The Naive and Sentimental Lover (59 page)

“My watch actually. It must be in the bathroom.” He returned the glass, empty.

“Lover.”

“Yes.”

“Look er . . . I know you're going to keep her in the style to which you're accustomed. But don't er . . . don't let her get her hands on a lot of money.
You
know.”

They tried both bathrooms, but the watch was not in either of them.

“And er . . . on the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“The other thing, you know.” He bucked his pelvis. “What we did in Paris,
you
know. Watch her. She'll do anything to get pregnant, anything. We'd a flat once up in Durham, we had the builders in. She went through the whole lot of them just on the off chance. Painters, plasterers, masons, the lot.”

“I don't believe you,” said Cassidy.

They returned to the front door.

“You didn't hit me though, did you?”

“What will you do?” Cassidy asked after rather a long silence. “Now.”

“Get pissed. Have a little drink with the Elderberries.”

“
Hurry up!
” Helen called. “For Christ's sake, we'll miss the train!”

“You just can't alter him,” they heard Beth Elderman say. “He's always been a ditherer, he always will be. He drove Sandra
mad.
”

“That's why Mark's so wet,” said the largest girl.

“Great people,” said Shamus. “I love them all. Honest, straightforward. Might play Fly with them. Teach the kids.”

“And the new book's all right, is it?”

“Finished,” said Shamus, without expression. “It's all about you, actually. And immortality. The eternal survival of Aldo Cassidy.”

“I'm glad I provided the material.”

“I'm glad
I
did.”

“
Cassidy!
” Helen called, very angry.

“I've got to go now,” said Cassidy, taking Helen's point, “or we'll miss the train.”

“Attaboy. Be brave.”

“Goodbye.”

“Chippie chippie,” said Shamus in his poofy voice. “Love to the Bentley. Er lover.”

“Yes.”

“Not to miss the train but er let us in on something, will you? That waitress down at the station buffet there, the one with the tits.”

“Maria,” said Cassidy automatically.

“Tell us, does she oblige, do you know? I had the definite feeling yesterday that she was fumbling my hand when I gave her the coffee money.”

“Well they do say she's a bit fast.”

“How much?”

“Fifty francs. Maybe more.”

Shamus' hand was already outstretched.

“It's for when I'm on my own you see. I'm going to need a spot of distraction.” Cassidy gave him a hundred. “Thanks. Thanks very much indeed. Pay you back, lover. Promise.”

“That's all right.”

“And—er—on the general theme.”

“Which one?” Cassidy asked, definitely
not
thinking of the train, which he definitely intended to catch, but
definitely.
The general theme of God, perhaps? Of the union of souls? Of Keats, death, taking and not giving? Of kites, or Schiller; or the threat of China to the pram trade? Or something more personal perhaps, such as the slow atrophy of a loving soul worn down to very little any more?

“Money,” said Shamus.

At first, Cassidy could not recognise his smile. It belonged to other faces; faces not present, till then, in the worlds which he and Shamus had explored together. Faces weakened by need, and failure, and dependence. It was a smile that accused even while it supplicated; that haunted with its first dawning, imparting without change both allegiance and contempt; a smile from loser to winner, when both had run the same financial race. “Aldo old boy,” it said. “Cassidy old man. A thousand would see me right.” A shifty, sandy smile worn with a good suit fraying at the cuffs, and a silk shirt fraying at the collar: “After all old boy, we were neck and neck once, weren't we, before you hit it lucky?”

“What do you need?” Cassidy asked. His custom, till then, had been to establish the minimum and halve it. “We'll have to be quick actually.”

“Couple of thousand?” said Shamus, as if it were nothing to either of them really; just a thing that friends arranged between themselves and forgot.

“I'll make it five,” said Cassidy, and wrote him a cheque, quickly because of the train.

He did not look at Shamus as he gave it him, he was too ashamed; and he never knew what Shamus did with it, whether he folded it away, Kurt-style, like a clean handkerchief, or read it after the lesson of Old Hugo, from the date to the signature, and then the back, in case. But he did hear him mutter the one word Cassidy was praying to God he wouldn't say:

“Thanks.”

