The Act of Love (36 page)

‘He’s a bit of a poet himself, you know,
mon mari
Marius. And a potter when the verses stick. Never seen a poem or a pot come out, though, despite his all-night vigils
là
.’ She pointed to the wooden shed which Marius had built, his bolt-hole from the trials of being a younger man manacled to an older woman grown desperate with insecurity.

‘Do you work there every night?’ Arwen asked.

‘He does something there every night,’ Elspeth went on. ‘Would you call it work, Marius? Or do you go there just to imagine being out in the blackness with the foxes?’

Marius held Arwen’s eyes in his.

On the third night of her stay, Arwen crept out into the garden and knocked on the shed. Marius opened the door. She put her mouth up to his and clawed at his neck.

‘What’s this?’ Marius asked.

‘You know what this is. Can I come in?’

‘I like you at the door,’ he said. ‘The eternal visitor.’

‘What does that mean?’

He mumbled something to himself then turned her around so that she could lean back into him. He took her weight and breathed in the fragrance of her hair. She relaxed against him, sighing. He put his hands under her jumper and held her breasts. She was just the smallest bit frightened, so tight was his grip on her. Not so much frightened of his strength but of what felt like sarcasm, if sarcasm is something a man can express in the way he holds your breasts.

‘Smell the night,’ he said. ‘If you look hard you will at last make out the outline of the hills.’

‘So beautiful,’ she crooned.

‘Beautiful? It’s death out here.’

Then he pushed her back into the garden and closed the door of his shed.

How do I know what I know about Marius? One: I used my eyes. Two: I used my intuition (a masochist is not the inverse of a sadist but he knows him as a fly knows a spider). Three: Marisa told me.

There will be some who wonder why, over time, Marisa chose to tell me so much of what Marius told her. My question is more fundamental: what did Marius himself intend by telling her so much?

Her destabilisation, is my answer.

Love has strange ways of showing itself. Some lovers piss in each other’s mouths. A wife scalds her husband’s genitals with boiling wax; a husband arranges for a stranger in Marquis de Sade breeches to push a riding crop into his wife’s vagina in a public place. These needn’t always be, but often are, expressions of sincere devotion.

Your true sadist works in quiet and employs none of the clumping machinery of cruelty – his site of operation the mind, not the body.

Hence the mental unquiet I detected in Marisa.

But this was only a theory. It was also possible that Marisa was unhappy because she and Marius were so in love that neither of them knew what to do about it.

‘Is everything all right?’ I finally summoned up the courage to ask Marisa, a few weeks into her depression, if a depression it was.

I was, I knew, taking a risk. I hadn’t alluded to Marius since our falling out and it was hard to ask if everything was all right without conjuring him into our bedroom, a place from which he was now conversationally banished.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Woman’s troubles.’

‘Nothing I can do?’

‘For woman’s troubles?’ She smiled. A wanner smile than I liked to see. ‘What have you ever been able to do for woman’s troubles?’

‘Be a man?’ I suggested, and no sooner suggested it than I wished I hadn’t.

She kissed my cheek and continued getting dressed. A more private affair now than it had once been. Many of the rituals of our marriage more awkward now, or altered in some other way I regretted. The candour gone. The intimacy dimmed.

We left the house together. I didn’t enquire where she was going. Something else that had changed. Once upon a time we knew the ins and outs of each other’s days as though they were our own. It had been a matter of pride to me that on a Monday morning I could recite Marisa’s week. No longer. Now we didn’t know and didn’t ask.

She walked with me to the shop – ‘for the exercise’ – then left me with the briefest of kisses. I watched her go. Another woman, feeling what I supposed she was feeling, would have shown it in her dress. Previous
girlfriends of mine went lumpy when their spirits were lowered, almost as though they wanted the lines and straps and other indices of their underwear to show, to spite the world. Not Marisa. She might have been off to address a board meeting in the City, she looked so sharp. The slit in her sculpted skirt like a dagger, the man’s jacket formidable with her fullness and authority, her coppery hair insolent with vitality. I smiled to myself, remembering her criticism that I always appraised her from the legs up. But today it was her legs that gave her away. In her stride she was not herself. She did not walk with her usual wide gait, attacking the paving stones with her heels. She was propelled by the momentum of her errand, but she did not, this morning, appear to propel herself.

Just for a moment I found it hard to breathe. Was she struggling to find ways of telling me she was going to leave me? Or was she coming to terms with Marius telling her he was leaving her?

Either way, her heart was torn and I saw that there was no fun left in this for either of us. Only sorrow.

If Marius had done this to her—

What? If Marius had done this to her, what?

What was it I proposed? What is it that a cuckold ever
can
propose?

Either way
– I kept repeating that phrase to myself as though it denoted the only exits, both of which were locked. Either Marius had made her fall in love with him so that they could elope together and go and live in his rat-hole of frustrated ambition above the button shop. Or he had made her fall in love with him so that he could turn his back on her.

By whichever reading, Marisa was in love. And it was my doing.
Felix
Vitrix
– my efforts garlanded with success. I had cuckolded myself to the limits of cuckoldom. I had sought palpable exclusion and exclusion didn’t get more palpable than this. A thunderbolt had struck me and I was as though I’d never been.

Ruination was the only word for it. Ruination as promised to the irreligious and irresolute in the language of the great unforgiving Bible of the Hebrews . . .

Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her . . . Thy sons
and thy daughters shall be given unto another people and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long: and there shall be no might in thine hand.

That’s telling them.

I made a fist of my right hand. A baby would have made a stronger.

A masochist seeks weakness and I had found it.

