Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Accidents, however, happen. This meeting — for it went beyond a sighting — was entirely accidental. Fortuitous or calamitous, depending how you view it. But not without a degree of embarrassment to all parties, in particular my secretary Dulcie with whom I was lunching when Marisa and her unknown friend entered the restaurant, not exactly with a show of intimacy, yet not as though they were there to discuss a business proposition either.

But then nor was I there on business. This wasn’t a business restaurant. You went there to be seen. You made your entrance. You all but took the applause of the other diners as you were escorted to your table. And you seldom got there without having to kiss people you knew along the way. As Marisa had no choice but to kiss me.

‘Felix,’ she said, ‘Miles.’

‘Hello, Miles,’ I said. ‘Miles, this is Dulcie.’

They shook hands, I thought, as though they’d met before and looked embarrassed.

Marisa, of course, knew Dulcie who had been my secretary for years. So she wouldn’t have supposed there was any impropriety in my taking her to lunch. Dulcie loved this restaurant but would not have been able to get a table without me. Every now and then I escorted her to it as a treat, or when there was a personal problem of which she needed to unburden herself, as was the case today. This, too, Marisa knew.

But Dulcie didn’t know why Marisa was there with Miles. She blushed, not only on meeting Miles, was my guess, but at hearing herself say, ‘Hello, Mrs Quinn,’ as though she sensed that calling Marisa Mrs Anything with Miles standing possessively by her could cause a complication. Did she read that just from seeing them, I wondered? Were they that obviously coupled? Or were Marisa’s infidelities common knowledge even to my staff? Did everybody know?

If I say I hoped so, I expect to be understood as meaning that I dreaded so, and therefore hoped so for that reason.

From his brief how-do-you-dos I took Miles to be an Irish millionaire. A horse-breeder, probably. He had good manners and was overdressed in the way of Irishmen trying to be Ivy League Americans, his suit more expensive than it needed to be, his pink tie knotted tightly at his narrow throat, just the right amount of double cuff showing when he extended his hand. His fingers, which I paused to look at fractionally in the moment before I took them, had a petrified, scalded appearance. There was not a germ on his body. At a guess I would have said he was Marisa’s junior by seven or eight years. Which pleased me in ways it isn’t necessary for me to go into. He gave me no sense that he knew or cared who I was. Which again pleased me in ways I’m sure I don’t have to explain.

I held him in my gaze for as long as it was decent to do so. So here he, here it , was. The dread alternative.

I was face to face with it at last.

The dread alternative made flesh, and I could handle it. I could more than handle it: I thrived on it. Something moved in my stomach, presumably the transubstantiation of blood into water. But otherwise I felt wonderfully alive. Felix Felicis .

Felix Vitrix.

If Marisa, for her part, was discomfited she didn’t show it. Peerless she was in her men’s tailoring and effrontery. Not too much smiling, nor too little. No mention of coincidences. No denying me, but no effusive acknowledging me either. ‘Well, enjoy your lunch,’ she said, with no trace of anything but what the words implied, and they were gone.

It might have been better for Dulcie, if not for me, had Marisa and her Irish companion been shown a table far from ours. As it was, though we could not hear them, we could observe as much of their behaviour as we chose to. Of what I saw in the first ten minutes, it was the clinking of their glasses that transfixed me. They had, I could tell, clinked glasses before. They found privacy in the action, raising their glasses higher than is usual, and keeping them there longer, which I took to be the expression of a mutual impatience to hold each other’s face in the reflection of the wine, away from the noise and publicity of the room. Marisa had looked at me through her wine glass in just that way when I was stealing her from Freddy. It was loving and impatient then, and it was loving and impatient now. I would say I smelled the impatience coming off them both were that not an insalubrious way of describing people enjoying lunch together. But then insalubrity is all in the interpretation and I have always been able to see it where less perceptive men see nothing. I must have turned a little white whatever I saw, because Dulcie asked if I was all right.

‘Never been better, Dulcie,’ I told her. ‘And you?’

Dulcie, as it happened — and this had nothing to do with her seeing her boss’s wife out flirting heavily with another man under both their noses — had never been worse.

A word or two about Dulcie, because her anxiety bore resemblances to mine, or would have borne resemblances to mine had anxiety been a fair summation of my state.

I have already alluded to the anomalous fine gold-linked ankle chain Dulcie wore, though I was pleased to notice she wasn’t wearing it for our lunch today. This was not an ankle-chain-wearing clientele. But then Dulcie was not by any stretch of the imagination an ankle-chain-wearing person herself. She certainly hadn’t worn one when I first interviewed her for the job, a good twenty years before. Nor had there been anything in her character, her deportment, or her curriculum vitae, to suggest she ever would. A trim and pretty woman, slightly catlike in appearance, with a turnedup nose, wide-apart eyes on to which she applied too much mascara and which for that reason had the appearance of being loose in their sockets, and elegant charcoal-grey hair which she wore in a style that was once, I think, associated with Doris Day, Dulcie Norrington was the daughter of a clergyman with a liking for old books (hence her wanting to work for me), the sister of a much loved Shakespearean actress (she played Emilia in the production of Othello of which I’ve spoken), and the wife of a viola player in a not very well-known or successful string quartet — a blissfully happy union of which the issue was a son who had won a scholarship to study Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, and a daughter who was reading theology at Cambridge. To say there was no intimation of an ankle chain in Dulcie’s history or home life would be like saying there was nothing in Dr Jekyll to prepare one for Mr Hyde. No, there absolutely was not, but you never know what’s going to turn up.

And turn up, suddenly one summer, it did. Dulcie without doubt had a good figure still, and attractive legs, if a little too narrow and close together to please the taste of someone for whom the airy separation of Marisa’s legs, slightly inflected at the knee, was the pattern of ideal beauty. So on fine days, when worn with slave-girl sandals and as an adjunct to floaty dresses, she could just about carry off her anklet. It was when she wore it under stockings, where at first sight it resembled a trapped centipede, that I began to worry seriously for her judgement.

She was the only woman who worked for me so she didn’t have the benefit of fashion advice from a female colleague. And it would have been more than the jobs of the other employees were worth to pass manly comment. The staff knew my views on coarse allusions in business hours even to one another, and around Dulcie I had, as a responsible boss, erected a sort of cordon sanitaire. In my father’s day no secretary or cleaner had been safe from rude comment or behaviour. Indeed it was in order to be rudely treated that they’d been employed. Once I took over, all that sort of nonsense came to an end.