It isn’t entirely true that Lily has been keeping the depth of her feelings for Sam Quaid from all her friends. Just most of them. With Amaryllis she’s been less circumspect. It’s the Hal thing. She is sure Amaryllis has carried a torch for him. This hasn’t made her jealous. But that might only be because – to her knowledge at least – nothing has happened. And if it has and they have succeeded in keeping it from her, well, she thanks them for their urbane consideration. Now she must show some.
‘What’s the occasion?’ Amaryllis asks as the two women kiss.
‘Must there be an occasion?’
‘To explain why we’re taking tea at Claridge’s, yes.’
‘I haven’t seen you in ages and I love taking tea at Claridge’s.’
‘I think of you as taking tea here every afternoon. I remember how much you loved afternoon tea at university. The joke was that any man who wanted to get into your bed had first to buy you scones.’
‘And none did.’
‘None?’
‘Few.’
‘So?’ Amaryllis says when they have ordered.
The question refers to the progress of Lily’s affair. It isn’t exactly to raise her hopes in relation to Hal that Lily has told her what she’s told no one else. It is not her job to match-make. And it would demean Hal to do so. Hal is more than capable of looking after his own love life. But she needed to talk to someone once in a while, and precisely because Amaryllis had an interest in the outcome of her affair but had always been a scrupulously honourable friend, Lily thought of her – perhaps perversely – as the one person she could confide in.
The tea comes before Lily can answer. ‘You be mother,’ Amaryllis says.
‘You want to see if my hand is shaking.’
‘Why would your hand be shaking?’
‘Because I stand at the crossroads of decision.’
‘Let me help. Don’t put the milk in first.’
‘I’m glad you feel you can make fun of me. But this is serious, Mar. He’s asked me to marry him.’
‘Well that’s wonderful if it’s what you want, but I’ve never thought of you as a woman who waits to be asked. I imagine you asking him. I even imagine you as being the one who buys the ring.’
‘To the degree that I could never trust Sam to buy a ring, you’re right. Left to his own devices he has the aesthetic of a savage.’
‘The last time we talked you said he was the only man you’d ever met who loved shopping. I didn’t suppose you meant for groceries.’
‘Loves shopping with me. I take him to Bond Street. I try on the clothes. I tell him what I like. He agrees. I see him eyeing off miniskirts and I daren’t let him near shoes, but yes, if I come out of a changing room enthusiastic about a winceyette nightie and a pair of bed socks he’ll feign delight and buy them for me …’
‘A winceyette nightie, you?’
‘Well, not quite yet. But you take my point. When he’s with me he isn’t visiting Soho sex shops.’
‘What does a Soho sex shop have to do with an engagement ring?’
‘That’s where he’d go to buy it.’
‘Oh, Lily. I don’t believe you. Where’s that refined mind you used to rave about?’
‘He’s refined only when it comes to words. Anything else and he might as well be a footballer. Had Hal and I married he’d have bought me an exquisite ring.’
Silence between them, as the sandwiches arrive.
‘But none of this is the point,’ Lily continues. ‘I don’t know that I want to be married. Don’t forget, I’ve always subscribed to the “marriage-as-prostitution” theory. Sam tells me his father is a Professor of Misogamy. It’s a position I wouldn’t mind holding. Marriage! You exchange independence, sexual favours and the right to your career, for a house you don’t like, a two-car garage, masses of jewellery and the fact that your husband will never be at home because he’s working all hours to “accumulate” more of the above. That’s partly why Hal and I never did …’
‘I always thought that was your excuse for not quite loving him enough.’
‘Oh, I think I cared for him well enough. Though it wasn’t love in the way I wanted to love or to call love. Sam I love in all the wrong ways, which is how I want to love. Maybe I can only think of love in all the wrong ways. He’s brilliant and fluent and charismatic and egomaniacal and every other seductive thing I like, but … till death do us part, in sickness and in health? I know how it will be. If he’s sick I’ll look after him. If I’m sick he’ll disappear. I don’t think he even knows how to call an ambulance. Wouldn’t I be crazy to swap a man who probably loves me and certainly respects me and definitely knows how to fix the boiler, for one who can make grandiloquent speeches about love but who swoons every time a glamorous woman – or man not too much more famous than he is – throws him a compliment, and doesn’t have a clue what a boiler does let alone where it lives.’
