The Act of Love, page 18
‘Baudelaire, presumably.’
‘Ah! I’m sorry. I have become predictable already.’
I thought so, but Marisa, I observed, did not.
From where I was positioned, it wasn’t possible for me to hear every word they exchanged, but what I didn’t hear for sure I lip-read or intuited or made up for them out of the intensity of my curiosity. I took it to be a good omen that Marisa had asked me to wait for her on the off-chance of her encountering Marius. It was a sign of how differently she felt about him that she could flirt outrageously with him in my presence – if you could quite call what I was a ‘presence ’ (certainly I wasn’t present to Marius) – without acknowledging me as she had somehow at all times acknowledged me the afternoon I saw her out with Dulcie ’s dentist.
Did it excite her to do this? Did it excite her for herself as well as for me? Was she, in Marius’s company, able to remove me as effectively from her consciousness as she appeared able to remove me from her proximity?
I never asked. I knew my place. And Marius was not a name we dared so much as breathe to each other. We carried him as though he were a precariously loaded tray which a single badly chosen word would cause either one of us to jolt and spill. He was our precious secret, hers from me, mine from her, inadmissible and unpronounceable, even as I lurked in the shadows of my own making, a self-ghosted man, and watched him fall in love with my wife. And she – if my luck held – with him.
He apologised again for the Baudelaire which she told him she did not recognise. I did. It was from one of the Frenchman’s prose poems. La Fausse Monnaie. But I was not able to demonstrate my cleverness. Ghosted men have no faces and no tongues.
‘The person who does the giving in the story,’ Marius explained, ‘is actually passing on counterfeit – performing a pretend-charitable act and making a good deal at the same time, gaining forty sous and the heart of God. A piece of calculation Baudelaire finds contemptible.’
‘You are not passing on counterfeit yourself, I presume?’ Marisa wondered.
‘Not knowingly.’
They looked each other directly in the eyes.
‘Not knowingly,’ Marisa repeated.
‘Not knowingly,’ Marius said, repeating her repetition.
Have I said I was as invisible as a bush? Think the burning bush.
SO WAS I SATISFIED YET?
No. Hungrier than the sea on which he ’s buffeted, a cuckold sighting land. They had gone further in one afternoon than I could contemplate with calm – enough had been said and done and promised to burn a thousand ordinary stay-at-home cuckolds alive in their beds – but I could look only forward, not back, and every act of lewdness vanished in its accomplishment and made me impatient for the next.
It also worried me that Marisa had told Marius there was no point in his starting looking for at least a week. A long time in politics, a week in love is an eternity, the more especially when one of the lovers was a man as easily stirred up and then as easily turned off as Marius.
One thing Marius didn’t mention to Elspeth after her husband died was that he ’d met another woman at the funeral and subsequently spent time in her company. In fact two women, and spent time with them both. Not women, strictly speaking, either. More girls. Sisters, as I’d thought. One fifteen, or so she said; one sixteen, or so she said. One with black lipstick, one with a ring through her nose. Marius wouldn’t have taken the trouble to remember which was which.
It would appear that I was mistaken, then, the morning I observed him in the village hall in Shropshire and picked him for a man who arranged more debaucheries than he attended. He did, after all, keep his four o’clock appointment. And that is not the only surprise. The appointment was for that same day. And not more than a few steps away from where he ’d made it. Meet me among the headstones, girls, he must have said, at four . . .o’ . . . clock.
I don’t know why I should have been surprised. Why not get on with it? What’s owing to the recently dead aside, I suppose because it’s beyond me to understand immediate gratification. Why come so quickly to the end of a pleasure you can spin out?
That, of course, is if he came to the end of it. Yes, he met them – I had been wrong about that. But who was to say how much of himself he gave? There is more than one way of withholding consummation.
Whether he did whatever he did with them one at a time, or whether they mucked in together; whether they found a patch of dry earth, if such exists in Shropshire, or whether they stretched out on cold sepulchral marble, and waited in the rain – I don’t know. In his reporting of the event years later he was sparing of these details; unless the person reporting it in turn to me was sparing of the details on his behalf. No one ever tells the whole truth about sex. Something must always be added or taken away.
