The Naive and Sentimental Lover (29 page)

“Jesus I hate that city,” Shamus declared. “Can't think why we ever went there.”

“Nor can I,” said Cassidy. “It's a heap.”

 

“Is he a good kid?” Shamus asked.

“Super. They both are.”

“Can't take them with you, lover, little buggers live on. Then they want what you want. The fucks, the laughs, the drinks, the bosscows . . .”

“It'll be better for them,” said Cassidy.

“It wasn't better for us, though, was it, lover?”

No answer. Cassidy is asleep. No conversation. Shamus is also asleep. Only the horse has life in him, moving ever farther south.

In fact, however, Cassidy was awake. Sentient, fast-thinking, acute. His body was stiff and aching but he dared not move because Hugo was sleeping in his arms, and only sleep would mend the injured child's kneecap.

It's a
coach
Hug, he is explaining in his mind; drawn by a super grey horse, the kind they have in Sainte-Angèle only in Sainte-Angèle it's a sledge.

A coach has wheels, Hug. Wooden, wobbly wheels, and the horse is the hunter they offered me at Haverdown, a thoroughbred of great docility, sent by God to take us away from a stinking city.

“Dad how much money have you got?” Hugo enquired drowsily. “How much in the whole world?”

“Depends how the market goes,” said Cassidy. “Enough,” he added, thinking: who wants enough?

 

Stretching—and simultaneously releasing the infant Shamus from his arms—Cassidy braced himself more comfortably against the seat and, rolling up his trouser leg, cautiously examined his injured knee. It was still in place and no mark was visible. Must be internal, he thought, accepting the bottle; the bleeding is internal, and poured a little whisky on the afflicted area.

“Is it all in prams?” Shamus asked, still on the matter of money.

“God, no. It's spread.”

“I was rich once,” said Shamus. They were going down the ride at Haverdown: an interminable avenue of tall trees. Not south but east: red sun lay at the end of it and the tarmac was swimming red.

“I was rich once,” Shamus repeated, tossing the empty bottle into the road.

“Meeow,” said Cassidy, quoting the master. “I fuck myself of self-pity.”

“Well done,” said Shamus with approval, and pushed him on to the road. But Cassidy was ready for the assault and landed neatly thanks to his army training.

“Lover.”

“Yes.”

“Is Monte Carlo a place?”

“For a night or so,” said Cassidy, who had never been there.

“Great. We'll go to Monte Carlo.”

And gave revised instructions to the horse.

 

“Terrified of everything in life except the perpetuation of it,” Shamus read aloud. “How's that? I've written it down about you. I'm going to make it completely permanent.”

Trust your wooden wheels. Tumbrils. Aristos on the way to execution. Miss Mawdray, get on to Park Wards at once, will you, tell them I want the wheels fixed?

 

Dozing again, Cassidy lay this time with the elder Hugo, his father, the night they took a train to Torquay to buy the Imperial Hotel. Old Hugo was not long back in those days, a month, two perhaps, still stopping in front of doors and waiting for Cassidy to open them. They had agreed on a reconnoitre, afterwards they would discuss the finance, possibly approach one of the big people, Charles Clore or the Aga Khan, it depended on whom they could trust. On the train, waiting for the dinner call, the old man began weeping. Cassidy, who had not heard this sound before, thought at first he was choking, for the sobs came in a high-pitched retch, like one of Sandra's bitches when she had swallowed a bone.

“Here,” he said, offering him a handkerchief, “Have this,” and returned to his newspaper.

Then it dawned on him that Old Hugo had no bone to chew, nothing to choke on but his shame, in fact; and lowering the newspaper stared at him, at the broken figure hunched to fit so small a space, and the massive shoulders shaking in loneliness, and the bald head mottled red.

To lift the newspaper?

To go to him?

“I'll get you a drink,” he said, and fetched a miniature from the bar, running all the way and crashing the queue.

“You took your time,” the old man said, dead straight, when Cassidy returned. He was reading his
Standard,
the greyhound page had caught his interest. “What's
that?
” Eyeing the miniature.

“Whisky.”

“When you buy whisky,” the old man said, turning the little bottle in his enormous, steady hand, “buy a decent brand, or nothing.”

“Sorry,” said Cassidy. “I forgot.”

 

“Lover.”

“Yes, Shamus.”

An hour had passed, perhaps a day. The sun had disappeared, the road was dull and dark, and the trees were black against an empty sky.

“Look at me very closely. Are you looking?”

“Sure,” said Cassidy, his eyes still closed against Old Hugo's shoulder.

“Deep into the innerest recesses of my irresistible eyes?”

“Deeper.”

“While you look at this picture, lover, thousands of brain cells are dying of old age. Still looking?”

“Yes,” said Cassidy, thinking: this conversation came earlier actually; this is what made me think of my father.

“
Now. Now. Bang! Bang!
See that? Thousands dead. Spread over the cerebral battlefield. Coughing out their tiny lives.”

“Don't worry,” said Cassidy consolingly. “You'll go on for ever.”

Long embraces under the warm blankets.

“I wasn't talking about
me,
” Shamus explained, kissing him. “I was talking about you.
My
cells get a lovely time. It's yours we're worried about. I'm writing that down too, if I remember it.”

Partly, Cassidy thought, this is an inward journey. Earthbound Aldo Cassidy,
en route
to Monte Carlo, relives his life in the company of his nomadic familiar.

“Lover.”

“Mmh.”

“Never go back to Paristown, will we, lover?”