And he knew he had seen his first dead body, it stood for all the rest he would ever see; dead dreams, lives ended, no point.

“Just coming,” he called to Helen.

“Pay you back one day lover.”

“No hurry,” said Cassidy, though actually there
was
a hurry in a way because Swiss trains are punctual.

He climbed on to the toboggan.

“It's on your wrist,” Shamus called after him, meaning his watch.

He could not possibly have seen it, for Cassidy had pulled his cuffs right down, in the style of Christopher Robin.

 

“
Whatever
were you up to?” Helen demanded. “I've been sitting here
freezing
for hours. Look at my hair.”

One of the children had found a bag of rice, and was flinging it at them in handfuls. The snow was falling steadily, the flakes thicker.

“I lost my watch,” said Cassidy.

“I'd have thought you
could
have done without it for once,” she said. “Seeing that it's made us miss the train.”

The next moment, a dozen willing hands propelled them into the darkness, the children's merry screams of “Good luck” faded behind them, and the happy pair was hurtling ever faster down the hill, already blinded by the icy streams of racing snowflakes.

The station was empty and very cold and the train was quite indisputably gone.

The next one could be late, the guard said, there was a lot of snow higher up.

“There's a lot down here too,” Cassidy replied jovially, still brushing himself clean—clean also of the guilt of dawdling—but the guard did not care for jokes apparently, nor was he of the tippable class. He was a big, rugged man, not unlike Alastair a thousand years before him, but his rocky face was set against all pleasantries.

“Well ask him
how
late,” Helen told him.

“How late?” Cassidy asked, in French.

The guard made no gesture at all, neither of answering nor refusing to answer. But after staring at Helen for quite a long time, silently closed the hatch on them and locked it from the inside.

“
How late?
” Helen shouted, hammering on the little door. “The
bugger,
look at that.”

They had fallen several times on the way down: Cassidy reckoned five. The first time they agreed it was funny; the second time, the suitcase came undone and Cassidy had to stumble like an Arctic explorer through the falling snow, looking for Sandra's clothes. After that, the falling was not funny at all. Helen said it was a lousy toboggan and Cassidy said you couldn't really blame it. Helen said she had thought he
knew
how to drive it, otherwise she would not have consented to come on it; she would have walked and at least remained dry.
Real
toboggans were wooden, she said, she had had one as a child. She hammered again, shouted “Bastard” through the chink, so Cassidy suggested they have a drink and try again in a few minutes.

“We can always go to Bristol,” he said.

“To
where?
”

“It was a joke,” said Cassidy.

“
Dithering
like that,” said Helen contemptuously. “If you'd
wanted
to go away with me you'd
never
have dithered.”

But still.

 

In the buffet, a group of English ladies in blue-banded pullovers was sitting at the English Table. Seeing Helen and Cassidy enter, a beautiful, thin lady with a deaf-aid beckoned them over.

“You old
devil,
” she said cheerfully to Cassidy, taking his wrist in her thin, dry hand. “You never even told us you were coming. You're a
devil,
” she repeated, as if he, not she, were deaf. “Hullo Sandra, dear, you look absolutely frozen.” But men were her preference. “Darling,” she asked him confidentially, “have you
heard
what Arnie's trying to do with the Championships this year?”

In a black rage, Helen accepted a glass of hot wine and drank it very slowly, staring at the clock.

“He wants a giant slalom at Mürren, my dear, can you imagine. Well I mean you know what happened
last
time we went to Mürren . . .”

Breaking away at last, Cassidy went back to the ticket office. It was still closed, there was no one in sight, and the snow was falling much harder, masking the village lights and casting a deep silence over the whole white world.

“They say about half an hour,” he told Helen, who had moved to an empty table. It seemed inappropriate to give her bad news, so he had invented a small hope. “They're working flat out but at the moment it's almost beating them.”

