Perdition was taking too long. They had started to meander. In the absence of decisive action from Quaid to move things along – impromptu phone calls weren’t decisive action – Lily had little by little begun to pick up the threads of her pre-Quaid life. She saw more of Hal. Not romantically – neither of them wanted that – but accompanying him to inventors’ balls and conferences, making up the numbers at dinner parties, even complimenting him on the suits he bought. As regards the latter, he wanted her to know how touched he was. ‘Thank you for noticing,’ he said. Not with sarcasm or even hurt. Just thank you. You are a good man, Lily thought. Meaning Quaid wasn’t? Quaid? Who was Quaid? For her part, she was grateful to be putting dates in her diary again. She had almost forgotten what a diary was for. The future? She did not know if she had any. You dread the future if you are an adulterer, you don’t plan for it. The future is for ruby weddings and children’s birthdays. As for Quaid, he was too susceptible to mood change, too given to sudden accesses of desire and then sudden accesses of guilt, to risk making plans with. How many times had she turned down a shoot so that she’d be available to meet him, only to discover that he was not available to be met? Now, she was saying yes without consulting him and he’d just have to manage without her for as long as the shoot took. And when she wasn’t away filming or being Hal’s companion, she resumed the regime of long walks – alone or with a girlfriend – that Quaid had interrupted. He’d told her he too was a walker, but he walked slowly with his head down as though in pain. ‘The outside hurts me,’ he said. When he walked he wasn’t with her. To be with her he had to be looking into her face, seeing through her eyes until he penetrated the sanctum of sanctums, the matrix of electrical and passional awareness that was her intelligence. It was flattering, when it wasn’t uncanny, to be seen this way. Following his example, she’d look back. Did she get as far into his head as he said he got into hers? She didn’t think so. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to. There was enough of him to love outside his skull, she thought – at least when he was there – enough of him to work on, if she could put it like that, without having to enter the engine room of his being. At the same time, yes, these exchanges of intense awareness, shutting out the whole world, overwhelmed her. He’d convinced her. To love was to annihilate everyone and everything but them.
But just occasionally she wanted to see a tree.
What Quaid was slow to understand was that the other thing she needed to see was him.
‘You can’t make yourself everything to me and then disappear,’ Lily warned. ‘And you can’t suddenly appear again the minute you need a fresh injection of delirium.’
Why couldn’t he?
It wasn’t as though he were living a secret life. He wasn’t such a fool as to suppose he could spread the bounty of himself evenly. The house he shared with Selena was no happier on the nights he was not with Lily. No other woman interested him. He was not giving any more time to his writing. It was more—
Well he didn’t know what more it was. The ship of Passion had become becalmed, that was all. The winds of Madness that had driven them this way and that had dropped. No one’s fault. These things happened. You just had to wait the lull out.
Lily had once told him that the time between their trysts could be measured by the time it took his semen to replenish itself. Like the cicada, in popular myth, he slept seventeen years before and after coupling.
An accusation, he declared, clutching his heart, that was more hurtful to him as a man than anything any woman, other than Edina Gore, had ever charged him with.
Lily was in skittish spirits. ‘I’m sorry I never met her in that case,’ she said.
But her words had the immediate effect of getting Quaid to ring her every night and proposition her. An enthusiasm – they were both sourly amused to note – that could not be sustained beyond a fortnight.
Becalmed, then, they were, waiting for the weather to change, Lily taking her solitary walks, Quaid thinking of her every minute God sent, but making a sort of sacrament of not seeing her, until one sweet night – ‘sweet’ is the clue: one night in which he did not look into her brain and she did not bind his wrists – she asked him if he’d like to accompany her to Amsterdam, whereupon the winds picked up again.
The mechanics of Amsterdam are easily explained. On the eve of the closing of the Rijksmuseum for substantial renovations, Lily was hired by the Dutch tourist board to make a promotional film highlighting what else the city had to offer beside wall-to-wall Rembrandt and Rubens. Quaid found himself enraptured as of old. He followed Lily and her crew around the city. He loved watching her work. ‘And … cut,’ she would say with an authority that made him shiver. He found himself mind-writing a screenplay about a man who falls in love with a documentary film-director, pursuing her around the world without her knowing it and succeeding in getting himself into at least one frame of every film she ever made. Just before his premature death of a disease he’d picked up while following her to the Sumatra rainforest, he sent her a composite clip of all his surreptitious appearances, telling her he’d been content to limit his devotion to her to being on the end of her camera, knowing that she saw him whether she knew it or not. Although she had never once been aware of him she now realised he’d been a permanent presence in her life. Was it possible that she’d all along been unwittingly in love with the image he’d secretly inserted into her life? This question haunted her as she lay dying of the very disease that had killed him.
