The Naive and Sentimental Lover (40 page)

Occasionally, in return, Shamus read to them from his manuscript, and although Cassidy on such occasions deliberately induced in himself a kind of inner vertigo which left him only a broad impression of genius, he readily agreed it was better than Tolstoy, better even than
Moon,
and that Dale was the luckiest publisher alive.

 

Occasionally, Shamus said nothing at all, but rocked back and forth in his chair, letting Keats shriek for him at the funny places.

 

And sometimes, if Cassidy had not actually spent the night there, he would call in the morning, early enough to share their breakfast in the blue flower bedroom and in the freshness of the hour discuss with them the world's problems, or better still their own. It was a time of exceptional frankness in all matters affecting their collective relationship. The love life of Helen and Shamus, for instance, was an open book between them. Though Paris was never spoken of—indeed Cassidy sometimes wondered whether they had ever been there—Helen had made it clear that she knew Shamus in
that
mood also, and that Cassidy was not concealing from her anything that could hurt her pride. Nor was it at all unusual for Shamus or Helen to make a reference to a recent sexual encounter, often with humorous overtones.

“Christ,” she said to Cassidy once as they rose from a prolonged luncheon at the Silver Grill, “he's practically broken my back,” and confided to him that they had been reading the
Kamasutra
and following one of its more ambitious recommendations. From other chance remarks let slip in the ordinary line of conversation, Cassidy learned that for the same purpose they were given to using telephone booths and other public amenities; and that their most treasured achievement had taken place on a parked Lambretta in an alley behind Buckingham Palace. While in the more general way, he could not help noticing (since he quite often slept in the adjoining bedroom) that his friends enjoyed at least a daily exchange of views, and not infrequently two or three.

 

The first sign of a flaw in this idyllic relationship came with their visit to Greenwich. As one perfect summer's day followed another it was very natural that Helen and Cassidy should wander farther afield in search of pleasure and information. At first, they contented themselves with the larger London parks, where they flew kites and gliders and floated yachts on ponds. But the parks were full of the Many-too-Many and rutting proles in pink underclothes, and they agreed that Shamus would prefer them to find their own place, even if it took longer to get there. Therefore they took the Bentley to Greenwich, and while they were there they found themselves looking at the yacht in which Sir Francis Chichester had sailed single-handed round the world. It was not in water, but concrete; embalmed there for ever, within a few feet of the embankment.

For some while neither spoke.

Cassidy in fact was not at all sure what his reaction should be. That the boat had superb lines, God look at those proportions? That it seemed an awful waste to put a perfectly good boat out of service, was public money involved? Or he wished they could sail away in it, just the three of them, possibly to an island?

“It's the saddest thing I've ever seen,” said Helen, suddenly.

“Me too,” said Cassidy.

“To think it was once
free
. . . a living, wild thing . . .”

Cassidy at once took up her argument. It was indeed a most tragic and affecting sight, he would write to the Greater London Council the moment he got back to the office.

Thrilled by the similarity of their separate responses they hurried home to share their feelings with Shamus.

“Let's all go down there one night,” Cassidy suggested. “With picks, and set it free!”

“Oh do let's,” said Helen.

“Jesus Christ,” said Shamus and went to the lavatory, ostensibly to be sick.

Later he apologised. An unworthy thought he said, forgive, lover, forgive. He had had visions of Christopher Robin, all wrong, all wrong.

But when Cassidy, leaving for home, made his way down the steel steps, he was met by a shower of water that could only have come from the bedroom window; and he remembered Lipp's restaurant in Paris, his baptism and Shamus' pain.

The cloud, it seemed, had passed, until one day—a week later, perhaps two—Hall's gym closed. Cassidy and Shamus went down on a Monday and found the iron door locked against them and no lights burning in the air-raid-glass window.

“Gone to a fight,” said Shamus, so they played football instead.

They went down again on the Thursday and the door was still locked, now with a crowbar and a curiously official-looking padlock with sealing wax over the hook.

“Gone on holiday,” said Cassidy, thinking of Angie Mawdray, who had left for Greece the day before with a ticket bought by the Company. So they went for a run round Battersea Park and played on the seesaw.

The third time they went, there was a notice saying “Closed,” so they rang the bell at Sal's place until she answered it. Hall was in stir, she said, very frightened, he had clobbered an American bosun for being fresh, he was doing three months at the Scrubs. She had a bruised eye and one hand bandaged and she shut the door on them as soon as she had told them the news. But there was a smell of cigar in the parlour and the sound of a radio upstairs, so they reckoned the American bosun had not suffered irreparable harm.

 

This news had a curious effect on Shamus. At first, he was incensed and, like the unreformed Shamus of old, made elaborate plans to effect his friend's escape: to kidnap the American Ambassador, for instance, or sequester the bosun's ship. He assembled an armoury of secret weapons: wire nooses, files, and pieces of bicycle chain attached to wooden handles. His plan was a mass breakout involving all inmates.

This aggressive mood was followed by one of deep melancholy and disappointment. Why had Hall allowed himself to be captured? Shamus would commit a crime in order to be joined with him. Prison was the only place for writers, and he fell back on the familiar examples of Dostoevsky and Voltaire.

But as the weeks passed and Hall was still not released, Shamus gradually ceased to talk about him. He seemed instead to enter a dream world of his own from which the excited accounts of his wife's exploits with Cassidy no longer woke him. But he did not turn away from Hall; to the contrary, he drew closer, developing, in some way which Cassidy could not fully understand, an inner partnership with him, a secret union, as it were; to languish with him waiting for a certain day.

