The Naive and Sentimental Lover (35 page)

“Lover,” Shamus said brightly, clapping his hands, “what a
clever
boy. You done it all alone!”

A few hours, a few lives later the same preserver of life applied himself painstakingly to the urgent task of restoring to the bedraggled, naked figure in the bed the ideals, dimensions, and glory of his fallen familiar.

 

By then, the world had turned for Cassidy several times. He woke first to hear the howling of a gale and the hotel cracking like a ship and he imagined the wet pavements heaving in the torrent and the mother whores clinging to the lampposts for their lives. The storm, of Shakespearean timeliness in view of the extreme turbulence of Cassidy's immortal soul, also woke Shamus, whom Cassidy discovered at the window, leaning outwards and down, over three floors to the courtyard below. Without fuss, Cassidy went to him and gently put his arm round the powerful back.

“I dropped my fag,” said Shamus.

Sixty feet below, a red ember burned miraculously in the dancing rain.

“That's all we are,” Shamus said. “Bloody little glows in a great big dark.”

Having by dint of his latent mechanical skill succeeded in locking the antiquated brass latch, which by means of rods and hooks uncomfortably joined the fat window frames, Cassidy returned Shamus to the bed and climbed in after him.

He did not however sleep.

The storm ended as suddenly as it had begun, it was replaced by a Sunday quietness reminiscent of the house in Abalone Crescent on the rare occasions when the builders were not on site.

Straddled across the pramseller's naked limbs, the writer was finally asleep.

Peace, thought Cassidy; Sandra has gone upstairs.

 

“Great night,” said Shamus, not looking at him.

“Great.”

The double bed. Eggs and coffee brought by the Algerian, sunlight on the eiderdown.

“Convivial, enlightening, broadening. Lover, give me a job.”

“No.”

“Listen, I sold those prams didn't I? I'll write you lovely brochures, lover, promise.”

“No.”

“Look, I drafted one the other night, want to hear it?”

“No.”

“I'll be your number one. Carry your bags, answer your phone . . . I'm better than that tight-arsed secretary of yours any day. Change my name, go straight . . .”

“Get on with your eggs,” said Cassidy.

 

While Shamus dozed, Cassidy made several telephone calls to his public world. Occasionally, hearing him mention a figure—five, tens of thousands, free on board, back it with a loan—Shamus groaned or covered his face with his hands. Sometimes he wept. And in the afternoon, still in bed, a subdued, rested, and definitely ordinary Shamus gave his own elusive version of the hellhound Dale.

How Dale was a spy, posing as one of the Few but actually a sworn supporter of the Many-too-Many. How under cover of darkness he accepted bribes from bishops and Jaguar owners, and was loyal to his frustrated wife. How
Moon
had made money, but the others hadn't; how the hardback advances had dwindled and the paperback advances ceased; and he talked quite knowledgeably of options and copyrights and things that Cassidy, being versed in Patent Law, at least marginally understood. How Dale wanted the centre pages rewritten, and would then seriously consider a second submission. And how Shamus must hurry back and shoot him, he would borrow a gun from Hall, there was not a day to lose.

“Alternatively,” said Cassidy lightly, “you might rewrite the middle.”

Long silence.

“I'll shoot you too,” said Shamus.

“Of course I haven't read the middle. But if everything you write is perfect, that's a different matter.”

Sulking, Shamus rolled to the other side of the bed. Later, however, dressing to go out, he was sufficiently revived to give Cassidy some useful instructions on the conduct of his private life.

“That bosscow.”

“Yes, Shamus.”

“You know, lover, you've got that lady wrong. That's a very steady and meaningful figure in your life. You want to get her back in the team.”

“I'll try.”

Don't
try,
said Mrs. Harabee: do it.

“Be
faithful,
lover. You're such a shit. Be
truthful.
”

“Okay.”

“Lot of woman there, boy.”

“Sure.”

“And don't read. Reading is out.”

“No problem.”

“And keep right away from Dostoevsky. That man was a criminal.”

“A maniac.”

“I need constants, lover. None of this shifting sand. How can I write if all the proles are growing long hair?”

“No way,” said Cassidy.

“Listen lover, you've got to stay frustrated. The whole order is in the balance. Promise.”

“Do you feel better now?” Cassidy asked as they left.

“Piss off,” said Shamus. “I don't need
your
sympathy.”

 

Walking down the rue de Rivoli, buying a second set of clothing,
terrines
for Helen, a handbag for Sandra, Shamus also counselled him on the tactic of wooing bosscows into a generous frame of mind.

“Tell her you're broke,” he urged. “Cheer her up. Christopher Robin in Carey Street, all I've got left is you.”

“All right,” said Cassidy.

“Flood's come, fleet's all washed away, no mink, no diamonds, no Breughels—”

“No cornices,” Cassidy put in. “No eighteenth-century fireplaces . . .”

“There is
nothing
that rejuvenates a lady faster, titillates her, stimulates her, jacks her up . . . better than catastrophe. Jesus, lover, I should know.”

“And you'll have a go at the middle pages, won't you?” said Cassidy. “And you'll go a
tiny
bit easier?”

