There’s a tide of impropriety in the affairs of lovers – lovers in the true, ravening sense, not mere chaste partners in the business of starting a family – that taken at the full sweeps them to perdition.
That’s Quaid’s way of putting it. He’s been waiting to be swept to perdition ever since playing Othello in a classroom reading of the play and swearing devotion to Desdemona with the words ‘Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee.’
‘You could try saying that less hungrily,’ he remembers Miss Gore advising, piously pressing her fingers together. ‘He says “I do love thee” not “I do devour you”.’
‘I’m trying to do justice to Shakespeare’s genius, Miss.’
‘And I’m trying to save him from yours,’ Miss Gore said, giving the part of Othello to someone else and Desdemona to Quaid.
The someone else turned Othello into a kindly uncle who wanted nothing more than to sit down in the evening with his wife over a green tea and show her holiday snaps of his time with the cannibals. Quaid knew the words should not be delivered other than as he had delivered them. Perdition, Miss Gore. You don’t expect perdition to make a grab for your soul just because you quite like a girl. Inordinate love invited mortal ruin, indeed half the time a longing for mortal ruin was the only available explanation for loving inordinately at all. He knew that at fifteen? Not in so many words, but fifteen is the first staging post of sexual desperation and he had a feeling that a longing to possess was not always to be distinguished from a longing to throw away.
Or be thrown away, come to that. At fifteen? When else?
Still waiting, in his almost-fifties, for the flames of hell to consume him, Quaid believed fate had at last delivered him into the hands of a woman who had the nerve to pitch him into them. How many times has he told her he wants her face to be the last face he sees, to ensure which she must cut his throat or tear his heart out? Does he mean it? At the time he says it, yes, he means it. And let perdition catch his soul.
Lily employs a more temperate vocabulary of desire, but she too cannot claim to be in control of events when she is with Quaid. Will there be a time when she takes him at his word, presses down on his chest, binds his wrists, looks into his pleading eyes, and shuts off his air supply once and for all?
But won’t such an act damn her too?
Perdition catch them both.
But not yet awhile. They proceed slowly, even cautiously, on their return from Capri, settling at once into that routine of subterfuge and depression well known to adulterers.
Quaid wonders if it was such a good idea, after all, to name and number the time he and Lily have spent together. Does it not throw into harsh relief the question of what-now to which neither of them has an answer? They both feel they have returned to school after the holidays. Unable to shake the chill of Sunday evenings from their souls, they fall silent with each other, in case sharing the despondency of indecision will only make it permanent. That to which they don’t refer, they hope silence might remedy – which is exactly what the knowing but forgiving Hal, and the only half-knowing but not at all forgiving Selena, also hope will happen, though of course to different effect. A nerve-wracking stillness descends on both households, reminding Quaid, who played Henry V as well as Othello in the Literary Sixth, of the creeping murmurs that hum through the French and English camps on the eve of Agincourt. One doesn’t have to be a soldier to be afraid. Illicit lovers, too, fill the wide vessel of the universe with their apprehension. Every day in which they go undiscovered might be their last. Their superstitions, bred from alternating convictions of entitlement and guilt, haunt the quiet of drowsy morning. No one knows who the wounded will be or where they’ll fall.
Or who will be the first to ring the other. It doesn’t matter. They feel as one, so that when the call does come neither can say who made it. This is the enforced pattern of their lives before they jump once and for all into the furnace, while they wait for a pretext to spend every minute of every day and every second of every night together. Times passes without any word about the series. Commissioning editors die. Winds of change blow through the corridors of broadcasting. And Lily has still not got her hands on development money. Sometimes, buoyed by something Lily thinks she’s heard, or Quaid thinks should happen because he wants it to, they believe they are on the cusp of favour and spend a morning buying books for research they probably won’t get round to undertaking, and then the afternoon in a hotel. Otherwise, they live like rats in the interstices of mundane existence, seizing whatever opportunities for ecstasy are dropped for them to gnaw.
‘We could,’ Lily suggests, ‘travel on our own money in expectation of its coming back to us.’
Quaid is hesitant only because spending money to be with a woman not his wife strikes him as a betrayal too far.
