The Naive and Sentimental Lover (44 page)

Sit down, will you?

There are a few things I have to explain to you, seeing you are new here and not quite our class. A
bully
is someone who picks on those who are weaker than himself. Not physically weaker necessarily; spiritually too. Emotionally also, perhaps. A
bully
performs acts of brutality against those who cannot retaliate. Our code does not like bullies. The regimental flags in the Abbey, for instance, were not scarred by unfair battles, our forebears did not march on undefended cities for their conquests. Well they may have done, but not often. Well, they wouldn't
now.

So I'm afraid, Shamus, we do not approve. Sal may be a slut. Conceded. But Hall was your friend. He loved you and he loved Sal, and that's why he didn't hit you.

Perhaps he even loved Helen too, in a pure way.

“Cassidy,” said Helen. She was trying different pronunciations. “
Cassidee,
” she said, in unconscious imitation of Elise. “Cassidy,” she growled in a deep, Sinatra drawl. “
You are a
MOLE,
you live in a
HOLE. How's the patient?”

“Bearing up,” said Cassidy.

“Will he live?”

“Maybe.”

Hall you see, Shamus, was here in double trust. You've read
Macbeth,
haven't you. A prescribed work for O-Level English? Hall was your kinsman and your subject, or whatever it says. You appointed him to the Few, even if he wasn't really a playing member; even if the Few are by nature self-appointed. You gave him his wings and then you shot him down. Which makes you rather low and small, don't you think?

That is why you deserve to be beaten, I'm afraid; that is why, in a minute, you will be asked to lower your handsome black head into the third washbasin from the left, hold the taps firmly, and offer a passive target to myself and my under-prefects. Do you understand? Is there anything you would like to say in mitigation?

Because actually, at this precise moment in time I am very anxious to hate you.

Yes lover, said Shamus, but not aloud. Of course I've got something to say. Bags in fact. Ready? Pen poised?

 

Shamus, the great guru, speaks:

 

“I'm not
brown,
” said Helen from the bathroom. “I'm
white.
”

“I know,” said Cassidy, still at Shamus' side. “I saw you at Haverdown. I always wondered how you heated the water.”

“Kettles,” Helen explained. “We got the bath ready, but by the time we'd made love it was cold again. So we had to heat it up. That's why the fire was still going when you arrived.”

“I see.”

“There's an explanation for everything if you look for it.”

Seizing his hand, Cassidy put his lips close to Shamus' ear.

“
Shamus.
Lover, wake up!”

Shamus you are a terrible shit but you are our priest and if you're not careful you'll marry us.

Shamus, I love you and you love me, I can see it in you even when you're hating me, you long for me. Alive or dead, Shamus, naked or in your deathcoat, screwing in the green brothel or carrying candles in the Sacré Coeur, you are our genius, our father, our creator. Therefore, if you love me, wake up and release me from this improbable situation.

“Shamus. Wake up!”

I am not like you, Shamus, I am not emotional, I am not drastic. I am an hotelier's son. I'm not anything more than that. I am rational and I like things as they are as long as they favour my situation. I'm a lover not of people but of compromise and orthodoxy. You might very well call me the archetypal victim of Fly. I'm a Jaguar driver, a Gerrard's Crosser, a doctor, and quite frequently a bishop in drag. I hold very much with the past, and if I knew where I came from I would return there like a shot. Also, you are right, I am a mother-fucker.

Now Shamus, having proved all that to me, proved it quite conclusively, will you kindly wake up and get me out of this!

“Cassidy?
Ici parle
Helen.
Bonjour.
”

“
Bonjour,
” said Cassidy politely.

 

“Forgive lover. Forgive. Please forgive.”

Without opening his eyes, Shamus drew Cassidy's hand into the bed and held it against his hot cheek.

“There's nothing to forgive,” Cassidy whispered. “It's fine. Listen, how about some more formaldehyde?”

Rising, he was about to switch on the overhead light when Shamus spoke again, in quite a strong voice.

“Lots, lover. Lots to forgive.”

“What, then?”

“Lent the Bentley to Hall. He was pissed, you see. Anyway, couldn't have him going home in a cab, could I? Got to travel in style. Not angry, lover?”

“Why should I be?”

“Not hit me?”

“Go to sleep,” said Cassidy.

 

“
Je m'appelle Hélène,
” Helen announced still from the bathroom. She had recently started French lessons at an academy in Chester Street.

“
Hélène est mon nom.
Hurrah
pour Hélène. Hélène est beau. Belle.
Fuck. Beau-belles, bow-bells, bow-bells, bow-bells!”

 

He sat in the dark. He had put out the lamp by the sofa so that the only light came from the bedroom and, indirectly, through the open bathroom door.

“Cassidy, I know you're listening.”

