The Naive and Sentimental Lover (30 page)

He lifted Shamus' muddy hand and put it against his head.

“You've
got
to love me, lover,” Shamus whispered, as more tears came. “I need it, honest. That's nothing to what I'll do to you if you don't love me.”

His hand was like a second Confirmation, light and full of feeling, trembling on Cassidy's scalp.

“All of you, you've got to give me
all
of you.
I
do. I've given you a blank cheque, lover. Real.”

“I'm trying to understand,” Cassidy promised. “I am trying. If only you'd tell me what it was.”

“Fucking little bourgeois,” said Shamus hopelessly. “You'll never make it. Jesus!” he cried suddenly. Relinquishing Cassidy's hand he bounded into the air. “My identity! It's ruined!”

He was pointing at a patch of scrub grass where his passport lay face downward. A dead butterfly, wings spread hopelessly for takeoff. The blue dye oozing over the grass.

“Bleeding to death,” he whispered, lifting it with both hands. “Lover, get me an ambulance.”

 

At the village post office, fully dressed, they bought a French envelope and sent their carnations to Helen. The gum tasted of peppermint and the carnations were no longer young.

And two gliders to bring them closer to Flaherty. And a kite for despatching prayers.

And a notebook because on the way back to Paris Shamus was going to start a new novel, on the theme of David and Jonathan. Also, he had lost the old one in the river, and did not hold with the past.

 

Roads to Paris,
Cassidy wrote in his private Baedeker, in the florid prose which was yet another of Old Hugo's countless gifts,
are long and various, often doubling back upon themselves. Some are bordered by great hills from which kites and gliders may be flown and avocations made to Irish gods, some by factories filled with sad proles and the Many-too-Many mounted on brakeless bicycles; some again by inns where whores banished from the city provide great writers with mediocre glimpses of the infinite. But all these roads are slow roads, made for the dragging of feet; for Paris is no longer popular, it is menaced by the mystery of Dale.

Lying in the barber's chair, covered in choirboy white, the weary chronicler fell asleep while being shaved, and dreamed of naked Helen standing on the beach at Dover, two dead carnations at her breasts while she launched small sailing ships in races round the world. When he woke the barber was cutting his hair.

“Shamus I don't
want
it cut!”

Shamus was sitting on the bench, writing in his notebook.

“It's good for you, lover. New life as a monk,” he said vaguely, not looking up. “Necessary sacrifice.”

“No!” said Cassidy, pushing the man away. God in Heaven, how to face Trumper's now?
“Non, non, non.”

Shamus continued writing.

“He wants it longer,” he explained to the barber with whom he was on terms of closest friendship.
“Il le veut plus long.”

 

“Shamus what do you believe in?”

At the world's edge the red sun rose or sank behind the swollen grid lines of a factory. Lights lay on the fields, and the gliders were wet with dew. “What
is
the light at the end of the pier?”

“Once I believed in a whore,” said Shamus, after long thought. “She worked Lord's cricket ground. I never knew anyone who loved the game better. She kept all the batting averages in her handbag.”

“What else?”

He hated clergymen, he said. Hated them with the passion of a zealot.

“What else?”

He hated the past, he said, he hated convention, he hated the blind acceptance of restriction and the voluntary imprisonment of the soul.

“Isn't that all rather
negative?
” Cassidy said at last.

“I hate that too,” Shamus assured him. “Essential to be positive.”

 

They were on stolen bicycles, one side of Cassidy's head now much colder than the other. And
that,
said Shamus, was Cassidy's problem.

W
ho would be Shamus? Cassidy wondered, watching him write at the inn.

The city was not far away now; perhaps that was why he was writing; to arm himself against whatever threatened him in Paris. A pink glow waited at the end of the avenue, and the evening air hummed like a boiler. They sat at a table beside the road, under an umbrella advertising Coca-Cola, drinking Pernod to clear their heads. The taxi waited in a lay-by, the driver was reading pornography.

Who would live with his own recording angel, life after life recorded, distorted, straightened and rounded off? Who would be Shamus, daily chronicling his own reality? Always attacking life, never accepting it; always walking, never settling.

“Will it really be a novel?” he asked. “A full-length one, like the others?”

“Maybe.”

“What about?”

“I told you. Friendship.”

“Read it,” said Cassidy.

“Piss off,” said Shamus and read: “
Reality was what divided them, reality was what put them together. Jonathan, knowing it was there, ran away from it; but David was never sure, and went looking for it every day.
”

“Is it a fairy tale?” Cassidy asked.

“Maybe.”

“Which of us is David?”

“You, you stupid sod, because you're fair.
David was a great sceptic, for he loved the present world and all its riches. Jonathan defamed the world, and was therefore the prophet of a better one; but David was too thick to understand that, and Jonathan too proud to tell him. David's world was one in which the ideals of the herd were realised, because he was of the herd, the best of the Many-too-Many. Jonathan had naïvety of the heart, but David had rococo of the soul. . . .
”

“But what does it
mean,
Shamus?”

“It means you need a drink,” said Shamus, “before I stone you again for being a heretic.”

 

To iron a passport—it is a truism of which Cassidy had not till then been sufficiently aware—you need a whore, whores have the most sensitive fingers.

“They're the best ironers in the world,” Shamus explained. “Famous for it. And when she's ironed the passport,” he added, with the pride of a time and motion expert, “you can fuck her. It's time you lost your hymen.”

So they went to the Gare du Nord, a terminal of great attraction, to find a pair of hands.

 

Their return to the city had not been, could not be perhaps, as triumphal as their flight from it. Cassidy had assumed they would go at once to the St. Jacques. He had even worked out a system for getting in without going through the hall—to cross the doorman's palm and slip in by way of the staff entrance, as becomes an hotelier's son—for their suits, though moderately dry, were shrunk and not at all debonair. Also he had fences to mend; the Fair was becoming an anxiety; how about his mail and the phone calls?

