The Act of Love (10 page)

In Victor’s case my father recognised that solemn rites were not appropriate. Victor put a brave face on his losses and trusted it would be only a matter of time before he was in a position to buy back from us what he’d sold, a fantasy which my father considered it in our interests to foster. To that end – though I must not be too cynical, for I think there was genuine friendship in it too – my father saw a lot of Victor, sometimes calling on him in his creaking Dickensian offices with me in tow, and later, after Victor’s melancholy move, inviting him to have dinner with us when he was in town. It was in the course of one of those dinners that Victor suggested I visit him in Cookham.

Classics were the pretext. He had studied classics at Balliol in his youth, and there was talk that I would do the same. It was presented as being for my future benefit, anyway, that I should spend a weekend with him in the country, see his library of which much remained, dine with him in the evening, talk literature, perhaps go rowing, and meet his wife, a one-time beauty and biographer of the Fitzrovia set, rumoured in her younger days to have been the mistress of more than one Fitzrovian scoundrel, but now, sadly, confined to her bed. Though too infirm to enter society or to engage in those researches necessary to her profession, Joyce Gowan still loved having visitors to her home.

I won’t pretend that I viewed the prospect of a weekend with my father’s disconsolate associate and his sick wife with any pleasure. At sixteen you don’t want to be close to people whose hopes have all but ended. But though I couldn’t picture anything that wasn’t dismal happening when I got there, the act of going felt like an adventure. I packed a bag, remembering to take a blazer and a tie for dinner and summer flannels for rowing, caught the train from Paddington to Maidenhead, and extended my hand like a seasoned traveller when Victor came along the platform to meet me. In a flash I saw my future, travelling on trains from one end of the country to another, getting off at rural stations, extending my hand to downcast book-collecting men who were getting on in years and reduced to selling
what was precious to them. Already, though I hadn’t met them all, I felt a bond with them. Men whose feelings of loss were etched into their faces.

In the car to Cookham Victor told me about Stanley Spencer, the presiding genius of the place, who was famous for some wonderful murals, in Victor’s view, showing local people rising from the dead, and also for a small number of shockingly fleshly paintings of himself and a woman called Patricia Preece with whom he had been wildly in love, though it was thought his relations with her were never consummated, if I understood his meaning. Wanting to show I understood his meaning perfectly, I wondered whether it could have been the fact of the non-consummation that rendered these paintings so shockingly fleshly. ‘Frustration is the midwife to imagination,’ I said, ‘and having to give body to what is denied you is a powerful inducement to art,’ though I might not have said it in quite those words. And even if I had I would only dimly have understood what I was talking about. Of the world of the passions I still knew nothing. I’d read a lot, that was all. And I’d gone out with the daughter of a cello teacher who threw me over for someone she met while I was holding her hand in the cinema. But like many boys my age, I bluffed well.

Victor, I remember, praised me for an astuteness beyond my years and couldn’t imagine how I wouldn’t sail into Balliol. (As, indeed, though it isn’t strictly relevant to this narrative, I did.)

Thereafter I caught him looking at me sideways on many occasions, as though not sure he ’d done the right thing inviting me. Alternatively he was thinking he ’d done exactly the right thing inviting me.

When he wasn’t looking sideways at me, I was looking sideways at him. He had a grand profile that seemed unrelated to his body, which was almost dainty. Only his head seemed to matter. But it was run spectacularly to seed, pouches under his eyes, hair growing in bunches from his ears and nostrils, the veins in his red cheeks broken as though from exposure to country life, the back of his neck beginning to pleat over his shirt collar. For reasons I couldn’t then and cannot now explain I hoped I would grow to look like that myself. A little tired of the world. A little weary
with the effort of carrying around so large a head. And with a secret sorrow that was also an inexplicable cause of satisfaction.