‘Some morality,’ Lily notes. ‘What’s in your bank account is more Selena’s than what’s in your trousers.’
She’s right. When he isn’t offering Lily his throat to cut, Quaid is governed by a quaint old-fashioned morality. Without the justification of a joint enterprise, he feels bound to withdraw periodically from the woman he thinks of as his mistress in all senses. It’s as though working together licenses their doing everything else together, no matter that the point of their working together is that they can do everything else together. He can’t explain it.
Lily goes along with it. You have to honour another person’s sense of decorum, even if you think it’s claptrap. She fears examining it too closely. What if it is just another word for indecision? What if it simply means keeping every option open? Is she merely one of several he might one day decide to take? Who knows better than she how pliant and biddable he is? She has to be steadfast and ruthless for both of them. On the other hand she no more wants to scare him off than steal him. At no point does she ask if he has any intention of divorcing his wife. As for him, he never asks about her situation. Is that because he doesn’t care or is insufferably confident of his power over her?
She has no other choice she can bear to countenance but to sit it out. Like Penelope, she listens, waits and weaves.
And are there suitors? It isn’t for Quaid to ask. Best – to beg a phrase from James Joyce on the subject of jealousy – to live in ‘wounding doubt’.
They can sustain three or four weeks at a time without meeting. Any longer and Lily goes into a decline. It isn’t only Quaid she misses, it’s her own resolution, everything she’s lived by since she was a girl, the authorship of her own actions. She has never had patience. Waiting on another person’s strength of mind robs her of her own natural robustness. Her face drains of colour. Her shoulders droop. She is subject to mystery pains. She begins to shake. Hal tells her she should see a doctor but fears what she might be diagnosed with. Her friends the same. Because she hasn’t told them that she and Quaid are lovers they can’t help her and, like Hal, dread the early onset of those ailments that stalk ageing women and which, for that reason, ageing women don’t dare name. ‘I’m not yet fifty, for fuck’s sake,’ she reminds them. She is a magnificent liar. None of her friends guess what’s wrong – that she is ill with the magnificence of her lies.
Over the years, Quaid has kept himself fit. Not in the gym, though he has a workout machine in his bedroom and keeps weights under his desk, but in nearby parks where he has always walked at a good pace and thought up ideas for plays which only take wing or die when he is back at his desk. Nature has been no muse to him. He needs stale air and oppression to write. Just as he needs an absence of air altogether to love.
Loving Lily makes him feverish. When he has not seen her for a while he can spend whole afternoons on a bench in the rose garden absorbed in thoughts of her that are so fantastical, adoring and obscene that he wonders whether, if the real her were suddenly to join him on the bench, he would recognise her. He is never – not for a single second of recorded time – not thinking about her, though he’d be the first to admit that it isn’t exactly by thought that he summons her. She just bursts into his mind. When he sees her face he smiles. She possesses an extensive collection of dressing gowns – Javanese, Chinese, Fijian, Arabic, Inuit – and, in so far as he can recall, has never worn the same one more than twice in his company. Her Japanese robe with its swirling pink dragons pleases him in particular – he cannot say why – and he can sit for an hour at a time recalling her strolling out of a hotel bathroom in it – girlishly, somehow, as though wearing this robe makes her feel she is dressed up for a party. What begins in a wolfish trance often ends in this almost fatherly appreciation. Because he has otherwise never felt fatherly in his life, he ascribes this unfamiliar sensation to her capacity to awaken in him forms of manliness – his word: always assume that when the word manly arises, it’s at Quaid’s summoning – of which he never knew himself capable. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Though quicker will it be to count the ways I don’t.
And then, after the fatherliness, the reversion to feelings no father should know anything about. He may have violently capitulated to Lily’s will, but when such a capitulation is welcomed to the degree that Quaid welcomes it – welcomes it even as it shames him – who can truly say who it is that is ceding power to whom?
On his bench, Quaid farewells the man not just in him but in all men. As a species we are over he says, but doesn’t feel over as he says it. Love has unmanned him and he isn’t sure how much more man he has left to lose. On the other hand, love has filled him full of man. New man? He wouldn’t go so far as that. Better to think man as differently conceived. How is he able to be replenished by what he’s lost? But since he is, he wants to lose some more.
