The Act of Love (9 page)

We solemnised our union quietly – what remained of both our families being of no account to us – in a registry office round the corner and honeymooned in Florida. Why Florida? Because after more than a year of near-chaste talk we felt we owed each other the swamplands of sensuality. We wanted to smell the Everglades. We needed to run with sweat in each other’s company.

Five days into our humid honeymoon Marisa fell ill. We had established a routine: every afternoon we returned to our hotel, I peeled her dress off her sticky body, then we showered the bad-egg odour of mangrove off each other, then we went to bed and stayed there until it was time for her to shake herself into something even more diaphanous for dinner. No woman I had ever known inhabited tropical fabrics better than Marisa; some women bulk them out, some disappear inside the folds, Marisa wore them as a second skin. Which made peeling her out of them a slow and laborious business, in the course of which I sometimes had to sit on the edge of the bed to get a second wind and look at her, the dress over her head, still caught on her arms, her glistening
thighs and belly unprotected from my stare. But on the fifth afternoon she was too feverishly weary for any of this conjugal horseplay. At first I took it to be merely one of those butterfly malaises to which she was subject. Lassitude. Loss of temporal bearing. Not unhappiness exactly, more a mislaying of happiness, as though she was happy in some other place but couldn’t remember where. The fever, however, was real enough. And she wasn’t sweating for my pleasure. The hotel called a doctor who examined her in our suite. He was a Cuban with an avaricious mouth, brown teeth the length of a horse ‘s, and exaggerated good manners. I wondered if he wanted me to leave the room. He put an arm around my shoulders, noticing my concern. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Pour yourself a drink. And pour me one while I see to Mrs.’

He had, I observed, the most beautiful long hands, with inordinate fringes of silky fur on every knuckle, and a wedding ring on both his little fingers. I poured us a drink then sat myself down in an armchair and watched as he took Marisa’s temperature, shone a light into her ears, looked deep into her open mouth, felt under her armpits and examined her chest. The moment was decisive. Not the beginning of a new sensation but a revelation of it in its entirety, like coming out of a dark room and being met by the brilliant orb of the sun. Whoever I had been before – whatever luxuriating oddities had marked me out from other men in the matter of love and loss (and I had only ever felt marginally odd, just a trifle too given to losing my heart and ending up at the suffering end of passion) – all equivocations were finally at an end: I was now someone who was aroused by the sight of another man’s hands on the breasts of the woman he loved. Henceforth, given the choice, I would rather Marisa gave her breasts to a man who wasn’t me. That was to be the condition, the measure, of my love for her. At a stroke I was freed from the fascination of Freddy’s jealousy. I was now liberated into my own.

You know it when you walk into the torture garden of your own disordered nature. You recognise the gorgeous foliage, overgrown and fantastical. You know the smell. The smell of home.

‘Overexposure to the sun,’ the doctor told me, looking round but keeping
longer than was necessary I thought, his hand on my bride ’s breast, allowing the nipple to swell unseen inside his palm.

Did he exchange a glance with me, in which the proprietorship of those breasts passed briefly from me to him, or did I imagine it? I am not blind to the politics of a woman’s breasts; I knew then, as I know now, that Marisa’s breasts were the property of Marisa and no one else. But familiarity confers the illusion of possession, however impertinent, and it might have been the rights to that familiarity that we exchanged. The sight of those silken-furred fingers on Marisa’s breasts precipitated in me, anyway, the desire to see them elsewhere on and, yes,
in
her body. A generalised desire which, over time, took on a less opportunistic, more sophisticated colouration. Marisa did not have to be feverish or otherwise at the mercy of a man. We did not have to be in Florida smelling the Everglades. And at last I did not have to see with my own eyes. Hearing about it, learning about it, and ultimately simply
knowing
about it, would be enough.

