The Act of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

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