One minute marriage is on the back burner, the next it’s in the microwave.
Quaid puts it in. Lily takes it out.
Lily is, of course, flattered by Quaid’s urgency, but she’s managed fine without for so many years and can’t imagine why she ever accepted Quaid’s second proposal with such alacrity. Was it just because it came without the baggage of his being indefinitely married to someone else? Did she just want to hear herself say yes for a change? Wasn’t that what women did? Yes, darling, yes.
It isn’t quite true that she couldn’t imagine why, other than for sweetness’s sake, she’d acceded to Quaid’s proposal. She saw it as a promissory note, from one to the other, that they’d stay together, not for a while but forever. Of course such an assurance didn’t need marriage: there were other forms that keeping a promise could take. But a contract concentrates the mind, reminds you in later years that when you swore in front of witnesses you meant the words you spoke.
Quaid was a hard man to read generally, but on the subject of marriage he was a sphinx. For all his ardour now, there’s no knowing how he’ll feel in a fortnight. By his own account he had been married all his life – actually married to Selena, but imaginatively married to almost every women he met, a mental husband, partly because he thought every woman he met wanted to be married to him and he couldn’t bear to disappoint them; partly to spite a father who held a personal chair in marriage-loathing in an East Midlands polytechnic and whose books were too explosive to be on sale in the usual places and could only be found in the Marriage-as-Tyranny section of anarchist bookshops in Bloomsbury, alongside Plato, de Sade and Kierkegaard. Lily hadn’t met the infamous father but she felt his malign influence. Who was to say his genes wouldn’t make a late appearance in his son?
‘We don’t have to do this, you know,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to put a ring on my finger to make me feel secure. Just swear a blood oath that you won’t go off with other women and tell me you understand I will take a knife to you if you betray me. That will suffice.’
‘Is that a threat or a promise?’ Quaid asked.
‘You are all talk.’
‘We are both all talk that’s why I want to marry you.’
‘How will marriage further talk?’
‘Well in the first place by our having a talky ceremony. Speeches, blessings, liturgy, the pomp of promises that take aeons to express. Not simply “I do” and “So do I” but here are the reasons, pro and con, like one of your lists, why after full consideration we think we probably should. Let the humdrum plight their troth humdrumly. We must have an exceptional occasion. I’m only sorry it can’t be a coronation.’
‘Didn’t you go to Oxford with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s son?’
‘Did I say that? Don’t believe a word anyone who’s been to Oxford or Cambridge tells you. They say they were happy when they weren’t. They say they met people they didn’t. I even lie about which of the two I went to. As it happens, though – and this too might be a lie – I did row in the same boat as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s cousin, but I hate asking for a favour.’
‘I’ll settle for a golden coach.’
‘Two. One for you, one for your mother.’
But there was another, less fanciful argument for them marrying. It would prove they were, and always had been, serious. Theirs was not just another affair between a director and the talent. They hadn’t fallen into each other’s arms because they were far from home and had nothing else to do. Something out of the ordinary, something exorbitant, had happened. Kerpow. And its longevity – no, its sempiternity – would be the proof of that. Odd as it was to say, they felt they owed it as much to Hal and Selena as to themselves to make a go of what had started, looked at coarsely, as something on the side.
Once, under a fearsomely large orange moon, joined at last as though dreading ever to be unjoined again, they admitted as much to each other. ‘This is our time and our opportunity,’ Quaid began. ‘If we should fail.’
Lily didn’t know whom he was addressing. The moon? Heaven’s cherubim? The witches?
But she knew how to answer. ‘We fail?’ she said, tightening her grip on him.
Under a moon like that it was impossible to feel they existed only accidentally. Out there on the night the sightless ones were listening keenly, the unseen judges, the divine arbiters of desire against whose holy expectations all lovers who are vain and crazed enough to believe themselves ordained measure their actions.
Neither of them needed telling that it was no longer any skin off Hal’s and Selena’s noses what they did. It was for themselves they made this promise not to fail.
‘We are not flibbertigibbets or serial betrayers who absconded on an idle impulse,’ Quaid asserts.
‘What are we then?’ Lily asks. She has her own answer to that but she wants to hear Quaid declare his.
‘In deadly earnest.’
Easy to make fun of them. All lovers are preposterous if you don’t look away when they’re talking about themselves.
They fail? Not if there’s a god of love.
