The Naive and Sentimental Lover (34 page)

“Butch Cassidy, son of Dale, in that you do earnestly repent you of your oafish ways, and faithfully promise to follow always in the paths of truth, experience, and love, we hereby baptise you in the name of . . .”

He stopped pouring. Thinking the jug was empty, Cassidy lifted his head, but Shamus was still standing over him, and there was a good half pint to come.

“Go on Butch. Hit me with your handbag.”

 

“Please don't pour any more,” Cassidy said.

He was beginning to feel quite angry, but there seemed to be nothing he could do. The injunction, however, moved Shamus unaccountably to fury.

“For Christ's sake,” he shouted, pouring the rest in one long sustained movement. “Grow, you little weed,
grow!
”

The waiter was an old, kindly man, and he had the bill ready. Cassidy kept the money in his back pocket, and somehow the water had got in there too, and the notes were all stuck together. The waiter didn't mind because Cassidy gave him a lot of them.

A copper urn stood in the corner for walking sticks and umbrellas. Taking out a silver-handled cane, Shamus began piping on it, swaying from the hips like a snake charmer and emitting a low wailing noise through his nose. Everyone waited, but no snake emerged. Using the stick as a club, Shamus drove it in sudden fury against the heavy chasing.

“All right you sodder,” he shouted into the urn. “Go on. Sulk. Jesus Christ, lover,” he breathed as they got outside, “oh God, lover, forgive, forgive.” Shaking his head, he took Cassidy's hand and held it against his tear-stained cheek. “Lover, oh lover, forgive!”

“
S
hamus, tell me! Please tell me. What the hell's the matter?

What's happened to you? Who the hell is Dale?”

“He's the bloke who bombed Hiroshima,” Shamus explained.

 

Shamus drunk.

Not high or tight or any other pretty word, but dirty, violent drunk. Sweating terribly, reeling and staggering as he held to Cassidy, refusing to go anywhere he knew but demanding always to move. Vomiting.

“
Wander, Jew, wander,
” he kept saying.
“Wander.”

 

His arm, hooked round Cassidy's neck, is divided between destroying and embracing him. Twice they have gone down, toppled by his iron grip, and Cassidy's trouser is cut from the knee to the foot. We're all that's left of an army, the rest are dead. The night is dead too, and the dawn is limping after them. They are in a square again but not dancing any more, the dancing is over, no horses either, just an early bitch of Sandra's, long dead, eyeing them from a doorway.

Shamus is vomiting again punctuating his spasms with cries of anger.

 

“Fucking body,” he shouts. “Do what you're bloody told! How the hell can I keep my promises if my body won't work? Tell it lover. Shamus has promises to keep.
Tell it to carry me!
”

“Come on body,” Cassidy says, trying to hold its sinking weight, “Come on body, Shamus has promises to keep.”

“For I have promises to keep . . .”

Shamus is trying to set the words to music. He sings quite well in Cassidy's unmusical opinion, a very Shamus sort of singing, half talking, half humming, but with a lot of quality to the voice even when (as watchful Cassidy accurately surmises) he is out of tune.

“The night is lo-v-e-ly, dark and deep—
sing
you bugger, Dale—the night - is - lovely - dark and deep—sing!”

“I don't know the words, Shamus,” Cassidy said, catching him again as he lurched forward. “I'm not Dale but I'd sing if I knew the words, I promise.”

 

Shamus stopped dead.

“Who wouldn't?” he said at last. “Jesus, who wouldn't?” Putting both hands over Cassidy's face, he lifted it into his own. “It's singing when you
don't
know the bloody words that tears your guts out, lover.”

“But you
do
know the words, Shamus.”

“Oh no I don't. Oh no I bloody don't, Dale my lovely. You
think
I do. Why I love you: worshipping prole. What more can a man ask? The roar of the proles at the door, dizzy faces . . . cameras click.... It's all anyone wants. Queen, me, Flaherty, all of us.”

Putting his whole weight on Cassidy's shoulders, Shamus forced him down on to the curb.

“Now give yourself a nice comfy rest Dale, old son,” he said in Irish, “while your poor Uncle Shamus tells you the secret of the universe,” and pulled the bottle of Scotch from Cassidy's inside pocket. After a couple of mouthfuls, he became quite sober but his arm was still locked round Cassidy's in case he tried to run away.