What interested me at that later time, lying listening to Marisa telling me about it in the half-light, unconsummated myself, was not the hows but the wheres, a cemetery not being everybody’s idea of a love nest. No one seriously interested in the erotic life of men and women can be ignorant of tapophilia, that morbid fascination with burial and decay of which tapophobia is the opposite and vampirism and Gothic romances the direct if somewhat lily-livered offshoots. That the death instinct was strong in Marius, I already knew from everything I’d seen and heard from his own lips in Shropshire. But you can be absorbed in the poetry of expiry – especially your own – and still not care particularly for yew trees and sarcophagi, let alone choose them as the backdrop to pleasure. The truth about Marius was that he was not simply half in love with death, but invigorated and made potent by it. Did the sisters have clay from the graveyard on their feet when he did or did not embrace them? Did their fingers claw at bones? Was their youth perversely redolent of decay?
‘There’s this to say for blood and breath,’ wrote Housman, the presiding spirit of that dispiriting cemetery, ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Marius functioned according to the reverse principle. Death gave him a taste for blood and breath.
‘I can’t pretend it detracted from the violence of my enjoyment of them, or did anything but sharpen my recovered taste for life,’ he was to tell Marisa, ‘that they were Elspeth’s nieces.’
So he wasn’t sparing of every detail.
Marisa was quiet for a while. ‘Or that they were not of an age to refuse you?’ she wondered at last.
‘Nor that,’ he said.
What, I wondered in my own time, did Marius stand to gain from bragging to Marisa about these violations? ‘In the end it wasn’t their flaming youth in that garden of death that stirred me,’ he told her, ‘any more than it was their blood-relatedness to Elspeth or each other. It was the bruised commonness of their mouths.’
Why tell Marisa that?
And here’s another question: were their mouths bruised before they met Marius, or after?
And another: if the bruising came after, was that all they took away from their encounter?
I knew nothing of this – if by knowing we mean having words for – when I fretted over the week Marisa had given him: a whole week in which to go cold, turn tail, or pick up a couple of goth schoolgirls on Marylebone High Street in the hope they’d fancy being shown around a cemetery. But I knew and feared it in my bones. I knew and feared him in my bones. Call that my version of tapophobia.
The week passed. The minute the gallery opened on the first morning of week two, when it was OK for Marius to start looking, I was in the square, enjoying the early sun through the plane trees, my hat pulled down above my eyes. But no Marius. Nor the next day. Nor the next. It amazed me how a man could know that a woman in whom he was interested had hidden something for his eyes alone – an erotic lure, an enticement to do God knows what – and yet not be in a raging fever of impatience to find it. Had it been me I’d have been banging at the gates of the gallery the minute Marisa told me I could. By the end of the first morning I’d have torn the place apart.
But then I wasn’t afraid of admitting my dependence on a woman’s whim. I knew what fun it was being led by the nose.
Whatever was keeping Marius, I decided not to wait for him. There was my own rampaging curiosity to consider. What Marisa had hidden, I reasoned, she had hidden for me as well. It was not spoken about between us, but hiding pertained to our marriage. Concealment had become the language of our love. By which logic the test she had set for Marius was as much mine as his. And it was imperative to me to know what she ’d left and where she ’d left it, even if it wasn’t imperative to him.
I didn’t go to the gallery as Marius’s rival. I went as his alter ego. And in a sense as Marisa’s alter ego too. I went looking for the thing she ’d hidden so that I could enter the heart of their intrigue, but more than that I went looking to learn how the cuckolding of me felt, as it unfolded, from the other side; I went to roll in Marisa’s falseness as she plotted it through the gallery, room by room; I went to taste on my tongue the dry mouth of Marius’s excitement as he closed in on the knowledge, artefact by artefact, that though she had told him she was a married woman she was soon to be his mistress.
