Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

After about two hours I went upstairs. All talking had stopped. I would not look into the room where I had left them should the door to it be closed. But it was open. Marisa had retired. Quirin was stretched out on a chaise longue once favoured by my mother, reading a magazine. He laughed when he saw me, his laughter like water overflowing. ‘Great woman, your wife,’ he told me.

The familiarity cut through me like a blade. At the same time I willed him to be more familiar still. Why ‘great’ woman? Why not ‘beautiful’ woman? Why not ‘seductive’ woman? Though I loathe the word ‘sexy’ I’d have taken that from him as well. ‘Sexy woman, your wife’ — the vile little neologism closing like hair-fringed fingers over Marisa’s honour.

Three nights later I left them to each other’s company again. This time Quirin talked about his life, painting himself, so far as I could hear, as lovably beyond the pale. Occasionally the name of a woman would float down to me, followed by a snort of incorrigibility, as though this was another one he’d either let escape or let down. I wondered how the roll call affected Marisa. Did it make her jealous? Was she retrospectively slighted by it?

But again when I went upstairs I found Quirin on his own, drinking my brandy and going potty, he told me, looking for a radio or disc player. ‘I’ve never lived in such a silent house,’ he told me. ‘What do you listen to all day?’

‘I’m out,’ I told him.

‘And Marisa?’

‘Ask her.’

‘But don’t you play music when you’re home?’

‘Sometimes, but I doubt it would be what you mean by music.’

He didn’t bother to rise to the insult. It’s possible he didn’t hear it. ‘I couldn’t live without music,’ he said.

‘Well I can,’ I said — disingenuously, for I did not add that I had music enough to listen to in my head.

A day or two after that conversation he collared me as I was leaving the house in the morning — he in a jute dressing gown, I in my business suit — to enquire if I intended being at home that evening.

‘Shouldn’t I be the one asking you,’ I said, ‘whether you intend being at work today? Work experience is what you are here for, is it not?’

He smiled his irresistible, sapling smile at me. ‘Finalising my accommodation today,’ he said. ‘By tonight we should all have reason to celebrate. I’m going to crack open something expensive.’

Something expensive of mine? I wondered.

He clapped an arm around my shoulder. An odour of flagrant youth came off him — cologne, hair gel, new skin, marijuana, optimism, music, sex. ‘Marisa has told me what she likes,’ he said, ‘so I’ll be picking up a bottle of that.’

‘Have you checked whether she ’ll be in?’ I wondered.

‘I have,’ he said. ‘And she will.’

When, I wondered, this being eight thirty in the morning, had he checked whether she’d be in?

When Marisa and I met for lunch that day, as we tried to do at least twice a week, I mentioned I had work to do again that night — indeed might not manage to get away until quite late — and would therefore, I was sorry, have to leave her to toast Quirin’s good news without me. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Anyone would think,’ she began, but then stopped herself. We were careful where we let any tetchiness lead us. But even curtailed, this was further than Marisa normally went.

‘Anyone would think what?’ I asked.

She took her time. ‘Anyone would think you’re trying to avoid him.’

‘I am.’

‘Why? He’s all right.’ ‘How all right?’

Impossible to tell whether the question irritated her. She was used to dealing with people about to throw themselves off a ledge. ‘As all right as a boy his age can be,’ she said.

‘I suppose so, if you mean by that pretty, and with an eye for the older woman.’

‘He doesn’t have an eye for me, Felix.’

‘He has an eye for your chest,’ I said, calling for the bill.

I stayed at work until nine then made my way slowly home. It was a moony night, the sky very high. On nights like this when you are young you imagine a vast life for yourself. Life felt vast again for me, pregnant, infinite. But what it was pregnant with I couldn’t have said.

Because our house sits at a watchful angle at the end of a terrace on the corner of a square, you can enjoy commanding views from any of its front windows; conversely you can enjoy commanding views of the house long before you reach its door. I approached it from the opposite side of the square with the trepidation of a traveller returning home after years abroad, unsure what he would find but hoping to tell from the number of lights burning what was happening within and what reception he might receive. This was a nonsensical calculation. They were not going to plunge the whole house into darkness because they needed a circle of darkness round themselves; nor were they going to turn on every lamp to let me know it was safe for me to return. But what did sense have to do with anything? I wanted evidence of an event and yet I did not. I wanted to see and yet I did not know whether I would be able to live with what I saw. Sense? Sense vanished from my vocabulary the day the Cuban doctor put his hands on Marisa’s fevered breasts and claimed them as his own.

Unless it vanished when Victor led me up the stairs to see his sickly wife.

Unless it vanished the night I first read a novel.

Unless it vanished the night I was born of woman.

Though the curtains of the upstairs room into which I stared were closed, I could see silhouettes behind them and they were not the silhouettes of people behaving in any way out of the ordinary. I don’t know how long I waited for the scene to change, but at last I crossed the square and took my keys from my pocket. I inspected them with a curiosity that amounted almost to nostalgia. Keys? Did I still possess keys to this house? I fumbled at the lock, not expecting it to work. Before I could open the door I heard singing. Whatever I expected of this evening — and much of what I expected I did not name even to myself — Marisa and QQ singing to each other was not part of it.

Here was a very different sort of jealousy from that for which I had prepared my mind. I took a couple of steps back to listen. Quirin was piping, ‘My luv is like a red, red rose.’ If he thought to win her that way, he was mistaken. Marisa had told me many times, in the intervals of operas and recitals, that she did not much care for tenors, let alone tenors who faltered in the falsetto register. True, that was Marisa sober, but when her turn came to sing she did not sound drunk. Like all women of her class and education, she had a vast repertoire of Scottish and Irish sentimental ballads of the Barbara Allen sort which she performed with trembling sorrow in her voice and a misty, exiled from the islands of her childhood look in her eyes. Quirin was welcome to those. It was when she started on Dido’s Lament that I became upset. The first time Marisa did Dido for me I wept. ‘When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create / No trouble, no trouble in thy breast.’ I had no defences against those words, no defences against the idea of a woman laid in earth, whoever the singer. But swelling in Marisa’s throat they touched feelings I did not know I possessed. On many an evening since then I had called for it and Marisa had obliged, taking an artist’s satisfaction in my tears, and also, it sometimes seemed to me, a mother’s, cradling me until I had sobbed myself out. Was the song, in that case, not sacred to our marriage?

After Dido the house went very quiet. I did not know whether to let myself in or not. I decided to walk once around the square, allowing my competing jealousies to find their own equilibrium. By the time I returned I had decided that the silence meant they were now in each other’s arms. How else do you follow Dido?