No good can come of this, Sam thinks, shaking his head. He has taken to doing that a lot. When he is not sitting with his head between his legs, waiting for the night to start, he is shaking it.
By ‘this’ – the ‘this’ that no good can come of – he means masquerading, which is his fancy word for ‘clubbing’, something they’ve taken to doing on a regular basis after Amsterdam, though he will go around the houses linguistically rather than join the riff-raff with words like ‘club’ and ‘clubbing’.
As for ‘no good’ coming of it, when did good ever come of erotic thraldom, which is another of his fancy terms for how he feels about Lily after Amsterdam? What’s happened to admiration, respect, awe? To Quaid, erotic thraldom encompasses them all. Erotic thrall is admiration heated up.
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, and the sight of her dancing in near-undress! Undress had been the norm there. A librarian in a cashmere cardigan would have attracted more attention than a woman with a bare chest. But these weren’t the breasts of any woman as seen on a beach in Ibiza. These were Lily’s breasts and they were exposed, not flagrantly but by suggestive mischance, on a crowded dance floor, as though to subtly intimate that there could be more to come, so long as the dance went on. There was, in other words, lewdness in the exposure and lewdness was not a quality he had until now associated with Lily, the most reserved and demure, the most dignified and genteel, of women.
Lily lewd!
No. No good could come of this.
Good or no good, they are soon slipping their domestic moorings and ‘masquerading’ wherever they can find a venue. They are selective at first – if not Amsterdam then Hamburg, and if not Hamburg, at the very least Prague or Paris – but soon, to satisfy Quaid’s hunger, they are to be seen, by anyone keeping watch over them, in such Home Counties Sodoms as Woking, Dagenham, Slough, Maidstone and even Sevenoaks. There is, they discover, no town too provincial to deny its home-grown crazies a cosy place to take their clothes off and exchange velvet blows and a little boiling candle wax. Quaid and Lily still wait eagerly for news of the series that will enable them to island-hop across the globe, but in its absence they masquerade conscientiously, as though they will forget what they are for if they don’t.
Aside from being recognised, the two things they have most to fear is hurt pride and a sense of the ridiculous. For all that he can’t get enough of seeing Lily let her hair down in public, Quaid is unable to reconcile himself to having to go to Woking and its environs to see it. Datchet, where taxi drivers in PVC harnesses look them up and down the minute they arrive – the tall, mute, despondent Venetian masquerader who holds himself like an inquisitor, and the haughty society lady who never wears the same corset twice – and don’t allow them to leave without giving them their number in case they ever again find themselves in these parts without transport. Dagenham, where Lily has to kick away the men who crawl to her on their bellies to kiss her boots and beg to be her home-help. ‘Mightn’t we need their services one day?’ Quaid wonders. She doesn’t say, ‘For that I’ll have you, darling.’ And God knows, if they ever do set up home together they will require someone to make the beds and clean the toilets. But she is quick to picture the Dagenham degenerates in their lurex thongs, spreadeagled in her way whenever she wants go to the bathroom or make a pot of tea.
Quaid is sorry Lily turns down the chance to have her own lovesick seraglio of below-stairs staff, but then again he isn’t. Everything in this world ministers to arousal and then defeats it.
He’s always waiting for something to happen that hasn’t yet. Does he know what that something might be? No, but Lily will be the centre of it. Whether the cause or the object, he cannot say. But he watches her every movement some nights, unable to breathe, wondering if the fearful something is about to disclose itself. The longer it doesn’t, the more desperate he is to return to the scene and begin the drama of anticipation again. Repetition is madness. But stopping just as you are about to get your wish is madness too. So when does sanity say enough is enough? ‘Loving Lily does not demand I stay on this whirligig of defeated masculinity,’ he tells himself. ‘It is a bastard sideshow to my love for her. So why don’t I hop off it now?’
Could the answer be that a whirligig of defeated masculinity is exactly where he wants to be? Hence, for all his protestations against the things they are doing, his determinedly going on doing them.
