Flesh (10 page)

“Well at least will you insist on having some control over what he does?”

“I’ve got all the control I need. He hardly buys at all without asking my advice.”

“Aren’t you going to make him expand? He could get a second shop.”

“Who’d run it?”

“You.”

Marcus shook his head.

“Darling, he can’t expect you to go on being a manual worker. You can’t stay in his basement for ever.”

“That’s what I’m good at. He’s good at the other things. It’s piece of luck for me.”

“But you could buy him up.”

Marcus chuckled. “I daresay I will one day. But there’s no hurry.”

N
ANCY
came back several times to the question of furnishing the flat, not because of inviting people to dinner but for its own sake.

“Do you hate me to go on about it, Marcus?”

“No. But these things take time.”

“Do you think I’m getting obsessed?”

“No. But I don’t think it’s so important. We’re marvellously comfortable as things are. There seems to be a sort of fashion for young married couples to make a fetish of their flats. Especially childless couples. It’s a bit pathetic.”

Nancy asked:

“Do you think we ought to have a child?”

He took even longer than usual to answer, surprised by the question.

“There’s no ought. It’s a thing we can do what we like about. And since it’s you who’ll have to have it, it’s for you to say.”

“Sometimes I feel a certain pressure from the prospective grandparents. Especially your mother.”

“O damn that. She hasn’t dared say anything, has she?”

“No, of course not. Just wistful looks.”

“She can give those to her other child. Why can’t
she
get married again, and supply hundreds of grandchildren? She could certainly knit for hundreds.”

“I’ve always felt odd about having a child,” Nancy said. “I never thought I would have one.”

A day or two later, Nancy said:

“Should we give it a try?”

“What?”

“A baby. I mean, we could stop trying
not
to have one. And see what happens.”

“Yes. All right,” he said in his mild, amenable slow voice.

“It may not happen.”

“No. It may not happen.”

But the child was conceived the first time they gave it the opportunity.

“We belong to a philoprogenitive race,” Marcus said.

They telephoned the news to the three grandparents. Next time Marcus’s sister came to dinner in Chelsea, she brought a present. Marcus was surprised to feel through the wrapping paper that it was a book. It was a great chunky American volume the size of a desk encyclopaedia, illustrated on every page—“lavishly”, the dust jacket said—with shiny colour photography that reminded him of the seicento painting he had sold; its title was
Traditional
Jewish
Food.

Marcus did not know whether his sister meant it as a protest against the non-sectarian menus she shared once a week in their house or as an indication of how the baby should be brought up.

Dinner, not by Nancy’s and Marcus’s wish, was turned into an acknowledgement of the baby. Marcus’s sister not only made more effort to talk than usual but talked, with complimentary speculations, about the baby. She called down enough sense of social occasion to prompt them all, instead of sitting on in the kitchen after the meal, to return to the drawing room.

Sunk in a sofa which was Polydore’s latest loan, Marcus picked up from its arm the cookery book—or, as it preferred to be called, cook book—and began looking at the pictures. “No, really,” he said, slowly, teasing his sister, “this is disgraceful. Americans would talk about anything.
I mean, if being Jewish is no longer something to be ashamed of——”

Nancy cut straight across him. “You’re being quite absurd, Marcus. And grossly unfair.”

Both he and his sister were amazed. After a silence, he felt obliged to say something more to his sister about her present. But his mind could not jump out of the chaffing groove it had started in. “It’s certainly mouthwatering,” he said. “What a present for a man who’s on a diet.”

Two weeks later, however, he was no longer on a diet. Nancy had to put the idea aside, because pregnancy gave her an insatiable appetite herself.

W
HEN
she was two months pregnant, Nancy confessed to him that she had always felt a physical terror of giving birth to a child. “Partly it’s physical cowardice,” she said, “but there’s something else as well. It’s more than just a rational fear.”

“Well I don’t think it’s very surprising. I should think most women feel the same.”

“I don’t know.” She appeared to disclaim knowledge of other women. “Or perhaps I do know. Some women are afraid of losing their virginity, some women are afraid of having a baby. I took the first in my stride——”

“You couldn’t,” he consideringly interposed, “have chosen a better place to take it.”

Nancy burst into tears.

When he apologetically and gently dabbed her tears with his handkerchief, she told him that her reaction meant nothing; it was a symptom of nothing except pregnancy, which made her edgy and weepy. All the medical booklets she had bought on the subject said that the lodging of the fœtus in the wall of the womb produced a physical shock to the whole organism.

A
T
three months, shock, weepiness, delicacy were all swallowed up in euphoria. Even the physical fear was dwarfed.

“No doubt
the
day will be absolutely bloody,” Nancy said, “but it can’t last for ever, and afterwards we’ll have
it
.”

“I find it impossible to imagine what
it
will be like.”

“Of course you do. You’re not even allowed to know what sex it will be. Because, if people could imagine it all in advance, no one would do it.”

“Do you think,” Marcus asked, “that the lodging of
it
within the walls of this house will produce a shock to
my
organism?”

“Undoubtedly,” she replied. “It might even make you thin. Running round to get its nappies up on the line.”

At the beginning of pregnancy, her appetite had been bitter, miserable, an addiction. Now it became glorious. She spent half the day cooking and at night they sat down to banquets. Whereas he was even further slowing down, she became even more, became Wagnerianly, energetic. She would not hear of giving up her job till the last moment. “I’ve never felt so well.” During the meals she was always jumping up, to fetch another loaf, to look at the next course in the oven.

The curious thing was that she didn’t get fat. It was Marcus who swelled as the pregnancy progressed. In Nancy it did not shew.

“I don’t believe you
are
pregnant.”

“The best medical opinion in London says I am.” She said it like a boast.

