The Naive and Sentimental Lover (6 page)

Towards her husband she showed a greater reserve. Her eyes seldom left his face and Cassidy did not fail to notice their darting expression of concern. How well, as always, did he understand a pretty woman's feelings! A drunken husband was liability enough. But who could tell what other blows her pride had suffered in the last months, the fights with lawyers, the towering death duties, the painful partings from family retainers, the tattered keepsakes in the silent desk? And how many potential purchasers in that time had swept brutally through the treasured chambers of her youth, mouthed their gross objections, and left without a word of hope?

I will ease her burden, he decided; I will take over the conversation.

Having concisely rehearsed the reasons for his unheralded arrival, he laid the blame squarely at the door of Grimble and Outhwaite:

“I've nothing against them, they're very good people in their way. I've dealt with them for a number of years and I shall go on dealing with them no doubt, but like all these old firms they get complacent. Slack.” Under the velvet, the steel showed. “I mean to take this up with them in quite a big way as a matter of fact.”

Shamus, who had crossed his legs under the curtain and was leaning back in an attitude of critical reflection, merely nodded with energetic approval and said, “Attaboy Cassidy,” but Helen assured him that his visit was perfectly convenient, he was very welcome at any time and it made no difference really:

“
Does
it Shamus?”

“None at all, lover,” said Shamus heartily. “We're having a ball.”

And resumed, with a complacency amounting almost to pride of ownership, his study of his unexpected guest.

“I'm so sorry about the smoke,” said Helen.

“Oh it's quite all right,” said Cassidy restraining himself with difficulty from wiping away a tear. “I rather like it actually. A wood fire is one of the things we just can't buy in London. Not at any price I'm afraid.”

“It's all my own fault,” Shamus confessed. “We ran out of firewood so I sawed up the table.”

Shamus and Cassidy laughed loudly at this good joke and Helen after a moment's doubt joined in. Her laugh, he noticed with approval, was modest and admiring; he did not care for women's humour as a rule, fearing it to be directed against himself, but Helen's was different, he could tell: she knew her place and laughed only with the men.

“Now there's a terrible thing about mahogany.” Leaping to his feet, Shamus wheeled away to where the bottle stood. “It just won't bloody burn like the lower-class woods. It positively resists martyrdom. Now I count that very bad manners indeed, don't you? I mean at a certain point we should all go gentle into that good night, don't you think so, Cassidy?”

Though the question was facetious; Shamus put it with great earnestness, and waited motionless until he had his answer.

“Oh rather,” said Cassidy.

“He agrees,” said Shamus, with apparent relief. “Helen, he agrees.”

“Of course he does,” said Helen. “He's being polite.” She leaned across to him. “It's weeks since he met a soul,” she confided in a low voice. “He's been getting rather desperate, I'm afraid.”

“Don't give it a thought,” Cassidy murmured. “I love it.”

 

“Hey Cassidy, tell her about your Bentley.” Shamus' brogue was all over the words: the drink had brought it to full flower. “Hear that, Helen? Cassidy's got a Bentley, a dirty big long one with a silver tip, haven't you lover?”

“Have you really?” said Helen over the top of her glass. “Gosh.”

“Well not new of course.”

“But isn't that rather a good thing? I mean aren't the old ones
better
in lots of ways?”

“Oh absolutely, well in my judgment anyway,” said Cassidy. “The pre-sixty-three models were a
much
superior job. Well certainly this one has turned out pretty well.”

Before he knew it, with only the smallest prompting from Shamus, he was telling her the whole story, how he had been driving through Sevenoaks in his Mercedes—he'd had a Merc in those days, very functional cars of course, but no real handwriting if they knew what he meant—and had spotted a Bentley in the showroom of Caffyns.

“In Sevenoaks, hear that?” Shamus called. “Fancy buying a Bentley in
Sevenoaks.
Jesus.”

“But that's half the fun of it,” Cassidy insisted. “Some of the very finest models come from as far away as India. Maharajahs bought them for safaris.”

“Hey, lover.”

“Yes?”

“You're not a maharajah yourself by any chance?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Only in this sort of light you can't always see the colour of a person's skin. Are you a Catholic then?”

“No,” said Cassidy pleasantly. “Wrong again.”

“But you are holy?” he insisted, returning to an earlier theme. “You do
worship?
”

“Well,” said Cassidy doubtfully, “Christmas and Easter, you know the kind of thing.”

“Would you call yourself a New Testament man?”

“Please go on,” said Helen. “I'm riveted.”

“Or would you say you were more in favour of the barbaric and untrammelled qualities of the Ancient Jews?”

“Well . . . neither or both I suppose.”

“You see this fellow Flaherty in County Cork now—”

“
Please,
” said Helen, directing a second quelling glance at her husband.

Well, Cassidy had had this feeling that the car was
right,
he couldn't explain it really, and so in the end he'd stopped and gone back to take a second look. And anyway to cut a long story short this young salesman hadn't pushed him at all but recognised one of the breed, so to speak, and in ten minutes they'd done the deal. Cassidy wrote out a cheque for five thousand pounds dated that same day and drove away in the car.

“Goodness,” Helen breathed. “How
terribly brave
.”

“Brave?” Shamus repeated. “Brave? Listen he's a lion. You should have seen him out there on the terrace. He frightened the hell out of me. I'll tell you that for nothing.”

“Well of course I did have the weekend to stop the cheque,” Cassidy admitted a little injudiciously, and would have gone on with a great deal more of the same thing—the Automobile Association's report for instance which had been one long paean of technical praise, the car's genealogy which he had only stumbled on months after he had bought her—if Shamus, suddenly bored, had not suggested that Helen show him round the house.

