The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page A

in order to be beneath him. If the shop was empty and I listened hard I fancied I could hear him pacing the floor. Still searching for that opening sentence. I bought far more buttons than I needed in the course of this operation, but I felt I was getting the smell of him this way, and would subsequently know, if we happened to be shopping in the same supermarket, say, or visiting the same doctor, that he was near.
    It could have been pure chance or it could have been his odour that took me to the local fromagerie one lunchtime when Marius was deliberating over cheese. That bread and cheese was just about all he ate I had figured out already. I felt certain there was no table in his flat. He would eat his lunch, I imagined, sitting on the edge of his bed, slicing the cheese with a sharp fruit knife and ripping the baguette apart with his hands. There was something satanic in this image, by virtue of its suppressedexplosiveness. No man his size and temperament could go on living like that.
    You could feel the tension he emitted in the fromagerie. Everyone fell quiet around him as he muttered into the cheese, asking for one rat-trap-sized portion after another, leaving increasingly long silences between each selection.
    ‘Will there be anything else?’ the young woman behind the cheese counter not unreasonably enquired, Marius having abstracted himself so completely at last that he appeared not to be there in mind at all.
    The question produced a wheeze of brokenhearted merriment from deep inside his moustaches. ‘ Will there be anything else? I certainly hope there will, but when there will, or what there will, I’m damned if I have an earthly. Time being unredeemable, what else there will be, no less than what might have been, is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation, as the poet he say.’
    ‘That’ll be seventeen pounds and thirty pence, then,’ the young woman said. I gathered she was used to his nonsense.
    Another of his tragic Old Man of the Sea wheezes, and then he peeled off a twenty-pound note from a wad he carried in the back pocket of his corduroy trousers, like an Oxford don who’d gone into the protection racket.
    ‘Ta, doll,’ he said, shining his icily heartache, opal-blue eyes into hers as she gave him his change. He had no desire to make a fool of her. On the contrary. The meek shall inherit the earth, Marius believed, the haughty having made such a mess of it. Then the meek shall do the same.
    Doll , for Christ’s sake!
    Who called a woman doll any more?
    I didn’t know how she felt, but I turned a little queasy for her, hearing it.
    Doll!
    I wasn’t sure it was still allowed to address a woman in that way. I wasn’t sure it should ever have been allowed.

    He didn’t buy his bread and cheese at the fromagerie every lunchtime, but he did so frequently enough for me to hope that they would see each other there eventually – he and Marisa – since she too was a cheese eater and the fromagerie, at least on the days there was no farmers’ market, was the place to get it.
    And eventually – though I had to keep my wits about me to ensure it – they did.
    As an expert on them both, I saw what they saw. He, as dusty as a snake, a scarf about his neck in defiance of the warm weather – the eternal student, just down from Wittenberg, not going anywhere in particular, thinking about his satanic lunch. She, in a high-waist pencil skirt so tight he would have wondered how her skin could breathe inside it, her sunglasses in her hair, her earrings rattling as she paced the shop in her punitive stilettos, an alien presence in so organic a place. She was, to my heightened senses, more than usually absented, her lovely Diana-the-huntress head slightly to one side, as when she was weighing up a proposition. I knew when Marisa registered a man. I had watched her register enough of them. She cleared her throat. I had seen Marius only with prey that was too young and a