Authors: Howard Jacobson
Thus did the early years of our marriage pass in a sort of cliff-hanging harmony, with every conversation we almost had or refused to have pressing in on our precariousness, but without any resolution in event. For my part I did not solicit salacious circumstance, and for hers Marisa gave me no cause for jealousy: a freedom from anguish which, until I grew accustomed to it, was anguish enough. But there is a hunger to know whereof you don’t know, which no amount of tearing at the wound of doubt can ever satisfy.
And so, at last, I
did
solicit salacious circumstance. A better way of putting it might be this: seeing it coming, I met it halfway.
A relative of mine, a Quinn but too far removed a Quinn for me to work out how exactly we were related, wrote to me requesting a period of work experience in the firm. Though I was unimpressed both by his handwriting and his manner of expression, I had no choice but to agree. In matters of business a Quinn does not refuse a Quinn. A queer loyalty, given what brutes the men of my family have all been to their wives, but then the wives weren’t born Quinns.
Quirin was his name. Quirin Quinn. QQs were not unknown in our family, I suspect as much for the elegant gold monographs they made on
leather suitcases and trunks as for any other reason. I had heard mention of at least three different Quentins among us, a Quinton, a Quintus, an earlier Quirin, and, though it is hard to credit, a Quilp. This Quirin turned out to be from the tall branch of the family. There are no half measures if you’re a Quinn – you’re tall or you’re short. And you scintillate or you don’t. Quirin flashed like a lighthouse. Which marked him as from the lazy as well as the tall branch of the family. He was as gold as his monograph, personable, handsome in a languid, milkmaidish sort of way, with soft skin and yellow curls, a penchant for bootlace ties and floral jackets, and an utterly untrustworthy air. He wasn’t a student, as I’d feared from his reference to ‘work experience ’, though after a stint in advertising and public relations, he was still unable to decide what to do with himself. Some cock and bull story about his being kicked out of a house he shared with an old girlfriend was the prelude to his asking if he could lodge with us for a day or two while he sorted things out. No, was my first response, then something made me say yes.
Ours was a big house, built in the 1770s by an architect called Johnson in the Adam style, but much interfered with since then, primarily by my grandfather, who returned from cruising to New York on the
Queen Mary
– I believe he was on the maiden voyage in 1936, by that time a more grossly sensual man than he ’d been in 1919 – with the conviction that a house should resemble a ship. Hence the loud, louche semicircular saloon staircase he installed, its extensively patina’d brass bannisters, the vast tinkling chandelier swaying above it, all of which no member of the family had since been able to find the money or the will to tear out. Though the house looked, on this account, far more spacious than it actually was, there were still bedrooms enough to sleep a handful of puppyish relatives with QQ on their luggage and not notice they were there. So how could I say no to Quirin?
I checked, of course, with Marisa first. She shrugged. She didn’t expect him to be in her way. She had a lot on that week: a hair appointment, dinner with a girlfriend, her once a month all-nighter for the Samaritans, a reception at the art gallery, another reception at her favourite shoe shop
– that was how they sold Marisa her shoes: over a martini and canapés – and an all-day and all-evening course that was in some way related to her Samaritans work and for that reason not to be discussed. By the time she was able to look up, he would be gone, would he not?
What she didn’t say was that it would be nice to have some young company about the place when she was home. But then there was much Marisa didn’t say.
When it was that I decided Quirin would be light relief for Marisa, and heavy exercise for my imagination, I don’t recall. Perhaps the minute he moved his stuff in. There is something about the sight of a flaxen-haired stripling unbending himself from a taxi with a leather grip on his shoulder, looking for somewhere to lay his head, and trying a little too hard to please, that is bound to move a man like me. Move him on behalf of his wife, I mean.
He went his own way for a couple of evenings – he claimed he was talking to people about accommodation – then Marisa went hers for a couple of evenings more. He must have been in the house a week before we all sat down to eat something together. As a consequence of my grandfather’s desire to feel at sea when he was at home, we had to ascend the staircase for drinks, a jest which Quirin entered into by taking Marisa’s arm (Marisa in a belted, short-sleeved linen dress, the colour of squashed plums) before they began the climb.