Condemned still for hours at a time to the imprisonment of his novel, he even acquired, to Cassidy's skilled eye, a prison pallor and certain prison mannerisms, a slough of the feet and shoulders, a furtive greed at table, and the habits of listless servility when addressed and of following them round the room with shut-off, unwatching eyes. In conversation, when he could be drawn, he was inclined to volunteer incongruous references to atonement, hubris, and the social contract, loyalty to one's private precepts. And on one unfortunate occasion, he let slip a most damaging comparison between the sublime Helen and Hall's bird Sal.

 

It happened late at night.

On Cassidy's suggestion they had been to the cinema—Shamus also liked the live theatre, but he was inclined to shout at the actors—and they had seen a Western starring Paul Newman, whose features Helen had recently compared with Cassidy's. Returning by way of a couple of pubs, they had linked arms as was their custom, Helen in the middle, when Shamus suddenly interrupted Cassidy's spirited rendering of the film's key scene with a cry of:

“Hey, look there's Sal!”

Following the direction of his gaze, they looked across the road at a middle-aged woman standing alone on a street corner, under a lantern, in the classic posture of a prewar tart. Irritated by their interest, she scowled at them, turned, and toppled a few ridiculous steps along the pavement.

“Nonsense,” said Helen. “She's far too old.”

“You're not though, are you? You've got a few years in you, haven't you?”

For a moment no one spoke. To look for Sal they had drawn to a halt, and were standing, still linked, outside what was probably Chelsea Hospital. The windows were lighted and uncurtained. A complex of pale shadows ran outwards from their feet. Cassidy felt Helen's arm stiffen inside his own, and her bare hand turned cold.

“What the hell's that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

“Jesus,” Shamus muttered. “Jesus.”

Breaking away from them he hurried into a side street and returned to the flat late and very pale.

“Forgive, lover, forgive,” he whispered, and having kissed Cassidy goodnight, put his arm round Helen and guided her gently, reverently to the bedroom.

On the next day the incident at football occurred.

It was for both of them conclusive. Shamus was overworked; abstinence had gone too far.

 

In the absence of Impact, football had become their main recreation. They played it twice a week: on Tuesdays and Fridays. It was a fixture, always at four. On the stroke of the clock, Cassidy would roll his trousers to the knee, toss his jacket on to the blue bed, kiss Helen goodbye, and run off across the road to the playground to reserve the goal. A few moments later, dressed in the inevitable deathcoat, Shamus would descend the iron steps and after a few preliminary exercises on the swings take up his position either as striker or goalie according to his mood. A rigid points system was applied, and Shamus kept all manner of records in a drawer of his desk, including diagrams of intricate manoeuvres he had performed. He even spoke of publishing a book on method football; he would talk to Dale about it, the sodder. Generally he was better in attack than in defence. His kicking had a wild, undisciplined brilliance to it which frequently lofted the ball far over the railings, and once into the river, for which he claimed a prize, an afternoon exchange of views with Helen. As a goalie he tended to rely on nerve tactics, which included shrill Japanese war whoops and many exotic obscenities on the subject of Cassidy's bourgeois nature.

On the day in question, it was Shamus' turn to attack. Taking the ball quite close to the goal mouth, he dug a mound, set the ball on it, then stalked slowly backwards preparatory to a self-awarded free kick. Since the ball was no more than five yards from him, and the line of Shamus' run appeared to direct it at his head, Cassidy decided on a defensive charge, which he executed without difficulty, clearing the ball to the other side of the ground, where it was intercepted by an old man and kicked back. The next thing Cassidy knew was that Shamus had hit him on the nose, very hard, and that a stream of warm blood was running over his mouth and that his eyes were watering profusely.

“But it's the
game,
” Cassidy protested, dabbing his face with his handkerchief. “That's the way it's played for God's sake!”

“You buy your own fucking ball!” Shamus shouted at him, furious. “And keep your fucking hands off mine. Sodder.”

“Here's to no rules,” said Helen, back in the Water Closet, quietly observing them over her Talisker.

“Here's to
my
rules,” said Shamus, not at all mollified.

“Well I wish you'd tell me what they are,” said Cassidy, still smarting.

“It's the book,” Helen assured him, as he left. “It's right on the brink. He always gets like this at the end.”

 

“I think you're absolutely
wonderful,
” said Sandra, her eyes bright with excitement as she staunched the wound that same night. “You haven't hurt him
badly
have you?”

“If I have, I have,” Cassidy retorted irritably. “If they want their politics rough, that's what they must expect.”

 

Next day Helen and Shamus disappeared.

W
aiting again.

Visiting Birmingham to discuss the Common Market with the local Liberal Party, Cassidy took Angie Mawdray, ripened by Greek suns, to dinner in Soho.

“You know what I demand of a woman?” he asked her. “A pact to live fully.”

“Gosh,” said Angie. “How?”

“Never to apologise, never to regret. To drink whatever life provides”—they had had a lot of retsina, Angie's favourite. “To take whatever is offered, never counting the cost.”

“Why don't you?” she asked softly.

 

“I want to
share,
” he told Heather Ast at Quaglino's the following night, a Tuesday, returning from Birmingham by way of Hull. “To cherish, to be cherished?
Yes,
” he conceded. “But never to . . . live on my second stomach like a cow. A couple of glimpses of the infinite, that's all I ask. Then I'll die happy. You know what the Italians say: one day as a lion is worth a lifetime as a mouse.”