Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

That, of course, is if he came to the end of it. Yes, he met them — I had been wrong about that. But who was to say how much of himself he gave? There is more than one way of withholding consummation.

Whether he did whatever he did with them one at a time, or whether they mucked in together; whether they found a patch of dry earth, if such exists in Shropshire, or whether they stretched out on cold sepulchral marble, and waited in the rain — I don’t know. In his reporting of the event years later he was sparing of these details; unless the person reporting it in turn to me was sparing of the details on his behalf. No one ever tells the whole truth about sex. Something must always be added or taken away.

What interested me at that later time, lying listening to Marisa telling me about it in the half-light, unconsummated myself, was not the hows but the wheres, a cemetery not being everybody’s idea of a love nest. No one seriously interested in the erotic life of men and women can be ignorant of tapophilia, that morbid fascination with burial and decay of which tapophobia is the opposite and vampirism and Gothic romances the direct if somewhat lily-livered offshoots. That the death instinct was strong in Marius, I already knew from everything I’d seen and heard from his own lips in Shropshire. But you can be absorbed in the poetry of expiry — especially your own — and still not care particularly for yew trees and sarcophagi, let alone choose them as the backdrop to pleasure. The truth about Marius was that he was not simply half in love with death, but invigorated and made potent by it. Did the sisters have clay from the graveyard on their feet when he did or did not embrace them? Did their fingers claw at bones? Was their youth perversely redolent of decay?

‘There’s this to say for blood and breath,’ wrote Housman, the presiding spirit of that dispiriting cemetery, ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Marius functioned according to the reverse principle. Death gave him a taste for blood and breath.

‘I can’t pretend it detracted from the violence of my enjoyment of them, or did anything but sharpen my recovered taste for life,’ he was to tell Marisa, ‘that they were Elspeth’s nieces.’

So he wasn’t sparing of every detail.

Marisa was quiet for a while. ‘Or that they were not of an age to refuse you?’ she wondered at last.

‘Nor that,’ he said.

What, I wondered in my own time, did Marius stand to gain from bragging to Marisa about these violations? ‘In the end it wasn’t their flaming youth in that garden of death that stirred me,’ he told her, ‘any more than it was their blood-relatedness to Elspeth or each other. It was the bruised commonness of their mouths.’

Why tell Marisa that?

And here’s another question: were their mouths bruised before they met Marius, or after?

And another: if the bruising came after, was that all they took away from their encounter?

I knew nothing of this — if by knowing we mean having words for — when I fretted over the week Marisa had given him: a whole week in which to go cold, turn tail, or pick up a couple of goth schoolgirls on Marylebone High Street in the hope they’d fancy being shown around a cemetery. But I knew and feared it in my bones. I knew and feared him in my bones. Call that my version of tapophobia.

The week passed. The minute the gallery opened on the first morning of week two, when it was OK for Marius to start looking, I was in the square, enjoying the early sun through the plane trees, my hat pulled down above my eyes. But no Marius. Nor the next day. Nor the next. It amazed me how a man could know that a woman in whom he was interested had hidden something for his eyes alone — an erotic lure, an enticement to do God knows what — and yet not be in a raging fever of impatience to find it. Had it been me I’d have been banging at the gates of the gallery the minute Marisa told me I could. By the end of the first morning I’d have torn the place apart.

But then I wasn’t afraid of admitting my dependence on a woman’s whim. I knew what fun it was being led by the nose.

Whatever was keeping Marius, I decided not to wait for him. There was my own rampaging curiosity to consider. What Marisa had hidden, I reasoned, she had hidden for me as well. It was not spoken about between us, but hiding pertained to our marriage. Concealment had become the language of our love. By which logic the test she had set for Marius was as much mine as his. And it was imperative to me to know what she ’d left and where she ’d left it, even if it wasn’t imperative to him.

I didn’t go to the gallery as Marius’s rival. I went as his alter ego. And in a sense as Marisa’s alter ego too. I went looking for the thing she ’d hidden so that I could enter the heart of their intrigue, but more than that I went looking to learn how the cuckolding of me felt, as it unfolded, from the other side; I went to roll in Marisa’s falseness as she plotted it through the gallery, room by room; I went to taste on my tongue the dry mouth of Marius’s excitement as he closed in on the knowledge, artefact by artefact, that though she had told him she was a married woman she was soon to be his mistress.

Yes, I had been in that position myself when Marisa finally proved false to Freddy. But what was false to Freddy compared to false to me !

Since there was little prospect of Marius and I doing the treasures of the Wallace Collection together in body — emeritus husband and lover-elect — I made do with taking him along with me in spirit. We were nervous the first morning, not knowing where to start, wandering from room to room without any purpose, discovering meanings in paintings and messages in furniture that probably weren’t there, unable to examine anything closely for fear of setting off an alarm. More than likely there was someone in a little room somewhere watching every move we made.

I ceded preference to Marius. I liked following him. It satisfied my sulphurous desire to be demeaned, the last in a line of obscene pursuit — Marisa laying down her scent, Marius tracking her, and I trailing in the rear of them both, like a wounded dog.

It was a shame, I thought, that he wasn’t there enough to converse with. ‘Do you not think it wonderfully Venetian,’ I would have asked him, ‘our looking together for we don’t know what, but which in my mind’s eye, as I’m sure in yours, resembles a parchment letter or a scroll, a ribboned summons to a carnivalesque rendezvous posted in an item of rococo furniture, which, if we never find it, could remain hidden here for centuries until some other lover in pursuit of an evasive mistress comes upon it and believes it is for him? Do you think Marisa might entice a man into her arms three hundred years after she has died? Knowing how you are around mortality, I must suppose you are even more inflamed by that idea than I am.’

I will be quick about our search, for it lasted several days. By the end of it perhaps no one knew the loot in that salacious temple to luxuriance better than we did. Eighteenth-century inkstands made of pinewood and walnut with boulle marquetry, French cabinets supported by bare-chested blackamoors, oak and ebony writing tables, escritoires veneered with satiné and purplewood, console tables, chests of drawers with griotte marble tops, wardrobes, roll-top desks, coffers on stands, pearwood book cabinets, secretaires — whatever had a drawer, ostensible or secret, a compartment that might just open or give a little, a ledge, a surreptitious niche, that could with ingenuity be employed to hold the thing we looked for, we tried (him first, me after) but tried in vain.