‘The captain awaits,’ he laughed, and Marisa, though she could not have found that funny, laughed with him.
I felt as the hounds must feel before the kill. But as the fox must feel as well.
When we reached the top I remembered aloud I had a catalogue to proofread before morning. I drank a claret with them, made my apologies, and descended.
Leaving my study door open, I was just able to hear the ebb and flow of their conversation, not anything that was said, only the music of their intimacy. Any silence was of course interpreted by me as an embrace. You do not, when you are as I am, grace people with the usual build-up to
impropriety. They talk. They stop. They kiss. Anything longer you do not have the patience for. Yes, waiting is of the essence. But you have already waited an eternity to get to this. Now the actors are assembled, it’s action.
As it happened, the silences were few and far between. Unless they were kissing while they were speaking, they were not kissing at all. Once or twice I stepped into the hall and listened hard. I thought I could hear Quirin quizzing Marisa about her work with the Samaritans and Marisa, as always, giving little away. Secrecy was in the nature of what she did and she did it well. If I wasn’t mistaken, Quirin asked if she knew how many people she had lost in her time manning the lines. I didn’t catch Marisa’s reply, but Quirin said, ‘Gosh.’
After about two hours I went upstairs. All talking had stopped. I would not look into the room where I had left them should the door to it be closed. But it was open. Marisa had retired. Quirin was stretched out on a chaise longue once favoured by my mother, reading a magazine. He laughed when he saw me, his laughter like water overflowing. ‘Great woman, your wife,’ he told me.
The familiarity cut through me like a blade. At the same time I willed him to be more familiar still. Why ‘great’ woman? Why not ‘beautiful’ woman? Why not ‘seductive’ woman? Though I loathe the word ‘sexy’ I’d have taken that from him as well. ‘Sexy woman, your wife’ – the vile little neologism closing like hair-fringed fingers over Marisa’s honour.
Three nights later I left them to each other’s company again. This time Quirin talked about his life, painting himself, so far as I could hear, as lovably beyond the pale. Occasionally the name of a woman would float down to me, followed by a snort of incorrigibility, as though this was another one he’d either let escape or let down. I wondered how the roll call affected Marisa. Did it make her jealous? Was she retrospectively slighted by it?
But again when I went upstairs I found Quirin on his own, drinking my brandy and going potty, he told me, looking for a radio or disc player. ‘I’ve never lived in such a silent house,’ he told me. ‘What do you listen to all day?’
‘I’m out,’ I told him.
‘And Marisa?’
‘Ask her.’
‘But don’t you play music when you’re home?’
‘Sometimes, but I doubt it would be what you mean by music.’
He didn’t bother to rise to the insult. It’s possible he didn’t hear it. ‘I couldn’t live without music,’ he said.
‘Well I can,’ I said – disingenuously, for I did not add that I had music enough to listen to in my head.
A day or two after that conversation he collared me as I was leaving the house in the morning – he in a jute dressing gown, I in my business suit – to enquire if I intended being at home that evening.
‘Shouldn’t I be the one asking you,’ I said, ‘whether you intend being at work today? Work experience is what you are here for, is it not?’
He smiled his irresistible, sapling smile at me. ‘Finalising my accommodation today,’ he said. ‘By tonight we should all have reason to celebrate. I’m going to crack open something expensive.’
Something expensive of mine? I wondered.
He clapped an arm around my shoulder. An odour of flagrant youth came off him – cologne, hair gel, new skin, marijuana, optimism, music, sex. ‘Marisa has told me what she likes,’ he said, ‘so I’ll be picking up a bottle of that.’
‘Have you checked whether she ’ll be in?’ I wondered.
‘I have,’ he said. ‘And she will.’
When, I wondered, this being eight thirty in the morning, had he checked whether she’d be in?
When Marisa and I met for lunch that day, as we tried to do at least twice a week, I mentioned I had work to do again that night – indeed might not manage to get away until quite late – and would therefore, I was sorry, have to leave her to toast Quirin’s good news without me. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Anyone would think,’ she began, but then stopped herself. We were careful where we let any tetchiness lead us. But even curtailed, this was further than Marisa normally went.
‘Anyone would think what?’ I asked.
