The Act of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 hisage 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. Nodoubt 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