The Act of Love (19 page)

Accidents, however, happen. This meeting – for it went beyond a sighting – was entirely accidental. Fortuitous or calamitous, depending how you view it. But not without a degree of embarrassment to all parties, in particular my secretary Dulcie with whom I was lunching when Marisa and her unknown friend entered the restaurant, not exactly with a show of intimacy, yet not as though they were there to discuss a business proposition either.

But then nor was I there on business. This wasn’t a business restaurant. You went there to be seen. You made your entrance. You all but took the applause of the other diners as you were escorted to your table. And you seldom got there without having to kiss people you knew along the way. As Marisa had no choice but to kiss me.

‘Felix,’ she said, ‘Miles.’

‘Hello, Miles,’ I said. ‘Miles, this is Dulcie.’

They shook hands, I thought, as though they’d met before and looked embarrassed.

Marisa, of course, knew Dulcie who had been my secretary for years. So she wouldn’t have supposed there was any impropriety in my taking her to lunch. Dulcie loved this restaurant but would not have been able to get a table without me. Every now and then I escorted her to it as a treat, or when there was a personal problem of which she needed to unburden herself, as was the case today. This, too, Marisa knew.

But Dulcie didn’t know why Marisa was there with Miles. She blushed, not only on meeting Miles, was my guess, but at hearing herself say, ‘Hello, Mrs Quinn,’ as though she sensed that calling Marisa Mrs Anything with Miles standing possessively by her could cause a complication. Did she read that just from seeing them, I wondered? Were they
that
obviously coupled? Or were Marisa’s infidelities common knowledge even to my staff? Did everybody know?

If I say I hoped so, I expect to be understood as meaning that I dreaded so, and therefore hoped so for that reason.

From his brief how-do-you-dos I took Miles to be an Irish millionaire. A horse-breeder, probably. He had good manners and was overdressed in the way of Irishmen trying to be Ivy League Americans, his suit more expensive than it needed to be, his pink tie knotted tightly at his narrow throat, just the right amount of double cuff showing when he extended his hand. His fingers, which I paused to look at fractionally in the moment before I took them, had a petrified, scalded appearance. There was not a germ on his body. At a guess I would have said he was Marisa’s junior by seven or eight years. Which pleased me in ways it isn’t necessary for me
to go into. He gave me no sense that he knew or cared who I was. Which again pleased me in ways I’m sure I don’t have to explain.

I held him in my gaze for as long as it was decent to do so. So here he, here
it
, was. The dread alternative.

I was face to face with it at last.

The dread alternative made flesh, and I could handle it. I could more than handle it: I thrived on it. Something moved in my stomach, presumably the transubstantiation of blood into water. But otherwise I felt wonderfully alive.
Felix Felicis
.

Felix Vitrix.

If Marisa, for her part, was discomfited she didn’t show it. Peerless she was in her men’s tailoring and effrontery. Not too much smiling, nor too little. No mention of coincidences. No denying me, but no effusive acknowledging me either. ‘Well, enjoy your lunch,’ she said, with no trace of anything but what the words implied, and they were gone.

It might have been better for Dulcie, if not for me, had Marisa and her Irish companion been shown a table far from ours. As it was, though we could not hear them, we could observe as much of their behaviour as we chose to. Of what I saw in the first ten minutes, it was the clinking of their glasses that transfixed me. They had, I could tell, clinked glasses before. They found privacy in the action, raising their glasses higher than is usual, and keeping them there longer, which I took to be the expression of a mutual impatience to hold each other’s face in the reflection of the wine, away from the noise and publicity of the room. Marisa had looked at me through her wine glass in just that way when I was stealing her from Freddy. It was loving and impatient then, and it was loving and impatient now. I would say I smelled the impatience coming off them both were that not an insalubrious way of describing people enjoying lunch together. But then insalubrity is all in the interpretation and I have always been able to see it where less perceptive men see nothing. I must have turned a little white whatever I saw, because Dulcie asked if I was all right.

‘Never been better, Dulcie,’ I told her. ‘And you?’

