The Act of Love (39 page)

Did I want to tell him that, since I couldn’t tell her? This was not for you, Marius, this was for us. Was that what made me release Marisa as though I’d suddenly seen my own death and go after him? Or was it another impulse entirely?

By the time I’d fought my way first through the dancers and then through the crowds of people watching – none of them pleased to be pushed aside while the music played – I’d lost him. Had he turned on his heel with the intention of going home, or was he determined to keep on walking in the same direction, as though seeing me and Marisa had been an incidental interruption to his journey and he would continue now without stopping until darkness fell and there was no road left to travel?

I looked this way and that, and even asked a couple of people if they’d seen him, a tall, parched man with walrus moustaches. When at last I did think I’d spotted him he was too far away for me to call his name, though I called it anyway. Then I ran. In a park full of strollers I was the only person breaking sweat. In fifteen seconds or so I caught up with him. He, long and aloofly handsome – for it became him to look drawn – like a plantation owner, in a pale, crushed colonial linen suit; I, puffing and impertinent, like his runaway slave, in a black bandana.

‘I congratulate you,’ I said. ‘You are a man of your word.
We have the
strength to walk away,
you said, and here you are, walking away.’

He did not slow his pace or turn to look at me. I had to hurry to keep up with him.

‘But then,’ I continued, ‘it’s not hard to walk away from jealousy when you don’t feel it.’

I thought he hesitated a fraction. Would he seize me by the throat? Would he fall into my arms?

‘I’m surprised,’ I said, ‘that you haven’t stopped to say hello to my wife. But given the hour of the day I presume your mind is already somewhere else. I’ll convey your greetings to her, shall I, and tell her not to be concerned, for you are a man indifferent to anything that jealousy can throw at him. Same time as usual next week?’

I’m not sure if he did pause at that moment, or whether his blow was the more effective for being delivered on the move. But without quite knowing how, I was on one knee holding the side of my face. It hadn’t been a punch, more a lunge with the elbow, as when you are shooing away a pickpocket. And I’d say it was the surprise of it, as much as the force, that knocked me off balance.

A man playing football with a dog smaller than the ball stopped to see if I was all right. ‘Shit, what did you say to
him
?’ he asked.

‘Just a domestic. I’m fine, thank you.’

But I did act on his suggestion and sit down on a bench.

I could not say how long afterwards – minutes? hours? days? – Marisa appeared, holding her shoes.

‘What happened?’ she asked. Though from her expression I believed she knew. Some events you dream in advance of their happening, so inevitable are they.

‘Marius,’ I said, assuming that would be enough. But as it was not enough, I added, ‘I thought he might like to see how well we dance together. It would appear he didn’t.’

She put her fingers to her temples. ‘Felix,’ she said, ‘don’t come home tonight.’

I nodded.

She began to say something else, but changed her mind. She had turned
quite white, the planes of her face giving her a monumental gravity, like one of Picasso’s demoiselles. For a moment I thought she was going to faint, but it could just have been the music still pumping blood too quickly through her body. She seemed distraught, like a woman who might tear her hair, or scream. I couldn’t tell, from the way she was moving her head, whether she was trying to rid herself of all memory of the day, or looking for Marius.

‘He went that way,’ I told her.

My words seemed to help her gather her wits. Without looking at me she put on her shoes, then went in the other direction to which I’d pointed.

I stayed on the bench for about an hour, regardless of the light rain that had begun to fall. A bird hopped out of the tree above me. A magpie – what else could it have been but a magpie! ‘Hello, Mr Magpie,’ I said. ‘How’s Mrs Magpie?’

Which could have finished me off had the man with the football-playing dog not reappeared that very moment. I smiled at the dog. Nothing beats having a dog to smile at when you don’t have a woman. He was a dachshund or something like. Though he had no legs to speak of, he kept the ball under perfect control. No doubt he thought he was kicking a badger.

‘That dog of yours sure can dribble,’ I said to his owner.

‘You think that’s good? You should see him in goal.’

I laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.

I am the wound, and yet the blade!
The smack, and yet the cheek that takes it!
The limb, and yet the wheel that breaks it,
The torturer, and he who’s flayed!

Roy Campbell,
Poems of Baudelaire

AND NOW THE COMEUPPANCE . . .

Isn’t that meant to be the way of it? After the wrongdoing the retribution. Anna Karenina must throw herself beneath a train. Don Giovanni must go to hell. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, though in fact the Lord couldn’t give two hoots. What we ascribe to moral justice is merely the guilty conscience of the reader, the viewer, the observer, the eternal voyeur of art, demanding payback to justify the salaciousness that’s kept him curious. In reality, punishment if it comes at all is usually more prosaic. Anna Karenina is as likely to find herself another civil-servant husband who makes her no happier than the first, and Don Giovanni, bald now and without his teeth, will go through his address book on the longest night of the year and discover that of those still alive none wants to come out and play. But we haven’t asked
and then what and then what
only to learn that sex runs out of steam. It is on the condition that indecency must await a grand and terrible finale that we turn the pages, pornographers in the early chapters on the strict understanding that it’s as puritans that we ’ll read the last. In this way the good citizen is every bit as apocalyptically dirty-minded as the deviant – each imagining sex to be so consuming it will leave not a wrack behind.

So here’s a scene to warm the hearts of puritans and pornographers both: a man much like me, in a cemetery again – for it was in a cemetery that his sordid tale began – standing by an open grave, grieving for the wife he ’s lost, knowing he will never be able to forgive himself for ignoring
what she tried to tell him, because he had ears only for something else. Another man, too, bent over the grave – another haunter of cemeteries, he too with a taste for death – the pair of them joined in a remorse that must stay forever mute.

Neat. And I won’t say a million miles away from truth. But not what happened.

