The Act of Love (3 page)

I never did get over it. What I suffered in the loss of Faith, reason told me, was quite disproportionate to what I’d felt for her on the mere two occasions we’d gone out and the time I’d thought about her in between. But reason was no help. Nothing helps against jealousy. I began to idealise her beauty. Her arms grew longer and more slender. Her kisses, which had been no more than tentative and toothy, were now deep probings, as
fathomless as the sea and as desperate as drowning, only someone else was swimming in them and I was drowning in their absence. I was unable to eat. My schoolwork suffered. My head ached. I felt murderous, not to Faith or Martin but to myself. Had I possessed more of whatever it was that girls wanted this could not have happened. And it was too late to acquire that mysterious whatever it was now, because there was no future in which to put it into practice.

I rubbed at the pain in my heart. Probed it, polished it, until there was no skin left between my heart and me. Was it Faith I missed or was it myself, the self I’d been when she’d wound her lovely arms around me twice? Where to locate the hurt exactly – in the kisses that had been stolen from me almost before they’d begun, or in the insult of her preferring Martin? What was it she saw in him? What was it she didn’t see in me? What was it, what was it, what was it . . . ?

It made me careful thereafter – in the thereafter I never thought there’d be – never to hurt as I’d been hurt, never to leave the cinema with anyone other than the person I’d gone into the cinema with, never to show that I preferred kissing someone else. How to survive jealousy became the study of my life. How to accept that someone you love might not love you in return. How to bear her kisses going elsewhere. How to face up to abandonment – the knowledge that you are and will remain unloved, cast out, not just because you are not worthy in yourself, but because you stand in the way of two other people’s happiness. Made lonely for all eternity so that they can be for all eternity together.

‘You know my motto,’ my father said in a cloud of cigar smoke. ‘If you miss one bus there’s always a second.’

He was disgusted by my weeping. I was disgusted, plain and simply, by him.

‘What’s the use of a second bus when you’ve been knocked down by the first?’ I replied.

He shrugged. ‘You’ll have a few broken bones,’ he said, ‘no more.’

‘Bones!’

My mother was more sympathetic, though of no more help. I did not
visit her in her room, which for as long as I could remember had been a chamber of private grief, for she too had been abandoned. But she came to me one morning as I lay disconsolate and motionless on my bed, looking up at the ceiling, nursing a sadness which day by day had been making a permanent home for itself in my body – a molten river of acid and scalding honey that moved with slow deceptive sweetness through my veins.

‘Is it always like this?’ I asked her.

‘Betrayal?’

‘Love.’

She thought about it for some moments, pulling her brocade dressing gown around her. She had always appeared to be from another age, my mother, as though abandoned into an earlier time. ‘I wish I could tell you it isn’t,’ she said. ‘But you will find someone else, and then you’ll forget what happened this time.’

‘And when it happens again?’

She touched my hand. A gesture of unusual warmth in my family where touching was reserved for impropriety or rejection. ‘You might be lucky,’ she said. ‘It might not happen again.’

‘What might make it not happen again?’

‘You might learn to love the next person a little less. Or at least invest a little less in her.’

‘But would that then be love?’

‘Ah, now that,’ she said, gathering herself up, ‘is the big question.’

I might only have been fifteen, but I knew the big answer. If you wanted to be in love – and I wanted nothing else – then you had to welcome into your soul love ‘s symptoms and concomitants: fear of betrayal which was no less potent than the fear of death, jealousy which ate into the very marrow of your bones, a feverish anticipation of loss which no amount of trust would ever assuage. Loss – loss waited upon gain as sure as day followed night, that’s if day would ever follow night again. You loved not only expecting to lose but
in order
to lose – this my favourite books had told me and now I’d put them to the test in life I knew them
to be right. You loved to lose and the more you loved the more you lost. Fear and jealousy were not incidental to love, they
were
love.

The molten river sluiced through my body, as though it had found its natural course there and would never leave me.

Good that
something
would never leave me.

I didn’t take the train back to London after the funeral as I’d meant to do. Some impulse or other kept me in Much Wenlock. Not a desire to hit the town even though it was a Saturday night. I ordered sandwiches and ate them in my hotel room. Everything in the hotel was on a slant. The sandwiches slid off the tray. My bottle of beer slid off the bedside table. It was only by holding on to the mattress that I was able to avoid sliding out of bed.

But the crookedness of the place went with my mood. I’d been disarranged.

I was woken by the sound of Sunday church bells ringing. A mocking sun was streaming in through the curtains. The old man was buried and now life could begin again. I decided to take advantage of what could be the only sun Shropshire was going to see for a hundred years and dressed quickly. I needed breakfast and wasn’t prepared to risk a fried egg sliding on to my lap, so I went looking for a café. After that I mooched around, taking in the priory, a few half-timbered buildings, at last finding a couple of bookshops of the sort I make a point of investigating when I’m out of town. I rarely find anything of value but I never fail to buy a book or two, simply as a way of expressing fellow feeling. Of all the forms of that premature interment I’ve talked about, selling books in the provinces is the most pitiable. They sit behind their wooden tables, pretending to read – though they’ve read their entire stock a dozen times already – entering their few sales into a ledger with a blunt pencil. Could so easily have been me, I always think, but for the worldly far-seeingness of my ancestors, making sure our destiny would be in Marylebone, London’s
city within a city. Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers – in the quiet assurance of our name I believe you hear the confidence of a family that couldn’t imagine ever living more than a few hundred yards from everything the soul and body of man requires: art galleries, concert halls, good restaurants, suppliers of wine and cheese, infirmaries, bordellos.

Others must travel to satisfy these needs; we had only to stretch out a hand.