Shamus would have none of it. The city had already darkened him; his mood was sharper and less kind.

“I'm sick of the fucking St. Jacques. It's a rotten little death cell. It's full of fucking bishops, I know it is!”

“But Shamus you liked it before—”

“I hate it. Fuck you.”

He's running away, thought Cassidy suddenly: I know that look, it's mine.

“What are you afraid of?” he was going to ask; but learning prudence, abstained. So they went to a place that Shamus knew, somewhere off the rue du Bac, a white courtyard house near an embassy; the street was lined with diplomatic cars. Inspired by the cars perhaps, Shamus insisted on signing their names as Burgess and Maclean.

“Shamus are you sure?”

Of course he was bloody sure; Cassidy could mind his bloody business or do the other thing, right?

Right.

 

Good hands are not plentiful at the Gare du Nord, even at commuting time on a sunlit evening. There are hands that hold luggage, hands that hold umbrellas, and tender hands that are linked to lovers and cannot, alas, be parted. Being already tired from their exertions, the two friends sat on a bench and, emptying their crumpled pockets, fed remnants of bread to French pigeons. Shamus, morose, barely spoke. Cassidy's head was aching painfully and his kneecap, till recently quiescent, had started to play him up again after the cycling.

“Good,” said Shamus, when he told him.

To ward off the encroaching despondency, therefore, Cassidy began singing. Not so much singing: droning. A lyric of his own invention, rendered in a modulated French monotone, a very passable imitation of Maurice Chevalier.

Which was how they found Elise, the well-known anagram of Elsie.

Woken from his melancholy, Shamus stared at him wide-eyed. It was the first time Cassidy had done a voice for Shamus, and Chevalier was one of his best.

“Lover go
on.
That's great. In the first position, go on! Jesus that's great, that's human. Why didn't you tell me?”

“Well your voices are so much better.”

“Balls! Go
on,
you sodder, sing!”

So Cassidy continued:

“More, lover! Jesus that's great! Hey listen everybody, listen to Cassidy!”

Leaping up, Shamus was about to summon a larger audience when they saw the girl, standing, smiling at them, wearing a smart fawn coat and a red shiny handbag like a Swiss conductor's purse on the small trains that mount the Angelhorn.

 

She was young and quite tall, hair cut short like a boy's; a trim, fair girl with fine skin that wrinkled into crazing when she smiled. Her toes and heels were together, and her legs, though these were not relevant to the restoration of Shamus' identity, were very straight but not at all thin, Angie Mawdray's legs in fact, revealed on the same generous scale.

“Ask to look at her hands,” Shamus urged.

She was smiling at Cassidy, not Shamus; she seemed to think him more her kind of man.

“She's wearing gloves,” Cassidy objected.

“Then tell her to take them off, you ape.”

“Do you speak English?” Cassidy asked.

She shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“For Christ's sake, lover, this is important!”

“
Vos mains,
” Cassidy said, “
nous voulons voir. . . .
Wouldn't you like to sit down?” he asked politely, offering her his seat.

Demurely, still smiling, she sat between them on the bench. Lifting her right hand, Cassidy gently removed the glove. It was of fine white nylon and it slipped off very easily like a stocking. The hand beneath it was soft and smooth and it curled naturally into Cassidy's.

“Now ask her whether she irons passports,” said Shamus.

“I'm sure she does,” said Cassidy.

“Then ask her what she charges. One passport, one fuck. Taxes, service, the lot.”

“I'd rather just pay her, Shamus. Please.” And to the girl: “
Je m'appelle Burgess,
” he explained.
“Mon ami est l'écrivain Maclean.”

“
Bonjour, Maclean,
” said Elise politely, while her hand fluttered in Cassidy's like a tiny bird.
“Et moi je m'appelle Elise.”

 

At the reception desk of the white hotel Cassidy borrowed an iron, a black smoothing iron of about 1870, Sandra had one in the kitchen and preferred it to the Morphy Richards. The receptionist was an Algerian boy, a very tired accomplice, but the sight of Elise appeared to give him hope.

“She'll need blotting paper,” said Shamus. “Blotting paper to put between the pages.”

His temporary elation had left him.

“Okay, okay,” said Cassidy.

The corridors were very narrow and dark. Through the connecting wall, a baby grizzled continuously. Cassidy helped Elise with her coat and sat her in a chair with a glass of wine to make her feel at home, and soon they were exchanging commonplaces about the weather and the hotel. Elise lived with her family, she said; it was not always convenient but it was economic and one had company. Cassidy said he lived with his family too, his father was an hotelier, the guests were sometimes tiresome. Shamus, meanwhile, deaf to such formalities, had gone straight to the window and pulled the table into the centre of the room. Tipping the electric heater on its back, he laid the flatiron on top of it.

“
Ah vous avez deux chambres!
” said Elise, as Shamus emerged from the bedroom with a blanket.
“Ça c'est commode, alors!”

It was an entire suite, Cassidy assured her, and leading the way showed her the full reach of the premises. The courtyard had a vine tree and a fountain; the bathroom was lined with old marble. Elise found it romantic, but feared it was expensive to heat.

“For fuck's sake!” Shamus shouted. “She's not buying the place is she? Tell her to come and iron my bloody passport.”

“She's washing,” said Cassidy. “Shamus
please
—”

“Washing to hell. She's disinfecting herself. Spraying Flit on her fanny, that's what they all do. Put you through a bloody sheep dip if they get half a chance. Here, take sixpence and get the blotting paper.”