Cut loose, they smell the air and survey their options. The world is all before them. Hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, they take their solitary way. Only, unlike Milton’s first pair, they don’t leave the garden, they enter it. But of course, if they are to live happily ever after, there’s horticultural work to be done.
Happiness fares poorly in the literature of love. Call no man happy, the wisdom has it, no, nor woman neither, until they renounce the flesh. Sam and Lily don’t mean to wait that long.
They house-hunt, hovering outside the windows of estate agents in alien suburbs, amazed by unfamilarity, transfigured by hope. They could be Bunyan’s tremulous elect – Christian and Hopeful – clothed in new raiments, each carrying a golden harp, hearkening to the bells of the Celestial City. They are at first, on undeclared principle – each wanting nothing to inhibit choice – unable to agree what sort of habitation would, in the spiritual as well as the physical sense, accommodate the people they are, the people they have been and the people they see themselves becoming in the future. A loft in Dalston, should it be? A penthouse in Docklands? A mansion with river frontage in Oxfordshire? Quaid would like a sloping garden down which he could roll with his dog. Lily reminds him he has no dog. No, but what’s to stop them getting one? – ideally something big and brown like a bear, with melancholy eyes and not too wet a mouth. ‘Fine,’ Lily agrees, ‘so long as you don’t expect me to—’ Which puts paid to the dog idea. Lily is relieved. She was jealous of the dog. If Quaid sees the future as roly-polies down a lush lawn to the very fringes of the Thames it should be her he’s roly-polying with.
As for what she wants – a ballroom, an editing suite and studio, a walk-in dressing room – no, two walk-in dressing rooms – and four guest bathrooms. Quaid reminds her that she’s said she doesn’t intend to have guests. ‘That’s four guest bathrooms for me,’ she tells him.
He doesn’t ask about where his friends will stay. He doesn’t have any friends. That’s why he wants a dog.
‘Otherwise,’ Lily tells the young estate agent, ‘we have no stipulations. Oh, except that my partner here rather fancies the idea of a dungeon.’
‘That could limit your choice somewhat,’ the estate agent tells her without changing her expression.
‘As to size of property or as to neighbourhood?’ Lily asks.
‘Both the above,’ the estate agent answers imperturbably, not looking up from the questionnaire she’s filling in. Clearly she has dealt with the dungeon prerequisite before.
‘Noted,’ Lily says.
So. For Quaid at least, that’s no friend, no dog and no dungeon.
‘Was that entirely necessary?’ he asks when they are back out on St John’s Wood High Street.
‘Are you telling me you’ve changed your thinking about having a dungeon?’
‘I’ve never thought about having a dungeon.’
‘You used to say that once we were masters of our fates we would maintain a lifestyle consistent with the unconventionality we’d espoused when we were young, hopeful and in hiding. I was to be your jailkeeper forever, remember. You would wake to the sound of clinking manacles. I recall your exact words. I didn’t suppose you meant them.’
‘Then you supposed wrong. I meant them metaphorically.’
‘So was your dread of declining into a featherbed of domestic mediocrity also metaphorical?’
He recalls the circumstance of his voicing that fear only too well, his hands bound, his breath constrained, his burning eyes imploring Lily for more. It was this, this theatrical abnegation of his will to hers, that he wanted never to forgo – the psychic condition, not the props. ‘I remember that conversation vividly,’ he says. ‘But if I mentioned a dungeon I can only imagine I was hyperbolising to conceal my embarrassment.’
‘I didn’t know you were embarrassed.’
‘I’m using the word in the embarrassment of riches sense.’
‘I was using the word dungeon in the same sense. Out of an abundance of high spirits. I’m happy. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
The change in circumstance has made them nervous of each other. They have to keep checking a) that they are still happy, and b) that they are still in accord. Now the gates are open will they run off in different directions?
‘Yes, it’s all right. More than all right.’
She has just bought a new summery dress and gives him a twirl. ‘Sure?’
Her skittishness delights him. So many expressions of love between them have been tinged with the terror of transience or discovery. Suddenly, with nothing to hide and no eventuality to fear, they are as children. ‘Sure. I, too, am happiness itself.’
He hears himself. The pedantic word-orderer. Why can’t he just say ‘I’m happy, too’? Happiness is not a word he’s used often. It takes some getting used to, that’s all.
His pomposity is yet another cover for his embarrassment, Lily realises.
They kiss on the High Street. Don’t ask them which High Street. This must be the hundredth estate agent’s they’ve kissed outside.
Anyone would think they are both setting up house for the first time.
There’s unenthusiastic talk of a wedding. There’s been talk of a wedding for some time. She’s never done it before and doesn’t know what it entails. He has and does. So no rush. Something for the future, no more.
They worry a wedding would mark the end of their lawlessness.
‘We aren’t that lawless,’ Lily reminds him.
‘Maybe not. But we were gifted amateurs. We pushed a few boundaries. We did things that would have made our mothers gasp.’
In private he wondered whether he’d been a good boy all along and feared marriage would make him even better. Even Lily wondered that.
The other thing she wondered was whether marriage would make her too good a girl.
That this was what marriage does his father had maintained for over half a century. In gathering his things from his old house Quaid found a review of the play in which he’d imagined killing his father.
Not such a good boy, after all.