“After all, if he's a compulsive buyer, maybe he'll buy us too, eh: I mean Jesus, we can't pass over an opportunity like this. Now Cassidy have you brought your cheque book? Because if you haven't you'd best get in that grey bedpan and hurry back to the West End and fetch it, I'm telling you. I mean we don't show the house to just
anyone,
don't you know. After all, if you're not God, who
are
you?”

Once more Cassidy's seismographic spirit recorded Helen's reticence and understood it. The same worried glance troubled her serious eyes, the same innate courtesy prevented her from putting her anxiety into words. “We can hardly show it to him in the dark, darling,” she said quietly.

“Of course we can show it to him in the bloody dark. We've got the lamp haven't we? Christ, he could buy the place by Braille if he felt like it, couldn't you, lover? I mean look here, Cassidy's quite clearly a
very influential person
and
very influential persons
who can wander round Sevenoaks signing cheques for five thousand pounds don't bloody well like having their time wasted, Helen, that's something you have to learn in life—”

Cassidy knew it was time for him to speak. “Oh now look here
please
don't worry. I can perfectly well come another time. You've been so good already—”

In an effort to make his intention real, he rose falteringly to his feet. The woodsmoke and the whisky had had more effect on him than he knew. His head was dizzy and his eyes were smarting.

“I can
perfectly
well come back another time,” he repeated foolishly. “You must be tired out, what with all the packing and making do.”

Shamus was also standing, leaning his hands on Helen's shoulders, and his dark, inward eyes were watching Cassidy intently.

“So why don't we make a date for next week?” he suggested.

“You mean you don't like the house,” Shamus said in a flat, menacing tone, more as a statement than a question. Cassidy hastened to protest but Shamus rode him down. “It's not good enough for you, is that it? No central heating, no poncy fittings like you've got in Londontown?”

“Not at all, I merely—”

“What do you want for Christ's sake? A tart's parlour?”

Cassidy in his day had handled scenes like this before. Angry trade unionists had beaten his rosewood desk, deprived competitors had shaken their fists in his face, drunken maids had called him fat. But finally such situations had remained within his control, occurring for the greater part on territory he had already bought, among people he had yet to pay. The present situation was altogether different, and neither the whisky nor his misted vision did anything to improve his performance.

“Of
course
I like the house. I thought I'd made that abundantly clear, as a matter of fact it's the best I've seen for a long time. It's got everything I've been looking for . . . peace . . . seclusion . . . garage space.”

“More,” Shamus exhorted.

“Antiquity . . . what else do you want me to say?”

“Then come on with you!”

A brilliant, infecting smile had replaced the brief cloud of anger. Grabbing the whisky bottle in one hand and the lantern in the other, Shamus beckoned them brightly up the great staircase. Thus for the second time that evening Cassidy found himself conveyed, not altogether against his liking, upon a compulsory journey that seemed to his swimming consciousness to alternate with each new step between past and future, illusion and reality, drunkenness and sobriety.

“Come, Flaherty!” Shamus cried. “God's house has many mansions, and me and Helen will show you the whole bloody lot, won't we, Helen?”

“Will you follow me?” Helen asked with an air hostess' charming smile.

 

Sir Shamus and Lady Helen de Waldebere. It was symptomatic of Cassidy's confused state that he never stopped to consider whose heritage was actually for sale. Having cast Shamus as a kind of grounded cavalry officer drinking away the humiliations of a horseless existence, he vested in Helen the fortitude and dignified resignation which properly accompany the evanescence of a Great Line; and never asked himself how it had come about within the probabilities of a conventional union that the two of them had passed their childhood in the same house. Even if he had hit upon the question, Helen's bearing would only have added to his bewilderment. She was in her element: the young chatelaine had stepped lightly from her portrait and was showing them her domain. Whatever restraint she had felt in the drawing room was swept aside by her transparent devotion to the task. Solemn, wistful, informative by turn, she guided him with loving familiarity through the labyrinth of mouldering corridors. Cassidy kept close behind her, led by the smell of baby soap and the contra-rotations of her firmly rounded hips; Shamus followed at a distance with the bottle and the lantern, moving on the edge of their discourse or calling after them with harsh ironic jokes. “Hey Cassidy get her to tell you about Nanny Higgins having it off with the vicar at the Servants' Ball.” In the Great Hall he found a pike and fought a shadow duel with his father's ghost; in the planthouse he insisted on presenting Helen with a flowering cactus, and when she accepted it he kissed her for a long time on the nape of her neck. Helen, in her serenity, took it all in good part.

“It's the waiting and the worry,” she explained to Cassidy while Shamus was chanting Gregorian plainsong in the crypt. “It's so frustrating for him.”

“Please,” said Cassidy. “I do understand. Really.”

“Yes, I think you do,” she said casting him a look of gratitude.

“What will he do now? Get a job?” Cassidy asked, in a tone which recognised that, for such as Shamus, employment was the final degradation.

“Who would have him?” Helen asked simply.

She took him everywhere. In hanging dusk with the first stars breaking they patrolled the crumbling battlements and marvelled at the empty moat. By the light of the lantern they stood in awe before worm-eaten four-posters and delved in dust-filled priest holes, they caressed mildewed screens and tapped on panelling honeycombed by beetles. They discussed the problems of heating and Cassidy said small-bore piping would do the least harm. They worked out which rooms could be sealed off with little alteration: how the rewiring could be run behind the skirting boards and how an electrolyte circuit worked perfectly as damp course.