He sometimes thinks he would like a friend to discuss this with. A good listener like Horatio.
Friends? Did someone mention friends? He’d settle for an acquaintance, some man with whom he could exchange thoughts on the subject of man. Some Horatio who’d know exactly what he meant. And then agree with it. ‘Aye, my lord … E’en so, my lord.’
It had always bemused and bothered Selena that Quaid had no male friends.
‘It’s not natural,’ she told him.
‘Friends aren’t natural. Enemies are natural.’
‘Then get yourself an enemy. Go out and have an arm-wrestle.’
‘You should be pleased I have neither friends nor enemies,’ he answered. ‘It means I’m free to give all my time to you.’
‘Except that isn’t how it’s worked out,’ she told one of her friends. ‘It means he’s free to give all his time to other women. Whenever he’s not with me he’s with an alternative to me.’
Her friend thought she was overstating this. ‘Do you have to see them that way? Couldn’t they simply be alternatives to men? I think it’s rather nice that he treats women as friends. Not all men are able to do that.’
Selena shook her head. ‘No they’re not, and he’s no exception. The women are alternatives to me because he only thinks in alternatives. He doesn’t have the words “and” or “also” in his vocabulary. It’s all “either – or”. And if it’s every other woman or me, I am bound to lose in the end because there are so many more of them.’
‘What would happen if you invited some of these women over?’
‘I’d have to cook for them.’
‘No, I mean accept that they truly are his friends and not his women.’
‘You mean believe him?’
‘Is that impossible?’
‘More than impossible. Unnatural. His word for why he has no male friends.’
‘Really none?’
‘Really none.’
‘No male friend to watch football with?’
‘He hates football.’
‘Someome to go to a film with … the theatre?’
‘He is the theatre.’
‘Fellow writers? Directors? Actors? Scene-shifters?’
‘He likes to keep his private and professional lives separate. Most of his directors have been women, coincidentally. And he sees himself as a bit above scene-shifters.’
‘The pub?’
‘He hates pubs.’
‘Golf?’
‘Golf!!!’
‘Music? Opera? A rock concert?’
‘He only likes music that makes him cry, and he prefers to be alone for that. But there’s no point listing where he could go with a friend when the problem is he doesn’t have a friend.’
‘If he joined an orchestra or a choir he might make a friend.’
‘Yes – one of the sopranos …’
He can hardly tell Selena that Lily is very nearly all the friend he needs. But Lily, too, worries that he has no one else to talk to, except of course his wife, and there are things a man who is cheating on his wife can’t tell his wife.
She loves being all in all to him, but not every man wants a woman to be that. There are those who prefer it the other way round.
Can’t there be a democracy of it? That, for the moment, is the big question of Lily’s life.
So where have his friends got to?
Suicide had taken one, a drugs overdose had taken another, and then there was the family. Quaid couldn’t share a friend’s attention with the friend’s children. It was him or them. Others emigrated or might as well have emigrated they became so consumed by campaigns and causes of a sort he couldn’t take seriously, let alone support. ‘A writer inhabits a different universe of discourse,’ he told those who sought his signature on petitions. His Wunderkind years at Oxford hadn’t helped either. He said friends treated him differently after his first play was staged, but Lily couldn’t help but wonder, when she heard him talk of this, whether it was he who had treated them differently. Not out of arrogance but a sort of self-amazement that couldn’t be replicated. If they weren’t able to be as astonished by him as he was by himself – this quiet, easily buffeted boy now lauded by critics as ‘a force to be reckoned with in the British theatre’, what kind of friends were they?
Once in a blue moon he met up with fellow writers. Thrice-yearly get-togethers at someone’s club or in private rooms at restaurants where the staff knew their names. In them he should have found the company and conversation he insisted he wasn’t missing. Art, philosophy, the state of the culture, detested reviewers, tax – what more did he want to talk about? That was easy to answer. Lily. Would showing around her photograph have been so terrible? Yes. Uxoriousness was a quality no more revered by writers than by his father.
And then Tim Marchant pops up out of nowhere. ‘Fine, Tim, thank you, yes,’ Quaid says. ‘You?’
