“He’s absolutely right,” said Cassidy.
Cassidy booked the call because he had a Post Office credit card and Shamus, amazingly, had the number written neatly in the margin of a cutting from the Daily Mail. “It’s Beohmin village pub,” he explained. “He’s there most evenings.” FLAHERTY FOR GOD the cutting read. They squeezed in all three together and closed the door for comfort. Alas, Flaherty was not available. For five minutes perhaps they listened to the number ringing out. Cassidy was secretly quite glad—after all, it could have been embarrassing—but Shamus was hurt and disappointed, returning to the car ahead of them and climbing into the back without a word. For a long while they drove in silence; while Helen, sitting beside her husband now, consoled him with kisses and small attentions.
“Sodder,” Shamus declared at last, in a cracked voice. “Shouldn’t even need a fucking telephone.”
“Of course he shouldn’t,” Helen agreed tenderly.
“Hey look,” said Shamus, sitting up straight, watching the unnatural moonlight scatter over the hedges. “Kolynos headlights!”
“They’re iodine quartz,” said Cassidy. “Halogen. The latest thing.”
“Meeow,” said Shamus and went back to Helen.
Back at Haverdown—after a pause for refreshment—they had a horse race. Shamus was Nijinsky, Cassidy was Dobbin. The start was unclear to him, and for once he forgot who won, but he had the clearest recollection of the thunder of their six feet as they galloped down uncarpeted back staircases, and of Shamus doing his butler voice while he charged a locked door.
“’Ere’s my lady’s bedroom!” He charged it again. “Merry bloody England, let’s knock the bugger down!”
“Helen . . .” whispered Cassidy. “He’ll smash himself to pieces.”
But the door it was that smashed and suddenly they were flying, crashing into bare mattresses that smelt of lavender and mothballs.
“Shamus, are you all right?” Helen asked.
No answer.
“Shamus is dead,” she declared, not in the least alarmed.
Shamus was underneath them, groaning.
“Sounds like a broken neck,” she said.
“It’s a broken heart you fool,” said Shamus. “For when they butcher my masterpiece.”
She was already undressing him as Cassidy left the room to make himself a bed on the Chesterfield. For a while he lay awake listening to the bucking of the bed as Helen and Shamus once more consummated their perfect relationship. The next moment Helen was waking him with a gentle shaking of his shoulder and he heard the transistor again playing cremation music from the pocket of her high-necked housecoat.
“No,” said Helen quietly, “you can’t say goodbye to him because he works in the mornings.”
She had brought a complete breakfast on a mother-of-pearl tray: a boiled egg and toast and coffee, and she carried the lantern because it was still dark. She was very neat and wore no make-up. She might have slept twelve hours and been for a country walk.
“How is he?”
“His neck’s stiff,” she said cheerfully. “But he likes a bit of pain.”
“For the writing?” Cassidy said, being of the clan now, and Helen nodded yes.
“Were you warm enough?”
“Fine.”
He sat upright, partially covering his bare paunch with the overcoats across his lap, and Helen sat beside him watching him with motherly indulgence.
“You won’t leave him will you Cassidy? It’s time he had a friend again.”
“What happened to the others?” Cassidy said, his mouth full of toast, and they both laughed, not looking at his tummy. “But I mean why me? I’m mean I’m not much good to him.”
“Shamus is very religious,” Helen explained after a pause. “He thinks you’re redeemable. Are you redeemable, Cassidy?”
“I don’t know what he means.” Helen waited, so he went on. “Redeemable from what?”
“What Shamus says is, any fool can give, it’s what we take from life that matters. That’s how we discover our outlines.”
“Oh.”
“That means . . . our identity . . . our passion.”
“And our art,” said Cassidy, remembering.
“He doesn’t like people throwing up the struggle whether their name is Flaherty, or Christ, or Cassidy. But you haven’t thrown up the struggle, have you Cassidy?”
“No. I haven’t. I feel sometimes . . . I’m just beginning.”
Very quietly, Helen said, “That’s the message we got.” She took the tray to the far end of the room, the ship’s lantern lighting her face from below. Caravaggio, Cassidy thought, remembering Mark’s postcard from Rome.
