Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Here he is, your four o’clock lover, he would have said, looking at his watch as she let him into the house, her sombre face lightening on seeing him as it had once lightened on seeing me — four o’clock, the hairspring handover hour, neither day nor night, four o’clock when a man of dreams and cynicism has no choice but to imagine himself in some other place. And of course, of course, the lovemaking would have been out of this world, sad, hectic, final, as the butterfly beat its wings for the last time in the moment before the hand of death closed over it.

Well he wasn’t the only one who heard the last act in the overture.

‘Tango with me, Marisa,’ I said.‘Tango with me in the park.’

‘Tango with you? You hate the tango.’

‘Only because I can’t do it. Teach me.’

‘What’s this about?’

‘Just do it for me.’

‘I’m out of practice.’

‘I’m out of skill.’

‘When is it?’

‘This Sunday.’

‘This Sunday! God, has it come around already?’

‘Time flies when you’re having fun, Marisa.’

She looked uneasy. ‘We were planning to be out.’

We, we, we.

‘Cancel it,’ I said. ‘Cancel it just this once, for me. You know you love dancing in the park. And the weather promises well.’

Marius, of course, was not a dancer. Too rational and nihilistic to be a dancer. You couldn’t make a dance fall in love with you and then bruise its eyes. And he was not a park man, either. Parks reminded him of the Welsh Marches and the years he wasted there watching Elspeth fall to dust. So I felt confident he and Marisa were not planning to tango in Regent’s Park together.

‘Can I come back to you on this?’

‘No. Just put off whatever else you were meant to be doing. I rarely ask anything of this sort of you, Marisa. You are not looking yourself. You need a dance.’

‘You are not looking yourself, either,’ she said. Kindly, I thought.

‘You’re right, I’m not. I’m feeling very much not myself. I need to

dance with you.’

This time a long stare from her. Once upon a time a stare of that intensity would have propelled us into an embrace.

‘OK, Felix,’ she said.

This left me two days to sort out what needed sorting.

I thought immediately of Ernesto. No more questions, we’d agreed. But not necessarily no more favours. I didn’t want to risk talking to him in Vico’s in case Marisa and Marius were there, Marisa consoling Marius for the broken arrangement with a lobster linguini, the dish Vico’s did better than any other restaurant in London, and whatever champagne the pair of them preferred. (Jacquesson Extra Brut 1996 — I knew which champagne the pair of them preferred.) So I took a cab to Maida Vale and waited outside his house for him to drag himself back on the Tube.

He didn’t look particularly pleased to see me, but invited me inside. The house echoed to our voices. A house without a woman in it echoes.

There were plastic flowers on the hall table, undusted. A half-bottle of wine, not quite finished, was on the mantelpiece. A wedding photograph showed them laughing in front of a painted backdrop of a ship. Off on their great journey.

He was reluctant to help at first, fearing I was going to expose him to further sexual distress.

‘Nothing is required of you,’ I said, ‘other than that you go over to this address tomorrow morning — it must be before ten when I know he’s at home — and give him the book. No spying. No questions. Nothing. You just ring his bell, wait for him to come down the stairs and hand it over. He’s bound to ask who it’s from, so you tell him someone who approached you in Vico’s. Say that the someone was anxious he received it. But don’t under any circumstances mention my name, though I doubt he knows it. He might recognise you from the restaurant, he might not. He doesn’t look at people. But if he does it’s not a problem. In fact better that he does. It will lend conviction to your story about where the book came from. If he wants to know how you got his address, the person sending him the book gave it to you. If he invites you up, which he won’t, refuse. You don’t want to be interrogated. All I ask is that you put it in his hands, don’t let him return it to you, and if he throws it at you and shuts his door, that you ring his bell again until he answers. And make sure the envelope doesn’t fall out. The envelope contains important matter.’

‘What if he’s out?’

‘At that time he is never out. He writes, or makes a gesture towards writing, until midday. Not a word published or ever likely to see the light of day, but that’s what he does. Religiously. I assume you are a Catholic, Ernesto. Well Marius isn’t, but this is how he expiates his sins.’

‘And how do you expiate yours, Mr Quinn?’

‘I give a book, Ernesto.’

The book I was giving Marius I had bought some months ago, not knowing at the time when or for what reason I would present it. The Rough Guide to West Africa . Maybe he would take the hint and go there. That’s a joke. I didn’t want him out of the country quite yet. I inscribed it, as I always like to inscribe a book, though this time with a message I had not employed before. It would, however, be familiar to Marius on several counts. It went — ‘There is no pleasure sweeter than surprising a man by giving him more than he had hoped for.’ And was signed in initials he would not be able to distinguish. The surprise — assuming the book itself was not surprise enough — was contained in the long white envelope I had slipped inside its pages. It contained a letter advising him that the woman to whom he had formed an intense attachment and who he had reason to believe was no less attached to him, had — even now, now, very now — another lover coterminous with him. It was in order to be with this second lover that she had, at late notice, put off their Sunday date. If his curiosity extended to such a thing, he could find the two of them in Regent’s Park that same Sunday afternoon — why not say four o’clock? — dancing, for all the world to see, that dance of port prostitutes, brothels, low dives and lechery: the tango.

And wasn’t signed.

As though he’d be in the slightest doubt who’d sent it.

I gave myself a thirty per cent chance of success. First Ernesto had to get the book to Marius without a hitch. Had to deliver it to the right address, at the right time, and do and say exactly as I’d told him. Then Marius had to put himself to the bother of opening it, and go looking for an inscription, which there was every reason to believe he wouldn’t, given that he’d know who sent it. Then he would have to admit, if only to himself, that he was sufficiently curious to read the contents of the envelope. How many opportunities were there here, between vicissitude and impulse, for him to throw the lot unopened in the bin? He had always made every effort to avoid me in person, why would he stay with me in print long enough for a poison that didn’t disguise its toxic properties to get into his system? Leave Marius’s opinion of me out of it — why would he trust anyone so transparently meaning to make mischief? A man cannot be straw to any wind that blows. We watch Othello and believe we would have acted differently. We owe trust to those we love. The smallest act of suspicion is a derogation of them. And a derogation of ourselves. And that’s before we put on false moustaches and go sniffing out their secrets in the park.

Now add to these considerations the fact of Marius being Marius. A man in whom aloofness was a moral principle. A man who took pride in being beyond surprise or disappointment. A man who had been able to go for weeks knowing Marisa had secreted something for him among the inkstands and escritoires of the Wallace Collection without attempting to find it, and who in all likelihood would never have gone looking for it at all but for the intervention of yours truly.