Cassidy

by Morris West

  …Which shows you the tricks that memory and an angry imagination can play. When I saw him in the church, huddled in a heavy greatcoat, I was surprised how small he was. When I touched his shoulder I could feel the bones under the thick tweed. The face he turned to me was yellow and emaciated, the eyes sunk back in the skull. But he could still raise the old mocking Cassidy grin.

  ‘Surprised, sonny boy?’

  I was shocked to the marrow. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the empty church.

  ‘Charles! What the hell’s happened to you?’

  He gestured towards the sanctuary and the altar.

  ‘One of the Almighty’s little jokes. I’ve just been talking to Him about it; but it’s cold comfort He’s offering. Help me up, will you? These pews are damned hard, and there’s small cover left on my backside.’

  There was a briefcase on the pew beside him. As I helped him to rise he pushed it towards me. It was quite heavy. I wondered how far he had carried it.

  He leaned on my arm as we walked out of the church and I had to ease him into the car like an invalid. He was shivering, so I switched on the engine and waited while the inside of the vehicle warmed up. I needed to talk to him before we got home. There was protocol we had to agree before I let him into our house. The words sounded stiff and graceless, but they were the best I could muster.

  ‘You’re welcome. I’m glad for Pat’s sake that you’ve come. We’re alone in the house just now. The children are at school until Friday, Clare’s in France. So we’ll have time to talk things out and get to know each other again. But there’s a warning, Charles. Don’t play games – with any of us. I won’t stand for it.’

  ‘Games?’ He gave a small, barking laugh, with no humour in it at all. ‘Games, is it? I’m under sentence of death, sonny boy. Can’t you read it in my face.’

  ‘Living or dying, Charles, the warning holds. You’ve caused enough hurt. So mind your manners in my house – and don’t call me sonny boy ever again! My name’s Martin; Martin Gregory, in case you’ve forgotten. Pat and our children are Gregorys too.’

  ‘Well, now…’ The words came out in a long exhalation. ‘I can’t quarrel with the proposition – and I’m too tired to fight with you. Do you want to shake hands on it?’

  His skin felt cold and clammy. I had the feeling that the bones were fragile and would snap if I pressed too hard. I asked him: ‘What’s the sickness, Charles?’

  ‘Secondary hepatic carcinoma. The primaries are in my gut somewhere. Nothing anyone can do. I’ll stay mobile as long as I can, then I’ll go into a hospice. The arrangements are all made.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Three weeks. My doctor in Sydney did the first scans. There was little doubt what I had. I swore him to secrecy, flew to New York and went into Sloan-Kettering for more tests. Once the diagnosis was confirmed I sent word back to Cabinet that I was taking a month’s holiday in the Caribbean. Instead I came here.’

  ‘So, nobody knows you’re ill or where you are.’

  ‘Not yet. Parliament’s in recess. It’s mid-summer in Australia; my Deputy Premier’s holding the fort. So nobody’s missing me too much. Which is just as well, because as soon as I break the news all hell’s going to break loose. The heavies will be out gunning for me. With any luck, I’ll be dead before they find me.’

  ‘What in God’s name is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just what it says; but I’ll explain it better with a couple of drinks under my belt. Can we go now?’

  ‘In a moment. Where are you staying in London?’

  ‘With an old and dear friend, a lady of title in Belgravia. She’s got a good doctor close handy and he’s promised to rush me off to St. Marks at the first signs of dissolution. Now will you get me out of this bloody weather?… I hope you’ve got a decent whiskey in the house. Some of the stuff they’re peddling now is like turpentine!’

  ‘Are you sure you’re allowed to drink?’

  ‘I’m allowed to do any damn thing I choose. I’m going to be a long time dead!’

  As we crawled home to Richmond through the peak-hour traffic, I told him: ‘Pat’s going to be very upset.’

  Cassidy shrugged wearily.

  ‘There’s no way to break it gently. One look at me and she’ll read it all.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get in touch before? Why did you wait so long?’

  He was after me instantly; snap-snap like an old turtle.

