Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Was it a test? Was it a trial of my resolution? Exert your will, Felix. Exert it over mine. If it was a test, I failed it. What she asked me to do I did. Passive. The old failing. A passive husband when what she needed was an active one.

The only thing I took like a man was my punishment.

I told her of course that I loved her and missed her. That I would never forgive myself for not being by her when she needed me. She told me not to reproach myself with that. The decision was hers. And yes, she loved me. But she never said she missed me. Which I took to mean she didn’t.

‘How long are you going to insist on this?’ I asked her.

‘Don’t ask me that.’

‘Don’t ask you because you don’t know, or don’t ask you because you think I will not be able to bear the answer?’

‘Don’t ask.’

I wondered if it was up to me to tell her Marius had upped sticks and returned to Shropshire, scene of the most miserable time of his life. But I had to work on the assumption that she knew.

‘Heard from anyone else?’ I said inconsequentially.

But she wasn’t going to be fooled by that. There was silence in the course of which I fancied she was holding the phone away from her, letting its toxins fall where they could do no harm to her already poisoned body. ‘This,’ she said after a moment or two, ‘is why I can’t consider coming home.’

I couldn’t change — that was why she wasn’t coming back to me. I was stuck in who I was. Marius, I believed, was stuck in four o’clock, and I, Marisa believed, was stuck in Marius. I wasn’t but I could see it looked that way. I was just stuck in myself, and myself needed a Marius, which was not quite the same thing.

I wished I could have cried ‘I’ll change, Marisa’ and meant it. But a pervert worth his salt knows that that’s where his perversion really lies — not in chasing underage schoolgirls or inviting other men to have congress with his wife and give her babies, preferably black, but in his unchangingness. Not in the menace posed by his obsession, but in its monotony.

‘I might as well be a hermit, Marisa,’ I told her, ‘if I can’t see you. Or at least know how soon I can start looking forward to seeing you.’

‘You wouldn’t enjoy seeing me right now. You wouldn’t cope. I can’t imagine how you’ll cope with being a hermit either. You enjoy talk too much.’

‘Then ring me up and talk to me.’

‘No, Felix. You’ll have to try to do without. You’ll fail, but you’ll have to try.’

‘Then I’ll show you you’re wrong,’ I said.

And I did. I locked myself away and exchanged words with no one.

Dulcie excepted. She came over to the house a couple of times a week with mail.

‘I’m worried,’ she said.

‘For the business or for me?’

‘Both. But mainly you.’

‘Don’t. I’m serving out my time.’

‘Until when?’

‘Don’t ask.’

She invited me over to dinner but I refused. ‘I don’t want to have to talk,’ I said.

Once only I accepted one of her suggestions. A Sunday Schubert sherry morning at the Wigmore Hall. Not lieder. I couldn’t have risked that in a public place. Just wordless chamber music. She had a ticket for me. ‘Are you going?’ I asked. She was. ‘Then if you see me don’t speak to me. I’ve stopped conversing.’

I’d stopped listening to music as well. And reading. Art is good for softening a hard heart, but when you are already pulp, art is not what you need. Silence is what you need. A wordless dark. .

So probably not a smart move, risking Schubert’s String Quintet in C, even if there were no words. One too many cellos in it for a man reduced as I was. I sat with my head in my hands and wept through every movement. Dulcie, I recalled, had seen Marisa and Marius both tearful in this very room. The thought of which only made me weep the more. I wept with jealousy, because it is unbearable to imagine your wife weeping for another man, far more unbearable than imagining him enjoying every of inch of her sweet body. But I wept with plain old grief still more. The grief that remains when jealousy has no more flesh to feed on.

I did not intend to stay for sherry afterwards. But on the way out I caught sight of Dulcie, Lionel and I assumed the electrician, queuing for theirs. It’s possible I would not have recognised them had they not given off something I recognised. Euphoria, if I must give it a name.

Anyone else observing them would have said the electrician was the husband and Lionel was the friend, but I knew what to look for. No ‘friend’ hovers in quite the way Lionel did. No friend pays such careful attention to the glances that pass between the married couple, the smallestbodily pressures they exchange, no friend could tell you the temperature of the air that passes to and fro between their faces. Lionel hung back and watched, and I hung back and watched Lionel. I couldn’t say whether Dulcie had her chain around her ankle because she was wearing black boots with her sensible woollen coat, but she was a hot wife in actuality now and didn’t need the symbolism. She was laughing and looked loved. When the electrician handed her her sherry she raised it as in a toast. Not to anyone in particular. To the world.

The electrician must have been a pleasant surprise to her when she met him because he had the air of a gentleman farmer, slightly ruddy, enthusiastic, loyal like his dogs. Between the men there appeared to be no tensions. They were as two friends out enjoying a picnic. Dulcie was the picnic. And other than helping himself to the contents of the hamper first, the electrician insisted on no privileges that were denied to Lionel. If Lionel hung back, that was up to Lionel.

On Lionel there was that milky wash of defencelessness which people had noticed on me in those early days when I lived not knowing what Marisa might do. You didn’t expect to see so plain a man as Lionel transfigured, but there was no other word for it: the light of angelic visitation was upon him, he had passed from man to vapour, freed of his will he floated around Dulcie and her lover like a spirit guiding them from another dimension. I watched them lose themselves among the throng of music lovers, oblivious to them all.

They did not, I think notice me. Had they done so they would have thought they’d seen a ghost.

TWO YEARS WENT BY. I DID NOT IN THAT TIME SEE MARISA. SHE CALLED me occasionally, but each call was more painful than the last. Not least as we realised we were growing accustomed to our estrangement. One day we would simply accept that we would never set eyes on each other again.

‘Do you know what I dread most?’ I said once. ‘That it’s so long since I’ve seen you that should I pass you in the street I won’t recognise you.’

‘You won’t,’ she said.

‘Won’t pass you in the street?’

‘Won’t recognise me.’

She went into hospital on two further occasions. I begged her to allow me to visit but she begged me not to. And her beg was stronger and more just than mine.

OKish , she texted me both times. Ta for flowers .

But she wouldn’t answer any of my questions about how well she really was because she insisted I couldn’t cope with knowing.

Tell me, tell me . . But she wouldn’t tell me anything.

I just knew that she was tired. You can hear tiredness and I heard Marisa’s.

It rained at the funeral. A sunken, sodden, better to be dead than alive in morning. Whether a wet funeral is preferable to a warm funeral I’ve never been able to decide. For the dead, sun is crueller by far than rain, but for the mourners you could argue either way, depending on what hopes for a new life they entertain.