Those husbands of hot wives who set out to demean themselves to the bottom of all demeaning and suck the semen of their rivals out of their wives’ vaginas couldn’t hold a candle to me – I had nothing left to suck out semen with.

I didn’t attempt to settle down to work that morning. I no sooner saw my desk than I knew I had to flee it. I walked the streets for an hour, unsure what to think or how I should proceed. Had I been a braver man I’d have walked into the path of a bus.

Eventually I decided that work would have to be good for me because outside Marisa work was all I had. I’d look at my appointments book, I’d talk to the invoice clerk, I’d check the progress of the new catalogue. I’d turn my mind from misery and when I next looked up maybe misery would be gone. But I wasn’t allowed to do any of this, for sitting in the snug, obviously wanting to talk to me, was Dulcie.

‘Two things,’ she said when I joined her. ‘Well three, actually.’

‘Go on.’

‘A friend of mine told me she’s received one of those GET A LIFE cards. If you look carefully you’ll see they’re not handwritten at all. Apparently it’s a PR campaign for a counselling service that’s just opened in Devonshire Place. So you needn’t have worried.’

To tell the truth, I had been so occupied with other matters I had clean forgot the postcard. GET A LIFE. It was sound advice whether it was directed personally at me or not. If anything I’d have preferred it had Dulcie not disabused me of its intent. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.

‘Indeed I needn’t,’ I said. ‘Though that still leaves open the question of why they think I’m the one that could use a counselling service. Why, for example, didn’t they tell you to get a life?’

‘Because,’ she said, raising her leg to show me that the gold chain was back becomingly around her ankle, ‘I’ve
got
a life.’

‘That’s terrific, Dulcie,’ I lied.

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Why should
I
mind?’

‘The firm’s image and everything.’

‘The firm has withstood greater scandal than this. If you’re happy and Lionel’s happy, Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers is happy.’

‘And they’re not the only ones,’ she said, with an odd catch in her throat.

‘Why? Who else is happy?’

‘Guess.’

Not a day for guessing games. I shrugged.

‘The electrician.’

‘Dulcie, you haven’t!’

‘I have.’ She looked uncomfortably pleased with herself, like someone who has just run her first marathon, but not in a very good time. A deep virginal blush began in her cheeks and spread down her chest.

‘Dulcie!’ I repeated.

‘I know,’ she said.

And this time the blush went all the way down to her ankle chain.

I did nothing for the rest of the morning. Clients came and went, none requiring my attention, Dulcie skipped about the office tinkling, and I sat in my chair and brooded like Electra for her father.

I’d pleaded Dulcie into the arms of her electrician and schemed Marisa into Marius’s. Yet I was a man who, in the abstract and as it bore directly on me, attached the highest value to modesty in women. A cheap woman was to me a thing of horror. That might seem contradictory but it isn’t. For where would have been the point of all I’d done had I regarded women cheaply?

So a Cuban doctor put his hands on my wife’s breasts and kept them there – was that so big a deal? There must be parts of the world – maybe Cuba – where this is standard practice. But it wasn’t standard practice for me. For me, any liberties taken with a woman’s person, or any display of wantonness in women, have always been profoundly shocking.

I don’t know how old I was when my father took me to see a production of Molière’s
Le Misanthrope
at the Albery Theatre in St Martin’s Lane, but I was old enough to be troubled and embarrassed when the actor playing Oronte placed his hands in the bosom of the actress playing Célimène. No wonder, I thought, that the fictional Alceste walked out on her shortly afterwards. You cannot love a woman who allows another man to touch her there. But what about the actress herself? How could she permit it, even in the name of art? What if her parents or her husband or her children were watching from the stalls? How would she explain it to them afterwards? And to herself what did she say? How could a woman depart, and in so public a way, from what womanly delicacy demanded?

Once, at a dinner party my parents threw, my mother’s sister-in-law Agatha, who was rumoured to be even more unhappily married than my mother, exposed her breasts before all the company and screamed insults, first at her husband, then at another of my uncles, then at my father and then I thought at me, defying us to prove we had what men were supposed to have. ‘Come on,’ she shouted, ‘come on, let’s see what you can do when you’re not with your tarts!’ My mother quickly gathered me up and hid me away between
her
breasts, but not before the men had guffawed into their port. It was funny, they thought, to see a woman expose her breasts. But it wasn’t in the slightest bit funny to me. I was never able to look my Aunt Agatha in the face again, ashamed for her for what I’d seen, and frightened by the animality of her distress. It had been a terrible thing, I thought, to witness a woman brought to such licentiousness.

This unease around any sign of promiscuity in a woman never left me, not even when I grew to be the age when boys maraud. I did not lust after the girls my friends pursued. I parted with the first girl I took out after Faith when I heard her laughing at dirty jokes. I hated overt sexiness, as I hate it
now when women of all ages swing down Marylebone High Street with their navels jewelled and tattoos up and down their legs. A tattoo holds no seduction for me. I don’t want a woman to look like a sailor. Where’s the pleasure in coaxing wildness from a seven seas adventuress with a pimp in every port? Sex, for it to be worth throwing one’s life away for, lives in surprise and dislocation. In geology the fault line marks the fracture in the vein of rock where movement has already occurred and where future trouble might be expected. Women, too, have fault lines – and no doubt men as well, but I do not study discontinuity in men – which carry the same promise of agitation. Only where there is discrepancy and equivocation in a woman does desire stir in me. Marisa crying ‘Fuck me, Marius’ on her lover’s chest would not have been of interest were she a woman of easy virtue. It was the shattering of her reserve that made me gasp for air.