‘Sex is not a memory pillow. Once it loses its shape it can never return to what it was.’
Lily started when she heard those words. They were spoken by a character in the first of Quaid’s plays she went to see in his company. Shifting in her seat, she had fanned herself comically with her programme. ‘Jesus!’ she whispered just loud enough for him to hear. She returned to it in the interval. ‘That’s a bleak view,’ she said.
‘Well as long as you remember it’s not mine,’ he said. ‘The character speaking is hardly one whose opinions I share.’
‘I understand that,’ Lily said. ‘But some statements have the power to stay with you, whoever makes them.’
Years later, floating in the pool of petals, she has not forgotten it. Nor has she forgotten what she thought at the time but didn’t dare say – that whoever spoke the words, Quaid wrote them. They had passed through him. For a fleeting moment, the words and Quaid shared the same space and breathed the same air.
Would they share the same space now, she wonders. Does Sam, showering continuously under the bamboo spout as though to shower his old self away, think their relations will never return to the shape they were?
She feels as though bereaved.
Ought they to put a black sheet on their bed?
How has it come to this? And what will be the consequence? Because she is a catastrophist she must first fix the origins of it and then confront the worst eventuality. By sex she doesn’t mean what other women mean by sex; by sex she doesn’t mean the ingress and egress of a man of steel. As if! when that man is Quaid who likes – who liked – her to tie to him to the bed. No, by sex she means the entire drama not the act – the orchestra, the overture, the prologue, the libretto (especially the libretto), the applause. Not Rheingold but the Ring entire. Back she goes over what she has done, what they have done together, to cause their drama to lose its form. Is it because they married, because they set up home together, because they left their spouses, because she danced like a showgirl in disreputable cellars, because they slept together the first night away from home, because they met? Kerpow! Was that the sin for which it was decided there and then that they would one day have to pay? Kerpow! And now kerpow again – from the beginning to the end in a single word.
For the moment at least, Quaid is not taking whatever it is that’s happening to them as badly as she is. Not having much liked the man he was, he’s well positioned to embrace a new version. He hopes he is not going to become one of those ingrate geriatrics who welcome the waning of desire as relief from an oppressive burden. It is not desire that’s oppressed him all his life, only himself, and of course the teaching of Edina Gore. Nor does he believe that desire has waned in him now. There’s been a subtle shift – in direction, in intensity, in concentration – that’s all. And even that might be no more than temporary. Love, he is beginning to realise, is like authorship. You don’t know where it’s going to take you. And you mustn’t hold out for your original plan. To be creative, in love as on the page, is to let yourself be buffeted by the gales of surprise and change. But Lily needs to know where she’s been and where she’s going. The more intense the looks of protective love he throws her, the more she thinks he is working out a way to divorce her.
She has – she must never allow herself to forget – been witness to his doing this before.
All she knows of him as a married man – again she must remember – is that he once found the condition irksome. Why did she agree to his embracing it a second time?
There is an argument that some people are too in love to marry. Too engrossed in the minutiae of each other, too fascinated by the chemical phenomenon of themselves – the correspondences and correlations, the freak affinities and benign incompatibilities – too indifferent to the side benefits which some look to marriage to provide: law, legitimacy, security, progeny, position in society.
This is not to embrace Ossian Freud’s view of monogamy as contrary to natural law. From an earlyish age – let’s say seventeen – Sam Quaid, already a playwright and a sentimentalist, believed he was the author of his own laws. So long as he was in love with one woman, he could never imagine being in love with another. But until Lily he had never been in love with one woman long enough to put monogamy to a rigorous test. Post-Lily, he was a one-woman man again. Fidelity, he was now prepared to tell the world, wasn’t just honourable, it was as exciting as hell. Fidelity, where its object was self-willed, more than a little reckless, not false but capricious, was the high-wire act of love.
Why Sam Quaid welcomed wedlock, when it was really a circus he wanted to join, was a question Lily, in her distress, pressed upon him.
‘I love you and am proud to be your wife,’ she told him on their return, ‘but did we really need to do this? Weren’t things going well enough before?’
Before! Before when? So long and sorrowfully did she look at him, she could have meant that things were going well enough before they met.
