The Naive and Sentimental Lover (39 page)

Once, to reward her efforts, he took her to the cinema, and she held his hand in mute submission, watching Cassidy rather than the screen, her little face flickering on and off as the beam switched above them like wartime searchlights.

As to his relationship with Helen and Shamus, Angie Mawdray was neither shocked nor curious.

“If you like them, it's good enough for me,” she said. “And he's a smashing writer, truly. As good as Henry Miller, whatever the beastly critics say.”

Within days of their arrival, she had learnt to recognise their voices on the telephone and put them through without enquiry. Once, using his Russian accent, Shamus asked her to go to bed with him. He was the Reverend Rasputin, he said, and tired to death of princesses.

“He would too,” said Cassidy with a laugh, “if he got half a chance.”

“What's so funny about that?” said Angie, stung.

But mainly he said he was Flaherty, an Irish fanatic in search of moderation.

U
p Hall's Shamus called it.

They went there for Impact, it was better even than water. They went there for Abstinence, it was Shamus' new mood; to keep fit, and preserve himself to a fine Old Testament age. They went there by bus riding at the front on the top deck, after six, when the eastbound buses were mainly empty. To a blackbricked warehouse behind Cable Street, with ropes swinging from the girders, and an old trampoline stretched above the concrete floor, and a rope boxing ring rigged under arc lights, the canvas blotched with blood. Cassidy wore squash kit with a little blue laurel on the left breast, but Shamus insisted on the deathcoat, he refused to dress for Impact. Hall wore white ducks as broad at the cuff as they were at the waist, and a cotton singlet with creases ironed across the shoulders. Hall was a small, round, toothless man with quick brown eyes and darting fists and a complexion made in squares like an old brown eiderdown. To Cassidy, he had a lot of the naval chaplain about him, the same shipshape philosophy and a pious way of drinking, the same way of shaking hands while he looked for God behind you.

He called Shamus Lovely.

Not my lovely, or lovely one, but plain lovely as if it were a noun.
Le beau,
thought Cassidy, hearing it for the first time; the Regency tradition. Before Impact they watched the sparring of Hall's White Hopes, and played on the trampoline and rode the anchored bicycle. After Impact they went up to Sal's place, which was Hall's name for where he lived. Sal was Hall's bird, Hall's body; he loved her better than life. She was nineteen and simple, by profession a tart, but now in retirement owing to Hall's insistence.

For this reason, Hall seldom allowed her out, but banged her up to keep her safe.

“
Bangs her up?
” asked Cassidy.

Bang up
was prison talk, Shamus explained proudly; Hall had been in stir.
Bang up
meant lock the cell door at night.

That's why Hall's a parson, Cassidy thought, reminded of Old Hugo; he's learnt the piety of granite walls.

 

For Impact, Shamus fought with Hall, when the gym was empty of all but Cassidy and a man called Ming, a blood-wiper and stone deaf.

Hall would only oblige when the gym was empty; that was his rule, that was his pride, Hall's sense of what was proper in a well-run gym, for Shamus had no art at all, and would not learn it.

“
Wait,
” Hall would say firmly, bolting the doors. “Wait, Lovely, I'm telling you,” and then duck quickly under the ropes and into the ring before Shamus could get at him.

Shamus in attack relied solely on the charge. He charged in sudden onslaughts, shouting and flailing his arms under the deathcoat: “Fucker, sodder, prole!” And if he reached his adversary, embraced him, squeezing his ribs and biting him until Hall was obliged to beat him off. Sometimes, affecting a Japanese style, he tried to kick him, then Hall took his foot and threw him on his back.

“Take it easy, Lovely, take it easy, I don't want to hurt you now,” Hall would say, quite misunderstanding the purpose of the engagement.

Very rarely, provoked beyond endurance, Hall smacked him on the cheek, most frequently a backhanded blow, to deflect him from the charge. Then Shamus would stand off, very pale, frowning and smiling together, feeling the pain and rubbing his cheek with his black sleeve.

“Jesus,” he would say. “Wow. Hey, go and do it to Cassidy. Cassidy, feel, it's fantastic!”

“I can imagine,” Cassidy would say, laughing. “Thanks very much, Hall, all the same.”

