The Naive and Sentimental Lover (55 page)

Sitting down, he saw the gun.

It lay on Shamus' lap, a sleek pet, the barrel towards Cassidy. It was essentially a military weapon, and probably an officers' issue from the First World War. Only a full-grown officer could have worn it, however, because the barrel was about twelve inches long. Or it might have been a target pistol from the days when you steadied your weapon on your left forearm, and the range sergeant yelled “Well shot sir” when you hit a man-sized target. A lanyard was fastened to the butt. From the free end dangled a pink powder puff.

In the kitchen, the wireless was broadcasting a Swiss time signal, a very war-like noise.

Cassidy ordered coffee,
café crème,
like the gentleman's. The waiter remembered him well. Mr. Cassidy who tips. He brought a gingham tablecloth and spread it with affection. He laid out cutlery and Maggi sauce and toothpicks in a silver box. And the children, the waiter enquired, they were well?

Fine.

They were not, for instance, suffering from the English habit of wearing short trousers?

Not noticeably, Cassidy said.

And they were hunting, hunting the foxes and the chamois?

At present, said Cassidy, they were at school.

Ah, said the waiter, pursing his lips,
Eton:
he had heard that standards had fallen.

“She's waiting,” said Shamus.

They set off up the hill.

 

Pulling with all his strength, Cassidy found that the tape was cutting his shoulder. If he had not been wearing his camelhair coat, in fact, it would have broken the skin. The tape was of nylon, six foot of it and bright red, he held it with both hands, one at the chest and one at the waist, making a harness of it as he strained forward. Twice he had asked Shamus to walk, but received no useful answer beyond an impatient wave of the gun barrel, and now Shamus was sitting upright with Cassidy's overnight bag across his knee, throwing out the things he didn't like. The silver hairbrush had already gone, sliding like a puck backwards down the icy path, bobbing and spinning over the half-frozen eddies of snow and ice. He had thought he was fit: squash at the Lansdowne, tennis at Queen's, not to mention the stairs at Abalone Crescent. But his flannel shirt was drenched by the time they left the railway line, and his heart, unaccustomed to the change of altitude, was already thumping sickly. Fitness is relative, he told himself. After all, he's at least my weight.

 

Even taken downwards, the path was unsuitable for tobogganing.

From the chalet, it wound at first through scattered woods where snow barely covered the boulders, and jagged tree trunks awaited the careless navigator. Crossing an avalanche gully, it descended by way of two steep bends to a poorly fenced ramp which, being much in use by pedestrians, was strewn with grit which tore at the runners and slewed them off course. If other, hardier children ignored these hazards, Cassidy's did not, for it was one of his recurring nightmares that they would have an accident here, that Hugo would skid under a train, Mark would crush his head against a signal post, and he had entirely proscribed the route on pain of punishment. Uphill, though no doubt safer, the path was even less attractive.

Shamus had chosen Mark's toboggan, probably because of the crazy daisies which were glued to its plastic base. It was a good toboggan of its kind, a prototype sent up by a Swiss correspondent for possible exploitation on the English market. At first the design had told in its favour. But soon the broad keel was dragging heavily in the slush, and Cassidy was obliged to lean far forward into the hill in order to get enough purchase. His leather-soled London shoes slipped with every step; occasionally hauling at the tapes, he slid backwards into the bow of the toboggan, grazing his frozen heels against the plastic point; and when this happened Shamus would urge him forward with a distracted oath. The night case had gone. There was nothing in it, apparently, which Shamus thought worth keeping, so he had thrown it overboard to improve the unsprung weight, and now he was aiming the gun distractedly at whatever offered itself; a bird on the roof of a hotel, a passing pedestrian, a dog.

“My dear Mr. Cassidy, how
are
you?”

 

Introductions; sherry on Sunday, come round after church. Shamus bows and waves the gun; shrieks of merriment. A Mrs. Horegrove or Haregrave, a senior senator of the Club.

“What a
dangerous
-looking burden!”

