Where they wanted to live turned out, to their surprise, to be Kew. Lily loved the idea of being close to the Gardens. Quaid loved what she loved. They weren’t exactly on the river but they could smell it. The house was painted white, enjoyed good views of the sky from the extensions, and breathed an air of wholesomeness.
‘Do you think this might be the only suburb of London without a bondage club?’ Quaid wondered.
‘Why? Are you starting to miss them?’
‘On the contrary. I like the idea that we might be free at last of the taint.’
‘Oh, taint. There is no taint. We didn’t murder anyone, remember. We didn’t catch a disease. No one did us harm. I danced a bit, that was all. You hid in a mask. Haven’t you always been hiding in a mask? Taint! You know you worry me. Can we ban that word from our vocabulary?’
‘Willingly. How about blessed?’
‘That’s just as crackers, Sam.’
‘I’m a hyperbolist.’
‘That’s also what worries me. What you overvalue one day you’ll undervalue the next.’
‘I promise I will never undervalue you.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘When will we see? In some unimaginable future? We’re in it, Lily. This is what’s to come. This is how we turn out. Do you remember fearing we wouldn’t be be able to adjust to each other? Well we adjusted, didn’t we? This is what adjustment looks like. We’ve made it through.’
But sometimes they both worry. Quaid recently bought a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and then a games table to put it on. Why? A question that never fully answered itself to Lily’s satisfaction was this: would they survive the everyday?
Thanks to Quaid’s father, they finally get round to discussing wedding dates. Quaid receives a phone call from the mother he has never forgiven for having married his father, for having wanted him to be a girl, and for those reasons rarely thinks about. ‘Your father is dying,’ she tells him.
Quaid is flabbergasted. ‘You’re in touch with my father? Promise me you haven’t let him back into the house.’
‘Only for a cup of tea. He begged.’
‘Oh, Mother. I suppose he told you he’d changed.’
‘Far from it. He’s still fathering children on impressionable students. He shows me the photographs. This time he’s fathered twin girls. Be happy for me, he says.’
‘And are you?’
‘I’m happy he’s dying of testicular cancer.’
‘I’m surprised he has testicles left. I’m surprised he has anything left. I thought he died years ago.’
‘You probably thought I died years ago.’
‘No. I saw you recently.’
‘Six months ago isn’t recently. Such loving children I have.’
‘You have my brothers. I’m sure they love you. How are they, by the way? You have loving grandchildren. You have loving great-grandchildren. How much more love do you want?’
‘I could ask you the same question.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Are you still with what’s-she-called?’
‘Lily. Yes.’
‘What happened to the other one?’
‘Selena? She married someone else.’
‘Without telling you?’
‘She mentioned it.’
‘So what about you? Have you remarried yet? I don’t like to think of you unmarried.’
‘I know. I’d make a beautiful bride.’
‘Bride, groom – what difference? Just get married. You’ll go to the bad if you don’t.’
‘I want to go to the bad.’
‘No you don’t. You only think you do. You don’t have your father’s flair for it. Just get married.’
‘It’s under discussion. If you promise not to cry I will invite you to the ceremony.’
‘You can say that because you know I don’t leave the house any more. I have two new hips and am waiting for a third. Invite your brothers.’
‘I don’t really know my brothers.’
‘Whose fault’s that?’
‘Yours. But I don’t harbour grudges.’
‘Good. Then invite your father too.’
‘Invite him to my wedding? Of course not.’
‘I think you should. He’s too ill to accept but he might appreciate the gesture.’
‘Mother, it would kill him. Or is that your intention? Are you hoping I’ll finish him off?’
‘It would be nice if you were reconciled at the end. It would make me feel we’d turned into one big happy family after all. Think about it at least.’
‘I’ve thought about it.’
But after thinking about it some more he was ready to reverse his decision. I fancy asking him to be best man, he told Lily.
‘Your father!’
‘Yes. Can you imagine his face when he opens the invitation?’
‘Sam, why would I want the country’s leading advocate for free love at my wedding? Why would you?’
‘Because he’s my father.’
‘That’s a reason for keeping him away.’
‘All right. To show him his teaching has made no earthly difference to his son. I see it as my final act of defiance. Look, Dad, I’ve won. Not that he’ll come. He must be at least ninety. My mother assures me he’s too ill to leave his bed, let alone come to the Ritz.’
‘The Ritz!’
‘Or wherever we have the party.’
‘If he’s ninety, why don’t we wait until he’s a hundred to be sure?’
Quaid thought otherwise. If they waited for his father to die he’d lose the unutterable satisfaction of infuriating him to death.
‘And for that unutterable satisfaction you’re prepared to risk infuriating me?’
‘Lily, do you want to marry me or not?’
‘I have already said I do.’
‘How many years ago was that?’
