The Act of Love (29 page)

He was a diminutive Roman with courtly manners and a kind, upsetting, crestfallen smile. I had always thought of him as a vigorous man, muscular in a compact way and delicately browned by the sun. But after the death of his wife the strength seemed to leave his body. He turned yellow.

I explained all this to the manager of Vico’s, another old friend, adding that I thought Ernesto would recover his spirits after a while in their employment, that he wasn’t looking for much money anyway, and would be happy just to go around pouring the San Pellegrino. I wasn’t suggesting him as a replacement for Rafaele, simply a body who was willing to start at the bottom while everybody else moved up.

In fact, Ernesto never did get much beyond pouring the San Pellegrino, but he was grateful to me for the change of scenery. A gratitude on which I did not scruple to capitalise. To Ernesto, as a way of repaying the favour I had done him, I gave the Iago task of telling me what I was unable to see with my own eyes.

I didn’t spare him. I’d meet him after he ’d finished in the restaurant, order a taxi to take him home, and travel with him, sometimes keeping the taxi waiting an hour or more outside his wife-vacated house in Maida
Vale while I squeezed out the last drop of information. Initially his answers to my questions were the same: he had seen nothing really, he had only poured them water, his observations were not worth anything; but eventually he learned that his evasions hurt me more than his confidences. It’s possible he made things up. It’s possible Marisa wasn’t even in the restaurant on some of the evenings he told me he had seen her holding hands across the table with a man who wasn’t me. None of this mattered. It was an impression I was after in those early days. A sense of them, of how they were perceived as a couple, by a man who had been near them, leaned across them, refilled their glasses, and who therefore bore the warm impress of them on his person.

Had Mephistopheles himself appeared and offered me the opportunity to be at their table with them while they canoodled – not as an invisible presence but as an unwanted and ignored third party, a no one before whom they felt free to kiss without compunction – I’d have dared damnation for it. But in the absence of such a deal – and neither Marisa nor Marius was going to invite me to break bread with them of their own accord – I had to turn Ernesto into my eyes and ears and even lungs.

‘Breathe them in,’ I told him once, ‘and then hold your breath until you can breathe them out again on me.’

‘Hold my breath all night?’

‘If you have to.’

He laughed his shrunken yellow laugh, all his Roman music gone. ‘Then it will be my dying breath.’

‘With luck it will be mine as well,’ I said.

In the dark of the taxi I could tell that he was scrutinising me keenly. ‘I thought you liked this.’

‘I do. So tell me how it went tonight . . .’

No matter how forthcoming he was I always had to drag him back a stage. Between the restaurant and the bed there are, as the least curious men understand, questions to be asked. But between the water and the glass, between the bread and the buttering of it, between the menu and the ordering, is a host of dramatic detail not an item of which is to be
forgone if you are me. Yes, Ernesto, but
before
she leaned forward to kiss him on the mouth, what had they said, had he asked for the kiss or did she give it gratis, had their conversation up until that point been animated, and who had done most of the talking, my wife or her lover, and would you have known from the way they inclined to each other, from the way they sat, that they were lovers, was there a consciousness of wrongdoing upon them, a self-conscious defying of the conventions, would you say, or a complete indifference to them, and of the two who looked the more delighted to see the other, did they arrive together or was one there first, which one, my wife or her lover, and did they kiss on meeting, a Continental cheek-on-cheek kiss, or French, mouth to mouth, and whose tongue . . .

Poor Ernesto. I had made him my Gyges as well as my Iago. By getting him to watch Marisa’s every move I was showing her off to him, displaying her even more nakedly than Candaules had displayed his wife, because the Queen of Lydia, when all was said and done, had only disrobed for bed, whereas Marisa was Ernesto’s to behold in flagrante delicto. But that was not all. As an ever-wakeful witness to the progress of Marisa’s infidelity, he had become a sort of party to it, a parallel lover almost, privy to secrets he knew more about than I did; but further, he had become a parallel cuckold as well. Grown interested in Marisa at my instigation, grown to love her for all I knew, he had, like me, to suffer the torture of playing second fiddle to Marius. So when I asked him to open Marisa’s mouth and describe –
lentamente
, Ernesto,
e con espressione
– the manner in which Marius slid his tongue into it, I was quite possibly putting him through agonies as unendurable as my own.

And at last he could endure them no longer. After three or four weeks of my interrogations he broke down.

‘What you are asking I cannot any longer agree to,’ he said before the taxi had come to a standstill outside his house.

I ordered the taxi driver to take us back to Marylebone. A look of weary pleading crossed Ernesto’s face. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to ask you more questions. I know they weren’t there this evening anyway. Just come in and have a drink with me.’

Marisa was away. Sh e’d told me she was meeting friends in the country – someone’s birthday party, someone she had once worked with in the Samaritans – but I decided they were Marius’s friends, hard as it was to imagine him having any. He had taken her to the Welsh Marches, I guessed. He was showing her off to people who remembered him when he was last there driving buses. Now the conqueror had returned, with another man’s wife on his arm.

You could smell Marisa’s absence. It was maudlin of me to let the house descend into melancholy the second she left it, to keep the lights dim, not to buy fresh flowers, not to wash up, but it was the upright version of the subspace into which I descended once there was no one left to talk to, no more information to screw out of anybody, just the silence of the house and her not in and I lying on our bed hearing her clothes coming off though she might have been a hundred miles away and the soft viscid sound for which there is no name of the porches of her body opening.

That’s if her body had yet opened for Marius.

Rather than frighten Ernesto by taking him upstairs – who knows, he might have thought I had led him home in the spirit of Victor Gowan, to see my wife arranged indecently for his pleasure – I sat him down at the kitchen table and poured him wine. He asked for coffee. I made him coffee.

