To’our bodies turn we then …
Shakespeare was characteristically precise about the number of natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A thousand.
Quaid and Lily had not yet – jointly at least – suffered quite that many when, some five years – was it? – into their happily rekindled marriage, Lily returned from the Women’s Hospital in Hampstead and told Quaid to pour himself a drink and sit down.
Yes, bad news. No, not that bad, but bad enough. She breathed deeply and took a long time to begin. Had she not feared Quaid was going to faint she’d have taken even longer.
‘Look,’ she said at last, ‘we’re going to have to be very grown-up about this.’
Cold with fear, Quaid nodded. Not just grown-up, very grown-up. Did he have that much grown-up in him?
For the last few weeks – he must have been aware of her anxiety – she’d been taking the sorts of tests no woman wants to talk about and no man wants to hear, and now … She paused again. Sparing him. Always sparing him.
‘Just tell me, Lily.’
Ha – just tell him. Just.
‘So – the upshot is that there are things we will no longer be able to do …’
‘You aren’t dying?’
‘I’m not, but our marriage might be.’
‘If you aren’t dying, we aren’t dying.’
‘You haven’t heard the worst.’
If she wasn’t dying there was no worst.
So she gave it to him, sparing his absurd squeamishness where she could. What would no longer be the same. What would have to be worked around. What would be the severest test on them both. Not being medically able to do was not the same as not doing. Not doing was a choice. Not being medically able was a sentence. Did she know how long she might be like this? She shook her head. Did people get better? She shook her head again. He opened his arms to her and she cried. He did the same.
She shook herself free, as though the last place she’d find resolution was in his arms. ‘We mustn’t give in to this. I have another appointment with Dr Umlaut in a fortnight.’
He guffawed. He needed a guffaw. ‘Doctor who?’
‘Don’t, Sam. Just don’t bother. She’s a leading consultant in her field. I don’t care what her fucking name is. We’re going to have to be very grown-up about this if we’re going to survive it.’
‘You keep introducing the phrase “grown-up” as though it’s a new idea.’
‘It is.’
‘So if we haven’t been grown-up, what have we been?’
‘Playing.’
‘My love, I am a playwright. Play is what I do.’
‘That’s why I am concerned. I’ve been happy to play along with you.’
‘That’s what love is.’
‘That’s what love was.’
She calls him to her and throws her arms around his neck. They fall silent, as in prayer, to say goodbye to play.
With too much decisiveness for his liking, she breaks free of him as though to begin their new life. ‘There must be no denials or recriminations,’ she says. ‘I don’t accuse you, you don’t accuse me. When Dr Umlaut asked me if I’d been under any stress of a sort that might, you know, I said no. Ours is a strong marriage based on a strong adultery, I told her. She raised an eyebrow. What did I mean by “a strong adultery”? We were sincere, I told her. We’d loved being together. She wondered how long our strong adultery had gone on for. She was surprised when I told her. And you were very active? Very. You could have worn yourselves out, she said. Was that a joke or did she mean literally worn ourselves out? You mean wear and tear? Like tyres? Not the image she’d have chosen but yes, like tyres. There must have been stress in all those years, she said. I told her the only stress was when we couldn’t be together. Not being together didn’t cause vaginal atrophy, she said.’
‘Vaginal what?’
There. She’d told him.
The blood drained from his face. Atrophy. Us! No, Sam. Me.
He stood up and at once needed to sit down again. ‘Put your head between your knees,’ Lily told him. Some help he’d be.
Atrophy!
He shook his head as though to empty it of the word.
She tried to make a joke of it. ‘Think of me,’ she said, ‘as what every husband wants – an Atrophy Wife.’
A joke? Quaid believed he would never laugh again. ‘What else did the doctor say?’ he asked. He would rather not hear but he had to ask something.
‘She asked how I thought you’d take it. I said I couldn’t say. What I didn’t tell her was that for all I knew you’d be relieved. I was giving you the best of all reasons for leaving me. If I could no longer be your wife, why stay?’
‘Why stay! Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I am being realistic, Sam. Ever since you turned away from me in Bali I’ve been half expecting you to leave. If you want to go, I will not stand in your way.’
‘I did not turn away from you in Bali. I turned away from myself.’
‘I don’t know what that means, Sam, and I doubt you do. I beg you to think before you speak. Don’t smother me in words. There are a thousand reasons we should call it a day.’
‘I can’t think of any.’
‘Haven’t you been listening to me?’
‘There’s more than one way of living, Lily.’
‘That’s exactly what Dr Umlaut said. “There are remedies”. I didn’t ask her to enumerate.’
‘She called them “remedies”?’
‘She’s German.’
‘Are you sure she didn’t call them “solutions”?’
‘I’m glad you can find a joke in this.’
‘Who’s joking? We aren’t Germans. We don’t need remedies. We aren’t ill.’
‘What are we?’
‘Older, wise, subtler … We don’t have to give it a name.’
‘Better to give it a name than to pretend it isn’t there.’
‘Give a thing a name and it becomes your master.’
‘That sounds like something the person who said sex was not a memory pillow might have gone on to say.’
‘I’ve no idea who you’re talking about.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
She kissed him. She wanted to say nothing mattered as long as they loved each other but she knew everything did.
They wept softly and silently in each other’s arms. How many weeps had that been?
They had been toying with amateur dysfunction and its impish cousins, lassitude, overfamiliarity, distraction, moodiness, marriage, now they were up against the real disabling thing – the ageing body, the troubled mind, the heavy heart.
It was as though they’d been told their adult lives would begin that minute.
Or end that minute.
Lily and Quaid, lovers for the ages, the pattern for all lovers to come, how like you this?
She put that very question to him that night, before sleep.
‘Will you be all right with this, my love?’
‘There is no “this”. Yes.’
‘Don’t just say it.’
‘I’m not just saying it. I’ll be all right. Will you?’
She took so long to answer he wondered if she’d fallen asleep.
Finally, she said, ‘I don’t know.’
And the evening and the morning were the Last Day.