Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

I threw my head back and screwed my eyes against the sun to make it easy for him if he didn’t want to reply. Let it never be said that I’m not a complaisant man.

Deciding not to be rude to me, he looked at his watch. ‘Time of the day, squire,’ he said.

I wasn’t sure I understood him. Was that a question? Was he wondering if his watch was slow? ‘What about the time of the day?’ I asked.

‘It’s the reason you want to be somewhere else. Nuffink to do with the weather,’ He consulted his watch again. ‘You’re smelling somewhere faraway. Four o’clock has that effect.’

I was surprised to detect a faint accent. I mean under the faux cockney or whatever it was he was affecting. Not West Midlands quite, but nearly. I hadn’t imagined him accented. It disappointed me. I wanted him pristine. I viewed him, as I have said, pornographically and pornography is a picky medium. It permits no extraneous material or tomfoolery. Just the clean, chill sepulchral lines of sexual violation and the silence that comes after.

‘And which faraway place does four o’clock smell of to you?’ I asked.

‘Ah!’ he said, as though that were a question that reached deep inside his soul. He drummed his fingers on the briefcase he carried on his lap and appeared to let his imagination roam worlds real and fanciful. I waited, expecting Petra or Heraclea, the Galapagos Islands or the Fields of Troy. I knew a pedant when I saw one. They always are, these queasy, tyrannical men. They ease their disgust by reading the classics.

‘Thanatos,’ was what he finally came up with. Proving me right. He was a tyrant.

I pulled a face. ‘Thanatos?’

‘You’re wondering where that is? Greek for death, matey.’

It took all my restraint not to tell him I’d rather he didn’t treat me as one of his schoolgirls. ‘I know what Thanatos is Greek for,’ I said. ‘I’m only surprised to hear you call death a place.’

‘What would you call it?’

‘The end of place.’

He rubbed his hand across his mouth as though to stop himself from laughing at me, or from ripping me apart with his teeth. I understood how those girls had felt. It was exciting to be near him. Dangerous, somehow, as though the death he spoke of was an entity he had power over. I felt I was sitting on Shrewsbury station with a vampire.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I’d covered my throat.

‘You’d probably argue no less prosaically, then,’ he said with undisguised scorn, ‘that deff ain’t a person neither. But the Greeks wouldn’t have agreed with you. They made him a beautiful young man and shoved a butterfly in his hands. Wherever you are at four o’clock, you hear the bu’erfly beating its wings for the final time. That’s why — since you brought the subject up — your heart aches, as every heart on the planet aches, in sympathy with the dying day as it faints in the embrace of desire. Comprendez? ’

I didn’t say I knew all about the fucking bu’erfly, thank you. I was too affected by his prose style. ‘Yours would appear to be the cosmology of an incurable romantic,’ I countered, showing I was not without a bit of style of my own. But by that time he was on his feet. There was no train coming, but he wanted to be certain that when one did, he would not be on it in my company.

This might be hard to credit, but Marius was travelling to London to clear a few matters up with people and one of the people he was travelling to clear a few matters up with was me. Not me personally, but me as in the business.

Not as coincidental as it sounds, given that his errand was connected to the death in which we were already bonded. I don’t mean his Thanatos twaddle, I mean the actual death that had taken me up to Shropshire in the first place. It appeared that the professor had been ill for some time and that in the course of his illness his mind had begun to wander. Someone, he believed, had stolen the most precious volumes of his library. He kept a diary which contained all the information necessary to track the thieves who had come up from London in the night and emptied whatever books they could lay their hands on into a pantechnicon. They hadn’t tied him up or harmed him, but they did warn him with threatening gesture against doing anything to hamper their getaway. Fortunately he ‘d had the presence of mind to take down the name of the driver. Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Bookseller. A reference in his diary to an appointment which he himself had made with Felix Quinn in person, and a subsequent entry describing the meeting as ‘highly satisfactory from one perspective’, suggested a different version of the story. But those who cared about him — retrospectively, that is — and who might just have been worried for their inheritance, thought it would be for the best to clear this up. A bit soon after the funeral, but it was not for me to pass judgement. Country people are more suspicious than we who live trustingly in cities.

As for those who cared about him, they comprised his wife who had run off with a much younger man — a favourite student of the professor’s — and the much younger man in question, who was Marius.

Nothing, as I say, coincidental about any of this, except the fact of one of my assistants, Andrew — who dealt with Marius when he turned up on Monday morning — knowing him from university. I wasn’t in the shop when Marius and Andrew renewed their acquaintance, but I was told it went off as amicably as any encounter involving Marius could. Marius left, grumpily satisfied the old man had not been swindled out of his George MacDonalds and Christina Rossettis, after which Andrew — a breathless, book-mad fellow in a ponytail which I insisted he cut whenever it reached low enough to threaten his safety on the library steps — agreed to tell me all he knew about Marius over lunch in a New Zealand restaurant that had just opened on the High Street.

He had eloped with her, the prof’s wife, that was the juiciest bit. We say ‘run off ‘ when all we mean is set up house elsewhere. But this was truly an elopement. He twenty, she fifty. The story of it, to which further researches of my own have added a degree of colour that Andrew’s rapid narrative of necessity lacked, was this:

She was the wife of an emeritus professor, working part-time and with only half his wits active, who befriended Marius in his second year at university, seeing in the young man a precocious and perhaps ill-fated genius that reminded him of his own. Before settling for a life of academic ignominy, addressing what was left of his thoughts to empty lecture theatres — empty of everyone except Marius — the professor had held out hopes of being an essayist, mythopoeist, and epigrammatist of wit. Now, lame and hard of hearing, he imagined that same future for Marius who became a frequent guest at his house, where he met — as it was always written that he should — Elspeth, old enough to be his mother, not quite old enough to be his grandmother. She was beautiful, silvery in that seemingly ageless style of middle-class Englishwomen who get the business of looking old over with while they’re young. At fifteen she looked about a hundred. For the following thirty years she looked about fifteen. Now she was poised, equinoctially, between assurance and desperation, her day not yet spent, the wheels of her evening just beginning to turn — and Marius, whatever the arguments in favour of circumspection, to say nothing of decency, was not, as I was to learn, proof against the equinox.

He talked to her, openly — by his standards of uncommunicativeness — and in the hearing of the professor, of his love for her. His language, as I now imagine it, somewhere between Gatsby’s and Schopenhauer’s, grasping at dreams, beating on, boats against the current, towards the most certain dissatisfaction and unhappiness.