The Act of Love (8 page)

But Freddy was not framed as I am framed. Though the mere thought of eating out alone with his wife, discussing the nothing very much of their domestic life (and no third party to appreciate the vivacity of his talk), made him apoplectic, the thought of another man discussing anything with her made him more apoplectic still. You can hurt some men, it seems, by stealing from them what they are not aware they want.

He visited me in the shop when he found out what had been going on, shouting, even before I’d come out of my office, ‘So these are the thanks I get.’ Most angry husbands would not have remembered their grammar. ‘This is the thanks’ is the usual locution. But Freddy was as punctilious in his usage as I am, and indeed as Marius would be, which must say something about Marisa’s preference for precise men.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘what it is I owe you thanks for.’ ‘For my wife for one thing.’

‘You haven’t given me your wife.’ ‘You’re damn right I haven’t.’

‘Then what are these thanks that you have come to collect?’

‘I haven’t come to collect anything. I’ve come to punch your nose.’

Hearing the commotion, my staff emerged in no great hurry from their cubicles. Had Freddy wanted to make a fight of it he ’d have had them to contend with as well. Not a terrifying sight, four antiquarian booksellers in worn bookworm suits (ponytailed Andrew the most macho of the lot), and an easily upset secretary in an ankle chain – I will come to the ankle chain – but then Freddy wasn’t a terrifying sight either. And I knew he
would not make good on his threat to punch me on the nose. His hands were too important to him. Not because he feared particularly for his piano playing, which even he knew was execrable, but because he needed them in his profession as expressive television pundit.

‘It’s all right, go back to work,’ I told my staff. To Freddy I said, ‘We do no more than meet in restaurants some afternoons.’

Not quite true, but true enough.

He breathed through his nostrils at me, like a horse. I got the feeling that had I told him we no more than met at the Savoy and fornicated some evenings he ’d have been less disgusted.

‘I didn’t ask,’ he said, ‘for you to meet my wife in restaurants some afternoons.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ I conceded.

‘And no judge is going to believe that story anyway.’ ‘No judge?’

‘What – you think I’m not going to name you? You think I’m going to go for irreconcilable differences or whatever they call it now when I’ve got the evidence of her adultery staring me in the face?’

‘We just talk, Freddy.’

Not quite true, but true enough.

‘
Talk
. I’ve seen your
talk
. I’ve got photographs of your
talk
.’

‘I doubt,’ I said, ‘that photographs of talk will cut much ice with a judge.’

A flippancy I regretted no sooner than I’d spoken it. But I’ve said that being the lover didn’t suit me. It turned me into a person I neither recognised nor liked. A jeerer. I even felt differently inside my own skin, as though I inhabited myself lightly, I a man who had always understood himself as heavy.

The husband burned his eyes into me. He too, perhaps, was playing an unaccustomed role. He lit a cigarette and threw the dead match on the carpet. I bent to pick it up.

‘We ’ll see then, shall we,’ he said. ‘We ’ll see what
cuts ice
, as you so elegantly put it. No doubt you are more familiar with the divorce courts
than I am. But my feeling, for what it’s worth, is that what you mean by
talk
would get you a life sentence in some parts of the world.’

Which parts of the world was he referring to? Saudi Arabia? The Yemen?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think this would be a divorcing matter.’

‘That’s good of you. What would you have done
had
you thought it was a divorcing matter? Made shorter sentences?’

He was waving his arms about so violently I wondered if he might punch me, inadvertently, after all.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Nothing like as sorry as you will be. Rest assured, Quinn, I will take you for every penny you have.’

He made an operatic gesture with his hand, meaning, I supposed, say goodbye to all this: your shelves of modern first editions, your locked mahogany cupboards of illuminated bibles, your Berliozes, the pampered lifestyle which allows you to go out to restaurants some afternoons with other men’s wives. I even thought I knew the tune.
Non più andrai,
farfallone amoroso
. . .

I shrugged. What else could I do? I had no instinct for being the other man.

‘And I’ll be sending back every book I have ever bought from you, together with every book you seduced my wife into buying for me – buying for
me
, ha, there ’s a joke I’m glad I was not privy to – for which, for which I give you fair warning, Quinn, I expect to be reimbursed with interest.’

I inclined my head. Something told me that now was not the time to remind him that we operated, as Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers had always operated, a strict no sale or return policy.

He was done with me. Breathing hard, he ascended the stairs, but before he was at street level he turned to face me. I had seen him negotiate the identical pantomime swivel on television, before delivering one of his famously saltatory pieces to camera. He tossed down what was left of his cigarette. With one hand he made a gesture suggestive of the
wildest largesse, casting his five fingers to the wind, with the other he made a sort of sucking sea creature with spidery tentacles, tugging obscenely at the viewer’s attention.

‘I have one more thing to say to you, Quinn,’ he said. ‘A woman who betrays one man will betray another. That is the immutable law of woman. So: you are welcome to her. Enjoy her. Take her to your bed. Wrap her in your arms and talk to her all you like. But never forget this: tomorrow she ’ll be in someone else ’s arms, drinking in his words, abandoning herself to his conversation exactly as she abandoned herself to yours. Words are cheap, Quinn. As you should know. As cheap as is a woman’s love, which you should also know. That’s my gift to you and, no, I expect no thanks for it: a woman whose loyalty you will never be sure of, not for a single fucking second of a single fucking minute of a single fucking hour . . .’

