Howard Jacobson: The Act of Love

I rubbed at the pain in my heart. Probed it, polished it, until there was no skin left between my heart and me. Was it Faith I missed or was it myself, the self I’d been when she’d wound her lovely arms around me twice? Where to locate the hurt exactly — in the kisses that had been stolen from me almost before they’d begun, or in the insult of her preferring Martin? What was it she saw in him? What was it she didn’t see in me? What was it, what was it, what was it. .?

It made me careful thereafter — in the thereafter I never thought there’d be — never to hurt as I’d been hurt, never to leave the cinema with anyone other than the person I’d gone into the cinema with, never to show that I preferred kissing someone else. How to survive jealousy became the study of my life. How to accept that someone you love might not love you in return. How to bear her kisses going elsewhere. How to face up to abandonment — the knowledge that you are and will remain unloved, cast out, not just because you are not worthy in yourself, but because you stand in the way of two other people’s happiness. Made lonely for all eternity so that they can be for all eternity together.

‘You know my motto,’ my father said in a cloud of cigar smoke. ‘If you miss one bus there’s always a second.’

He was disgusted by my weeping. I was disgusted, plain and simply, by him.

‘What’s the use of a second bus when you’ve been knocked down by the first?’ I replied.

He shrugged. ‘You’ll have a few broken bones,’ he said, ‘no more.’

‘Bones!’

My mother was more sympathetic, though of no more help. I did not visit her in her room, which for as long as I could remember had been a chamber of private grief, for she too had been abandoned. But she came to me one morning as I lay disconsolate and motionless on my bed, looking up at the ceiling, nursing a sadness which day by day had been making a permanent home for itself in my body — a molten river of acid and scalding honey that moved with slow deceptive sweetness through my veins.

‘Is it always like this?’ I asked her.

‘Betrayal?’

‘Love.’

She thought about it for some moments, pulling her brocade dressing gown around her. She had always appeared to be from another age, my mother, as though abandoned into an earlier time. ‘I wish I could tell you it isn’t,’ she said. ‘But you will find someone else, and then you’ll forget what happened this time.’

‘And when it happens again?’

She touched my hand. A gesture of unusual warmth in my family where touching was reserved for impropriety or rejection. ‘You might be lucky,’ she said. ‘It might not happen again.’

‘What might make it not happen again?’

‘You might learn to love the next person a little less. Or at least invest a little less in her.’

‘But would that then be love?’

‘Ah, now that,’ she said, gathering herself up, ‘is the big question.’

I might only have been fifteen, but I knew the big answer. If you wanted to be in love — and I wanted nothing else — then you had to welcome into your soul love ‘s symptoms and concomitants: fear of betrayal which was no less potent than the fear of death, jealousy which ate into the very marrow of your bones, a feverish anticipation of loss which no amount of trust would ever assuage. Loss — loss waited upon gain as sure as day followed night, that’s if day would ever follow night again. You loved not only expecting to lose but in order to lose — this my favourite books had told me and now I’d put them to the test in life I knew them to be right. You loved to lose and the more you loved the more you lost. Fear and jealousy were not incidental to love, they were love.

The molten river sluiced through my body, as though it had found its natural course there and would never leave me.

Good that something would never leave me.

I didn’t take the train back to London after the funeral as I’d meant to do. Some impulse or other kept me in Much Wenlock. Not a desire to hit the town even though it was a Saturday night. I ordered sandwiches and ate them in my hotel room. Everything in the hotel was on a slant. The sandwiches slid off the tray. My bottle of beer slid off the bedside table. It was only by holding on to the mattress that I was able to avoid sliding out of bed.

But the crookedness of the place went with my mood. I’d been disarranged.

I was woken by the sound of Sunday church bells ringing. A mocking sun was streaming in through the curtains. The old man was buried and now life could begin again. I decided to take advantage of what could be the only sun Shropshire was going to see for a hundred years and dressed quickly. I needed breakfast and wasn’t prepared to risk a fried egg sliding on to my lap, so I went looking for a café. After that I mooched around, taking in the priory, a few half-timbered buildings, at last finding a couple of bookshops of the sort I make a point of investigating when I’m out of town. I rarely find anything of value but I never fail to buy a book or two, simply as a way of expressing fellow feeling. Of all the forms of that premature interment I’ve talked about, selling books in the provinces is the most pitiable. They sit behind their wooden tables, pretending to read — though they’ve read their entire stock a dozen times already — entering their few sales into a ledger with a blunt pencil. Could so easily have been me, I always think, but for the worldly far-seeingness of my ancestors, making sure our destiny would be in Marylebone, London’s city within a city. Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers — in the quiet assurance of our name I believe you hear the confidence of a family that couldn’t imagine ever living more than a few hundred yards from everything the soul and body of man requires: art galleries, concert halls, good restaurants, suppliers of wine and cheese, infirmaries, bordellos.

Others must travel to satisfy these needs; we had only to stretch out a hand.

Indeed, it was one of my father’s recurrent malodorous jokes that at his age happiness resided solely in being able to reach out his hand and feel under a woman’s skirt. He didn’t mean my mother’s.

By the time I’d searched the shelves of the bookshops and made consolatory, not to say condescending, conversation with their hapless proprietors I needed lunch. It was gone three when the taxi slid me out at Shrewsbury station. All the trains were late. I pounded the far end of the platform in irritation, looking for somewhere to sit in the sun, wondering whether to pick fights with people who took up seats with their luggage. People with backpacks always the worst offenders. Walkers! Those masochists who think their minds are healthy. At last a seat fell empty and I bagged it. When I looked around me I saw that I was sitting next to Marius.

He was still dressed funereally. I thought I could see traces of cemetery clay on his shoes and even on his jacket. But that was probably fanciful. I glanced at him a couple of times, hoping for one of those half smiles that invite conversation. I was curious to know why he’d been at the funeral, what his relations were to poor Jim Hanley and his widow. Maybe, if we were travelling to London on the same train, he’d tell me about his penchant for picking up and then letting down underage schoolgirls. Explain the appeal of sadism to me.

‘Such a beautiful afternoon,’ I said at last, accepting that if I waited for him I’d wait forever. ‘Weather like this makes one wish one were somewhere else, don’t you think?’

He favoured me with the quickest of looks, such as a wild animal might throw a man he’s not afraid of, but doesn’t want to eat. It was evident that if I wished to be somewhere else, he wished I’d go there. It was equally evident that he didn’t recognise me from the funeral.