“I told him your remark about money.”
“Oh . . .” said Cassidy, not knowing which remark, but wondering somewhat nervously whether it was to his credit.
“A man is judged by what he looks for, not by what he finds.”
“What did he think of it?”
“He’s using it,” she said simply, as if there were no higher accolade. “Do you know Shamus has written his own epitaph?” she continued brightly. “Shamus who had a lot to take. I think it’s the most super epitaph that’s ever been written, don’t you?”
“It’s wonderful,” Cassidy said. “I entirely agree. It’s beautiful.” Adding: “I’d like it for myself too.”
“You see Shamus loves people. He really does. He’s the difference between paddling and swimming. He’s like Gatsby. He believes in the light at the end of the pier.”
“I think that’s what I believe in too,” said Cassidy, trying to remember who Gatsby was.
“That’s why he loved your remark about money,” Helen explained.
She saw him to the car.
“He’ll even believe in Flaherty if Flaherty will only give him a chance.”
“I thought he wanted to kill him.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” said Helen, giving him a very deep look.
“I suppose it is,” Cassidy conceded.
“Give my love to London.”
“I will. Helen.”
“Yes?”
“Can I give you some money?”
“No. Shamus said you’d ask. Thanks all the same.” She kissed him, not a goodbye kiss but a kiss of gratitude, swift and accurate on the blank of the cheek. “He says you’re to read Dostoevsky. Not the works, just the life.”
“I will. I’ll start tonight.” He added, “I don’t read much, but when I do I really like to take my time.”
“He’ll be up in a week or two. As soon as he’s finished the book, he’ll come up and see all the managers and agents and people. He likes to be alone for that.” She laughed resignedly. “He calls it charging his batteries.”
“The ghouls,” said Cassidy.
“The ghouls,” said Helen.
The early sun sprang suddenly through the monkey puzzle trees, raising the brickwork of the mansion to a warm, flesh pink.
“Tell him to ring me at the firm,” said Cassidy. “We’re in the book. Any time, I’ll always take the call.”
“Don’t worry, he will.” She hesitated. “By the by, you remember last night you offered Shamus a Swiss house to work in?”
“Oh the chalet. Yes. Yes, of course. Tense slope. Ha.”
“He says he might take you up on that.”
“Goodness,” said Cassidy gratefully, “that would be wonderful.”
“He can’t promise.”
“No, of course.”
A moment’s silent plea: “Cassidy.”
“Yes?”
“You won’t rat, will you?”
“Of course not.”
She kissed him again without fuss, on the mouth this time, the way sisters kiss brothers when they’re no longer worried about incest.
So Cassidy left Haverdown with the taste of her toothpaste on his lips and the smell of her simple talc in his nostrils.
8
Bohemia.
Tha
t was his first thought and it sustained him all the way to Bath. I have visited Bohemia and got away unscathed. It was many years since he had met an artist. At Oxford in his time there had been an old house near the river that was reputed to contain a number of them and sometimes, passing on his way to the Scala Cinema, he had seen their clothes hanging from the iron balcony, or a great quantity of empty bottles sprawling out of their dustbins. On Sundays, he had heard, they congregated in the George Bar, their men in earrings and their womenfolk smoking cigars, and he imagined them saying amazing things to one another about their private parts. At public school there had been a painting master known as Whitewash, a soft man in later middle age who had worn butterfly collars and made the boys sit for each other in gym shorts, and one Wednesday Cassidy had been to tea with him alone but he had hardly spoken a word, just smiled sadly and watched him eat hot muffins. Apart from these sparse experiences, his knowledge of the breed was negligible, though he had long counted himself an honorary member.
Stopping in Bath he went to his hotel to collect his luggage and pay the bill, and found himself glancing in furtive excitement at the daylight shining on the scenes of their revel. Rotten little town, he told himself. Prole-ridden Vatican. And vowed never to return.
He had signed in as Viscount Cassidy of Mull.
