The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online

myself; I am speaking maritally – have eyed him sooner.
    Wherever he’d got to after Elspeth’s death he’d been living as one of the dead himself, growing a moustache to keep the world at bay, communicating from his great height with almost no one, the few words he spoke now – to the staff at the button shop below him, to the newsagent, to anyone who bothered him at a pavement café, as I was to make a habit of doing until I was sure of him – inaudible behind his moustache.
    ‘Barely a word of it,’ was Andrew’s answer, when I enquired whetherhe’d been able to hear anything Marius had asked him. ‘But then he was never that easy to understand at university.’
    An oblique man even before he had reason not to look life directly in the face, Marius, in his disgrace, was in danger of speaking a language spoken only by himself.
    I the same. Though I claim universality for my condition I cannot pretend I know many people who find the words for it which I do. Except at the outer reaches of pornography, in the phantasmagoric chat rooms where the deranged whisper to the deranged, what I do is not talked about. So that was each of us speaking a language spoken only by ourselves. On which basis I believed we could converse. Or at least do verbal business.
    He would, I was certain, be appalled by my language once he got to hear it. But I didn’t mind that. I wanted to appal him.
    No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else – that sort of language. No husband is ever happy – truly, genitally happy, happy at the very heart of himself as a husband – until he has proof positive that another man is fucking her.

    To say I kept Marius under surveillance aggrandises somewhat my efforts to become familiar with the patterns of his existence. There wasn’t, when all was said and done, that much to surveil. He was in most of the time, trying to finish the book he’d never started. But thanks to conscientious staff, and domestic arrangements that can best be described as plastic, I had time on my hands and was sometimes able to catch him when he did venture out. Once or twice I saw him circling Manchester Square, as though unable to decide whether to brave the Wallace Collection. What kept him out I didn’t know. Paintings, I discovered later. Paintings reminded him of Elspeth. Elspeth loved paintings. Loved them too much for Marius’s temper. He met paintings eye to eye, squabbled with them, felt their power and wrestled with it – he didn’t ‘love’ them. Music ditto. He listened, mused, resisted and gave in only after a struggle – he didn’t ‘love’. Whichwas presumably why I saw him loitering outside the Wigmore Hall in the same spirit. Elspeth died for music, too.
    Art hung about her like a halo. She was transfigured by it. The refulgence, when she came home from a concert or a gallery, hurt Marius’s eyes. Art was not the reason he left her; the deterioration of her body was the reason he left her. But who’s to say that loving being around art, especially art of an overly imaginative sort – her most favourite exhibition of all time had been Pre-Raphaelite Fairy Painting at the Victoria and Albert, and she owned, or had owned, signed first editions of everything by Tolkien, a one-time acquaintance of her father’s and husband’s – who’s to say that fevered art in whatever form she favoured it had not been instrumental in loosening her flesh from the bone?
    Otherwise, Marius proved to be a difficult customer to tail. The one routine of his I could count on – four o’clock coffee at whatever tin table he could find vacant on the High Street, by preference one of those outside the Greek café opposite the travel bookshop – was too risky to take advantage of. I doubted he’d recognise me from Shropshire, but I couldn’t take the chance. It was important, for what I wanted of him, that he didn’t know of my existence.
    I began to haunt the button shop simply