The Act of Love (24 page)

Fragonard, being less queasy, and no doubt with a quicker intuitive understanding of why a man might choose to submit the private parts of the woman he loves to the eyes of as many onlookers as possible, took over without demur, introduced a young voyeur – perhaps to double the nobleman’s excitement – and painted what Marisa described as ‘The most profusely arboreal excuse for a vagina ever seen.’

Thus was coition managed between them, as an act of purely intellectual indecency, in a room full of art lovers not a one of whom would have noticed that anything untoward had happened.

Except me, and I wasn’t even there.

They took tea – as I was able to learn, deduce, or otherwise piece together later – in the courtyard where Marisa had expected him, but then again not, a fortnight before. Marius wondered, since their afternoon had been so educative, whether she would accompany him to dinner on an evening of her choosing in order that he might be educated some more. She told him she was a married woman. He asked her to name her favourite cuisine. She told him Italian. He said his was French. She asked him if he spent time in France. He said only in his head. She wondered what he had against going there in body. He told her he was more head than body, just as he
was more past than present.
Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanées
, he said. Baudelaire, he told her. I thought as much, she said. Which was why, he continued, it was such a pleasure,
this
– stretching out his fingertips to her, which she didn’t touch with hers, she being a married woman – to talk to someone in the living present. There were too many withered roses, and insufficient live ones. She laughed at him. He coloured. She apologised.

‘I’ve never been able to take flower imagery seriously,’ she said. ‘The nuns used to beat me for laughing at Wordsworth.
Three years she grew in
sun and shower
– and I had my head in the desk, imagining this little girl standing in the rain for three years.’

‘The nuns! You were a novitiate?’

‘Hardly. But I boarded at a convent for a year. My mother thought I needed a religious education. In fact it was she who needed a religious education. She released me into the hands of nuns to expiate her sins.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. Which must be why I am expiating them still.’

‘Is that what you’re doing? I thought you were agreeing to meet me for dinner.’

She made a pyramid of her fingers. ‘You are a presumptuous man,’ she said.

‘You know a lot about me,’ he said, echoing her earlier words to him, ‘for someone you’ve barely spoken to before.’

She smiled, and no doubt flushed a little, to be reminded of his fullfrontal attack on her the afternoon of her talk on Lady Blessington.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘Since you offered then to know so much about me, and offer now to be so certain I’ll enjoy your company, I’ll accept your invitation on one condition.’

‘And what condition is that?’

She rose from the table, not coquettishly, but abstracted. Marius paid for their tea, put money into the collecting box at the door of the gallery, then led her out into the thundery dampness of the afternoon where I was waiting for them, as invisible and inconsequential as an ornamental bush. Above them a watercolourist’s sky, great smudges of grey cloud breaking
up no sooner than they’d formed, a wet brush inscribing the impermanence of things in charcoal marks which they would have been within their rights to suppose they could read, so like calligraphy was it. A more fanciful man than Marius would have made Marisa look up to see their names coupled in bleeding black ink –
Marius and Marisa
or maybe
Marius Loves Marisa
– but then Marisa was not, in turn, fanciful enough to have cooperated with him in this. ‘I see no such thing,’ she would have said, unless the marks had been incontrovertible, and I am not prepared to go so far as to assert they were.

‘And what condition is that?’ Marius asked again.

I pricked my ears, aroused by the word ‘condition’. If there was already a condition between them, they were making progress.

‘That you book the table at the restaurant of my choice any night but Friday, and then ring me to say you’ve booked it.’

‘That’s not a very stringent condition. Consider it done. Just tell me the name of the restaurant and give me your number.’

‘Ah, but that’s the condition. You have to find those out.’

‘And how do I do that?’

‘I will hide them.’

Ah, Marisa – hiding now for someone else! ‘Hide them where?’

‘In the gallery.’

‘In the gallery as in at the enquiry desk or on a noticeboard?’

‘No. In the gallery as in the art.’

‘Art as in paintings?’

‘Not necessarily, but not necessarily not. The Wallace Collection has a fine collection of European furniture and sculpture.’

‘And will the information I seek come in a code I must crack, or in an expression I must interpret, or will I be looking for an actual object in a drawer?’

She thought about it. ‘I’m still deciding,’ she said. ‘I’d say a combination of all those. But yes, there will be a thing. Though I’m hardly going to tell you where to look for it, am I?’

‘A thing?’

‘You ask far too many questions for a man with such a quick intelligence. Use your eyes and you will find it.’

‘Do I get any other clues?’

‘None.’

‘And when can I start looking?’

‘One week today.’

‘It will take you that long to hide it?’

‘Keeping you amused is not all I have to do.’

‘Amused is not exactly the word I’d use to describe my condition.’

Nor mine, I have to say. Not on this afternoon of words and hidings.Doubly false, I found it, the idea that Marisa would hide a thing from Marius, a man with whom she hid herself from me.

A
Big Issue
seller accosted them before they could shake hands.

‘I don’t see your badge,’ Marius challenged him.

‘It was nicked from me,’ the seller told him. ‘They nick things from you on the street.’

Marius put his hand into his hip pocket and pulled out a wad of notes – a costermonger flourish which I recognised from the fromagerie. ‘Don’t believe a word of it, old cock,’ he said, refusing the
Big Issue
but handing the man a five-pound note all the same.

‘You’re having an expensive day,’ Marisa laughed.

‘As the poet says, “There is no pleasure sweeter than surprising a man by giving him more than he had hoped for.”’

‘Baudelaire, presumably.’

‘Ah! I’m sorry. I have become predictable already.’

I thought so, but Marisa, I observed, did not.

