The Act of Love Read Online Free PDF

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