The Act of Love (4 page)

As for those who cared about him, they comprised his wife who had run off with a much younger man – a favourite student of the professor’s – and the much younger man in question, who was Marius.

Nothing, as I say, coincidental about any of this, except the fact of one of my assistants, Andrew – who dealt with Marius when he turned up on Monday morning – knowing him from university. I wasn’t in the shop when Marius and Andrew renewed their acquaintance, but I was told it went off as amicably as any encounter involving Marius could. Marius left, grumpily satisfied the old man had not been swindled out of his George MacDonalds and Christina Rossettis, after which Andrew – a breathless, book-mad fellow in a ponytail which I insisted he cut whenever it reached low enough to threaten his safety on the library steps – agreed to tell me all he knew about Marius over lunch in a New Zealand restaurant that had just opened on the High Street.

He had eloped with her, the prof’s wife, that was the juiciest bit. We say ‘run off ‘ when all we mean is set up house elsewhere. But this was truly an elopement. He twenty, she fifty. The story of it, to which further researches of my own have added a degree of colour that Andrew’s rapid narrative of necessity lacked, was this:

She was the wife of an emeritus professor, working part-time and with only half his wits active, who befriended Marius in his second year at university, seeing in the young man a precocious and perhaps ill-fated genius that reminded him of his own. Before settling for a life of academic ignominy, addressing what was left of his thoughts to empty lecture theatres – empty of everyone except Marius – the professor had held out hopes of being an essayist, mythopoeist, and epigrammatist of wit. Now, lame and hard of hearing, he imagined that same future for Marius who became a frequent guest at his house, where he met – as it was always written that he should – Elspeth, old enough to be his mother, not quite old enough to be his grandmother. She was beautiful, silvery in that seemingly ageless style of middle-class Englishwomen who get the business of looking old over with while they’re young. At fifteen she looked about a hundred. For the following thirty years she looked about fifteen. Now she was poised, equinoctially, between assurance and desperation, her day not yet spent, the wheels of her evening just beginning to turn – and Marius, whatever the arguments in favour of circumspection, to say nothing of decency, was not, as I was to learn, proof against the equinox.

He talked to her, openly – by his standards of uncommunicativeness – and in the hearing of the professor, of his love for her. His language, as I now imagine it, somewhere between Gatsby’s and Schopenhauer’s, grasping at dreams, beating on, boats against the current, towards the most certain dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

‘What would you know of love or its unhappiness?’ she challenged him, her voice all bells, like a Christian village on the morning of a coronation.

They were in the garden, drinking Pimm’s. It was one of those soft English summer days that make one think of eternity.

‘At your age love is just a word,’ said the professor. ‘You cannot yet have fathomed its miseries.’

When the professor spoke it was as though dry paper rustled in the trees.

‘On the contrary,’ Marius objected, ‘I have fathomed
only
its miseries.
I agree that what Wittgenstein calls “pathos” attaches to a man in love regardless of whether that love makes him happy or unhappy. “
Aber es
ist schwerer gut unglücklich verliebt sein, als gut glücklich verliebt
” “But itis harder to bear yourself well when you are unhappily in love than when you are happily in love.’‘

Now the trees sang a song of forever.

The professor exchanged glances with his wife. See, the old man’s eyes said, is he not as brilliant as I told you he was?

Elspeth nodded. Yes, yes she saw.

They eloped. They may have been the last people in this country
to
elope, elopement being an act of desperation for lovers in a strict society. Now you just say you’re going and whoever doesn’t like it can lump it. In fact they would have met no resistance either from the professor, whose life was already such a disappointment that the loss of his wife (which could, anyway, be seen as the gain of a son) barely impinged upon his melancholy, or from Marius’s father who looked down on his son and needed no further evidence that he was a fool. Marius’s mother, it embarrasses me on behalf of human psychology to report, had eloped herself just a year after Marius was born. A proper elopement, pursued by a husband with a gun. Marius and Elspeth, pursued by no one, eloped because they wanted to elope.

