On an evening which, one way or another, was to have no small bearing on the lives of Sam and Lily, Sam was meant to be dining in Shepherd Market with a precociously brilliant student director desirous of taking a farce of sexual manners he’d all but forgotten he’d written – Caliban in Cheltenham – to the Edinburgh Festival. Quaid didn’t know Shepherd Market well and had left the choice of restaurant to Gillian, on whom youth sat more like experience than innocence and who had the air of knowing everywhere. The restaurant she chose was Theodora, named after a classical courtesan who rose to be empress of the Byzantine Empire. Restaurants bearing the names of whores and concubines and housed in former bordellos had become fashionable in parts of London that had a lurid past and Theodora was the latest. Because Theodora’s mother had been a dancer and her father a bear trainer in Constantinople, the walls were decorated with paintings of bears and belly-dancers. The menu was Armenian with modern vegan interpolations.
Quaid arrived first and was sitting in a cubicle consulting the wine list when Selena and her two daughters turned up in the company of a man who could have been a bear trainer himself. Quaid hoped that if he kept his head down he would not be observed, but his hair was distinctive in its crackling luxuriance and her daughters who were leading the way saw him at once. ‘Mummy, let’s leave,’ Eleanor said in a stage whisper, ‘he’s here.’ The word ‘he’ had a galvanic effect on Selena, almost knocking her off her feet. Though he had been at home hours earlier, the sight of him out made her feel he was no longer ever in. She took two steps back, her feet barely touching the floor, and paused at the entrance to his cubicle. ‘Ah – the husband!’ she cried. ‘On your own? That must be a novel experience for you. So where is she? Left you for someone younger?’
With which she lowered herself as though to make a curtsy, raised the edge of her husband’s tablecloth, and peered under the table.
‘I am here on business, Selena,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make a fuss.’
‘Business! Good choice of venue for your kind of business. A brothel!’
The waiter was leading her daughters and the bear trainer to their table. But Selena did not want to leave before Lily appeared. She wanted to see them meet. Greet each other. Embrace. Exchange saliva.
This is to be the big scene, Quaid feared. This is the one she’s been waiting for. But he felt sorry for her at the same time, sorry for all he’d put her through and all she was about to say. And her fantastical pantomime of looking under his table reminded him of the merriment they’d once shared. He almost wished Lily had been there and Selena had found her.
He saw Gillian descending the stairs in time to shout, ‘Don’t come down. There’s unpleasantness here. I’ll call you to explain …’
‘That’s it, run, cowardly slut,’ Selena shouted after the clatter of the girl’s receding heels. ‘Unpleasantness? You’ve seen nothing yet!’
‘Not here, Selena,’ Quaid begged. He was afraid that she was already drunk. ‘We can talk at home.’
‘Home! When are you at home?’
‘Then let’s talk outside.’
Perhaps because she knew her jealousy was feeding on itself and she needed air to cool her down or, conversely, because she hoped she’d get the chance to see and strike her rival, Selena agreed to leave the restaurant with him. Whispering an apology, he slipped the waiter a couple of twenty-pound notes on the way out. And there among the boorish bawls of outdoor drinkers, but louder by far than any of them, Selena gave vent to a rage she had already given vent to over breakfast and would again when he crawled home at whatever time – for it wasn’t true that he was never at home, just that he always looked as though he didn’t want to be.
He heard only scraps of what she said. He could have delivered every fair but stale complaint for her. At last, she lowered her voice and asked the only question that could deliver her the full draught of anguish she couldn’t do without. ‘So do you love her?’
‘Selena—’
‘Do you love her, yes or no? Give me an honest answer for once in your life.’
Quaid didn’t say an honest answer would be too cruel, so he gave a dishonest one.
‘No … I don’t love her … how many more times must I say it … she is not my type.’
Spare one and you wound another.
‘Since when did that bother you? Are you sleeping with her still?’
‘Still?’
‘Are you telling me you never did sleep with her?’
‘All right, once.’
‘Why?’
‘Alcohol, I suppose.’
‘No – why only the once? Didn’t you like it?’
‘Selena – this is unseemly.’
‘Oh, THIS is unseemly! What about when you discussed me?’
‘I wouldn’t have dreamed of discussing you.’
‘No, I bet …’
‘Selena, we work together – that’s it.’
‘You’re supposed to be a playwright. Who did Shakespeare work with?’
He could have said ‘Scholars opine Thomas Middleton and maybe even John Fletcher.’ But just because he was a louse of a husband didn’t mean he had to be a facetious one too. ‘We’ve been through this,’ he said instead. ‘Over and over.’
‘And is it your intention to go on working together?’
‘As long as the work is interesting, yes.’
‘And aren’t you interested,’ she asks, ‘to know who I’m sleeping with?’
‘Don’t be a child.’
‘I, a child?’
Why he said what he said next, Quaid had no idea. ‘Just so you know, Selena, the person whose receding back you just saw is not who you think.’
‘Ah, so you have another one on the go.’
And why he replied as he did, he had no idea either.
‘Yes.’
‘Does your Mexican trollop know?’
Quaid lowered his head.
Selena’s colour rose to meet her elation. ‘Serves her fucking right. I can’t wait to tell her when she next pants down the phone at me. May I speak to Sam, please? No, you may fucking not. Not possible right now. He’s got his dick in someone else.’
With which she turned from him and skipped down the stairs to the restaurant, perhaps to take one more look under the table.
How long he continued to stand there, in the self-engrossed, booze-fuelled piazza of Shepherd Market, stock-still like a monument to inadequacy, Quaid could not have said. An hour, was it? A week? Selena had miscalculated if she’d hoped the roaring brokers and estate agents would pause their bottled laughter long enough to jeer at her husband. Why would they, when words identical to hers awaited them when they got home?
As a rule, boozers on expense accounts disgusted the bohemian in Quaid. Tonight he felt a sort of envy for them. They seemed content being the men they were. They drank in unison, laughed in unison, no doubt deceived their wives in unison. He had scorned such men at Oxford. The rugby players. The oarsmen. The company he kept had been poetical and neurasthenic. Joyce and Lawrence would have been his friends had they been there. They hated each other, of course. Or at least, as they never met, hated each other’s work. The same with Quaid and the writers he knew. All rage and envy and disparagement and when they drank they drank to kill themselves, not to laugh in tipsy accord. Had I been a man like these, Quaid thought, I’d have been no better a husband than I am, but maybe I’d have been less of a liar.
He couldn’t forgive himself. He had betrayed Lily. Yes, in order to spare Selena. But a betrayal is a betrayal whatever the justification for it. He’d denied, again and again, that he loved Lily. Swore he couldn’t love her. Insisted she was not his type. Never mind that these words bore not a grain of truth and Lily was not here to hear them. Just the fact of their utterance was a betrayal. And then he had betrayed her further by encouraging Selena to believe that just as he’d been unfaithful her, so was he unfaithful to Lily – as though that might somehow make things better. He could tell himself that these were no more than offerings on the altar of a dead marriage, that he owed his wife some piffling consolation. But did he have to steal from Lily to give it? Must a man deny his mistress to placate his wife?