Meanwhile, at a less hallowed, more domicillary level, there were obligations to themselves to consider. All very well being celebrants of love, but where, in that case, was their church? Shouldn’t candles burn around their bed at all hours of the day and night? Shouldn’t the air be perfumed with holy incense?
Released now from the urgency that living in hiding conferred, weren’t they in danger of sliding from the high-wrought poetry of their first amazed encounters into the prose of mere familiar cohabitation?
A dungeon was never a serious suggestion, but oughtn’t they to have done more in the way of stocks, cages, pillories, smother boxes, spiked Spanish Inquisition iron maidens for renouncing your religion in, fin de siècle dominatrix chairs for renouncing your masculinity under? Feeling bad about it, they went to a restraints-equipment fair in Earls Court where they bought a raffle ticket for a weekend for two in the Marquis de Sade’s old asylum in Charenton, but – citing Lily’s unwillingness to commit to cleaning anything bigger than a handcuff and Quaid’s not wanting anyone to know that he and Lily had recourse to anything other than the lips they’d been born with – they excused themselves on the grounds of preferring minimalist design and left Earls Court empty-handed.
‘Your documentary-maker’s love of low-life doesn’t appear to extend to your taste in furnishings,’ Quaid twitted her.
‘You should talk,’ Lily said. ‘It was you who used to rub down my whip with antiseptic wipes when we got back to the hotel.’
‘And it was you who used to rub down the hotel.’
‘I was brought up by a mother who kept plastic on the sofa. One can enjoy slumming without wanting to live in a slum.’
‘So you were only ever playing?’ He was mocking her old complaint against him. That he was never fully committed to the oaths they made. That he didn’t really want to end his life – that minute – in her arms.
‘No. Not only.’
‘When then weren’t you?’
They had not so far put their old life behind them that she could throw up the opportunity to torment him. ‘Wonder and suffer,’ she said.
Whereupon they kissed voraciously, as they’d been kissing outside the window of the Conran Shop on Fulham Road, Harrods in Knightsbridge and of course Heal’s.
‘Never fear. Our bed will be our dungeon and our bridal chamber our garden of exquisite torture,’ Lily said.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘We need to confirm the new roster with the cleaner.’
Hush. Listen carefully and in the jesting can be discerned stirrings of inevitable change. They won’t be the first outré couple to find degeneracy too demanding to keep up. Once you have someone in to change the sheets and sweep the floors, you are limited as to what you can use your living quarters for. Besides which, they are getting older. ‘We are getting older only if we let ourselves get older,’ Lily says sternly. Now that she has twenty-four-hours’ oversight of Quaid’s domestic routines, she is shocked by how careless he is of himself physically. She knew he ate big hotel breakfasts and liked wine in the evening, but didn’t realise he ate no smaller a breakfast at home and could be drinking his first glass of Shiraz by lunchtime. She hadn’t been aware how little he walked. ‘Do you know I’ve never seen you run,’ she says two weeks into their new life together. ‘And you never will,’ he promises her. He is a tall man. He can get away with indulgences a smaller, rounder man cannot. But now that he is Lily’s forever, she has the right to demand he stay well forever. If they are going to install any equipment in their bedroom it will be a rowing machine not a gibbet.
He is drinking freely, he tells himself, to make up for everything else he isn’t doing freely. Since Shepherd Market and Camden, those sites of shamefulness and sin, he has been under self-imposed house arrest. Drink’s the only tawdry adventurism he has left. As for Lily – though it isn’t she who is throwing in the towel – she has less zest than of old for the whole caboodle of preparation and pageant, the long wait for the evening to start, and then, in harlot’s heels, the long walk down the cold steps to the catacombs, followed by the long looks of Quaid’s lugubriousness should the night not pan out as he wants it to. They are not quite living out of a suitcase. They take short-term leases on mansion-block apartments in Marylebone and Regent’s Park while looking for the house that will simultaneously enable and thwart the louche amenities they once imagined indispensable to the expression of their love. But in the meantime they are too comfortable plumping cushions for each other to want to venture out to the cold cellars of Vauxhall.
And now, as if they aren’t making concessions to normalcy enough, they are talking about a wedding again. Are they losing their minds? Getting married is so against the spirit of the never-ending bacchanal they swore their life together would be, should they ever break the shackles of the life before, the thought of it positively takes their breath away.
‘Are we mad or what?’
‘You say.’
‘No, you.’