Indeed, it was one of my father’s recurrent malodorous jokes that at his age happiness resided solely in being able to reach out his hand and feel under a woman’s skirt. He didn’t mean my mother’s.

By the time I’d searched the shelves of the bookshops and made consolatory, not to say condescending, conversation with their hapless proprietors I needed lunch. It was gone three when the taxi slid me out at Shrewsbury station. All the trains were late. I pounded the far end of the platform in irritation, looking for somewhere to sit in the sun, wondering whether to pick fights with people who took up seats with their luggage. People with backpacks always the worst offenders. Walkers! Those masochists who think their minds are healthy. At last a seat fell empty and I bagged it. When I looked around me I saw that I was sitting next to Marius.

He was still dressed funereally. I thought I could see traces of cemetery clay on his shoes and even on his jacket. But that was probably fanciful. I glanced at him a couple of times, hoping for one of those half smiles that invite conversation. I was curious to know why he’d been at the funeral, what his relations were to poor Jim Hanley and his widow. Maybe, if we were travelling to London on the same train, he’d tell me about his penchant for picking up and then letting down underage schoolgirls. Explain the appeal of sadism to me.

‘Such a beautiful afternoon,’ I said at last, accepting that if I waited for him I’d wait forever. ‘Weather like this makes one wish one were somewhere else, don’t you think?’

He favoured me with the quickest of looks, such as a wild animal might throw a man he’s not afraid of, but doesn’t want to eat. It was evident
that if I wished to be somewhere else, he wished I’d go there. It was equally evident that he didn’t recognise me from the funeral.

I threw my head back and screwed my eyes against the sun to make it easy for him if he didn’t want to reply. Let it never be said that I’m not a complaisant man.

Deciding not to be rude to me, he looked at his watch. ‘Time of the day, squire,’ he said.

I wasn’t sure I understood him. Was that a question? Was he wondering if his watch was slow? ‘What about the time of the day?’ I asked.

‘It’s the reason you want to be somewhere else. Nuffink to do with the weather,’ He consulted his watch again. ‘You’re smelling somewhere faraway. Four o’clock has that effect.’

I was surprised to detect a faint accent. I mean under the faux cockney or whatever it was he was affecting. Not West Midlands quite, but nearly. I hadn’t imagined him accented. It disappointed me. I wanted him pristine. I viewed him, as I have said, pornographically and pornography is a picky medium. It permits no extraneous material or tomfoolery. Just the clean, chill sepulchral lines of sexual violation and the silence that comes after.

‘And which faraway place does four o’clock smell of to you?’ I asked.

‘Ah!’ he said, as though that were a question that reached deep inside his soul. He drummed his fingers on the briefcase he carried on his lap and appeared to let his imagination roam worlds real and fanciful. I waited, expecting Petra or Heraclea, the Galapagos Islands or the Fields of Troy. I knew a pedant when I saw one. They always are, these queasy, tyrannical men. They ease their disgust by reading the classics.

‘Thanatos,’ was what he finally came up with. Proving me right. He was a tyrant.

I pulled a face. ‘Thanatos?’

‘You’re wondering where that is? Greek for death, matey.’

It took all my restraint not to tell him I’d rather he didn’t treat me as one of his schoolgirls. ‘I know what Thanatos is Greek for,’ I said. ‘I’m only surprised to hear you call death a place.’

‘What would you call it?’

‘The end of place.’

He rubbed his hand across his mouth as though to stop himself from laughing at me, or from ripping me apart with his teeth. I understood how those girls had felt. It was exciting to be near him. Dangerous, somehow, as though the death he spoke of was an entity he had power over. I felt I was sitting on Shrewsbury station with a vampire.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I’d covered my throat.

‘You’d probably argue no less prosaically, then,’ he said with undisguised scorn, ‘that deff ain’t a person neither. But the Greeks wouldn’t have agreed with you. They made him a beautiful young man and shoved a butterfly in his hands. Wherever you are at four o’clock, you hear the bu’erfly beating its wings for the final time. That’s why – since you brought the subject up – your heart aches, as every heart on the planet aches, in sympathy with the dying day as it faints in the embrace of desire.
Comprendez?
’

I didn’t say I knew all about the fucking bu’erfly, thank you. I was too affected by his prose style. ‘Yours would appear to be the cosmology of an incurable romantic,’ I countered, showing I was not without a bit of style of my own. But by that time he was on his feet. There was no train coming, but he wanted to be certain that when one did, he would not be on it in my company.

This might be hard to credit, but Marius was travelling to London to clear a few matters up with people and one of the people he was travelling to clear a few matters up with was me. Not me personally, but me as in the business.

Not as coincidental as it sounds, given that his errand was connected to the death in which we were already bonded. I don’t mean his Thanatos twaddle, I mean the actual death that had taken me up to Shropshire in the first place. It appeared that the professor had been ill for some time and that in the course of his illness his mind had begun to wander.
Someone, he believed, had stolen the most precious volumes of his library. He kept a diary which contained all the information necessary to track the thieves who had come up from London in the night and emptied whatever books they could lay their hands on into a pantechnicon. They hadn’t tied him up or harmed him, but they did warn him with threatening gesture against doing anything to hamper their getaway. Fortunately he ‘d had the presence of mind to take down the name of the driver. Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Bookseller. A reference in his diary to an appointment which he himself had made with Felix Quinn in person, and a subsequent entry describing the meeting as ‘highly satisfactory from one perspective’, suggested a different version of the story. But those who cared about him – retrospectively, that is – and who might just have been worried for their inheritance, thought it would be for the best to clear this up. A bit soon after the funeral, but it was not for me to pass judgement. Country people are more suspicious than we who live trustingly in cities.