The Act of Love, page 7
‘Where are you, Marisa?’ – her mother calling.
‘Hiding.’
‘Marisa, you are always hiding.’
To which Marisa knew better than to say, even at that early age, ‘That’s because I’m trying not to be found by you, Mummy.’
Apart from the charity work she did – that’s if it really was her who did it – and all the dancing she could crowd in, she was not what could be called a busy woman. Though well educated – well finished, might be a better way of putting it, but then I’m a snob when it comes to education – she had not, in her words, ‘achieved anything’. No need. She had always been well provided for. Her father, who had owned most of the bed shops on Tottenham Court Road, walked out on her mother when Marisa was five years old. The child could perfectly well see why. Her mother lacked judgement. True, it was her father’s fault for leaving her mother alone as much as he did, but that didn’t excuse her mother for falling for every man she met and introducing all of them to Marisa as her new daddy.
‘Why does Mummy love everybody?’ she asked her father. ‘She doesn’t love me.’
‘But she used to, didn’t she?’
‘Yes, and I used to love her for loving me. Then I realised she would have loved me no less had I been a cloth bag stuffed with marbles. Or with beans, like your frog Frenchie.’
So would her mummy have liked her just as much had she been stuffed with beans like her frog Frenchie, Marisa wondered, hiding in her wardrobe.
Hiding became at last their only medium of communication. To lure Marisa out of the wardrobe, her mother had to hide presents for her, hide her clothes, hide her supper. ‘See if you can find what I’ve made you, Marisa.’
‘What have you made me?’ ‘You’ll have to find it to find out.’
‘See if you can find me, Mummy,’ Marisa said. The difference being that while she wanted to find supper, she didn’t want her mummy to find her.
‘I wish she ’d hide my new daddies,’ she told her old daddy, ‘where they can’t be found.’
She remembered the day her father left, she remembered him lifting her up on to his shoulders, she remembered looking down into his strong chestnut-polished baldness and seeing her own forlorn reflection in it, she remembered his words: ‘Whatever she tells you, Daddy is leaving Mummy, whom he doesn’t love or see the point of any more, not you, whom he does.’ In proof of which, though she only infrequently spent time with him again (it had to be in secret, everything always in secret, because his new wife didn’t like to be reminded that there’d been an old), he paid for her to go to a good school, to have singing and ballet lessons, to hide as far away from her mummy and her armies of new daddies as she could get, to drive her own car while she was at university, to rent a flat in Venice for a year after graduating, to enrol for every fine-art course that took her fancy in Florence, Spoleto, Siena, she had only to name it – to live, in short, the life she pleased.
She grew up secretive and well off. Looking good, always in expensive clothes, which were the grown-up version of being in hiding, keeping herself to herself – sometimes keeping herself from herself – with time on her hands.
Because of her looks she could not entirely and forever remain her own property. Boyfriends insisted themselves on her, each of whom she hid from the other, followed by first one and then – again initially in hiding – a second husband. She never thought of herself as adulterous. Simply close. It was no one ’s business but hers. One way or another, though, the indulgences she ’d been used to from her father continued. For the reason that she looked spoiled already, you could not see Marisa and not want to spoil her more. Just as you could not be with her, even when you were perfectly entitled to be with her, and not feel you were stealing her from someone else. Sometimes in Marisa’s company I could not escape the sensation that I was stealing her from myself.
And to commemorate that theft, I, like everyone else, showered her with gifts – perfume, jewellery, underwear, whatever you buy to perpetuate the illicit.
But always I sensed I had not found the gift that was adequate to her temperament. Grey beneath the eyes, with a long reflective countenance and a Roman nose such as you see on statues of Roman goddesses in Italian gardens, Marisa looked too sombre, however tight her skirts, for perfume or underwear. Wouldn’t the collected dialogues of Plato have made a better present? I asked her once. Of course she said she wanted nothing. But the impression I formed was that the ideal gift for her was the dialogues of Plato and underwear.