After Bali, she settles on marriage as their big mistake. Everything fine until then. It was their own fault. They had grown used to listening only to each other. Eyebeams plaited, fingers intergrafted, ankles locked, they had become an entire universe unto themselves, beyond counsel or example. Marriage, once they embarked on it, would be its own New Creation. Where they went from there they didn’t know but the illusion of marriage was that you must be going somewhere. That was what ruined Bali for them. They forgot to live in their own present. You don’t go to paradise-promising places when you carry paradise around with you. If they were ever to renew their vows they’d honeymoon in Harlesden.
They’d been relieved to get back home. A commission to write a new play for the Chichester Festival Theatre boosted Quaid’s spirits. Then Lily was headhunted by an important museum to design a programme for interviewing women film-makers. Both were flattered and excited until they remembered that Lily hated gender-specific work and Quaid hated commissions. They were both occupied enough already. They didn’t need a leg-up. So why did the idea that fortune was giving them one please them, even if only for five minutes? It must have been because they were still under matrimony’s charm, still expecting more to happen.
On the morning they decided to say no to the museum, no to Chichester and no to anything else that came in the post, Quaid laughed, opened his empty hands and said, ‘Welcome to a blank slate.’
Lily shuddered.
‘Be not afeared my pretty one,’ he went on. ‘At least we have each other.’
Though meant to be jocular, the remark touched a raw nerve. What few high spirits were left in the bed fled as though from a punctured balloon.
‘Isn’t the trouble,’ Lily replied, ‘that we only have each other?’
‘Who else would you like us to have?’
‘Children.’
‘Children! Lily, I’ve rarely seen you look at a child and when you do it’s as though you’ve seen a cockroach. You’ve told me every day I’ve known you that you never wanted children.’
‘And I still don’t. But we have to face the consequence of not having any.’
‘Yes – a quiet life. Allelujah!’
‘Since when did you want a quiet life?’
‘Since you started wanting children.’
‘You don’t get it, do you. I don’t want children. But they’re the natural consequence. Love, marriage, children. Without them we cut ourselves off mid-performance. As though the end of all our exploring is to arrive where we started – with ourselves. Children lead you out into the world. They connect you, Sam. Don’t you ever ask yourself where all this is going? What are we for?’
He rose on one elbow to kiss her. ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt—’
She turned her cheek. ‘This isn’t Rome, Sam.’
‘You’ve never turned your cheek from me before.’
‘We’ve never been here before.’
‘Where’s here?’
‘Without a future.’
He tried to kiss her cheek again. ‘We are the future,’ he said. The new Sam Quaid. Impotent and all-powerful. Flaccid and imperturbable.
But there was no new Lily. ‘No we are not. We are just ourselves and when we’re done we’re done. My mother often said her main motive for staying alive was wanting to see what happens to me. It gave her something to live for.’
‘Isn’t that because she kicked your father out?’
‘That’s a cruel thing to say, Sam. But all right, if either of us kicks the other out, what then? What would have been the point of it all? It would mean we’d led to nothing.’
‘No, it would mean it had led to us.’
‘Us, us, us! Is that it?’
‘I think it’s quite a lot.’
She thought about it. ‘I too. That’s the trouble. We’re self-consumed, like those fabulous creatures that eat themselves, starting with their own tails? What are they called?’
‘Sea squirts.’
‘You’re making that up.
‘No I’m not. Sea squirts. I’m a world expert. I did a dissertation on them at school. But I could have said artists.’
‘Don’t be smart with me. I’m being serious. How will our story end, Sam?’
‘It won’t. You know the Thomas Hardy poem: “Yonder a maid and her wight / Come whispering by: / War’s annals will cloud into night / Ere their story die.” Well, you’re the maid and I’m your wight. Our story has no end. We aren’t an event. We just go on and on. Like nature itself.’
‘Not a very satisfactory story in that case. Who’d want to read us?’
‘Other lovers.’
‘What if I’d like to be read by someone else?’
‘You mean readers of whodunnits and fantasy fiction? Forget it. We aren’t that kind of story. We don’t begin and end. We are not linear. There is no end to us.’
‘What kind of story are we, Sam?’
‘We aren’t a story at all. We’re a poem.’
She took consolation in that. But which poem?