Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

She shook her head — a rattle of razor blades. ‘That won’t be possible,’ she said. ‘I’m doing only one talk in this series. And I’ve just done it.’

He was about to say that wasn’t what he meant but recovered his subtlety in time. He ’d been up in Shropshire too long. Consorting with the under and the overaged.

‘Perhaps, then, we could reconvene at the next person’s talk.’

‘Do you have an interest in Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour?’

‘I do if you do.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Perhaps we could reconvene so you could tell me why.’

‘Perhaps we could,’ she said. With which she turned her body and her attention to other matters.

So was that a date or wasn’t it?

Marius, for his part, wasn’t sure. He strode back home with no spring in his step, his mouth set in a curl of hollow distaste. He told himself he was bored. What else was sexual desire but boredom turning in its sleep? However they started, these things always finished the same way. Her mention of Boucher reminded him of his precious Baudelaire, spleening it to the moon:

I am an ancient boudoir filled with faded roses

In which a ruck of long-outmoded gowns reposes,

Where pastels all too sad and Bouchers all too pale

Alone breathe in the scents that uncorked flasks exhale.

Marius, too, was an ancient boudoir, his sorry brain the repository of too many secrets, poems, love letters and golden curls. Worst of all, it held the fatal knowledge of what always comes next, the unmistakable finale heard in the overture.

He was ungrateful, it seemed to me. He was undeserving. It’s a species of rudeness amounting to cruelty not to be able to accept an erotic adventure and maybe even the promise of erotic happiness when it’s offered you, no matter that the offer has a few equivocations in it.

But I had to accept what was offered me as well. It was for his cruelty, when all was said and done, that I’d sought him out. It was for the trouble he was capable of causing. So I wasn’t going to relinquish him for being himself. When you find a man like Marius you don’t willingly let him go.

I happen to know that Elspeth clung to his legs when he told her he was leaving. It was a most terrible scene. A woman in her middle sixties and a man not yet forty, a mother and her son they might have been, except that mothers don’t behave that way with their sons, except in the murderously pornographic novels — of which I have a signed set in mint condition, not for sale — of Georges Bataille. Though Marius had loved her so deeply in their first years together that he would sometimes weep over the transience of her mature beauty while she slept, afraid that each breath might be her last (and he the reason for it), unable to imagine any life of the senses without her, all he felt when she clung sobbing to his legs (unable to imagine her life without him ), was revulsion.

‘To despoil is the essence of eroticism,’ Bataille wrote, which is why ‘there is nothing more depressing than an ugly woman. . for ugliness cannot be spoiled.’ Old age with its indignities, similarly. It had been something for Marius to live for, profaning the elegance of this older woman by subjecting her to every act of loving and not so loving animality his fevered ingenuity could devise. But there was nothing left now to profane or despoil. Time had done it for him.

Her hands, he noticed, had grown square, the skin at the base of her fingers puffy, as grey as dough. And she was without wrists now. Her thumb was an extension of her arm. Fingers which he would once, and not so many years ago, have plucked with violence one by one from contact with another man, he found so loathsome that the effort necessary to pluck them from his legs was beyond him.

‘It doesn’t become you, Elspeth, to behave like this. Not at your age.’ Did he actually say those words to her or did he merely think them? It’s an unnecessary distinction. You cannot think those words in the presence of somebody who loves you without your face betraying them.

‘At my age! Do you dare? How many times did I beg you,’ she cried, ‘that if you were going to leave me, to leave when I was young enough at least to make provision for myself? Now look at me.’

Look at her? That was the last thing of which he was capable.

‘You were never young enough to make provision for yourself,’ he might or might not have said. ‘Not on my watch.’

‘Didn’t I say to leave me where I was if you were not sure you could love me forever?’

‘How could I have left you where you were? You weren’t happy.’ ‘I was happy enough.’

‘Had you been happy enough—’ But no, that he couldn’t say. Instead, ‘It doesn’t fall to any man to be sure he ’ll love a woman forever, Elspeth.’

‘Yes it does. Yes he can. And if he can’t then he must leave the woman where she is. I had a life, didn’t I? I was cared for. I was secure. I didn’t need you to come along and do this .’

Her mouth, he noticed, had lost the fleshy fullness he had once loved. In her distraction it hung open, like a dog’s, and he wondered if she would ever again be able to close it fully, or to keep it dry. The brows of her eyes, too, once so full of challenge, striking in the broad arch of their expressiveness, particularly when she laughed or conveyed desire, had fallen below the bone, making her look tired and bewildered, again like an old dog fearing the end.

When he drew his legs away from her clutches — yes, clutches — she fell forward on to the floor, striking her head. This seemed to suggest to her a last, desperate course of action. ‘I begged you, I begged you,’ she screamed, banging her head on the floorboards willingly now, blow after blow, causing blood to pour from her face, meaning to dash her brains out if she could. And to spill them at his feet.

‘Elspeth!’ he cried. ‘Elspeth, please stop it.’

But he couldn’t go to her. Couldn’t touch her. Couldn’t help her.

MARISA DIDN T KNOW WHETHER THEY HAD A DATE EITHER. SHE, TOO, WAS out of sorts. She feared she ’d been obvious, both in allowing Marius to see that the painting had got under her skin, and in showing him it irritated her to be found out. Wasn’t this precisely what infuriated her in the portrait of Countess Blessington — a wealthy and successful woman, at the height of her influence and power, unable to conceal her vulnerability? No, not unable, unwilling . Marisa could perfectly well see why the painting, in Byron’s words, had ‘set all London raving’. It was what usually set all London raving in a woman: the persistence in her of the supplicating girl. A pettish and slightly crooked girl at that, beggarly even, despite the fur and finery; a suggestion, beneath the allure of her assurance, of uncertainty and neediness. Was this to be woman’s indelible mark, no matter how far she progressed in the world of men — the wanting to be loved and rescued by them?

And she, Marisa, had betrayed this very neediness on her own face.

She couldn’t forgive herself. She would show Marius a different expression the next time.

How did I know she was contemplating a next time? I lived inside her head, that’s how I knew. Had we been Siamese twins my heart could not have been attuned more sensitively to hers. But it worked the other way, too. I passed my dreads to her along her bloodstream, where eventually — in her own time — she transmuted them into her own desires.

She didn’t turn up the following week for the Madame de Pompadour talk. She wasn’t going to be obvious. But the week after she lunched late with Flops at the Café Bagatelle in the gallery’s sculpture garden — two hours sitting over a plate of rocket salad and parmesan shavings, a further thirty minutes looking harder at the urns than any urn could merit — being careful to return to the room where the next talk in the series was being held, at the stroke of four o’clock.