The Act of Love (43 page)

I did not intend to stay for sherry afterwards. But on the way out I caught sight of Dulcie, Lionel and I assumed the electrician, queuing for theirs. It’s possible I would not have recognised them had they not given off something I recognised. Euphoria, if I must give it a name.

Anyone else observing them would have said the electrician was the husband and Lionel was the friend, but I knew what to look for. No ‘friend’ hovers in quite the way Lionel did. No friend pays such careful attention to the glances that pass between the married couple, the smallest
bodily pressures they exchange, no friend could tell you the temperature of the air that passes to and fro between their faces. Lionel hung back and watched, and I hung back and watched Lionel. I couldn’t say whether Dulcie had her chain around her ankle because she was wearing black boots with her sensible woollen coat, but she was a hot wife in actuality now and didn’t need the symbolism. She was laughing and looked loved. When the electrician handed her her sherry she raised it as in a toast. Not to anyone in particular. To the world.

The electrician must have been a pleasant surprise to her when she met him because he had the air of a gentleman farmer, slightly ruddy, enthusiastic, loyal like his dogs. Between the men there appeared to be no tensions. They were as two friends out enjoying a picnic. Dulcie was the picnic. And other than helping himself to the contents of the hamper first, the electrician insisted on no privileges that were denied to Lionel. If Lionel hung back, that was up to Lionel.

On Lionel there was that milky wash of defencelessness which people had noticed on me in those early days when I lived not knowing what Marisa might do. You didn’t expect to see so plain a man as Lionel transfigured, but there was no other word for it: the light of angelic visitation was upon him, he had passed from man to vapour, freed of his will he floated around Dulcie and her lover like a spirit guiding them from another dimension. I watched them lose themselves among the throng of music lovers, oblivious to them all.

They did not, I think notice me. Had they done so they would have thought they’d seen a ghost.

TWO YEARS WENT BY. I DID NOT IN THAT TIME SEE MARISA. SHE CALLED
me occasionally, but each call was more painful than the last. Not least as we realised we were growing accustomed to our estrangement. One day we would simply accept that we would never set eyes on each other again.

‘Do you know what I dread most?’ I said once. ‘That it’s so long since I’ve seen you that should I pass you in the street I won’t recognise you.’

‘You won’t,’ she said.

‘Won’t pass you in the street?’

‘Won’t recognise me.’

She went into hospital on two further occasions. I begged her to allow me to visit but she begged me not to. And her beg was stronger and more just than mine.

OKish
, she texted me both times.
Ta for flowers
.

But she wouldn’t answer any of my questions about how well she really was because she insisted I couldn’t cope with knowing.

Tell me, tell me
. . . But she wouldn’t tell me anything.

I just knew that she was tired. You can hear tiredness and I heard Marisa’s.

It rained at the funeral. A sunken, sodden, better to be dead than alive in morning. Whether a wet funeral is preferable to a warm funeral I’ve never been able to decide. For the dead, sun is crueller by far than rain, but for
the mourners you could argue either way, depending on what hopes for a new life they entertain.

There were few people there and of those I recognised only two or three. I held myself together remarkably well, I thought, for someone who’d been brimful of tears for two years. But then Marius had never exactly been dear to me.

He had died walking in the Brecon Beacons. He had lost his way and suffered a heart attack. He had been dead three days when he was found. That was the official version. His heart had never been sound, it seemed, and fatigue and exposure had done the rest. My own view, based on no evidence, was that he’d walked out one afternoon when there was less than usual to live for and willed himself to death. I had no doubt that on whatever day he did this, it would have been four o’clock, the light not yet spent, the wheels of evening just beginning to turn. The hour when men dream of being somewhere else.

Marisa was informed of the place and date of his funeral by a close friend she didn’t know he had but who knew of her. Marius, he explained, had been very fond of her. She had been his second and he said his last big adventure. Marisa then rang me.

‘Christ!’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

I meant Jesus Christ that he had died, but also Jesus Christ about everything else – Jesus Christ that he had died like that, Jesus Christ that he had become a walker, Jesus Christ that his heart had never been sound, Jesus Christ that he was to be buried in the same churchyard that held Elspeth and her husband. Whose idea was that, I wondered. Had Marius left a will expressing his desire to be buried close to them? There was much I wanted to ask Marisa, but accepted it was not my place to ask anything. Just as, for the same reason, I accepted it was not my place to ask how badly the news had affected her.

We fell silent with each other. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she said at last, ‘and in some ways I don’t think you should, but then again . . .’

‘Then again what?’

‘Well it draws a line under something between us.’

‘I thought we ’d already drawn a line under something between us.’

‘Then don’t come.’

‘No, I’ll come.’

‘Good. But just one thing, Felix.’

‘Don’t come over and talk to you? Don’t act as if I know you? Don’t ask any questions?’

‘Don’t be shocked by how I look.’

We didn’t travel up to Shropshire together, though I knew the way to the churchyard. But I did warn her that the Wrekin heaved and advised her to take galoshes.

When I say I held myself together remarkably well I am referring only to my demeanour by the graveside. The moment I saw Marisa my legs gave way beneath me. I must have turned the colour of poor Marius.

She was standing with someone I took to be the old friend Marius had never mentioned, an unexpectedly red-faced man with a nautical expression. Who knew who Marius knew? She waved to me – a hesitant, fragile, fluttering gesture I was unable to read, almost like the action of someone troubled by summer flies, though there were no summer flies here. I couldn’t decipher its meaning – stay away, come here, meet me at four o’clock behind the headstones? I waved back. It was impossible to tell how she looked. She was wearing a long black coat, a black hat, a black veil. Did anyone wear a veil for funerals any more? Did anyone wear black even? Had Elspeth worn a veil at her husband’s funeral, I tried to remember. I thought not. But I recalled how like a fallen woman in a Victorian novel she had looked, conscious of an ancient and never to be repaired wrong, and Marisa, to my eye, appeared even more the mistress whom everyone in this superstitious place would obscurely blame for Marius’s death.

