The Act of Love (16 page)

I sat in the leather chair in my office – a chair which had exuded authority for generations – uncertain what to do next. You can never know how you are going to feel in a situation such as this. I was elated as I expected to be, but I had no employment to which to put my elation. You cannot stay elated, waiting in a silence which might be a silence of something or nothing. Exclusion had all along been my object, but now exclusion was achieved I felt excluded from the exclusion I had sought.

The wife-besotted artist Pierre Klossowski – a photograph of whom, acting out his besottedness, I had on my desk – wrote a novel on this very subject.
Roberte Ce Soir
. Not much read on account of the erogenic subtlety of its subject matter. How, Klossowski wondered, do you take a woman in your arms when you want it to be someone else who takes her in his arms, and you aspire to see him at the very moment he sees you? The conundrum that had troubled Candaules and Anselmo both: how to be simultaneously voyeur and actor, exhibitionist and stage manager, husband and lover. ‘One cannot at the same time,’ Klossowski wrote, ‘take and not take, be there and not be there, enter a room when one is already in it.’

Or, conversely, leave a room that one has already left.

Once or twice I crept out into the hall, but heard nothing. All the lights
were on as they would have been when the evening began, otherwise it was as a house shut up for the night, not a sound anywhere. I am not sure how long I kept up this vigil of pacing, listening and not listening, but I must at last have fallen asleep in my chair because the sound of a cry and then a thumping sound, as though something had fallen off a wall, and then a second cry reached me as from some other dimension. By the time I was out of the chair there was more commotion. I ran into the hall and there was Quirin unconscious, if not dead, at the bottom of the stairs, and there was Marisa, frantic, in her nightgown, at the top.

Quirin was not dead. He was not even all that unconscious if you discount the wine. Blood was trickling from a small cut above his nose. He moaned when I kneeled by him and felt his shoulder. ‘Christ,’ he said, looking around, ‘what’s this?’

‘A bloody miracle,’ I said.

He stared around him as though he’d never seen the place before. So that was two of us.

Above him, switched on by Marisa, a thousand starry shipboard lights began to twinkle. Quirin looked up with an imbecile grin on his face, as though he expected to see the dazzling countenance of God grinning back at him. ‘Great chandelier, Uncle Felix,’ he said.

‘I’m not your uncle,’ I told him.

Marisa was ringing for an ambulance. ‘Tell him to lie still and not talk,’ she called from the phone.

What was it she didn’t want him to talk about? It couldn’t have been the chandelier, so what then? The kiss at the top of the stairs that had been so dizzying he couldn’t keep his feet? The erotic horseplay that made them careless of all danger? Had she pushed him to repel him? Had he fallen to escape her?

My questions were not of the Maigret sort. I wanted to know what had happened, but not to solve a crime.

How far had things gone?

I phrase the question with the bluntness it phrased itself to me at the time, despite there being more pressing matters to deal with. But there you have it: for me there was no matter more pressing than this. Yes or no? Suppose Quirin to have been in mortal agony, which, thanks to young bones, soft carpets, and all-round insensibility, he was not, I would have ordered my thoughts no differently. Had the thing happened, and if it had not, what chances were there of its happening still?

You are meant to be returned to your senses when an accident occurs. That is what accidents are for. The madness goes and sanity reasserts itself. But my elation had not been dampened by events. Baulked, yes, but not extinguished. The night was not over yet.

The doorbell rang. I could see a blue light flashing outside. ‘I think,’ I said, taking Marisa to one side, ‘that you should go with him in the ambulance.’

She stared at me. ‘Felix, this is not a joyride. The boy’s fallen down the stairs. He might have broken every bone in his body for all we know.’

‘That’s why I think you should go with him.’

‘He’s your relation.’

‘Yes, but distant. You’re much closer to him.’

‘I?’

‘You.’

She backed away from me. Something she had never done before. ‘You’re insane,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it isn’t you that’s fallen down the stairs?’

I didn’t say I had no reason to fall down any stairs because it wasn’t I who’d been locked in a wild embrace at the top of them. ‘I can’t see what’s insane about my suggestion,’ I said instead, which better proved my mental stability. ‘If you won’t go with him I will, but I don’t know what I’ve said that’s insane.’

She shook her head. ‘Does it never stop for you?’ she asked.

Shocking in itself, for what it posed, the question shocked me still more for being put at all. This was the most direct Marisa had ever been with
me on a subject that burned between us, but which we had tacitly agreed never to address in words.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, not looking at her. Had I met her eyes they would have roasted me alive.

‘Yes, you do, Felix. Does it never stop? Does nothing more important ever intervene?’

It was a great temptation to seize the moment and admit it – no, Marisa, nothing more important ever intervenes because nothing more important exists. But that would have been the end of everything. She already thought I was crazy and she didn’t know the half of it. When the moment presents itself to a masochist he dare not seize it unless he wants to pull his world down around his ears, which he thinks he does and boasts he does, but which of course he doesn’t. More even than the sadist, the masochist craves infinite repetition.

I took a step back from the precipice so that I might stand over it again.

THINGS WERE BOUND TO BE DIFFERENT BETWEEN US AFTER THAT.

But not on the surface. And not all at once.

I’d gone with Quirin in the ambulance and could see there was not much wrong with him. Not in body, anyway. He was released from hospital after a couple of days of observation, and was thereafter, so I heard, to be seen limping around town with a silver-topped cane. He didn’t show up for further work experience. He dropped us a card to thank us for our hospitality and conversation – the word conversation underlined for some reason which I thought only Marisa would understand – and sent round a friend with an even more untrustworthy air than his own to collect whatever he ’d left lying about our house (toys, as far as I could tell) and return the key. The end. Marisa did not mention him and nor did I. Our conversation sealed over him, as it sealed over the dangerous eruption of frankness he had precipitated. He hadn’t taken a suspicious tumble down our grand triumphal staircase. I hadn’t asked Marisa to travel in the ambulance and hold his hand. Marisa hadn’t said to me what she ’d said.