 

“He'd be a grand fighter,” Hall declared, back at Sal's place, as they drank the Talisker out of Cassidy's briefcase. “It's his footwork, that's the trouble, it spreads him out, don't it Lovely? You're a murderous bugger though, aren't you?”

“I think he's nice,” said Sal, who was very prim for her age and seldom said much else.

Hall enjoyed his whisky neat, from a tall glass so full it looked like still pale beer.

“That's how
we
should drink it,” Shamus explained as they returned to Helen. “If it wasn't for me being dedicated.”

 

“I must say,” Sandra told John Elderman. Heather was present and passed it on to Cassidy. “I must say he's keeping very fit. He's lost four pounds in a week.”

“It's all that Trade Union food,” said John Elderman, who knew his lower classes.

“He's been taking exercise too,” said Sandra, with (Heather reported) a most unusual smile.

 

Observing,
Helen called it.

It was her own idea; she advanced it one morning while Cassidy sat on the end of the blue bed finishing up their toast from a Michael Truscott plate. He had dropped in early on his way to South Audley Street. It was the holiday season, and the business world was almost at a standstill.

The cups were also Truscott: stoneware of great delicacy, he had thought the plain form would appeal to her.

“Honestly, Shamus,” she said. “He's just never lived, have you, Cassidy? He's been in London all his life and he doesn't know anything about it at all. Honestly, you ask him where anything is, or when it was built, or honestly . . .
anything,
and I'll bet he doesn't know the answer. Cassidy, have you ever been to the Tate? Listen to this, Shamus. Well, Cassidy?”

So that afternoon while Shamus toiled, they went to the Tate, stopping on the way to buy Helen some sensible shoes. Finding the Tate closed they had tea at Fortnum's instead, and afterwards Helen insisted on visiting the Baby Carriage Department to inspect one of Cassidy's prams. The salesman was extremely respectful and, without knowing that Cassidy was of his audience, praised the excellence of his inventions. Also he assumed Helen and Cassidy were married and that Helen was pregnant, and this led to much secret laughter between them, and squeezes of the hand and confiding glances. Then Helen said actually it
might
be twins, there was quite a record of twins in the family, particularly on
her
side.

“My father's a twin,
and
my grandfather and my greatgrandfather. . . .”

And Cassidy put in, “It led to awful trouble with the title, didn't it darling?”

So the salesman showed them a Cassidy Two-in-Hand carriage with a Cassidy Banburn canopy over the top and Helen wheeled it very solemnly up and down the carpet until she got the giggles and had to be removed.

At the zoo Helen made straight for the vultures, studying them gravely and without apparent fear. Hugo's gibbons gave her particular pleasure, causing her to laugh out loud. No, Cassidy quietly corrected her, they were not making love in the air, that was the baby holding on underneath, it was the way they carried their young, almost like kangaroos.

“Nonsense, Cassidy, don't be so prim, of
course
they're—”

“No,” said Cassidy, firmly, “they're not.”

In the night animals' house they watched badgers preparing a set and bats cleaning their ears and small rodents burrowing against the glass. No, said Cassidy in answer to the same question, they were just using each other's backs for steps. In the dark corridor, watched by a crowd of bleary children, Helen was moved to kiss Cassidy in gratitude for all the wonderful things he had done for Shamus; and she promised Cassidy that she loved him, in her way as faithfully as Shamus, and that he would always have a home with them however bleak the other parts of his life.

And when finally, by way of several pubs, they reached the Water Closet (Shamus' name for the flat) and found him still working, still in the beret, crouched at the river window, they told him everything they had observed, and all the fun they had had; everything in fact except the kiss, because the kiss was private and, like the actions of certain animals, liable to facile misconstruction.

 

“Great,” said Shamus quietly, when he had heard it all. “Great,” and having taken each of them in an affectionate embrace, returned to his desk.

A few days later the two men went down to Hall's for Impact and Shamus succeeded in landing Hall a painful blow on the eye. For retaliation, Hall punched him in the stomach, hard, just under the rib cage, on what boxers call the mark, and Shamus became white and sick and even more quiet than before.

