Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

In fear of himself, however, he was not so productive. On his desk he kept a lined notebook which he’d bought when he was a student nearly twenty years before. In this he had intended to write an English version of Baudelaire’s spleen-fuelled prowlings around late-night Paris. He had the title. Four o’clock . That was the hour that excited Marius. Never mind midnight. Midnight was obvious. If the twenty-four-hour day marked nothing but the fluctuations of our desires, four o’clock was, for him, the hairspring hour. Once upon a time it had affected him like a transfusion of vital fluids. He walked the streets and felt the oscillation between day and evening as a change in the temperature of his own body. He heard his blood heat. Now he merely observed it through his window above the button shop. Four o’clock in the city — the shop assistants looking at their watches; the waiters, with that violence of gesture peculiar to waiters, throwing their cigarette stubs into the street and laying out clean tablecloths; barmen polishing glasses and looking at their reflections in the bowls; men and women on the streets quickening their pace, their minds elsewhere, heading home to change, pausing only to buy flowers, chocolate, wine, lingerie — as though the whole city were a lover thinking about its date, but a date which, for the cycle of expectation and disappointment to begin again, had to end unsatisfactorily.

His bed was narrow and uncomfortable, like a monk’s. It had been the fourth-best guest bed in his previous life. But what did he need now? He wouldn’t have admitted it was a penitential bed; it was narrow because that was all his new space allowed. But the discomfort served a purpose. His bed was for reading in only; he would not be bringing back any woman to sleep in it.

Other than to check the currency markets in the newspapers — and no other item in the newspapers engaged his interest, everything was predictable — he had nothing to do with the time at his disposal. No work. No function. On a good day the little money he had made selling a house he’d inherited made a little more. On a bad day he was brought to the point of having to decide again whether to keep it in dollars or in yen.

Once in a blue moon, when the money markets turned against him and he was able to summon the will to get out of bed, he sold Taiwanese copies of old masters on the railings outside Hyde Park. He knew a man who knew a man who knew how you could lay hands both on the space and the paintings to fill it. A pastiche of Michelangelo or Gainsborough slapped together in five minutes on an island off China appealed to Marius’s sense of the ridiculous. It made a mockery of meaning. Nothing came from anywhere or had value.

Otherwise, he had no occupation. He had behaved as badly to his career, such as it might have been — teacher, critic, man of letters, chronicler of the daylit city turning into night — as to the woman he’d once loved. Because abandonment becomes a habit, he had left it to die as well.

What had caused this change in Marius’s circumstances is simply told. Elspeth had died and he had not been with her. You can not be with someone when they die as a matter of accident or choice. Marius had not been with Elspeth as a matter of choice.

It had been evident at the professor’s funeral that relations were not as they should have been between a couple who had run away for love — Elspeth to be with Marius every hour God granted, never to miss a moment’s looking into his face or lying alongside his body; Marius, convinced her beauty would continue to enrapture him, making the wildest protestations of devotion and promising to adore her forever. It’s possible Marius had not liked seeing her shedding tears over her ex-husband. Some people are jealous of the dead. It’s also possible he was troubled by retrospective misgivings, whether of the ‘I’ve been a bastard’ sort, or ‘I’ve been a fool’. Whatever the explanation, I had watched him with my own eyes behave abominably to the poor woman, tormenting her with philandering and coldness at a time when it was nothing short of a solemn duty to let her grieve and reprove herself in peace.

If things had been bad before the funeral they deteriorated quickly after it. Who knows, perhaps the death of the professor stripped Elspeth of what was left of her allure. It’s inconceivable that Elspeth would not have charged Marius throughout their years together with falling for her only because she belonged to another, older, wiser man. And now, appalled and frozen, Marius would have wondered whether she was right.

Though the disparity in their years had moved and excited him at first — just as the theft of her had excited him at first — it had little by little been losing its fascination until at last he had to admit to himself that he could not bear, for her sake no less than his, to watch her age. Accordingly, though it must be said only after much pilgrimage of the soul and body (of which his removal of what was left of him to Marylebone was the final stage), he spared her the distress of his suffering and left her, to die with dignity, on her own.

Finis .

That was three years before. How long he’d been in Marylebone since was anybody’s guess. He liked to keep his movements secret. It went with his cultivated air of accidentality. A Conrad of the Marylebone Archipelago. But he couldn’t have been kicking about for very long or I would surely, as a conscientious not to say compulsive looker-out for erotic opportunity — not for myself; I am speaking maritally — have eyed him sooner.

Wherever he’d got to after Elspeth’s death he’d been living as one of the dead himself, growing a moustache to keep the world at bay, communicating from his great height with almost no one, the few words he spoke now — to the staff at the button shop below him, to the newsagent, to anyone who bothered him at a pavement café, as I was to make a habit of doing until I was sure of him — inaudible behind his moustache.

‘Barely a word of it,’ was Andrew’s answer, when I enquired whether he’d been able to hear anything Marius had asked him. ‘But then he was never that easy to understand at university.’

An oblique man even before he had reason not to look life directly in the face, Marius, in his disgrace, was in danger of speaking a language spoken only by himself.

I the same. Though I claim universality for my condition I cannot pretend I know many people who find the words for it which I do. Except at the outer reaches of pornography, in the phantasmagoric chat rooms where the deranged whisper to the deranged, what I do is not talked about. So that was each of us speaking a language spoken only by ourselves. On which basis I believed we could converse. Or at least do verbal business.

He would, I was certain, be appalled by my language once he got to hear it. But I didn’t mind that. I wanted to appal him.

No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else — that sort of language. No husband is ever happy — truly, genitally happy, happy at the very heart of himself as a husband — until he has proof positive that another man is fucking her.

To say I kept Marius under surveillance aggrandises somewhat my efforts to become familiar with the patterns of his existence. There wasn’t, when all was said and done, that much to surveil. He was in most of the time, trying to finish the book he’d never started. But thanks to conscientious staff, and domestic arrangements that can best be described as plastic, I had time on my hands and was sometimes able to catch him when he did venture out. Once or twice I saw him circling Manchester Square, as though unable to decide whether to brave the Wallace Collection. What kept him out I didn’t know. Paintings, I discovered later. Paintings reminded him of Elspeth. Elspeth loved paintings. Loved them too much for Marius’s temper. He met paintings eye to eye, squabbled with them, felt their power and wrestled with it — he didn’t ‘love’ them. Music ditto. He listened, mused, resisted and gave in only after a struggle — he didn’t ‘love’. Which was presumably why I saw him loitering outside the Wigmore Hall in the same spirit. Elspeth died for music, too.