‘What do you think of it?’ Quaid asked Lily.
‘A bit Peruvian, perhaps?’
‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘Not necessarily. Will the film fade on her declaring “My God, I love him”?’
‘Of course.’
‘You are quite the sentimentalist.’
‘But you knew that already. And this is a film not a stage play. Films are a sentimental medium. You sit in the dark, existentially alone, and weep. I thought I’d call it Lily.’
‘Thank you, but do I have to die?’
‘Two answers to that. Yes. And what makes you think it’s about you?’
She scratched her head. ‘Little clues.’
In a small coffee house by the Brouwersgracht Lily pointed to a poster on a message board for an upcoming Leather and PVC Ball. It showed semi-naked revellers one of whom, she maintained, notwithstanding the wire halo on his head, looked like a younger Quaid.
‘There never was a younger Quaid,’ he said. But he conceded the resemblance.
And there the matter might have ended had Lily not noticed Quaid’s attention returning at frequent intervals to the poster.
‘Fancy it?’ she asked.
He took too long to say no.
As ever, it had fallen to Lily to make it happen, check out the dates, buy tickets, make enquiries as to dress code – as little as she dared for her; whatever could not be mistaken for street clothes for him – and then keep up his enthusiasm. Hell finally awaited, but Quaid would never jump of his own volition.
Quaid made the same joke whenever they passed a novelty adult fetish shop. ‘Was ever the word “adult” more misplaced?’ he’d ask. ‘Could there be anything more oxymoronic than an adult doll?’ But Lily would notice how he would hesitate a little longer outside these shops than the joke merited before walking away with a sniff. Once they’d agreed to give Amsterdam a try Lily registered a change in Quaid’s shopping patterns; now the racks of chorus-girl corsets and rows of patent leather boots with spiked, hallucinatory heels transfixed him. ‘If you want me to go to the ball looking like a tart at least let me go looking like a tart with taste,’ she said, assuring him that shoes no less high and corsets no less dangerously cut could be bought in her usual shops in Knightsbridge for ten times the price, which, if that was all right with him, she was more than willing to pay.
As a rule she loved shopping with him because he loved shopping with her. She would come out of a changing room and there he would be, not reading the sports page of a newspaper, not rolling his eyes in impatient collusion with other men, but attentive only to her appearance and possessed of a vocabulary of fashionable appreciation rare in his sex. Given how refined and conservative a judge he was of what suited her best, it was a surprise to discover his weakness for pink fur, cheap satin and black PVC. ‘I would appear to be the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of couture,’ he admitted, uncertain which of those men preferred what.
Lily apologised for not being able to satisfy the lowest of those longings. ‘Like you when it comes to love,’ she said, ‘disreputable I’ll do, plebeian I won’t.’ But he assured her he hated this ‘sorry junk’ every bit as much as she did. What he felt for it was a fascination born of horror. Not because it suggested all things infernal but because it didn’t. ‘I’m prepared to burn for eternity for my sins,’ he said, ‘but what’s the punishment for sex-shop sex?’
‘Susceptibility to it is its own punishment.’
Did he blush ever so slightly? He thought he didn’t mind what she knew about him but he was wrong.
‘Just you leave the management of the costume side of all this to me,’ she said, stroking his hair.
In so far as there was a saving elegance to be found, she found it in a magenta metallic sheen bustier with semi-sheer panels purchased from a boudoir shop in Sloane Street, and something more obviously Moulin Rouge in soft black leather with French lace and a scarlet feather boa which she had made for her by a designer in a top-floor atelier on South Molton Street. She would only show herself to him in both outfits like a bride several hours before the ball. He could choose and then lace her into it. For him she bought a priestly cape from Ede & Ravenscroft, Doc Martens and a white Pierrot mask framed with soft white feathers that blew about his face. She had offered him a choice – he could be Pierrot or Arlecchino – a clown to whom everything had ceased to be funny or a heartless savage of misrule. He picked the Pierrot because it looked tubercular and wasted and seemed to remove him from the business of life. He could decide later whether or not to wear the leather choker studded with the letters L.I.L.Y.’S which she had – of course – gone back to buy from the artisan shop in Santa Fe after he had returned to England and the embraces of his wife.
