The Naive and Sentimental Lover (26 page)

“Get hold of Lemming,” Cassidy said quietly to Meale. “Tell him to rescind the deal.”

“How?” said Meale, aggressively.

“Meale what
is
the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I happen to admire him, that's all; I think he's truthful and fine.”

“Lose the order, d'you understand? Bury it. She hasn't signed anything, nor have we. We've never given thirteen to the dozen in our lives and we're not starting now.”

 

“I made it, lover!” Shamus cried as the limousine returned them to the city. “I made it! Jesus I can swim! See the way I gave her the oil?”

“You were terrific,” Cassidy agreed. “You were absolutely great.”

“Jesus, that whole place, I could
die
there; I tell you, there's no better compliment than that now is there? The tent, the music, the flags . . . Lover, listen, before it goes to my head, was there anything I did wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Not too much?”

“No.”

“Not too familiar? The hand on the arm?”

“Just right.”

By the time they reached the St. Jacques he was even capable of reproof.

“You know lover you shouldn't have let those Japs in. I mean they were just standing there photographing the exhibits. I mean look what they did to the car trade. You should throw the sodders out, honest. Put a notice up ‘No Japs,' I would.”

Lying in the bath, playing with the carnations, Shamus added his own bizarre appreciation of market trends: “Hey lover, what about Paisley now? I mean if that feller's going to murder all us procreating Catholics there won't
be
any bloody babies.”

“Ask Flaherty.”

“You know when you come to think of it, prams are a very worthy thing to be in. I mean prams are your
ploughshares,
aren't they, for tomorrow's world. I mean there's other buggers churning out swords by the million but you and me are absolutely in the non-belligerent camp, wouldn't you say so lover?”

“See you after the party,” Cassidy said benevolently.

“Why can't I come?” he demanded sulkily. “I sold the prams not you.”

“Principals only,” said Cassidy. “Sorry.”

“Meeow,” said Shamus. “Those people loved me,” he continued reflectively, “and I
loved
them. A perfect marriage. A great pointer for the future.” He sang a few bars of an Irish melody. “Hey, lover, you never answered my question.”

“What question?”

“I asked you once: any views on the meaning of love?”

“I must say, you pick your moments, don't you?” said Cassidy with a laugh.

With his toe, Shamus guided a carnation away from the jet of the tap. “Oh do not die,” he recited, apparently to the flower, “For I shall hate all women so when thou art gone. Chippie chippie, lover.”

“Chippie, chippie,” said Cassidy.

His last sight of Shamus was of him sitting in the bath wearing the black beret and studying stock prices in the
Herald Tribune.
He must have used the whole bottle of Cassidy's bath essence; the water was a dark green and the carnations floated on it like lilies on a stagnant pond.

 

The British Minister (Economic) was one of those fastidious, small, very rich, unworldly men whom, in Cassidy's experience, the Foreign Office invariably appointed to deal with trade. He cringed at one end of a long room in the shelter of a powerful wife, beside a marble fireplace stuffed with red cellophane, and he received his guests one by one after a butler had thinned them out at the door. Cassidy arrived early, second only to McKechnie of Bee-Line, and the Minister shook their hands very separately as if he would referee their fight.

“We know some Cassidys in Aldeburgh,” the Minister's wife said, having listened carefully to his voice and found it phonically acceptable. “I don't expect they're any relation are they?”

“Well we are a pretty big tribe,” Cassidy admitted, “but we do all seem to be related in some way.”

“What does it
mean?
” the Minister complained.

“I'm told it's Norman,” said Cassidy.

McKechnie, who had not been favoured with such intimacies, stood off glowering. He had brought a wife. Cassidy had met her in the tent that morning, a freckled red-headed lady in yellow and green, and she looked like all the wives he had ever met since he had begun in prams. “You stole our Meale,” she had said to him, and she was getting ready to say it again. She had put her hair up and bared one shoulder. Her handbag had a long gold chain to it, enough for at least one prisoner, and she held her elbow wide in case she needed to jab anyone.

“How's the Fair going?” the Minister asked. “They're having a
Fair,
” he said, for the benefit of his wife. “Out near Orsay, where poor Jenny Malloy used to walk her dog.” It was more an objection than an explanation. Fairs, his tone suggested, had replaced dogs, and the change was not for the better.

“We've taken ten thousand quid in eight hours,” Mrs. McKechnie said straight at Cassidy. She came from near Manchester and did not care for side. “We've not a graduate on the books, have we Mac?”

“I thought they'd all arrive together,” the Minister said hopelessly. “In a charabanc or something. It is extraordinary. What about drink?”

“Two up,” his wife warned. The butler announced Sanders and Meyer of Everton-Soundsleep.

“
Norman
did you say?” the Minister enquired. “Norman
French,
that kind of Norman?”

“Apparently,” said Cassidy.

“You ought to tell them that. They'd like it.
We
get by because she's half a Lamey, it's the only reason. They
loathe
the rest of us like poison, always did. They loathe
us
too, really, except she's half a Lamey.”

A pack of junior diplomats entered through another door.

“Can we tempt you to a drink?” they asked of Mrs. McKechnie, picking by training on the plainest woman present. One held canapés on a government tray and another asked whether she would have time for pleasure.

“She's laying it on a bit about the ten thousand,” McKechnie told Cassidy aside. “It's more like two.”

“There's plenty of room for both of us,” said Cassidy.