Never the necessity to make provision for herself, there was the problem which no amount of social or community work could solve. Yes, she could have filled her days with the deeds her morality pressed her into doing; but that wouldn’t have left her sufficient time to improve her own lot as a thinking being, and if she wasn’t any good to herself then how could she be any good to other people?
She didn’t complain, repine or moon, she just mused a lot. Which men, of course, find provocative. A woman musing on something other than them piques their amour propre. Especially predatory men who muse a lot themselves, with time to hang around outside art galleries and museums, singing tirra lirra and waiting for just such a woman to emerge, so that they can shatter the mirror of her concentration. But that’s to anticipate Marius.
Men apart, they pay a high price for their own beauty and fortune, these women for whom self-improvement is a necessity, and achievement is a goad. Marisa would have gone further in any career she chose for herself had she looked less as though her clothes had been cut for her by a glovemaker, and had she not known how to please the absent daddy in any man. No bitterness intended. If anything, Marisa rather admired the way men could tell lies, take off whenever the fancy pleased them, or instal a woman like her in a fine villa in Marylebone, with every confidence that she would play the part of lady of the house to perfection. In her head, she lived as though she had been born a man herself. Whenever one of her half-sisters phoned her for advice (she had as many new sisters as she had new daddies) the advice she gave was always practical, forward-looking and iron-hearted – ‘Leave him, darling’ or ‘Go get him if he takes your fancy, just don’t tell your husband’ – much as she imagined a man would have given. She walked like a man. Her clothes, in particular her suits, were ironical references to what men wore for the City. Even when she showed her legs, which in all honesty were too good not to show, she showed them as a man – say a fencing master or a danseur noble – might, as evidence of her suppleness and strength. She followed her fancy, drank hard, declined motherhood with fervour, doted on no man, and wasn’t averse to being looked over in the street. Only in actuality was she kept as more feminine, less ambitious women had been kept for centuries. Though even ‘in actuality’ things weren’t actually as they seemed. Contrary to what the great man said, all happy families are not alike.
THOUGH I SAY THEY WERE REVELATORY, I WAS NOT A COMPLETE STRANGER to the emotions which overcame me in the hotel room in Florida. At least I was not a stranger to the fact of their existence in the human heart.
In my sixteenth year I was befriended by an associate of my father’s, Victor Gowan, a once successful publisher who, in the brief period I knew him, moved from a lightless, noisily ramshackle office opposite the British Museum to a silent house with a great glass window overlooking the Thames in Cookham – Stanley Spencer country. The move felt like a retirement to me, though whether Victor saw it that way I didn’t know. But he couldn’t have been more than fifty at the time of his migration, and when I saw him in his offices he was voluble and merry, and when I saw him in Cookham he was introspective and sad.
Looking at a river all day can do that to you, of course, but I didn’t think the river was the cause of it. Some misfortune that wasn’t talked about must have befallen him, anyway, because his association with my father began with the selling off of his library almost book by book. Not the books he published – we wouldn’t have been much interested in those – but a rather fine collection of classical texts, both in the original Greek and Latin and in translation. It is, as I have said, a melancholy business for a person who loves books to have to sell them. Each book you part with is a little death. Which is why a shop like ours is necessarily a funereal place. We are to all intents and purposes undertakers. We wear black suits, tread softly and try to make the extinction of a lifelong passion, the passage of an old friend, as comfortable and dignified as possible.
In Victor’s case my father recognised that solemn rites were not appropriate. Victor put a brave face on his losses and trusted it would be only a matter of time before he was in a position to buy back from us what he’d sold, a fantasy which my father considered it in our interests to foster. To that end – though I must not be too cynical, for I think there was genuine friendship in it too – my father saw a lot of Victor, sometimes calling on him in his creaking Dickensian offices with me in tow, and later, after Victor’s melancholy move, inviting him to have dinner with us when he was in town. It was in the course of one of those dinners that Victor suggested I visit him in Cookham.
