Lily wishes she still had her mother to talk to. All very well having Sam, but some conversations about women you can only have with another woman.
Remember Lucasta, Mother, whose husband left her for another, older woman and then came back? Yes, you know what’s coming … he is in the process of leaving her for another woman again. Also older? No, he’s done that. This time younger. Maybe next time he’ll find one exactly Lucasta’s age.
She can’t be quite so dry with Lucasta. She was younger herself when she arched an eyebrow at her friend’s decision to forgive and forget. There were more men in the world then. And poor Lucasta was more capable of landing some. Age is cruel. ‘I told him that if he was going to leave me again he shouldn’t wait until I was an old lady,’ she said to Lily, showing her the flaps of loose skin under her arms.
‘We all have those,’ Lily said.
‘But some of us have husbands.’
Lily sighed. ‘Is there any reason to think that if he goes he won’t come back again?’
‘There’s always a reason to think he won’t come back again, but even if he does – and his record suggests he will – it will be the same old complaint: that we got together when we were too young, that we never experienced life, that he’s missed out—’
‘Whatever you do, you miss out on whatever you didn’t do.’
‘I know that. Though I don’t feel I’ve missed out on all the things he thinks he’s missed out on—’
‘Those things being?’
‘Oh, you know. Playing the field. Wife-swapping. Handcuffs. Troilism. Visiting prostitutes. Being gay. Bestiality, for all I know. Topless bathing—’
‘Who stopped him topless bathing?’
‘Ho, ho. He says we’ve been too straight. Oral sex …’
‘What about oral sex?’
‘The usual. Missing out on it.’
‘Which version?’
‘How many are there? I’ve never liked the two I know.’
‘Oh, Lucasta. Liked.’
‘Well what’s your secret been?’
‘Secret of what?’
‘Being happy with a man.’
‘That’s a very dangerous condition to admit to. But the truth is—’
She hesitated. How would the truth – the truth about the reckless woman she’d been, the wild acts she still couldn’t believe she’d initiated – help the not-at-all-reckless Lucasta? If you want to help a friend you don’t boast about yourself. You stay within the range of that friend’s capabilities. Or is that to be condescending? Lily shrugged inwardly. ‘In my experience, at least,’ she went on, ‘it helps to go along with what you might not like especially if the man you love does.’
‘Lily! That’s so Victorian.’
Ha! She couldn’t wait to tell Sam that.
‘Just good manners,’ she said. ‘That’s all. No one likes doing everything.’
‘You once told me you’d been to a sex club.’
‘I told you that?’
‘Only in answer to the question have you ever been to a sex club.’
‘Ask me again.’
‘Lily, have you ever been to a sex club?’
‘Lucasta, my whole life has been a sex club. But why did you ask the first time?’
‘Jules wanted us to go. You were the only person I knew who might have been to one.’
‘I shouldn’t have answered you. It wasn’t really a sex club anyway.’
‘What was it?’
‘A dressing-up and smacking-people club.’
‘You let strangers smack you?’
‘No, they let me smack them.’
Lucasta screwed up her face. ‘How could you enjoy that?’
‘Who said I enjoyed it?’
‘You did. You said you had a good time. You said it was fun. You said everybody should try it.’
‘Everybody should. Better to try than to wonder. But I hope you didn’t tell Jules that.’
‘I did. Only I made up that Sam didn’t like it quite so much and that you didn’t think you’d ever go again. Did you?’
‘I’m not telling you. But what did Jules say?’
‘That just the once would have sufficed him. That he’d thrown his life away doing nothing and going nowhere and then wondering what doing something and going somewhere would have been like. He said he was afraid of dying unused.’
‘We will all do that, Lucasta.’
‘Will we? You won’t. You’ve been to a sex club.’
Lily laughed. ‘There’s more to a fulfilled life than visiting a sex club.’
Lucasta didn’t laugh. ‘Is there? I’m beginning seriously to doubt that.’
‘Remember Lucasta?’
Quaid nodded. ‘I remember you talking about her.’
‘Her husband Jules was leaving her as I was meeting you.’
‘I hope his leaving turned out as well as our meeting.’
‘It did for Lucasta. He came back.’
‘Good.’
‘But now he is leaving her again.’
‘Why the present-continuous tense?’
‘Because that’s the continuous state he’s in.’
‘For another woman, another man, more space, the chance to find himself …?’
‘On the surface for another woman, but from the way she tells it, I’d say a combination of all those things.’
‘Presumably she wouldn’t let him have a dog either.’
‘Are you warning me?’
