Charles Parnell Cassidy – God rest his soul! – was the perfect specimen of an Irish politician. They’re a migratory tribe, so you find them everywhere: Boston, New York, Chile, Vatican City, Liverpool, Peru and Sydney, Australia. They’re hardy, longevitous, resistant to infection by disease or new ideas, little modified by regional influences.
The accent drifts a bit, maybe. The dialect adapts itself to the local patois: but that’s a chameleon’s trick: protective colouring, no more. The rest of it, the sinuous mind, the easy passion, the leery eye, the ready smile, the fine, swaggering, billycock-and-shillelagh walk, the flexible moralities, the bel canto oratory, the black bilious angers, these never change.
Charles Parnell Cassidy could have been anything, from horse-coper to Cardinal – except that he was too bright for the one and not celibate enough for the other. He wanted two things: money and power. First he became a lawyer: taxation and corporation law, what else? Then he made money. How could he fail, with the parcel of brewery shares his old man left him, and his own connections in commerce? After that it was politics – Labor politics of course. Make the loot among the privileged and then get the proletariat to protect it!
He rose like a rocket: one term on the back bench, one in Opposition. Then, with an election looming up, Caucus made him leader of the Parliamentary Party in the State of New South Wales which, as the whole world knows, was founded as a dumping ground for British felons and dispossessed Irish. With golden oratory and charisma poured out like balm in Gilead – not to mention a lot of leg-work and a lot of money spread around the depressed areas of the electorate – Cassidy led Labor to a landslide victory and a ten-year term of office.
It sounds like magic; but it wasn’t. He was a natural. The game was in his genes. He was bred under the same blanket as the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds of Boston, the Moynihans of New York, the Duhigs and the Codys in the Church and the Reagan who used to act in California.
The great Brian Boru sired them all, in the old, far time which is still ‘now’ for the Irish. Cassidy knew them all too, had dined at their tables, corresponded with them – or their womenfolk! – learned how their precinct machines were run and how they paid their scores and exercised their patronage. Then he came back to Sydney and worked up what he had learned into a revised version of the Gospel according to Cassidy:
‘Document everything. If you can’t write it – don’t do it. Let some other mother’s son carry the honey-bucket.
‘Collect all debts in kind or in tax havens. Cash in the local bank is too easy to trace.
‘Never get mad, get even! Remember Shakespeare: a man can smile and smile and still be the son-of-a-bitch he wants to be!
‘Never bet on cards or horses. The electors love a sporting man; they’re suspicious of a gambler.
‘If you need more sex than you’re getting at home, stay away from the whores and find a discreet mistress. The public love a little romance; but they don’t want their elected representatives turning up on pornographic postcards.
‘Nominate your own Police Commissioner; but let another Minister appoint him and run him. That way you’re always the clean-skin and you’ve still got the police in your pocket.
‘Make sure you’ve got a good Party man in every migrant group. You’ll never forgive yourself if the Croats or the Turks cost you a swinging seat.
‘Get some bright women on the front benches. Let them field the curly ones, like abortion and battered wives… A man always sounds like an idiot when he’s talking about a woman’s right to her own body.
‘Never debate political theory. That’s an exercise in futility.
‘Stay clear of professional economists. They can lose you an election and still have tenure at their universities.
‘The law is the ultimate instrument of power. So long as you’re the lawmaker, you’re the man who wields it.’
With a gospel like that, and the gall to practise it, there was no reason why Charles Parnell Cassidy couldn’t have led the country. The Party tried hard to get him into the Federal bull-ring; but his ambitions stopped at the State borders.
‘This is my bailiwick,’ he would say in that soft, blarneying brogue. ‘I know how it runs and how to run it. Why should I want to blow myself up like a great horned toad in the capital? That’s a short-term lease at best – and the tenant always ends under the executioner’s axe. Here’ – an eloquent shrug and smile of deprecation – ‘here I’ll know when it’s time to quit, and I’ll not wait to be pushed.’
The locals cheered him for it, of course. Round the parish pump, the simpler you are, the more they love you – and Cassidy was as simple as a biblical serpent. Of course he didn’t want to quit, for a long time yet; he was coining millions.
I had no idea then – though I have now, by God! – of the size of the empire he was building, through interlocking enterprises inside and outside the country. But during his lifetime the image remained unsullied. He was rich when he was elected. He was entitled to a natural increase of his substance. He wasn’t venal; he wasn’t gaudy. His private charities were generous. He drank little, looked fit, was always coherent. He kept the traffic running, the hospitals open, the streets as safe as they could be in a violent age. The electors felt they were getting their money’s worth.
Of his home-life little was known. While Parliament was in session he lived in a harbourside apartment, cared for by a husband and wife. His hostess at official functions was a young back-bencher whom he was grooming for a junior Ministry. Mrs. Cassidy was said to be a semi-invalid, living in seclusion on their country property. There was one daughter, Patricia, married long since and residing abroad. Clearly the poor fellow had a lonely life but he was respected as a man who carried his cross bravely. The press had given up their routine attempts to ferret out a scandal.
It was all beautifully tidy and stable. Even I, who had stolen his daughter and given sanctuary to his wife when she left him, had to offer a reluctant salute. Once, in a fury, I had called him ‘bog-Irish on the make, trying to buy lace curtains’. Well, he’d made it now. The bogs were generations behind. The lace curtains were long past, too. Charles Parnell Cassidy was the lawmaker, the Lord High Panjandrum, and his writ ran further than I could then imagine.