 

With Shamus wholly given to work, abstinence, and contemplation, it was inevitable that Helen and Cassidy should spend much time observing on their own. Now in his deathcoat, now stark naked before the window, the beret pulled like a cage low on his dark brow, he would sit for hours on end, head bowed, driving his pen across the paper. Not even for
Moon,
said Helen, had he shown such zeal, such application:

“And he has
you
to thank for it.
Dear
Cassidy.”

“Is it
all
rewrite?” Cassidy asked, lunching with her at Boulestin. “It looked like a whole new novel to me.”

Helen said no, she was sure it was the rewrite. He had promised Cassidy he would do it, he had made the same promise to Dale: Shamus never, never forgot a promise.

“He always pays what he owes. I've never met anyone with a greater sense of honour.”

She said this without drama, as a statement concerning someone they both loved; and Cassidy knew it was true, a fact beyond pretending.

 

London was her city.

Shamus was Paris. The Celt, the nomad, the dreamer, the practitioner: all were met in the unfathomable artistic genius of Paris. But Helen was London, and Cassidy loved her for it. She loved its worthiness, its dingy pomp and ordinary grime. And though they both subscribed to Shamus' dictum that the past was not worth discussing, Cassidy by now had learnt enough of her to know that London was where most of her life had been spent.

She led him.

She led him along wharves, past Dutch warehouses painted with impossible professions: cane importers, whalers, grinders of fine curry. She led him down dangerous Dickensian alleys, gaslit and haunted by bollards, where for twenty seconds they thrilled to a sense of being young and well-dressed and desirable to evildoers. She showed him City churches with postagestamp edges; took him into synagogues and mosques, held his hand at the place where poets were buried in Westminster Abbey. She showed him empty markets where brown dogs ate Brussels sprouts by lamplight, and Mussolini's statue in the Imperial War Museum. She took him to the Anchor and stood him on a wooden platform and made him gaze at the sunlit outline of St. Paul's across the water; and she asked him to become Lord Mayor all in furs and chains so that she could visit him and eat roast beef by candlelight. And Cassidy knew he had never seen any of these places before, not one of them; not even the Tower of London or Piccadilly Circus, until Helen had shown them to him.

For conversation they had Shamus: their star, their parent, their lover, and their ward. How they loved him more than themselves; he was their bond. How his talent was their responsibility, their gift to the world. That to damage him in any way would be to violate a trust.

 

Shamus, meanwhile, had cut his beard square at the end in order to look like a rabbi.

“Solid for the Old Testament,” he explained, still writing.

 

While at Abalone Crescent, Sandra was extremely impressed by Cassidy's portrait of dockside conditions.

“When will they realise it's the
quality
of life that matters, not the amount that people earn?” she demanded.

“Jesus,” said Snaps. “Hear you.”

“Still, darling, money is
nice,
” countered Mrs. Groat, who had recently put her arm in a sling on the grounds that it hurt when she had it straight.

“Nonsense,” said Sandra. “Money's just token. It's happiness that matters, isn't it, Aldo?”

To compensate for his prolonged absences Sandra had wisely acquired a new interest.

“What are the dockers doing about birth control?” she wanted to know. Were there advisory centres for wives? If not, she and Heather would open one
at once.
Or—a sensible thought—should they postpone their decision until Cassidy had his Seat?

“I think,” said Cassidy shrewdly, after some thought, “that you might do best to wait and see where we end up.”

 

The change in Shamus, when it came, was at first barely distinguishable from the strains of an arduous routine, and only loosely related to external events. Hall had much to do with it; yet the part he played was probably, in the end, analogous rather than contributory.

For several weeks now, Helen and Cassidy and Shamus had lived a life of quite unusual happiness. As Shamus added page after page to the neat piles of paper before him so, it seemed to Cassidy, did his own contentment rise in an ever-ascending swell of perfect companionship. Cassidy came most often after lunch, when Helen had put behind her the majority of her domestic duties. Sometimes she was still washing up—the machine, for all its simplicity, had defeated her—and in that case Cassidy would dry the glasses for her while they planned their afternoon's entertainment. Often they would consult Shamus: did he think it would rain? What did he feel about a trip to Hampton Court? Should they take the Bentley or get a car from Harrods? And when they came back, they would sit at the table hand in hand and tell him, over a frugal Talisker or a bottle of shampoo, of all their many adventures and impressions.