Yes, I had been in that position myself when Marisa finally proved false to Freddy. But what was false to Freddy compared to false to me!
Since there was little prospect of Marius and I doing the treasures of the Wallace Collection together in body – emeritus husband and lover-elect – I made do with taking him along with me in spirit. We were nervous the first morning, not knowing where to start, wandering from room to room without any purpose, discovering meanings in paintings and messages in furniture that probably weren’t there, unable to examine anything closely for fear of setting off an alarm. More than likely there was someone in a little room somewhere watching every move we made.
I ceded preference to Marius. I liked following him. It satisfied my sulphurous desire to be demeaned, the last in a line of obscene pursuit – Marisa laying down her scent, Marius tracking her, and I trailing in the rear of them both, like a wounded dog.
It was a shame, I thought, that he wasn’t there enough to converse with. ‘Do you not think it wonderfully Venetian,’ I would have asked him, ‘our looking together for we don’t know what, but which in my mind’s eye, as I’m sure in yours, resembles a parchment letter or a scroll, a ribboned summons to a carnivalesque rendezvous posted in an item of rococo furniture, which, if we never find it, could remain hidden here for centuries until some other lover in pursuit of an evasive mistress comes upon it and believes it is for him? Do you think Marisa might entice a man into her arms three hundred years after she has died? Knowing how you are around mortality, I must suppose you are even more inflamed by that idea than I am.’
I will be quick about our search, for it lasted several days. By the end of it perhaps no one knew the loot in that salacious temple to luxuriance better than we did. Eighteenth-century inkstands made of pinewood and walnut with boulle marquetry, French cabinets supported by bare-chested blackamoors, oak and ebony writing tables, escritoires veneered with satiné and purplewood, console tables, chests of drawers with griotte marble tops, wardrobes, roll-top desks, coffers on stands, pearwood book cabinets, secretaires – whatever had a drawer, ostensible or secret, a compartment that might just open or give a little, a ledge, a surreptitious niche, that could with ingenuity be employed to hold the thing we looked for, we tried (him first, me after) but tried in vain.
As though to recall to us the immemorial indecency of our errand,wherever we looked classical mythology was there before us, playing out its exemplary carnalities. Ornamental satyrs raped and carried off their plunder, bacchant fire-dogs rolled their eyes, deep pudendal inkwells dared us to explore their blue-black darkness with our fingers (first mine, then his), Venuses chased and suckled Cupids, a gilt-bronze, imperturbably bare-breasted Diana stroked the head of a snarling hunting dog, while at her feet a pair of less pacified curs ripped out the throats of deer. I permitted Marius to stand a long time studying the Diana, struck by the impassivity of her bloodlust, wondering if there was some communication for him here. Whatever he was looking for, he guessed that Marisa must have concealed it in or by an artwork that spoke eloquently about her feelings for him. So was she warning him to beware her cruel Diana chastity? Was he, Marius, intended to find a reflection of himself in the wounded deer?
I’d have liked him not to move for an eternity so that I could go on attributing to his heart the palpitations which shook my own. At last, when I did move him on, I paused to see if we were being watched, then tested the drawers of the cabinet on which Diana and her dogs stood, but to no avail. Two cupboards held catalogues for the Wallace furniture collection – works to which I felt I could by now make an informed contribution – but these too, though a perfect hiding place, were inaccessible.
On we went, from untouchable walls of pink-nippled Psyches and Ariadnes painted by the breast-besotted Greuze, through dense rooms of armour and ormolu, and out again into the indolent frivolities of Boucher, I never so far behind that I couldn’t inhale the heat of him, wondering what he was wondering, doubly tense for I was pursuing not only Marisa, I was pursuing his pursuit of her as well.
At last, for this could not go on forever, much as I wanted it to, we were led – as to our destiny – to Marisa’s hiding place. But first something curious happened. I got rid of Marius. It was the third day and I no longer welcomed his presence in my head. I grew selfish, suddenly. I wanted to savour the moment all by myself. Call it a marital impulse. As I neared the naked proof of my wife ’s adulterous intention, I wanted her to share it with me alone.