“Never,” said Shamus.

For their last dinner, Cassidy chose Allard again. Eating there with Elise he had noticed a duck being enjoyed at a neighbouring table and he was anxious to give it a try.

Shamus' cure was complete.

“Now the first thing you've got to do, lover, is screw Angie Mawdray, right? Face to face, frenzy all the way.”

“Right,” said Cassidy.

“Then there's this other bird you fancy.”

“Ast.”

“Correct. Phase two. Proposition Ast.”

“Right.”

“But don't
ask.
Take. All this looking for an ideal cow. Don't do it. There's a bit of her in all of them and not much in any of them. You have to collect it wide and put it together for yourself.”

“All right.”

“As for your beastly wife . . .”

“Yes?”

“I hate her, lover.”

“I know you do, Shamus.”

“And she hates you, so why the bloody hell don't you drop her down a hole?”

“I know. I will, I will.”

“Well do it. Don't just finger it, do it.”

“I will, I promise.”

 

“You know what you forgot?” said Cassidy in bed at the St. Jacques.

“What?”

“We were going to build a cairn to Flaherty. We never did.”

“Do it another time,” said Shamus.

“That's right,” said Cassidy.

“Goodnight, lover.”

“Goodnight,” said Cassidy.

“Maybe I'll do those middle pages instead.”

“Great,” said Cassidy.

“I love you,” said Shamus as they fell asleep. “I love you. And one day, I'll give you back your faith, the way you gave me mine.”

Smiling in the darkness, Cassidy touched his hand.

“Poof,” said Shamus. “Vandal. Bourgeois.”

And made train noises, pooff, pooff, pooff, until he fell asleep.

 

Sandra with the sun on her looked very pretty and she smiled to see him back.

“Hullo bosscow.”

“Poor love. You look worn out.”

“It's all those fast Parisian women,” Cassidy said with a lean smile, breathing the smells of home.

“How was the Fair?”

“Actually rather good. We took quite a few orders, considering.” A char's husband emerged from the kitchen and took his suitcase. “Mind you,” he added shrewdly, pursing his lips and lowering his eyes, “the revaluation of the Deutschmark helped a good deal. Those Germans are knocking the bottom out of their own market.”

“Silly things,” said Sandra, leading him towards the drawing room. The disputed cornice was in place. Gilded, it looked rather handsome.

“They'll begin the other wall as soon as the plaster's dry,” she said.

“Fine.”

They've changed her over, he thought, like they do with babies when their blood's wrong; they've just kept the outside of her and changed everything else.

“Sorry about that letter,” said Sandra.

“That's okay,” said Cassidy, numb-headed.

One “
look
” for every flight of stairs. Hugo's leg was out of plaster.

A
n unusual silence fills the house and no birds sing.

The piano is locked. The key, well out of Hugo's reach, shares a picture hook with an unknown Florentine master whose value old Niesthal has guaranteed, he does business only with friends. In the hall, the carved eighteenth-century fireplace, completed in all but the pointing, is draped in Haverdown dust sheets, a monument never to be unveiled. The unfinished section of the cornice reaches this far only; the plasterers have been sent away. On the street side, windows are closed to noisome traffic, and curtains partly drawn in mourning. In the Crescent, neighbours have been cautioned. Even the cleaning women, customarily an important element of Sandra's social life, are tamed. They Hoover like conspiratorial bees behind closed doors and tea is taken quietly; their many children have been placed elsewhere. The Austrian cook has instructions not to weep, on pain of dismissal; whether Hugo insults her or not.

As to Mrs. Groat, she addresses her departed world in a fraught whisper which passes in bands of high energy to every corner of the house. At midday her alarm clock sounds, in forty years she has not mastered it. The signal sends her galloping six full flights. Once, mistaking the occasion, she boils water, and Sandra reproves her with discreet fury. Light is also rationed. A watchful gloom illuminates the corridors, which smell of broth as well as paint. Hugo plays in the basement, pop music is proscribed. Only John Elderman is welcome. He comes twice daily on a private basis, regardless of socialism or expense.

At the antique wrought iron gate (Sotheby's again, a snip at four hundred pounds) the press waits deferentially.

“Please keep very quiet,” Sandra sends out to them with dignity. “A bulletin will be issued as soon as there is anything to say.”

Aldo Cassidy, alone in high fever in the sick wing of his costly London house, is dying.

 

A virus, said Sandra; a special virus which assailed the overworked.

A
French
virus, said Mrs. Groat, she had had it in the Tropics, Bunny Sleego's brother died of it in an hour. It was the chrysanthemums, she said; she had never held with having chrysanths in the house, the pollen could be fatal. Additionally, she blamed the London water, which the Brigadier also disapproved of.

“Though he's not here to drink it, of course.
We're
the ones who've got to drink it,” she complained. “We” were the female race, discarded when we lost our looks. “
He's
out there drinking
pure
water, no wonder he's healthy, but still.” In support of this theory, she crept into Cassidy's ward while Sandra was shopping and poured commercial bleach down the waste pipe of the basin.