Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

We were in good shape. We denied it all to each other, therefore none of it had happened.

But, whatever we pretended, our precious pact of implicitness had been broken.

And with it our still more precious pretence that the wounding doubt in which I lived was no figment of my disordered brain but answered to an actuality — Marisa’s wounding, never to be mentioned infidelities.

When my love swore that she was false, I did believe her though I knew she lied.

Not any longer.

Now Marisa would have to be false to me in earnest.

Hard to explain the moral logic of that, but we both sensed it was how it had to be. It was as though we accepted the necessity to move down a philosophic plane — as it were from the beauty of abstractions to the ugliness of deeds — and would be coarser with each other from now on. Not because Marisa had to punish me with who I was — hers was not a punitive or vindictive nature — but because there was nowhere else for us to go.

Without doubt, she could not have done what she went on to do had she not been an adventuress with a deep instinct for concealment. But she could not have done it had she been an adventuress only. What she did she did because she loved me. I see her forerunner not in Guinevere or Messalina or Moll Flanders, not in Sacher-Masoch’s fur-wrapped Wanda or any of the libertine women in de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom , but in the highly respectable Mrs Bulstrode in Middlemarch who stayed loyal to her disgraced husband. Good wives do this. They shoulder the burden of us, they espouse our sorrows. I wasn’t disgraced, but I wasn’t weighted down with moral honours either. Mrs Bulstrode took off her ornaments and put on a plain black gown; Marisa touched up her lipstick — otherwise they were acting out of the same sense of duty. That Marisa didn’t suggest the separation route, and that I never threatened her with it — that divorce never entered into either of our minds — proves how devoted to each other we remained.

In recognition of which, and again without words, we threw ourselves into a period of the most intense, romantic love. It was like the honeymoon we had never quite managed to have. We woke smiling into each other’s eyes. I wouldn’t let her leave the bed, whether to go into the kitchen or the bathroom, without me. I watched her dress. I watched her apply her make-up, her head tilted slightly backwards for the final application, as though she were putting eye-drops in her eyes and was careful not to spill any. When she did this her nostrils narrowed and the muscles in her neck tightened. From this angle, too, the grey tea-bag stains beneath her eyes shone silver. Fascinating. I didn’t want to miss a moment of any of it. Which of course made her self-conscious, though that too I didn’t want to miss. Brusque in her dressing normally, like a man, she would slide more sinuously into her clothes with my eye on her, until this struck her as preposterous and she would put the finishing touches to herself hurriedly, without looking in a mirror. Wonderful to me — how colourful and varie-gated she could look with so little ceremony. Even in her younger days my mother had rarely descended before lunch, so much was there to do to her person before she was ready to face the world. Marisa skipped into the day still warm from bed, as though she couldn’t wait for her life to start.

On the afternoons she worked in the Oxfam shop I’d visit and pretend to browse through the books, though all I wanted was to see her, to observe her with other people, to hear her voice and make her smile when I appeared from behind a stack. She was the same. She walked to my premises with me. And she was there, as though she ’d never left, her face illuminated, when I came up out of the basement six hours later. We paused somewhere for tea. Then we paused again for a drink, like lovers not wanting to part, though there was nothing to stop us going straight home and following each other round the house. We burst out laughing for no reason, and this time Marisa laughed in the present tense, overjoyed by the state we were in. We went for long walks all over London, our hands glued. People smiled when they saw us. I am not a person who normally invites conversation from strangers. I am not saying my face repels it, but I don’t make it easy for people to break in on my concentration. Marisa, too, can be forbidding. Though where my face closes down, hers is full of sharp intelligence which you think twice before you brave. But together in this mood we seemed to suck whoever came anywhere near us into our happiness. Old ladies sat close to us on park benches. Children too. Dogs played around our feet. We were not just innocently and good-naturedly in love, we were the cause of innocent, good-natured love in others.

And every day while it lasted Marisa grew more lovely to me. The stains beneath her eyes faded. Her stern, Roman nose lifted infinitesimally. Her lips relaxed and grew softer. A light seemed to have turned on inside her. On one particularly restorative spring morning we went out walking in St James’s Park early, while the trees were still damp with night. One of the pelicans was sitting on a bench, as miraculous and cumbersome as an angel, clacking its plastic salad-server beak. Marisa made me join him and put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Smile,’ she said, as she photographed us with her mobile phone.

And I swear that that was exactly what the pelican did.

‘It’s difficult to say,’ Marisa laughed, ‘which of you looks more incapable of flight.’

‘He does,’ I replied.

I spoke only the truth. This morning I was lighter than any other living creature in the park, Marisa excluded.

A magpie crossed our path. ‘Hello, Mr Magpie,’ Marisa said. ‘How’s Mrs Magpie?’

I asked her what she meant by that. She was surprised I didn’t know the superstition. A single magpie was bad luck. You had to make the pair of them present.

I wanted to weep for her. Other people ’s superstitions affect me in this way. It is as though all their long-ago childhood fragility is distilled into the moment of their revealing them. I love seeing the girl in the woman. It breaks my heart. And that was how I suddenly saw Marisa — as a little girl, skipping through the park, being taught by her skittish mother to say, ‘Hello, Mr Magpie, how’s Mrs Magpie?’

We kissed under the minty, maiden leaves of a willow tree, breathing in their newborn greenness with the rapture of parents smelling for the first time the freshness of their infant’s hair. When we left the shelter of the tree I saw that minute diamonds of moisture hung upon Marisa’s eyelashes like seed pearls. The image is Thomas Hardy’s. Tess in a rare moment of happiness. And that was how I saw Marisa in all her harmed innocence. Enjoying a reprieve.

And then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped. It was as though we’d been embracing for the last time at the foot of the scaffold, and now one of us had to ascend.

Before the willow tree came into full leaf she had a lover.

As for how I knew — well you just know. You cannot be all in all to each other as we had been, and then admit another person, and not know.

To the eye of an outsider we must have looked the same: still a solicitously loving pair, no space between us, at fault — if it could be called a fault — only in our closeness. Certainly there was nothing in Marisa’s appearance, her dress or her demeanour, to suggest her life was even microscopically different to how it had been. I have seen men oblivious to the fact of their wives’ fall from virtue while all the world notes with cruel amusement the shortening of their skirts, their teetering heels, the expansion of their décolletage, their longer nails, their more swollen and empurpled lips. Marisa was not a woman of that sort. She had not departed from any of her customs or from her essential idea of herself in the course of her dishonouring Freddy, nor was she other than she had always been now that she was dishonouring me.