The Act of Love (23 page)

She turned to face Marius again. ‘You know a lot about me,’ she said, ‘for someone I’ve never spoken a word to before.’

He mumbled what might have been an apology into his moustache. ‘I was struck by your talk, for which I thank you,’ he said. ‘I listened hard. That was all. I just thought you weren’t saying all you thought.’

‘So you are privy to my intellectual life as well? I am an open book to you, evidently. You miss neither the words I don’t say nor the sadness I don’t feel.’

He stared hard into her face, noting the tea-bag stain pouches under her eyes, the site where the skin would turn from ochre to yellow and at last to brown, though as yet the pouches suited her, suggesting the play of seriousness, a capacity for philosophic amusement unspoiled by levity. He was like me in this regard: he loathed inconsequence. Or at least he did in the company of Marisa. No silly voices or foolish accents with her. A man who could be himself only with women, I noted. Or with women with whom he thought he could fall in love. ‘I would much rather,’ he said, lowering his gaze at last, ‘that you gave me the chance to know exactly what it is you do feel.’

She shook her head – a rattle of razor blades. ‘That won’t be possible,’ she said. ‘I’m doing only one talk in this series. And I’ve just done it.’

He was about to say that wasn’t what he meant but recovered his subtlety in time. He ’d been up in Shropshire too long. Consorting with the under and the overaged.

‘Perhaps, then, we could reconvene at the next person’s talk.’

‘Do you have an interest in Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour?’

‘I do if you do.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Perhaps we could reconvene so you could tell me why.’

‘Perhaps we could,’ she said. With which she turned her body and her attention to other matters.

So was that a date or wasn’t it?

Marius, for his part, wasn’t sure. He strode back home with no spring in his step, his mouth set in a curl of hollow distaste. He told himself he was bored. What else was sexual desire but boredom turning in its sleep? However they started, these things always finished the same way. Her mention of Boucher reminded him of his precious Baudelaire, spleening it to the moon:

I am an ancient boudoir filled with faded roses
In which a ruck of long-outmoded gowns reposes,
Where pastels all too sad and Bouchers all too pale
Alone breathe in the scents that uncorked flasks exhale.

Marius, too, was an ancient boudoir, his sorry brain the repository of too many secrets, poems, love letters and golden curls. Worst of all, it held the fatal knowledge of what always comes next, the unmistakable finale heard in the overture.

He was ungrateful, it seemed to me. He was undeserving. It’s a species of rudeness amounting to cruelty not to be able to accept an erotic adventure and maybe even the promise of erotic happiness when it’s offered you, no matter that the offer has a few equivocations in it.

But I had to accept what was offered me as well. It was for his cruelty, when all was said and done, that I’d sought him out. It was for the trouble he was capable of causing. So I wasn’t going to relinquish him for being himself. When you find a man like Marius you don’t willingly let him go.

I happen to know that Elspeth clung to his legs when he told her he was leaving. It was a most terrible scene. A woman in her middle sixties and a man not yet forty, a mother and her son they might have been, except that mothers don’t behave that way with their sons, except in the murderously pornographic novels – of which I have a signed set in mint condition, not for sale – of Georges Bataille. Though Marius had loved her so deeply in their first years together that he would sometimes weep over the transience
of her mature beauty while she slept, afraid that each breath might be her last (and he the reason for it), unable to imagine any life of the senses without her, all he felt when she clung sobbing to his legs (unable to imagine her life without
him
), was revulsion.

‘To despoil is the essence of eroticism,’ Bataille wrote, which is why ‘there is nothing more depressing than an ugly woman . . . for ugliness cannot be spoiled.’ Old age with its indignities, similarly. It had been something for Marius to live for, profaning the elegance of this older woman by subjecting her to every act of loving and not so loving animality his fevered ingenuity could devise. But there was nothing left now to profane or despoil. Time had done it for him.