ON TOP OF THE TWO AFTERNOONS A WEEK SHE GAVE TO PRICING ART BOOKS
at the Oxfam bookshop, the four Friday nights out of five on which she manned a hectic phone line for the Samaritans, the occasional day she put in at the Wallace Collection, not quite telling visiting ladies from the provinces what she thought Fragonard was really painting, Marisa read to a blind man once a fortnight and four times a year bundled up the clothes she no longer wanted to wear and gave them to a local hospice. Though she believed she was good at what she did – twice, for example, she had found books which had gone on to fetch in excess of £1,000 at auction at Christie ’s; the blind man, she felt sure, was enraptured by her reading; art lovers thanked her for showing them what they could never have seen without her; and God only knew how many deep depressions she lightened at the slit-wrist end of a Friday night – she was unable to recognise herself in these activities. She didn’t begrudge the time (how could she, given the amount of time at her disposal), nor did she resent the neediness of those she helped (in their need, she believed, she found her purpose). But she wasn’t personally engaged in what she did. The only time Marisa felt she was anyone she knew was when she danced. ‘You say you find yourself dancing,’ I told her once, ‘but to me it looks more as though you lose yourself.’ She smiled in recognition of the paradox. Outside herself was where she lived. Other than when she danced she was in some foreign place, speaking in a voice that wasn’t hers, though where that foreign place was, and whose voice she borrowed, she couldn’t have said.

‘Where are you, Marisa?’ – her mother calling.

‘Hiding.’

‘Marisa, you are always hiding.’

To which Marisa knew better than to say, even at that early age, ‘That’s because I’m trying not to be found by you, Mummy.’

Apart from the charity work she did – that’s if it really was her who did it – and all the dancing she could crowd in, she was not what could be called a busy woman. Though well educated – well finished, might be a better way of putting it, but then I’m a snob when it comes to education – she had not, in her words, ‘achieved anything’. No need. She had always been well provided for. Her father, who had owned most of the bed shops on Tottenham Court Road, walked out on her mother when Marisa was five years old. The child could perfectly well see why. Her mother lacked judgement. True, it was her father’s fault for leaving her mother alone as much as he did, but that didn’t excuse her mother for falling for every man she met and introducing all of them to Marisa as her new daddy.

‘Why does Mummy love everybody?’ she asked her father. ‘She doesn’t love me.’

‘But she used to, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, and I used to love her for loving me. Then I realised she would have loved me no less had I been a cloth bag stuffed with marbles. Or with beans, like your frog Frenchie.’

So would her mummy have liked
her
just as much had she been stuffed with beans like her frog Frenchie, Marisa wondered, hiding in her wardrobe.

Hiding became at last their only medium of communication. To lure Marisa out of the wardrobe, her mother had to hide presents for her, hide her clothes, hide her supper. ‘See if you can find what I’ve made you, Marisa.’

‘What have you made me?’ ‘You’ll have to find it to find out.’

‘See if you can find me, Mummy,’ Marisa said. The difference being that while she wanted to find supper, she didn’t want her mummy to find her.

‘I wish she ’d hide my new daddies,’ she told her old daddy, ‘where they can’t be found.’

She remembered the day her father left, she remembered him lifting her up on to his shoulders, she remembered looking down into his strong chestnut-polished baldness and seeing her own forlorn reflection in it, she remembered his words: ‘Whatever she tells you, Daddy is leaving Mummy, whom he doesn’t love or see the point of any more, not you, whom he does.’ In proof of which, though she only infrequently spent time with him again (it had to be in secret, everything always in secret, because his new wife didn’t like to be reminded that there’d been an old), he paid for her to go to a good school, to have singing and ballet lessons, to hide as far away from her mummy and her armies of new daddies as she could get, to drive her own car while she was at university, to rent a flat in Venice for a year after graduating, to enrol for every fine-art course that took her fancy in Florence, Spoleto, Siena, she had only to name it – to live, in short, the life she pleased.

She grew up secretive and well off. Looking good, always in expensive clothes, which were the grown-up version of being in hiding, keeping herself to herself – sometimes keeping herself
from
herself – with time on her hands.

Because of her looks she could not entirely and forever remain her own property. Boyfriends insisted themselves on her, each of whom she hid from the other, followed by first one and then – again initially in hiding – a second husband. She never thought of herself as adulterous. Simply close. It was no one ’s business but hers. One way or another, though, the indulgences she ’d been used to from her father continued. For the reason that she looked spoiled already, you could not see Marisa and not want to spoil her more. Just as you could not be with her, even when you were perfectly entitled to be with her, and not feel you were stealing her from someone else. Sometimes in Marisa’s company I could not escape the sensation that I was stealing her from myself.