We were in good shape. We denied it all to each other, therefore none of it had happened.

But, whatever we pretended, our precious pact of implicitness had been broken.

And with it our still more precious pretence that the wounding doubt in which I lived was no figment of my disordered brain but answered to an actuality – Marisa’s wounding, never to be mentioned infidelities.

When my love swore that she was false, I did believe her though I knew she lied.

Not any longer.

Now Marisa would have to be false to me in earnest.

Hard to explain the moral logic of that, but we both sensed it was how it had to be. It was as though we accepted the necessity to move down a philosophic plane – as it were from the beauty of abstractions to the ugliness of deeds – and would be coarser with each other from now on. Not because Marisa had to punish me with who I was – hers was not a punitive or vindictive nature – but because there was nowhere else for us to go.

Without doubt, she could not have done what she went on to do had she not been an adventuress with a deep instinct for concealment. But she could not have done it had she been an adventuress only. What she did she did because she loved me. I see her forerunner not in Guinevere or Messalina or Moll Flanders, not in Sacher-Masoch’s fur-wrapped Wanda or any of the libertine women in de Sade’s
The One Hundred and Twenty
Days of Sodom
, but in the highly respectable Mrs Bulstrode in
Middlemarch
who stayed loyal to her disgraced husband. Good wives do this. They shoulder the burden of us, they espouse our sorrows. I wasn’t disgraced, but I wasn’t weighted down with moral honours either. Mrs Bulstrode took off her ornaments and put on a plain black gown; Marisa touched up her lipstick – otherwise they were acting out of the same sense of duty. That Marisa didn’t suggest the separation route, and that I never threatened her with it – that divorce never entered into either of our minds – proves how devoted to each other we remained.

In recognition of which, and again without words, we threw ourselves into a period of the most intense, romantic love. It was like the honeymoon we had never quite managed to have. We woke smiling into each other’s eyes. I wouldn’t let her leave the bed, whether to go into the kitchen or the bathroom, without me. I watched her dress. I watched her apply her make-up, her head tilted slightly backwards for the final application, as though she were putting eye-drops in her eyes and was careful not to
spill any. When she did this her nostrils narrowed and the muscles in her neck tightened. From this angle, too, the grey tea-bag stains beneath her eyes shone silver. Fascinating. I didn’t want to miss a moment of any of it. Which of course made her self-conscious, though that too I didn’t want to miss. Brusque in her dressing normally, like a man, she would slide more sinuously into her clothes with my eye on her, until this struck her as preposterous and she would put the finishing touches to herself hurriedly, without looking in a mirror. Wonderful to me – how colourful and varie-gated she could look with so little ceremony. Even in her younger days my mother had rarely descended before lunch, so much was there to do to her person before she was ready to face the world. Marisa skipped into the day still warm from bed, as though she couldn’t wait for her life to start.

On the afternoons she worked in the Oxfam shop I’d visit and pretend to browse through the books, though all I wanted was to see her, to observe her with other people, to hear her voice and make her smile when I appeared from behind a stack. She was the same. She walked to my premises with me. And she was there, as though she ’d never left, her face illuminated, when I came up out of the basement six hours later. We paused somewhere for tea. Then we paused again for a drink, like lovers not wanting to part, though there was nothing to stop us going straight home and following each other round the house. We burst out laughing for no reason, and this time Marisa laughed in the present tense, overjoyed by the state we were in. We went for long walks all over London, our hands glued. People smiled when they saw us. I am not a person who normally invites conversation from strangers. I am not saying my face repels it, but I don’t make it easy for people to break in on my concentration. Marisa, too, can be forbidding. Though where my face closes down, hers is full of sharp intelligence which you think twice before you brave. But together in this mood we seemed to suck whoever came anywhere near us into our happiness. Old ladies sat close to us on park benches. Children too. Dogs played around our feet. We were not just innocently and good-naturedly in love, we were the cause of innocent, good-natured love in others.

And every day while it lasted Marisa grew more lovely to me. The stains beneath her eyes faded. Her stern, Roman nose lifted infinitesimally. Her lips relaxed and grew softer. A light seemed to have turned on inside her. On one particularly restorative spring morning we went out walking in St James’s Park early, while the trees were still damp with night. One of the pelicans was sitting on a bench, as miraculous and cumbersome as an angel, clacking its plastic salad-server beak. Marisa made me join him and put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Smile,’ she said, as she photographed us with her mobile phone.

And I swear that that was exactly what the pelican did.

‘It’s difficult to say,’ Marisa laughed, ‘which of you looks more incapable of flight.’

‘He does,’ I replied.

I spoke only the truth. This morning I was lighter than any other living creature in the park, Marisa excluded.

A magpie crossed our path. ‘Hello, Mr Magpie,’ Marisa said. ‘How’s Mrs Magpie?’

I asked her what she meant by that. She was surprised I didn’t know the superstition. A single magpie was bad luck. You had to make the pair of them present.

I wanted to weep for her. Other people ’s superstitions affect me in this way. It is as though all their long-ago childhood fragility is distilled into the moment of their revealing them. I love seeing the girl in the woman. It breaks my heart. And that was how I suddenly saw Marisa – as a little girl, skipping through the park, being taught by her skittish mother to say, ‘Hello, Mr Magpie, how’s Mrs Magpie?’