We went a long way back, Cassidy and I. He gave me my first job after I graduated. In those days he was senior partner of Cassidy, Carmody, Desmond and Gorman. I devilled for him, on the affairs of the Archdiocese of Sydney and the big Catholic Assurance groups. When he saw that I was interested in his daughter he warned me off the course. I was too old for her, he told me, too poor in money and prospects – and, besides, he didn’t like fortune-hunters who expected to marry money instead of working for it.
He could have been testing or teasing, or both; but I’ve got some Irish in me too and I don’t like people treading on the tails of my coat. I told him what he could do with his money and walked out.
A week later I had a job in the legal department of a merchant bank with connections in Switzerland, Paris and London.
Pat and I married soon after, in a civil ceremony, because we couldn’t risk the local clergy forewarning Cassidy or calling the banns from the pulpit. Her mother was in the plot, but when we called to tell Cassidy the news and invite him to a reconciliation dinner, he told us he’d see us both in hell before he’d break bread or drink wine with us. If children were born they’d be bastards in the eyes of Mother Church and he’d want no part of them anyway.
It was as rough and dirty as only the Irish can make a family squabble. It got dirtier still when Clare Cassidy left him two years later and came to join Pat and me and the children in Paris, where I was working for Lazard Frères.
Cassidy, she told us, was a man driven by demons. His case-load at the office had doubled. He was out four nights a week, dining with union leaders or lobbying Party pundits or arguing in committee over strategies and speeches for his campaign. He was playing hard, too, golfing on Wednesdays, racing with the Squadron on Saturdays, hosting or guesting at Sunday barbecues, always with a gaggle of pretty women in attendance.
When Clare protested his philandering, he accused her and us of conspiring to unman him, blacken his name, tear his career to tatters. When we sent him photographs of the grandchildren – a pigeon pair, both beautiful – he handed them to Clare with a shrug and told her, ‘Poor little bastards! I feel sorry for them!’
That was the straw that collapsed the fragile structure of their marriage. Clare Cassidy packed her bags and left. She briefed a roughneck lawyer who convinced Cassidy that if he wanted a fight, he would get it; but if he wanted a separation without scandal and a divorce on demand, the price would be steep, but fair. Cassidy was too bright to push his luck. He was being offered the best of both worlds: a marriage of convenience that kept him clean with the Catholics, a bachelor life-style, a reasonable bill of costs and no one to hold him to account for his later profits. He signed the agreement and trotted on down the triumphal way.
Only Pat refused to be thrust out of her father’s life. Every Christmas she sent him a letter with a sheaf of photographs of the children. Every year the letter was returned unopened. She was hurt, but she took it calmly enough. Duty was done. She was holding the door open. It was up to her father to walk through it.
I believed he never would. He had turned hating into a fine art. For my own part I’d ceased to care. The children were teenagers now. They had three grandparents in working order. One black Irish curmudgeon wouldn’t hurt them too much. We were living in London at that time. I had moved up in the banking hierarchy, with half a dozen well-paid directorships, good friends in the best houses and a crack at the market for the soundest floats.
Then, one bleak Tuesday in February, a note was delivered to me by special messenger. There was no address, no superscription, no ‘Kind Sir, kiss-my-foot’ – nothing but Cassidy’s emphatic script.
I’m supposed to be in New York. I’m here in London. Except for the last rites and the last gasp, I’m a dead man. I’d like to tell my girl I’m sorry and kiss my grandchildren before I go. I’d like to shake your hand, too. If you’re willing, pick me up at the Jesuit church in Mount Street at 5.30 this afternoon. I’ll be sitting in the last pew – like the taxgatherer in the Gospel. If you’re not there by six, I’ll leave and I won’t blame you. Cassidy.
I don’t think I ever hated him so much as I did at that moment. Even if he were dying – and I wouldn’t believe that until I saw the undertakers! – he had no right to sneak back into our lives like some errant schoolboy. Something more was called for: a letter to Pat, flowers, a phone call – some kind of prelude, for Christ’s sake! And what about Clare? Was she to be included in the reconciliation? She was in Paris until Monday. I saw no reason to expose her to needless hurt.
I telephoned Pat, read her the note and asked her what she wanted to do about it. She thought, as I did, that ‘the last gasp and the last rites’ were at least half rhetoric. For the rest, between laughter and tears, she told me: ‘…He never steps out of character, does he? Of course I’m glad he’s come round at last; but I’d still like to spit in his eye for all the good years he spoiled… The children don’t get out of school until the weekend, so you and I will have the worst of it over… I’ll serve a roast of beef for dinner. He’ll like that. And do you have any Glenfiddich in the liquor cupboard? It’s the only Scotch he’ll drink… Mother? We don’t have to worry about her yet. I had a card from her today. She met an elderly American art scholar at Giverney. She likes him very much and she’s going down to Aries with him…’
Great! Mother had her scholar. The kids wouldn’t be home. We’d have the old monster all to ourselves. If I thought it would help – but I knew it wouldn’t – I’d pickle him in Glenfiddich and donate him to the Museum of Natural History: elephantus hibernicus malitiosus, a real rogue elephant from Ireland.
…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 place 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.