Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

I won’t pretend that I viewed the prospect of a weekend with my father’s disconsolate associate and his sick wife with any pleasure. At sixteen you don’t want to be close to people whose hopes have all but ended. But though I couldn’t picture anything that wasn’t dismal happening when I got there, the act of going felt like an adventure. I packed a bag, remembering to take a blazer and a tie for dinner and summer flannels for rowing, caught the train from Paddington to Maidenhead, and extended my hand like a seasoned traveller when Victor came along the platform to meet me. In a flash I saw my future, travelling on trains from one end of the country to another, getting off at rural stations, extending my hand to downcast book-collecting men who were getting on in years and reduced to selling what was precious to them. Already, though I hadn’t met them all, I felt a bond with them. Men whose feelings of loss were etched into their faces.

In the car to Cookham Victor told me about Stanley Spencer, the presiding genius of the place, who was famous for some wonderful murals, in Victor’s view, showing local people rising from the dead, and also for a small number of shockingly fleshly paintings of himself and a woman called Patricia Preece with whom he had been wildly in love, though it was thought his relations with her were never consummated, if I understood his meaning. Wanting to show I understood his meaning perfectly, I wondered whether it could have been the fact of the non-consummation that rendered these paintings so shockingly fleshly. ‘Frustration is the midwife to imagination,’ I said, ‘and having to give body to what is denied you is a powerful inducement to art,’ though I might not have said it in quite those words. And even if I had I would only dimly have understood what I was talking about. Of the world of the passions I still knew nothing. I’d read a lot, that was all. And I’d gone out with the daughter of a cello teacher who threw me over for someone she met while I was holding her hand in the cinema. But like many boys my age, I bluffed well.

Victor, I remember, praised me for an astuteness beyond my years and couldn’t imagine how I wouldn’t sail into Balliol. (As, indeed, though it isn’t strictly relevant to this narrative, I did.)

Thereafter I caught him looking at me sideways on many occasions, as though not sure he ’d done the right thing inviting me. Alternatively he was thinking he ’d done exactly the right thing inviting me.

When he wasn’t looking sideways at me, I was looking sideways at him. He had a grand profile that seemed unrelated to his body, which was almost dainty. Only his head seemed to matter. But it was run spectacularly to seed, pouches under his eyes, hair growing in bunches from his ears and nostrils, the veins in his red cheeks broken as though from exposure to country life, the back of his neck beginning to pleat over his shirt collar. For reasons I couldn’t then and cannot now explain I hoped I would grow to look like that myself. A little tired of the world. A little weary with the effort of carrying around so large a head. And with a secret sorrow that was also an inexplicable cause of satisfaction.

I didn’t meet Mrs Gowan on my first evening in Cookham. She wanted to say hello, Victor explained, but wasn’t up to seeing me. The house was quiet with the quiet of a woman who wasn’t up to seeing anybody. Everything was put away and tidy, the curtains closed in a way that suggested it was a long time since they’d been opened, a faint covering of dust on the furniture, none too fresh flowers in the vases, an air of distraught disuse pervading everything.

But in another sense Joyce Gowan was ubiquitously present. There were photographs of her everywhere — Joyce as a little girl laughing with other little girls, even then lovely to look at, dark, intense and knowing; Joyce masterfully leading her pony; Joyce as a young woman in a London pub, surrounded by poets, with her lipstick smudged; Joyce in the act of becoming Mrs Gowan, sculpted into her bride ’s dress, throwing back her head, her throat long like a swan’s; Joyce the biographer of wild times signing one of her books at Foyles, dazzling the signee with the brilliance of her smile. . Joyce, Joyce, Joyce. In the living room a grand society painting of her in her glory days, her hands, one of which held a black fan, crossed in her lap and a faraway expression in her eyes. On the stairs a cruder oil showing her in a plunging evening gown, her breasts more rouged than any serious painter would have made them, a dog too obviously representing male besottedness at her feet. And in the bathroom assigned to me a frolicking sepia nude dancing with curtain drapes, by Russell Flint: not definitely her, so stylised was the pin-up, and so unlike her, given how else she had permitted artists to represent her — but if it wasn’t her why was it there? And if it was her, why was I permitted to see it?

For the sake of her beauty, maybe, and nothing else. For the sake of the beauty she had been.

Victor took me to a pub for chicken in a basket and asked me questions about myself, about my closeness to my father, about the books I liked to read. He was reading Don Quixote for the umpteenth time and wondered if I knew it. I told him I’d started it umpteen times but could only get so far before I had to give up. It was when the novel departed from its own narrative to relate stories that were strictly speaking extraneous to it that I lost interest. ‘Like the story of Anselmo and Lothario,’ he said. I told him I didn’t think I had got as far as Anselmo and Lothario. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then you should.’

The following morning we went rowing on the river as he ’d promised, though we never strayed far from the riverbank. Then we had lunch in another pub, went to see one or two of Stanley Spencer’s paintings — though nothing that struck me as either shocking or fleshly — in the little village museum devoted to his work, and returned home for tea. Because the weather was fine we were able to sit out on the lawn and watch more able-bodied rowers power up and down the Thames. A gentle wind blew through the trees. A succession of creamy, calming clouds floated across the sky. Again, Mrs Gowan was too indisposed to join us.

At around about four o’clock my host nodded off in his chair. On the grass by him lay a copy of Don Quixote , which he’d presumably brought out so that he could read an extract from the story of Anselmo and Lothario aloud to me. While he slept I leafed through the novel to see if I could find their names, which proved not to be too difficult as many of the scenes in which they appeared were marked. Their adventure, if it could be so called, appeared to be another version of a plot in a Shakespeare play I’d read at school — one man inviting another to try the fidelity of the woman he loved, to tragic or near-tragic effect. According to the notes in my Arden Shakespeare, the ‘fidelity test’ was a recurring motif in medieval Italian novellas, from which Cervantes too must have borrowed. I was too young to know anything for sure, but something told me that a fidelity test was more likely to be a literary device than a strategy much resorted to in real life. But it could only have cropped up frequently in literature if it answered to something that gave real men cause for concern: namely, the character of their wives when subjected to overwhelming temptation, for where, as Anselmo says to Lothario, is the merit in her being virtuous ‘when nobody persuades her to be otherwise? What mighty matter if she be reserved and cautious, who has no opportunity given her of going astray?’ A fear which once acted upon, it occurred to me, must surely stimulate a curiosity that is never to be assuaged. Why should Anselmo stop with a Lothario no matter how true this Lothario proves his wife to be? Indeed it would be illogical to do so. For is there not always to be encountered a Lothario more persuasive than the last? Will there not always be an ‘opportunity’ for disloyalty greater than the one before?