Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

She remembered the day her father left, she remembered him lifting her up on to his shoulders, she remembered looking down into his strong chestnut-polished baldness and seeing her own forlorn reflection in it, she remembered his words: ‘Whatever she tells you, Daddy is leaving Mummy, whom he doesn’t love or see the point of any more, not you, whom he does.’ In proof of which, though she only infrequently spent time with him again (it had to be in secret, everything always in secret, because his new wife didn’t like to be reminded that there’d been an old), he paid for her to go to a good school, to have singing and ballet lessons, to hide as far away from her mummy and her armies of new daddies as she could get, to drive her own car while she was at university, to rent a flat in Venice for a year after graduating, to enrol for every fine-art course that took her fancy in Florence, Spoleto, Siena, she had only to name it — to live, in short, the life she pleased.

She grew up secretive and well off. Looking good, always in expensive clothes, which were the grown-up version of being in hiding, keeping herself to herself — sometimes keeping herself from herself — with time on her hands.

Because of her looks she could not entirely and forever remain her own property. Boyfriends insisted themselves on her, each of whom she hid from the other, followed by first one and then — again initially in hiding — a second husband. She never thought of herself as adulterous. Simply close. It was no one ’s business but hers. One way or another, though, the indulgences she ’d been used to from her father continued. For the reason that she looked spoiled already, you could not see Marisa and not want to spoil her more. Just as you could not be with her, even when you were perfectly entitled to be with her, and not feel you were stealing her from someone else. Sometimes in Marisa’s company I could not escape the sensation that I was stealing her from myself.

And to commemorate that theft, I, like everyone else, showered her with gifts — perfume, jewellery, underwear, whatever you buy to perpetuate the illicit.

But always I sensed I had not found the gift that was adequate to her temperament. Grey beneath the eyes, with a long reflective countenance and a Roman nose such as you see on statues of Roman goddesses in Italian gardens, Marisa looked too sombre, however tight her skirts, for perfume or underwear. Wouldn’t the collected dialogues of Plato have made a better present? I asked her once. Of course she said she wanted nothing. But the impression I formed was that the ideal gift for her was the dialogues of Plato and underwear.

Never the necessity to make provision for herself, there was the problem which no amount of social or community work could solve. Yes, she could have filled her days with the deeds her morality pressed her into doing; but that wouldn’t have left her sufficient time to improve her own lot as a thinking being, and if she wasn’t any good to herself then how could she be any good to other people?

She didn’t complain, repine or moon, she just mused a lot. Which men, of course, find provocative. A woman musing on something other than them piques their amour propre . Especially predatory men who muse a lot themselves, with time to hang around outside art galleries and museums, singing tirra lirra and waiting for just such a woman to emerge, so that they can shatter the mirror of her concentration. But that’s to anticipate Marius.

Men apart, they pay a high price for their own beauty and fortune, these women for whom self-improvement is a necessity, and achievement is a goad. Marisa would have gone further in any career she chose for herself had she looked less as though her clothes had been cut for her by a glovemaker, and had she not known how to please the absent daddy in any man. No bitterness intended. If anything, Marisa rather admired the way men could tell lies, take off whenever the fancy pleased them, or instal a woman like her in a fine villa in Marylebone, with every confidence that she would play the part of lady of the house to perfection. In her head, she lived as though she had been born a man herself. Whenever one of her half-sisters phoned her for advice (she had as many new sisters as she had new daddies) the advice she gave was always practical, forward-looking and iron-hearted — ‘Leave him, darling’ or ‘Go get him if he takes your fancy, just don’t tell your husband’ — much as she imagined a man would have given. She walked like a man. Her clothes, in particular her suits, were ironical references to what men wore for the City. Even when she showed her legs, which in all honesty were too good not to show, she showed them as a man — say a fencing master or a danseur noble — might, as evidence of her suppleness and strength. She followed her fancy, drank hard, declined motherhood with fervour, doted on no man, and wasn’t averse to being looked over in the street. Only in actuality was she kept as more feminine, less ambitious women had been kept for centuries. Though even ‘in actuality’ things weren’t actually as they seemed. Contrary to what the great man said, all happy families are not alike.

THOUGH I SAY THEY WERE REVELATORY, I WAS NOT A COMPLETE STRANGER to the emotions which overcame me in the hotel room in Florida. At least I was not a stranger to the fact of their existence in the human heart.

In my sixteenth year I was befriended by an associate of my father’s, Victor Gowan, a once successful publisher who, in the brief period I knew him, moved from a lightless, noisily ramshackle office opposite the British Museum to a silent house with a great glass window overlooking the Thames in Cookham — Stanley Spencer country. The move felt like a retirement to me, though whether Victor saw it that way I didn’t know. But he couldn’t have been more than fifty at the time of his migration, and when I saw him in his offices he was voluble and merry, and when I saw him in Cookham he was introspective and sad.

Looking at a river all day can do that to you, of course, but I didn’t think the river was the cause of it. Some misfortune that wasn’t talked about must have befallen him, anyway, because his association with my father began with the selling off of his library almost book by book. Not the books he published — we wouldn’t have been much interested in those — but a rather fine collection of classical texts, both in the original Greek and Latin and in translation. It is, as I have said, a melancholy business for a person who loves books to have to sell them. Each book you part with is a little death. Which is why a shop like ours is necessarily a funereal place. We are to all intents and purposes undertakers. We wear black suits, tread softly and try to make the extinction of a lifelong passion, the passage of an old friend, as comfortable and dignified as possible.

In Victor’s case my father recognised that solemn rites were not appropriate. Victor put a brave face on his losses and trusted it would be only a matter of time before he was in a position to buy back from us what he’d sold, a fantasy which my father considered it in our interests to foster. To that end — though I must not be too cynical, for I think there was genuine friendship in it too — my father saw a lot of Victor, sometimes calling on him in his creaking Dickensian offices with me in tow, and later, after Victor’s melancholy move, inviting him to have dinner with us when he was in town. It was in the course of one of those dinners that Victor suggested I visit him in Cookham.

Classics were the pretext. He had studied classics at Balliol in his youth, and there was talk that I would do the same. It was presented as being for my future benefit, anyway, that I should spend a weekend with him in the country, see his library of which much remained, dine with him in the evening, talk literature, perhaps go rowing, and meet his wife, a one-time beauty and biographer of the Fitzrovia set, rumoured in her younger days to have been the mistress of more than one Fitzrovian scoundrel, but now, sadly, confined to her bed. Though too infirm to enter society or to engage in those researches necessary to her profession, Joyce Gowan still loved having visitors to her home.