“Enjoy your stay my lord?” the cashier enquired with a little more intimacy than Cassidy considered needful.
“Very much indeed, thank you,” he said and gave two pounds to the porter.
The process of ratting therefore, which Helen had so accurately anticipated, did not begin until round about Devizes. For the first hour of the drive, before his hangover had entered the retributive phase, Cassidy remained confused but still elated by his encounter with Helen and Shamus. He had little idea of what he felt; his mood seemed to change with the landscape. On the highroad to Frome where blue plains reached to either side of him, a child-like innocence gilded all he saw. His whole future was one long adventure with his new friends: together they would bestride the world, sail distant seas, mount the sky on wings of laughter. In Devizes where the rain began and a dull sickness overtook his gastric system, he remained moderately enchanted, but the sight of the morning shoppers and mothers with prams gave him food for thought. By the time he reached Reading his head was aching terribly and he had convinced himself that Helen and Shamus were either a dream or a pair of fakes posing as celebrities.
“After all,” he argued, “if they’re who they say they are, why should they be interested in me?”
And later: “I am one of a row. People like me have no part in the life of an artist.”
Reconstructing Helen’s tour d’horizon of Shamus’ argument on the relationship between the artist and the bourgeois, he found it frail, confused, and poorly reasoned.
I’d have put it better, he thought, if I’d held that opinion: a lot of hot air actually.
By the time he reached the outskirts of London he had come to certain useful conclusions. He would never hear from Helen or Shamus again; they were probably confidence tricksters and he was lucky to get away with his wallet; and whether they reappeared or not, they belonged with certain other phenomena to that area of Cassidy’s world which for the general peace was best not revisited.
He would have dismissed them then and there, in fact, if a small incident had not forcibly reminded him of Shamus’ disagreeably personal perceptions.
Parked in a lay-by, he was checking the pockets of his car for compromising souvenirs when he came upon a crumpled sheet of paper stuffed into a glove pocket. It was the menu from Bruno’s restaurant in Bath on which, in his simplicity, he had believed that Shamus was writing immortal prose. Down one side of the back, done in pencil, was Shamus’ portrait of Cassidy with words written at the side and arrows to show what feature they referred to. “Baby cheeks, good at blushing; noble brow, furrowed by vague agonies; eyes shaggy and very, very shifty.” Over the top of the head in capitals was the word WANTED and underneath a further description of Cassidy.
NAME: Cassidy, Butch. Also known as Hopalong, Chris- topher Robin, and Paul Getty.
CRIME: Innocence (cf, Greene: a leper without his bell).
FAITH: First Church of Christ Pessimist.
SENTENCE: Survival for life.
The other side of the menu contained a letter, addressed to LOVER.
Dear Lover,
I hope you are well. I am. Thank you very much for a lovely nosh. Twice or thrice had I loved thee before I knew thy face or name. So forgive nasty drawing, can’t help the Eye but the Heart’s yours for the asking. Love, love, love
P. Scardanelli, alias
Flaherty, alias Shamus
What a very undergraduate communication thought Cassidy indignantly; how very embarrassing. Sighing, he threw the menu away. Talk about submerged proof . . .
Ever killed anyone lover? a voice asked from inside him. Switching on the wireless, he turned south for Acton. Art is all very well, he thought, but sometimes it goes a damn sight too far.
His business in Acton was brief and useful. A wholesaler named Dobbs, notoriously difficult but an influential connection, had been objecting to the new leather-look strollers and was flirting with a rival manufacturer. Cassidy had never much cared for strollers, which he regarded as an unhappy cross between your mere pushchair and your full-scale baby carriage, but they were a useful stand-by in the spring when demand was capricious. Rightly he calculated that a personal visit would end the dispute.
“Well I didn’t expect Himself I will say,” Dobbs confessed nervously. “What’s happened to the rep then, horse?”
He had lost a lot of hair, Cassidy noticed; the second marriage is wearing him out. He was a very wasted man, always perspiring, and scandal attached to him.
“I like to check on these things myself, that’s all. Where a valued customer complains,” Cassidy said not without a certain sternness, “I like to look into it personally.”