After it was all over, the dirt thrown in, the last dread word spoken, we made a halting move towards each other.

‘Some place to meet,’ I said.

What else was there to say? I couldn’t ask how hard this was for her. I couldn’t lower my voice and say
My dear, I am so sorry.

‘Don’t look at me,’ she said.

I shook my head and smiled. ‘Marisa, for God’s sake. You are beautiful. You are always beautiful.’

But I was uncertain how to embrace her. I was afraid to take her in my arms. I didn’t know how much of her was left, where she was in pain, what part of her she didn’t want me to touch or didn’t want to be touched.

She lifted her veil and gave me her lips. Cold in the rain. Her face had changed, though I couldn’t quite explain to myself how. A little thinner, maybe. The grey beneath her eyes more pronounced, as though the tragedy which her face had always appeared to be anticipating was on her at last. That, I think, was the biggest shock – her being of her time now, no longer playing catch-up or saving herself for another day. She had taken possession of her life.

But perhaps this was exactly how she’d looked the last time I saw her and I hadn’t noticed. It was so long since I’d seen her.

‘Come home,’ I said.

She made a clicking noise in her throat. ‘You look well,’ she said. ‘

I look like a recluse.’

‘You do a bit. But it suits you.’ She took my arm. ‘Walk with me,’ she said.

I looked down at her feet. She had not taken my advice about sensible shoes and galoshes but wore black patent high heels instead. For which I would have cheered her had I dared. And asked her to raise her coat so I could see her legs.

‘You’ll sink into the mud in those,’ was all I could manage.

‘Then I’ll have to hold on to you.’ She squeezed my arm. ‘It’s nice to feel you again.’

‘Is it?’

‘Very.’

‘Then come home.’

‘Elspeth’s stone must be here somewhere,’ she said.

‘Do you want to look for it?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Apparently he wanted to be buried near her but there was no space.’

I said nothing.

‘You have strange loyalties, you men,’ she went on.

‘Do we?’

‘There is one thing I have always thought I would tell you, but maybe now I think I shouldn’t.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘I think I shouldn’t.’

‘Why shouldn’t you?’

‘It will spoil it for you.’

‘Spoil what?’

‘He never got over Elspeth, that’s all.’

‘
Marius
never got over Elspeth?’

‘Never.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he wasn’t . . . No, forget it.’

‘Wasn’t what, Marisa?’

‘This isn’t the place.’

‘Then where
is
the place?’

She paused as though to catch her breath. Did it hurt her, I wondered.

‘Felix, I told him better than he was.’

I turned to look at her. If I could have scraped her meaning off her soul I would have, however great the pain it caused her.

I remembered what Marius had said to me as he was leaving my house. ‘Words deceive.’

‘When you say better . . . ?’

‘Better, other . . . I gave you the Marius you wanted.’

‘
I
wanted!’

‘I told you this would spoil it. Leave it, Felix. Let it lie. Let
him
lie.’

But
she
hadn’t left it. Whatever the ‘it’ was,
she
hadn’t wanted it to lie unspoiled.

‘What are we talking here, Marisa,’ I persisted, ‘hyperbole or invention? Are you telling me we ’ve buried a man who never lived?’

‘In a sense that’s what I’m telling you, yes.’

‘In a sense? So who was that who rang our doorbell three times a week? Who shared your bed, Marisa?’

She shook her head and sighed. ‘Ah, Felix, Felix, you are impossible. Foolish of me ever to have worried. No one can ever spoil it for you, can they? I think I probably envy you that. It’s a gift I don’t have. Or if I had it, I don’t have it now. Come on, it’s getting wetter. Let’s walk.’

There are some things you know you must postpone. At least in the presence of death. However bewildering or sensational, they are not for now, they are for later. And maybe not even for then. So we walked, and I was glad to.

I had always loved having her on my arm. I liked bearing her weight, the husbandly sensation of supporting her. This was at odds sometimes with the pleasure I took in watching her from a distance, whether approaching or receding. It would have pleased me, for example, to see another man bearing her weight, enjoying the husbandly sensation of supporting her, if somehow she could still have hung on to me as well. The old, unsolvable conundrum – how to be with her and not with her, how to be me and someone else.

Now become another unsolvable conundrum, left to me to mull over unanswered in the lonely hours ahead: had that someone else been there at all, ever really been with Marisa in all the senses that mattered to me?

The rain began to fall more heavily. As though to show it mattered not a jot to him, a fat sleek crow flew out of the trees and crossed our path, bursting with greedy life, uncaring of the rain which slid from his body. I put up an umbrella, careful of Marisa, gently pulling her close to me, but ignorant of what I was supporting, of how she really was, sure only that I was not to ask.

‘Come home,’ I said again, feeling her weight on my arm.

‘And do what?’

We walked on, picking our way between the rows of long-buried bones.
Occasionally we stopped to read an inscription. Prose, poetry, a line of Bible, a scrap of doggerel – what difference? Wouldn’t that have been Marius’s thought as, presumably upon these very stones, he helped himself to girls below the age of lawful taking?
What difference?
I longed to ask Marisa her opinion, whether she thought the what difference question had presented itself to him just once too often on the Beacons, before he lay down in the damp and closed his eyes – or before he left his flat above the button shop come to that, before he left
her
, that’s if he’d ever been with her – but I knew that that too I couldn’t ask.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well what?’

‘You haven’t answered me. Come home and do what?’

And terrible to say I was unable to give her an answer, because I didn’t have one.