I didn’t meet Mrs Gowan on my first evening in Cookham. She wanted to say hello, Victor explained, but wasn’t up to seeing me. The house was quiet with the quiet of a woman who wasn’t up to seeing anybody. Everything was put away and tidy, the curtains closed in a way that suggested it was a long time since they’d been opened, a faint covering of dust on the furniture, none too fresh flowers in the vases, an air of distraught disuse pervading everything.

But in another sense Joyce Gowan was ubiquitously present. There were photographs of her everywhere – Joyce as a little girl laughing with other little girls, even then lovely to look at, dark, intense and knowing; Joyce masterfully leading her pony; Joyce as a young woman in a London pub, surrounded by poets, with her lipstick smudged; Joyce in the act of becoming Mrs Gowan, sculpted into her bride ’s dress, throwing back her head, her throat long like a swan’s; Joyce the biographer of wild times signing one of her books at Foyles, dazzling the signee with the brilliance of her smile . . . Joyce, Joyce, Joyce. In the living room a grand society painting of her in her glory days, her hands, one of which held a black fan, crossed in her lap and a faraway expression in her eyes. On the stairs a cruder oil showing her in a plunging evening gown, her breasts more rouged than any serious painter would have made them, a dog too obviously representing male besottedness at her feet. And in the bathroom assigned to me a frolicking sepia nude dancing with curtain drapes, by Russell Flint: not definitely her, so stylised was the pin-up, and so unlike her, given how else she had permitted artists to represent her – but if it wasn’t her why was it there? And if it was her, why was I permitted to see it?

For the sake of her beauty, maybe, and nothing else. For the sake of the beauty she had been.

Victor took me to a pub for chicken in a basket and asked me questions about myself, about my closeness to my father, about the books I liked to read. He was reading
Don Quixote
for the umpteenth time and wondered
if I knew it. I told him I’d started it umpteen times but could only get so far before I had to give up. It was when the novel departed from its own narrative to relate stories that were strictly speaking extraneous to it that I lost interest. ‘Like the story of Anselmo and Lothario,’ he said. I told him I didn’t think I had got as far as Anselmo and Lothario. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then you should.’

The following morning we went rowing on the river as he ’d promised, though we never strayed far from the riverbank. Then we had lunch in another pub, went to see one or two of Stanley Spencer’s paintings – though nothing that struck me as either shocking or fleshly – in the little village museum devoted to his work, and returned home for tea. Because the weather was fine we were able to sit out on the lawn and watch more able-bodied rowers power up and down the Thames. A gentle wind blew through the trees. A succession of creamy, calming clouds floated across the sky. Again, Mrs Gowan was too indisposed to join us.

At around about four o’clock my host nodded off in his chair. On the grass by him lay a copy of
Don Quixote
, which he’d presumably brought out so that he could read an extract from the story of Anselmo and Lothario aloud to me. While he slept I leafed through the novel to see if I could find their names, which proved not to be too difficult as many of the scenes in which they appeared were marked. Their adventure, if it could be so called, appeared to be another version of a plot in a Shakespeare play I’d read at school – one man inviting another to try the fidelity of the woman he loved, to tragic or near-tragic effect. According to the notes in my Arden Shakespeare, the ‘fidelity test’ was a recurring motif in medieval Italian novellas, from which Cervantes too must have borrowed. I was too young to know anything for sure, but something told me that a fidelity test was more likely to be a literary device than a strategy much resorted to in real life. But it could only have cropped up frequently in literature if it answered to something that gave real men cause for concern: namely, the character of their wives when subjected to overwhelming temptation, for where, as Anselmo says to Lothario, is the merit in her being virtuous ‘when nobody persuades her to be otherwise? What mighty matter
if she be reserved and cautious, who has no opportunity given her of going astray?’ A fear which once acted upon, it occurred to me, must surely stimulate a curiosity that is never to be assuaged. Why should Anselmo stop with a Lothario no matter how true this Lothario proves his wife to be? Indeed it would be illogical to do so. For is there not always to be encountered a Lothario more persuasive than the last? Will there not always be an ‘opportunity’ for disloyalty greater than the one before?

