And, and, and …?
They have not yet arrived at their destination. Quaid listens as though to a death sentence – could it be his own death sentence? – delivered in a language he doesn’t recognise.
‘You do know,’ he says at last, ‘that you could have got yourself killed?’
‘Yes, I do know that.’
‘And you do know that I wouldn’t have wanted that?’
‘I think I know that too. But getting myself killed isn’t any longer the issue.’
The issue … The issue being … Can they really be having this conversation?
‘So what is it,’ he asks, ‘that has made you change your mind a second time? Why, now, do you think you hurt this freak?’
‘Not hurt, Sam. Murdered.’
‘Yes, but what makes you think that?’
‘He wasn’t moving.’
‘Isn’t that his shtick? You don’t ask people to tie you up so you can move.’
‘I wasn’t sure he could breathe.’
‘And you don’t ask people to choke you so you can breathe.’
‘I met him in a club, Sam, remember. I didn’t know anything about him.’
‘All the more reason you shouldn’t have gone there.’
‘I don’t need to be told that.’
‘But you still haven’t explained what’s changed. He wasn’t moving or breathing when you left him and yet you left him.’
‘I wondered about it.’
‘But you left him. Why only now do you think you left him for dead?’
‘Maybe what’s changed my mind was what you said to me in Shepherd Market. If you could fear you’d murdered me with words, shouldn’t I fear—’
‘—that you’d murdered him with a Hermès scarf? So had I said nothing, you’d have said nothing?’
Lily thinks about it. ‘Is that terrible?’
‘Not too terrible. You, after all, didn’t ask me to deny you. Whereas, as I understand it, the freak did ask you to make a parcel of him. But I see it might be hard for you to argue that distinction in a court of law.’
‘Sam, you aren’t taking this seriously.’
‘I couldn’t be taking it more seriously. But at the same time it’s all too extreme to believe. I simply cannot connect to the idea of murder. In all the plays I’ve written no one has been murdered. I do throw a character not far removed from my father into a pyre, but that’s different. Otherwise I’m not even able to imagine a murderous impulse. Murder’s what other people do. Not us.’
‘This isn’t about us, Sam.’
‘All right – I just can’t associate the idea of murder with you.’
‘Well maybe you should.’
And it is only when they arrive at Alain’s Folkloric Bazaar and find the pavement in front of it cordoned off with blue and white police tape warning the public against crossing, that he does.
‘Before jumping to conclusions …’ Quaid says.
‘Jumping to conclusions? A police cordon!’
‘Yes, I know, I know. But just stop to think about it. How many days ago was it that you returned the scarf? Seven? Eight? If you did what you think you might have done then, why would the police still be here?’
‘Could it be because they have only just found the body?’
The word body affects them badly. Murder itself is an abstract concept until you connect it to a body.
Quaid holds her face in his hands. ‘Christ, Lily.’
In a pub across the road she drinks more brandies than have passed her lips in the whole of her life.
She asks him to hold her face again. ‘Christ, Sam.’
They are sitting hugger-mugger in a corner, keeping their voices down.
‘We must look as guilty as hell,’ Quaid says.
‘There is no we. I must look as guilty as hell. Sam, I am as guilty as hell.’
She goes over, for the hundredth time, all that had happened. Not just the actions but, far more interesting to them both, the wayward impulses that drove her to do so wild a thing.
‘There are times,’ she says, looking into her glass, ‘when I am so overwhelmed by all I feel for you – so excited and disrupted by us, by what we’ve unloosed in one another – that I feel there is nothing, absolutely nothing, I wouldn’t do, wouldn’t give you …’
‘I don’t ask for anything.’
‘I know you don’t ask for anything. The thing they call folie à deux doesn’t have to be the consequence of rational conversation between lovers. You don’t need to tell me what you want for me to try to give it you.’
‘I don’t want anything I don’t already have in you.’
‘Sam, just listen. It isn’t about meeting your requests. If anything it’s about exceeding your expectations of me, and my knowledge of myself. It’s – I don’t know – an audacity, a lunacy even, that can’t be reasoned or explained. Imagine all the usual inhibitions and precautions just falling away. Sam, I’m not exaggerating when I say that some nights I feel I could do anything. Love engenders criminal insanity – I shouldn’t have to tell you that.’
Quaid tries to take her hand but she pulls it from him. This isn’t a holding-hands matter.
‘Who is your favourite novelist, Lily?’
‘Sam, if this is your way of taking my mind from what’s happened, it isn’t going to work.’
‘I know the answer. Your favourite novelist is Jane Austen. So why are you talking like a character out of Emily Brontë? I feel I’ve married Heathcliff.’
‘We aren’t married, Sam.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Love turns the brain, Sam. I don’t need any of the Brontës to teach me that.’
Does he understand what she’s telling him?
‘You aren’t saying you were in love with this fruitcake?’
No, he doesn’t understand. How disappointing. And he reputedly so clever.
‘In love with him! What do you think?’
‘Lily, all this is shocking to me. I don’t know what to think.’
‘If you are trying to find out whether I slept with him, no of course I didn’t sleep with him. I barely noticed him. This was about you and me, not him. He was merely the occasion. The madness – the liberation, the risk, whatever you want to call it – was generated by us. By what we say. By what we do. You and me. And don’t call him a fruitcake. Just remember what you beg me to do to you.’
‘Do I beg?’
‘Yes. You do. You beg. You’d beg like a dog if I demanded it. And I give you what you beg for. Admit it about yourself. Admit it about me. We’re all just a single blow, a single word away from being murderers and victims.’
Quaid stared into her storm-tossed eyes. ‘Who the hell are we, Lily?’
Finally, a question to which she knows the answer. ‘Lovers.’