Shamus' voice has a note of anxiety. Not everything is play on this journey.

“Never.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Liar.”

Cassidy, sobering, revisits the question. “Tell me Shamus, actually, why
don't
you want to go back to Paris?”

“Doesn't matter, does it? We're not going.”

 

Partly however, as recorded, an outward journey; for when he woke again the police were keenly disputing the horse's possession.

They were near a private airfield, in a lay-by between two blue vans; a small biplane was circling to land. Everyone was talking; however, the coachman, who had arrived separately by bicycle, was talking loudest. He was an old, grey man in sailcloth trousers and a long overcoat from the war, and he was kicking the grey's front legs and cursing it for infidelity. The coachman, who shared the view of the police that Shamus was in no way to blame, would not take Cassidy's traveller's cheques so they went to a bank and the police kept guard while Cassidy signed his name ten times along the dotted line.

How did I ever cash a cheque at dawn?

 

“Shamus,” said Cassidy, thinking of Bloburg and Meale and letters from Abalone Crescent, “isn't it time we went back?”

“Blow,” said Shamus.

They blew. From the pile of twigs a thin smoke rose, but no flame. Their suits lay beside them on the shingle like dead friends; beyond them a dried-up river, just a shallow stream where they had bathed, and cracking clay imported from the moat at Haverdown. Beyond the river, the fields, beyond the fields a wood, a railway line, and a bank of Flemish sky that reached for ever.

“You'll
never
do it without paper,” Cassidy objected. He was feeling cold and rather sober. “I could ring for a taxi if you'd let me dress.”

A train passed over the viaduct. There were no passengers but the lights were lit in the carriages.

“I don't
want
a taxi.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't, so piss off. I don't want to go to Paris and I don't want a taxi.” He blew again, shivering. “And if you try to dress I'll kill you.”

“Then let me get some paper.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Shut up!
Sodder!
Shut up!”

“Meeow,” said Cassidy.

The last bottle was empty so they put it on a stick and broke it with artillery fire, ten stones each, fired alternately. And that was when the boy appeared. Mark's age but younger in the face. He carried a fishing rod and a rucksack and he was sitting on a Dutch bicycle of which Cassidy owned the United Kingdom concession. First he compared their genitals, one blond one black but otherwise little to choose, then he picked up a stone and threw it hard and straight at the post where the bottle had stood.

Cassidy wrote out a shopping list and gave him twenty drenched francs.

“And mind how you cross the road,” he warned him.

 

“You see my view is,” said Cassidy cautiously, pulling the cork with his teeth—the boy, a resourceful child, had persuaded the shop to draw it halfway—“that if we called a
cab
—”

“Lover,” Shamus interrupted.

“Yes.”

Encouraged by several editions of the Paris press, the twigs were burning with conviction. Farther down the bank, the boy was casting for fish.

“Lover do you reckon this is a clash of egos?”

“No,” said Cassidy.

“Ids?”

“No.”

“Ego versus soul? Ibsen?”

“It's not a clash at all. I want to get back,
you
don't. I want a bath and a change and you're prepared to live like a troglodyte for the rest of your life—”

The stone hit him on the side of the head, the left side just behind the ear. He knew it was a stone all the way, saw it coming as he fell, saw the map on it, mainly of the Swiss Alps, the Angelhorn massif leading. The distance to the ground was much farther than he expected. He had time to throw the bottle to one side before he landed, and time to get his arm up before his head hit the shingle. Then Shamus was holding him, kissing him, pouring the wine between his teeth, forgive lover, forgive, weeping, choking like Old Hugo in the train, and the boy was pulling a small brown fish out of the water, a child's fish for a child's rod.

 

“What the hell did you do it for?” Cassidy asked.

Shamus was sitting apart from him in self-imposed purdah, the beret pulled over his eyes for remorse, his bare back cut in two by the grimy watermark of the depleted river. He said nothing.

“It's a bloody odd way to behave, I must say. Specially for a master of words.”

The boy threw back the fish. Either he had not seen the incident, or he had seen many such incidents already, and blood did not alarm him.

“For Christ's sake stop hitting yourself with that stone,” Cassidy continued irritably. “Just tell me why you did it, that's all. We did everything you wanted. Froze in the bloody river to feel our identities, ruined our new suits, caught pneumonia, and all of a sudden you stone me.
Why?
”

Silenzio.
Very slightly the beret moves in rejection.

“All right, you told me: you don't want to go back to Paris. Fine. But even great lovers can't camp beside a dried-up river all their lives. Well
why
don't you want to go back? Don't you like the hotel? Are you fed up with cities all of a sudden?” A pause. “Is it something to do with Dale? With your book?”

This time the beret does not move at all, not in rejection, not in acceptance; the beret is as still as Sandra at the door, when she is cross with him for not being cosmic, for not providing her with the tragedy she was groomed for.

“Shamus for God's sake. One moment we are halfway to being pooves, the next you're trying to kill me. What the fuck's the matter with you?”

As if shaken by the wind, the bare back sways. Finally the penitent lifts the bottle, drinks.

“Here,” said Cassidy, crouching beside him. “I'll have some of that.” Putting out his hand he received not the wine, but the battered carnation from Shamus' buttonhole. Gently lifting the beret, Cassidy saw how the tears had collected on the rim.

“Forget it,” he said softly. “It didn't hurt, I promise. I don't think you even did it. Look. Look, no lump, no throbbing, nothing. Feel, come on, put your hand there.”