Her hands, he noticed, had grown square, the skin at the base of her fingers puffy, as grey as dough. And she was without wrists now. Her thumb was an extension of her arm. Fingers which he would once, and not so many years ago, have plucked with violence one by one from contact with another man, he found so loathsome that the effort necessary to pluck them from his legs was beyond him.

‘It doesn’t become you, Elspeth, to behave like this. Not at your age.’ Did he actually say those words to her or did he merely think them? It’s an unnecessary distinction. You cannot think those words in the presence of somebody who loves you without your face betraying them.

‘At my age! Do you dare? How many times did I beg you,’ she cried, ‘that if you were going to leave me, to leave when I was young enough at least to make provision for myself? Now look at me.’

Look at her? That was the last thing of which he was capable.

‘You were never young enough to make provision for yourself,’ he might or might not have said. ‘Not on my watch.’

‘Didn’t I say to leave me where I was if you were not sure you could love me forever?’

‘How could I have left you where you were? You weren’t happy.’ ‘I was happy enough.’

‘Had you been happy enough—’ But no, that he couldn’t say. Instead, ‘It doesn’t fall to any man to be sure he ’ll love a woman forever, Elspeth.’

‘Yes it does. Yes he can. And if he can’t then he must leave the woman where she is. I had a life, didn’t I? I was cared for. I was secure. I didn’t need you to come along and do
this
.’

Her mouth, he noticed, had lost the fleshy fullness he had once loved. In her distraction it hung open, like a dog’s, and he wondered if she would ever again be able to close it fully, or to keep it dry. The brows of her eyes, too, once so full of challenge, striking in the broad arch of their expressiveness, particularly when she laughed or conveyed desire, had fallen below the bone, making her look tired and bewildered, again like an old dog fearing the end.

When he drew his legs away from her clutches – yes,
clutches
– she fell forward on to the floor, striking her head. This seemed to suggest to her a last, desperate course of action. ‘I begged you, I begged you,’ she screamed, banging her head on the floorboards willingly now, blow after blow, causing blood to pour from her face, meaning to dash her brains out if she could. And to spill them at his feet.

‘Elspeth!’ he cried. ‘Elspeth, please stop it.’

But he couldn’t go to her. Couldn’t touch her. Couldn’t help her
.

MARISA DIDN T KNOW WHETHER THEY HAD A DATE EITHER. SHE, TOO, WAS
out of sorts. She feared she ’d been obvious, both in allowing Marius to see that the painting had got under her skin, and in showing him it irritated her to be found out. Wasn’t this precisely what infuriated her in the portrait of Countess Blessington – a wealthy and successful woman, at the height of her influence and power, unable to conceal her vulnerability? No, not unable,
unwilling
. Marisa could perfectly well see why the painting, in Byron’s words, had ‘set all London raving’. It was what usually set all London raving in a woman: the persistence in her of the supplicating girl. A pettish and slightly crooked girl at that, beggarly even, despite the fur and finery; a suggestion, beneath the allure of her assurance, of uncertainty and neediness. Was this to be woman’s indelible mark, no matter how far she progressed in the world of men – the wanting to be loved and rescued by them?

And she, Marisa, had betrayed this very neediness on her own face.

She couldn’t forgive herself. She would show Marius a different expression the next time.

How did I know she was contemplating a next time? I lived inside her head, that’s how I knew. Had we been Siamese twins my heart could not have been attuned more sensitively to hers. But it worked the other way, too. I passed my dreads to her along her bloodstream, where eventually – in her own time – she transmuted them into her own desires.

She didn’t turn up the following week for the Madame de Pompadour
talk. She wasn’t going to be obvious. But the week after she lunched late with Flops at the Café Bagatelle in the gallery’s sculpture garden – two hours sitting over a plate of rocket salad and parmesan shavings, a further thirty minutes looking harder at the urns than any urn could merit – being careful to return to the room where the next talk in the series was being held, at the stroke of four o’clock.