Tim was an exact contemporary whose cleverness made Quaid feel banal, or would have done had Tim not admitted that Quaid made him feel banal. ‘I’ll never forget meeting you on the first day of term,’ Tim said. ‘You seemed to know by heart every poem written before 1650.’
‘And you seemed to know every poem written after it,’ Quaid had rejoined.
Tim and Quaid had moved in different circles at university. Quaid among theatre people. Tim somewhere else. But they ate together often, in Chinese restaurants and curry houses where they bewailed what T. S. Eliot had called ‘the dissociation of sensibility’, that’s to say thought and feeling going their separate ways in the seventeenth century. They tried to locate the very poem in which that separation could be seen to begin, but couldn’t agree on what they called the salient text.
They have not seen each other for years, but neither has changed much. Quaid is still dishevelled trying to look a dandy, and Tim is still a dandy trying to look dishevelled. As far as Quaid knows, Tim is living in Kent and teaching sixth-formers at a smart private school. That Tim knows what Quaid has been up to, professionally at least, goes without saying. In town to see lawyers about a divorce, Tim had rung Quaid’s agent with a message on the off-chance he’d be in town himself. And lo – here they are at the American Bar in the Savoy. Quaid can’t remember if he’d ever met Tim’s wife. ‘Yes, you have,’ Tim says. ‘Melanie. She was at Somerville.’ Melanie, Melanie … No. He can’t bring her to mind. I mustn’t have fallen in love with her, Quaid thinks. Was that why Tim had? They were rivals after all. They even liked different poems on principle.
‘So how long were you married?’ Quaid asks.
‘A lifetime, but thank God the tragedy is nearly over.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Quaid says. ‘Do you have plans to marry someone else?’
‘Marry? No,’ Tim laughs urbanely. ‘That’s not possible. Not until the law changes.’
‘Ah, is she already married?’
‘No. He is.’
He still makes me feel banal, Quaid thinks.
Tim is evidently in a cheerful frame of mind. Sad that he didn’t make a bid for happiness of this sort much earlier, but otherwise fulfilled, fruitful, productive. Quaid is bemused by how Tim manages to make not having written a play appear grander than having written a dozen. How does he do that? Gender, Quaid recognises. He makes me feel gender-inadequate. ‘I too,’ he confides, ‘have fallen in love and am considering breaking out.’
‘Out of your marriage or out of yourself?’
‘Like you, I suppose. Out of the confines of my outdated masculinity.’
Go on, Tim, say it. E’en so, my lord.
Instead, Tim lays a hand on Quaid’s sleeve. ‘Just to be clear,’ he says, enunciating as though to a child, ‘masculinity has never been a problem for me. And isn’t now.’
Having been talked to like a child, Quaid blushes sufficient for a schoolroom of them.
Though it’s early evening, a time he imagines Lily to be en famille, however en famille works in her life, he rings her. She is surprised to hear from him. She wonders if he is all right. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but is this a good time to talk? What are you doing?’
‘Snacking.’
‘Smacking?’
‘Snacking.’
‘Does that mean you’re on your own?’
‘Ish.’
What does ‘ish’ mean? Is she or isn’t she?
‘Can I come round?’
‘No. Just tell me what’s wrong.’
‘Who said there was something wrong?’
‘You never ring me at this hour, and so close to the last time, unless something’s wrong.’
‘I maligned you to a friend.’
‘I thought you didn’t have a friend.’
‘Well I certainly don’t now.’
‘Because you maligned me?’
‘No, because he thinks I maligned him.’
‘What did you do?’
It’s like pulling teeth, she thinks. Which can only mean he wants the comfort of staying on the phone to her. Well, comfort is one of the things she provides.
‘Are you sure I can’t come round?’
‘Certain. Just tell me what you did to your friend.’
‘I inadvertently questioned his masculinity.’
‘How does that malign me?’
‘I implied that you made me question mine.’
She laughs. ‘I should hope so,’ she says.
And that’s all it takes. Can lightning strike from below? A forked flame ascends Quaid’s body, as though from the fiery centre of the earth.
They spend the following day in a hotel close to the London Library.