The Act of Love (34 page)

Felix had of course – because he could not keep his nose out of any of her things – read Marisa’s diary entry relating to the fetish club she’d been taken to in Walthamstow. The event was long ago, a betrayal of Freddy not of him, but he lived it as in present time and imagined taking himself to such a place – preferably not in Walthamstow – and meeting Marisa there, on the night she was supposed to be with the Samaritans, being felt up by strangers.

Other than that, a fetish club held no interest for him. He did not like dressing up and was not in need of a public whipping. Marisa’s sleeping with Marius was flagellation of the heart enough. But she had dismissed him from her sight. Go get your sting elsewhere, she’d told him. In peevish response to which – to pay her back and hurt himself still more – he would allow some other woman to do her worst with him, since his wife had done her all.

He didn’t know how to go about finding a fetish club but remembered seeing shops that advertised them while eating Indian street food with Marisa in Camden Lock. Thereafter it was easy. He collected fistfuls of flyers from a couple of those shops and made some discreet enquiries as to dress. He owned no leather shorts or chain-mail vests and was too embarrassed to try any on, but, yes, if that was all he had, a frilly Hamlet shirt and evening suit would do as well, depending of course on the signal he meant to send. A frilly Hamlet shirt and evening suit, he learned, might well be considered masterful. He flushed a little. Not on me they won’t, he thought.

He found a club that promised more wildness than he believed he could handle, but at least it was in the City and therefore, he reasoned, likely to be classless and clean. In the taxi there he was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to be taking Marius with him – a Virgil to his Dante, escorting him around an underworld he knew nothing of. Get a load of this, Marius, you narcissistic little cuckoldmaker. Where are your underage Shropshire schoolgirls now?

Queer that he felt a denizen of the scene already, though all he’d done was pick up a flyer.

A bouncer made him open his coat to show he wasn’t wearing street clothes, though they felt like street clothes to Felix. Behind a plastic-coated card table a woman in a nautical hat and with both her breasts exposed like party balloons looked surprised to see him, took his money and told him he was the first.

‘The first what?’ he asked.

‘The first here.’

He consulted his watch irritably. It was eleven o’clock, for God’s sake. In the action he saw what a toff he must have looked in his Burlington Bertie evening wear, amazed to discover that life had still not got going in some parts of town a full half-hour after the theatres had emptied in his.

‘Shall I go away and come back, then?’ he asked.

‘Up to you,’ she said. ‘The bar’s open. But it won’t start to fill up until well after midnight.’

‘Do I get a passout?’

‘I’ll recognise you,’ the bouncer promised.

For an hour, he wandered the warren of streets that enclosed the Bank of England, cutely named to please Americans – Change Alley, St Swithin’s Lane, Throgmorton Street, Austin Friars, King’s Arms Yard – then stopped to buy himself a hamburger. Only unsavoury people were about. Which made him angry with Marisa. And her fucking lover. He read the headlines in the morning papers – LEADING
LONDON BOOKSELLER MURDERED WHILE VACATING HOUSE FOR WIFE’S SEXY ROMP
WITH UNEMPLOYED TOYBOY. He was flattering himself, he realised. Who’d care he was a bookseller? KINKY HUSBAND MURDERED, more like. KINKY CUCKOLD HUSBAND. In which event the consensus of opinion would be against him. Kinky cuckold husbands only get what they deserve.

Back at the club the bouncer asked him to open his coat.

‘You promised you’d remember me,’ he reminded him.

‘I do remember you. I just don’t remember what you were wearing.’

‘It’s getting going in there now,’ the woman with the balloon breasts said.

Felix pushed open a tattered red curtain and almost fell over a shaven-headed man with no clothes on – just a gold bar, like an elongated cufflink, threaded through the eye of his penis – in the act of stepping into a kilt. There was a cloakroom but no changing room. People transformed themselves from librarians and telephone engineers
into Egyptian goddesses and Nubian slaves wherever they could find a spare inch of space. Felix handed in his coat for which he was given a raffle ticket in return, straightened the frills on his shirt, and propelled himself – he’d been right to invoke Virgil and Dante in the taxi – into hell. Hell – no other word for it. He meant no criticism. There is a hell of the imagination that is simply a good time infinitely multiplied and unpoliced. And though these weren’t Felix’s good times, he felt a distant kinship with them, a fondness for the participants which was at one and the same time what an old man might feel for those learning a trade in which he’s grown wise, and a timid deviant’s admiration for perversions lived out to the full.