Marius was not there.

She was mildly disappointed. She looked good, she thought, in a not too short steel-grey tulip skirt and wide leather belt, high-heeled sandals that showed her painted toes, big metallic earrings and of course a white shirt in which when she moved she rippled. She coruscated, was her own view of herself. But he wasn’t there to be dazzled. She was more surprised than hurt. Her instinct for these things was normally uncanny. If she expected to see a man she saw him. ‘I conjure them,’ she joked in an entry in her diary that might or might not have been left around for me to read. ‘Some people bend spoons, I conjure men.’

This was no wanton boast. More a reflection on the cruelty of things. Conjuring men was her affliction.

But she did not, on this occasion, conjure Marius.

She tried to dismiss him from her mind. He was not important to her. For herself she could take him or leave him alone.

The next talk in the series she skipped. Two could play at touch me not.

But the final one she attended. As, by the marvellous synchronicity of warped desire, did Marius.

I missed them meeting. (I was loitering with intent – Marisa’s intent – in Manchester Square. ‘Leave the shop early,’ she ’d told me. ‘Wait for me. Don’t know how long I’ll be.’) But it must have gone off well, because afterwards they sauntered round the gallery together, Marius deferring to her expertise, Marisa thinking he might like to see how Fragonard’s
The
Swing
looked in its new position in the reinstalled Oval Room. My understanding is that they spent more time looking at this painting than a man and woman who are not officially betrothed should ever be allowed to
spend. In my perhaps overexcited interpretation of events, what had of necessity transpired between them – given the painting, given the overheatedness of their discourse – was this: in full public view, and on the basis of an acquaintance of no more than fifteen minutes’ duration, including the look they had exchanged at the cheese counter, they had made Marisa’s vagina the subject of their conversation. Indeed, had Marius kneeled before her, unzipped the pinstripe trousers she was wearing, pulled aside her underclothes and exposed her genitals to his curiosity, he could not have offended against decorum more. I make no judgements. I merely describe events as they occurred.

A shame I missed it.

That they were able to do this without causing a scandal I ascribe to education. Educated people, particularly those educated in literature or the visual arts, have more ways of talking about a woman’s vagina than those who leave school when they’re fifteen. The latter will claim they call a vagina a vagina – except, of course, they mainly call it something else – and that talking about it anyway is not what they prefer to do. Thus they miss out twice: first on knowledge, then on sex at its most refined – talking about it being an indispensable prologue to doing it with any grace. But then the uneducated are not taught to value grace.

I’m not sure how much Marius knew already about the happenstance of Fragonard’s
The Swing
, originally titled
Les Hazards Heureux de
l’Escarpolette
, but whatever gaps in his knowledge my Marisa found, my Marisa filled.

In fact you don’t have to be educated beyond the common tittle-tattle of art history to know how Fragonard came to accept the commission for this most prurient example of rococo trifling, so innocently admired of the art-loving public that they have it reproduced on tea towels and table mats though it is about the pudenda and nothing else. I don’t intend to repeat that tittle-tattle here. Suffice it to remind those who have forgotten that a lesser painter than Fragonard had been invited to execute the composition first, but declined the commission on the grounds that it was indecent. The commissioner of the painting – a French gentleman of the
court – wished to have his mistress painted swinging in a bower, as high and as uninhibitedly as a bird. Pushing the swing was to be a bishop, and gazing up her skirts was to be the gentleman of the court. Why the bishop no one knows. As Marisa would have said to Marius, ‘There is no plumbing the religious filthy-mindedness of the French.’

It’s possible that for the painter – at the time enjoying some éclat in Paris as a religious allegorist – the bishop was the last straw. But it’s also possible, as Marius might have surmised in return to Marisa, as they stared up at the painting together, ‘That the invitation to throw the lady’s legs as wide as the composition or his imagination would allow was not one he felt he could accept, bishop or no bishop.’