‘You remember the man with the Hermès-scarf fetish?’
‘Which man with the Hermès-scarf fetish?’
‘Sam, how many men with Hermès-scarf fetishes do we know?’
‘I don’t know any.’
‘We met him in a club.’
‘You mean you met him in a club.’
‘I told you about him.’
‘I don’t remember. So what about him?’
‘He’s the one.’
She had met him originally in one of those deep, dark, iniquitous cellars into which it pleased her to lead Quaid, not on a leash – he knew why men wanted to be treated like dogs, but a leash he found demeaning in the wrong way – but by a light gold chain tied to his wrist. ‘Like an item of my jewellery,’ Lily said. That he found demeaning in the right way. He was wearing his sad blank Pierrot mask that made him at once invisible and conspicuous. He could not speak through the mask but he had increased the size of the eye sockets so that he shouldn’t miss anything. The man, taking the blankness of Quaid’s mask to be an advertisement of his non-existence, approached Lily with the directness of a suitor, bowing exaggeratedly and introducing himself as Alain. ‘And I’m Leonore,’ Lily told him. But for a Hermès scarf wrapped around the bottom half of his face like that of a designer bank-robber, Alain was dressed as an Eton sixth-former in pinstriped trousers, a black evening waistcoat, a stiff white shirt with an Arundel collar, and a tailcoat. The room was too dark for her to see that, with an Etonian’s disdain for conformity, he wore unmatching socks. ‘I would like to make you a present of my scarf,’ he said, unwinding himself from it like a dancer.
‘He’s a yes,’ Lily’s mother would have pronounced had her daughter brought him home for tea. ‘But see if you can get him to lose the scarf.’
‘I couldn’t possibly take this,’ Lily said. But he no sooner handed it to her than he pirouetted away.
A month later, in the same deep dark iniquitous cellar, he asked for it back.
‘I thought it was a gift,’ Lily said.
‘It was. But I hoped that when I saw you again you would be wearing it. As you aren’t, I can only assume you don’t want it and therefore I would appreciate your returning it.’
‘How do you know I still have it?’
‘You say you thought it was a gift. I don’t see you as a woman who would destroy a gift. Here is my address. I have a shop opposite Camden Lock. I specialise in folk art.’
‘You told me you sold rag and bones near Mornington Crescent,’ Lily reminded him.
‘You see? I was right about you. You remember.’ He drew a flyer from his frock coat and presented it to her. ‘This is my emporium.’
Lily inspected it. ‘Am I to keep this as a gift or return it the next time I see you?’ she asked.
Something faintly reminiscent of a smile passed across his gloomy features. I don’t like him but I can handle him, Lily thought. As far as she could tell from the flyer, the ‘emporium’ had no windows. Its frontage was one teeming mural of wild animals and even wilder dancers. The words Alain’s Folkloric Bazaar were scrawled across it as though in blood. ‘As you can see, I am easy to find,’ he said. ‘I have a beautiful carved Kachina doll above the door. I picked it up on my travels.’
‘Ha,’ Lily said. ‘A Hopi clown.’
He was impressed she knew what it was.
‘I too am well travelled,’ she said, irritated by his condescension, ‘and I have met many clowns.’
He looked at her sadly. ‘Are you saying I am another?’
Too intimate. ‘Just tell me,’ she went on, ‘what does a dealer in folk art want with a Hermès scarf?’
‘Return it to me and I’ll show you,’ he said.
‘I think not,’ Lily thought, even as she was thinking she probably would.
Alain made as though to look into her soul. Lily looked directly back into the slough of misery that was his. These wan, perverted men, she thought. Whatever else, the warps in their personalities did not make them happy. Unless unhappiness was what drove them to perversion. She hoped it wasn’t that way for Quaid. She hoped it was love for her that explained his propensities. As it was love for him that drove hers – that and the simple fact that wandering off the straight and narrow energised her.
‘Please ring the phone number on the flyer before you come round,’ Alain said. ‘And make it late. I don’t want anybody to be embarrassed.’
Lily blew out her cheeks. ‘You can’t really think I’m coming,’ she said.
But, exactly as he had done the time before, he spun on his heels and left.
Quaid made it a rule not to ask Lily what words passed between her and the men with whom she struck up conversation underground. The point of his mask was to convey the idea that he didn’t exist. The room marked Pierrot was empty. To admit curiosity was to admit possessiveness and possessiveness would break the trance. The minute their masquerade began Lily moved in her own sphere, answerable to no one. But on this occasion – so odd a fetish was a Hermès scarf, and so odd a coincidence was the Hopi clown – she took Quaid into her confidence and showed him the brochure.
Quaid nodded silently. It would not have been permissible, by his lights, to evince any more interest than that.
What made her decide to return the scarf? The man who had presented it to her and now wanted it back was not in the least to her liking. He was insistent and humourless. Good reasons, both, to have kept away from him. But the wildness was upon her and a good reason she shouldn’t do something was a good reason she should.
