They will remember their first night together as so transcendent that they expected light to do the decent thing and retreat from sight. She had warned him that he would have to creep silently from her room in the early hours so as not to be seen by any of the crew, but even as he was getting his things together the cameraman rang from London. Their plane was still on the ground. Normally, such a delay to a tight shooting schedule would have rendered Lily apoplectic. This morning, ‘Ah well,’ was all she said.
She ordered breakfast in her room. For two.
‘Say it again,’ Quaid said.
‘Say what?’
‘For two.’
Was he going to turn out more romantically needy than her, she wondered. She had travelled the world and breakfasted happily alone in a thousand hotels. For two didn’t hold the magic for her it did for him. But she said it and he clutched his heart.
Dread in his soul, milk and water in his heart.
They talked all day, even lunching in bed, waiting for more night.
‘But I don’t care if it never comes,’ he said. ‘I have all the time in the world.’
‘The shoot is only three weeks,’ she reminded him. ‘And we’re in the process of losing a day of it.’
‘There is a life after a shoot,’ he said, waving away consequences with the hand that wasn’t irritating her by drawing absent-minded circles on her thigh.
‘Mr Reckless,’ she said.
‘Why the sarcasm?’
‘Last night you warned me against turning up on your doorstep.’
‘I did no such thing.’
‘You told me about a woman who followed you back from a signing and camped outside your house. Why?’
‘Why did she camp outside my house?’
‘Why did you tell me about her? Are you afraid I might do something similar?’
‘Of course not. I just – well, I don’t know.’
‘I do. You just wanted to remind me you are a married man with responsibilities. As you did when you told me that ringing and not leaving a message made your wife suspicious. I have not forgotten you have a wife.’
‘Then maybe I have.’
‘Don’t say that. If you had forgotten you have a wife you wouldn’t start whenever there’s a knock at the bedroom door. Are you worried she might have followed you from Notting Hill?’
They managed to summon a dark laugh when, that very minute, there was indeed a knock at the door. Housekeeping. No, thank you, they didn’t want the room made up. Fresh towels? Yes. Leave them outside the door, please.
‘Tell them to leave sufficient for two,’ he whispered.
Whether it was the arrival of the towels or the fractious conversation that preceded them that made her decide to take a shower, she couldn’t have said. He decided not to join her under water, disconsolate, pleading tiredness. Wives – just the very mention of wives – spoil everything.
She came out of the bathroom smelling of all the spices of Arabia, abashed and yet brazen, with a towel tied round her head. He was snoozing when she left him and she thought he’d be asleep when she returned, turbanned, looking like a wife herself. He sensed what she was thinking and let himself drift off; when he opened his eyes again she was on the phone to the Pueblo authorities in Taos, pacing the bedroom, trying not to lose her temper. She looked unassailable, turban or no turban. From a knot in her brow a dark shadow, like a storm cloud, formed. Could someone so solemn and significant have been in his arms half the night? After each call she paused to write something down in the blue notebook she was never without. Had the blue notebook been in his arms half the night too?
Years later he will cherish this fond, almost domestic memory of her, which is also a fond domestic memory of himself, part husband, part father, part son, part petitioner, part Ptolemaic holy man. But at the time, as he dozed twitching like a pensioner, he feared he may have taken his foot off the pedal of passion too soon. What if she, coming out of the bathroom, had seen what life with him would be like when the bloom of wrongdoing had faded? She told him she hadn’t had that many lovers, but he assumed that, whoever they were, many were younger than him. A critic had called him boyish but he was more than halfway through any reasonable expectancy of life. Yes, tonight felt like beginning all over again but that was bound to be illusory. He thought he caught her looking at him affectionately, a fond used-up lover already, someone she might mention in passing to the next man she stayed with in a foreign hotel.
She’d shown him her steeliness after he’d been fool enough to warn her against camping out on his doorstep. Well, he’d rather she wanted to kill him than console him.
At last night did come. This time he took the shower and when he returned she was lying disrobed like Manet’s Olympia, a flower in her hair, a delicate leather lace tied around her neck, one black stocking on, one black stocking off, her hand covering the part Miss Gore presumed the poet Marvell meant by the ‘rest’, her gaze too direct for him to meet. Was she staging an ironic pantomine about male desire? Showing she knew? Knew and didn’t mind? Showing she could live up to the fantasy, however preposterous? Or was the smile more collusive still? Was she saying ‘This is my fantasy every bit as much as yours’?
Is he dreaming? Should he pinch himself?
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
The Wyatt. How he loved that poem. He could not remember a time when he had not loved that poem. It had been an education to him, a prefiguration, a promise. So it would one day happen, when – a ‘when’ to trump all other dreamed-of ‘whens’ – When
her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?
Long before he’d known a Lily he’d encountered her, for those ‘arms long and small’ were Lily’s arms exactly. Long and strong enough, those narrow arms, to reach up to him and ensnare him but, in that very act of ensnaring, submitting – smally? – to his gaze and desires. Dear heart, how like you this? Was that sacrifice or seduction? Not good enough to say both. For it was as though the one could not be possible without the other.
Dear heart, how like you this?
For once, he didn’t have the words.
She looked at him and at last he found the resilience to look back, their eyes meeting in mutual appreciation of her bold gesture, her high-class, educated whorish joke, the hellish and hilarious path from which, if they held their nerve, they would never have to deviate.
It was like a children’s staring bet but with more at stake than any child could have wagered.
‘What?’ she mutely asked.
‘What?’ he mutely asked in return.
They stared, interrogatively, so hard into each other’s eyes throughout the night, in a darkness made even darker by their staring, it would have been a miracle had they seen anything else for a week. Which, he would insist forevermore, they did not.
In the morning their eyebeams were still crossed.
‘What?’
‘What?’