The Naive and Sentimental Lover (5 page)

“I really don't know,” said Cassidy.

Obedient to his companion's whim, Cassidy allowed himself to be brought to a halt. The dark face came very close to his and he was suddenly aware of tension.

“Only I wrote to him see, challenging him to a duel. I thought that's who you might be.”

“Oh,” said Cassidy. “Oh no, well I'm afraid I'm not.”

“You've a trace of him though, all the same, you've definitely a spot of divinity in you, I could tell it a mile off.”

“Oh.”

“Oh yes.”

 

They had turned a second corner and entered another corridor even longer and more derelict than the first. At its far end red firelight was playing on a stone wall and whorls of smoke were curling towards them through the open doorway. Seized by a sudden sense of lassitude, Cassidy had the eerie feeling of walking through an adverse tide. The darkness was dragging against his feet like currents of warm water. The smoke, he thought, the smoke has made me dizzy.

“Bloody chimney's bunged up. We tried to get the fellow to fix it but they never come, do they?”

“It's the same in London,” Cassidy agreed warming to his favourite topic. “You can ring them, write to them, have an appointment, it makes absolutely no difference. They come
when
they want and charge
what
they want.”

“Bastards. Jesus, my grandfather would have flogged the lot of them.”

“You can't do that these days I'm afraid,” said Cassidy loudly, in the voice of one who also yearned for a simpler social order. “They'd be down on you like a ton of bricks.”

“I'll tell you this for nothing, it's time we had another bloody war. Listen, they say he's about forty-three years of age.”

“Who?”

“God. This fellow in Cork. That's a bloody odd age for him to choose, don't you think so? I mean let's have him young or old, that's what I said to him see, who the hell thinks he's God at forty-three? Still, when I saw the car, then you . . . well you can't blame me can you? I mean if God
was
going to run a car, well that Bentley of yours . . .”

“How
is
the servant problem round here?” Cassidy enquired, cutting him short.

“Bloody awful. All they want is fags, telly, and fucks.”

“I suppose they get lonely. Like you.”

Cassidy was now quite recovered from his initial nervousness. His companion's racy tones, echoing ahead of him, were for all their quaintness pleasantly reassuring; the firelight was now definitely closer and the sight of it, after their inward journey through the successively darker chambers of the enormous mansion, gave him further cheer. His composure however was barely won before it was violently intruded upon by a new and wholly unannounced phenomenon. A sudden waft of tinny music issued from a side doorway and a girl crossed their path.

 

Cassidy in fact saw her twice.

Once silhouetted against the smoky firelight at the end of the corridor, and once in the direct beam of the lantern as she stopped and turned her head to look at them, at Cassidy first and then in cool question at the torchbearer. Her stare was straight and by no means welcoming. She held a towel over one arm and a small transistor radio in her hand. Her copious auburn hair was banked on top of her head as if to keep it out of the wet, and Cassidy recognised, as they briefly exchanged glances, that she was listening to the same programme which he had been playing in the car, a selection of Frank Sinatra's music on the theme of male solitude. These impressions, fragmented as they were by the wandering beam of the lantern, the flickering of the firelight, and the clouds of woodsmoke, did not by any means run consecutively. The girl's appearance, her fractional hesitation, her double glance were but flashes upon his heightened consciousness. She was gone in a moment, vanishing into another doorway, but not before Cassidy had observed, with the helpless detachment which often accompanies a wholly unexpected experience, that she was not only beautiful but naked. Indeed, so utterly improbable was the apparition, so irreconcilable its effect upon Cassidy's beleaguered fantasy, that he would have discounted her altogether—fed her at once into his ever-ready apparatus of disbelief—had not the beam of the lantern firmly pointed him the proof of her terrestrial existence.

She had been walking on tiptoe. She must have been quite used to going barefoot, for each toemark was drawn separately in round spots on the flagstone like the print of a small animal in the snow.

L
ong ago in a great restaurant an elderly lady had stolen Cassidy's fish. She had been sitting beside him at an adjoining table facing into the room, and with one movement she had swept the fish—a sole Waleska generously garnished with cheese and assorted seafoods—into her open tartan handbag. Her timing was perfect. Cassidy happened to look upwards in response to an inner call—a girl probably, but perhaps a passing dish which he had almost ordered in preference to his Waleska—and when he looked down again the fish had gone and only a pink sludge across the plate, a glutinous trail of cornflour, cheese and particles of shrimp, marked the direction it had taken. His first response was disbelief. He had eaten the fish and in his distraction not even tasted it. But
how
had he eaten it? the Great Detective asked himself. With his fingers? His knife and fork were clean. The fish was a mirage: the waiter had not yet brought it, Cassidy was looking at the dirty plate left by a guest who had preceded him.

Then he saw the tartan handbag. Its handles were clamped tight together, but a telltale pink smear was clearly visible on one brass ball of the clasp. Call the waiter, he thought: “This lady has stolen my fish.” Confront the thief, summon the police, demand that she open her handbag.

But her posture of spinsterly composure as she continued to sip her apéritif, one hand curled lightly in her napkin, was too much for him. Signing the bill he quietly left the restaurant, never to return.

Following the lantern into the smoke-filled drawing room, Cassidy underwent the same symptoms of psychic disarray. Had the girl existed, or was she the creation of his lively erotic fantasy? Was she a ghost? A de Waldebere heiress, for instance, murdered in her bath by the reckless Sir Hugo? But family ghosts do not leave footprints nor carry transistor radios, and are certainly not constructed of such eminently persuasive flesh. Assuming then that the girl was real and that he had seen her, should he as a matter of protocol venture some casual comment suggesting he had not? Imply that he had been studying a portrait or an architectural feature at the critical moment of her appearance? Ask his host whether he was all alone here or who looked after him?