Classics were the pretext. He had studied classics at Balliol in his youth, and there was talk that I would do the same. It was presented as being for my future benefit, anyway, that I should spend a weekend with him in the country, see his library of which much remained, dine with him in the evening, talk literature, perhaps go rowing, and meet his wife, a one-time beauty and biographer of the Fitzrovia set, rumoured in her younger days to have been the mistress of more than one Fitzrovian scoundrel, but now, sadly, confined to her bed. Though too infirm to enter society or to engage in those researches necessary to her profession, Joyce Gowan still loved having visitors to her home.
I won’t pretend that I viewed the prospect of a weekend with my father’s disconsolate associate and his sick wife with any pleasure. At sixteen you don’t want to be close to people whose hopes have all but ended. But though I couldn’t picture anything that wasn’t dismal happening when I got there, the act of going felt like an adventure. I packed a bag, remembering to take a blazer and a tie for dinner and summer flannels for rowing, caught the train from Paddington to Maidenhead, and extended my hand like a seasoned traveller when Victor came along the platform to meet me. In a flash I saw my future, travelling on trains from one end of the country to another, getting off at rural stations, extending my hand to downcast book-collecting men who were getting on in years and reduced to selling what was precious to them. Already, though I hadn’t met them all, I felt a bond with them. Men whose feelings of loss were etched into their faces.
In the car to Cookham Victor told me about Stanley Spencer, the presiding genius of the place, who was famous for some wonderful murals, in Victor’s view, showing local people rising from the dead, and also for a small number of shockingly fleshly paintings of himself and a woman called Patricia Preece with whom he had been wildly in love, though it was thought his relations with her were never consummated, if I understood his meaning. Wanting to show I understood his meaning perfectly, I wondered whether it could have been the fact of the non-consummation that rendered these paintings so shockingly fleshly. ‘Frustration is the midwife to imagination,’ I said, ‘and having to give body to what is denied you is a powerful inducement to art,’ though I might not have said it in quite those words. And even if I had I would only dimly have understood what I was talking about. Of the world of the passions I still knew nothing. I’d read a lot, that was all. And I’d gone out with the daughter of a cello teacher who threw me over for someone she met while I was holding her hand in the cinema. But like many boys my age, I bluffed well.
Victor, I remember, praised me for an astuteness beyond my years and couldn’t imagine how I wouldn’t sail into Balliol. (As, indeed, though it isn’t strictly relevant to this narrative, I did.)
Thereafter I caught him looking at me sideways on many occasions, as though not sure he ’d done the right thing inviting me. Alternatively he was thinking he ’d done exactly the right thing inviting me.
When he wasn’t looking sideways at me, I was looking sideways at him. He had a grand profile that seemed unrelated to his body, which was almost dainty. Only his head seemed to matter. But it was run spectacularly to seed, pouches under his eyes, hair growing in bunches from his ears and nostrils, the veins in his red cheeks broken as though from exposure to country life, the back of his neck beginning to pleat over his shirt collar. For reasons I couldn’t then and cannot now explain I hoped I would grow to look like that myself. A little tired of the world. A little weary with the effort of carrying around so large a head. And with a secret sorrow that was also an inexplicable cause of satisfaction.
I didn’t meet Mrs Gowan on my first evening in Cookham. She wanted to say hello, Victor explained, but wasn’t up to seeing me. The house was quiet with the quiet of a woman who wasn’t up to seeing anybody. Everything was put away and tidy, the curtains closed in a way that suggested it was a long time since they’d been opened, a faint covering of dust on the furniture, none too fresh flowers in the vases, an air of distraught disuse pervading everything.
But in another sense Joyce Gowan was ubiquitously present. There were photographs of her everywhere – Joyce as a little girl laughing with other little girls, even then lovely to look at, dark, intense and knowing; Joyce masterfully leading her pony; Joyce as a young woman in a London pub, surrounded by poets, with her lipstick smudged; Joyce in the act of becoming Mrs Gowan, sculpted into her bride ’s dress, throwing back her head, her throat long like a swan’s; Joyce the biographer of wild times signing one of her books at Foyles, dazzling the signee with the brilliance of her smile . . . Joyce, Joyce, Joyce. In the living room a grand society painting of her in her glory days, her hands, one of which held a black fan, crossed in her lap and a faraway expression in her eyes. On the stairs a cruder oil showing her in a plunging evening gown, her breasts more rouged than any serious painter would have made them, a dog too obviously representing male besottedness at her feet. And in the bathroom assigned to me a frolicking sepia nude dancing with curtain drapes, by Russell Flint: not definitely her, so stylised was the pin-up, and so unlike her, given how else she had permitted artists to represent her – but if it wasn’t her why was it there? And if it was her, why was I permitted to see it?
