The Naive and Sentimental Lover by John le Carré

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.
    â€œIt turns the house into a dry battery,” Cassidy explained. “It’s not cheap but then what is these days?”
    â€œYou know an awful lot about it,” said Helen. “Are you an architect by any chance?”
    â€œI just love old things,” said Cassidy.
    Behind them, hands clasped, Shamus was chanting the Magnificat.

4
    â€œ Y ou’re a lovely man,” Shamus says quietly, offering him a drink from the bottle. “You’re really a lovely perfect man. Tell us, do you have any theories on the general nature of love?” Tell us, do you have any theories on the general nature of love?”
    The two men are on the Minstrel Gallery. Helen stands below them, gazing through the window, her eyes upon the long view of the chestnut walk.
    â€œWell I think I understand how you feel about the house. Let’s put it that way, shall we?” Cassidy suggests with a smile.
    â€œOh but it’s worse for her, though, far.”
    â€œIs it?”
    â€œUs men, you know, we’re survivors. Cope with anything really can’t we? But them, eh, them.”
    She has her back to them still: the last light from the window shines through the thin housecoat and shows the outline of her nakedness.
    â€œA woman needs a home,” Shamus pronounces philosophically. “Cars, bank accounts. Kids. It’s a crime to deprive them of it, that’s my view. I mean how else are they fulfilled? That’s what I say.”
    One black eyebrow has risen slightly and it occurs to Cassidy, but not with particular force, that Shamus is in some way mocking him, though how is not yet clear.
    â€œI’m sure it’ll work out,” says Cassidy blandly.
    â€œTell me, have you ever had two at once?”
    â€œTwo what?”
    â€œWomen.”
    â€œI’m afraid not,” says Cassidy very shocked; not by the notion, which he has quite often entertained, but by the context in which it is expressed. Could any man blessed with Helen think so base?
    â€œOr three?”
    â€œNot three either.”
    â€œDo you play golf at all?”
    â€œNow and then.”
    â€œHow about squash? Would squash be a game you play?”
    â€œYes, why?”
    â€œI like you to keep fit that’s all.”
    â€œShouldn’t we go down? I think she’s waiting.”
    â€œOh, lover,” says Shamus softly as he takes another pull from the bottle. “A girl like that’ll wait all night for the likes of you and me.”
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    â€œCouldn’t you give it to the National Trust?” Cassidy asked loudly in his boardroom voice as they descended the rickety staircase. “I thought there was some arrangement whereby they maintain the house and let you live in it on condition that you open it to the public so many days a year.”
    â€œAh, the buggers would stink the place out,” Shamus retorted. “We tried it once. The kids peed on the Aubusson and the parents had it off in the orangerie.”
    â€œYou have to pay something for upkeep as well,” Helen explained with another of those appealing glances at her husband that were so sadly eloquent of her distress.
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    Pee-break, Shamus called it. They had left Helen in the drawing room staunching the smoking fire and now they stood shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the moat, listening to their own water trickling over the dry stones. The night was of an alpine majesty. With shaggy splendour the black house rose in countless peaks against the pale sky, where powdery swarms of stars followed the moonlit ridges of the clouds like fireflies frozen into the eternal ice. At their feet a white dew glistened on the uncut grass.
    â€œThe heaventree of stars,” said Shamus. “Hung with humid nightree