She attached no value to the scarf. Why she kept it in that case – or at least why she hadn’t thrown it away – she could not have explained. But it took up no room and, as her mother would have said, didn’t ask to be fed. Notwithstanding the universal strangeness of the predilections to which she was growing accustomed, she was curious as to the talismanic hold the Hermès scarf enjoyed over its owner. Was that sufficient motivation to do something so reckless as to call on him, alone, in the dead of night? Recklessness was its own sufficiency.
She took a taxi, making deliberate conversation with the driver, so that if he saw a picture of her in the papers describing her as missing, he could give the police the address at which he’d dropped her. She sat huddled in the back of the cab, alarmed at her temerity and folly. Was she excited? Yes, but not in anticipation of meeting Alain. She was excited by the thought of Quaid, by the love she felt for him, by what they had brewed up together, by the loosening of the laws and precautions she had previously – pre-Quaid, pre-She-and-Quaid – lived by. Whatever else – and maybe there was nothing else – this escapade was an expression of infatuated, uncontainable, frenzied love. Was there anything, she had begun to wonder, that she wouldn’t do, both for him and as a consequence of his influence? But she was party to his influence. He didn’t simply exert it. She invited and then hosted it. So the question ought to have been: Was there anything she wouldn’t do for them?
In a stroke of intuitive genius – an act of empathetic prescience attributable to her crazed state – she paused before getting out of the taxi to put the Hermès scarf over her hair and tie it under the neck. To anyone catching a brief glimpse of her in the dark it might have seemed that a senior member of the royal family was going calling. Could she have kept a horse here?
Alain, wearing only an Etonian’s gown, opened the door to her and dropped to his knees. He didn’t greet her or speak. The headscarf transfixed him. Lily, wearing the impossible spiked shoes Quaid loved, kicked the door closed behind her and, less forcibly, prodded him out of the way. She would discover soon enough if this had been the wrong thing to do but she doubted it. The square of silk that transfixed him empowered her.
‘Where?’ she asked.
He led her into what she could only think of as a seafarer’s cabin, on the walls of which were engravings of harpooned whales and from the ceiling of which hung nets and ropes.
Did he want her to spear him? Or net him like a fish? She’d encountered stranger longings in the club.
‘Take off your gown,’ she said. ‘Now lie on the floor.’
She couldn’t have described what he looked like naked. She had no curiosity about his appearance. Afterwards she couldn’t even remember if he were fat or thin. Only when she began to tie his hands behind his back, as she had countless times tied Quaid’s, did he make a move or utter a sound. ‘Uh, uh,’ he said, freeing his hands and folding them flat upon his chest, as though in prayerful repose. He could have been laid out in his own coffin, like the poet Donne, posing for a brass rubbing, had he not, a moment later, brought his knees up to his stomach. By means of signs he was able to convey exactly how he wanted to be bound. Not unlike a chicken, Lily thought, without humour or disdain. No aberrance shocked her; no vagary of desire struck her as absurd. She set to work, occasionally allowing him to smell her perfume and feel the corners of her scarf brush his skin. Midway through, it occurred to her that she had never performed a more maternal task. ‘For you, Sam,’ she thought. ‘Come to my woman’s breasts …’
As she struggled to make the knots tighter, it crossed her mind that women had always to implore a special dispensation of strength and cruelty before they could do what men did naturally. It infuriated her that her trembling fingers were not stronger or more expert. Come thick night … Did she really need Stygian assistance to truss a naked, unresisting Etonian like a chicken? But it would have to do. He was sufficiently helpless, she thought at last, for her to leave him. They exchanged no words. She unknotted the Hermès scarf, draped it over his face like a shroud, waited to be sure he was breathing beneath it, sucking it in, dimpling it out, then she turned off the light and closed the front door after her. Back out on the street she walked quickly and hailed a taxi. She could hear her heart beating.
The whole thing had taken fifteen minutes.
It was only when she’d found a taxi that fear began to take over from exultation. Should she have left him as she had? She had felt certain at the time that only a seasoned escapologist would have allowed himself to be tied up and abandoned by someone as amateur as she. And if he couldn’t escape himself, he would surely have made provision for a friend, a partner, a helper, maybe even a wife, to come around and disembarrass him. But she now knew for herself what desperation human beings were capable of when the lust for abandon was on them. Quite possibly he had not thought beyond the craving to be subjected to a middle-aged woman in spiked heels and a Hermès scarf. Quite possibly, he was happy to die where he was, fulfilled at last. Just as – yes, she had to admit – she was happy, half-happy at any rate, exhilarated certainly, to have been the cause. It wasn’t in the slightest bit personal – but if the worst happened, hadn’t they both got something they wanted?
She imagined going back and finding a succession of women knocking urgently at his door, each scarfed like the Queen. An intimation of the commonality of her action disappointed her. Halfway home, she had told the driver to go back, but now she told him not to. Alain? Alain who? Who cared!