In answer to the only question that really mattered to her, would she be the only woman over twenty at the ball, the organisers were non-committal when she rang them. But further researches suggested that while there were lower age restrictions, there weren’t higher. Whoever could negotiate the corkscrew spiral of pitted stone stairs down into the vaults of the deconsecrated Lutheran church in spiked-heel boots, was welcome to participate. No mention was made of climbing back up again.
Waiting for the evening to turn into night – for no Leather Ball protective of its reputation opened its doors until sane people were asleep – was a torture of another sort to them. They sequestered themselves in their hotel bedroom and pretended to read, then sat with their heads between their legs, tensed and trussed, consulting their watches every fifteen minutes. Could time really pass so slowly or so silently? Though garrulous by erotic inclination, they knew they dared not speak or even look at each other. The longer the hours before the night itself dragged on, the more estranged they grew, like criminals waiting to be led to the scaffold, with nothing further to confess, no more blame to lay, no more guilt to share.
Negotiating the midnight cobbles – she in vertiginous French heels and shudder-making Moulin Rouge corset, he in the more chicken-hearted guise of fallen Quaker who had never seen the sun – did nothing to break their silent trance. An icy, fateful mutuality led them on. But whose idea was it – once they’d discovered how cold the stones beneath their feet were, how loud the torture music for the artificially intelligent, and how little in the way of good wine was on offer at the bar – to stay?
‘Well?’ Lily asked. She was shocked to hear her own voice.
‘What do you think?’ Quaid whispered in return.
‘No, you.’
‘No, you.’
They couldn’t decide if the event was too wild for them or too tame. The former because guests were more overtly costumed for debauch than they’d expected, the latter because they’d arrived too early, still, for any actual debauch to have yet got going; but by the time they’d deferred to each other sufficiently and shared a bottle of lukewarm Dutch beer and fallen into further pre-execution silence, there was more of what they’d come to look at, if that indeed was all they’d come to do – more slaves and slave-owners, more Roman centurions in swaying studded skirts, more rubber-encased deep-sea divers breathing raspily through snorkels, more mixed-metaphor fishermen, unless they were airmen, in thigh-high waders and gas masks, more bodybuilders in posing pouches and dog muzzles, more Nazis in bus conductors’ caps, more leather-harnessed clergymen, more bears, more vampires, more Hapsburg Empire courtesans, more men wanting to be dogs and women wanting to be their walkers, more of the gilded young and desperately not so young, the dissolute and would-be dissolute, the lost, the lonely and the louche, about whom Quaid had blithely written from time to time but never looked upon with his own eyes.
‘Gosh,’ he said.
‘Seen enough?’ Lily wondered.
‘You?’
She wasn’t sure. Her initial dread of mixing with the depraved youth of Europe looking like mutton dressed as lamb had subsided. Men appraised her lasciviously enough. Women too. A pair of identical twin schoolgirls of indeterminate age blew into her feathers to make them ruffle. Quaid shook his head over her appearance. ‘Who’d have thought,’ he said.
‘Are you saying the woman you see tonight is not the woman you saw all along?’
‘Only in my wildest imaginings.’
‘Then your wildest imaginings are where you should expect to find me from now on. Just allow me to direct them.’
Was that a threat or a promise? He stepped back to look at her. Never mind where had she been. Where was she going? Would she want to take him with her? And would he have the nerve to go there?
How had she done it? How, out of the reserve and propriety native to her had she manufactured such indecorousness? How, without losing her reserve, did she succeed in conveying abandon. Selena could have worn these clothes, laughed and let her hair down. But she would have looked ready for netball. Before marriage and a husband had ground the zest out of her, Selena could be counted on to be the life and soul of any party. For precisely that reason she was never shocking; she could never have communicated the idea, as Lily did, of a fall, of a solemn, even hallowed descent, from respectability and conscience into depravity. Quaid took great care never to compare the two women in his life, the artist and the documentary-maker. But in this instance he couldn’t help it. Lily the documentary-maker was more reflective and withdrawn and on that account more libidinous.
‘I don’t know what the word for you is,’ he said. ‘I am bouleversed. Is that a word? You look as though you’ve stepped out of The 120 Days of Sodom.’
‘Let no one say you don’t know how to compliment a woman.’
But others were clearly thinking the same. A heavily made-up man in papal garb and a Medusa wig – just possibly those were real snakes in his hair; just possibly he was the Pope – genuflected before her. A passing stormtrooper whispered ‘Schön’ into her ear and handed her his card. ‘Ah, we’re in the same business,’ she laughed. He was the producer of porn movies, based in Berlin.
