The Naive and Sentimental Lover (27 page)

“Shamus, it was wonderful what you did. It was just fantastic. They really believed in you . . . more than in me. You could have told them anything, just anything you wanted. You could run my whole business with your left hand.”

“Great. And you write my books.” They drank to that as well.

“I wish Helen was here,” said Cassidy.

“Never mind lover, woods are full of them.”

“What's it like being married to someone like Helen? To someone you
really
love?”

“Guess,” said Shamus, but Cassidy, who had an ear for such things, sensed that he would be wiser not to.

Shamus talked.

Over linen, candles, chalices, and plate, he talked of the world and its riches. He talked of love and of Helen, and the search for happiness and the gift of life, and Cassidy, like a favoured pupil, listened to every word and remembered almost nothing but his smile and the beguiling softness of his voice. Helen is our virtue; we talk, but Helen acts. Helen is our constant; we rotate but she is still.

“I've never met a woman like her,” Cassidy confessed. “She could be . . . she could be . . .”

She
is,
Shamus corrected him. Helen has no potential; Helen is fulfilled.

“Does she
mind
about . . . Elsie and people, Shamus?”

Not as long as they are called Elsie, said Shamus.

Of the obligation to live romantically and feel deeply. He talked of writing, and what a feeble task it was beside the vocation to experience.

“A book . . . Jesus. Such a
little
thing, just a handful of days.
Enoughs,
that's what a book is. Get pissed enough, get the guilts enough, get screwed enough, and suddenly . . . it's a natural. Honest, lover.”

Creation was an act of moderation, but life:
life,
Shamus said, existed only in excess. Who wants
enough
for Christ's sake? Who wants the twilight when he can have the fucking sun?

“No one,” said Cassidy loyally, and believed he spoke the truth.

 

He talked about inspiration, that much of it was genuine but useless, you left your soul out in all weathers, the birds shat on it, the rain washed it, but you had to leave it there all the same, there was no backing out, so fuck it. About equality, how there was none, and freedom, none either, it was crap, and the act of creation made it the biggest crap of all, whether God's or Shamus' creation. Because freedom meant the fulfilment of genius, and the existence of genius precluded equality. So the howl for freedom was New Testament crap, and the howl for equality was the howl of the Many-too-Many, Shamus fucked himself of them all. How he hated youth, it made an artist of every little pig who could afford a paintbrush; how he hated age, it retarded the genius of youth; how the world was in existence because Shamus witnessed it, it was certain to die without him.

And when Shamus had told him about life, he told him about Art as well. Not Vatican art, not history book art, nothing for School Certificate, attempt any two of the following questions.

Art as a destiny. As a calling and a lovely agony.

And out of the air, out of the undefined edges of Shamus' magical conversation, Cassidy discovered that Shamus was chosen.

Fatally, wonderfully chosen.

That he belonged to a body of men who never met; of the gifted early dead; and their embrace was already on him.

Whom waiters loved although they never tipped them.

That he was one of a Pack, a Few against the Many-too-Many, but each hunted alone and none had help in time of need except the comfort of knowing.

“Knowing
what,
Shamus?”

That you belonged, and nothing more.

That you were best, and could only elect yourself; that Flaherty was the only true and living God, because Flaherty was self-appointed, and Self-Appointed Man was divine, and limitless, and out of time, like love.

 

As to what it was exactly that joined Shamus to the others, that, as Cassidy's tutor would say, was concept rather than fact. The concept was to choose yourself very early, and to be precociously familiar with death: with premature death, romantic death, sudden and very destructive of the flesh. To live always testing the edges of your existence, the extreme outlines of your identity. To need water, not air; water defined you, there was a German poet always bathing in fountains; man is invisible until the cold waters of experience have shown him who he is, hence total immersion, violence, boxing with Hall, the Baptist church, and (somehow) Flaherty again.

Gradually, with the aid of a third bottle of wine and several names supplied by Shamus, Cassidy formed a picture of this wonderful band of brothers, this Few: a nonflying Battle of Britain squadron captained by Keats and supported by a long list of young men.

Not all of them were English.

Rather, a Free Europe Squadron, as it were, which included the pilots Novalis, Kleist, Byron, Pushkin, and Scott Fitzgerald. Their enemy was bourgeois society: the Gerrard's Crossers again, the fucking bishops in drag, the doctors, lawyers, and Jaguar drivers who thundered towards them in black, mechanical fleets; while Somewhere in England, waiting for the last Scramble, they penned fraught elegies and made up peaceloving verses in writing.

Such men by definition survived more in the promise than in the fulfilment; and commanded most respect by what they had left undone.

Also they took a lot, because it was not long before they themselves were taken.

“Who can write about life and run away from it at the same time?” Shamus wanted to know.

“No one,” said Cassidy.