  ‘Because I didn’t need you then. I need you now.’

  ‘Your manners haven’t improved, Charles. I hope you’ve got a gentler answer for Pat.’

  ‘It isn’t Pat I’m talking to; it’s you, Martin. You were the stone in my shoe always: too bright by half, and righteous as bloody Cromwell. The only way I could get to my daughter, my grandchildren – even my own wife! – was through you. I gagged on that. I still do.’

  ‘You’re past me now, Charles. Soon you’ll be face to face with your daughter. Be gentle with her.’

  ‘I’ve got a whole stable full of speech-writers,’ said Charles Parnell Cassidy irritably. ‘I need a new one like a pain in the arse!’

  As it turned out, very few words were needed or said. When Cassidy walked in, Pat’s face crumpled into a mask of grief and she clung to him, sobbing helplessly. Cassidy held her against his shrunken body and crooned over her. ‘There, child, there! It’s all for the best. You’ll see. It’s all for the best.’

  I didn’t see it that way at all. I’ve always thought that piece, about everything being for the best in the best of all possible worlds, was opium for idiots. But this moment belonged to Pat and not to me; so I took myself off to the study, poured myself a large drink and waited for father and daughter to join me.

  Cassidy was up to something, though I was damned if I could see what it was. I didn’t believe one word of his blarney about kiss and make up before he passed on to bargain with his maker. He wasn’t made like that. If he couldn’t cheat the headsman, he’d have a damned good crack at cheating the devil – and I was the patsy he’d picked to help him.

  Churlish and obsessive as it sounds, I knew the old monster too well. Give him half an opening and he’d have his thumbs on your windpipe – and you’d be dead before he was.

  He came to the study alone, lugging the heavy briefcase, which he pushed under the desk with his foot. As I poured his drink he told me: ‘Pat’s putting on a new face. She’ll call us when dinner’s ready… She tells me you’re a good husband and you make her happy. My thanks for that.’

  ‘We make each other happy.’

  ‘Good. I’m leaving the bulk of my estate to her and the children.’

  ‘What about Clare?’

  ‘She’s a beneficiary under a trust. The provisions are quite generous. I’ve named you as executor of the will. I hope you’ll accept the job.’

  ‘If you want, of course.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Now I’d like you to do a favour for Pat and me.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Call Clare. She’s still your wife. She has a right to know what’s happened – what’s going to happen to you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged wearily. ‘We dispensed with each other a long time ago. Anything more is just courtesy.’

  ‘You owe her that, surely.’

  He was instantly hostile.

  ‘After I’m dead you dispose of my affairs! Until then, I tally my own accounts, thank you!’

  ‘I’m reminding you of a debt, Cassidy!’

  For a moment I thought he would attack again; but, to my surprise, he grinned and raised his glass in an ironic toast.

  ‘To all the bloody righteous! Christ! You’re a stiffnecked son-of-a-bitch, Martin. You won’t give an inch, even to a dying man!’

  ‘With your record, do you blame me?’

  He laughed and I laughed too. Then he was off on another tack.

  ‘Tell me, Martin, do you have a strongroom at your pla
ce of business?’

  ‘We do indeed, the latest and the best. Why?’

  ‘I want you to deposit my briefcase there first thing in the morning. The combination is set at the day, month and year of Pat’s birth. You open it only after my death.’

  ‘Any special instructions about the contents?’

  ‘The instructions are inside in a sealed envelope, with my will. Everything else is on microfiche, classified and cross-indexed, with access codes to the original documents. You’ll find everything very clear. I’ve always been a methodical fellow, as you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to know you better. I mean that.’

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  ‘Don’t apologise! It was I who wasted the years, not you.’

  ‘Is there any reason why you can’t spend the rest of your time with us?’

  ‘Yes, there is. Her name’s Marian. She’s a great lady. We’re comfortable together and I don’t want to hurt her feelings. Which reminds me… I don’t want the scandal of dying in her bed, or being carted away in an ambulance from her apartment. So far as the press is concerned, I want it reported that I’ve passed away peacefully in the bosom of my family. It’s not too much to ask, is it? A small white lie or two for the sake of posterity?’

