Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

As though to recall to us the immemorial indecency of our errand,wherever we looked classical mythology was there before us, playing out its exemplary carnalities. Ornamental satyrs raped and carried off their plunder, bacchant fire-dogs rolled their eyes, deep pudendal inkwells dared us to explore their blue-black darkness with our fingers (first mine, then his), Venuses chased and suckled Cupids, a gilt-bronze, imperturbably bare-breasted Diana stroked the head of a snarling hunting dog, while at her feet a pair of less pacified curs ripped out the throats of deer. I permitted Marius to stand a long time studying the Diana, struck by the impassivity of her bloodlust, wondering if there was some communication for him here. Whatever he was looking for, he guessed that Marisa must have concealed it in or by an artwork that spoke eloquently about her feelings for him. So was she warning him to beware her cruel Diana chastity? Was he, Marius, intended to find a reflection of himself in the wounded deer?

I’d have liked him not to move for an eternity so that I could go on attributing to his heart the palpitations which shook my own. At last, when I did move him on, I paused to see if we were being watched, then tested the drawers of the cabinet on which Diana and her dogs stood, but to no avail. Two cupboards held catalogues for the Wallace furniture collection — works to which I felt I could by now make an informed contribution — but these too, though a perfect hiding place, were inaccessible.

On we went, from untouchable walls of pink-nippled Psyches and Ariadnes painted by the breast-besotted Greuze, through dense rooms of armour and ormolu, and out again into the indolent frivolities of Boucher, I never so far behind that I couldn’t inhale the heat of him, wondering what he was wondering, doubly tense for I was pursuing not only Marisa, I was pursuing his pursuit of her as well.

At last, for this could not go on forever, much as I wanted it to, we were led — as to our destiny — to Marisa’s hiding place. But first something curious happened. I got rid of Marius. It was the third day and I no longer welcomed his presence in my head. I grew selfish, suddenly. I wanted to savour the moment all by myself. Call it a marital impulse. As I neared the naked proof of my wife ’s adulterous intention, I wanted her to share it with me alone.

A milky Sicilian marble Cupid set into a Minton-tiled recess at the far end of the Smoking Room holds the attention of all visitors to the Wallace Collection whatever their mission. The Cupid is a youth, lavishly winged, taking an arrow from his quiver. Love Triumphant the work is called, though a flighty Cupid has never seemed to me an adequate metaphor for the way love clubs you into submission. Around the base of the sculpture runs a paean to love ’s stranglehold, itself far from flighty, written by Voltaire:

Qui que tu sois voici ton maître.

Il l’est, le fut, ou le doit être.

(Whoever you are, here is your master.

He is it, or was, or must be.)

Here is your master , but in fact this was not the place. No conceivable hiding room here for a communication directly from Marisa’s hand. But to the immediate left of Love Triumphant was a staircase that gave the impression of being private, or at the very least rarely used. Certainly I had never before noticed it on my visits to the gallery. I sniffed Marisa’s presence here at once. It was unmistakable. It overwhelmed me like a perfume. Men mastered by a woman can tell to a certainty when she has been in a room; for them her impression lingers long afterwards like warm breath on a mirror, or the recollection of a dream which daylight can’t shake off. Obsession manufactures ghosts, and Marisa’s ghost was here in all its restlessness. The ghostliness not only of her person but of the deadly game that she was playing. That was what, over the perspiration of my own nervousness, I could smell: not just her clothes and hair and breath but the delinquent purpose that had brought her. Up the stairs she ’d gone, up into the ill-lit gloom, one step at a time, in full possession of what she was about, knowing what she meant to leave, where she meant to leave it, and what would ensue once it was found.

I fought against my own impatience. It was getting late. I didn’t want bells ringing to warn that the gallery was closing just as I was on the point of laying hands on what was not for me. But even had the afternoon been less advanced I’d have done the same, resisting the smaller temptation for the greater. For the greater temptation was to remain in ignorance another night.

Subspace beckoned me — that nirvana stillness of utter submission which hitherto I’d practised only in Marisa’s absence but which tonight I would enter with her by my side. There was a sort of blasphemy in it, but it was blasphemy in the name of a higher form of worship.

The following day, though I had barely slept (subspace, as I’ve said, is not for sleeping), I was at the gallery before the doors opened. With a heart beating violently enough to keep ten men alive I nosed my way where Marisa’s adventuresome feet had been, breathing in, as though it were a poison I was destined to take, the flagrancy of her resolution.

Among dross not worth discussing, two small, and in the circumstances arresting paintings — arresting by virtue of their contrast — confront each other on opposite walls above the stairs; both of insufficient value to warrant tight security, and both with space enough behind their frames to hide a card, a letter, maybe even a small package. One, entitled Reading the Bible , by the nineteenth-century French painter Hugues Merle, shows two young girls in Quakerish bonnets being read to from scripture. Jailbait, both of them, if you are so minded. So arresting in that sense, too. Otherwise nothing to get excited about if you leave out what hangs on the opposing wall, and if you didn’t know that the young Marisa had studied the Bible.

Opposite, as conceived by the academic painter Thomas Couture, an exact contemporary of Merle, the poet Horace partying with his mistress Lydia. A Roman Feast . The poet, reclining on a couch, holds out his goblet for a servant to refill. Naked down to her toes, Lydia snakes into her lover, one arm flung about his neck, her breast pressed into his chest, her flanks arced in sinuous luxuriance towards our scrutiny. The opulence of her haunches is shocking. Though she is bold and faithless in Horace ‘s Odes to her, she hides her face in Couture ’s painting, embarrassed by the proximity of her lover’s water boy. For a woman is of necessity more naked in the presence of two men than she can ever be with one.

Let me be plain. Nothing in the lusciously immodest shame of Lydia’s posture would have made any man not intimate with her think specifically of Marisa. But if one started from the other end of the proposition, anyone who knew Marisa only in her clothes and imagined her without them would have pictured her much like this. Of a flowing voluptuousness that was beyond bearing.

Whether one of these paintings would have been enough, without the other, to stop in his tracks a man hunting down a love token, I doubt. Manchester Square is swollen with erotic invitation. But together, eyeing each other from opposite walls of the staircase, they were irresistibly garrulous.

I caught my breath when I found myself between them. Without a shadow of a doubt this was the place — hidden from the eye of any other person — where Marius’s searching, if he could be prised out of his den, would come to an end.