Dulcie, as it happened – and this had nothing to do with her seeing her
boss’s wife out flirting heavily with another man under both their noses – had never been worse.

A word or two about Dulcie, because her anxiety bore resemblances to mine, or would have borne resemblances to mine had anxiety been a fair summation of my state.

I have already alluded to the anomalous fine gold-linked ankle chain Dulcie wore, though I was pleased to notice she wasn’t wearing it for our lunch today. This was not an ankle-chain-wearing clientele. But then Dulcie was not by any stretch of the imagination an ankle-chain-wearing person herself. She certainly hadn’t worn one when I first interviewed her for the job, a good twenty years before. Nor had there been anything in her character, her deportment, or her curriculum vitae, to suggest she ever would. A trim and pretty woman, slightly catlike in appearance, with a turnedup nose, wide-apart eyes on to which she applied too much mascara and which for that reason had the appearance of being loose in their sockets, and elegant charcoal-grey hair which she wore in a style that was once, I think, associated with Doris Day, Dulcie Norrington was the daughter of a clergyman with a liking for old books (hence her wanting to work for me), the sister of a much loved Shakespearean actress (she played Emilia in the production of
Othello
of which I’ve spoken), and the wife of a viola player in a not very well-known or successful string quartet – a blissfully happy union of which the issue was a son who had won a scholarship to study Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, and a daughter who was reading theology at Cambridge. To say there was no intimation of an ankle chain in Dulcie’s history or home life would be like saying there was nothing in Dr Jekyll to prepare one for Mr Hyde. No, there absolutely was not, but you never know what’s going to turn up.

And turn up, suddenly one summer, it did. Dulcie without doubt had a good figure still, and attractive legs, if a little too narrow and close together to please the taste of someone for whom the airy separation of
Marisa’s legs, slightly inflected at the knee, was the pattern of ideal beauty. So on fine days, when worn with slave-girl sandals and as an adjunct to floaty dresses, she could just about carry off her anklet. It was when she wore it under stockings, where at first sight it resembled a trapped centipede, that I began to worry seriously for her judgement.

She was the only woman who worked for me so she didn’t have the benefit of fashion advice from a female colleague. And it would have been more than the jobs of the other employees were worth to pass manly comment. The staff knew my views on coarse allusions in business hours even to one another, and around Dulcie I had, as a responsible boss, erected a sort of cordon sanitaire. In my father’s day no secretary or cleaner had been safe from rude comment or behaviour. Indeed it was in order to be rudely treated that they’d been employed. Once I took over, all that sort of nonsense came to an end.

Among the changes I instituted, for the benefit of every employee, was the installation of what I thought of as a comfort room or snug, not somewhere to drink coffee and catch up on one another’s gossip – there were sufficient pubs and cafés above ground where staff could do that – but a place of meditation and quiet, almost like a hermit’s cell only not quite so isolated. It was lit by a single pink lampshade and had a silvery pink Chinese rug on the floor. Originally there ’d been a door so that my father and my grandfather (separately, of course) could lock themselves away in it and press their suits on willing or unwilling subordinates – a distinction, I regret to say, that was largely lost on both of them. I had the door taken off. Thus, if you’d repaired here in low spirits, you could count on a passing sympathetic glance, or even a concerned enquiry, if you simply raised your eyes to signal that you needed it.

It was here, not long after the first appearance of her ankle chain, that I found Dulcie doubled up like someone who had been shot in the stomach, sobbing like a child. Her right foot was stuck out in front of her. I saw that it was denuded of all ornament.

I popped my head in, gingerly.

‘Everything all right, Dulcie?’ I enquired.

It needed no greater prompting than that for the poor woman to unpack her heart to me.

I must have noticed, she began through her tears, that she had, these past three or four weeks, been wearing jewellery on her feet.

I lowered my head. ‘No, Dulcie,’ I lied, ‘I had not.’

‘Thank God at least for that,’ she said.

For a fraction of a moment I wondered whether she might have taken my unnoticing to be an insult. A woman wears jewellery, when all is said and done, in order that its effect upon her be remarked.