‘Of course not. I don’t think a dog is a leaving-home issue. In the end I doubt any one thing is—’
Lily put up a hand. ‘Can I stop you there?’
‘My love, you can stop me anywhere.’
‘Would you speak to Jules?’
‘Me?’
‘You.’
‘Jules?’
‘Jules.’
‘About?’
‘What constitutes a leaving-home issue.’
‘A man I’ve never met wants to talk to me about his marriage? Come on. Why?’
‘He admires your work.’
‘I admire a lot of people’s work. That doesn’t mean I want to discuss matrimony with them.’
‘Sam, you admire no one’s work.’
‘That’s not an answer to my question. What possible reason can he have to discuss love and marriage with me?’
‘It’s more what Lucasta thinks. She exerts a strong influence over him.’
‘But not strong enough to stop him leaving.’
‘He always comes back.’
‘Then why doesn’t she just wait for the cycle to complete itself?’
‘For fear that one day it won’t.’
‘So where do I come in?’
‘He needs a man to talk to.’
‘I bet he didn’t say that.’
‘No, Lucasta did.’
‘And what does Lucasta hope I might say to him?’
‘Stay with your wife.’
‘Ha! Does she know I didn’t stay with mine?’
‘I’m your wife.’
‘But does she know that I had to leave an earlier one to be with you?’
‘Details, details. It’s more that she hopes the secret of our marital happiness will rub off on him.’
‘Christ! Does your friend Lucasta think happiness is infectious?’
‘Is that idea so implausible? Would you write plays if you didn’t think words have the power to affect?’
‘Can’t I just send him a play in that case?’
‘No, darling. He needs to feel the happiness coming off your person.’
‘Ooof. Do I deserve that?’
‘You are always saying how happy you are. I know that’s to make me feel better—’
‘It’s to make me feel better.’
‘I didn’t know you had been feeling bad.’
‘A little depleted, that’s all. It happens to men my age.’
‘Then drink less.’
‘I know. And walk more. And stop complaining.’
‘I would never accuse you of complaining. I appreciate it that you don’t. Many a man would complain more.’
‘So I’m to urge Jules to complain less? What if when I meet him I take his side? What if I think he should leave Lucasta and this time never go back?’
‘You won’t tell him.’
‘I’m to lie for your friend Lucasta?’
‘No, you’re to lie for me. You’re a persuasive person. Persuade Jules!’
Persuade Jules! Kill Claudio! They both heard it and laughed. Like Prospero’s Island, a good, properly self-satisfied marriage is full of sweet airs and detected echoes that give delight and hurt not.
‘The way I see it,’ Quaid began, but it was plain Jules wasn’t listening. Quaid realised he had made a big mistake arranging to meet him at an outdoor table in a café in Soho. There was too much that looked like the life Jules had never lived walking past on the pavement. Thoughtlessness was it, or sadism? Quaid didn’t know Jules and had nothing against him so it must have been the former.
In fact he did know Jules but didn’t know he knew him. ‘You won’t remember but we were in the same English class at school,’ Jules said during a lull in the parade.
Quaid turned his own gaze from the street to scrutinise Lucasta’s husband. As a rule he didn’t look much at men. Some were interesting, some were not. It wasn’t as though he were looking for a friend. This man had a big, tired, granite face that appeared too heavy for the shoulders that supported it. His eyes, though, were soft and imploring.
Something came back to Quaid. ‘My God, it was you Miss Gore chose to read Othello in place of me. You took the sex out of it, I remember.’
‘I took the sex out of everything.’
Well that wasn’t long coming, Quaid thought. A beggar holding out a black top hat interrupted their conversation. Jules gave him a pound coin. Quaid gave him nothing.
They drank coffee, moved on to wine, and talked about things that were supposed to interest men. There was a European football match being played somewhere and the sounds of excited supporters watching it on television rang out from Bar Italia. They both smiled parentally. A special tolerance is granted to fans of football when they happen to be Italian.
‘I can’t imagine,’ Jules said suddenly, ‘that it bothered you much.’
‘Losing to you? It bothered me greatly. I was a sensitive boy when it came to sex.’
‘I’m surprised. You seemed so worldly, with all those erotic poems you knew. And it was rumoured you visited prostitutes.’
‘Visited sounds a bit decadent. And there was only one. I picked her up on a street corner in Streatham.’
‘You see.’
‘Anyone can pick up a prostitute.’
‘No they can’t. I couldn’t have.’
‘Maybe you didn’t know where to look.’
‘I wouldn’t have dared try. I had Miss Gore dinning the importance of respecting women in my ear.’
