It is not so much that he has left as that he is leaving home – peeling away his old life a rip of wallpaper at a time, peeling away himself, more like it. He is sleeping in clubs. Smart, high-end members’ clubs, not discos or dungeons. And not hotels. This accords with his idea of sophistication and decency. A man spending a few nights in his club has not done a bunk. A man spending a few nights in his club is considering his options and obligations. A man spending a few nights in a club is doing what his father did, but he tries not to think of that.
It’s in that same spirit that he changes clubs every few days. It could be said that he is researching a new play, though it would be more accurate to say he is researching himself.
But changing clubs makes no difference to the nightmares he’s having – the same nightmare – night after night. The nightmare begins euphorically, Sam happier than he has ever been in his life, packing a bag, expecting no resistance, so light of spirit his feet barely touch the floor, a bird in flight on the loveliest of summer mornings, but ends, somehow, with him staying. It is not a resolution to stay, it is the absence of a resolution – the absence of the capacity even – to do anything else. No part of him can move. Not even his eyelids. Wide open in the grey dawn, his eyes take in a terrain of terrible mistake, a battlefield of remorse, misgiving and dread.
What have I let happen? he asks in the moment before waking. And he is still asking it when he does wake. The weakness of will he dreams about at night cannot be annulled by day. Even before the nightmare begins again he is preparing himself for it, knowing what he will not be able to do. Irresolution leads him into sleep and holds him there.
There is one sliver of solace. Because the nightmare does not allow him to see who it is he cannot leave, it is always possible he has made the right choice and stayed with the woman he wants to stay with. But if that’s the case, why the dread that he hasn’t?
By nightmare logic there is no right choice. There is only wrong piled on wrong. And that includes wrong to his heart as well as to the heart he will be breaking. Woven into the hair shirt of nightmare is the anguish of craven betrayal. How to tell the other woman, waiting for him in some other dream, that the thing he went out meaning to do he has not done and never will do. But beyond her grief, like a dark, immovable shape in the shadows, is his own. The battlefield strewn with remorse and dread from which he wakes, night after night, in a cold quicksilver sweat, is no less the battlefield of his hopes. His love, too, lies bleeding.
What have I let happen?
Some nights Lily joins him at the Groucho or the Savile or the Shoreditch or the Chelsea Arts Club, and on those nights, God be praised, he is spared the nightmare. He doesn’t want her to hear him crying What have I let happen? She will wonder if she is the mistake. To be on the safe side, to be sure she hears nothing, should so much as a fragment of nightmare leak out, he imprisons her in his arms. Yes, they have stopped masquerading but they have also stopped sleeping back-to-back. If he could sleep with his hands over her ears he would. His assertiveness surprises her, but she goes along with it. Could it be she understands with her sixth sense that he must assert the primacy of his daytime moral universe over whatever it is that seizes him in the night? Wherever nightmare leads him, Lily close to him when he wakes, Lily not abandoned, is what he wants.
She can feel her importance to him in the tightness of his grip on her.
So why doesn’t she stay every night?
He hasn’t asked her to. And she will not force herself upon him. His need for her all but devours her, but still she holds a part of herself in reserve. He is still a married man. He still has other obligations whether he acknowledges them or not. And she has obligations to her self-respect. Her honour.
And Hal?
Leaving him, she thinks, will not be the excruciation that leaving Selena is to Sam. Not because he has been less dear to her but because she connects differently. Or at least she connected differently with Hal. There had been no maelstrom of passion. She made fewer promises. She kept one foot outside the magic circle. Though they have only been half together for a long time, she doesn’t minimise what she will lose when finally she leaves. It will be like parting from her history – the ‘University Years’, ‘the ‘Job Interviews’, the ‘World of Work’, ‘Success’ – the sequences of their lives ticking over like the calendar marking the passage of time in black and white movies. It’s Hal who has charted the course of her life in tandem with his own. These are the things she must have done because he’s done them. It would be wrong to call him possessive; he’s been protective rather, like a shell. Should a new life sweep him up, what will become of her old one? Will her past cease to exist? Will she have gone straight from childhood to Sam with nothing in between? And what chance of narcissistic Sam – Sam the selfish artist who fabricates what he needs to see and is oblivious to everything else – what chance of him carrying her life in him as carefully as Hal has done?
And vice versa? Will her future life put an end to Hal’s past? No. Because she has not been all in all to him she won’t leave as cruelly and finally as Sam the flamboyant giver and greedy taker will. She gave less and will take less. And she will not forget Hal as Sam will forget Selena. She will keep him on as part of her life, as he always has been.
Sam is looking tired. He has bags under his eyes and his skin has yellowed. Lily wonders whether he is overwrought because he fears Selena is having him tailed, though if it is true that she knows why he has left her, there would be no reason for her to do that.
‘You are being honest with me, Quaid? She does know? I’m not demanding you tell her. I have no right to do that. I just want to know that what you tell me you have told her, you have told her.’
‘Yes, she knows.’
‘You haven’t half-told her? You haven’t spun one of your impenetrable verbal evasions round her? She doesn’t think you’ve just popped round to the corner shop for a newspaper?’
‘She knows I’m leaving her.’
Leaving, not left.
And what he isn’t able to say is that Selena knows he is leaving her because he is in love with another woman.
There is something he hasn’t thought of until now. ‘What if these nightmares are the direct consequence of my obviations? Are they the price I must pay for not being able to look Selena in the face and tell her the truth? Could it be that the powers that control nightmares do not accept that I have left her for another woman until I leave her for another woman in words? Say it, Quaid. Say it!’
What if he meets his nightmare halfway? What if he moves out of the Groucho Club, the Saville Club, the Chelsea Arts Club, rents a flat, asks Lily to leave Hal and move in with him, pops a change of address card in the post to Selena, and resumes a proper life?
Proper! Did he say proper?
Selena deserves to be free of him: of that, in waking hours, he entertains not the slightest doubt. But what of Lily? Oughtn’t life to have dealt her a better hand? Given her a better shot at happiness?
False humility. He knows she loves him and believes he can make her happy. His certainty of that is rooted in how much he loves her. How can it not be mutual? But as for proper, he isn’t is he? Proper as in owned by himself, appropriate, genuine, decorous, all he should be. He is not a proper man in any of those senses, and therefore not the material of which proper husbands or proper husbands-in-waiting are made.
He has vowed to be a pornographer of the heart no longer, but he is finding that promise to himself hard. Love, for Quaid, just won’t stay still or clean.
Nor is he a proper playwright, not having finished a full-length play in years.
He can’t write in a club bedroom. He can’t read much either. Someone has left a biography of Hemingway on a dresser in the Groucho. ‘Now here’s an unhappy man,’ Quaid thinks, opening the book where the page has been folded down. In love with two women blah, blah. Quaid, who is in love with only one woman and suffers agonising nightmares, wonders how much worse they’d be if he were in love with two. Did Hemingway have bad dreams? Did he dream in short sentences?
Quaid flicks through the book. Surprise, surprise, questions about the great white hunter’s maleness. A photograph of him as a little boy in a dress. No doubt someone has a photograph of Hemingway as an old man in a dress. Leave us alone, Quaid thinks. Give men a break. Let us look at whatever we want to look at. Let us look however we want to look. He wishes Lily were here with him this minute. He would like to try on her dress.
Like a proper husband.