Victor awoke as I was turning the pages. ‘Ah,’ he said, when he saw which pages those were.

Joyce Gowan never did descend from her room. On my final evening in the house, after just the two of us had eaten a cold dinner at his kitchen table, Victor suggested I accompany him upstairs to take his wife a nightcap. A terror immediately seized my heart. Was I to play the part of Lothario to his Anselmo? Was this all the weekend had ever been about, a preparation to my trying the virtue of a sick old lady by making love to her? Was my father himself a party to the scheme? I wouldn’t have put it past him. He was of that class of men who sought to further their sons’ worldly education by taking them to brothels and ensuring they got their first dose of syphilis where it could be treated by a London doctor, rather than in Abu Dhabi where the medical attention was patchy, though I have to say he hadn’t yet gone that far with me. I could even have been part of a business deal between the two men, Victor reclaiming a number of his books in return for his wife, or my father laying hands on the rest of Victor’s library in return for me. It all depended on how you calculated the favour.

I say a terror seized my heart, but desire was not unmixed with it. The two are rarely separable in me. When I thought of the invalid in her bed and what she or her husband or indeed my father might have been expecting of me, I felt giddy with apprehension and disgust; but when I remembered the Russell Flint nude doing a striptease with curtain drapes, the rouged breasts on the society oil painting, and the smudged lipstick
in the photograph of Joyce carousing with literary men and painters with loose morals in Fitzrovia, I felt giddy with longing. I was still a virgin. Whatever was about to happen to me had not happened before. Whatever I had to do, I did not know if I could.

I followed Victor up the stairs. He was a carrying a tray with a bottle of port and three glasses on it. Joyce Gowan’s bedroom door was closed. Her husband paused, put an ear to it, then pushed. The room was in semi-darkness, just one small bulb burning, not by her bedside but in a far corner of the room. I thought I could smell medication, but it was possible I’d brought the smell up with me, indistinguishable from my apprehension.

‘I’m not sure,’ Victor said in a whisper, ‘whether she ’s awake.’

I stood half in the bedroom, half on the landing. In the dark I could make out only shadows, the shape of a window through which were thrown a couple of fine diagonal bars of citrus light from the garden, the outline of a chair, the immanence of the bed but not its occupant.

‘You can come in,’ Victor said, again in a whisper.

But I barely had the courage to proceed. I’d been brought up to respect the privacy of a woman’s room. I must have seen my mother in her bed when I was an infant, but I’d never seen her in her bedroom let alone her bed thereafter, except to see her die. My father, I suspect, was kept out of there as well. A woman’s bedroom was a revered and frightening place to me. I didn’t know what happened there, other than that it was where women wept. And this wasn’t a boudoir consecrated to a healthy if embittered woman’s mysteries, it was a chamber of sickness and decay. God knows what I would walk into and knock over in my fear if I did as Victor suggested. I hovered at the threshold.

Suddenly, there was more light. ‘There,’ Victor said.

Not brilliant light but light enough to make out more than just the bulking outline of the bed, and then yes, yes, to discern Joyce Gowan herself, still asleep on it, or apparently asleep, but not hidden by the bedclothes, indeed not hidden by anything, but disposed as a painter such as Russell Flint might have disposed her, for the titillation of the buyer,
not quite on her back but not quite on her side either, her nightgown rucked up as though by an accident of sleep to reveal the undulation of her thighs and buttocks – silvery and slender in the half-light – and fallen off her shoulders by the same careful disarrangement of accidentality to show the spillage of her breasts, in profile only, not with that startlingly grand fullness and frontality celebrated in the oil painting on the stairs, or with the same attention to the rouge (unless the pallor was just an effect of the lighting), but the more tremblingly desirable, it seemed to me, for being a gentle intimation rather than a bold assertion of themselves.