Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Would he have brazened it out and dared the feminists to do their worst had it not been for Elspeth? Possibly. He could have lived with being the Lord Rochester of a West Midlands university. A bad reputation — particularly of that kind — never did a bachelor harm, no matter what warning letters circulate. But to Elspeth, who had once enjoyed the status of being married to a professor and had looked down sweetly on students as a species of orphan or foundling, it was humiliating. So they packed their things and left. For which — though this is only my theory — he was never able to forgive her.

Nor she him. To her friends — those that remained — she referred to him as the Dark Lord Morgoth. As a girl, she had sat on Tolkien’s knee, had met him again in the company of her husband who trembled making the introduction, and subsequently read every word he’d written. So it’s possible that the choice of Morgoth was tempered by her affection for the work; like Morgoth, Marius had fallen from airy grace into evil darkness, yet she still loved him. That she continued to call him Morgoth, however, knowing how much he despised her for confusing Tolkien with literature, suggests her anger towards him was real.

They rowed continuously, her temper all flounce and self-exposure, like the clothes she wore, his ice-cold and reserved, like water from a spring of scorn.

‘If I’d known it was going to be like this,’ she ’d say to him, not finishing the sentence, her girlish puffball sleeves showing too much sway of slackened skin.

‘How did you think it was going to be, Elspeth?’ he ’d ask. Hurting her with her name. Putting spit and spite into it.

‘Lovely. Is there anything wrong with that?’

‘ Lovely . We tore at each other’s flesh. Was that lovely ?’

‘We loved each other, Marius. We made promises.’

‘That was in another country,’ he ’d say, leaving her to complete the quotation.

It was the mark of how bad things had got between them. Neither could finish what they’d started.

She didn’t walk out on him, however dead to him she feared she had become. She’d left one man and saw no future for herself in leaving another. Presumably, too, she was unable to believe, having maddened him into desire once — he spoke the truth, he had torn at her flesh — that she couldn’t do it a second time. Marius’s turning niggardly where once he had been profligate served him well in his relations with women, at least in that they found it hard to drag themselves away from him until his profligacy returned. It’s one of the cruellest laws of the erotic life that meanness in either sex, provided there ’s the remotest promise of generosity returning, never fails to be effective. We all cower in disgraced gratitude, like trained dogs, in anticipation of whatever scrap of love is going.

Even my mother, who knew perfectly well where my father had been, would welcome him back from his Grand Tour of the bordellos of France, Germany and the Low Countries provided he had Belgian chocolates for her.

And I am the same.

Behold Marius and Elspeth, anyway, in their peregrinations around the Welsh Marches, looking for something for Marius to do, the picture of marital unhappiness — though it was an unhappiness that transfixed Elspeth and kept her a sexual being, on edge and watchful, wanton even, when it might have served her better to notice she was ageing fast and make the appropriate adjustments of dress and expectation. ‘He ’s “the great enemy” but he ’s good for me,’ she told herself. Good for her erotically, she meant. Marius was a man who went deep into women, as though pursuing something not to be found on the surface, perhaps not to be found at all. With Elspeth when he bothered with her he went deep in the wounding as well as the exploratory sense. Out of a job and out of cash he kept his distance, looking at anything but her, but when he got work helping to put together a local newspaper in Ludlow, or driving a school bus from Stourport to Shrewsbury, or plastering cottages in Church Stretton where they finally settled — ironic work was how he thought of it, a joke against himself and all his early promise, a ludicrous life lived in a ludicrous part of the country — he returned to her with passionate vindictiveness, recalling how in their early days it had excited him to see her perfect House and Garden features screwed into a grimace, her wife-of-a-professor’s mouth puckered as for a scream. And of course every time this happened, Elspeth believed that things were all right with them again, and would be until their ship at last reached the shores of the Uttermost West, dwelling place of the lords and queens of the Valar.

Marius was not all at once installed in my house after claiming his prize from Marisa — or, to speak plainer, his prize of Marisa. There was an intervening courtship period of several months — call it an interregnum — in the course of which all three of us had a number of adjustments to make.

I linger over this period perversely, though I hasten at the same time to get Marius under Marisa’s sheets. Were my intentions sadistic, I’d have put them to bed together chez moi long ago; for the sadist hurries to the place of pain. As a masochist I obey a more complex and delicious chronology. It is always too soon to be there, for the masochist, no matter how long it’s taken. There is always more of the run-up to torment to undergo before it can be enjoyed in its completeness.

So there are further details to be recorded of this ‘interregnum’ before Marius’s cuckooing of me can be completed.

It was as it should be that Marisa took him to our favourite restaurant and sat him at our table. I’m not simply talking symmetry. By turning our haunt into their haunt, by allowing herself to be seen there in his company — ostentatiously and unapologetically with him — Marisa showed that she was a wife who attended conscientiously to her husband’s needs. Humiliate me, I’d been mutely pleading since the Cuban had usurped my role, and had Marisa thrashed me in a public place she could not have humiliated me more.

One of those old family Italians, with pictures of Vesuvius and the Trevi Fountain on the walls, Madeira sauce over everything and caramelised oranges for dessert, Vico’s had a been a home from home for me for years, first in my bachelor days, and later when I took Marisa there, as the conversation-starved wife of a man to whom I sold books. Though we frequented it less once we were married — you either went there on your own or you went there because you were up to no good, it seemed to me — I remained on the friendliest of terms with all the staff, in particular Rafaele the head waiter, a Pole pretending to be an Italian through whom confidences leaked as through a sieve. Marisa knew she could not go there with a man and not be reported the next time Rafaele saw me. Whenever I dined there alone — and the husband of a faithless wife dines alone often — he would roll his eyes into the back of his bald head and mention, if not in words then in looks, the coincidence of his having waited on her only the evening or the afternoon before. . he had no idea in the company of whom. . he assumed, for what else was there to assume, her brother or some other family member, so intimate was their conversation. . A beautiful woman, your wife, Signore. Simpatica.

She was taking a risk, my beautiful, simpatica wife. A man might want his wife to be unfaithful without at the same time wanting all the world to know about it. In Dostoevsky, it is true, to be a cuckolded husband proper is to invite all society to be witness to your shame, but we were living in Marylebone not St Petersburg. For Marisa to have appropriated Vico’s was a measure of her confidence in herself, but it also demonstrated her utter certainty of me. I was like a boxer who would hang on to the ropes and soak up every punch. Without fear of being hurt herself, she could circle me and hit as low and as often as she cared to. I’d double up but not go down.