The Act of Love (35 page)

SOME ACTIONS IT IS WISE TO KEEP TO YOUR YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT
your commitment to honesty. I decided against telling Marisa where I’d been. Now that she’d jerked the tears out of me once, I couldn’t be certain she wouldn’t jerk them out of me again. And yes, kissing the thighs of another woman struck me as a crying matter.

We didn’t discuss the altercation that had precipitated my fall from grace. I didn’t again ask to be the water boy at her Roman feast, didn’t put a name to any of my wants, and was careful to be out of the house at Marius’s appointed hour. For her part Marisa did not ask why I had returned home at four o’clock in the morning in a frilly shirt, smelling of smoke, and did not again reproach me for my neediness. Instead, we did what we were good at and changed the subject.

Normal life resumed. We were a happy family once more. The three of us.

Much talked about, no doubt, as time went on, but that was the way I liked it. Indeed, had the world turned into a sound box reverberating to our scandal, I could not have asked for more, so long as it reverberated, too, with admiration for Marisa. People were slow to understand I welcomed this, needed it even to counteract the conformism that will spread like suburban ivy over even the most outrageous
ménage
. I am not – apropos conformity – saying that we had settled into a serene imperturbability. Such a condition is impossible for a cuckold, who awaits in suspended agitation each new indignity. But with every passing week routine takes
hold, until it is only through other people that you go on registering the strangeness of your life and the remarkable character of the woman who holds its continuance in her hand.

There was no shortage of concerned looks of the Dulcie sort, expressions of obscure compassion, or enquiries, from the more intrepid of my friends and business associates, as to the progress of my divorce since they assumed we must be separating. At the merest hint that I was ready for such opinions, some would assuredly have told me they had thought my marrying was unwise from the beginning, Marisa never striking them, if I wanted to know the truth, as a settling-down sort of person. Andrew was to be numbered among those who subtly let me know they had disapproved of Marisa from the start. But it’s possible he was simply jealous of Marius for bagging the boss’s wife just as he’d bagged the professor’s. He left my employ, anyway, about six months into our arrangement. ‘Sometimes you just have to know when to let go, Mr Quinn,’ he said as we parted, though whether he was referring to me or to himself I couldn’t decide.

Appreciation was far harder to come by. A writer of ecstatic tales who lived next door, well past her prime now but once a sort of bluestocking de Sade for women undergraduates – indeed, in her heyday a prolific buyer of eighteenth-century French pornography from us – made a prune of her face whenever we passed each other on the street.

‘Your house!’ she exclaimed one morning, as it were over the garden fence.

‘What about my house?’

‘Well you tell me what about your house.’

‘I’m not sure I am obliged to. But since I think of us as coming from the same space erotically, Mariana, wouldn’t you say my house exemplifies those freedoms your stories have always claimed for your sex? Is not Marisa one of yours?’

‘Freedoms! Freedoms are taken, not given.’

‘Ah, so you are privy to our negotiations.’

The word ‘negotiations’ caused her face to assume its prune shape again
.

‘“Fuck or be fucked” – wasn’t that your exhortation to your readers? Well, my wife fucks. You should be fucking pleased for her. Unless you think she’s thereby bringing down the tone of a respectable neighbourhood.’

‘Well she’s certainly not raising it,’ she said. A high priestess of the sexual mysteries worrying about the value of her property.

I doubted that property was on the mind of the retired media lawyer who lived in widowered sadness the other side of us – a sweet man with broken veins in his cheeks who, when the sun shone, invited us into his garden for sherry he imported from Portugal. But he too, I thought, was watching Marius’s comings and goings without knowing what to make or say of them.

‘How’s Marisa?’ he would ask me some days. He was worried for her, he wanted me to see.

‘Look,’ I said to him one evening, sitting in his garden listening to the Marylebone bells striking six, the pair of us sipping sherry like a pair of old bees. I was without Marisa who was somewhere else. ‘You’re approaching this the wrong way. Imagine we’re in Rome discussing Cleopatra. I’m Agrippa, who’s never left the city, and you’re the muchtravelled Enobarbus impressing me with tales of the Nile. So . . .
the barge
she sat in
. . .’

He tried, but lacked the amplitude of vocabulary. ‘She’s a peach,’ he said, refilling my glass and blushing, ‘there can be no two opinions about that.’

Leaving me to pine for descriptions of how she was adorned, what wild Asiatic scents came off her body, how sick with love for her the winds were.