Marius, in a borrowed car, waited outside her cottage in the Shropshire village of Quatford. He was twenty, she was . . . but it didn’t matter how old she was in actuality; in expectation she was twenty too. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, an hour when her husband the professor was either lecturing or taking a nap, or, as Elspeth joked, her voice as merry as a young girl’s, doing both things simultaneously. She would have preferred to be driven away at night, with only the moon as their witness, but Marius couldn’t borrow the car for that long.

Marius tried to kiss her the moment she appeared carrying an overnight bag and with a scarf around her shoulders, but Elspeth insisted they make haste.

‘Drive,’ she said. ‘Just drive.’

He enquired after the rest of her luggage.

‘Just drive,’ she ordered him.

No one was following but Marius did as she said and just drove.

Occasionally she would lean across and look into the rear mirror to be sure they weren’t being tailed. She grew nervous at traffic lights and appeared startled whenever someone overtook them. But they were safe. No alarm had been raised and no one was in pursuit. Having ascertained that his library was intact and that they hadn’t run off with a single one of his lectures, the professor sighed and left them to their fate. For this, Elspeth never forgave him.

They hadn’t discussed where they were going. Elspeth wanted it to be a secret. Marius assumed he would be taking her back to his digs in Sutton Coldfield, no matter that he shared a bathroom with four other students. But Elspeth expected a transitional passage in a place that belonged to neither of them. When Marius explained he had to get the car back before night fell she warned him that in that case he’d have to get her back before night fell too.

‘If you can steal a wife from your professor and protector,’ she told him, ‘you can steal a car from your friend.’

It was at that moment that Marius realised what a crooked course he had embarked on. Henceforth he was to understand himself as an immoralist.

He drove without purpose or direction until Elspeth saw a sign to Stratford-upon-Avon. ‘Take me there,’ she said.

Marius checked his petrol gauge. He believed he had just enough juice to make it.

Elspeth, who loved Shakespeare, loved Stratford-upon-Avon on his account. Instead of going straight to their room in the bed and breakfast Marius found them, she took him to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to see, as luck would have it,
Antony and Cleopatra
.

‘Do you know,’ she whispered to him before the lights went down, ‘I watched Peggy Ashcroft play Cleopatra to Michael Redgrave’s Antony in this very house twenty-five years ago.’

‘Before my time,’ Marius whispered back, concealing his alarm at Elspeth’s use of the word ‘house’.

She held on to his arm. ‘Nobody thought Peggy Ashcroft had a Cleopatra in her, but she was magnificent.’

Before his time it might have been, but Marius remembered that Kenneth Tynan had been waspish about this famously aberrant coupling. It was Marius’s essay comparing Tynan and George Bernard Shaw as critics of the English stage that had first brought him to Elspeth’s husband’s attention. The professor was not a lover of the theatre, as was not Marius, and they shared a taste for those moments in theatre criticism when the great critics weren’t that keen on theatre either. What Marius remembered was Tynan’s joke that the only role in
Antony and Cleopatra
that any English actress was equipped to play was Octavia, Caesar’s pallid sister. Somewhat sadistically, in the circumstances, he repeated this to Elspeth, along with Tynan’s deliberately bad-form follow-up joke that ‘The great sluts of world drama have always puzzled our girls.’

We will assume the worst of Marius’s motives. Not only must he have wanted to reassert himself after the poor fist he’d made of the mechanics of elopement, but it must have excited something in his nature – the spitefulness and the sadism, let us guess – to use the word ‘slut’ in the company of his professor’s wife, a woman of an age to scold him for his language, and who had this very day left the decorous safety of her old life for him.

For her part, Elspeth believed that Peggy Ashcroft had found as much slut in herself as was necessary to play the part of Cleopatra. In her heart she winced from the brutality of the word and didn’t consider it apposite to Shakespeare. But she argued the case dreamily and without conviction, as though it excited her, in turn, to wonder, in this hallowed place, whether she would be able find as much slut in
herself
as would be necessary to play with conviction the part of Marius’s mistress.

