped her drinks and gravely nodded her approval.
“Yes,” she said. “You thought of everything.”
Or: “But how did the competition take it?”
“Oh, the Japs had a shot at copying us as usual.”
“But they couldn’t,” Helen said, not as a question at all but as a positive statement there was no gainsaying.