He got over it. That is the immutable law of man. The immutable law of that sort of man at least. He and Marisa were divorced without any judge having to look at photographs of the co-respondent discoursing with the wife, and shortly afterwards Freddy married his research assistant – a woman, if he was right in his assessment, of whose loyalty he would never be assured.

I envied him his uncertainty. Not because I lacked uncertainties of my own, but because I believed you could never have too many.

At the time Marisa and I were putting him through hell I envied him still more. For her part, Marisa didn’t believe a word of his every single fucking second of every single fucking minute oration. But that, I think, was because Marisa didn’t understand how minutely jealous even an indifferent man could be. I never doubted it. Whenever I escorted Marisa to the theatre or the opera I imagined Freddy imagining us in the dark. When we strolled together through the park I imagined him wondering how many of his friends saw us, what they thought, what conclusions about our intimacy they drew, how our togetherness on benches throwing breadcrumbs to
the ducks reflected on him. Conversing with Marisa in a restaurant, I imagined him at a nearby table in disguise, still as a hare, watching, listening, inhaling, no grain of infidelity in a single syllable lost to any of his senses; or outside taking photographs to show the judge, proof tangible of that betrayal which talk in the abstract represented for him.

Remember, he had no sense of humour. And men with no sense of humour, who fear and loathe the intimacy which laughter brings because it is unknown to them, experience a jealousy beyond the range of men ordinarily amusable. Or at least – because I admit no rival in jealousy myself and I am, I hope, amusable – they are without the resources to convert it into an emotion from which they might garner consolation, even pleasure. You need wit to get the best out of being a cuckold. For Freddy, the thought or, worse, the spectacle of Marisa and I joking together must have been as scorpions in his brain.

The lucky devil! (Had he only known how to enjoy it.)

It might seem strange, my envying a man for what I put him through, but nothing that bears on sex should surprise us. And besides, what is envy of the sort I have described but imagination in the service of humanity? I placed myself where Freddy was because it pleased me to; not triumphantly but sympathetically. Is this not precisely the act of fellow feeling which the world’s religions exhort us to perform? Art, too. We enter into the consciousness of someone not ourselves. As Mozart entered into the clownish jealousy of Masetto, as Shakespeare entered into the fastidiously witty jealousy of Leontes, as Tolstoy entered into the demented Beethoven-driven jealousy of Pozdnyshev. Had they not sought, at the moment of creating these tortured figures, to suffer what they suffered, these artists would not have made the consummate art they did. Of course envy is not the word for it in art. Just as art is rarely the word for it while we envy. But it felt like art, sitting there with my thumb and forefinger looped at last around Marisa’s wrist, creating the turmoil of poor Freddy.

We married soon after the divorce. They came apart easily, Freddy and Marisa. So easily that it was difficult to see what they had been together
for. ‘He was good company when I first met him,’ Marisa told me. ‘And he knew the words of every song I liked.’

She sat quietly with me in a coffee shop on the morning before our wedding, running her hand through her coppery hair, going through his qualities. ‘I admire him, actually. He has always persisted in what he ’s good at. And he did it for himself. I was born into advantage, of a sort, he wasn’t. He had to create himself.’ She raised her eyes to me, serious as always, ‘I won’t hear anything against him,’ she said.

I nodded. I didn’t feel I had to defend myself against an unjust accusation. It was clear what she was doing. She was putting one house in order before she moved on to the next. She could hold more than one loyalty in her head, she wanted me to understand. One nail did not drive out another.

I didn’t ask too many questions. I’d peeled her relatively effortlessly from him, no matter that she admired him still, but was not so vain as to attribute my success to something overwhelmingly irresistible in me. Either she ’d been unbearably lonely with him, in which case I would make it up to her; or she ’d fallen into the habit of solacing herself elsewhere, in which case I wasn’t yet ready to learn with whom. Whom other than me, that was.

I’d never previously married. Faith was not the last girl or woman to cause me to weep copious tears. But though the memory of their rejection stayed with me, the memory of them did not. Whether that meant I was a lukewarm lover after all, heated only by the pain they caused me, or I was simply holding myself in reserve for Marisa, I was unable to decide. But at least there were no feelings of earlier spouses or children of earlier unions to consider. The Marylebone villa which had been in my family for generations, witness to the unsuccessful marriages which my father and his father and his father before him had all made – unsuccessful because not a one of them had found a wife with an amused attitude to her husband’s bringing home the clap – was now mine and waiting to be warmed back into life by the latest Mrs Quinn. ‘Bring home the clap to me and neither you nor it will be left
standing,’ Marisa had said with a laugh when I’d filled her in on the house ’s history. Otherwise she seemed more than happy to move in.

It was, anyway, since Marylebone had always been her patch too, no more than a matter of packing up on one side of the road and unpacking again on the another. Everything she was used to was here, not only her conveniences but her obligations. Her hairdresser
and
the Oxfam bookshop which she worked in out of conscience. Her acupuncturist
and
the Samaritans to whom she devoted her Friday nights. The nail shop
and
the Wallace Collection to which she volunteered her services as a guide, when other guides to the collection fell ill. Even without me she had the wherewithal to pamper herself, and every time she did that she felt she had to make amends. Hairdresser to charity organisation, manicurist to beggar. Thus did she balance the scales of social justice. It was a good day for a seller of the
Big Issue
when he caught Marisa coming out of her favourite shoe shop. But then in my eyes it was a good day for anyone when he caught Marisa coming out of anywhere.