We think of Hogarth as the great painter of English debauch but only Bosch could have done justice to the sight that met his eyes – a Garden of Earthly Delights, no one vomiting or defecating, no one, in fact, behaving anything but civilly to everybody else, but otherwise that circus crush of flesh which we always imagine will presage or succeed the apocalypse, that grand carnival of the orifices which no English artist is capable of rendering for all the pride we take in our mastery of the grotesque.

Felix found room at the bar between a figure encased entirely in black rubber, with no means, that Felix could discern, to see or breathe through, and a man wearing one black and one white stocking under a dinner lady’s apron. Why, Felix wondered.

He nodded at both of them, bought a German beer, and watched. Essentially the club was one large room with a dance area in the middle, and several side annexes, some no bigger than cubicles, created by screens and curtains. You could find privacy if you wanted it, but no one wanted it. Why come out to hide yourself away? The dungeon was periodically the main centre of attention, the extremity of the enacted scene determining the level of excitement. Felix wasn’t sure at first what his rights to view were and stayed at the bar. The dance floor filled and emptied. Two transexuals, both modelled on ladies who took tea in the Brighton
Pavilion, circa 1922, danced in each other’s arms. An old, headmasterish-looking man, completely naked but for a stout pair of sandals and a leather pouch strapped around his waist, danced alone. His penis, though apparently erect, was minuscule. Therapy, Felix thought. The cure for diffidence was exhibitionism, someone must have told the old man – perhaps Marisa if he’d rung the Samaritans – and now here he was without a care in the world, making a virtue of necessity and gifting his midget manhood to the room. No one made light of him, Felix noticed. Indeed, the only person noticing him was Felix.

The music was trance-inducing. The lighting low and acidic. A woman of Marisa’s age, with an arrogant alabaster face, smooched with two men, one black, one white, kissing each of them in turn. She wore what Felix took to be a traffic warden’s hat (why, Felix wondered). Just that and a gauze Gstring which showed the outline of her vagina. Though the white man carried a whip he didn’t use it on her. Once he turned her to face his companion and roughly thrust his fingers into her rectum. She arched into the pain while the black man kissed her face tenderly.

Watching them with interest was a person whose sex was difficult to determine with confidence, in a plain white liberty-bodice and matching knee-length drawers, his face/her face covered with a stocking like a bank robber. Why, Felix wondered.

And why the couple dressed as Robin Hood and Maid Marian? The rubber nurse he thought he understood. And the Decline of the Empire centurion in a leather skirt and steel breastplate. And even the man with a wooden clothes peg on each nipple and a bouquet of wooden clothes pegs which appeared to spring like flowers from his testicles. But why the again-indeterminate person in a floor-length duffel coat and black scarf tied around his or her mouth like Tom Mix? Why, Felix wondered. Why, of all the places the sexual urge might arrest and fixate itself, why here?

At intervals, women whom Felix took to be professional whippersin made their appearance and traversed the room. Some, in tight corsets and high-heeled boots, looked like the cartoon dominatrices who had paraded before his father and his uncles in the House of Correction off Baker Street, but most – presumably because they were overweight – wore never-never Edwardian riding mistress habits that covered them from head to foot, or belle époque society dresses with feathers, veils and Merry Widow hats. Wherever a mistress was seated, a man was on the floor before her, kissing her feet, in one instance actually licking the soles of her lace-up ankle boots, an action of such concentrated intensity he must have wanted to lick up every impurity she had ever trodden in.

