The Act of Love (12 page)

No doubt I inherited this fascination with promiscuous prior ownership from my disreputable father and his no less disreputable brothers. Until me, however, no member of the family had taken that conception of the erotic to its natural conclusion. Only I have turned out to be a true voluptuary of the second-hand.

Which, among other things, means I am sensitive to a similar voluptuousness in others. I don’t push anyone into selling, even if I’ve travelled far to buy. Few of those who decide they must part with their books genuinely wish to do so. Easier, for some of them, to part with their wives. The elderly and long-retired professor without whose funeral I’d never have met Marius was a case in point. He was pacing up and down the drive when I came in answer to his summons, made distraught by the idea that I’d be arriving in a pantechnicon at the appointed hour and begin loading immediately. Seeing me turn up in a bumpy taxi from the railway station and discovering I was going to do no more than look at what he had, calmed his agitation considerably.

‘Oh,’ he said. A high piping sound such as a mouse might make when you tread on it. ‘Then I don’t have to hide things from you after all.’

He made me tea with shaking hands, an old scholarly fusspot abandoned to his books and bookish thoughts by a wife who, as he explained it, had been unable to bear their musty smell. ‘Or mine,’ he laughed, the laughter rattling his chest.

I liked him. I liked his long bent silhouette, his boniness, and the fact of his wearing a tie knotted he didn’t care where, so that the narrow end was twice the length of the broad. In my business I meet a lot of men who knot their ties this way, a coincidence I ascribe to the loneliness of book collecting.

I have a soft spot for abandoned men. I enter into their feelings. Perhaps because I’ve always feared that one day I’ll be an abandoned man myself.
And yes – since we are entertaining perhapses – perhaps because I hope to be one too. Left to sob out the rest of my days, while the woman I love . . .

There are more unfathomable desires.

After tea there ensued a terrible passage in which, emboldened by the lack of anything like rapaciousness in me, he began removing what he thought to be priceless editions from a cupboard underneath his stairs, George MacDonalds, Christina Rossettis, ‘Monk’ Lewises, each ceremented in ancient newsprint, only to discover that the Shropshire damp had got to them long ago, as it had got to him, and turned their brilliant pages into compost.

‘Oh,’ he said, his voice more piping than the first time, as though I’d trodden on him again. ‘Then you won’t be wanting these.’

But there was relief for him even in a disappointment as sharp as this. He laughed an old man’s dry and bony laugh. I wouldn’t be taking his books because his books weren’t worth taking.

I clasped his arm. I was happy to be travelling back to London emptyhanded.

He sent me the occasional greeting card after this, expressing guilt and gratitude, out of which motives he bought a few things from our catalogue – the odd George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, ‘Monk’ Lewis. After his death, his executors arranged for us to purchase the little of his library that was of value, which happened to be the very books he’d bought only recently from us. Time’s whirligig and all that. But it wasn’t for business reasons that I attended his funeral. Sometimes the heart must lead you. And mine led me to Marius. So you could say I hadn’t travelled back to London empty-handed after all.

I was careful not to discuss the Cuban doctor with Marisa on her recovery. It’s possible she remembered nothing of her illness or his visit and would not even have known who I was talking about. We flew home from Florida
as soon as Marisa was strong enough to travel and took an immediate second honeymoon in Suffolk. After the swamplands we felt the urge to be somewhere chillier and more bracing. I am not one who subscribes to the hot and cold shower theory of marriage, but we needed to clear our heads.

In the event, I didn’t succeed in clearing mine. Today I’m at peace with the knowledge that I never will, that it cannot ever be quiet or uncrowded in there, but at the time the mental congestion I suffered whenever I embraced my wife alarmed me. I am a moralist in the matter of intercourse. You sleep with whom you’re sleeping with, I’ve always believed. It isn’t necessary that you love every woman you invite to share your bed, but you must do each of them the honour, at least while you’re inside them, of thinking of no one else. If another woman’s face rises up before you, you withdraw and make your apologies. But my morality floundered when the face which rose up before me was not another woman’s but another man’s – not someone I wanted to kiss more than I wanted to kiss Marisa, but someone I wanted Marisa to kiss more than I wanted her to kiss me.

I opposed the presence of this phantom with all my will. He made himself known to me initially on that second honeymoon, indeed on the very first occasion of our making love in Suffolk on an iron bedstead from which we could see – or should have seen had another not intruded – the vast greyness of the sea. I took long walks in the morning, sometimes before Marisa had so much as stirred, convinced that the wind which could make such startling transformations to the Suffolk sky would blow away my unwanted guest. But the moment I returned and moved my face close to Marisa’s, there he was again, the Cuban doctor with his long brown horse ’s teeth. No matter how tightly I pressed Marisa to me he was always able to find sufficient space to slide his silk-fringed knuckles between us and find a way to her breasts.

This action, I must stress, was not that of a man who meant to replace me. The part he played was more that of my assistant, in the sense that a magician has an assistant. But doesn’t every magician’s assistant want to be the magician in the end?

As I hadn’t raised the Cuban doctor with Marisa, I saw no reason to raise his ghost. Though I had virtually talked her out of her previous marriage, though conversation was our medium and words were our caresses, some things we were too discreet ever to speak about. Direct verbal engagement with our feelings for each other was not our way. I’m not saying that our relations were cold – far from it. There ’s a heat in inexplicitness which couples who live in a state of mutual erotic candour know nothing of. Our eyes met furtively across signals barely made and scarcely halfperceived and in the exchange of guesswork and intuition we found our space.