“I'm not Dale,” said Cassidy again, patiently. “I'm your lover. Cassidy.”

“Then I'll tell Cassidy instead. What do we have in common, you and me, Cassidy, in ourselves? Guess.” He shouted very loud. “
Guess,
Cassidy! Before I turn you into Dale again, you crawling little funk!”

A window opened on the other side of the street.

“You American?” a man's voice enquired, in an American accent.

“Piss off,” Shamus yelled, and back to Cassidy: “Well?”

“Well we
love
each other, if that's any help,” Cassidy suggested, using one of their earlier dialogues as a working guide. “We've got
love
in common, Shamus.”

“Balls,” said Shamus, and brushed away a tear. “Sheer bloody romantic bollocks, if you'll forgive me, which you will, as usual.”

Two tarts were standing a few feet away from them. One of them carried a loaf of bread, and was eating mouthfuls off the end of it.

“The greedy one looks like your mother,” said Shamus.

“I think we've done that one,” Cassidy said wearily.

“
Êtes vous la mère de mon ami?
” Shamus enquired.

The tarts scowled and went away, tired of the prolonged joke.

“Well perhaps that's it. Perhaps we
are
queer,” said Cassidy, still working on the false assumption that he would do best to rely on Shamus' themes, and offer them as his own.

“Zero,” said Shamus. “Did I ever once venture just the smallest finger up your skirts? Not the tiniest little digit, did I?”

“No,” said Cassidy, as Shamus hauled him abruptly to his feet. He was more tired than he had ever been in his life. “No, you didn't.”

“Then will you listen to me please? And will you
stop
putting forward low-grade arguments,
please?
”

Cassidy had little option, for Shamus was holding him in a cruel embrace, and their faces were pressed together, rough cheek on rough cheek.

“And will you please give me your very fullest attention, Dale? What we have in common is the most dreadful, hopeless, fucking awful pessimism. Right?”

“Okay, I'll buy that.”

“And the other thing we have in common is the most dreadful, awful, hopeless, fucking awful . . . mediocrity.”

Real fear seized Cassidy; real unreasoning alarm.

“No Shamus, that's not true, that's absolutely not true. You're
special
Shamus, we all know that—”

“You do, do you, lover?”

The grip tightened.

“I
know.
Helen knows. We
all
know. . . .” Cassidy was going now, really frightened; holding on and desperate to survive. The Bentley was sinking in the river; Abalone Crescent was falling to its knees. “Christ you idiot you only have to walk into a room, tell a story, give them your rat's-eyes, and they
know,
we
all
know, that it's
you,
Shamus; your world. You're our chronicler, Shamus, our magus. You've got all we want, the truth, the dream, the guts. Okay you're impossible. But you're the best! You make it real for us, we
know
how good you are.”

“You do?”

It was Cassidy's left arm Shamus had taken now; he had driven the upper part into the shoulder socket, and the pain was like the water at Lipp's, spreading and creeping and screaming all at once.

“Shamus you'll break it in a minute,” Cassidy warned.

“You really believe that crap I tell you? Listen, I am the lousiest fucking conjuror in the business and you fall for every fucking trick. Nietzsche. Schiller. Flaherty. I never read those fucking people in my life. They're scraps. Tit-bits. Fag-ends. I pick them out of the gutter for breakfast and you poor fuckers think they're a bloody feast.
I am a bum.
You want to throw me out, pramseller: that's what you want to do. I don't work, I don't write, I don't exist! It's the fucking audience that's doing the magic, not me.
I am a fraud.
Got it? A con man. A fucking clapped-out conjuror with an audience of one.”

“No!” Cassidy shouted. “NO! NO! NO!”

 

“You think I'm your friend.” Shamus had found a place to lie down, so Cassidy was obliged to lie beside him, partly to hear the words and partly not to lose his arm. “Well I don't
want
a fucking friend. I don't even know how to deal with a friend. I want a fucking archaeologist, that's what I want. I'm
Troy,
not a fucking bank clerk. There are nine dead cities buried in me and each one is more rotten than the next fucker. And what do you do? You stand there like a bloody tourist and bleat, ‘
No! No! Shamus no.
'
Yes,
Cassidy.
Yes,
Shamus is a
bum.
There's a nasty smell around here. Know what it is? Failure!”