And to commemorate that theft, I, like everyone else, showered her with gifts – perfume, jewellery, underwear, whatever you buy to perpetuate the illicit.

But always I sensed I had not found the gift that was adequate to her temperament. Grey beneath the eyes, with a long reflective countenance and a Roman nose such as you see on statues of Roman goddesses in Italian gardens, Marisa looked too sombre, however tight her skirts, for perfume or underwear. Wouldn’t the collected dialogues of Plato have made a better present? I asked her once. Of course she said she wanted nothing. But the impression I formed was that the ideal gift for her was the dialogues of Plato
and
underwear.

Never the necessity to make provision for herself, there was the problem which no amount of social or community work could solve. Yes, she could have filled her days with the deeds her morality pressed her into doing; but that wouldn’t have left her sufficient time to improve her own lot as a thinking being, and if she wasn’t any good to herself then how could she be any good to other people?

She didn’t complain, repine or moon, she just mused a lot. Which men, of course, find provocative. A woman musing on something other than them piques their
amour propre
. Especially predatory men who muse a lot themselves, with time to hang around outside art galleries and museums, singing tirra lirra and waiting for just such a woman to emerge, so that they can shatter the mirror of her concentration. But that’s to anticipate Marius.

Men apart, they pay a high price for their own beauty and fortune, these women for whom self-improvement is a necessity, and achievement is a goad. Marisa would have gone further in any career she chose for herself had she looked less as though her clothes had been cut for her by a glovemaker, and had she not known how to please the absent daddy in any man. No bitterness intended. If anything, Marisa rather admired the way men could tell lies, take off whenever the fancy pleased them, or instal a woman like her in a fine villa in Marylebone, with every confidence that she would play the part of lady of the house to perfection. In her head, she lived as though she had been born a man herself. Whenever one of her half-sisters phoned her for advice (she had as many new sisters as she had new daddies) the advice she gave was always practical, forward-looking and iron-hearted
– ‘Leave him, darling’ or ‘Go get him if he takes your fancy, just don’t tell your husband’ – much as she imagined a man would have given. She walked like a man. Her clothes, in particular her suits, were ironical references to what men wore for the City. Even when she showed her legs, which in all honesty were too good not to show, she showed them as a man – say a fencing master or a
danseur noble
– might, as evidence of her suppleness and strength. She followed her fancy, drank hard, declined motherhood with fervour, doted on no man, and wasn’t averse to being looked over in the street. Only in actuality was she kept as more feminine, less ambitious women had been kept for centuries. Though even ‘in actuality’ things weren’t actually as they seemed. Contrary to what the great man said, all happy families are not alike.

THOUGH I SAY THEY WERE REVELATORY, I WAS NOT A COMPLETE STRANGER
to the emotions which overcame me in the hotel room in Florida. At least I was not a stranger to the fact of their existence in the human heart.

In my sixteenth year I was befriended by an associate of my father’s, Victor Gowan, a once successful publisher who, in the brief period I knew him, moved from a lightless, noisily ramshackle office opposite the British Museum to a silent house with a great glass window overlooking the Thames in Cookham – Stanley Spencer country. The move felt like a retirement to me, though whether Victor saw it that way I didn’t know. But he couldn’t have been more than fifty at the time of his migration, and when I saw him in his offices he was voluble and merry, and when I saw him in Cookham he was introspective and sad.

Looking at a river all day can do that to you, of course, but I didn’t think the river was the cause of it. Some misfortune that wasn’t talked about must have befallen him, anyway, because his association with my father began with the selling off of his library almost book by book. Not the books he published – we wouldn’t have been much interested in those – but a rather fine collection of classical texts, both in the original Greek and Latin and in translation. It is, as I have said, a melancholy business for a person who loves books to have to sell them. Each book you part with is a little death. Which is why a shop like ours is necessarily a funereal place. We are to all intents and purposes undertakers. We wear black suits, tread softly and try to make the extinction
of a lifelong passion, the passage of an old friend, as comfortable and dignified as possible.