She showed the card to Quaid. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Should I audition?’
The stormtrooper had good English. ‘You won’t need to audition,’ he said, looking back at her.
And then the dancing started. Not waiting to find a partner – she knew not to ask Quaid: playwrights are no more inclined to dance than novelists – she let herself be sucked into the maelstrom.
‘Be careful in those shoes,’ Quaid shouted over the music.
‘You’re the one who wanted me to wear them.’
‘Not to dance in.’
‘You’re beginning to sound like an old man. I can dance in anything. You just might have to carry me home afterwards.’
Quaid, who had begun the night fearing he might be recognised – yes, he was hidden behind a commedia dell’arte mask, but what if, in the true spirit of Carnival, someone plucked it off him? – feared he was going to end it not knowing who had taken Lily home.
He sought the safety of an apse which he thought might once have housed a saint, before he remembered that Lutherans didn’t hold with saints, and strained to see her. He couldn’t tell who she was dancing with but saw that she was waving her hands in the air and thought her breasts – two hundred years to adore each one – had escaped the confinement of her corset. Escaped or been released? Should he march out on to the floor to tell her? He caught her eye and tried to signal her, tapping his own chest and then covering his mouth in shock. Miraculously, she understood him and laughed. Yes, she was on show. Wasn’t that why they’d come?
She’d never felt she lacked power. Yes, of course she’d had to put up with the usual spurns and insolences – the plumber wanting to talk to her ‘husband’ to explain the mysteries of the ‘O’ ring; the mechanic guessing she must have been a good girl to be allowed to drive a car like hers; the men who told her their life stories over dinner and never asked a single question about hers, the odd too-knowing stare and misplaced pat, but on the whole she’d been mistress of her life. She told the cameraman to cut and he cut. This, however, this, was different. Aware of Sam’s eyes burning at her behind his mask, she danced with an abandon she had never risked, not caring what she looked like or what anyone thought, allowing her body the freedom to go where it wanted. And the more Sam’s eyes burned, the more she burned – with the exhilaration of being someone she didn’t recognise and yet somehow knew as from an earlier life.
After twenty minutes she returned to his side, perspiring. ‘Don’t look so alarmed,’ she said.
‘It’s an inferno,’ he said.
‘I thought that was what you wanted.’
‘I didn’t know what I wanted.’
‘You are always inviting hell to throw open its gates and then complaining when it won’t. Well now it has. Come—’
She took him by the wrists – Virgil escorting Dante – and led him into the dancing flames, proprietorially as though the task of stoking them fell to her, deep into the great vacant church interror, smiling at dancers she seemed already to be familiar with, showing him where she’d been, what she’d seen, unimaginable religious tableaux in which congregants were nailed to crosses or flailed, and boiling wax from holy candles was poured on unholy flesh, and ropes disabled able bodies longing to be restrained, and lovers watched in fascinated devotion as one or other of them was sacrificed to the brute incursions of a third party, and on her knees a traffic warden who had issued tickets for more than half a century took parking offenders in her mouth, two, three, four at a time.
‘Hellish enough for you?’ she asked.
‘It’s a start.’
‘Have you noticed something surprising?’
‘This and that.’
‘No, I mean how decorous everybody is.’
‘Decorous!’
‘Circumspect. Respectful. Well mannered. In all the depictions of hell I know Satan’s security men drive sinners into the flames with pikes. Here, if anyone so much as brushes past you they apologise profusely.’
‘So how is it that your breasts are on show? Did someone pass too close?’
‘Possibly. But rest assured, whoever did so would have asked my permission first.’
Had wax from holy candles been dripped on Quaid’s exposed flesh, he would not have stung and smarted as he did.
His eyes met hers.
What?
What?
Lily kept the card the Berlin-based producer of porn movies gave her. She couldn’t have said why.
Back in London Quaid found it when she accidentally spilled the contents of her handbag on the floor of a taxi. That was when she understood why she’d kept it – to arouse and perplex him.
‘Would you actually have done this?’ he enquired.
She shrugged.
‘Would you consider doing it now?’
‘Do you want me to?’
This time he shrugged.
‘Do you think I shouldn’t?’
‘It’s not about what I think.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Why you think you should.’
‘Should?’
‘Could.’
‘You don’t think I could?’
‘Might, then.’
She didn’t answer.