Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

When my father and my uncles couldn’t get away, however, they made do with what was round the corner.

I accompanied them once to a house on Baker Street, not far from Sherlock Holmes’s address, as a sort of bonding exercise. It was my twenty-first birthday. ‘You can have a thrashing or a cake,’ my father had said.

‘I’ll have a cake,’ I told him.

‘That settles it,’ he said, ‘you’ll have a thrashing.’

They viewed it as therapeutic, like going to the barber’s for a hot towel or having a foot scrub.

We sat together on a long couch, all four of us, with crocheted antimacassars behind our heads, and inspected the women who paraded before us. Anyone watching would have said we were auditioning kitchen maids, albeit unconventionally attired kitchen maids. Each of the women reeled off her specialism according to its geography of origin or practice — Greek, French, Moroccan, English — which my father decoded for me in the grossest terms. ‘She’ll piss in your mouth — do you want that? Supposed to be very good for your gums.’ None of the girls was extraordinarily good-looking, but they weren’t dogs either. I mentioned that fact to my father years later during one of his tirades against the condition of venery in England. ‘That’s because you’ve never been down the Reeperbahn,’ he said.

I had actually, but it didn’t seem worth making a row of it.

I don’t know about my uncles but my father wasn’t remotely interested in being beaten. He called it going to be thrashed but he liked to be the one who did the thrashing. Most Houses of Correction have submissives as well as dominatrices, and this House of Correction appeared to know already which of the submissives my father favoured. She was a pale Dickensian girl with big pleading eyes. The others wore towering showgirl’s heels and variations of wicked-witch corsetry, but she was clothed in a yellowed slip, her hair cut straight and pulled off her face with a couple of spinsterish hairgrips, on her feet shoes such as I imagined were given to you when you entered an orphanage. Why my father paid for such a girl when we had any number of them working for us at home or in the shop, with each of whom he enjoyed whatever he wanted to enjoy, I only understood much later. It was the paying for them that constituted the excitement. Once he’d parted with his money he was pretty much ready to go home.

I chose a stringy, red-haired dominatrix who looked at me in a searching way I found arousing and who told me she was putting herself through psychology and sociology at Queen Mary, which aroused me even more. ‘I’m at Oxford,’ I told her.

‘Nice,’ she said, fastening a leather collar around my neck and leading me up and down a little dungeon that was so childishly make-believe, like a backdrop for an exhibit in Madame Tussaud’s around the corner, that I would have laughed had laughter been appropriate.

‘What’s your subject?’ she asked me.

‘Classics.’

‘Wow. I like an educated conversation.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

‘You know Freud’s problem,’ she said. ‘He thought that for sex to be normal it had to have a final aim. Anything that stopped short of that finality he considered perversion. Which would make both of us perverts.’

‘Which we’re not.’

‘Dead right. Which we’re not. Do you like this?’

‘The collar? Quite.’

‘Would you like it more if I led you by your cock?’ ‘Probably.’

‘Well you’ll have to be a good boy.’

‘And if I’m not?’

‘You’ll get that,’ she said, striking me across the cheek. She was wearing elbow-length black gloves, of the sort my mother wore for funerals, which compounded the insult.

‘That hurt,’ I said.

She struck me again.

‘No, I mean that really hurt. I’ll go if you hit me again.’

‘There won’t be any point, then, in me tying you to the whipping post?’

‘None.’

She looked at me with her hands together. There was something of an El Greco Mater Dolorosa about her — washed-out and elongated in her sado-gear.

‘All I can think in that case,’ she said, ‘is that you’re a moral masochist.’ ‘As opposed to what?’

‘A sexual masochist.’

‘I didn’t know I was a masochist at all.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘It was my father’s idea.’

‘And do you do everything your father tells you?’

‘Only when’s he’s paying.’

‘He’s paying? Does your mother know?’

‘My mother! God forbid.’

She cocked her head knowingly, like a great red scrawny parrot. ‘Sounds to me,’ she said, ‘as though there’s some idealisation of the mother going on here.’

‘Not at all. I just know she wouldn’t want my father brutalising me.’ ‘Brutalising, you say? Interesting word. Does he brutalise your

mother?’

‘Of course.’

‘Does that hurt you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Did you ever want to make love to your mother?’

‘Of course.’

‘Did you hate your father for being able to?’

‘Of course. But also for not bothering to.’

‘So he didn’t only have the woman you desired, he rejected her?’ ‘Does that make me a masochist?’

‘It does if you identify with your mother.’

I thought about it. ‘I still don’t want you to hit me,’ I said at last. She laughed. ‘We’ll just have to try something else.’

But I didn’t enjoy anything we tried. Not the crop, not the cat-o’-ninetails, not the bullwhip, not the wheel, not the cage, not the manacles, not the ball lock, not the bit gag, not the cock ring, not the butt plug, not the separator, not the speculum, not the fisting sling, not the nipple clamps, not the bollock stocks, not the kneeling bench, not the hogtie bars, notthe spanking horse, not the queening chair, and in the end not even her company. So presumably moral masochist was right, if that meant it was my mind I wanted someone to hurt, not my body.

My mind and in some unaccountable way my father.

I never again went to be whipped in Baker Street. The experience wasn’t metaphorical enough for me. But on an impulse born out of idleness — the devil’s time — I did once go to find my father’s submissive. I was disappointed at first to learn she ‘d left, but when I thought further I decided it was for the best. You can’t escape your psychology, but you can keep it under wraps. Another submissive, a touch prettier and less of a doormat than my father’s, suited me just as well. I wasn’t a chip off the old block. I could no more have raised my hand to her than I could have struck a child. But I’d decided after my last visit that the reason submitting to a dominant was no fun was that it was too predictable — what else are submissives and dominants meant to do? — whereas being a submissive to a submissive might have more of the excitement of unnaturalness. The submissive herself wasn’t sure what she thought about the idea. She gave me the impression that she found it weird in the extreme. They are conventional people as a rule, prostitutes. She wasn’t sure, either, whether she ‘d be seen to be taking work off the dominatrices. But when I told her I didn’t want her to beat or whip me she relented.

‘So what do you want?’ she asked, leading me to her boudoir by the hand.

‘To lie across your knee.’

‘Is that all?’

‘ All! You call that all?’

‘Men normally want more than that.’

‘For me there is no more than that.’

So she put me over her cold knees.

After ten minutes of this, just lying there, my face in the rug, I said ‘And now can we discuss it?’

‘Discuss what?’ ‘This.’

‘What this ?’