Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Victor awoke as I was turning the pages. ‘Ah,’ he said, when he saw which pages those were.

Joyce Gowan never did descend from her room. On my final evening in the house, after just the two of us had eaten a cold dinner at his kitchen table, Victor suggested I accompany him upstairs to take his wife a nightcap. A terror immediately seized my heart. Was I to play the part of Lothario to his Anselmo? Was this all the weekend had ever been about, a preparation to my trying the virtue of a sick old lady by making love to her? Was my father himself a party to the scheme? I wouldn’t have put it past him. He was of that class of men who sought to further their sons’ worldly education by taking them to brothels and ensuring they got their first dose of syphilis where it could be treated by a London doctor, rather than in Abu Dhabi where the medical attention was patchy, though I have to say he hadn’t yet gone that far with me. I could even have been part of a business deal between the two men, Victor reclaiming a number of his books in return for his wife, or my father laying hands on the rest of Victor’s library in return for me. It all depended on how you calculated the favour.

I say a terror seized my heart, but desire was not unmixed with it. The two are rarely separable in me. When I thought of the invalid in her bed and what she or her husband or indeed my father might have been expecting of me, I felt giddy with apprehension and disgust; but when I remembered the Russell Flint nude doing a striptease with curtain drapes, the rouged breasts on the society oil painting, and the smudged lipstick in the photograph of Joyce carousing with literary men and painters with loose morals in Fitzrovia, I felt giddy with longing. I was still a virgin. Whatever was about to happen to me had not happened before. Whatever I had to do, I did not know if I could.

I followed Victor up the stairs. He was a carrying a tray with a bottle of port and three glasses on it. Joyce Gowan’s bedroom door was closed. Her husband paused, put an ear to it, then pushed. The room was in semi-darkness, just one small bulb burning, not by her bedside but in a far corner of the room. I thought I could smell medication, but it was possible I’d brought the smell up with me, indistinguishable from my apprehension.

‘I’m not sure,’ Victor said in a whisper, ‘whether she ’s awake.’

I stood half in the bedroom, half on the landing. In the dark I could make out only shadows, the shape of a window through which were thrown a couple of fine diagonal bars of citrus light from the garden, the outline of a chair, the immanence of the bed but not its occupant.

‘You can come in,’ Victor said, again in a whisper.

But I barely had the courage to proceed. I’d been brought up to respect the privacy of a woman’s room. I must have seen my mother in her bed when I was an infant, but I’d never seen her in her bedroom let alone her bed thereafter, except to see her die. My father, I suspect, was kept out of there as well. A woman’s bedroom was a revered and frightening place to me. I didn’t know what happened there, other than that it was where women wept. And this wasn’t a boudoir consecrated to a healthy if embittered woman’s mysteries, it was a chamber of sickness and decay. God knows what I would walk into and knock over in my fear if I did as Victor suggested. I hovered at the threshold.

Suddenly, there was more light. ‘There,’ Victor said.

Not brilliant light but light enough to make out more than just the bulking outline of the bed, and then yes, yes, to discern Joyce Gowan herself, still asleep on it, or apparently asleep, but not hidden by the bedclothes, indeed not hidden by anything, but disposed as a painter such as Russell Flint might have disposed her, for the titillation of the buyer,not quite on her back but not quite on her side either, her nightgown rucked up as though by an accident of sleep to reveal the undulation of her thighs and buttocks — silvery and slender in the half-light — and fallen off her shoulders by the same careful disarrangement of accidentality to show the spillage of her breasts, in profile only, not with that startlingly grand fullness and frontality celebrated in the oil painting on the stairs, or with the same attention to the rouge (unless the pallor was just an effect of the lighting), but the more tremblingly desirable, it seemed to me, for being a gentle intimation rather than a bold assertion of themselves.

Whether her pose was artful or artless, Mrs Gowan would have found a path to any man’s heart, let alone a frightened boy’s. It was impossible not to imagine what it would be like turning her over and gathering her into your arms. Was that because her limbs were truly slender, or because they were wasted? Was it because she had retained her beauty even in her illness, or because, with the help of careful lighting, the illness itself was beautiful? I didn’t know. How could I know? I was too young to know.

‘If you come closer,’ Victor said, but I could not.

I wanted to look but I could not. All thoughts of what would follow, or what should follow, fled my mind. There was no right or wrong of what came next because there could be no next. This was wrong enough. Whoever was its instigator — and I didn’t exclude myself from blame, for desire is instigation too — this was an unpardonable abuse of a woman’s helplessness. She was an invalid. A man’s rapacious eye will take every kind of liberty with a woman’s body and permit no actual or moral obstacle to be a hindrance to his seeing, but Joyce Gowan’s sickness was a hindrance I could not overcome. Never mind that you would never have known from the lovely shape of her that she was ill. Never mind that her being desirable in despite of that illness made her if anything more desirable still. And never mind that she was a woman who had been admired for her beauty all her life and perhaps wanted to go on being admired whatever her age and health. Enough had passed between us for me to be sure it had been Victor’s idea to get me up here, not his wife ’s; that it was he who, in an act of desperate love, sought to exhibit her one more time to someone who could never have beheld such beauty before; and that, no matter whether she had willingly gone along with him in this, his will — his need, the rather — had been the stronger. But it didn’t matter for whom I had been brought here. For myself I wanted to look, but I did not. Desire dissolved in sadness.

‘I will go downstairs now,’ I said to Victor.

A few days after my return to London I received a package from Victor with an accompanying letter of explanation and apology. ‘I cannot imagine what you must think of me,’ he wrote, though the fact of this apology proved he could imagine it only too well. ‘I plead — but what right have I to plead anything. I did not mean unkindly by you. I realise now how alarmed by the Cervantes story you must have been. Trust me, I had no such errand as Lothario’s in mind for you. Your youth would have persuaded me against such a course had I ever considered it, but I have never doubted Joyce and of course, tragically, can have no cause ever to doubt her now. I am unable to explain what prompted me to dredge that story up. If your answer is that I dredged it from my unconscious there is nothing I can say to you, since my unconscious is of necessity unknown to me. But I do beg you not to view my situation — for yes, I confess it to be a “situation” — in that sinister light. It is not in order to be forgiven, only to be understood, that I send you as a sort of corrective the enclosed. It is, I think, a truer account of the respects I bear to you and the love I feel for my dear wife.’