The Act of Love, page 4
HE WAS LIVING, I DISCOVERED, ABOVE A BUTTON SHOP IN A LANE OF small romantic restaurants and chic boutiques at the epicentre of the action, as though to show himself each day what he was missing. To one side of him was a curtain-maker, to the other a stain removalist’s. Left and he was in Wigmore Street, right he was in Harley Street. Day or night there was nothing a man needed that he couldn’t immediately find – art, music, cheese, shoes, sausages, specialists of the spine, the brain, the cardiovascular system, new books, antiquarian books, the bored wives of retired professors – except that there was nothing he believed he any longer needed. Other than the stain removalist.
He was as disordered sexually as I was, in his way, only he couldn’t get out of bed to enjoy it. It wasn’t laziness, it was torpor. He had done a terrible thing and wanted nothing more to do with the world in which he’d done it.
He woke early, often before dawn, with a worm of bile coiled around his gut. Some mornings he wondered if the worm of bile was his gut. He would think of going to his desk to write something, epic or epigram, but automatically reached out instead to turn on his bedside lamp by the light of which he would go on reading whatever had occupied the previous night’s vacant hours before he had slid, neither willing nor unwilling, into sleep. Usually what he read was modern foreign literature in translation – the chill eroticism of Czech or Italian rendered into plainsong English being all he could digest, like cold weak tea.
The sort of prose, incidentally, which I feel I should write when I describe Marius, rendering him as the type of heartless English libertine the French love to fantasise about, like Sir Stephen in Story of O, a man in whom O detects ‘a will of ice and iron’. But that’s one falsity of porno I cannot swallow: its chastity of expression. In my fear of Marius – in my greed for Marius – I teemed with words.
In fear of himself, however, he was not so productive. On his desk he kept a lined notebook which he’d bought when he was a student nearly twenty years before. In this he had intended to write an English version of Baudelaire’s spleen-fuelled prowlings around late-night Paris. He had the title. Four o’clock. That was the hour that excited Marius. Never mind midnight. Midnight was obvious. If the twenty-four-hour day marked nothing but the fluctuations of our desires, four o’clock was, for him, the hairspring hour. Once upon a time it had affected him like a transfusion of vital fluids. He walked the streets and felt the oscillation between day and evening as a change in the temperature of his own body. He heard his blood heat. Now he merely observed it through his window above the button shop. Four o’clock in the city – the shop assistants looking at their watches; the waiters, with that violence of gesture peculiar to waiters, throwing their cigarette stubs into the street and laying out clean tablecloths; barmen polishing glasses and looking at their reflections in the bowls; men and women on the streets quickening their pace, their minds elsewhere, heading home to change, pausing only to buy flowers, chocolate, wine, lingerie – as though the whole city were a lover thinking about its date, but a date which, for the cycle of expectation and disappointment to begin again, had to end unsatisfactorily.
His bed was narrow and uncomfortable, like a monk’s. It had been the fourth-best guest bed in his previous life. But what did he need now? He wouldn’t have admitted it was a penitential bed; it was narrow because that was all his new space allowed. But the discomfort served a purpose. His bed was for reading in only; he would not be bringing back any woman to sleep in it.
Other than to check the currency markets in the newspapers – and no other item in the newspapers engaged his interest, everything was predictable – he had nothing to do with the time at his disposal. No work. No function. On a good day the little money he had made selling a house he’d inherited made a little more. On a bad day he was brought to the point of having to decide again whether to keep it in dollars or in yen.
Once in a blue moon, when the money markets turned against him and he was able to summon the will to get out of bed, he sold Taiwanese copies of old masters on the railings outside Hyde Park. He knew a man who knew a man who knew how you could lay hands both on the space and the paintings to fill it. A pastiche of Michelangelo or Gainsborough slapped together in five minutes on an island off China appealed to Marius’s sense of the ridiculous. It made a mockery of meaning. Nothing came from anywhere or had value.
Otherwise, he had no occupation. He had behaved as badly to his career, such as it might have been – teacher, critic, man of letters, chronicler of the daylit city turning into night – as to the woman he’d once loved. Because abandonment becomes a habit, he had left it to die as well.
