Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

There were few people there and of those I recognised only two or three. I held myself together remarkably well, I thought, for someone who’d been brimful of tears for two years. But then Marius had never exactly been dear to me.

He had died walking in the Brecon Beacons. He had lost his way and suffered a heart attack. He had been dead three days when he was found. That was the official version. His heart had never been sound, it seemed, and fatigue and exposure had done the rest. My own view, based on no evidence, was that he’d walked out one afternoon when there was less than usual to live for and willed himself to death. I had no doubt that on whatever day he did this, it would have been four o’clock, the light not yet spent, the wheels of evening just beginning to turn. The hour when men dream of being somewhere else.

Marisa was informed of the place and date of his funeral by a close friend she didn’t know he had but who knew of her. Marius, he explained, had been very fond of her. She had been his second and he said his last big adventure. Marisa then rang me.

‘Christ!’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

I meant Jesus Christ that he had died, but also Jesus Christ about everything else — Jesus Christ that he had died like that, Jesus Christ that he had become a walker, Jesus Christ that his heart had never been sound, Jesus Christ that he was to be buried in the same churchyard that held Elspeth and her husband. Whose idea was that, I wondered. Had Marius left a will expressing his desire to be buried close to them? There was much I wanted to ask Marisa, but accepted it was not my place to ask anything. Just as, for the same reason, I accepted it was not my place to ask how badly the news had affected her.

We fell silent with each other. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she said at last, ‘and in some ways I don’t think you should, but then again. .’

‘Then again what?’

‘Well it draws a line under something between us.’

‘I thought we ’d already drawn a line under something between us.’

‘Then don’t come.’

‘No, I’ll come.’

‘Good. But just one thing, Felix.’

‘Don’t come over and talk to you? Don’t act as if I know you? Don’t ask any questions?’

‘Don’t be shocked by how I look.’

We didn’t travel up to Shropshire together, though I knew the way to the churchyard. But I did warn her that the Wrekin heaved and advised her to take galoshes.

When I say I held myself together remarkably well I am referring only to my demeanour by the graveside. The moment I saw Marisa my legs gave way beneath me. I must have turned the colour of poor Marius.

She was standing with someone I took to be the old friend Marius had never mentioned, an unexpectedly red-faced man with a nautical expression. Who knew who Marius knew? She waved to me — a hesitant, fragile, fluttering gesture I was unable to read, almost like the action of someone troubled by summer flies, though there were no summer flies here. I couldn’t decipher its meaning — stay away, come here, meet me at four o’clock behind the headstones? I waved back. It was impossible to tell how she looked. She was wearing a long black coat, a black hat, a black veil. Did anyone wear a veil for funerals any more? Did anyone wear black even? Had Elspeth worn a veil at her husband’s funeral, I tried to remember. I thought not. But I recalled how like a fallen woman in a Victorian novel she had looked, conscious of an ancient and never to be repaired wrong, and Marisa, to my eye, appeared even more the mistress whom everyone in this superstitious place would obscurely blame for Marius’s death.

After it was all over, the dirt thrown in, the last dread word spoken, we made a halting move towards each other.

‘Some place to meet,’ I said.

What else was there to say? I couldn’t ask how hard this was for her. I couldn’t lower my voice and say My dear, I am so sorry.

‘Don’t look at me,’ she said.

I shook my head and smiled. ‘Marisa, for God’s sake. You are beautiful. You are always beautiful.’

But I was uncertain how to embrace her. I was afraid to take her in my arms. I didn’t know how much of her was left, where she was in pain, what part of her she didn’t want me to touch or didn’t want to be touched.

She lifted her veil and gave me her lips. Cold in the rain. Her face had changed, though I couldn’t quite explain to myself how. A little thinner, maybe. The grey beneath her eyes more pronounced, as though the tragedy which her face had always appeared to be anticipating was on her at last. That, I think, was the biggest shock — her being of her time now, no longer playing catch-up or saving herself for another day. She had taken possession of her life.

But perhaps this was exactly how she’d looked the last time I saw her and I hadn’t noticed. It was so long since I’d seen her.

‘Come home,’ I said.

She made a clicking noise in her throat. ‘You look well,’ she said. ‘

I look like a recluse.’

‘You do a bit. But it suits you.’ She took my arm. ‘Walk with me,’ she said.

I looked down at her feet. She had not taken my advice about sensible shoes and galoshes but wore black patent high heels instead. For which I would have cheered her had I dared. And asked her to raise her coat so I could see her legs.

‘You’ll sink into the mud in those,’ was all I could manage.

‘Then I’ll have to hold on to you.’ She squeezed my arm. ‘It’s nice to feel you again.’

‘Is it?’

‘Very.’

‘Then come home.’

‘Elspeth’s stone must be here somewhere,’ she said.

‘Do you want to look for it?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Apparently he wanted to be buried near her but there was no space.’

I said nothing.

‘You have strange loyalties, you men,’ she went on.

‘Do we?’

‘There is one thing I have always thought I would tell you, but maybe now I think I shouldn’t.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘I think I shouldn’t.’

‘Why shouldn’t you?’

‘It will spoil it for you.’

‘Spoil what?’

‘He never got over Elspeth, that’s all.’

‘ Marius never got over Elspeth?’

‘Never.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he wasn’t. . No, forget it.’

‘Wasn’t what, Marisa?’

‘This isn’t the place.’

‘Then where is the place?’

She paused as though to catch her breath. Did it hurt her, I wondered.

‘Felix, I told him better than he was.’

I turned to look at her. If I could have scraped her meaning off her soul I would have, however great the pain it caused her.

I remembered what Marius had said to me as he was leaving my house. ‘Words deceive.’

‘When you say better. .?’

‘Better, other. . I gave you the Marius you wanted.’

‘ I wanted!’

‘I told you this would spoil it. Leave it, Felix. Let it lie. Let him lie.’

But she hadn’t left it. Whatever the ‘it’ was, she hadn’t wanted it to lie unspoiled.

‘What are we talking here, Marisa,’ I persisted, ‘hyperbole or invention? Are you telling me we ’ve buried a man who never lived?’

‘In a sense that’s what I’m telling you, yes.’

‘In a sense? So who was that who rang our doorbell three times a week? Who shared your bed, Marisa?’

She shook her head and sighed. ‘Ah, Felix, Felix, you are impossible. Foolish of me ever to have worried. No one can ever spoil it for you, can they? I think I probably envy you that. It’s a gift I don’t have. Or if I had it, I don’t have it now. Come on, it’s getting wetter. Let’s walk.’