‘Yes, it ought, I know, to have been possible for me to feel all these things’ – leaving out some of them – he told Lily over a bottle of American wine (she noticed the allusion) in a bar round the corner from the cutting room, ‘and not treat you so contemptuously.’
By all these things he meant the commonplace abstractions of delinquency he had cobbled together, not the tenderness akin to love his wife had reawakened in him. For to have told Lily of that would have been no different to telling Selena of her. Each was now to be kept secret from the other.
Not that things weren’t hard enough already for Lily. She couldn’t meet his eye. ‘Yes, it ought. It ought. You could have rung.’
‘And said what?’
‘“Hello.”’
‘Hello, I’m trying to sort my feelings out vis-à-vis my wife?’
‘Exactly that. Why not? I might have asked how come you hadn’t done that already. Or what you thought you were doing with me since you hadn’t. But yes, you could have said that and I’d have understood.’
‘But I didn’t dare risk talking to you, Lily. I was frightened of hearing your voice.’
‘Why, were you so vain as to suppose I’d try to inveigle you back?’
‘Of course not. It was the music of your voice I feared hearing again. I couldn’t think unless I could clear my mind of you. I don’t mean forever—’
‘Get away.’
‘I mean it, Lily. I had to give my conscience air—’
‘And I mean get away. Go!’
And because he was unbearably, vainly slow to realise she really did mean it, she rose and got away herself.
Which left the film in limbo. She called in sick to her editor. OK, yes, there was stuff he could get on with without her. The only pity was he couldn’t do everything he’d have liked. Such as edit out Quaid.
Then Lucasta, whose husband had run off with an older woman, rang to say he was back. ‘He’s come to his senses,’ she said. ‘Just as I said he would.’
‘I thought his senses were the reason he left you,’ Lily said.
‘Christ, Lily, that’s a cruel thing to say.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to be. I’m a little disillusioned with men at the moment.’
‘What do you mean at the moment?’
‘I don’t believe them, that’s all. But if you’re happy to have him back …’
‘Of course I’m happy to have him back. If I don’t have him back I watch television on my own.’
‘Then I’m delighted for you.’
‘But you aren’t, Lily, I can hear that. I’m sorry I can’t be more like you.’
‘What does like me mean?’
‘Self-motivated. True to yourself. Cynical.’
‘Cynical? Lucasta, I’m made of jelly.’
‘Well it doesn’t show.’
‘The worse for me.’
‘You mean the worse for me. I can hear your disapproval.’
‘If you hear disapproval, it’s your own. I wouldn’t dream of judging you.’
‘Look, Lily, I know what you’re thinking and I agree with you. But if we don’t cut these lying swine a bit of slack – which is no more than we are always asking them to cut us – we’ll die lonely.’
‘Christ, Lucasta, that’s a cruel thing to say.’
‘I don’t mean you.’
But Lily decided she did mean her.
They can’t go back into the cutting room together without returning to the whys of what he’d decided to call his tergiversation.
‘That enables you not to call it what it was.’
‘So what do you call it?’
‘Spinelessness.’
‘I’ll take pusillanimity.’
‘You’ll take what you get. You can’t word your way out of trouble with me. Pusillanimity, indeed!’
He loves the way the word explodes on her lips.
Yes, he is admiring her again. A rush of tenderness overwhelms him. All right – it was a rush of tenderness for his wife that overwhelmed him into forgetting Lily. Can’t a man show tenderness to two women? He feels morally weightless, as light as a pin hovering between two magnets.
‘What was I to do? Walk past her in the airport? Wasn’t she entitled to an explanation?’
‘And did she get one?’
‘Not in so many words. It’s hard. I felt a heel. I still do.’
‘Heel! You feel a heel? I think I prefer tergiversator. But can we get one thing clear? I am not talking about your wife. I have no business talking about your wife. I am only asking why, however much of a heel you felt about her, you couldn’t squeeze in a quick call telling me you were all right and asking, if only out of politeness, how I was.’
‘All right, all right. I wanted to punish you.’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere. You hated yourself and so you had to wound me as your accomplice.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Dropping me like a stone and not bothering to find out if I’d drowned was your way of punishing me for your guilt.’
‘No, it was not as bad as that, unless it was worse. I thought the more I neglected or, if you like, disrespected you, the less I’d be neglecting or disrespecting her.’
‘So your guilt was a shuttlecock that you batted to and fro between us?’
‘I’m talking about more than guilt.’
Lily pricked her ears. If he were to talk of love in this context he would ruin all mention of it forever.
‘Others have their rights to you, Sam. I have none. But I will not be weighed out as on a set of moral scales, wondering every time I see you, or don’t see you, on which side the pan happens to be tilting that day.’
‘Lily—’
But she wouldn’t be so easily Lilied.