The Act of Love (6 page)

Art hung about her like a halo. She was transfigured by it. The refulgence, when she came home from a concert or a gallery, hurt Marius’s eyes. Art was not the reason he left her; the deterioration of her body was the reason he left her. But who’s to say that loving being around art, especially art of an overly imaginative sort – her most favourite exhibition of all time had been Pre-Raphaelite Fairy Painting at the Victoria and Albert, and she owned, or had owned, signed first editions of everything by Tolkien, a one-time acquaintance of her father’s and husband’s – who’s to say that fevered art in whatever form she favoured it had not been instrumental in loosening her flesh from the bone?

Otherwise, Marius proved to be a difficult customer to tail. The one routine of his I could count on – four o’clock coffee at whatever tin table he could find vacant on the High Street, by preference one of those outside the Greek café opposite the travel bookshop – was too risky to take advantage of. I doubted he’d recognise me from Shropshire, but I couldn’t take the chance. It was important, for what I wanted of him, that he didn’t know of my existence.

I began to haunt the button shop simply in order to be beneath him. If the shop was empty and I listened hard I fancied I could hear him pacing the floor. Still searching for that opening sentence. I bought far more buttons than I needed in the course of this operation, but I felt I was getting the smell of him this way, and would subsequently know, if we happened to be shopping in the same supermarket, say, or visiting the same doctor, that he was near.

It could have been pure chance or it could have been his odour that took me to the local fromagerie one lunchtime when Marius was deliberating over cheese. That bread and cheese was just about all he ate I had figured out already. I felt certain there was no table in his flat. He would eat his lunch, I imagined, sitting on the edge of his bed, slicing the cheese with a sharp fruit knife and ripping the baguette apart with his hands. There was something satanic in this image, by virtue of its suppressed
explosiveness. No man his size and temperament could go on living like that.

You could feel the tension he emitted in the fromagerie. Everyone fell quiet around him as he muttered into the cheese, asking for one rat-trap-sized portion after another, leaving increasingly long silences between each selection.

‘Will there be anything else?’ the young woman behind the cheese counter not unreasonably enquired, Marius having abstracted himself so completely at last that he appeared not to be there in mind at all.

The question produced a wheeze of brokenhearted merriment from deep inside his moustaches. ‘
Will
there be anything else? I certainly hope there will, but when there will, or what there will, I’m damned if I have an earthly. Time being unredeemable, what else there will be, no less than what might have been, is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation, as the poet he say.’

‘That’ll be seventeen pounds and thirty pence, then,’ the young woman said. I gathered she was used to his nonsense.

Another of his tragic Old Man of the Sea wheezes, and then he peeled off a twenty-pound note from a wad he carried in the back pocket of his corduroy trousers, like an Oxford don who’d gone into the protection racket.

‘Ta, doll,’ he said, shining his icily heartache, opal-blue eyes into hers as she gave him his change. He had no desire to make a fool of her. On the contrary. The meek shall inherit the earth, Marius believed, the haughty having made such a mess of it. Then the meek shall do the same.

Doll
, for Christ’s sake!

Who called a woman
doll
any more?

I didn’t know how she felt, but I turned a little queasy for her, hearing it.

Doll!

I wasn’t sure it was still allowed to address a woman in that way. I wasn’t sure it should ever have been allowed.

He didn’t buy his bread and cheese at the fromagerie every lunchtime, but he did so frequently enough for me to hope that they would see each other there eventually – he and Marisa – since she too was a cheese eater and the fromagerie, at least on the days there was no farmers’ market, was the place to get it.

And eventually – though I had to keep my wits about me to ensure it – they did.

As an expert on them both, I saw what they saw. He, as dusty as a snake, a scarf about his neck in defiance of the warm weather – the eternal student, just down from Wittenberg, not going anywhere in particular, thinking about his satanic lunch. She, in a high-waist pencil skirt so tight he would have wondered how her skin could breathe inside it, her sunglasses in her hair, her earrings rattling as she paced the shop in her punitive stilettos, an alien presence in so organic a place. She was, to my heightened senses, more than usually absented, her lovely Diana-the-huntress head slightly to one side, as when she was weighing up a proposition. I knew when Marisa registered a man. I had watched her register enough of them. She cleared her throat. I had seen Marius only with prey that was too young and a mistress who was too old, so I wasn’t sure what changes to look for in him. But I saw him take hold of the ends of his moustaches and shape them into a pointed beard. Short of his making goat’s horns with them I don’t know how he could have signalled his interest more plainly.

It was all over in a second – just a flicker of acknowledgement between them, such as high-bred cats exchange when they pass on the common street.

Had they been cats I could have left them to it. They would have known what the next move was. But they were an over-civilised pair. On their own, no matter how often they eyed each other off in the fromagerie, they would not have proceeded further. They were too alike – they stimulated the romance of impossibility in each other.

I, on the other hand, proceed more quickly than is considered decent from the subtlest intimations of sex to the grossest couplings. Jealousy
operates at a speed beyond the capabilities of adultery, no matter how licentious the adulterers – from a dropped handkerchief to the act of shame a thousand times committed, all in the blinking of an eye. And jealousy when it is a hunger is faster still. No sooner did I remark the catlike hauteur of their exchange of glances than I leaped all intervening stages to Marisa quivering, head down, hindquarters raised; Marius, claws out, parting her fur, obscenely scarlet like a line of blood . . .

