Like many lovers, they took pleasure in skipping between tenses, reliving their happiest hours and greatest escapades, then granting themselves sneak previews of felicities to come.
For her sixtieth birthday, he buys her a French diamond and platinum full eternity ring dated circa 1935, a vicuña sweater from Peru, crêpe de Chine pyjamas – he had earlier in their relationship bought her silk pyjamas that had wild tigers on them: this latest pair features a woodland scene – and a fish-smoker. Were there such a thing as a cashmere fish-smoker he’d have bought her that.
Ten years earlier than that he’d bought her a black leather catsuit and Batman mask.
Ten years further along he doesn’t want to think about, but he knows that whatever he buys her will have to be warm. If shoes, they will be flat. If a handbag, it will be capacious and easy to get into.
She buys him Ferragamo ties, low-alcohol wine and, every year, a new and bigger silver pillbox for his tablets. She has already bought him a dosette box engraved with his name and a Breitling divers’ watch, the joke being that he doesn’t swim, is frightened of overfilling the bath, and can’t understand any of the dials.
There are two ways for couples who stay together to envisage the future. They can see it as an old folks’ home or they can see it as living happily ever after.
‘We’ll be living happily ever after,’ Lily says.
Sam drinks to that, but not too much. Too many bottles of wine and you’ll be lucky even to make it to an old folks’ home.
However determined they are to stay happy, there are pockets of grey reflectiveness in the corners of all lovers’ eyes. What will living happily ever after really be like?
It is cruel to concertina a love affair. The time it takes to get to wherever it gets to is the story, not its final resting place.
Sam and Lily don’t expect to subside into comfortable amicability all at once, if ever. They are not going to let the fire go out. The tigers might be sleeping but they will not retract their claws. Sam isn’t sure what Lily will do or whom she will murder next and still, some nights, wants it to be him.
Time, however, will reveal them to be living together in rare amity, nearly twenty years after the great escape from their previous lives. And they will be talking valiantly – no, not valiantly, that’s too ageing a word; more matter-of-factly – of looking forward to twenty more. They have an architect-designed house – designed for a pair of lovers before them – made of glass and stainless steel and overlooking the Thames at Putney. From here they watch the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Sam supports Cambridge to prove he is still a pervert. They don’t go into town much unless one of Quaid’s plays is being reprised. They have friends – at least they have Lily’s friends – and throw dinner parties, but are largely content with their own company. Each understands everything the other says, even when they aren’t speaking. They don’t have children, dogs – though Quaid would like a dog – or sex.
They are living happily ever after.
A word about their great escape. Both knew, after they had confessed their crimes to each other, that there could be no going back to their previous lives. Matters had become too weighty. Lovers need a comfy place of their own in which to discuss such matters as betrayal and murder.
The move out of their respective houses, obligations and mindsets had not been easy for either of them. Of the two, Lily managed it the better. When Lily broke up with someone, she didn’t leave them devastated. She transformed what might have felt like a rupture into an adjustment. Those she’d loved she went on loving. Sam, who broke promises on a scale commensurate with his making them, had first to negotiate something resembling a nervous collapse, though as was habitual with him when it came to calling a spade a spade, he called it something else.
He called it – amusingly to himself, less so to Lily – an interregnum: a break in continuity, an interval between two authorities.