“Shamus,” said Cassidy quietly. “I would swap all my fortune for your talent . . . for your life, and for your marriage . . .”

“All right,” Shamus whispered, letting him loose as the tears came. “All right, lover. If I'm so bloody marvellous, why did you turn down my novel?”

 

Cassidy's world swung, and held still.

“It's okay, lover,” Shamus whispered, seizing his arm again and twisting it more tightly, “I'm your friend, remember.”

 

Cassidy looked into the troubled eyes, so full of suddenness and chaos, looked at the whole iron, wild face of him, taut at the cheeks, careless at the mouth, and he wondered almost with detachment how one body could hold so much, and hold together. There seemed, as Shamus crawled slowly to his feet, still arm in arm with Cassidy, to be something cosmic in his self-destruction; as if, knowing that the creative genius of mankind was also the cause of its ruin, he had determined to make that truth personal, to take it for his own.

“He turned down the last one too,” said Shamus, grinning through his tears. And releasing Cassidy's arm, fell back full length on to the cobbled street.

A
ldo Cassidy, lately of Sherborne School and an undistinguished Oxford college, the preserver and lover of life, sometime Lieutenant Cassidy, national service subaltern in an inconspicuous English regiment of foot, secret negotiator of the world's unconquerable agonies, clandestine owner of foreign bank accounts, drew in that moment on resources of positive action which he had written off for dead.

Seizing his lover Shamus roughly by the collar of his black coat—now known to him mysteriously as the deathcoat—he dragged him to a bench. He thrust the wet, hot head between the parted male knees and held the wet unshaven face while the discarded writer again vomited on to the Paris cobblestones. He loosened the discarded writer's necktie as a precaution against suffocation, and having crouched beside him, one knee on the bench in order to force down his head a second time, entered a telephone box across the square and found the right change and the right number to summon a taxi. The telephone connection being out of order, he returned to Shamus, lifted him bodily to his feet—the dejected writer's vitality, if not his actual life, lay at his feet like the milky map of his unnative Ireland—and guided him towards a fountain which however turned out to have run dry. In the course of making this short journey, he discovered Shamus to be unconscious and quickly diagnosed an excessive heart rate and suspected alcoholic poisoning. With the aid of a passing policeman, to whom he gave at once a hundred new francs—£8.62 at the currently prevailing devalued rate, but certainly deductible from his generously viewed expense account—the Managing Director and Founder of Cassidy's Universal Fastenings finally obtained transport in the form of a green police patrol car armed with a blue light which revolved, apparently, inside the car as well as on the roof. Recumbent in the rear compartment, which was divided from the driver by a jeweller's screen of black steel, Shamus was again sick and Cassidy succeeded, during the brief spell of subsequent articulation, in obtaining from him the name of the white hotel where, as the resourceful Second Lieutenant Cassidy resourcefully remembered, two missing British diplomats had neither paid for, nor relinquished, their reserve accommodation.

To the driver and his companion, who had prudently remained in the front of the car, but were not inclined to criticise Shamus too hastily, Cassidy gave a further hundred-franc note and apologised profusely for the condition of the rear seat. His friend, he said, had been drinking in order to overcome a great personal loss. In the field of love no doubt? they enquired, examining the handsome profile. Yes, Cassidy the preserver slyly conceded, one could say it was in the field of love.
Eh bien,
Cassidy should look after his friend, supervise his recovery; with such men as this, the path was steep and slow. Cassidy promised to do his best.

The Algerian boy, keeping watch over the reception desk through the open doorway of a windowless downstairs bedroom, where he was recovering from a night of sexual exertion with a colleague he did not introduce, received a further one hundred francs for putting on his pyjamas, unlocking the front door, handing over a key, and switching on the lift, an antiquated backless box of rosewood in which Shamus attempted without success to vomit yet again. In the drawing room of their suite the small table had been replaced in its proper position in front of the window, but traces of Elise's inexpensive scent still lingered in the threadbare pile of
ancien régime
upholstery. Here Shamus, having now rejoined the ranks of the walking wounded, insisted on going alone to the bathroom, where Cassidy the preserver soon afterwards found him asleep on the floor. With a last heroic effort, Cassidy the passable rugger forward removed his sodden clothing, sponged down the naked body of his heterosexual friend, and lifted, actually
bore
him to the double bed, where he was soon well enough to sit up and request a drink of whisky.