‘Picking up a prostitute wasn’t a mark of disrespect to women. It was a mark of respect to prostitutes. And it was desperation not worldliness. I had to kiss a woman before I went up to university.’
‘And?’
‘And what? How was it? She took the pocket money I’d saved for months and offered me sex in a car park but wouldn’t kiss me. I told her I loved her but she still wouldn’t kiss me.’
‘Did you have sex?’
‘That’s between me and the prostitute.’
‘Amazing. I envy you.’
‘I don’t visit prostitutes any more.’
‘But at least you’ve done it. I’ve done nothing. Someone in one of your plays quotes a Chinese proverb. The twisted tree lives out its life, the straight tree ends up as a board. I’ve never forgotten that. It could have been a description of me. I’m the straight tree.’
Quaid was becoming embarrassed. So this was what being friends with a man was like. ‘We are who we are,’ he said.
‘But not always who we want to be.’
Because it would have been impolite not to ask, Quaid asked. ‘So who do you want to be?’
‘Someone shocking. The first time I left poor Lucasta I thought I’d achieved it. I imagined that running off with a woman my mother’s age would show I was a sicko.’
‘It’s not a bad start.’
‘It was, actually. Everyone, including Lucasta, thought I’d done a grand thing for post-menopausal women. SAGA invited me to give a course of lectures on the subject on one of their cruises. That’s a joke, by the way. But what’s not a joke is ending up a board no matter how twisted I’ve struggled to be.’
Quaid tried a laugh and ordered another bottle of wine. Italy scored a goal and Bar Italia exploded. He felt a pang of sympathy for Jules. He knew himself how easily debauchery could slip from one’s grasp.
‘It strikes me,’ he said, ‘that you’re going about it the wrong way. I take it, since you keep coming back to Lucasta, that you love her.’
‘Unconscionably. She’s an angel of forbearance.’
‘Then instead of finding danger in leaving her, what about finding it in staying? Fidelity’s an underrated perversion. You say you love Lucasta, well love her obsessively, love her against reason, make yourself think of no one and nothing but her. Make her your religion. Make yourself sick with her. Has she ever been unfaithful to you?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Pity. An unrequited fidelity is the most giddying of them all. But don’t despair – she will surely be unworthy of your love in some other way.’
Jules stared wild-eyed. He needed to support his heavy head with both hands. ‘I’m listening,’ he said, ‘but the situation is complex. I have a girlfriend.’
‘You mean a mistress?’
‘No, I’d say she’s more a girlfriend.’
‘Then she’s halfway to being a wife, which means your wife’s halfway to being your mistress. That’s ideal. What can be more crooked than having a torrid affair with your wife?’
‘Secretly, you mean?’
‘That’s up to you.’
‘But then I’d be deceiving two women.’
‘Morally that’s no worse than deceiving one.’
‘I can’t just up and leave Sara.’
‘Spoken like a husband.’
‘So?’
‘You want to be a twisted tree? Do your duty. Up and leave neither.’
A straggle of cheering Italians stopped at their table. One of them recognised Quaid, introduced himself as Sandro who’d been the cameraman in Taos, and opened his arms. ‘We won,’ he said. Though he’d never much liked Sandro whom he’d suspected of colluding in some indefinable way with Lily, and didn’t care whether Italy had won or not, Quaid had no choice but to return the embrace. Having embraced one, and being almost as drunk as they were, he thought it behoved him to embrace them all. Anyone watching would have thought he’d spent the afternoon cheering himself hoarse in Bar Italia. Jules looked on with the rapt attention of a child in the world’s biggest toyshop.
They sat a little longer. It seemed to Quaid that Jules had fallen just a little bit in love with him. Not impossibly, he’d leave both the women for me, he thought. All he really wants is to be somewhere else.
They shook hands. ‘Keep writing plays,’ Jules said inanely.
‘And you,’ Quaid said, ‘keep – but I don’t know what line of work you’re in. Do you still review plays?
‘No, that’s long gone. I run a travel agency.’
‘So how did that go?’ Lily asked when Quaid got home.
‘As badly as could have been expected.’
‘Did he ask your advice?’
‘No.’
‘But you gave it anyway?’
‘Yes. At length. You know my only mode of conversation with men is sententious hectoring.’
‘No, that’s your only mode of conversation when you’re drunk. But what’s the upshot? Will he be leaving or staying?’
‘My guess is staying.’
Lily kissed him warmly. ‘Thank you.’
He didn’t mention that he’d also be leaving.