“She's loyal, mind.”

“I'm sure she is. Where are you staying?”

“Imperial. Here, have you had the Japs in?”

“They came this morning.”

“It's got to be stopped,” said McKechnie, and to Sanders who had just joined them, “I was saying to young Cassidy here, we've got to do something about the Japs.”

“Japs?” said Sanders, mystified. “What Japs?”

McKechnie looked at Cassidy and Cassidy looked at McKechnie and they both looked again at Sanders, this time with pity.

“I expect it's just the big firms they go for,” said McKechnie.

“I'm sure it is,” said Cassidy and moved away as if in answer to a call.

 

They were about twelve in the room, fourteen perhaps including their hosts, but reinforcements were arriving fast. Their topic was transport. Bland and Cowdry had shared a taxi; Crosse had walked and the tarts had nearly eaten him: “Lovely some of them were, just kids, nineteen or twenty, it's a disgrace.” Martenson had almost decided not to come as a protest against the Ambassador whom he thought should have been at the Opening. As soon as he returned to Leeds, he said, he proposed to complain to his Member of Parliament.

“Bloody peacock I'll have his bloody balls off. We earn it, he spends it. Look at the size of this room THEN!
One man
from Commerce: that's all you need.
One man.
You could close the whole bloody Embassy apart from him.”

It was while listening to this piece of intelligence that Cassidy heard the butler call an unfamiliar name. He did not catch it precisely but it sounded like Zola; it was certainly Conte
et
Contessa, and he turned to watch them enter. Afterwards he said he had had an instinct; only instinct, he argued afterwards, could explain why he had freed himself from Crosse and Cow-dry and stepped back a full pace to get a clearer view of Shamus bowing courteously over his hostess' hand.

He was wearing his rue de Rivoli suit and a pale salmon shirt belonging to Cassidy, a coveted garment which he had been keeping in reserve for a special occasion. A dark-haired girl waited at his side, one hand lightly on his arm. She was serene and very beautiful and she stood directly beneath the light. From his point of vantage Cassidy noticed, with the acuteness of perception which accompanies sudden shock, the bold imprint of a love bite on her lower neck.

“You've not had
trouble
from him?” asked McKechnie, who had joined him again. “My wife says he's queer as two left shoes.”

“Who?”

“Meale.”

“I'm sure not,” said Cassidy. “In fact I think if anything he's too much the other way.”

 

“It's
frightfully
enterprising of you,” the Minister's wife was moaning, “to keep your own man in Warsaw. What does he
do
all the time?”

“Oh we have quite a lot of trade with them actually,” Cassidy confessed modestly. “You'd be surprised.”

Never hold him back,
Helen whispered.
Promise you never will.

Shamus had charmed them all. Stately and subdued he moved graciously from group to group, now talking, now listening, now gently deferring to the girl as he offered her canapés and whisky. His gestures, to those who knew him, might have seemed a little slurred; his Polish accent, where Cassidy could hear it, occasionally yielded to a faint Irish intonation, but his magic had never been more compelling.

The Minister was particularly impressed.

“If only
more
of you would look east,” he complained. “Who is she?”

“Great dignity,” the Minister's lady agreed. “Make a
marvellous
diplomat's wife, even in Paris.”

“She's stoned out of her mind,” Shamus warned him
en vol
between two admiring wives. “If we don't get her out she'll fall flat on her arse.”

“Give her to me,” said Cassidy.

Receiving the full weight of her he walked straight out of the room.

“Here,” he heard McKechnie say, “that's the fellow who kicked my stand. Bloody well kicked it and told young Stiles our canopies were crap. He's not foreign, he's Irish!”

 

“Tour d'Argent,” said Shamus. They were standing on the pavement watching the girl's departing taxi. Shamus looked slightly dishevelled, as if he had been pushed by several people at once.

“Shamus are you
sure?
”

“Lover,” said Shamus holding his forearm in an iron grip, “I've never been hungrier in my life.”

 

“To the suit,” said Shamus.

“To the suit,” said Cassidy.

“God bless her and all who sail in her.”

“Amen.”

Once again the unpredictable had proved itself the rule. Cassidy had claimed his corner table with the gloomiest foreboding. He did not know how much Shamus had drunk but he knew it was a lot and he was seriously wondering whether he could handle him without Helen's help. He did not know whether anyone had played Fly in the Tour d'Argent before, but he had a pretty good idea what would happen if they tried. In the cab Shamus had taken one of his quick naps and Cassidy had been obliged to wake him under the eye of the commissionaire.

Now, against all expectation, they were in paradise: Old Hugo's paradise, with food and waiters, the fragrance of angels and of heavenly flowers.

Diamonds surrounded them: hung in giant clusters in the window panes, pricked the orange night sky, were draped in the eyes of lovers and in the brown silk of women's hair. Cassidy heard nothing but the sounds of love and battle, the whispers of longing couples and the far sharpening of a knife. Vertigo seized him, stronger than Haverdown, stronger than Kensal Rise. Of all the places he had ever been, this was the most exciting, the most intoxicating. Best of all was the company of Shamus himself. Something—the drink, the girl, his conquest of the Embassy, the magic of the city—something had freed Shamus, soothed and softened him and made him young. He was alight and yet at peace, he was miraculously sober.

“Shamus.”

“What is it lover?”

“
This,
” said Cassidy.

Shamus' eyes were shadowed behind the candles, but Cassidy could see he was smiling.