Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

We have been selling antiquarian and rare books for more than a century and a half, never once moving from the same discreet premises, barely noticeable to the naked eye and closed to you unless you have an appointment, in a quiet square to the north-west of Wigmore Street. People with an appointment look to the right and the left of them when they enter and do the same again when they leave, like men afraid of being caught loitering in the vicinity of a brothel. This is how we like our clients to feel. We encourage an atmosphere of underhandedness and dubious intent, no matter that the great majority of the thousands of books which pass through our hands are works of the utmost probity.

I grew up among old books and feel in sympathy with them. In particular I enjoy the buying of them, an activity which has taken me — exactly as I foretold it would the day Victor collected me from Maidenhead — to the most picturesque parts of the country and acquainted me with human nature in some of its sweetest and most melancholy aspects.

The selling I leave mainly to my employees. These days technology looks after most of it. But buying libraries is a business of the senses as well as the intelligence. You can smell the quality of a collection in advance of perusing it, as you can smell what you are going to get from a lover before the kissing starts. Sex inheres in everything, in books and their histories no less than in humans — at times more than in humans. Do we not, on a bus or a train, see people turning the pages of a book with a sensual expectation that reminds us of nothing so much as the act of undressing another person? And where the book is consecrated by age and experience, the turning of those pages is rendered the more delicious by the thought of the number of fingers which have been there before you. This, I grant, is not everyone’s taste. Some prefer that odour of brandnewness which comes off paper covers, as some prefer an unperforated virgin. We are all sick in our own way.

No doubt I inherited this fascination with promiscuous prior ownership from my disreputable father and his no less disreputable brothers. Until me, however, no member of the family had taken that conception of the erotic to its natural conclusion. Only I have turned out to be a true voluptuary of the second-hand.

Which, among other things, means I am sensitive to a similar voluptuousness in others. I don’t push anyone into selling, even if I’ve travelled far to buy. Few of those who decide they must part with their books genuinely wish to do so. Easier, for some of them, to part with their wives. The elderly and long-retired professor without whose funeral I’d never have met Marius was a case in point. He was pacing up and down the drive when I came in answer to his summons, made distraught by the idea that I’d be arriving in a pantechnicon at the appointed hour and begin loading immediately. Seeing me turn up in a bumpy taxi from the railway station and discovering I was going to do no more than look at what he had, calmed his agitation considerably.

‘Oh,’ he said. A high piping sound such as a mouse might make when you tread on it. ‘Then I don’t have to hide things from you after all.’

He made me tea with shaking hands, an old scholarly fusspot abandoned to his books and bookish thoughts by a wife who, as he explained it, had been unable to bear their musty smell. ‘Or mine,’ he laughed, the laughter rattling his chest.

I liked him. I liked his long bent silhouette, his boniness, and the fact of his wearing a tie knotted he didn’t care where, so that the narrow end was twice the length of the broad. In my business I meet a lot of men who knot their ties this way, a coincidence I ascribe to the loneliness of book collecting.

I have a soft spot for abandoned men. I enter into their feelings. Perhaps because I’ve always feared that one day I’ll be an abandoned man myself. And yes — since we are entertaining perhapses — perhaps because I hope to be one too. Left to sob out the rest of my days, while the woman I love. .

There are more unfathomable desires.

After tea there ensued a terrible passage in which, emboldened by the lack of anything like rapaciousness in me, he began removing what he thought to be priceless editions from a cupboard underneath his stairs, George MacDonalds, Christina Rossettis, ‘Monk’ Lewises, each ceremented in ancient newsprint, only to discover that the Shropshire damp had got to them long ago, as it had got to him, and turned their brilliant pages into compost.

‘Oh,’ he said, his voice more piping than the first time, as though I’d trodden on him again. ‘Then you won’t be wanting these.’

But there was relief for him even in a disappointment as sharp as this. He laughed an old man’s dry and bony laugh. I wouldn’t be taking his books because his books weren’t worth taking.

I clasped his arm. I was happy to be travelling back to London emptyhanded.

He sent me the occasional greeting card after this, expressing guilt and gratitude, out of which motives he bought a few things from our catalogue — the odd George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, ‘Monk’ Lewis. After his death, his executors arranged for us to purchase the little of his library that was of value, which happened to be the very books he’d bought only recently from us. Time’s whirligig and all that. But it wasn’t for business reasons that I attended his funeral. Sometimes the heart must lead you. And mine led me to Marius. So you could say I hadn’t travelled back to London empty-handed after all.

I was careful not to discuss the Cuban doctor with Marisa on her recovery. It’s possible she remembered nothing of her illness or his visit and would not even have known who I was talking about. We flew home from Florida as soon as Marisa was strong enough to travel and took an immediate second honeymoon in Suffolk. After the swamplands we felt the urge to be somewhere chillier and more bracing. I am not one who subscribes to the hot and cold shower theory of marriage, but we needed to clear our heads.

In the event, I didn’t succeed in clearing mine. Today I’m at peace with the knowledge that I never will, that it cannot ever be quiet or uncrowded in there, but at the time the mental congestion I suffered whenever I embraced my wife alarmed me. I am a moralist in the matter of intercourse. You sleep with whom you’re sleeping with, I’ve always believed. It isn’t necessary that you love every woman you invite to share your bed, but you must do each of them the honour, at least while you’re inside them, of thinking of no one else. If another woman’s face rises up before you, you withdraw and make your apologies. But my morality floundered when the face which rose up before me was not another woman’s but another man’s — not someone I wanted to kiss more than I wanted to kiss Marisa, but someone I wanted Marisa to kiss more than I wanted her to kiss me.

I opposed the presence of this phantom with all my will. He made himself known to me initially on that second honeymoon, indeed on the very first occasion of our making love in Suffolk on an iron bedstead from which we could see — or should have seen had another not intruded — the vast greyness of the sea. I took long walks in the morning, sometimes before Marisa had so much as stirred, convinced that the wind which could make such startling transformations to the Suffolk sky would blow away my unwanted guest. But the moment I returned and moved my face close to Marisa’s, there he was again, the Cuban doctor with his long brown horse ’s teeth. No matter how tightly I pressed Marisa to me he was always able to find sufficient space to slide his silk-fringed knuckles between us and find a way to her breasts.