‘Listen, Lily, if you want my opinion, this is a pretty speech to reassure yourself of your feminist credentials.’
‘You might be right. But I can’t part with them just like that, on the say-so of an arrogant man with a voice like hot macadam. Yes, his world fascinates me. He’s always complaining he isn’t writing enough, but he never stops writing. I am engrossed by his imaginative energy, even if it makes him a bad listener. And it will be great travelling with him to see productions opening abroad and that sort of thing, but what about my world, what about my work? I love it, you know I do. I love the access it gives me to the unfamiliar – to people for whom Sam has only contempt – and the compliment of being respected and trusted enough for interviewees to let me into their stories and their secrets and their psyches even – and I’m not going to give it up for anyone.’
‘I think you’ll just have to deal with that as and when. Lily, my beloved and best of friends, you know you’re going to marry him. Just get on with it.’
Without doubt, Lily thinks, she is pleased for me. And for herself?
As much out of habit as precaution the lovers took separate taxis from the airport, Lily going home, Quaid to the Savile Club. They had only been away four days but that was long enough for him to have forgotten where he’d been staying. He’d moved out of the Savile Club ten days before, and out of the Groucho Club a week before that. Unable to remember where his clothes were he hailed another cab to take him to his house. He was surprised to find his keys still worked, and more surprised to find the house empty. On his pillow was a letter and on the letter a PS. ‘Gone. Don’t come looking for me.’
The letter was dated two months before and the house had the air of not having been lived in for even longer. He found it oddly vexatious to think that while he’d been carting his belongings around from club to club, and having nightmares about leaving and not leaving, there had all along been no one here to leave.
The letter went straight to the point. The chap she told him she’d been seeing – and in whose existence he had steadfastly refused to believe – had asked her to marry him. She had said yes. So had the chap’s wife. So had her daughters. That left only Quaid. She hardly needed his blessing but hoped he could find it in himself to let her go without unpleasantness and would be amenable to facilitating a quick and cordial divorce. In the meantime, she was gone and had no intention of telling him where. Giving him time to remove all trace of himself from what had once been a home but he had turned into a hell.
He thought of writing back, ‘Do you love him?’ but didn’t have an address for her and on reflection decided it wasn’t worth pretending, even for a joke, that he was anything but delighted. When someone hands you a full tray you don’t make any sudden movement that might spill it.
He couldn’t believe his luck. He had taken the coward’s wager and won. The marriage he hadn’t had the courage to end had come apart without his having to tell his wife he loved another.
Couldn’t believe his luck, but couldn’t meet his reflection in the mirror. This was what pusillanimity looked like. Too grand a word. This was what a wretch looked like.
Wretched or not, his first instinct was to ring Lily and tell her the good news. But wouldn’t such haste be indecent? Didn’t he owe Selena a day’s respect? Didn’t he owe it to Lily not to suppose she’d been hanging on for dear life to hear him say he was now all hers? If he’d learnt anything from adultery it was how difficult it was not to insult all parties to it.
And there was something else: would he dare tell Lily that it was Serena who’d delivered the coup de grâce because he lacked the nerve and probity to do any such thing himself? How would the conversation go? ‘Hey, Lily, guess what? Thanks to Serena …’
But wouldn’t a new life erase the old him? Wasn’t it to wipe the slate of their dishonour clean that adulterers laid waste to all around them? Sometimes again and again. Well, Quaid was only going to do it once. After weighing all the compunctions, he couldn’t wait to be the new him.
Lily had only recently taught him how to text so he texted her.
Where are you?
Claridge’s
Shame I have news
What news?
I’m available
What for?
Matrimony
You’ve always been available for matrimony
He took a taxi to Claridge’s and waited outside for her. He had already bought the ring.
He helped her into the taxi with exaggerated courtliness and sat beside her as immovable as a pharaoh. The minute the taxi stopped at lights he turned towards her – after Rome he was not going to drop to his knees – and in silence handed her the box.
The ring resembled a tortured oyster and comprised two bands cradling a large round cut diamond that bloomed like a carnation and hurt her eyes.
‘I’m told it’s called a Capri,’ he said. ‘I thought—’
She kissed him before the lights could turn to green. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.