Depending on your point of view, what happened was worse. But I will not have it that anyone got his or her comeuppance. Whether our desires are foul or fair, it is mortality itself that thwarts them, because our bodies are frailer than our fantasies.

I did as Marisa told me, and stayed away from the house that night. In fact I stayed away for two nights to be on the safe side. I’d remembered there was a hotel near the park in Primrose Hill. Not much of a place but I didn’t care to be seen anywhere better. Not feeling as I felt. And not in my tango clothes. I had them bring me food up and never left the room.

Extremity has its consolations. There was nothing I could think because every thought was too terrible. It was like being a schoolboy again on the eve of his examinations. I had prepared all I could: now what would be would be. Such moments, when we can do no more for ourselves, are among the calmest we enjoy. We pass or we fail – it’s in someone else ’s hands.

But for the occasional, intense descent into sleep out of which I awoke in sheer terror, not remembering where I was or how I’d got there – but for these black amnesic interludes that must have lasted only ten or fifteen minutes but felt like days, I lay wide awake. Not in subspace. Subspace was a festival compared to this. Those nights when Marisa left me without a word, sometimes appearing briefly to show me what she wore – a silent twirl for my approval when the situation amused her, a smile and then gone – were sumptuous, a feast of smell and colour, my every nerve alive to the subtle music of abandonment: the sound of her not there, the sound of her adventuring in the world, the sound of her returning, full of traveller’s tales, which I awaited as amazed as Adam in the moments before
the creation of Eve. The hours lying awake in the Primrose Hill dosshouse were a cruel parody of this – austere, odourless and bleak.

The worst of it, when, in the taxi back, thought insisted itself upon me finally, was knowing that Marisa must have supposed me to have arranged it all, to have arranged
her –
and in that way to have abused every last feeling we had for each other – in order to get at Marius. Unless worse still was knowing I would never be able to convince her this was not the case, not if we crept back into what passes for a normal marriage and lived to be a thousand.

Marisa was not there when I got home. I can’t say that surprised me. I went to her wardrobes to see if she’d cleared herself out completely. She hadn’t. But much of her make-up was gone from the bathroom. I checked the suitcases. Had she taken an overnight bag or something bigger? She had taken something bigger.

There was no note. No message on my phones. I went into work, avoiding everybody, not because I was capable of work but because I wanted to be where Marisa knew she would be able to find me on a Tuesday morning. No message from her there. I made no attempt to contact her for another twenty-four hours. This might or might not have been the right thing to do. I didn’t go looking for her shape in the windows above the button shop either. That
was
the right thing to do. At last I decided I had to know, at least, that she was all right. I rang her mobile but she didn’t answer it. I composed a simple, non-committal text –
r u safe?
The uncharacteristic r u from me – she knew I hated text abbreviations – denoting a bare urgency that didn’t intend to trap her into a conversation she didn’t want to have. And who could say? – perhaps denoting a changed and much-improved personality as well.

Later that night I got my reply.
I am
. Well, that was something. But I was disappointed. I had hoped she would tell me where she was, and perhaps thank me for not bothering her.
Safe
had its own exquisite tact, I thought. A husband who had forgotten to keep his distance remembering to keep it now. But then, as I consoled myself with thinking, so had her reply. Tactful of her not to reproach me for what I’d done. Tactful not to
tell me I could go to hell for all she cared. It was only after brooding on it further in the dark that I realised she hadn’t reciprocated my concern and asked if I was safe.

So was that to be the way she paid me back? Of the man who asked too many questions, not a question would be asked?

The following evening at about seven o’clock the doorbell rang. I was sitting in my study drinking blood-red wine and listening to lieder. The bell startled me. Seven o’clock was not a time when people rang our bell. Too late for tradesmen or deliveries, and in London friends don’t call on you without at least a fortnight’s warning. So it was good news or bad. My first excited thought was Marisa, ringing rather than letting herself in as a way of signalling she did not live here any more. I did not check my appearance before I opened the door. Let her see me looking rough, whether it inspired pity or satisfaction. Just let her see me.

But it wasn’t Marisa. It was Marius.

‘This is not your usual time,’ I said.

His fingers rose to his moustaches.‘I know that.’

‘Marisa isn’t here,’ I said.

‘I know that too.’

How did he know that? Did he know it because she was with him? He read what I was thinking. ‘She is not with me,’ he added.

But that still implied they’d been in touch and that he knew more about her whereabouts than I did. I was not, though, going to ask him what he knew.

‘So what can I do for you?’ I said.

He looked me up and down. ‘So you’re the bookseller,’ he said. ‘You mentioned artist and pervert. But you said nothing about selling books. I should have put the three together.’

‘If you’re here on book business our office hours are ten to six. I believe
you are familiar with our shop. But I remind you that an appointment is necessary.’

‘I am not here on book business. Can I come inside?’

I laughed. ‘Do you want me to show you through or will you make your own way? I assume you know where everything is.’

‘I don’t know why you’re acting the aggrieved husband,’ he said. ‘Could it be because I’m aggrieved?’

‘You have no more right to act the aggrieved husband than I have to act the aggrieved lover. Less, if you want the truth.’

Incorrigible, the thing I called my heart. Even at such a time I had only to hear him call himself my wife ’s lover and I was aflame all over again. Had he called her his mistress I’d have combusted.

I regarded him from the higher step, eyeball to eyeball. Did I want to see what Marisa saw? He eyeballed me back. Did he want to see the same? This close, of course, you don’t see anything in another person’s eyes except the depths of your own looking. For a few seconds we were in a staring competition, like schoolboys. But it was my instinct, still, to let him win. ‘Come in,’ I said, releasing him. ‘We ’ll sit in my study.’