The Naive and Sentimental Lover (61 page)

 

Palominos were bought but the boys were not fond of them and one night they were sold to a gypsy.

 

Occasionally, in idle hours in his library, Cassidy would try his hand at writing. The spy vogue was high at that time, and he thought he might get in on the market. For a while he even had something quite good going—an idea about deep-freezing a professional assassin, and turning him loose on the leaders of a new age—but gradually the idea died on him and he put it aside. There was something else, too, about the whole process of writing, that disturbed him. The way his thoughts took him in unsavoury directions: back to certain events, for instance, which he had of necessity banished from his conscious memory; or worse still, forward to possibilities that should not be entertained. He realised also what a lonely business writing was, how obvious and yet how tiresomely elusive; and then he would put down his pen and go to the kitchen, where Sandra was making jam. Quietly, he embraced her, usually from behind.

“What's the matter?” she would ask, as if he had a cold.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just missed you, that's all.”

 

Sandra slept much, often twelve hours a night.

 

It was common gossip that the building work at Haverdown would last indefinitely. Within months of their arrival the house was encased in the familiar steel corsetry of Abalone Crescent, and tilers had boarded the roof. What could not be restored must be pulled down and rebuilt for greater permanence. Sometimes the Cassidys said they had a duty to the past, sometimes to the future; the present was not spoken of. A landscape gardener, summoned from Cheltenham to judge the soil, pronounced it sour and advocated sweetness. A second pronounced it sweet, a third prescribed lime. There was much to dig up.

Old Hugo's funeral took place with full parliamentary honours; a Baptist minister spoke at length of a profitable life spent in God's service. But Cassidy was not convinced, and some years later heard that he had opened a new hotel on the Inverness Road, a place called the Ideal Star and managed by a Mrs. Bluebridge.

 

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.