A milky Sicilian marble Cupid set into a Minton-tiled recess at the far end of the Smoking Room holds the attention of all visitors to the Wallace Collection whatever their mission. The Cupid is a youth, lavishly winged, taking an arrow from his quiver. Love Triumphant the work is called, though a flighty Cupid has never seemed to me an adequate metaphor for the way love clubs you into submission. Around the base of the sculpture runs a paean to love ’s stranglehold, itself far from flighty, written by Voltaire:
Qui que tu sois voici ton maître.
Il l’est, le fut, ou le doit être.
(Whoever you are, here is your master.
He is it, or was, or must be.)
Here is your master, but in fact this was not the place. No conceivable hiding room here for a communication directly from Marisa’s hand. But to the immediate left of Love Triumphant was a staircase that gave the impression of being private, or at the very least rarely used. Certainly I had never before noticed it on my visits to the gallery. I sniffed Marisa’s presence here at once. It was unmistakable. It overwhelmed me like a perfume. Men mastered by a woman can tell to a certainty when she has been in a room; for them her impression lingers long afterwards like warm breath on a mirror, or the recollection of a dream which daylight can’t shake off. Obsession manufactures ghosts, and Marisa’s ghost was here in all its restlessness. The ghostliness not only of her person but of the deadly game that she was playing. That was what, over the perspiration of my own nervousness, I could smell: not just her clothes and hair and breath but the delinquent purpose that had brought her. Up the stairs she ’d gone, up into the ill-lit gloom, one step at a time, in full possession of what she was about, knowing what she meant to leave, where she meant to leave it, and what would ensue once it was found.
I fought against my own impatience. It was getting late. I didn’t want bells ringing to warn that the gallery was closing just as I was on the point of laying hands on what was not for me. But even had the afternoon been less advanced I’d have done the same, resisting the smaller temptation for the greater. For the greater temptation was to remain in ignorance another night.
Subspace beckoned me – that nirvana stillness of utter submission which hitherto I’d practised only in Marisa’s absence but which tonight I would enter with her by my side. There was a sort of blasphemy in it, but it was blasphemy in the name of a higher form of worship.
The following day, though I had barely slept (subspace, as I’ve said, is not for sleeping), I was at the gallery before the doors opened. With a heart beating violently enough to keep ten men alive I nosed my way where Marisa’s adventuresome feet had been, breathing in, as though it were a poison I was destined to take, the flagrancy of her resolution.
Among dross not worth discussing, two small, and in the circumstances arresting paintings – arresting by virtue of their contrast – confront each other on opposite walls above the stairs; both of insufficient value to warrant tight security, and both with space enough behind their frames to hide a card, a letter, maybe even a small package. One, entitled Reading the Bible, by the nineteenth-century French painter Hugues Merle, shows two young girls in Quakerish bonnets being read to from scripture. Jailbait, both of them, if you are so minded. So arresting in that sense, too. Otherwise nothing to get excited about if you leave out what hangs on the opposing wall, and if you didn’t know that the young Marisa had studied the Bible.
Opposite, as conceived by the academic painter Thomas Couture, an exact contemporary of Merle, the poet Horace partying with his mistress Lydia. A Roman Feast. The poet, reclining on a couch, holds out his goblet for a servant to refill. Naked down to her toes, Lydia snakes into her lover, one arm flung about his neck, her breast pressed into his chest, her flanks arced in sinuous luxuriance towards our scrutiny. The opulence of her haunches is shocking. Though she is bold and faithless in Horace ‘s Odes to her, she hides her face in Couture ’s painting, embarrassed by the proximity of her lover’s water boy. For a woman is of necessity more naked in the presence of two men than she can ever be with one.
Let me be plain. Nothing in the lusciously immodest shame of Lydia’s posture would have made any man not intimate with her think specifically of Marisa. But if one started from the other end of the proposition, anyone who knew Marisa only in her clothes and imagined her without them would have pictured her much like this. Of a flowing voluptuousness that was beyond bearing.
