Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

As well, she stopped talking to me in the night about Marius.

I could have been the cause of it, however returned to husbandly compliance I now was. I was an oppression with my ever-waiting ear, I accepted that. But I didn’t think it was me. If she looked anything, yes, she looked lovesick, and though I believed she was still in love with me, it wasn’t any longer love of the sort that makes your eyes go black. So it was Marius. Things were not right between them.

I had several theories as to the cause of her distress. Chief among them being Marius’s nature. Marius the Withholder doing what he did best — withholding. An unforgiving account of my part in their affair would see this as intrinsic to my intentions from the start. I had picked him for exactly this quality. If Marisa was suffering, was she not suffering exactly as I knew she would, indeed exactly as I meant her to?

It’s hard for me to accept I wished Marisa harm. Where would the sense have been in that? I wanted her to fall for Marius in a big way, because that would hurt me, not her. But I see I may at some level have sought her degradation as the price or even the condition of mine. In which case I bore the blame for whatever Marius was doing, or not doing, to her now. Was this too, then, intrinsic to my intentions from the start — that I would have to save her from him?

‘I know your game,’ Elspeth told him once.

‘I have no game,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes you do. You make women feel it’s their fault you don’t want them.’

‘Women?’

‘I’m not a fool, Marius.’

‘My dear, I would never for one moment say you were.’

‘Say it, no. But you look it, think it, communicate it every time I come near you.’

‘You are hoping I’ll say, “Then don’t come near me,” so I’ll have proved your point.’

‘It doesn’t make you a pleasant or a kind man, Marius, to know yourself.’

‘Self-knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you say?’

‘Not when it’s you who’s knowing you, no, it isn’t.’

‘Then who would you like me to know? Name a person you don’t resent me knowing.’

The reference was to their previous argument when she’d accused him of seducing her godchild, a pretty girl with the eyes of Mata Hari who, like her godmother, had a soft spot for clever men. That Marius dared allude to this incident, however obliquely, damned him in Elspeth’s eyes to just the criticism she’d been making. But she had no defences against its logic.

‘You prick!’ she said.

He curled his lip at her. ‘And you wonder why I don’t come near you.’

The godchild was called Arwen — the daughter of a woman Elspeth’s husband had taught and who had formed a close union with Elspeth based on a shared enthusiasm for the Middle Earth. It had been in order to guarantee a sort of continuity in Tolkien, should anything happen to her, that the mother had asked Elspeth to be godmother. Arwen had been staying with them in Church Stretton, recuperating from an unhappy affair with a famous poet. She had met the poet at a book signing in a London bookshop. He had apologised to her because his fountain pen had smudged his signature. ‘It’s running wet,’ he said.

‘Wet is how I like it,’ Arwen had replied, and the next day the poet left his wife.

Six months later he left her.

She was more careful with Marius, who warned her against literary men in general but poets in particular.

‘Was he dark-suited or did he sport a headband and two earrings?’ he asked her.

‘Are those the only options for a poet?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was dark-suited.’

‘Ah, the worst kind. I guessed as much. And low-voiced?’

‘How did you know?’

‘And he chewed his words to make them digestible for you. But never quite audible. So you had to be forever inclining your head to hear him, like a beggar wanting alms.’

She laughed and flashed her eyes. ‘How do you know this?’

‘Because he’s the fucking same himself,’ Elspeth said.

They were in the garden, looking across towards the slumbering purple outline of the Long Mynd — Marius’s least favourite sight on earth. Elspeth was serving them Pimm’s. It was four o’clock and Marius felt that suffusion of irritated desire appropriate to the hour. His eyes met the girl’s. He didn’t need them to say anything. Elspeth had said it all for him. Always her mistake, to suppose she could discommend him as a bounder. All she did was pique the curiosity of the women she hoped to deter. For three days Marius held the girl in his eyes and let Elspeth do the talking.

‘He’s a bit of a poet himself, you know, mon mari Marius. And a potter when the verses stick. Never seen a poem or a pot come out, though, despite his all-night vigils là .’ She pointed to the wooden shed which Marius had built, his bolt-hole from the trials of being a younger man manacled to an older woman grown desperate with insecurity.

‘Do you work there every night?’ Arwen asked.

‘He does something there every night,’ Elspeth went on. ‘Would you call it work, Marius? Or do you go there just to imagine being out in the blackness with the foxes?’

Marius held Arwen’s eyes in his.

On the third night of her stay, Arwen crept out into the garden and knocked on the shed. Marius opened the door. She put her mouth up to his and clawed at his neck.

‘What’s this?’ Marius asked.

‘You know what this is. Can I come in?’

‘I like you at the door,’ he said. ‘The eternal visitor.’

‘What does that mean?’

He mumbled something to himself then turned her around so that she could lean back into him. He took her weight and breathed in the fragrance of her hair. She relaxed against him, sighing. He put his hands under her jumper and held her breasts. She was just the smallest bit frightened, so tight was his grip on her. Not so much frightened of his strength but of what felt like sarcasm, if sarcasm is something a man can express in the way he holds your breasts.

‘Smell the night,’ he said. ‘If you look hard you will at last make out the outline of the hills.’

‘So beautiful,’ she crooned.

‘Beautiful? It’s death out here.’

Then he pushed her back into the garden and closed the door of his shed.

How do I know what I know about Marius? One: I used my eyes. Two: I used my intuition (a masochist is not the inverse of a sadist but he knows him as a fly knows a spider). Three: Marisa told me.

There will be some who wonder why, over time, Marisa chose to tell me so much of what Marius told her. My question is more fundamental: what did Marius himself intend by telling her so much?

Her destabilisation, is my answer.

Love has strange ways of showing itself. Some lovers piss in each other’s mouths. A wife scalds her husband’s genitals with boiling wax; a husband arranges for a stranger in Marquis de Sade breeches to push a riding crop into his wife’s vagina in a public place. These needn’t always be, but often are, expressions of sincere devotion.

Your true sadist works in quiet and employs none of the clumping machinery of cruelty — his site of operation the mind, not the body.

Hence the mental unquiet I detected in Marisa.

But this was only a theory. It was also possible that Marisa was unhappy because she and Marius were so in love that neither of them knew what to do about it.

‘Is everything all right?’ I finally summoned up the courage to ask Marisa, a few weeks into her depression, if a depression it was.