Had I spoken of the Cuban doctor’s presence in our bed, had I proposed finding another man to do what he’d done when he’d examined her, or suggested to Marisa that she find one for herself, I might well have lost her. There was a streak of severity in Marisa that I feared. Make no mistake: I loved her for it. It excited me to be married to a beauty who was also a moral philosopher. Not every man gets to lie simultaneously with Salome and Socrates. But the disadvantage, if it can be a called a disadvantage, was that I thought twice before opening to her the sewer that was my mind.

And to myself, too, I knew to be careful about bringing up the Cuban doctor. I didn’t want to murder in me a sickly hankering which had a way to go yet before it flowered into a monstrous appetite.

There are some desires which are too elusive and undefined ever to be put satisfactorily into words: utter them and they lose their trepidation, call them by their name (supposing that you know their name) and you forgo that oscillation between the possible and the unthinkable, between what you rub at in your imagination and what you fear ever coming to pass (or worse, not coming to pass) in reality. If that oscillation made us giddy it also made us the more in love. Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for Marisa. It was part of our unspokenness never to be certain how in love the other person was. For me, though, the not knowing what was permissible, what Marisa made of my odd nature, how many of my dreads and fancies she had become aware of and would ever allow to come to pass,
threw me into a frenzy of waiting and wondering that conventional people would regard more as servitude than love, but which for me was love ’s very image, love without surety or promise, love in an eternity of suspense.

There are men in whom the masochistic impulse takes the crudest forms. They want a woman to strike and abuse them, to spit in their faces, to thrash them like children. It was otherwise with me. Marisa’s knee would surely have been a fine place on which to take one’s punishment, but it was her mind I wanted to lie across. And there, in the wordless quiet, to wait for her to think her worst.

I glowed with the suspense of it. People I ran into in the impersonal way of work commented on my appearance. My staff suddenly enjoyed my company and seemed to want to talk to me in the morning rather than scuttle off into their cubicles. Defencelessness, I suppose, was what they saw. That aura of being unprotected and unguarded we love in infants or young lovers, as though they are in their milk skin still, waiting for the second layer to grow. Isn’t that, half the time, all we mean by beauty? A translucence of the flesh through which the quaking nakedness of our souls is visible.

I rarely visited my father. We didn’t like each other. I had deposited him in an old persons’ home in Hertfordshire where, as I have said and will say again because it gives me pleasure to hear the words, he played canasta with elderly women with sick minds, making them promises he couldn’t keep. He had done the same with my mother. Me too, in a way. He had promised I would never get the business but here I was in charge of it. For which he promised he would never forgive me. But even he, the one time I did go to see him, was struck by how well I looked.

‘Anyone would think,’ he said, spitting into a bowl, ‘that you’d found someone to get your leg over at last. It’s not a man, is it? I recall your mother had a brother who went in for that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s in the genes.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It isn’t a man.’

Though of course strictly speaking . . .

My doctor went so far as to offer it as his opinion that marriage so
agreed with me it had extended my life by at least ten years. My bad cholesterol had gone down, my good cholesterol had gone up, my blood pressure was lower than at any time since I’d been his patient, I had lost weight and if I allowed him to measure me I would probably discover I had grown taller by a couple of inches.

‘Whatever it is she’s giving you, Mr Quinn, it would save the National Health Service millions if we could bottle it.’

‘I visit you as a private patient,’ I reminded him. ‘Think altruistically,’ he said.

I fear I must have blushed, so altruistically was I thinking.

I have said Marisa was severe but I must not give the impression that she was prim. Of the two of us, though I was the more criminally insane, I was also the more censorious. It is not uncommon to be simultaneously perverted and puritanical. For only the pervert knows how rank it gets inside his head. Had I been the judge charged with trying me for crimes against the hearth, I’d have sentenced me to hang at first light and let the birds peck my bones clean.

Marisa, on the other hand, was unshockable in matters of sex, passing judgement on nobody, least of all herself. Prior to me, whether married or single, she had taken lovers freely. Not always when she wanted them, for there were other people ’s feelings to be considered, which made her hang back or go ahead not quite in accordance with her desires. But as a woman who admired the freedoms open to a man, and who was herself, psychologically speaking, the triumphant product of those freedoms, she had no choice but to reach out and take a lover so long as there was no compelling reason not to. Men helped themselves to what came along; she did the same. The experience neither inflamed nor depressed her. It was possible she was not in it for the sex. Yes, the act first of making, then of keeping an assignation energised her: being taken to a restaurant she did not know, deciding what to wear, choosing what to eat, wondering what
might happen next, where and in how much secrecy and danger. Hotels she liked, provided they were comfortable, the beds warm and large, the hot water plentiful and the room service efficient. Four star was about as low as she could tolerate. Anything less and she would rather forgo sex altogether. Was she in it for the linen? She sometimes wondered. Things went best when she saw to the arrangements, who would sign in first, how one would know the other was in the room, in what fashion (meaning in what manner and in what garment) she would either open the door or knock on it. The social-organisation side of adultery – its Women’s Institute, bring-and-buy-sale aspect (helping
out
rather than helping herself ) – she found engrossing; thereafter – the kissing, the unbuttoning, the penetration, the apologies, the thanks, the excuses and the fabrications – she could take or leave alone.