“Now look this isn’t a complaint, Mr. Cassidy. The stroller’s a very elegant job and your chassis does it credit, course it does. The making of it in fact. I sell a lot of them, swear by them, course I do, horse.”
“A complaint’s a complaint, Andy, once it gets into the pipeline.”
“It’s the folding they don’t like, Mr. Cassidy,” Dobbs protested not with any real conviction. “They’re doing their stockings on the links.”
“Let’s take a look shall we, Andy?”
They climbed the wooden steps to the warehouse and examined links.
“Yes,” said Cassidy, kneeling to caress a particularly wellturned example, “I see what you mean.”
“Here, watch your trousers,” Dobbs cried. “That floor’s filthy.”
But Cassidy affected not to hear. Stretching himself at full length on the unswept floorboards he ran a devoted hand along the underpart of the pram, touching with his fingertips the nipples, threads, and couplings of his earliest and most fruitful patent.
“I’m very grateful to you, Andy,” he said as they returned to the office. “I’ll have my people look into it right away.”
“Only they do their nylons on them you see,” Dobbs repeated feebly as he brushed down Cassidy’s suit. “They did on the last lot anyway.”
“Know what one nylon said to the other, Andy?” Cassidy asked casually as he unloaded the crate of sherry he had ready in the trunk. Sherry, they said, was what he drank.
“What’s that then?”
“There’s a fellow feeling between us,” said Cassidy. Their laughter covered the flurried transaction. “It’s an Easter present,” Cassidy explained. “We’re shedding a bit of the profits from the last financial year.”
“It’s very decent I must say,” said Dobbs.
“Not at all. Thanks for putting us on to that link.”
“I get worried sometimes,” Dobbs confessed, seeing him back to the Bentley. “I just think I’ve been forgotten.”
“I understand,” said C
assidy. “How’s the wife then?”
“Well, you know,” said Dobbs.
“I know,” said Cassidy.
Changing his mind, he went to the cinema. He liked best those films which praised the British war effort or portrayed with Fearless Honesty the Intimate Sex Life of Scandinavian Teenagers. On this occasion he was fortunate enough to find a double bill.
Sandra was out. She had left a quiche Lorraine on the kitchen table and a note saying she had gone to her meths drinkers’ clinic. The hall smelt of linseed oil. Dust sheets and painters’ ladders reminded him uncomfortably of Haverdown. Adding or subtracting? He tried to remember. The mouldings, he knew, were inferior and must be taken down. The fireplace perhaps? They had bought one at Mallets a month or two ago, pine, eighteenth century, three hundred quid and fine carvings over. The fireplace was a feature, their architect assured them, and features, God alone knew, were what their house most needed.
Her mother was in her room. From several flights above, he heard the mellifluous tones of John Gielgud reading Héloïse and Abélard on her gramophone for the blind. The sound moved him at once to a trembling fury. Idiot, braying idiot, she can see perfectly well when she wants to.
Very softly he went to the nursery and by the glow of the uncurtained window tiptoed to Hugo’s bedside, picking his way through the litter of toys. Why had he no night light? Cassidy was convinced he was afraid of the dark. The boy slept as if dead upon the blankets, his plastered leg shining palely in the orange light and his pyjama jacket open to the waist. On the floor beside him lay the egg whisk which he used for frisking up his bubble bath. One by one Cassidy fastened the pyjama buttons, then gently laid his open palm on the child’s dry brow. Well, at least he was not overheated. He listened, studying him intently through the speckled twilight. Against the sleepless boom of traffic the boy’s breath came and went in small, regular sips. Nothing wrong there apparently, but why did he suck his thumb so? A child of seven doesn’t suck his thumb, not unless he’s deprived of love. Inwardly, Cassidy sighed. Hugo, he thought, oh Hugo, believe me son, we all go through it. Kneeling now, he minutely examined the outer surface of the plaster, searching for the telltale ridges which might betray a second parting of the fractured bone within; but the light from the window was not enough, and all he could make out were graffiti and pictures of houses done in felt-nibbed pens.