Sometimes these women took to the dance floor, dangling men on leather collars like the one with which Felix’s red-haired Freudian had failed to make a sexual as opposed to a moral masochist out of him. As then, the conceit aroused him more than its execution. A woman leading a man around like a dog – it should have been exciting, but it wasn’t. Some element was missing. What was it? A proper reduction of man to animal, Felix decided. Had the woman gone on to geld the man, or have his throat cut in an abattoir, then yes, arousing.

He must have said some of this aloud to himself because an almost skinless man with a painted body and curved needles through his cheeks wondered if Felix was addressing him.

‘I’m trying to make up my mind about dog leads,’ Felix said, feeling that he knew the man and then realising that he did – he knew him from
Moby Dick
. Queequeg, the South Sea fetishist.

‘What about them?’

‘Whether they’re a turn-on.’

‘Not to me they’re not. You?’

‘Can’t decide.’

‘So what do you like?’He had the gentlest voice, and even a slight lisp, though Felix didn’t know if that was an effect of the needles through his cheeks
.

‘I can’t decide that either,’ Felix said. ‘Cuckoldage, I suppose.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Submitting to your wife’s infidelity.’

‘How do you spell it?’

Felix spelled it for him.

‘Is that a fetish?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose it must be.’

‘Is that her?’ He pointed to a woman encased in black rubber, dancing with the man encased in black rubber whom Felix had stood next to earlier. They were kissing – though through what aperture he could not tell – entwined about each other like a pair of black snakes copulating.

‘No,’ Felix said. ‘Though if it were I’d be enjoying it.’

The man who reminded him of Queequeg adjusted one of the curved needles in his cheek and scratched his head in a bemusement he could not conceal. ‘I think all this dancing spoils it,’ he said, inconsequently. ‘Too much posing, if you ask me. They’re all just playing around.’

As opposed to what, Felix wondered. But then he noticed that a crowd had gathered in the dungeon and he decided this time to join it. A heavily made-up woman, Scandinavian in appearance, was dripping candle wax on to a man’s penis. He was bound by leather straps into a sort of Bedlam chair. With every molten drop he winced, but could not move his hands to protect himself. Each time, the woman leaned towards him, her hair falling in his face. Felix assumed she was whispering something to him, asking if he was all right. But she was kissing him too. When it was all over they embraced. Felix was new here and had no measure other than his instincts, but other people surely must have known the difference between a transaction and a loving act. And they too, it seemed to him, saw this as a loving act.

There were many such. A beautiful, lithe girl with amber skin was rotated on a wheel by a young man in a leather waistcoat who
appeared to think the world of her. That the whipping he administered answered more to her desire than to his Felix believed he could tell from the tension in his shoulders. There were plenty of people here who flogged without inhibition, their bodies at one with the movement of the flogger. But the lover of the girl with the amber skin flogged against himself. Now on her breasts, now on her belly, now on her pubis, he struck, and with each blow he started, as she did not. Perhaps she knew how beautiful she looked spinning naked in the acid light. Perhaps she knew how much he loved her.

Felix fought against the sentimentality of his nature. Not everything he saw was pretty. A man in chaps which bared his buttocks made an occasional nuisance of himself, asking women if they would piss on him. Another, dressed similarly, pushed himself too close, in Felix’s view, to other people’s action and was eventually, though with great politeness and discretion – for you must mind your manners where you are otherwise vulnerable and abandoned – removed from the premises. And often there was no knowing where sentiment finished and opportunism began. A male equivalent to the belle époque mistresses, haughty and preposterous in tight riding trousers and a shirt not a million miles from Felix’s, attended a couple in their sixties in what was surely, though Felix saw no money change hands, a professional capacity. The woman was spread out on a version of a hospital trolley in an attitude reminiscent of labour. In the intensity of his concentration, the husband resembled a medical student, as painted by a Dutch master, attending his first dissection of a corpse. With more flourish than Felix thought necessary, the torturer raised the woman’s skirts, under which she was naked, spread her legs, patted her labia with the handle of his crop which, when he thought she was ready, he inserted, an inch at a time, into her vagina.

The woman made a sound like birdsong – not recognisably human, perhaps the sound of however many thousand years of shame leaving her body
.