The Naive and Sentimental Lover (47 page)

To this letter, on reflection, he added a precautionary postscript:

Having sealed the letter, stamped it, and put it in his pocket he ordered a fresh plate of hot scones and ate them in grey despair. Now you know all, he thought; do with me what you will.

Leaving the café, he consigned the letter to a public litter basket. Forget, he told himself. Put nothing in writing.

 

They never existed, he told himself. I made them up. Come now, be honest, could I really have got away with it so long?

 

Driving to Labour Party Headquarters, he enquired at the desk how he should offer himself for adoption as a candidate. The girl did not know but promised to find out.

“It was
Labour
you wanted, wasn't it?” she asked rather doubtfully, looking past him through the window at the newly sprayed Bentley.

“Please,” said Cassidy, and left his card.

 

 

So you see, Shamus is dead.

Helen is dead.

They never existed.

I dreamed them.

To nothing.

 

And yet, out of the pit of his agony, out of the misery of guilt, remorse, deceit, and regret, the little weed, as Shamus would have it—also grew. For his agony was tempered by a quite urgent will to live—the gift of certain unnamed friends whose influence upon him had by no means lost its sting.

Returning next day from an all-night debate at the dockers' headquarters, he fulfilled an engagement at the Elderman dinner table and won the respect of all who heard him. Well, he said, the Report was highly confidential; he did not honestly feel he could say much about it. Yes, it would be called the Cassidy Report.
The scope?
It covered pretty well everything from the reception procedure at Party Headquarters to the provision of recreation facilities in Cable Street warehouses.
Terms of reference?
Very much as quoted in the press (a nice touch—no one confessed to having missed the notice) with a few additions he had insisted upon for his own protection.

In bed, armed with a virility brought on by extreme anxiety—and stimulated perhaps by certain inexplicit memories of events which had not occurred—he astonished his wife with a succession of sexual feats.

“And get rid of your mother,” he told her. “I'm sick of having her around.”

“I will,” said Sandra.

“I want you to myself,” he said.

“It's all that matters,” Sandra agreed. “
Dear
Pailthorpe.”

 

Grew, burgeoned, and even, mysteriously, flourished.

And felt, among many other conflicting emotions—such as panic, for instance, such as hatred of the scarlet whore Helen, such as a profound sympathy with the extreme right of the Conservative Party, which protects men of property from the vicious assaults of penurious writers and their unprincipled wives—felt that special superiority only found among those who live eye to eye with destiny: alpinists, the mortally ill, and the many heroes of the war he'd missed. The weed was of the brotherhood at last; the
élite.
He understood why Helen and Shamus talked so much about mortality. Death is the property of those who live; they should study it with every hour.

Also the weed slept less; ate less; worked better and more briskly.

And finding, in the passage of that fortnight, that he had neither contracted leprosy, nor been arrested by the police, nor had served on him those ever-threatening notices from the Inland Revenue or the Board of Trade; and having heard nothing from either Helen or Shamus, and made no move to reach them on his own account; and having therefore presumed them at first missing and later killed, he decided it was safe, in a quiet way, to explore a little further his new exciting policy of taking.

“You know . . . ,” Sandra began gratefully one night.

“What do I know?”

“Even if it were all a lie, the whole thing . . . the Paper, the Party, the safe seat . . . I'd still love you. I'd still admire you. Whatever the truth was.”

But Cassidy was asleep, she could tell by his breathing.

“The truth is
you,
” she whispered. “Not what you say.
You.
”

T
ime out; borrowed Time; a past unlived, too long imagined, belatedly made real; a cashing-in before the final settlement; an ascent of the emotional scale; a claiming of his rightful dues; a renewed search for the Blue Flower: who cares? Cassidy stripped, stood in the fountain, and felt the edges of his existence.

 

“You know what I wish, Aldo?”

“What do you wish?”

“I wish all the stars were people and all the people were stars.”

“What good would that do?”

“Because then our faces would be lit up with smiles all the time. We'd twinkle at each other and never be miserable any more.”

“I'm not miserable,” said Cassidy stoutly. “I'm happy.”

“And all the people we don't like would be masses of miles away, wouldn't they, because they'd be in the sky instead of the stars.”

“We've got all night,” said Cassidy. “I'm not tired or anything. I'm just happy.”

“I love you so much,” said Angie. “I wish you'd grin.”

“Make me,” said Cassidy.

“I can't. I'm not clever enough.” She kissed him with placid, expert sensuality. “I never will be.”

He grinned. “How's that?”

“That's good,” she said. “That's very good for a beginner.”

Tasting of snail garlic from the Epicure, watched by a white dog called Lettice, they lay in naked mutuality on the thin, bony bed of her attic flat in Kensington, next to the stars. Lettice was born under the sign of the bowman, she said, and Bowman was the sexiest sign out.

“It means cock,” she explained. “Julie told me. Everything's phallic really, isn't it?”

“I suppose it is,” said Cassidy.

A Che Guevara poster hung on the wall beside a tapestry woven by Cretan primitives.

“Lettice loves you too,” said Angie.

“And I like him.”

“Her,” said Angie. “Silly.”

Yesterday he knew nothing about her; today everything.