Lily is amazed by his persistence. He now rings her every other day, wondering if she’s found a place for them to go at the weekend and what she’s thinking of wearing. They book a room at the nearest hotel to the venue, where they change and then wait in silence for half the night to bleed away. There is no talking. Words will break the spell. Then it’s off to the latest crypt or catacomb, holding on to each other, gingerly managing the stone descent, smelling the warm bodies packed together as in a nest of rats, beholding the first tableaux of pain and humiliation that minds even more deranged than Quaid’s have contrived. All this dispels whatever disappointment lingers from the last time. But his re-arousal rarely survives the night. He catches his reflection in a bar mirror and shakes his head for shame. He looks foolish and out of place in his morose Pierrot mask, no matter that, to his eye, everyone else looks foolish and out of place as well. It could be Disneyland. A toyland of torture in which no one means to hurt or suffer, and children of any age could be admitted without fear of damage to their psyches, unless contempt for their elders can be be accounted damage. Lily is right. Lily is always right. He over-invests and can only ever be deflated. Yet again perdition shows no interest in catching them and leaves them to their fun.
Masquerading has taken over from film-making as a moral justification for their spending every possible minute together. They both know it makes no sense – descending into the city’s underbelly hardly constitutes a sacred necessity – but because it entails work: preparation, travel, dressing-up, risk-taking, staying up late, it somehow creates its own category of solemn duty. They are bound to drop everything else, and make every conceivable excuse, in order to spend five or six hours in holy silence in a hotel room, like devils preparing their expressions for Walpurgis night, and then almost as many hours, when it is all over, unpacking the experience, expounding in wordy confessionals on the excitement the event has or has not generated. In the main it’s Lily who does the talking and Quaid the listening. Noticing is her business after all. She comes out of herself as Quaid can’t, looks around her, absorbs the atmosphere, gets deeper into conversation with fellow deviants, many of whom are only looking for love from a woman who understands their propensities. In other words a woman just like her. But Quaid isn’t only wanting her to describe everything he’s missed or tell him what sad stories she’s been privy to. He’s hoping she will have some unholy indiscretion to confess.
Can he be more definite about what he wants from her than that? Of course he can’t. It’s what he keeps coming out to discover.
Hell will come at last to those who wait.
For every twenty clubs for weary London taxi drivers to show off their wives’ piercings, there’s a torture chamber that lives up to its name.
‘At least the celebrants are beautiful,’ Quaid says one night as they descend unfamiliar steps into an unfamiliar corner of the city’s bowels.
‘Does their beauty matter?’
‘Where there is beauty to mar, there is drama in the infliction of pain. Who wants to pay good money to see the already disfigured and infirm chastised?’
‘You sound like a rake from a novel by Samuel Richardson.’
‘I am nothing if not literary.’
‘You are nothing if not a snob.’
But Lily is pleased to see he is at least taking notice of where she’s brought him.
She must have known this club to be a cut above the others. She’s had her hair coloured so that it coruscates and she is wearing a black leather corset he has not seen before. It has a diagonal gold zip running across her chest from her right shoulder. Quaid shivers. Would she dare?
In the corner of his eye he sees an angelic young man who is either concealing his genitals, or has none, spinning slowly on a torture wheel. A woman in a monk’s habit turns the wheel by hand, chanting in Latin and flicking him with a cane. A ring on her wedding finger catches lights. Is she married to the angel, Quaid wonders, as she flicks her cane again. Or is a husband hidden in the shadows, looking on. Once more the man makes no sound. ‘Ouch!’ Quaid says for him.
‘That’s good,’ Lily said. ‘You’re joining in.’
Before his mood changes, she takes him by the wrist and leads him into the darkness. An overweight woman in a fine, flowing African headwrap and wearing a ball-gag face mask is being slowly undressed by two white men in rubber bodysuits who could be father and son. The older man carries a scalpel. Surely not, Quaid thinks, pausing to watch. Lily pulls him away. Best not to look on when what’s being performed is ambiguous. Who means what here? ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Lily whispers.
It’s a busy night. Nearly all the equipment is in use. Not that Lily needs more than a wall and the Swarovski jewel-handled whip she carries at her hip. She pulls Quaid towards her so that they can feel the warmth of each other’s breath, removes his frock coat and folds it neatly over a ducking stool, unbuttons and pulls down his shirt, and pushes his face into the cold Victorian brickwork. To her, he looks like a hero of the revolution about to be led to the scaffold.
‘Count to fifty,’ Lily says. ‘Imagine they are the last fifty seconds you have left to call your own.’