  Then I saw his ploy – or thought I did – and it set me laughing until the tears rolled down my face. Cassidy was only mildly amused.

  ‘What’s so funny? Everyone rewrites history. Why shouldn’t my part of it have a happy ending?… Besides, you ought to be thinking of Pat and the kids. They’ll be the ones hurt by a scandal. I’ll be dead and past caring.’

  He’d made his point. I told him I’d do my best to give him a pious send-off. I don’t know why I used the word: but Cassidy was pleased by the flavour of it.

  ‘Pious! That’s good… “iustus piusque”. It fits, don’t you think? Charles Parnell Cassidy, just and dutiful even to the end. You might find a Latinist good enough to build it into my epitaph… oh, that’s another thing! I’ve got a State funeral coming to me. I don’t intend to miss it. I’ve left orders to embalm me and fly me back so I can enjoy the spectacle of all my enemies crowding around the graveside to make sure I’m buried…’ He held out his glass. ‘Anyway, no more of death tonight. Pour me another drink, a large one, if you please, and I’ll tell you the marvellous tale of the three girls in Piccadilly…’

  By the time Pat came to call us to dinner, I was beginning to warm to him as I had in the days when I devilled for him in Sydney. Call him all the names in the book, the man still had style. He was suffering. He was humiliated by his infirmities. He was dissolving every day towards extinction. Yet he could still manage that louche, loping strut of the Celtic playboy.

  His daughter had style too. I knew her as I knew my own pulsebeat. She was bleeding for Cassidy, crying for the years he had stolen from her, but she still chatted happily and chuckled at his jokes and was instant with small solicitudes. I have to admit that he was tender with her too. The old rasping wit was tempered to an elegiac humour. If he didn’t exactly beat his breast with a stone, he did have the grace to say ‘mea culpa’ for the failure of his own marriage and the mischief he had tried to do to ours.

  I couldn’t love him but I wanted to trust him. I wanted to pay him filial respect and smooth out the last rough days for him, but I dared not do it. Every instinct told me I had to be wary of him until the stake was driven through his heart and the flowers were growing on his grave. The best I could manage was a show of cordiality so that Pat’s dinner party would not be spoiled.

  We had finished dessert and Pat was in the kitchen making coffee when the key word I had heard and lost popped back into my head.

  ‘The heavies… You said the heavies would be gunning for you, Charles. What did you mean?’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Immediately he was back in the greasepaint, the old ham playing to his gullible public. ‘A trade-word, nothing more! You know the way a Labor Caucus works. If you don’t toe the line they wheel in the heavies to twist your arm and stamp on your toes and call in your IOUs and remind you of the nights you spent in Minnie Murphy’s whorehouse. I knew how to deal with them; so they didn’t worry me too much.’

  ‘But they’re worrying you now.’

  ‘The hell they are!’ His indignation had a fine terminal flourish. ‘What can they do? Dig up my coffin and scatter the bones?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m asking you.’

  ‘They can do nothing. It’s just that I’m tired of arguments and deals and whiskey oratory and the smell of cheap cigars at midnight. If Caucus knew the state I’m in they’d have a deputation in London within 48 hours to talk succession and ask for my private papers. I don’t want that. I can’t cope with it… Do you have a respectable port in the house?’

  I knew I’d get nothing more out of him. That Irish two-step is a foolproof act. They teach it in seminaries to candidates for the priesthood and there’s an intensive course for bishops and Ministers of the Crown. Cassidy had passed it summa cum laude.

  I offered him the decanter of port but he asked me to pour for him. When he raised the glass I saw that his hand was trembling and that there was a dew of perspiration on his forehead and his upper lip. Clearly he was in distress. I suggested he lie down and let me call a doctor. No! He would finish his port. Then I could drive him to Belgravia. And he didn’t want Pat to come with us. He hated farewells. Amen, so be it!