“It's Hugo's,” Cassidy explained, panting through his smiles. “We took it to be mended. You know what he's like about guns.”

“My dear,
whatever
would Sandra say?”

About Shamus or the gun?
Cassidy wanted to ask, for her eyes were moving from one to the other with mounting surprise.

“Go away,” Shamus screamed at her, suddenly losing patience, and picking up a convenient stick, threw it hard at her feet. “Prole. Get out or I'll shoot you.”

The lady withdrew.

A heap of horse manure obstructed their progress. Cassidy took the left side, favouring the verge.

“Pull, you bugger,” Shamus ordered, still angry. “Mush, mush,
pull.
”

 

In the forest, the going was easier. The trodden snow, sheltered by the trees, had neither melted nor frozen; sometimes, for short distances, they even went downhill, so that Cassidy had to run ahead in order to remain covered by the gun. At such moments, Shamus became nervous and issued conflicting orders: lift your hands, put them down, keep left, keep right, and Cassidy obeyed them all, thinking of nothing, not even the hole in his back. The trees parted, giving a view of the brown valley and the banks of mist that rose like oil smoke from its narrow floor. They saw the Angelhorn in a fragment of perfect blue, its fresh snow glittering in the high sunlight.

And stopped.

“Hey, you,” said Shamus quietly.

“Yes?”

“Give us a kiss.”

His hands still above his head, Cassidy walked back to the toboggan, stooped, and kissed Shamus on the cheek.

“More,” said Shamus. And at last: “It's all
right,
lover, it's all
right,
” he whispered, pushing away the tears. “Shamus fix it. Promise. We're big enough, lover. We can make it.”

“Of course we can,” said Cassidy.

“Make history,” said Shamus. “Be a great first, lover. We'll beat the whole fucking system.”

“Will you walk now?” Cassidy asked, after more breathless hugs. “I'm a bit tired actually.”

Shamus shook his head. “Lover, I got to toughen you up, this is a very vigorous course, very vigorous indeed. Takes
grip.
Faith, remember? For both of us?”

“I remember,” said Cassidy, and picked the tape out of the snow.

The clouds covered them. They must have left the trees without his noticing, and walked blindly into the ambush of the fog. Sightless, Cassidy lost his balance and fell forward. Not even the path existed, for its edges were lost in the downward gust of wet mist, and his hands, grasping the slope before him, were clutching an invisible enemy. He struggled forward again.

“Where are you?”

“Here.”

“Pull, lover,” Shamus warned. “Keep pulling, lover, or it's shootibangs.”

As suddenly as it had descended the cloud cleared and the house stood clean and waiting on its own expensive patch of snowclad hillock, fifteen pounds a square meter, “Mr. and Mrs. Aldo Cassidy” framed beside the bell button and Helen wife of Shamus painted on the balcony.

Painted on the sized, white canvas of the drifting fog, in matt half-tones, a fraction out of register.

 

Tall, from where they looked up at her; wearing a head scarf of Sandra's; hands set apart on the rail, face turned sharply towards the path, not seeing them but hearing their footsteps in the slush, and perhaps the zigzag echo of their voices.

“Cassidy?”

“She's a bit blue,” Shamus warned in a whisper coming up beside him. “Where I belted her. Sorry about that, didn't mean to damage the goods.”

“Cassidy?” she repeated, still blind but guessing at the sound.

For a moment longer, she scanned the path not realising they were there beneath her. Waiting, as all women wait. Using her body to catch the sound. Waiting for a ship, or a child, or a lover; upright, taut, vibrant.

“We're just below you,” said Cassidy.

The bruise was on the cheekbone, the left one, he recorded; Shamus had hit her with his right hand, a hook probably; a hard wide one from the side, not at all unlike the mark on Sal that evening they had gone to her in Cable Street. By the time he had opened the door she was in the hall. She closed her eyes long before he touched her, the good one and the bad one, and he heard her whisper “Cassidy” as her arms came gently round him; and he felt her shaking as if she had a fever.