From where I was positioned, it wasn’t possible for me to hear every word they exchanged, but what I didn’t hear for sure I lip-read or intuited or made up for them out of the intensity of my curiosity. I took it to be a good omen that Marisa had asked me to wait for her on the off-chance of her encountering Marius. It was a sign of how differently she felt about him that she could flirt outrageously with him in my presence – if you
could quite call what I was a ‘presence ’ (certainly I wasn’t present to Marius) – without acknowledging me as she had somehow at all times acknowledged me the afternoon I saw her out with Dulcie ’s dentist.

Did it excite her to do this? Did it excite her for herself as well as for me? Was she, in Marius’s company, able to remove me as effectively from her consciousness as she appeared able to remove me from her proximity?

I never asked. I knew my place. And Marius was not a name we dared so much as breathe to each other. We carried him as though he were a precariously loaded tray which a single badly chosen word would cause either one of us to jolt and spill. He was our precious secret, hers from me, mine from her, inadmissible and unpronounceable, even as I lurked in the shadows of my own making, a self-ghosted man, and watched him fall in love with my wife. And she – if my luck held – with him.

He apologised again for the Baudelaire which she told him she did not recognise. I did. It was from one of the Frenchman’s prose poems.
La
Fausse Monnaie
. But I was not able to demonstrate my cleverness. Ghosted men have no faces and no tongues.

‘The person who does the giving in the story,’ Marius explained, ‘is actually passing on counterfeit – performing a pretend-charitable act and making a good deal at the same time, gaining forty sous
and
the heart of God. A piece of calculation Baudelaire finds contemptible.’

‘You are not passing on counterfeit yourself, I presume?’ Marisa wondered.

‘Not knowingly.’

They looked each other directly in the eyes.

‘Not knowingly,’ Marisa repeated.

‘Not knowingly,’ Marius said, repeating her repetition.

Have I said I was as invisible as a bush? Think the burning bush.

SO WAS I SATISFIED YET?

No. Hungrier than the sea on which he ’s buffeted, a cuckold sighting land. They had gone further in one afternoon than I could contemplate with calm – enough had been said and done and promised to burn a thousand ordinary stay-at-home cuckolds alive in their beds – but I could look only forward, not back, and every act of lewdness vanished in its accomplishment and made me impatient for the next.

It also worried me that Marisa had told Marius there was no point in his starting looking for at least a week. A long time in politics, a week in love is an eternity, the more especially when one of the lovers was a man as easily stirred up and then as easily turned off as Marius.

One thing Marius didn’t mention to Elspeth after her husband died was that he ’d met another woman at the funeral and subsequently spent time in her company. In fact two women, and spent time with them both. Not women, strictly speaking, either. More girls. Sisters, as I’d thought. One fifteen, or so she said; one sixteen, or so
she
said. One with black lipstick, one with a ring through her nose. Marius wouldn’t have taken the trouble to remember which was which.

It would appear that I was mistaken, then, the morning I observed him in the village hall in Shropshire and picked him for a man who arranged more debaucheries than he attended. He did, after all, keep his four o’clock appointment. And that is not the only surprise. The appointment was for
that same day. And not more than a few steps away from where he ’d made it.
Meet me among the headstones, girls
, he must have said,
at four . . .
o’ . . . clock
.

I don’t know why I should have been surprised. Why not get on with it? What’s owing to the recently dead aside, I suppose because it’s beyond me to understand immediate gratification. Why come so quickly to the end of a pleasure you can spin out?

That, of course, is if he came to the
end
of it. Yes, he met them – I had been wrong about that. But who was to say how much of himself he gave? There is more than one way of withholding consummation.

Whether he did whatever he did with them one at a time, or whether they mucked in together; whether they found a patch of dry earth, if such exists in Shropshire, or whether they stretched out on cold sepulchral marble, and waited in the rain – I don’t know. In his reporting of the event years later he was sparing of these details; unless the person reporting it in turn to me was sparing of the details on his behalf. No one ever tells the whole truth about sex. Something must always be added or taken away.

What interested me at that later time, lying listening to Marisa telling me about it in the half-light, unconsummated myself, was not the hows but the wheres, a cemetery not being everybody’s idea of a love nest. No one seriously interested in the erotic life of men and women can be ignorant of tapophilia, that morbid fascination with burial and decay of which tapophobia is the opposite and vampirism and Gothic romances the direct if somewhat lily-livered offshoots. That the death instinct was strong in Marius, I already knew from everything I’d seen and heard from his own lips in Shropshire. But you can be absorbed in the poetry of expiry – especially your own – and still not care particularly for yew trees and sarcophagi, let alone choose them as the backdrop to pleasure. The truth about Marius was that he was not simply half in love with death, but invigorated and made potent by it. Did the sisters have clay from the graveyard on their feet when he did or did not embrace them? Did their fingers claw at bones? Was their youth perversely redolent of decay?

‘There’s this to say for blood and breath,’ wrote Housman, the presiding spirit of that dispiriting cemetery, ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Marius functioned according to the reverse principle. Death gave him a taste for blood and breath.

‘I can’t pretend it detracted from the violence of my enjoyment of them, or did anything but sharpen my recovered taste for life,’ he was to tell Marisa, ‘that they were Elspeth’s nieces.’

So he wasn’t sparing of
every
detail.

Marisa was quiet for a while. ‘Or that they were not of an age to refuse you?’ she wondered at last.

‘Nor that,’ he said.

What, I wondered in my own time, did Marius stand to gain from bragging to Marisa about these violations? ‘In the end it wasn’t their flaming youth in that garden of death that stirred me,’ he told her, ‘any more than it was their blood-relatedness to Elspeth or each other. It was the bruised commonness of their mouths.’