  To tell the truth, I was glad Pat wouldn’t have to cope with him, and I wouldn’t have to argue myself through my quite paranoid dislike and distrust of the man. I would deliver him back to his Lady Marian, then come home and make love to my wife. Which was another thing I didn’t like to dwell on: my dislike of Cassidy made me lust the more after the woman I had taken away from him.

  We drove the first part of the way in silence. Cassidy was getting worse. He lay back in the seat, eyes closed, sucking in air to oxygenate his thickened lungs and steady his heart beat. Between gasps he managed to tell me that he was lapsing into cardiac arrhythmia and that I should notify his doctor and then drive him straight to hospital. He fished in his pocket and brought out a card with his physician’s emergency number on it.

  I pulled into a small garden square with a telephone booth on the corner and called the doctor. He told me he would meet us at St. Mark’s. As I went back to the car I saw Cassidy take a capsule from a small enamelled comfit box. He palmed the capsule into his mouth, shoved the comfit box back in his fob pocket, then lay back, panting for air. I pulled away from the kerb and drove as fast as I dared towards St. Mark’s Hospital, whose grim, Victorian buildings belie the mercy that is dispensed there to cancer sufferers.

  Just past Harley Street, a motorcycle patrolman pulled me over to the kerb. He told me I was twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. I told him why. He took one look at my passenger and then rode in front of me all the way to St. Mark’s. By the time we got there, Charles Parnell Cassidy was dead.

  2

  Cassidy’s doctor, an urbane grey-haired fellow in his middle fifties, gave me a brief greeting, asked me to wait and then went into conference with the house physician. Half an hour later he came back and asked me to join him for coffee in the staff room. He offered his sympathies – and a summation as bland as butter.

  ‘…These sudden collapses are quite common with terminal patients. Quite frankly, I’m surprised the man stayed on his feet so long. He was riddled with secondaries. There was minimal hepatic and renal function. I’d say it was a happy release… There are no problems about the death certificate. I’ve seen all his X-rays and the reports from Sloan-Kettering. I’ve been treating him long enough to issue the document without qualms. You can pick it up on your way out, and sign for his personal effects at the same time… He told me you were his executor. I presume you’ll inform his government and make arrangements for the obsequies… I understand you’ve never met Marian… I’ll break the news to her. She’s prepared, of course, b
ut she’ll need someone to hold her hand. She and Cassidy were close – very close… Well, if there’s nothing else, Mr. Gregory, I’ll be running along. My card, in case there are any queries, though there shouldn’t be. My respects and sympathies to your wife. Try to explain to her that it was a happy release. Cassidy was spared a lot of pain… Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, doctor.’

  And goodnight to you, Charles Parnell Cassidy, cold and pallid on your mortuary slab… Now I’m the guardian of what they used to call your relicts: your wife, your daughter, the grandchildren you never acknowledged, whatever secrets are locked in that briefcase you kicked under my desk…

  It was one-thirty in the morning when I got home. I had hardly set foot inside the door when Pat challenged me.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? He was dying when he left the house. I wanted to be with him but he wouldn’t have me!’

  I reached out to take her in my arms but she pushed me away.

  ‘Don’t touch me! Not yet… Please, Martin!’

  I was stunned. In all the years of our marriage neither of us had ever rejected a caress from the other. Then a small cold finger of fear began probing round my heartstrings. It was as if Cassidy’s implacable spirit had taken up lodging in his daughter’s body and was challenging me from her tearless eyes and her tight, pale lips. This time, however, I was in no position to fight. I suggested gently that we could both use a drink.

  She poured a stiff whiskey for me and a glass of mineral water for herself. We made no toast and the liquor burned my gullet as it went down. Then Pat made an apology so formal and detached that it hurt more than the rebuff.

  ‘I don’t mean to hurt you, Martin. Truly I don’t. I love you, but that’s beside the point… Here and now you threaten me…’

  ‘You don’t believe that!’

  ‘It’s true. Tonight at dinner you were trying so hard to be civilised and compassionate, but you were just as unforgiving as my father was. I felt as if I were watching two stallions battling to the death.’

  ‘And that’s why you can’t bear me to touch you? – You blame me for your father’s death?’