‘If you can assure me that your father will be too ill—’
‘—or too dead—’
‘—then all right. But not the Ritz.’
‘Why not the Ritz?’
‘Too showy for my mother.’
‘I have always thought of your mother as a very smart woman.’
‘The essence of my mother’s smart is knowing when not to go too far.’
‘Like mother like daughter.’
‘If only.’
In the event, Ossian Freud wrote his son a charming letter, calling him ‘my verdant boy’ and thanking him ‘from the bottom of my rancid heart’ for reposing such unexpected filial trust, but regretting the indisposition that prevented his accepting. He would, though, like to take the opportunity to congratulate Quaid for marrying a second time and hoped he would marry many times more in the future. He hoped thereby to correct the imputation that he was a marriage hater. It was only staying married he objected to.
Quaid did not show Lily the letter. He would sooner have made her a gift of a poison spider. Instead he washed his hands a dozen times and told her that the old bastard had said no. So they could go ahead and book the ballroom at Claridge’s.
But Lily still hesitated until the news came that her father-in-law-to-be had fallen into a fire at the old people’s home.
‘You do think he’s flammable, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘Better to burn than to marry was his motto,’ Quaid said, ‘but I wouldn’t bet on his burning if he could stop a marriage some other way.’
Before they could agree a date, Lily’s mother was rushed to hospital. Lily had been wondering if the wedding would be painful to her mother. Would she owe it to her not to look too radiant? Was this another parent they needed to die for decency’s sake?
Well, soon she would. But there could be no wedding until she had.
Quaid was fond of his mother-in-law-to-be and thought the idea of her daughter’s nuptials might cheer her up, even if she couldn’t come to them. They could video-link it to her bed. Lily could visit her in her wedding dress.
‘What wedding dress?’
‘The white one I’m going to buy you.’
She snorted. ‘The leather one?’
But no. There could be no wedding yet. It would be cruel to her.
‘Not marrying,’ Quaid said, ‘would be cruel to me.’
‘You’re not dying.’
‘That’s what you think.’
He was one of those men whom love made morbid. Her kissed Lily and thought about the grave. He took her in his arms and heard the melancholy, long withdrawing roar of the sea as it retreated from the naked shingles of the world. The eternal note of sadness. And it wasn’t just his own extinction he listened out for. What if Lily died before him? Many a night he would lie on his back to stop himself snuffling into his pillow like an adolescent, imagining the cold wind blowing across a Lilyless universe.
He reminded her they would soon have been together nearly twenty years, counting from – well, whenever it was seemly to start counting from. Marriage would make it a double celebration. It always amazed Lily how conscientious a keeper of their personal almanac he was. Like Hal, he never forgot her birthday. This didn’t mean he would get round to organising a special event to mark it as Hal would – a house party for her and all her friends in the Seychelles, a helicopter ride around the Shetlands, a box at a Rugby League Cup Final. Sam remembered the day, sent a card, gave her a bunch of flowers, and then forgot about it. But at least that way she was spared having to say thank you but she didn’t want to go cliff-jumping in Negril. Sam knew to the month how long they’d been together and could tell her what, in any of those months, they’d done and, no, not only which of his plays they’d seen premiered together at what theatre. Lily lived more in the moment and often, unless she was on a shoot, couldn’t have said what day it was. It worried her that Sam was an almost frantic time-watcher. Shouldn’t he have lost himself in work? What did he always have an eye on? Why the wall and the desk calendars? Why the three diaries? What was he desperate not to miss? What event was he steeling himself against?
Lily’s mother agreed with Quaid. The idea that her daughter was marrying cheered her up. ‘Do it quick, before I die,’ she said. ‘I’ll go happily knowing I’ve finally got you off my hands.’
Which left no time for a coronation. So they married one sunny morning at Chelsea Register Office and then walked to the reception at the Chelsea Arts Club. This was Lily’s idea. Invite the membership, she said, since you have no friends. It would be good for you to be surrounded by fellow artists. He reminded her that he had never sought the company of ‘fellow artists’ before.
‘You weren’t married before.’
‘Yes I was.’
‘Not to me.’
Midway through the wedding breakfast a ghostly waiter came looking for Quaid. ‘There’s a guy in the garden who wants a brief confidential word with you,’ he whispered in Quaid’s ear. Quaid shuddered. This was the very sentence the Devil’s emissary had whispered into Don Juan’s ear in Quaid’s early play about the Don in Oxford.
Who would remember that? Christ no, Quaid thought. Fortunately Lily was working the room, accepting kisses and compliments. She looked marvellous, to Quaid’s eye, in streetwise Yamamoto pleats and a pencil in her hair. He rose from the table and followed the waiter to the French doors.
‘This guy,’ he asked, hesitating. ‘He’s not on fire is he?’
‘On fire?’
‘He doesn’t have burn marks?’
‘I didn’t really notice.’