At last it was Marisa’s own sickness that began to cause me concern. Something, I could tell, was eating away at her. I hadn’t noticed it coming on, but suddenly she was looking hollow-eyed. She left food on her plate, a thing she ‘d never done in the whole time I’d known her. She would stub out a cigarette barely before she ‘d drawn on it, then immediately light another. She started conversations she couldn’t be
bothered to finish. She missed appointments, two weeks running letting down the blind man and even failing to turn up to her precious dancing lessons, which I often thought she ‘d skip my funeral to attend. This latter omission I took to be especially significant with the summer coming round and London’s open spaces getting ready for all those al fresco festivities Marisa loved – tea dances in Covent Garden, ballroom and old-time in front of the National Theatre, tangoing in Regent’s Park.

As well, she stopped talking to me in the night about Marius.

I could have been the cause of it, however returned to husbandly compliance I now was. I was an oppression with my ever-waiting ear, I accepted that. But I didn’t think it was me. If she looked anything, yes, she looked lovesick, and though I believed she was still in love with me, it wasn’t any longer love of the sort that makes your eyes go black. So it was Marius. Things were not right between them.

I had several theories as to the cause of her distress. Chief among them being Marius’s nature. Marius the Withholder doing what he did best – withholding. An unforgiving account of my part in their affair would see this as intrinsic to my intentions from the start. I had picked him for exactly this quality. If Marisa was suffering, was she not suffering exactly as I knew she would, indeed exactly as I meant her to?

It’s hard for me to accept I wished Marisa harm. Where would the sense have been in that? I wanted her to fall for Marius in a big way, because that would hurt me, not her. But I see I may at some level have sought her degradation as the price or even the condition of mine. In which case I bore the blame for whatever Marius was doing, or not doing, to her now. Was this too, then, intrinsic to my intentions from the start – that I would have to save her from him?

‘I know your game,’ Elspeth told him once.

‘I have no game,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes you do. You make women feel it’s their fault you don’t want them.’

‘Women?’

‘I’m not a fool, Marius.’

‘My dear, I would never for one moment say you were.’

‘Say it, no. But you look it, think it, communicate it every time I come near you.’

‘You are hoping I’ll say, “Then don’t come near me,” so I’ll have proved your point.’

‘It doesn’t make you a pleasant or a kind man, Marius, to know yourself.’

‘Self-knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you say?’

‘Not when it’s you who’s knowing you, no, it isn’t.’

‘Then who would you like me to know? Name a person you don’t resent me knowing.’

The reference was to their previous argument when she’d accused him of seducing her godchild, a pretty girl with the eyes of Mata Hari who, like her godmother, had a soft spot for clever men. That Marius dared allude to this incident, however obliquely, damned him in Elspeth’s eyes to just the criticism she’d been making. But she had no defences against its logic.

‘You prick!’ she said.

He curled his lip at her. ‘And you wonder why I don’t come near you.’

The godchild was called Arwen – the daughter of a woman Elspeth’s husband had taught and who had formed a close union with Elspeth based on a shared enthusiasm for the Middle Earth. It had been in order to guarantee a sort of continuity in Tolkien, should anything happen to her, that the mother had asked Elspeth to be godmother. Arwen had been staying with them in Church Stretton, recuperating from an unhappy affair with a famous poet. She had met the poet at a book signing in a London bookshop. He had apologised to her because his fountain pen had smudged his signature. ‘It’s running wet,’ he said.

‘Wet is how I like it,’ Arwen had replied, and the next day the poet left his wife.

Six months later he left her.

She was more careful with Marius, who warned her against literary men in general but poets in particular.

‘Was he dark-suited or did he sport a headband and two earrings?’ he asked her.

‘Are those the only options for a poet?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was dark-suited.’

‘Ah, the worst kind. I guessed as much. And low-voiced?’

‘How did you know?’

‘And he chewed his words to make them digestible for you. But never quite audible. So you had to be forever inclining your head to hear him, like a beggar wanting alms.’

She laughed and flashed her eyes. ‘How do you know this?’

‘Because he’s the fucking same himself,’ Elspeth said.

They were in the garden, looking across towards the slumbering purple outline of the Long Mynd – Marius’s least favourite sight on earth. Elspeth was serving them Pimm’s. It was four o’clock and Marius felt that suffusion of irritated desire appropriate to the hour. His eyes met the girl’s. He didn’t need them to say anything. Elspeth had said it all for him. Always her mistake, to suppose she could discommend him as a bounder. All she did was pique the curiosity of the women she hoped to deter. For three days Marius held the girl in his eyes and let Elspeth do the talking.