‘It’s hard to explain,’ I began, but he held his hand up.

‘It isn’t hard to explain,’ he said. ‘I understand. Every man has some of these feelings. We deal with them differently. My wife had an affair soon after we married. With someone I knew. I wanted to kill her and to kill him. But one day he came to see me and cried in my arms. I cried too. Afterwards he went away and I was sorry for my wife. Some days I wanted to ask her why, what she had seen in him that she hadn’t seen in me, but always I thought it would be cruel to her to ask. Her feelings were her feelings. They weren’t to do with me.’

I listened quietly. ‘You think I am being cruel to Marisa?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘That’s not to do with me either. The person you are being cruel to is me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘It is not easy for me. I am in mourning. I will be in mourning for the rest of my life. You have a wife. Why you are allowing or encouraging her to do this to you I do not understand. That’s your business. But if she dies tomorrow you’ll be sorry what you did. Anyway, I can’t help you any more. I don’t want these sexual feelings for myself. To you they are a kind of luxury. I cannot afford.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said a second time. ‘I won’t ask any questions of you again.’

There followed a precarious period for me. Denied questions, I grew restive. If you don’t ask questions you don’t get answers, and where was the point of Marius and Marisa – for
me
– if my wondering about them went unconfided and unconfirmed?

There was too much I didn’t know. For example, to start from the bottom, had they or hadn’t they? Ask that of another pair spending as much time together as they were and they’d laugh lasciviously in your face. But Marius and Marisa had already taken an eternity to get this far. In their own way they were as hooked on suspense as I was. And at least one of them was a congenital holder-back. So it was entirely possible that as yet, no, they hadn’t; that they were savouring each other still, saving themselves so that when at last they did it would be as the collision of planets.

But the not knowing was wrecking my nerves.

In the days before Marius, when Marisa wounded me with wounding doubt, there had always been scraps of intimated wrongdoing for me to chew on. She confided enigmatic thoughts to her diary, left ambiguously unfinished letters to her half-sisters lying around unfolded, allowed her expression to give away her feelings, spoke overexcitedly on the phone to callers I did not know. Now her diary was locked away, her eyes were always turned from mine and her phone had stopped ringing. Meaning, presumably, it was serious.

Leaving me with the question: How serious?

As for Marius, where once I had never let him out of my sight, delighting in apprehending him and ruining his four o’clock, now that he was squiring my wife around Marylebone I felt I had to keep out of his way. I still watched him, but from a greater distance. No more standing behind him at the cheese counter. No more sharing tin tables on the High Street. I didn’t want him making connections if he saw me, nor did I want anything to happen that would cause Marisa to suspect we were acquainted. Though I longed to dine with them at Vico’s and have them not notice I was there, it was essential they didn’t notice I was there in actuality. Paradoxically, the very measure of my success was the care I had to take not to be seen enjoying it.

Thus it was as it always must be in a life dedicated to the twisted pleasures: with every gain I made there was a falling back.

Until at last I forced the issue. Not a word I associate with myself, force. But force was what I used.

‘Samaritans, can I help you?’

The voice was gentle but not unctuous. And not Marisa’s.

I had hoped for her but not expected her. You can’t just dial up a Samaritan of your choice. You can’t say, ‘Put me through to Marisa, please.’ You take your chance even if you’re a regular. Who you get is who you get.

I’d discussed this with Marisa long ago, not knowing I’d have use for the information.

‘So what happens,’ I’d asked, ‘if someone wants to talk to you and you alone?’

‘They can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because relationships are frowned on. Not always, but usually if they want a particular person it’s because they want the wrong sort of intimacy.’

‘What’s the right sort of intimacy?’

‘When you don’t hear heavy breathing at the other end.’

‘But if they’re not nutters or heavy-breathers, they can’t ever get the same Samaritan twice?’

‘I wouldn’t say “not ever”. It varies. But if you ring often enough you’ll strike lucky eventually.’

‘A bit of a lottery if you’ve got a gun in your mouth.’

‘Mainly they don’t have guns in their mouths, Felix.’

As did not I the day I rang. Though that all depends on what you mean by a gun in your mouth.

‘I hope you can help me,’ I said in answer to the impersonal greeting. ‘I think my wife ’s having an affair.’

‘What makes you think that?’ the voice enquired, a trifle bored.

I could have put the phone down when it wasn’t Marisa who answered, but I’d have felt pusillanimous. On the other hand I didn’t want to pass for a heavy-breather either.
I fear my wife’s having an affair, what colour
brassiere are you wearing?
So I tried to sound like a perfectly normal man worrying about his wife ’s suspected infidelity, though it wasn’t easy, for me, imagining what a perfectly normal man worrying about his wife ’s suspected infidelity sounded like.

‘The usual signs,’ I said, deciding I could do worse than try to sound like Marisa’s first victim, Freddy – Radio Three, hurt, cultured, marginalised. ‘She comes home at odd hours. The person I suspect, who is my best friend, has suddenly stopped joking with me. It’s always the best friend, isn’t it? Those are the thanks you get.’

‘Have you spoken to your wife about this?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Don’t you think you should? People are often wrong in their suspicions.’

‘I never thought of that,’ I said, seeing a quick way out. ‘I’ll talk to her when she comes home this evening. Thank you for your advice. You’ve been very helpful.’ And I rang off.

This happened four or five times, with me thanking them sooner and sooner on each occasion. Once, when I thought I was back talking to the
person I’d talked to first, I said, ‘I just rang to let you know she hasn’t been home yet,’ and rang off again.