She took her time. ‘Anyone would think you’re trying to avoid him.’
‘I am.’
‘Why? He’s all right.’ ‘How all right?’
Impossible to tell whether the question irritated her. She was used to dealing with people about to throw themselves off a ledge. ‘As all right as a boy his age can be,’ she said.
‘I suppose so, if you mean by that pretty, and with an eye for the older woman.’
‘He doesn’t have an eye for me, Felix.’
‘He has an eye for your chest,’ I said, calling for the bill.
I stayed at work until nine then made my way slowly home. It was a moony night, the sky very high. On nights like this when you are young you imagine a vast life for yourself. Life felt vast again for me, pregnant, infinite. But what it was pregnant with I couldn’t have said.
Because our house sits at a watchful angle at the end of a terrace on the corner of a square, you can enjoy commanding views from any of its front windows; conversely you can enjoy commanding views of the house long before you reach its door. I approached it from the opposite side of the square with the trepidation of a traveller returning home after years abroad, unsure what he would find but hoping to tell from the number of lights burning what was happening within and what reception he might receive. This was a nonsensical calculation. They were not going to plunge the whole house into darkness because they needed a circle of darkness round themselves; nor were they going to turn on every lamp to let me know it was safe for me to return. But what did sense have to do with anything? I wanted evidence of an event and yet I did not. I wanted to see and yet I did not know whether I would be able to live with what I saw. Sense? Sense vanished from my vocabulary the day the Cuban doctor put his hands on Marisa’s fevered breasts and claimed them as his own.
Unless it vanished when Victor led me up the stairs to see his sickly wife.
Unless it vanished the night I first read a novel.
Unless it vanished the night I was born of woman.
Though the curtains of the upstairs room into which I stared were closed, I could see silhouettes behind them and they were not the silhouettes of people behaving in any way out of the ordinary. I don’t know how long I waited for the scene to change, but at last I crossed the square and took my keys from my pocket. I inspected them with a curiosity that amounted almost to nostalgia. Keys? Did I still possess keys to this house? I fumbled at the lock, not expecting it to work. Before I could open the door I heard singing. Whatever I expected of this evening – and much of what I expected I did not name even to myself – Marisa and QQ singing to each other was not part of it.
Here was a very different sort of jealousy from that for which I had prepared my mind. I took a couple of steps back to listen. Quirin was piping, ‘My luv is like a red, red rose.’ If he thought to win her that way, he was mistaken. Marisa had told me many times, in the intervals of operas and recitals, that she did not much care for tenors, let alone tenors who faltered in the falsetto register. True, that was Marisa sober, but when her turn came to sing she did not sound drunk. Like all women of her class and education, she had a vast repertoire of Scottish and Irish sentimental ballads of the Barbara Allen sort which she performed with trembling sorrow in her voice and a misty, exiled from the islands of her childhood look in her eyes. Quirin was welcome to those. It was when she started on Dido’s Lament that I became upset. The first time Marisa did Dido for me I wept. ‘When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create / No trouble, no trouble in thy breast.’ I had no defences against those words, no defences against the idea of a woman laid in earth, whoever the singer. But swelling in Marisa’s throat they touched feelings I did not know I possessed. On many an evening since then I had called for it and Marisa had obliged, taking an artist’s satisfaction in my tears, and also, it sometimes seemed to me, a mother’s, cradling me until I had sobbed myself out. Was the song, in that case, not sacred to our marriage?
After Dido the house went very quiet. I did not know whether to let
myself in or not. I decided to walk once around the square, allowing my competing jealousies to find their own equilibrium. By the time I returned I had decided that the silence meant they were now in each other’s arms. How else do you follow Dido?
I looked up at the window but there was no sign of them. The lights still burned, but nothing, no one, not a shadow, moved. Did that mean they had left the room? If so, to which room had they repaired?
Not a murmur from the house. I turned the key in the door and went inside. It was not my intention to spy or listen in; all I wanted was to be under the same roof as them. The house was as quiet within as it had seemed without. I trod quietly, but not so quietly that they shouldn’t know I was back. You will not be disturbed by me, I hoped my tread would say. You are not to hold back on my behalf.