Free The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson Page A

persisted in what he ’s good at. And he did it for himself. I was born into advantage, of a sort, he wasn’t. He had to create himself.’ She raised her eyes to me, serious as always, ‘I won’t hear anything against him,’ she said.
    I nodded. I didn’t feel I had to defend myself against an unjust accusation. It was clear what she was doing. She was putting one house in order before she moved on to the next. She could hold more than one loyalty in her head, she wanted me to understand. One nail did not drive out another.
    I didn’t ask too many questions. I’d peeled her relatively effortlessly from him, no matter that she admired him still, but was not so vain as to attribute my success to something overwhelmingly irresistible in me. Either she ’d been unbearably lonely with him, in which case I would make it up to her; or she ’d fallen into the habit of solacing herself elsewhere, in which case I wasn’t yet ready to learn with whom. Whom other than me, that was.
    I’d never previously married. Faith was not the last girl or woman to cause me to weep copious tears. But though the memory of their rejection stayed with me, the memory of them did not. Whether that meant I was a lukewarm lover after all, heated only by the pain they caused me, or I was simply holding myself in reserve for Marisa, I was unable to decide. But at least there were no feelings of earlier spouses or children of earlier unions to consider. The Marylebone villa which had been in my family for generations, witness to the unsuccessful marriages which my father and his father and his father before him had all made – unsuccessful because not a one of them had found a wife with an amused attitude to her husband’s bringing home the clap – was now mine and waiting to be warmed back into life by the latest Mrs Quinn. ‘Bring home the clap to me and neither you nor it will be leftstanding,’ Marisa had said with a laugh when I’d filled her in on the house ’s history. Otherwise she seemed more than happy to move in.
    It was, anyway, since Marylebone had always been her patch too, no more than a matter of packing up on one side of the road and unpacking again on the another. Everything she was used to was here, not only her conveniences but her obligations. Her hairdresser and the Oxfam bookshop which she worked in out of conscience. Her acupuncturist and the Samaritans to whom she devoted her Friday nights. The nail shop and the Wallace Collection to which she volunteered her services as a guide, when other guides to the collection fell ill. Even without me she had the wherewithal to pamper herself, and every time she did that she felt she had to make amends. Hairdresser to charity organisation, manicurist to beggar. Thus did she balance the scales of social justice. It was a good day for a seller of the Big Issue when he caught Marisa coming out of her favourite shoe shop. But then in my eyes it was a good day for anyone when he caught Marisa coming out of anywhere.
    We solemnised our union quietly – what remained of both our families being of no account to us – in a registry office round the corner and honeymooned in Florida. Why Florida? Because after more than a year of near-chaste talk we felt we owed each other the swamplands of sensuality. We wanted to smell the Everglades. We needed to run with sweat in each other’s company.
    Five days into our humid honeymoon Marisa fell ill. We had established a routine: every afternoon we returned to our hotel, I peeled her dress off her sticky body, then we showered the bad-egg odour of mangrove off each other, then we went to bed and stayed there until it was time for her to shake herself into something even more diaphanous for dinner. No woman I had ever known inhabited tropical fabrics better than Marisa; some women bulk them out, some disappear inside the folds, Marisa wore them as a second skin. Which made peeling her out of them a slow and laborious business, in the course of