What had caused this change in Marius’s circumstances is simply told. Elspeth had died and he had not been with her. You can not be with someone when they die as a matter of accident or choice. Marius had not been with Elspeth as a matter of choice.
It had been evident at the professor’s funeral that relations were not as they should have been between a couple who had run away for love – Elspeth to be with Marius every hour God granted, never to miss a moment’s looking into his face or lying alongside his body; Marius, convinced her beauty would continue to enrapture him, making the wildest protestations of devotion and promising to adore her forever. It’s possible Marius had not liked seeing her shedding tears over her ex-husband. Some people are jealous of the dead. It’s also possible he was troubled by retrospective misgivings, whether of the ‘I’ve been a bastard’ sort, or ‘I’ve been a fool’. Whatever the explanation, I had watched him with my own eyes behave abominably to the poor woman, tormenting her with philandering and coldness at a time when it was nothing short of a solemn duty to let her grieve and reprove herself in peace.
If things had been bad before the funeral they deteriorated quickly after it. Who knows, perhaps the death of the professor stripped Elspeth of what was left of her allure. It’s inconceivable that Elspeth would not have charged Marius throughout their years together with falling for her only because she belonged to another, older, wiser man. And now, appalled and frozen, Marius would have wondered whether she was right.
Though the disparity in their years had moved and excited him at first – just as the theft of her had excited him at first – it had little by little been losing its fascination until at last he had to admit to himself that he could not bear, for her sake no less than his, to watch her age. Accordingly, though it must be said only after much pilgrimage of the soul and body (of which his removal of what was left of him to Marylebone was the final stage), he spared her the distress of his suffering and left her, to die with dignity, on her own.
Finis.
That was three years before. How long he’d been in Marylebone since was anybody’s guess. He liked to keep his movements secret. It went with his cultivated air of accidentality. A Conrad of the Marylebone Archipelago. But he couldn’t have been kicking about for very long or I would surely, as a conscientious not to say compulsive looker-out for erotic opportunity – not for myself; I am speaking maritally – have eyed him sooner.
Wherever he’d got to after Elspeth’s death he’d been living as one of the dead himself, growing a moustache to keep the world at bay, communicating from his great height with almost no one, the few words he spoke now – to the staff at the button shop below him, to the newsagent, to anyone who bothered him at a pavement café, as I was to make a habit of doing until I was sure of him – inaudible behind his moustache.
‘Barely a word of it,’ was Andrew’s answer, when I enquired whether he’d been able to hear anything Marius had asked him. ‘But then he was never that easy to understand at university.’
An oblique man even before he had reason not to look life directly in the face, Marius, in his disgrace, was in danger of speaking a language spoken only by himself.
I the same. Though I claim universality for my condition I cannot pretend I know many people who find the words for it which I do. Except at the outer reaches of pornography, in the phantasmagoric chat rooms where the deranged whisper to the deranged, what I do is not talked about. So that was each of us speaking a language spoken only by ourselves. On which basis I believed we could converse. Or at least do verbal business.
He would, I was certain, be appalled by my language once he got to hear it. But I didn’t mind that. I wanted to appal him.
No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else – that sort of language. No husband is ever happy – truly, genitally happy, happy at the very heart of himself as a husband – until he has proof positive that another man is fucking her.
To say I kept Marius under surveillance aggrandises somewhat my efforts to become familiar with the patterns of his existence. There wasn’t, when all was said and done, that much to surveil. He was in most of the time, trying to finish the book he’d never started. But thanks to conscientious staff, and domestic arrangements that can best be described as plastic, I had time on my hands and was sometimes able to catch him when he did venture out. Once or twice I saw him circling Manchester Square, as though unable to decide whether to brave the Wallace Collection. What kept him out I didn’t know. Paintings, I discovered later. Paintings reminded him of Elspeth. Elspeth loved paintings. Loved them too much for Marius’s temper. He met paintings eye to eye, squabbled with them, felt their power and wrestled with it – he didn’t ‘love’ them. Music ditto. He listened, mused, resisted and gave in only after a struggle – he didn’t ‘love’. Which was presumably why I saw him loitering outside the Wigmore Hall in the same spirit. Elspeth died for music, too.
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.
PART TWO
MARISA
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.)