To himself, shirtless in his Pierrot mask, he looks like a character who has wandered into the wrong play. I am an absurdist cliché, he thinks. He is at one and the same time frightened of what Lily intends – for she has never before, at least beyond the confines of the bedroom, taken control of him like this – and apologetic that his twisted desires have brought her to this pantomime of whips and fancy dress. Whips for Christ’s sake. And yes, yes, he knows – the whip she wields is a whip he bought for her to wield.
‘Lily, I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘What for?’
‘All this.’
‘You mean the aesthetics? It’s bit late for that. And anyway, I’m fine with it.’
She puts a hand on his neck and squeezes it between her thumb and forefinger. He feels that if she were to squeeze harder he would pass out.
She remembers the girl with the slavering dog in Taos Pueblo. Ancient man made gods of the animals he slaughtered. You must revere those you hurt.
‘Just count, my love,’ she tells him.
She knows this isn’t what he wants; that he doesn’t care for the bathos of whips and chains and prison bars; that it’s too literal-minded an enactment of what should never be performed beyond the high walls of the imagination. But what are they here for, if not this?
She is not a flagellator by nature, her life until now has not felt the want of a torture chamber, but she hasn’t sneaked out of the hotel in full Sloane Street Sadeian regalia in order to stand around and smack an expensive whip against her boots. Are they serious or aren’t they? What you start, you go through with, Lily believes, not least to find out where it will end. It’s theatre. Grand Guignol – hasn’t Sam Quaid, winner of two Laurence Olivier Awards, heard of that?
‘Fifty,’ he says quietly.
‘I can’t hear you.’
‘Fifty.’
She brings the whip down on his back. Tonight she will not spare the rod and he will consent to her dramaturgy.
Her. Hers.
Does Sam think this is all for him? As she brings the whip down on his shrinking body she thinks how fine he looks. The more she hurts him the more she loves him, and the more she loves him the more she wants to hurt him.
Quaid, knowing nothing of what she’s thinking, closes his eyes against the unaccustomed pain, picturing what he can’t see, the raising and bringing down of her arm, the heaving and freeing of her elegant, slight chest, the diamantes in the handle of her whip going off like artillery, the men, dominants and submissives alike, pausing from the staging of their own mad desires to look at her desirously, wanting her, wishing they were him. He can picture the envy in their eyes. Isn’t this what so many of them come out night after night to clubs like these to find – a soulmate in loving cruelty, a woman who understands, who will take advantage of their queer weakness and yet at the same time make herself complicit in it? Such a woman, supposing she exists, is rare, elusive, prized beyond rubies. Night after night the search goes on, and night after night it ends in failure.
But Lily does exist. ‘I am the most fortunate of men,’ he thinks.
But he still has to bail out before she asks him to count to another fifty.
‘Ouch,’ he says. ‘Ouch, ouch.’
She releases him and laughs. ‘My Pollyanna of Perversion,’ she sighs, pulling up his shirt and kissing his cheek with care, not wanting to bruise his softness. She isn’t worried about his back. She has barely touched him.
Perhaps sensing her annoyance, perhaps feeling the waste of her, as she feels it herself, perhaps seeing a way to the extinction Quaid has feebly declined, a frail, bare-chested, white-skinned onlooker, observing Quaid’s retreat, approaches and begs her to do to him what Quaid has shrunk from. Dungeons being places where it is considered bad form to refuse a favour, Lily nods her assent. She sees him eyeing an estrapada but is not prepared to go that far. ‘I don’t use or need equipment,’ she says, pleased by her own boldness. ‘Other than this.’ She orders him to turn his back to her and press his face against a pillar. She raises her coruscating whip and waits. The dungeon falls silent around them. Somewhere in the darkness, Quaid is surely watching what he’s missed out on. Then she strikes.
It alarms her to see how quickly the pale man’s skin reddens. It seems to her she’s barely hit him before a small smear of blood, no bigger than a teardrop, trickles down his side. These men! She knows that an apology will be unwelcome but she does say ‘I have Savlon in my bag if you want it.’ He shakes his head. ‘Put your finger in the blood,’ he pleads. ‘Now put your finger in my mouth.’ Of all the things she’s been asked to do in recent months, putting a finger in a stranger’s mouth is the most shocking. What would her mother think? ‘This is all you’re getting,’ she says, wiping her finger quickly across his lips. He darts out his tongue like a maddened goat but she is too fast for him. ‘Stop!’ she hears herself order. ‘You haven’t earned another drop!’ And the moan he makes teaches her that while he wants her to dabble in his blood, he longs for her to chide him more.