Lucky I bought the place then, really. Now that I've got to live in it. The basic essentials of life, Old Hugo said. Food, drink and now this. Lucky the market was looking the other way.

“Did you have lots of girls in Paris?” Helen asked, over the gentle splashing of water.

“No.”

“Not even one or two?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know.”

“I would if I were a man. I'd have all of us, bang bang bang. We're so
beautiful.
I wouldn't ask, I wouldn't apologise, I wouldn't care. To the victor the spoils. Fuck!”—she must have banged against something. “Why do they put the door handle on the door?”

“Carelessness,” said Cassidy.

“I mean take Sal. Moronic. Totally. So why
not
be a whore? It's fun, it's profitable. I mean it's nice to do
one
thing well, don't you think? Cassidy.”

She was getting out, one leg, two legs; he could hear the rubbing of the towel.

“Yes.”

“What do you want most in the world?” she asked.

You
maybe, thought Cassidy; maybe not.

“You,” he said.

There was a knock at the door. The floor waiter wheeled in the trolley. A middle-aged man of great courtesy.

“In here, sir?” he asked, ignoring the figure on the sofa. “Or next door?”

“In here, if you would.”

He set it parallel to Shamus, a hospital trolley waiting for the surgeon. Signing the bill Cassidy gave him a five-pound note.

“That's all right. That covers everything else we may need. For tips I mean.”

The waiter seemed unhappy.

“I have
got
change, sir.”

“All right, well give me three pounds.” Transaction. “They still dancing down there?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

“What time do you get off?”

“Seven o'clock, sir. I'm the night waiter, sir.”

“Tough on your wife then,” said Cassidy.

“She gets used to it, sir.”

“Any kids?”

“One daughter, sir.”

“What's she doing?”

“She's up at Oxford.”

“That's fine. That's great. I was there myself. Which College?”

“At Somerville, sir. She's reading zoology.”

 

For a moment Cassidy was on the brink of asking him to stay; to sit down with him at a long ritual dinner, to share the wine with him and eat the steak, and gossip with him about their different families and the intricacies of the hotel trade. He wanted to tell him about Hugo's leg and Mark's music, and hear his views on cantilevered extensions. He wanted to ask him about
Old
Hugo and Blue; whether he'd heard rumours, was Old Hugo still a name?

“Shall I draw the cork, sir? Or will you be doing it yourself?”

“You haven't got a toothbrush, have you, Cassidy?” Helen called from the bathroom. “You'd think they'd provide them, wouldn't you, for people like us?”

“Just leave the corkscrew here,” said Cassidy, and once more opened the door for him.

“The head porter will have a toothbrush, sir; I can send you one up if you wish.”

“It's all right,” said Cassidy. “Don't bother.”

 

“Is yours tough?” asked Helen.

“No it's fine. How's yours?”

“Fine.”

They sat on opposite sides of the bed, eating steak, Helen in a bath towel and Cassidy in his dinner jacket. The towel was very long, pale green, with a rich woolly nap. She had combed out her hair. It lay in smooth auburn tresses down her bare white back. She looked very childish without her make-up; her skin had that luminous innocence which in certain women comes with the experience of recent nakedness. She smelt of soap, a nutty masculine soap, the kind that Sandra liked to put in his Christmas stocking; and she sat just as she had sat at Haverdown, on the Chesterfield in the morning twilight.

“By
want,
” she said, “do you mean
love?
”

“I don't know,” said Cassidy. “It was your question, not mine.”

“What are the
symptoms?
” Helen pursued, being helpful. “Apart from lust which, while we know it's lovely, doesn't really last the whole drink through, does it?”

Cassidy poured more wine.

“Is that claret?” she asked. “Or Burgundy?”

“Burgundy. You can tell by the shape. Square shoulders are claret, rounded are Burgundy. You're all I want. You're witty and beautiful and understanding . . . and you like men best.”

“You mean we have that in common?” Helen enquired.

He wished very much that he had Shamus there to say it all again. Helen is our virtue; that part he remembered, that part he believed: Helen will go where her heart is, she knows no other truth. Helen is our territory; Helen is . . . Also there was a formula. Shamus had drawn it for him on the wallpaper, at a drinking in Pimlico the same night he told him about the Steppenwolf, who from the spaces of his wolfish solitude loved the security of the little bourgeois life. The formula had a fraction; why could he not remember it, Aldo Cassidy the inventor of gadgets, fastenings, and couplings?
Cassidy divided by Shamus equals Helen.
Or was it the other way round?
Helen over Cassidy equals Shamus.
Try again.
Cassidy over Helen . . .

Somewhere in Shamus' law of human dynamics, his love for her was inevitable. But where?

“Cassidy, you still love Shamus too, don't you? I'm only trying to
diagnose
you see. Not prescribe.”