She believed in the Spirit and wore rows of mystic beads against her bare and extremely beautiful bosom. She believed in God and, like Shamus, hated the fucking clergy more than any other living thing; she was a vegetarian but thought snails were all right because they couldn't feel and anyway the birds ate them; she had loved Cassidy from the day she joined the firm. She loved him as she loved no one in the world; Meale was a stupid bugger. She had identified the actual stars which determined Cassidy's fortune, and gazed at them for nights on end. She had broad, hard thighs and her fleece grew downwards very neatly from the upper line, she called it her beard and liked him to keep his hand there, she couldn't get enough. Her right breast was erogenous, she disapproved of abortion. She adored children and hated her fucking father. As a rule, Cassidy disliked swearing in women and had been hoping, at a suitable moment, to check it in Helen. But there was a hardy familiarity to Angie's obscenities, a sublime indifference to their connotations, which somehow disinfected them of sensation.

She was twenty-three. She adored Castro but her greatest single regret was that she had not fucked Che Guevara before he died; it was for this reason she had him nearest to her bed. Greece was fabulous, and one day when she had made lots of money she was going to go back and live there and have lots of babies: “All by myself, Aldo, little brown ones that play bare on the sand.”

He knew also that naked she was very beautiful and neither shy nor afraid; and it amazed him beyond words or comprehension that she had lived so long fully dressed within his reach, and that he had not put out his hand to unzip her.

“Listening?”

“Yes,” said Cassidy. “Don't let go.”

“Pisces, right? That's Latin. Two fishes, joined by the astrological umbilical cord, one swimming upstream and the other swimming downstream.”

“Like us,” Cassidy suggested humbly.

“Not
us; me,
silly. I've got a dual personality. That's what dual personality means: two whole different people inside one head. I'm not one fish, I'm
two,
that's the whole point, silly.” She continued reading. “Decisive events await you this week. Your greatest desire will come within your reach. Do not flinch. Seize the opportunity but only before the ninth or after the fifteenth, Christ what's the date?”

I love you, he thought. I love the way your ears point through your long brown hair; I love the sheerness of you, the spring and ease of your young body, I want to marry you and share the Greek beach with your babies.

“The thirteenth,” he said looking at the date window of his gold watch.

“I don't care,” said Angie resolutely. “They're not always right so sod them.”

She lay flat on her back, pensively studying Che Guevara.

“I don't care, I don't care,
I don't fucking care,
” she repeated fiercely, staring the great revolutionary in the eye. “It's a cloud. One day the wind will come along and puff it away and I
still
won't care. Do you do it a lot, Aldo? Do you fuck lots of girls?”

“It's just the way I'm made,” said Cassidy and gave a traveller's sigh, hinting at the lonely road and the wandering, and the rare moments of consolation.

“Come off it, Garbo,” said Angie.

Naked, she made him cocoa, a foulmouthed goddess clattering plates in the tiny galley; a child, backlit by the orange glow from the window, preparing a dorm feast. And afterwards, she promised him, they'd do it again. She loved him, he could do it whenever he liked. Her breasts moved with her, not a tremor; her long waist had the authority of a statue. She straddled him, knees spread, making a sand castle. Bending forward, she kissed him over and over while she stirred him slowly into the thick basin of her hips.

“He was
such
a sod, my Dad,” she said afterwards, still in awe, her round cheek pressed gratefully against his shoulder, her hand still lightly holding him. “But
your
kids
really
love you don't they, Aldo?”

“I love
you,
” said Cassidy, not finding it, for once, at all difficult to say.

 

Ast, an older lady a good three years Cassidy's senior but not yet wholly infirm, lived nearer to the ground but in greater affluence. In bed she was very large, about twice her dressed weight he reckoned, thinking vaguely of Cassius Clay; and when she leant on her side to talk to him her heavy elbow staked him to the mattress.

The walls of Ast's room were hung with unframed canvasses by painters yet to rise; her windows faced a museum, and her interest in Cassidy, after the first round, was essentially of the historical kind.

“When did you
know?
” she asked, in a voice which suggested that love could be proved by research. “
Frankly,
Aldo. When did you have the first
inkling?
”

Frankly, Cassidy thought, never.

“Was it,” she suggested, prompting his memory, “that night at the Niesthals', at the harpsichord concert? You looked at me. Twice. You probably don't even remember.”

“Of course I do,” said Cassidy politely.

“October. That gorgeous October.” She sighed. “God, one says such corny things when one's in love. I thought you were just a boring . . . lecherous . . . merchant.” Cassidy shared her amusement at this ridiculous misconception. “How wrong. How utterly wrong I was.” A long, meaningless silence. “You
love
music, don't you, Aldo?”

“Music is my favourite thing,” said Cassidy.

“I could tell. Aldo, why don't you take
Sandra
to concerts? She's so frightfully anxious to
understand
the spirit. You've got to help her, you know. She's nothing without you. Nothing.” The significance of her words suddenly appalled her. “Oh God what have I said! Forgive me, say you forgive me.”

“It's quite all right,” Cassidy assured her.

“
God
what have I said?”—She rolled on to him—“Aldo, please, don't cut me off, please.
I forgive you.
Say
I forgive you.
”

“I forgive you,” said Cassidy.

Peace returned.

“And then you went for me at the Eldermans'. I could hardly believe it. No one had spoken to me like that for months. You were so fluent . . . so
sure.
I felt like a child. Just a little girl.” She laughed at the pleasurable memory. “All we stupid women could do was look insulted while you lectured us. My mouth went dry and my heart was going inside and I thought: he's right. He
cares
about the artist.
Publishers,
” she snorted. “What do
they
know?”

“Nothing,” said Cassidy, thinking of Dale.

“As to those flowers . . . well, I just never had so many flowers in my life. Cassidy?”