A story which – whatever else there was to say about it – explained why Marius had agitated me from the moment I’d set eyes on him. It isn’t every boy of twenty who will entice a woman two and a half times his
age away from her husband and get her to set up house with him. He was a crosser of lines, a disrespecter of the decencies, and I have a nose for such people. Never mind that (or do I mean precisely because) he was a disrespecter of me as well.

To say I have a nose for such people makes light of an instinct about which I should be more courageously forthcoming. Some men – and Marius was such a man – have always filled me with dread on account of their appearing to possess a quality I don’t: the wherewithal to persuade a woman to abandon herself, against all reason and against all conscience, to unbridled lust. This is what I mean when I say I viewed Marius pornographically. Whatever the reality of him, he played an archetypal role in that book-fed theatre of riot and melodrama that was my sexual imagination. He lurked in darkened cinemas, invisible to everyone but the woman he would steal from you, kissing her unnoticed in the blackness even as you sat and held her hand. He was the eternal rake or roué who must make any man not a rake or roué worry about his potency. It doesn’t matter whether or not you yourself wish to persuade a woman to abandon herself against all reason to unbridled lust, the knowledge that you can’t and he can lies curled like a poisonous snake in the long grass of your self-esteem. And that’s before you address the heated question of what will happen if you find yourselves going head to head for the same woman.

Freudian? Did I see my father in him, competing with me for my mother? I wouldn’t bet against it. I see my father in most men and no doubt my mother in most women. She was permanently in distress, he was a swine – as archetypes go, you won’t go far wrong in life with those to guide you.

Mystery of my absorption in Marius solved, anyway. He was one of
those
. He had what Sacher-Masoch saw in that dark-furred, shuddermaking Greek – ‘the power to subjugate’. It wasn’t because I’d desired either of the underage girls myself that it had made me uncomfortable to watch him toy with them in the bone-freeze cemetery damp of Wootonunder-Whateveritwas; nor was it because I envied him the professor’s widow that I felt her pain as he tormented her with his detachment. No
doubt the latter was just part of their age-discrepancy ritual of cruelty and cringing anyway. No, what had got under my skin was that he’d done what he’d done because he could get away with doing it. They enjoy an exemption, these non-delivering libertines with sad faces. Or they do in my fears. Which might mean only that I’m the one who exempts them.

First I attribute almost impossible powers to them. Then I set them free. Free to do what?

Free to do whatever a pervert’s delirious fancy wishes them to do. Free to do damage. Free to take what’s yours. Free to whistle your wife away from you. Free to make a slut of her. Free to make a nothing of you.

Whatever else there is to be said about the subject, that was where my interest in Marius ended. He was a character in a salacious fiction I wrote in imitation of all the salacious fiction I’d ever read (and what fiction isn’t salacious?) only when his image was before me. Once he was out of view, the fiction went unwritten. And it would have stayed unwritten had he not turned up entirely unexpectedly but opportunely some five or six years later – the years in which I’d fallen hard for Marisa – on an errand of the heart. Not normally where a normal person’s heart takes him, Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers, but Marius was no more normal a man than I was.

He wanted us to retrieve a number of volumes of personal significance that had passed into our hands some years before. That was the gist of it. Not the volumes the professor had accused us of purloining on his deathbed, but others that had been the property of the professor’s wife and which she had not had time to take away with her when she eloped. It wasn’t with me that he made his appointment, indeed he had no reason to connect me with the shop, but Andrew, remembering my interest – he remembered everything: every book that anyone had ever wanted, every book that we have ever sold, every book that anyone had ever written – informed me Marius was coming in. I was in my office when he called and recognised him immediately, though heavy glass separated us and he was much changed. He carried his height differently, less imperiously,
more as an excuse for abstraction. He had grown moustaches, great sealion excrescences which he wore, like a Swedish adventurer’s, as though to give himself the look of someone with something to hide. But which to me gave him even more the look of a bodice-ripper sadist. From the number of times Andrew had to incline towards him, sometimes going so far as to pull his ponytail clear of his face and tug the tip of his ear, I gathered that Marius had become a mumbler too.