‘About ninety?’
He shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. Who that is twenty knows what ninety looks like?
Doing his best to be surreptitious, though he was drunk and halfway to being disorderly, Quaid slipped into the garden. A tall gaunt man with wrinkly expat’s skin and a glittering eye was curled like the snake around a tree.
‘Here,’ he rasped.
‘I can see that,’ Quaid said.
The man unwound himself and extended a skinny hand. ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he, thought Quaid. ‘If you have a terrible tale to tell I’ve already heard it,’ he said skittishly. It was his wedding day. He was happy.
‘I do actually,’ the man said, ‘but that’s not why I’m here.’
Quaid was not prepared for these words to issue like the final cough from a hole in the man’s throat. He stepped back, as though frightened of what deadly cocktail the man might cough at him.
Should he apologise for his reaction or would that only make the situation worse? ‘So who are you and why are you here?’ he asked. Rude, he knew, but what else was he to do – invite him in to drink champagne, that’s if he could drink champagne without spraying it about, and terrifying the guests? He could hear what Lily would say. ‘Are you mad?’
‘I’m here to give you this.’ The stranger held out a brown envelope. ‘It’s a wedding gift. But you might not want to give it to her right away. You might not want her to know I’ve been here.’
Though every instinct in his body told him to back away, Quaid knew he had to extend his trembling hand and accept the envelope. ‘If it’s for Lily, why didn’t you give it to her directly?’ Quaid asked.
‘To answer that I’d have to embark upon my terrible tale after all. And believe me, you wouldn’t want to hear it.’
‘I’ll settle for knowing why you were hiding behind a tree.’
‘I shouldn’t have to tell you of all people that that’s what characters in Shakespeare do when they want to see but not be seen.’
‘Ah. By your daughter, presumably.’
Not much of a guess, even by a drunk, Quaid thinks.
‘Yes. Forgive the cloak-and-dagger, but I know she wouldn’t want to see me. I respect her feelings. I came only in the hope of catching sight of her. And I have. You are a lucky man. She is very beautiful, like her mother. But don’t tell her I said that. In fact, better you don’t mention I came at all.’
The voice reminded Quaid of the fetishists in rubber suits and snorkels who’d asked Lily for a dance in Amsterdam and Slough. Face to face with Lily’s father, Quaid felt a rush of shame that they’d been to such places. You allowed my daughter to do that!
Well, Quaid was not her – or anyone’s – father.
Maybe I should have tried harder to be one.
‘And this?’ he asked, tapping the envelope.
‘It’s a forget-me-not brooch. Don’t throw it away when I leave. It’s set with sapphires. I don’t know what she likes. But her mother would have worn it. Sell it if you think she won’t and buy her something exquisite with the money. It’ll be enough for me to think she has something from me, even indirectly. Take care of each other. God bless you both.’
And with a wave of the hand, he disappeared, coughing first behind one tree, then another, before quitting the garden altogether. So did the Devil take his leave of Don Juan in Magdalen Garden.
Quaid watched him go, uncertain whether to call him back and embrace him – no, he didn’t have the courage for that – uncertain whether to run inside and tell Lily what had just happened. Would she want to meet him? Would he have to prepare her for what she’d see? Or would knowing he’d been there spoil the day for her?
He was not a man who took decisions. The point of Lily was that she did the deciding. But he couldn’t ask her to decide this.
He stayed a little longer in the garden, sure that if he returned immediately to the reception his face would give the game away. Her fucking father, for God’s sake. Ill. Quite possibly dying. Quite possibly dead. Spirits visit weddings. The dying were everywhere. It could have been any of them. Even his own father – as he’d first expected the unholy ghost to be – looking for a bit of pity.
He took the liberty of opening the envelope. The delicate sapphire brooch was bound with a ribbon of fine gold to which was attached a label engraved with the words ‘Ne M’Oubliez Pas’.
Funny. He had once bought Lily that very perfume.
It touched him beyond measure to think that someone else loved Lily as much as he did, craved her love as much as he did, and that she did not know and, even sadder, did not care to know it. In asking her not to forget him, her father showed he would not forget her. Would Quaid tell her eventually? He didn’t know. Should I tell you eventually, he needed to ask her.
Paradoxically, what had happened made her, in his eyes, the more in need of protection. No love lasts long in which one of the participants isn’t part-parent to the other. He first asked Lily to marry him in Rome when, like the best of mothers, she had told him she could not bear to see him disappointed. Had he knelt down on one knee to his mother?
Lily had not looked to him to be her father. She knew him too well. He was not father material. But did he owe her what she hadn’t asked for?
Here, anyway, was his first fatherly test …
No – he would not mention a word to her of her real father’s appearance.
Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
We have been married barely an hour, he thinks, and already I’m keeping secrets from her.
Lily’s mother didn’t need to be told either. She died the next night.