The Naive and Sentimental Lover (32 page)

Waiting again, this time with real anxiety.

Telephone Helen? Place enquiries with the Economic Minister?
It's Cassidy the Norman Frenchman, we met in quieter times, you remember, haha. Well actually, he's going under the name of Maclean, it's hard to explain why. And I'm Burgess yes. Well it's a joke you see, we have an identity problem.

 

Waiting, Cassidy mended his fences, an excuse for great activity.

L
eaving the white hotel gratefully behind him (notes to Shamus posted with the boy, in the bedroom, drawing room, and fine rococo lavatory) the President, Managing Director, Chairman, and Most Active Principal of Cassidy's Overseas Couplings, a company recently added to The Stock Exchange Index and widely tipped as a good long shot for the investor looking for a flutter, straightens his tie, puts his world back into shape, and fastens it at every threatened seam. Pausing on his way to the Hotel St. Jacques, an establishment known to him from previous business trips to Paris, he buys with the last of his traveller's cheques a cheap but passable raincoat which disguises the questionable condition of his suit. At the desk, where his return is received without comment, he takes possession of certain business mails of no pressing importance and enquires most casually after his associate and roommate Monsieur (note the name) not Maclean but Shamus.

The intelligence is not enlightening.

Monsieur Shamus came in yesterday evening and collected his post. Yes there was much post. Naturally: Monsieur Shamus was a person of the highest distinction. Thereafter Monsieur Shamus went to his room and made a two-hour telephone call to London, the manager hoped the cost could be covered by a separate and perhaps an earlier payment, since he understood that Monsieur Cassidy was charged with settling the accounts of his superior. To this request, the cunning negotiator readily assented on the condition that he be shown the telephonist's ticket. The ticket gave a number in Temple Bar which the well-known secret service agent Burgess covertly noted on the back of the bill, but afterwards lost. Ascending in Flaherty's lift he made quickly for the love nest and continued his search for the absent writer.

It is here that the crime took place. The room is in disorder. Cassidy's clothes cupboard has been ransacked and the best things removed.

Feeling markedly less concerned for Shamus, Cassidy turns his attention to other clues. He had lain on his bed, no doubt to make the forty-pound telephone call. Three typewritten messages from the hotel telephonist yield identical information: a Monsieur Dale has telephoned, Shamus should ring him back. On the eiderdown, several postcards to Shamus, written and despatched by the addressee before he left London and signed variously Keats, Scardanelli, and Perseus, wish him a useful rest and congratulate him on his well-attested existence. These cards include lists of places he must visit, together with information on rivers, public fountains, and the shrines of great writers now dead. One such card cautioned him severely against venery; another, from Helen, reminded him to bring home a
terrine
and gave him the name of a shop distinguished by its fine foods.

Also on the scene of the kidnap: one volume (in German, mysteriously) of Schiller's
Uber Naïve und Sentimentalische Dichtung;
one tract from Flaherty on the subject of modern heresies, citing in particular the Pope and Archbishop Ramsey; one paperback work entitled
Flying Saucers Are Hostile
(“With 16 pages of photographs and the independent laboratory analysis of UFO Residues”); and one booklet on Mystical Practices laid down by the Master Aethesius from the Planet Venus for the maintenance of health and well-being. Further: one volume of the poems of John Donne, much thumbed.

Further: one empty whisky bottle, Glen Grant 1953, by Berry Brothers and Rudd.

 

Temporarily putting aside his search for Shamus, Cassidy himself now made a number of telephone calls, largely of a business nature, one to an agency requesting flowers for Sandra, one to his bank requesting a further draft of funds. The business world, it appeared, had not after all disintegrated in his absence. Orders at the Fair were respectable but not dramatic; McKechnie's wife had gone home in a rage. By skilfully playing off Bloburg against Lemming, and Faulk against Meale, Cassidy gave the impression of being too busy with everyone to deal with everyone else. Shortly before lunch, having bathed, shaved, and eaten a large plate of eggs, he actually took a limousine to the Fair and patrolled his lines with an expression of grave preoccupation.

“It's vitally important,” he told Meale. “More important than you can possibly guess at this stage.”

 

Having despatched extravagant gifts to Hugo and Mark, he remembered a jocular promise made in South Audley Street just before his departure and transferred a consignment of flowers to Miss Mawdray—no
arrière-pensée,
the welfare of my staff is paramount—but deeming it nevertheless wise to pay cash in order to avoid incriminating slips of paper.

 

On the way, however, he also remembered his dispute with Heather Ast and, needing comfort, sent her flowers as well. It was not a moment to nurse old grudges.

He returned to the hotel in time for the afternoon mail.

These communications drove him back into the streets where for an hour he walked beside the Seine looking for a good place to jump in. When he returned, Shamus was lying on the bed, his face in the beret again, legs splayed, as if he had never left the island.

 

“Your passport's on the dresser,” Cassidy said.

Ironed by loving hands.