She must have read my mind. ‘It was not,’ she said, ‘my idea to wear the dreadful thing.’

Whose then?
was the natural question, but I didn’t feel I had the right to ask it.

She told me anyway. The whole sad saga of it.

Her husband Lionel, the viola player, had, while on a concert tour of the Midwest of America, encountered at a party he was loth to discuss in any detail an example, indeed several examples, of what Americans call a hot wife. Hot wives, Lionel had explained to Dulcie, were married women who, usually with the connivance of their husbands, announced their availability to men who were not their husbands by wearing gold chains around their right ankles. In the subculture where a semiology as subtle as this was recognised and acted on, a gold chain worn around the right ankle was as a promissory note of fornication with no strings attached, unless having the hot wife ’s husband looking on – as frequently occurred – could be called a string.

‘It all sounds,’ were Dulcie ’s first words to her husband on hearing about hot wives, ‘appallingly blue collar. Did these people actually come to hear you play Janáček?’

‘What you have to understand,’ Lionel told her, ‘is that they are in all other respects identical to you and me.’

Dulcie shuddered and feared the worst. Lionel had been seduced by one of these appalling women and had either fallen in love with her or brought home a social disease or both. Even if neither she was not sure
she could forgive him. A woman with an ankle chain, from Detroit! Oh Lionel, Lionel, how could you?

But in fact – and Dulcie knew when he was telling the truth – Lionel had not fallen in love with anybody. He was as much in love with her, Dulcie, as he had ever been. In token whereof he had brought back from America an ankle chain for her to wear for him.

‘To signal I am a hot wife?’

‘Yes but only to me.’

‘From what you’ve told me, Lionel,’ she said, ‘a hot wife is for other men to enjoy. Where would be the point of my showing you that I am available for other men’s enjoyment when I’m not?’

He found that question, apparently, hard to answer. ‘It’s just the idea of it,’ was the best, finally, he could manage.

‘The idea that I am available to other men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though I’m not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think you should see a psychiatrist?’

I had felt, even as she was talking to me, great sympathy for Lionel. I had met him a few times, either on the Antiquarian Booksellers Association’s equivalent of a works outing, or at occasional recitals his quartet gave at the Wigmore Hall or other local venues which I felt we owed it to Dulcie to attend. I can’t say I cared for him. He was at once a little too manly in the basso profundo, real-ale sense, and a little too womanly in the organisational way of things, ringing up unnecessarily to confirm dates and making lists of people ’s orders at restaurants – particularly Chinese restaurants where he liked to order by number – so as not to confuse the waiters, though his officiousness invariably confused them more. He had a long, Founding Father’s face, marked by a sort of wolfish puritanism which he exaggerated by wearing what couldn’t quite be called a beard, more a permanent five o’clock shadow which was sculpted into points on his cheeks and below his ears. There was something about the way he moved his mouth I didn’t like either, as though
it pained his teeth to talk to you. And he couldn’t stop touching his hair. Even on stage, when he wasn’t playing, his hair appeared to plague him. I’d have said it was a wig, except that no one would have paid good money for such a mildewed patch. But you don’t have to like a man to feel for his predicament as a husband. He had been happily and conventionally married for too long. Nothing wrong with Dulcie. If you had to be happily and conventionally married for an eternity, Dulcie was probably the ideal person to be happily and conventionally married to. But the strain of keeping to the straight and narrow had begun to tell on him as it tells at last on everybody. It is too cruel, the way our society packages and sells the ideal of blissful conjugal normality. There is not enough room left for people to be peculiar. And by and large it is only by being peculiar that we achieve a measure of happiness. The majority of people who rang Marisa at their wits’ end were not at their wits’ end being peculiar. The peculiar are too busy being peculiar to have time to ring the Samaritans. It is not odd sex that drives people to the window ledge, it’s no sex. We die of loneliness at the margins, not perversion. Perversion is exhilarating. The pervert might have second thoughts about himself sometimes but he knows he’s alive.