He ordered more hot wine.

“Got your passport all right?” he asked, trying to cheer her up.

“Of course I haven't. Shamus burnt it.”

“Oh.”

“What do you mean:
oh.
You can get a duplicate. Any consulate or legation will provide one. We can go to Berne. Once the train comes, if it ever does.”

“We'll get one tomorrow,” Cassidy promised her.

“I'll need more luggage too. All that stuff's
soaked.
”

She began crying into her folded hands.

“Oh no,” Cassidy whispered. “Oh Helen, please.”

“What will we
do,
Cassidy, what will we
do?
”

“Do?” he said gallantly. “We'll do exactly what we said we'd do. We'll have a lovely holiday, then I'll go into politics and you'll be an M.P.'s wife and . . .”

From the English Table, the beautiful lady looked on with great compassion.

“Is she having a baby?” she called pleasantly. “It usually makes them odd.”

Cassidy ignored her.

“It's only reaction,” Cassidy promised her, holding her hand and fighting to win a smile. “Sorry about it . . . it's not because you're sad.”

“Don't
apologise,
” said Helen, stamping her foot. “Not
your
fault.”

“Well it is in a way,” Cassidy insisted. “I got you into this.”

“It's not. Love's nobody's fault. It just happens. And when it happens you have to do what it says. There are winners and losers. Like in everything else. We're the winners, that's all. Although we missed the train.”

“I know,” Cassidy agreed. “We're very lucky.” And pressed his handkerchief into her palm.

“It isn't
luck
either.”

“Well what is it?” Cassidy asked.

“How should I know? Why did you take so long?”

“What for?”

“To say
yes.
It was
exactly
the same as missing the train. There they were, all waiting, and you being the ardent lover and God knows what and Shamus being so helpful, and all you do is dither while I
sit
there and look a complete fool in front of a
doctor
of all people, and his brilliant wife. Why do you have to know such brainy people?”

Drying her eyes, she saw the guard sitting at a table by the door, drinking schnapps and coffee.

“What the hell's
he
doing there?” she demanded. “He's supposed to be waiting for the train.”

Off duty, the guard was quite a different man. “Hallo,” he called, raising his glass. “Hallo. Cheerio. Hallo.
Ja. Bonjour.
”

“Cheers,” said Cassidy. “You speak English eh? Very good.
Très bon.
”

“No train,” said the guard with great satisfaction, as he drank. “Too much snows.”

He drank again, as if a little more of the same could do him no harm. As he drank, he walked towards them, bent on conversation; he loomed very large and very drunk, and his eyes were on Helen, not at all on Cassidy. So when the pistol shot came it was almost a relief.

 

There was no other sound. None. It was not at all a question of distinguishing this bang from conflicting ones: a door slammed, a car was backfiring; a slate from the station roof. The snow had thrown a blanket over everything; only pistols were exempt. Also, the shot was close. Not in the buffet certainly; but near to it, and it was followed by a chilling howl, midway between pain and fury; a long, baying howl of the kind that by tradition haunts deserted marshes, and ends as this howl ended with a choking, agonised sob, dwindling to nothing; a howl to chill the blood, and arrest drunken railwaymen in mid-movement.

“
My
God,” he remarked, with the accent on the possessive pronoun. “They shot the bitch, I think.”

He was still laughing at this apposite snatch of Americana as Cassidy raced past him into the station forecourt.

 

The Russian snow was tumbling crazily through the downbeams of the railway lamps. The line was covered over. A road, a path, a fence, a house, it was already buried by a new generation.
I'm Troy. There's seven fucking civilisations buried in me and each one's more rotten than the other.
Even the nearest buildings were caving in. The newspaper kiosk was on its knees; the eyes of the Hotel Angelhorn were closed and bleeding; in the high street, not a shop or church or ice palace but the remorseless snow was pounding at its doors, blotting out roofs, skirmishing in the forecourts. Wildly, hand to his eyes, Cassidy looked about him. Footprints, he thought; search for footprints. There were none but his own.