“One of these days,” said Shamus to the black beret, “I'll find a whore I like.”

 

“Cassidy,” said Shamus quietly, head once more buried in the pillow.

“Yes.”

“Go on about your mother.”

“I wasn't talking about my mother.”

“Well go on about her all the same, will you?”

The death cell had no ormolu clock, but time had stood still for quite a while. They had had two drinks for certain—Shamus was on cognac and Perrier, he gave no reason for the change—but this was the first attempt that either of them had made to speak. Shamus was using his Haverdown voice, not quite the Irish but a little bantering. Tense, on an edge, and slipping to either side.

“She was a Frog. A tart, I think, knowing the old man.”

“About how she left you. That's the bit I like.”

“She left me when I was small. Seven.”

“You said five before.”

“Five then.”

“What effect did this have on you, Cassidy?”

“Well . . . it made me lonely I suppose . . . it sort of . . . robbed me of my childhood.”

“What does that mean?” Shamus enquired, sitting bolt upright.

“What?” said Cassidy.

“What do you mean by being
robbed of childhood?
”

“Denied normal growth, I suppose,” Cassidy faltered. “A sense of fun . . . I had no female reference, no one to make women . . . human.”

“Normal
sexual
growth, in other words.”

“Yes. It drove me in on myself. What's the matter with you?”

Placing the beret over his face, Shamus resumed his recumbent pose.

“We are not concerned with
me,
we are concerned with Cassidy. We are concerned with a man in whom the absence of maternal love has induced certain negative symptoms. I would describe these symptoms of Cassidy's as follows. One, timidity, right?”

“Right.”

“Two, guilt. Guilt arising from Cassidy's secret conviction that he drove his mother forth from the household. Possible?”

“Oh yes,” said Cassidy, as ever willing, when the subject was himself, to see the force of any argument.

“Three, insecurity. The female sex, represented by Mummy, at a crucial moment rejected him. He has felt her rejection ever since, and in various disguises he has made futile attempts to regain her favour. By making money for instance, and engendering little babies. Correct?”

“I don't know,” said Cassidy, very confused. “I'm not sure.”

“His relations with women are accordingly apologetic, morbid, and frequently infantile. They are doomed. That is the substance, is it not, of your complaint? How was the whore?”

“Who?”

“Elise.”

“Fine.”

“You fucked her, did you?”

“Sure.”

“She was satisfactory? She moved in mysterious ways for you? Or did you have her flog you with barbed wire?”

“Shamus, what is it? What's eating you?”

“Nothing is
eating
me. I am merely attempting a diagnosis.”

Rolling on to his back he put the brandy bottle to his mouth and drank for a long time.

“That's all, lover,” he said, Irish now; and gave a sudden, brilliant smile. “Just giving the devil a name, no offence. Surely to God we can't prescribe the treatment till we've diagnosed the symptoms now, can we?”

Cassidy wanted very much to ask about the two-hour telephone call to London, but he had learned by now that Shamus did not care to be questioned, so he wisely held his peace.

“You're my treatment,” he said lightly. “Where shall we eat?”

 

After dinner, which passed largely in silence, Shamus returned to the theme of the Maternal Frog.

What did she look like, he enquired, striding purposefully at Cassidy's side through darkening streets, what were Cassidy's earliest memories of her, his last? What were her names, would he tell him; did Cassidy remember all her names?

Ella, said Cassidy.

“Did Ella have any distinguishing marks now, a walleye for instance,” he required good-humouredly, but still using the Irish. “Did she have a walleye at all, the poor soul?”

They turned into a side alley.

“Not that I remember,” said Cassidy laughing.

“Any mannerisms then? I'm trying to get a picture of her you see, after all Cassidy I am a writer of some stature, am I not? My subject is man, after all, in all his rich variety and complexity. I mean did she pick her nose or scratch her arse in bed?”

“She wore cashmere pullovers,” Cassidy said. “She loved pink, I remember. Can we leave her alone now Shamus? I'm a bit fed up with her to be honest.”

Shamus did not hear, apparently. They were walking faster, Shamus was quickening the pace, looking upwards at the street signs as he strode ahead.

“Shamus, where are we going?”

They crossed a main road, plunged into another maze of little alleys.

A light over the door said “Bar.” They went in, Shamus leading.

Girls sat on a horseshoe bench, drinking and looking inward at the mirrors, studying their bodies, their reflected ghosts. A few pimps, a few customers, a slot machine for pills to stop you smoking.

“Paging Mrs. Cassidy,” Shamus called, drawing Cassidy after him by the wrist. Shamus' hand was wet, but its grasp was as strong as ever. “Her small son is looking for her.” At the bar, a few faces lifted. “Is
Mrs. Cassidy
here now?” He turned to Cassidy. “See her, Oedipus?” he asked.

“Please, Shamus—”

“Is she Chinese at all, is that a possibility?” indicating a lady of South East Asian extraction. “Not mainland, of course, just the fringe islands, you know.”