After several hours hiding away in the pub, going over and over what she’d done and not done, Lily said she wanted to ask around.
‘Ask around for what?’
‘Just ask.’
She’d like to find some locals to talk to but almost everyone here was a tourist. Come to Camden to buy pre-shrunk jeans and meet a murderer.
But she did get talking to a weathered, nautical-looking man at the next table who she fancifully thought might know Alain – might have known Alain – on account of those nets and pulleys in his dungeon. What was going on across the road? Same old circus was his bet. Drugs, transvestites, prostitutes, weirdos, men in rubber nappies, asphyxiators … Asphyxiators? Yep, quite a craze for it in these parts, and that shit-heap of a shop was somewhere asphyxiators were known to hang out if you’ll forgive the pun. Why the police presence? Damned if he knew. A couple of chokers were reputed to have been brought out, but whether alive or dead he had no idea. It was immaterial, anyway. They’d be dead next time if they weren’t dead this.
Lily turned to Quaid. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘I heard that.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think we need our heads examining. Who have we been hanging out with, Lily? Asphyxiators!’
Now was not the time, in her view, to be judging the company they kept. Feeling that little bit safer, she wanted to return to Alain’s Bazaar. Take a second look. ‘That a good idea?’ Quaid wondered. She sighed. Mr Curious. She was unsteady on her legs. He was unsteady on his. They didn’t speak. The silence reminded them both of those hours waiting to go clubbing. When they got to the shop the police were taking the cordon down. ‘Crime solved?’ Lily asked one of the policemen rolling up the tape. He ignored her. Quaid gripped her hand. What would she ask next? Whether they’d like to take her prints? A second policeman was talking to a man – an Etonian, upright, scarfed and not in a winding sheet. Alain.
‘He’s here,’ she whispered.
‘Who’s here?’
‘Alain, you moron.’
‘Alive?’
Now it was her turn to say ‘Keep your voice down.’
Quaid gripped her hand still tighter. Don’t smile, Lily. Don’t fucking smile at him.
He pulled her away into an adjoining shop doorway where they kissed and kissed, as much to hide their faces as in relief. Relief would come later. Relief could not be rushed.
‘Jesus, Lily.’
‘Jesus, Sam.’
They agreed that Lily should not drive herself home. Quaid flagged down a taxi. He was going to stay in Camden for an hour, shake the day off. They held on to each other before she was driven away. They should have their own home to go to.
Quaid wondered whether, in a tiny, unfamiliar corner of his being, he was disappointed she was not a murderer.
Walking the sulphurous streets of Camden, Quaid rewrote the story as he could best comprehend it. Lily, fizzing with love for one man, had accepted another’s dare to visit him and return his scarf. Not much of a challenge on the face of it, but that could only mean it concealed a secondary risk. What wouldn’t she do to prove what madness drove her? To prove it not only to the man she loved but to herself. She had described that madness as fomented by her fixated union with Quaid: an induced consanguinity, as deranged as incest, in which, like Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle, two indulged the fantasy that they were one. ‘Two distincts, division none’. So she had set out in the darkness, alone, distinct but not divided – so she had set out, poor undivided Lily, alone and in the dead of fearful night, with the intention of returning an unwanted gift to a man she’d met in a rat-hole and, either because he had assaulted her when she arrived, or begged her to assault him (bind him, throttle him, suffocate him, hang him with his scarf), had been unable to prevent play descending into reality and, in the real or pretend struggle, had – almost had, could have – killed him.
Such an eventuality was not unknown where people demanded pain to enhance pleasure. At the furthest extremes, death itself was a small price to pay – and for some the only price to pay – to attain that final, all-consuming throb of ecstasy. Though Quaid was not so far gone in erotic hysteria himself, he could see the road ahead. It was distant yet, but a step, a belt, a buckle, a whip, at a time … Clearly, the inexplicable idiot who loved Hermès scarves and Hopi clowns had put in the miles. Good luck to him, then, if he’d got his wish. Maybe he was grateful. Maybe he thanked Lily in the imagined moment of expiry. In which case he was thanking the wrong person. The debt he owed was to Sam Quaid, playwright, pretender by trade, without whose crazed longings to escape the ordinary conditions of love, Lily would not have encountered an answering craziness in herself. He had done this to her. He had put her life in danger, dragged her down, demeaned, degraded, defiled her. He had cared more about the seemliness of a sentence than the dignity and honour of the woman he claimed to love.
And not only her. He thought of poor Selena, reduced to cursing in a public place of horn-mad drunkards – she too was his doing.
Miss Gore had been right all along. A man starts by slavering over a woman’s breast, and next …
Take murder back out of the equation and thank you, thank you God, all is good. Lily was in the clear. Of course Lily was in the clear. Morally, however, he was not. What she hadn’t done she could have done. And behind such a could have was him, the source of all that was disruptive and rampaging between them. She denied him the credit – how dare he see himself as the author of her desires? – but he denied her denial. He wasn’t going to have self-blame snatched from his grasp. Yes, she tied the belt but only after he had offered her his wrists. Lily was sweetness incarnate. He revered everything that was kind and lovely in her. Yes, accommodating, too. The pornographer-in-chief of their wild, weird passion was and always had been Quaid.
Vanity? Without doubt. Lovers’ vanity.
And she had her share of it. Who was to say she would not go adventuring in the name of love again? What if this narrow escape were to convince her she could get away with anything? Lily invincible. It was an attractive proposition. Even as he dreaded its consequences he felt himself go weak before the very idea of it. Lily invincible …
Had he lost his mind?
He stayed in Camden Town long enough to make a number of resolutions. In so far as it was in his hands to lower the temperature, he would do so. They didn’t have to burn for each other. Wasn’t it enough to glow? No more nights in the stews and sewers of London. Enough with the lewd masquerading. There were other ways of loving. They had loved otherwise at the beginning themselves. They must love otherwise again. They must, like a new Adam and Eve, quit the torture garden they had no business frequenting in the first place, leave deviants to their deviancy and the sordid to their dishonour. They must be all in all to each other, indifferent to the examples of the dissolute and far from the stimulating stares of smutty strangers. If her loose gown should from her shoulders fall, only he must be there to see it.