The Naive and Sentimental Lover (9 page)

“What would
you
do, lover,” Shamus asked Cassidy quietly, “if we gave
you
the treatment?”

Not knowing what answer Shamus wanted, Cassidy took refuge in the truth.

“Oh I'd bolt,” he said. “Absolutely.”

There was a small silence while Helen played with her spoon.

“But what
should
I do?” Cassidy asked, suddenly confused. “What do you
want
me to do?”

“Flash it,” said Helen promptly, very much to Cassidy's consternation, for he was not used to wit in women, nor coarseness either, even of the harmless, mannish kind.

“But then you don't know any better, do you?” Shamus said at last and gently reached for his hand across the table. “You've never seen the bloody daylight, have you lover? Jesus, I remember now, you're Flaherty.”

“Oh no I'm not,” Cassidy assured him modestly.

“He thinks all the time,” said Helen. “I can tell.”

“Who
are
you?” Shamus asked, still holding Cassidy's hand and watching his face with an expression of great puzzlement. “What have you got?”

“I don't know,” said Cassidy, putting on a shy expression. “I'm sort of waiting to find out I suppose.”

“It's the waiting that kills you, lover. You have to go and get it.”

“Look at Alastair,” Helen exhorted. “Alastair's been waiting for a train all his life. They come and go but he never hops aboard, does he, Shamus?”

“Maybe he
is
God at that,” said Shamus, still studying his new friend.

“Not old enough,” Helen reminded him. “God's forty-three. Cassidy's much younger, aren't you, Cassidy?”

Finding no immediate answer to these questions, Cassidy shrugged them off with a rueful, world-weary smile calculated to suggest that his problems were too profound to be resolved at a single sitting.

“Well anyway I'm very proud to be with you. I really am.”

“We're very proud to be with Cassidy,” said Helen after a slight pause. “Aren't we, Shamus?”

“
Estatica,
” said Shamus in homemade Italian, and kissed him.

A
nd it was at Bruno's still, just before they left for other treats, that they first touched upon the subjects of Shamus' new novel, and of Shamus' reputation as a writer. This moment was most vivid in Cassidy's recollection.

Helen talking.

“I mean honestly, Cassidy, it really is so,
so
fantastic you've no idea. I mean God, when you see the muck that
does
get well reviewed and you read this, just read it, it's ridiculous that he should worry at all. I mean I
know.
”

“What's it about?” Cassidy asks.

“Oh God,
everything,
isn't it, Shamus?”

Shamus' attention has been drawn to the next table, where a blond lady from Gerrard's Cross is listening to a disguised bishop talking about The Dustbin of Ideas, which is Shamus' metaphor for politics.

“Sure,” he says vaguely. “Total vision,” and shifts his chair into the aisle the better to observe his quarry.

Helen resumes.

“I mean he's put his entire life into it: me and . . . well everything. I mean just the dilemma of the artist, the way he
needs
real people, I mean people like you and me, so that he can match himself against them.”

“Go on,” Cassidy urges. “I'm absolutely fascinated. Honestly. I've never, sort of . . .
met
this before.”

“Well, you know what Henry James said, don't you?”

“Which bit exactly?”

“
Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our doubt. The rest is the madness of art.
That's Shamus, honestly, isn't it, Shamus? Shamus, I was talking about Henry James.”

“Never heard of them,” says Shamus.

The bishop, having taken the Gerrard's Crosser's hand, is apparently summoning his courage for a kiss.

“And then the identity thing,” Helen continues, returning to Cassidy. “You know, who
are
we? Actually
that
part of the book's rather like Dostoevsky, not a crib of course, just the sort of
concept,
isn't it, Shamus?” Still distracted, Shamus ignores her. “I mean honestly the symbolism just on this one level alone is incredible and there are so many levels, I mean I've read it half a dozen times at least and I haven't got them all yet.”

“Follow, Cassidy?” Shamus enquires, over his shoulder. “Got the meat of it, have you, lover?”

Bored, finally, by the rutting habits of the Many-too-Many he pulls in his chair and helps himself to the menu, which he now reads, moving his lips in a caressing Italian murmur. “Jesus,” he whispers once, “I thought
cacciatori
was a parrot.”

Helen lowers her voice.

“It's the same with suffering. Look at Pascal, look at, well, anybody . . . We've
got
to suffer deeply. If we don't how
on earth
can we overcome suffering? How on earth can we create? How? That's why he simply hates the middle classes. And I mean do you blame him? They compromise the
whole
way along the line. With life, with passion, with, well . . . everything.”

She is interrupted by Shamus' applause. He is clapping quite loudly and a lot of people are watching, so Cassidy changes the subject to politics: how he is thinking of standing as a candidate, how his father was a devoted parliamentarian, retired now of course, but still passionately wedded to the Cause, how Cassidy believes in enlightened self-help rather like the old-style Liberals . . .

“
Meeow,
” says Shamus, and, losing interest, begins writing on the back of the menu, but privately, withholding his Art.

“He writes on
anything,
” Helen whispers. “Envelopes, old bills, it's fantastic.”

“I was a writer once,” Cassidy confesses, “but only in advertising.”

“Then you know what it's like,” says Helen. “You've been down there in the pit.”

They watch him, head bowed in the candlelight, still writing on the menu.

 

“How long does it take him to finish one?” Cassidy asked, still watching him.

“Oh God years . . .
Moon
was different of course, being his first. He just sort of romped through it in four months. Now, well he's . . .
conscious.
He demands more of himself. He knows what he has to do to . . . justify his success. So naturally it takes longer.”

“
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?”