The Naïve and Sentimental Lover: A Novel

by John Le Carré

he hummed to himself with that furtive sincerity common to the tone-deaf.

one who had felt the wind of battle but never the fire of it.

Heavy at the waist, short in the leg, a squire always in the making, he possessed those doggedly boyish features, at once mature and retarded, which still convey a dying hope that his pleasures may be paid for by his parents.

Cassidy’s was a car that conveyed rather than transported; a womb, one might even have thought, from whose padded, lubricated interior the occupant had yet to make his entry into the harder world.

There was no within. Cassidy on such occasions concerned himself resolutely with exteriors.

“Not a peep, not a funeral note.”

It’s the end of the world out here. Just the moo cows and the chickadees. And wild rooks, of course, seeking whom they may devour, the buggers.”

It was as though the figure behind the lamp were not a separate figure at all, but his own, mysteriously reflected from the depths of the liquid twilight; as though his swifter, freer self were examining, by the light of that unusual lantern, the features of his pedestrian other half.

“You’re gorgeous, that’s my view. In the first position. No fooling. We haven’t had a bourgeois for years.”

“Jesus. There’s a hearse for a Nondescript.”

I mean it was kind of death in slow motion. Come to think of it, I don’t know how they caught each other up.”

Jesus, I’ve been so bored: reading John Donne to the chickadees.

All they want is fags, telly, and fucks.”

Mistress? Lecherous housemaid? Incestuous sister? A gypsy whore slunk in from the woods? Fiver a bang and free bath after?

There is no established method, even to a formalist of Cassidy’s stamp, of greeting a lady of great family whom you have just met naked in a corridor.

“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,

each waiting for the other to revert to the follies of his parents, so in the end we did, both of us, because we’re inheritors, like everyone else, and because sometimes the only way to punish our parents is to imitate them.

“Of course she won’t. What the hell are you talking about? Do you realise that in an average working day that angel of light eats about ten of us alive? She does not observe, she does not expect to observe, either the inhibitions or the priorities of the English middle class. For all she cares—”

Schiller’s Uber Naïve und Sentimentalische Dichtung;

We’re all that’s left of an army, the rest are dead. The night is dead too, and the dawn is limping after them. They are in a square again but not dancing any more, the dancing is over, no horses either, just an early bitch of Sandra’s, long dead, eyeing them from a doorway.

“It’s singing when you don’t know the bloody words that tears your guts out, lover.”

“And will you please give me your very fullest attention, Dale? What we have in common is the most dreadful, hopeless, fucking awful pessimism. Right?”

“And the other thing we have in common is the most dreadful, awful, hopeless, fucking awful . . . mediocrity.”

You want to throw me out, pramseller: that’s what you want to do. I don’t work, I don’t write, I don’t exist! It’s the fucking audience that’s doing the magic, not me. I am a fraud. Got it? A con man. A fucking clapped-out conjuror with an audience of one.”

“That’s all we are,” Shamus said. “Bloody little glows in a great big dark.”

All this looking for an ideal cow. Don’t do it. There’s a bit of her in all of them and not much in any of them. You have to collect it wide and put it together for yourself.”