Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

There are some things you know you must postpone. At least in the presence of death. However bewildering or sensational, they are not for now, they are for later. And maybe not even for then. So we walked, and I was glad to.

I had always loved having her on my arm. I liked bearing her weight, the husbandly sensation of supporting her. This was at odds sometimes with the pleasure I took in watching her from a distance, whether approaching or receding. It would have pleased me, for example, to see another man bearing her weight, enjoying the husbandly sensation of supporting her, if somehow she could still have hung on to me as well. The old, unsolvable conundrum — how to be with her and not with her, how to be me and someone else.

Now become another unsolvable conundrum, left to me to mull over unanswered in the lonely hours ahead: had that someone else been there at all, ever really been with Marisa in all the senses that mattered to me?

The rain began to fall more heavily. As though to show it mattered not a jot to him, a fat sleek crow flew out of the trees and crossed our path, bursting with greedy life, uncaring of the rain which slid from his body. I put up an umbrella, careful of Marisa, gently pulling her close to me, but ignorant of what I was supporting, of how she really was, sure only that I was not to ask.

‘Come home,’ I said again, feeling her weight on my arm.

‘And do what?’

We walked on, picking our way between the rows of long-buried bones.Occasionally we stopped to read an inscription. Prose, poetry, a line of Bible, a scrap of doggerel — what difference? Wouldn’t that have been Marius’s thought as, presumably upon these very stones, he helped himself to girls below the age of lawful taking? What difference? I longed to ask Marisa her opinion, whether she thought the what difference question had presented itself to him just once too often on the Beacons, before he lay down in the damp and closed his eyes — or before he left his flat above the button shop come to that, before he left her , that’s if he’d ever been with her — but I knew that that too I couldn’t ask.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well what?’

‘You haven’t answered me. Come home and do what?’

And terrible to say I was unable to give her an answer, because I didn’t have one.