I was not insane. I knew I’d have to wait a while for that.

But at least we were up and running. And in the meantime I did not lack resource. I knew their weaknesses. In Marisa’s case, conversation. In Marius’s, women who already had husbands, and – so long as it was not wonder-touched, so long as there was corruption in it – art. All I had to do was get them to a gallery and start them talking.

He didn’t like dancing. He didn’t like gambling. He didn’t even like
drinking. His only pleasure was jealousy. He loved it, he lived by it.

Joseph Roth,
The Tale of the 1002nd Night

In the East Indies, though chastity is of singular reputation, yet
custom permitted a married woman to prostitute herself to anyone
who presented her with an elephant . . .

Michel de Montaigne,
Essays

NO MAN HAS EVER LOVED A WOMAN AND NOT IMAGINED HER IN THE ARMS
of someone else.

I repeat the sentence not only for the pleasure it gives me to imagine Marius appalled. I repeat it as a categorical, unwavering truth, though I fully expect it to be contradicted. You will sooner get a man to give away his money than admit he longs to give away his wife. (Or better still – for we are dealing, if only we’d come clean about it, in nothing but degrees of good – to have his wife give away herself.)

Of course imagining is not the same as longing; what you see in your mind’s distempered eye you might not welcome in your heart. But then again you might. What else is imagination for if not to lure the heart away from safety?

Here’s a simple test for husbands: Do I
fear
another man is fucking my wife or do I
hope
another man is fucking my wife? And of the two, which do I prefer?

Take as much time as you need to think about it. Close your eyes. Do a little picturing of the scene. You are filled with dread, of course. But what if part of what appals you is the degree to which you want the thing you dread? Are you not as much energised as terrified by what you see?

The more you love a woman the more you fear her loss. Is it not a sensible strategy – of the imagination
and
the heart – to
practise
losing her?

Call it self-protection: we do it in every other sphere, we shore up against tragedy and destruction, we take out insurance, we make provision.

If you know you cannot bear what is going to happen, if your heart is pulp – and what man’s heart is not as pulp? – then surprise it before it surprises you.

Against the swollen river of molten jealousy there is, as far as I know, no other defence. Throw yourself in. At least that way you have a hand in your own destiny. And sink or swim, it may prove exhilarating.

A great endeavour lures me on
– the words are not mine but those of another deviant on a moralising mission. Pervert Pervert, as I recall a sneeringly buttoned-up English teacher calling him when I mentioned I’d been reading
Lolita
in the vacation. Takes one to know one, was what I should have said, but I didn’t want to lead him on. In my school you only had to look at a teacher to have him leaving you love letters in your satchel. His – Pervert Pervert’s – great endeavour bore on girls even further below the age of consent than Marius would have been prepared to entertain, though with Marius it was more a case of being horrified by old flesh than revelling in young. My endeavour, which is strictly legal, is less threatening to society. It is to make the case for cuckolds, though I have to say I hate the comicality of the word. And when I say ‘make the case ’ I don’t mean win publicity for our cause. I’m not looking to form an association. What lures me on is an altogether more pastoral ambition – to extend the great arm of brotherhood around the millions upon millions of husbands who would invite their wives to wrong them if they could only find the courage for it. Cuckolds of the World Unite! You have everything to lose but your chains.

By someone else – the someone else whose arms we imagine wound around our wives – I mean another man. The fancy which some husbands entertain of seeing their wives carnally embracing another woman is something else entirely. I’m not such a puritan as to deny titillation its place in the erotic life, or to pretend that the sight of two women kissing isn’t sometimes pretty – my father more than once announced he had a taste for it – but titillation is not what I’m about. Hell doesn’t wait on the soft-focus
experimentalism of an age that will try anything once and in the process let all danger (other than disease) drain clean away from sex. The nymphs climb off the bed, bow gracefully to their audience, get dressed, and normal life resumes, unless they discover they like too much where they’ve just been, but that too is another story.

No, the love of which I speak, love desperate and bloody, the only love that
deserves
to speak its name – the last erotic adventure left to us as we await extinction – requires another man. A rival. Not a companion in enjoyment of your spouse’s favours, not a Jim to your Jules or a Jules to your Jim. Not a vacation from you or a variation of you, or even the Heathcliffif-all-else-perishes rocky-eternity beneath you, but the dread, day and night and in all weathers alternative to you. You as it hasn’t fallen to you to be. You who might efface you and make you as though you had never been.

But such imaginings come and go, sometimes acted upon, more often not, until the imagination cools and finds other errands for itself outside obsession. For the lucky (or the daring) few, fancy is transfigured into fact. You unlatch your nature. You welcome Pandemonium into your heart. You do not have to wonder, you know. You do not have to beg, as Othello begs, ophthalmic proof. You have the proof. And now the love you bear the woman who betrays you – except that it is no betrayal, for a consummation cannot be called betrayal – flowers into adoration.

No man has ever adored a woman who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else.

No man ever adored his wife as I, Felix Quinn, adored Marisa Quinn, already the lover of other men, but soon – soon, soon, if desires have wings – to be the mistress of Marius.