He was still wrestling with the problem when he heard himself addressed in what he took to be a foreign language.

“Alc?”

To compound Cassidy's sense of unreality he had the strong impression of being cut off by fog, for the enormous fireplace was emitting billows of cannon smoke over the stone floor and heavy palls already hung from the rafters overhead. The same fire, which seemed to consist entirely of kindling wood, provided their only source of light, for the lantern was now extinguished and the windows, like those in the Great Hall, were firmly shuttered.

“I'm awfully sorry. I don't think I understand.”

“
Alc,
lover. Alcohol.
Whisky.
”

“O thank you. Alcohol. Alc.” He laughed. “Yes indeed I'd love an alc. It's quite a long drive from Bath actually. Well
fussy,
you know. All those narrow lanes and side turnings.
Alc.
Haha.”

Mistress? Lecherous housemaid? Incestuous sister? A gypsy whore slunk in from the woods? Fiver a bang and free bath after?

“You want to try walking it.” Glass in hand, the tall figure rose massively at him out of the smoke. If we were the same size, thought Cassidy, how are you now bigger? “Eight bloody hours it took us, with all God's limousines damn near running us into the hedge. It's enough to turn a man to drink, I'm telling you.” The brogue was even stronger. “Still
you
wouldn't do that would you, lover? Carve us into the ditch, and not even stop to set the bone?”

A call girl perhaps, sent down by disgraceful agencies? Question: how can you call a call girl when your phone's cut off?

“Certainly not. I'm a great believer in defensive driving.”

“Are you now?”

The dark eyes seemed, with this question, to invade still further Cassidy's unprotected consciousness.

“Look my name's Cassidy,” he said as much to reassure himself as to inform his host.

“Cassidy? Jesus that's a lovely native name if ever I heard one. Hey, was it you robbed all those banks then? Is that where you got your money from?”

“Well I'm afraid not,” said Cassidy silkily. “I had to work a little harder for it than that.”

Emboldened by the aptness of his retort, Cassidy now undertook an examination of his host as frank as that which he himself had recently undergone. The garment which encased his dark legs was neither a skirt nor a bath towel nor yet a kilt, but a very old curtain embroidered with faded serpents and ripped at the edges as if by angry hands. He wore it off the hip, low at the front and higher at the back like a man about to bathe himself in the Ganges. His breast under the black jacket was bare, but garnished with clusters of rich black hair which descended in a thin line down his stomach before opening again into a frank pubic shadow.

“Like it?” his host enquired, handing him a glass.

“I beg your pardon?”

“
Shamus
is the name, lover.
Shamus.
”

Shamus. Shamus de Waldebere . . . look him up in Debrett.

From the direction of the doorway Cassidy heard Frank Sinatra singing about a girl he knew in Denver.

“Hey Helen,” Shamus called over Cassidy's shoulder. “It's not Flaherty after all, it's Cassidy.
Butch
Cassidy. He's come to buy the house now poor Uncle Charlie's dead and gone. Cassidy me old friend, shake hands with a very lovely lady, lately of Troy and now reduced to the abominable state of—”

“How do you do,” said Helen.

“Matrimony,” said Shamus.

She was covered, if not yet fully dressed.

Wife,
he thought glumly. I should have known. The Lady Helen de Waldebere, and all doors closed.

There is no established method, even to a formalist of Cassidy's stamp, of greeting a lady of great family whom you have just met naked in a corridor. The best that he could manage was a hog-like grunt, accompanied by a watery academic smile and a puckering of the eyes, designed to indicate to those familiar with his signals that he was a short-sighted person of minimal libido in the presence of someone who had hitherto escaped his notice. Helen on the other hand, with looks and breeding on her side and time to think in the dressing room, displayed a stately composure. She was even more beautiful dressed than not. She wore a housecoat of devotional simplicity. A high collar enfolded her noble neck, lace cuffs her slender wrists. Her auburn hair was combed long like Juliet's and her feet were still bare. Her breasts, which despite his simulated myopia he could not help remarking, were unsupported, and trembled delicately as she moved. Her hips were similarly unbound, and with each balanced stride a white knee, smooth as marble, peeped demurely through the division of her robe. English to the core, thought Cassidy to his relief, what an entry; what a dash she'd cut in trade. Switching off the wireless with a simple movement of her index finger and thumb, she placed it on the sofa table, smoothed the dust cover as if it were the finest linen, then gravely shook his hand and invited him to sit down. She accepted a drink and apologised for the mess in a low, almost a humble tone. Cassidy said he quite understood, he knew what it was to move, he had been through it several times in the last few years. Somehow, without trying, he managed to suggest that each move had been for the better.

“My God, even moving the
office,
when one has secretaries and assistants, even one's own workmen, it takes months. Literally
months.
So what it's like here . . .”

“Where is your office?” Helen asked politely.

Cassidy's opinion of her rose still higher.

“South Audley Street,” he said promptly. “West One. Just off Park Lane, actually. We went in there last spring.” He wanted to add that she might have read about it in the
Times Business News
but modestly he forebore.

“Oh how
very
nice.” Chastely rearranging her skirts to cover her peerless thighs, she sat down on the sofa.