“On the
mouth,
” Shamus shouted from behind. “Jesus. What is this, a fucking convent?”

So he kissed her on the mouth; she tasted just a little of blood, as if she had had a tooth out.

 

The drawing room—it was his own design—was long and perhaps too thin for comfort. The balcony ran the whole length of it, mastering the three views: the valley, the village, and the mountain range. At one end, near the kitchen, was a pine dining recess and Helen had set the table for three, using the best napkins and the beeswax candles from the top left drawer.

“She's a bit thin,” Shamus explained. “Because I locked her up till you came.”

“You told me,” Cassidy said.

“Not
blaming
people, lover? Got to lock princesses in towers, haven't we? Can't have the bitches whoring all over the realm.”

Whether she had lost weight or not, Helen's eyes had a defiant brightness, like the courage of the very sick.

“I managed to get a duck,” she said. “I seem to remember it's your favourite.”

“Oh,” said Cassidy. “Oh thanks.”

“You do still like it, don't you?” she asked very earnestly, offering him pretzels from the compartmented red plate which Sandra used for curries.

“Rather,” said Cassidy.

“I thought you might have gone off it.”

“No, no.”

“It's only frozen. I tried to get a fresh one, but they just . . .” She dried up, then began again. “It's so difficult on the telephone, all in a foreign language . . . he wouldn't let me out, not at all. He's even burnt my passport.”

“I know,” said Cassidy.

She was crying a little so he led her to the kitchen, holding her under the elbow. She leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder, and breathed very deeply, filling her lungs with the strength of his presence.

“Hullo hellbeef.”

“Hi.”

“He just sort of . . . knew. He didn't guess, or suspect, or anything ordinary, he
knew.
What's it called when you mop it up through the pores?”

“Osmosis.”

“Well he's got it. Double osmosis. I'm crying because I'm tired that's all. I'm not sad, I'm tired.”

“I know.”

“Are you tired, Cassidy?”

“A bit.”

“He wouldn't let me lie down. I had to sleep standing up. Like a horse.”

She was crying a great deal; he guessed she had been crying for several days and now it was habit, she cried when the wind changed and when the wind stopped or when it started again, and this was the
foehn,
it changed all the time.

“Cassidy.”

“Yes.”

“You'd have come anyway, wouldn't you? Whether he told you to or not?”

“Of course.”

“He laughed. Every day you didn't come, he laughed and said you never would. Then in between he got sad.
Come on lover,
he said,
big boy now, where are you?
Then he got loving to me and told me to pray for you.”

“I had a lot to do my end too.”

“How did the bosscow take it?”

Through her tears he heard Sandra's scream echoing in the stairwell, up and down, like Hugo's magic bouncing ball, between the fine cornice and the flagstone floor.

“Fine. No problem. She was happier, really . . . knowing.”

“It was easy here too, really . . . once he knew I loved you.”

“I better go back now,” said Cassidy.

“Yes. Yes he needs you.”

With a little pat of encouragement she urged him on his way.

Shamus was at the long window. He had discovered Cassidy's binoculars and was trying to train them on the bedrooms of a distant hotel. Bored, he tossed them to the floor and sauntered to the bookshelves. The gun was stuck in his waistband; the powder puff dangled idly from his fingers.

“Someone's big on Ibsen,” he observed distractedly.

“Sandra.”

“I like that lady. Always did. Better than Helen, anyway.”

While Helen cooked, the two men played Mark's mouse game. The mouse, which was plastic, was fed into a slide. After it had run about, jumped a gap, slipped through several small holes, it entered a narrow cage and tripped a bell. The bell rang, the door closed, the mouse was caught. It was not a competitive game, since there was no way of losing, and therefore none of winning either, but it was a good game in the circumstances because it enabled Shamus to keep one hand on the gun. They had not had many turns however before Shamus grew restless and, using the poker from the fireplace, smashed the outer end of the cage. After that the mouse escaped, and Shamus became easy again, and even smiled, patting Cassidy on the shoulder by way of encouragement.