For the sake of her beauty, maybe, and nothing else. For the sake of the beauty she had been.
Victor took me to a pub for chicken in a basket and asked me questions about myself, about my closeness to my father, about the books I liked to read. He was reading Don Quixote for the umpteenth time and wondered if I knew it. I told him I’d started it umpteen times but could only get so far before I had to give up. It was when the novel departed from its own narrative to relate stories that were strictly speaking extraneous to it that I lost interest. ‘Like the story of Anselmo and Lothario,’ he said. I told him I didn’t think I had got as far as Anselmo and Lothario. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then you should.’
The following morning we went rowing on the river as he ’d promised, though we never strayed far from the riverbank. Then we had lunch in another pub, went to see one or two of Stanley Spencer’s paintings – though nothing that struck me as either shocking or fleshly – in the little village museum devoted to his work, and returned home for tea. Because the weather was fine we were able to sit out on the lawn and watch more able-bodied rowers power up and down the Thames. A gentle wind blew through the trees. A succession of creamy, calming clouds floated across the sky. Again, Mrs Gowan was too indisposed to join us.
At around about four o’clock my host nodded off in his chair. On the grass by him lay a copy of Don Quixote, which he’d presumably brought out so that he could read an extract from the story of Anselmo and Lothario aloud to me. While he slept I leafed through the novel to see if I could find their names, which proved not to be too difficult as many of the scenes in which they appeared were marked. Their adventure, if it could be so called, appeared to be another version of a plot in a Shakespeare play I’d read at school – one man inviting another to try the fidelity of the woman he loved, to tragic or near-tragic effect. According to the notes in my Arden Shakespeare, the ‘fidelity test’ was a recurring motif in medieval Italian novellas, from which Cervantes too must have borrowed. I was too young to know anything for sure, but something told me that a fidelity test was more likely to be a literary device than a strategy much resorted to in real life. But it could only have cropped up frequently in literature if it answered to something that gave real men cause for concern: namely, the character of their wives when subjected to overwhelming temptation, for where, as Anselmo says to Lothario, is the merit in her being virtuous ‘when nobody persuades her to be otherwise? What mighty matter if she be reserved and cautious, who has no opportunity given her of going astray?’ A fear which once acted upon, it occurred to me, must surely stimulate a curiosity that is never to be assuaged. Why should Anselmo stop with a Lothario no matter how true this Lothario proves his wife to be? Indeed it would be illogical to do so. For is there not always to be encountered a Lothario more persuasive than the last? Will there not always be an ‘opportunity’ for disloyalty greater than the one before?
Victor awoke as I was turning the pages. ‘Ah,’ he said, when he saw which pages those were.
Joyce Gowan never did descend from her room. On my final evening in the house, after just the two of us had eaten a cold dinner at his kitchen table, Victor suggested I accompany him upstairs to take his wife a nightcap. A terror immediately seized my heart. Was I to play the part of Lothario to his Anselmo? Was this all the weekend had ever been about, a preparation to my trying the virtue of a sick old lady by making love to her? Was my father himself a party to the scheme? I wouldn’t have put it past him. He was of that class of men who sought to further their sons’ worldly education by taking them to brothels and ensuring they got their first dose of syphilis where it could be treated by a London doctor, rather than in Abu Dhabi where the medical attention was patchy, though I have to say he hadn’t yet gone that far with me. I could even have been part of a business deal between the two men, Victor reclaiming a number of his books in return for his wife, or my father laying hands on the rest of Victor’s library in return for me. It all depended on how you calculated the favour.