 

Of this squadron, Shamus was that night and for all the nights to come the one survivor. Cassidy believed that. He knew he would always believe it, because somehow that night and for ever Shamus had stolen into his childhood, and would stay there like a favourite place or a loved uncle. As to Cassidy himself, he was their squire, frying their bacon, carrying their helmets, and polishing their fur-lined boots; posting their last letters and giving their rings to their Helens, wiping their names off the blackboard when they didn't come back.

“You know Shamus,” Cassidy said much later—they were rowing somewhere, one oar each—“I'll always be there when you need me.”

He meant it. It was a promise, more real to him than marriage because it was an idea, and one that with Shamus' help he had found for himself, that night, in the Tour d'Argent in Paristown.

“Why are you crying?” Cassidy asked, as they left.

“For love,” said Shamus. “You want to try it some time.”

 

“Who's Dale?”

“Who?”

They had taken a limousine to the seventh district, Shamus had friends there.

“Dale. You talked about him in your sleep. You said he was a bugger.”

“He is a bugger.”

Shamus' head was very still against the window, but the lights from the street played over it like gold coins, raising him and pushing him back, so that his silhouette wore the passive look of a man not able to control what the outside did to him.

“Then why don't you drop him down a hole?”

“Because he dropped me first, and they're the ones you can't beat.”

“Did he love you?”

“I suppose so.”

“As much as . . .”

Reaching out, Shamus took Cassidy's hand in both of his. “No lover, not like you,” he assured him gently, turning his hand over and kissing the palm. “Not like you're going to learn. You'll be the best. Number one. In the first position. Honest.”

 

An instinct made him say it. A moment of profoundest empathy, of prophetic anxiety.

“Shamus . . . you're the greatest writer of our time. I believe that. I'm very proud.”

The face was turned away from him, very beautiful and sudden against the night, against the running glitter of the street.

“You've got me wrong lover,” Shamus whispered, gently putting away his hand. “I'm just a failed businessman.”

 

Still in Paradise they went to Paris.

Not Cassidy's Paris of hissing vacuum doors and bad American accents, but Shamus' Paris of hydrants and cobblestone streets and rotten vegetables and doors with no name; a Paris which Cassidy had not dreamed of, not aspired to even, since it answered appetites he did not know he had, and showed him people he had not imagined; relaxed, gay people of unworldly wisdom who gravely shook Shamus by the hand and called him
maître
and asked him about his work. They went to the Sulpice, to a square full of bookshops, through a dark courtyard buoyant with music, to a door that led straight to a lift, and they emerged into a sea of chatter and laughing girls and men with bare chests and beads.

“They love you, Shamus,” Cassidy whispered to him, as they drank the whisky and answered questions about London. “Look at you,” Cassidy kept saying. “You're
famous.
”

“Yes,” said Shamus, without bitterness. “They remember.”

 

They went to an island, to a high grey house belonging to an American, and someone gave Shamus his own book to sign,
Moon,
a first edition, and he stood in a pulpit reading aloud from it, to sleeping couples breathing in the dark. Indians, white girls, murmured their applause. He read very quietly so that Cassidy, even had he wished, could not have heard the words, but he knew from the rhythm and the fall of them that they were the most beautiful words he had ever heard, more beautiful than Shakespeare or Kahlil Gibran or the German High Command; and he sat alone, eyes half closed, letting them go through him like the language of love, and his pride knew no bounds, pride of possession, pride of creation, pride of love.

“Shamus let's stay. Please let's stay.”

“Negative.”

“What about
her
then?”—for Shamus had found a girl and was gently turning her breast inside her dress.

“No good,” said Shamus. “It's her house.
His
house,” he corrected, indicating her husband.

The American gave them both another whisky. He was a big, kindly man, very pugnacious in his sympathy and a keen opponent of aggression.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he advised them. “Have a drink and go.” And to Cassidy: “I'll crucify him. He's a great guy but get him out.”

“Of course,” said Cassidy. “You've been very kind.”

 

In a bright bar, drinking Chartreuse because Shamus said it had the highest killing power, shielding their eyes against the neons, they found their first whore.

“Shamus, why do you live so alone when they all want you so much?”

“Got to keep moving,” Shamus said vaguely. “Can't stand still, lover, they'd get you right between the eyes. Twenty years since I wrote that book.”

His gaze had drifted to the girl. A dark girl, pretty but austere; Angie Mawdray asking for a rise in salary. For a while he studied her in silence, then slowly raised his glass to her. She came to him without smiling. The barman did not even look up as they left.

S
itting on the curb, waiting for his master to return from the Crusade, the faithful squire watched the river and dreamed of perfect love. Of big beds made for himself and Shamus and the dark-eyed girl, of houseboats hung with lights and filled with naked bodies which never creased and never tired. White boats floating to a Hollywood Heaven of Interminable Dawn, rocking to the music of Frank Sinatra.