She put on one of the maternity smocks she had bought, along with the medical booklets, at the outset, but Marcus made her take it off, saying she looked obscene, like a little girl masquerading. “It’s more for me than you,” he added.

The only things she would not cook or eat were the Jewish dishes catalogued in Marcus’s sister’s present to them. Marcus went through the pages with a curiosity partly scientific (under the name of each dish, the Yiddish name was given in italics, like the scientific under the common name of an animal) and partly gluttonous. “Don’t you think you ought to try some of them? At least when she comes?”

“Perhaps—afterwards,” Nancy said. “I don’t want to take any risks with my digestion at the moment.”

“Your digestion seems to stand up to quite a lot of punishment.”

“I know,” she said, happily. “You’d think I’d get fat from eating, if not from the baby.”

“You’re like Polly,” he said. Nancy was not so displeased as she would have been before. “Do you think Polly’s pregnant?”

“Not unless you made him so,” Nancy said.

She gave other signs, too, that although her euphoria had not lessened her dislike of Polydore, it had given her a freedom—and therefore a sort of gaiety—in expressing it.

If she had had, before, a talent for sexual intercourse, she now seemed to have an appetite for it. For the first time Marcus felt an impulse to flinch from her sexually. He did not think he was withdrawing from the strong physicalness of her well being, or even from the just perceptible coarsening of her face, which was the only way the pregnancy had yet made itself bodily visible. But the
idea had fixed itself in his mind that when he made love to Nancy the baby was spying on them.

In any other circumstances he would have explained his feeling to Nancy. But then in any other circumstances he would not have felt it.

She, so far from noticing an inhibition on his part, delighted in explaining to him that by making her pregnant he had destroyed in her the last shred of sexual inhibition. “At any other time one must have, at the back of one’s mind, the fear of getting pregnant. One always knows something
might
go wrong. The only one hundred per cent foolproof contraceptive is to have a baby already in there.”

Her words did nothing to demolish his image of being spied on.

Only in the seventh month did she begin to need her smocks. “You’re an honest pregnant woman at last.” But it was still a small pregnancy and gave her not the least trouble to carry round, sticking out in front of her in a shape like a rugger ball. “You won’t be disappointed if you give birth to a small rugger ball?”

“I won’t be disappointed,” she said, “whatever I give birth to.”

She made the same reply when Marcus’s sister asked whether to buy pink or blue knitting wool.

But when the term grew nearer, she told Marcus that she really wanted a girl.

“I didn’t think you much liked girls.”

“I told you once before,” she said, laughing, “ages ago, it’s different when it’s me. And it’ll be different when it’s mine.”

He thought she was probably rebelling against the obsessive Jewish desire for sons; and, in case she should misinterpret him, he did not admit to her that he would prefer a boy.

Presently he thought that perhaps she did not so much
want a girl as want to avoid a boy, on whom the Jewish pressure would be much stronger. Nancy did not say anything about it, so in the end he asked:

“If it should be a boy, would we have him circumcised?”

“I don’t know. What do you think? I suppose it’s quite a sensible hygienic precaution, anyway. Lots of non-Jews do.”

“You told me once before, ages ago, that things of that sort aren’t hygienic precautions at all.”

She said nothing. Even her euphoria could not quite ride over his quoting her own words at her to an end that was not meant to be amusing. He was aware of hostility in his own speech; and it led him to a prevision that, if they did have a son, they might, over him, become hostile to one another.

B
UT
it was a girl.

Nancy was delivered of her, almost punctually, which all the medical books told them was rare with a first child, with a great deal of effort but very little actual pain. She had taken tuition, of course, and done her exercises regularly. The only way she departed from the advice given at her classes was to ask Marcus not to be present at the birth.

The midwife told him immediately afterwards that his wife was very good at having babies. He replied he had known she would be. Nancy was very pleased when he reported the conversation: she set store on the midwife’s approval.

Polydore bought a half bottle of champagne and ordered it to be mixed with Marcus’s usual stout.

In the hospital Nancy still seemed borne up by her euphoria—or perhaps by the midwife’s approval. But when she brought the baby home she fell subject to weariness. She remained weary even when she gave up breastfeeding the child. She worried about her weariness, about her unwillingness to drag herself round in the baby’s service and—as soon as the baby took to the bottle—about the fact that it was rapidly proving overweight. In this last worry Marcus read a reproach to himself. For a day or two he ate less. But Nancy was too tired to work out diets for him—she was content if she could only serve
some
food—and in any case he reckoned that if he had really passed on an hereditary disposition to overweight it
would not be cured by reducing the symptom in himself.

The baby seemed to him a very elementary form of life, hardly more organised than a sea invertebrate. Its life activity provoked no thoughts or imaginings in him: it merely went on impressing the absolute primacy of eating and excretion. All the same he was conscious of—in an elementary way—loving it. This consciousness came to him only when he thought about the question in the abstract, not at all in the moments when he held the baby in his arms and on his knee, where Nancy sometimes deposited it while she prepared its bottle; at those moments all he thought of was its eating and excreting.

He could not conceive why they had wasted time speculating about its sex or why he had supposed its sex might cause discord between him and Nancy. The thing that had come into the flat
had
no sex.

Nancy had preserved her figure, but she had not got her looks back. Her face still had the coarseness of pregnancy but without the healthiness. Her weariness shewed. It was perhaps not surprising that her plainness made Marcus feel constantly tender towards her; what did surprise him was it repeatedly provoked him to passion. It was as though her good looks had been a touch too neat and contained for a completely abandoned experience; he had always remained sensuously aware of the niceness of her body. Now he thought it would be possible to lose awareness of both bodies.

Nancy, however, did not share this experience. She did not see her return home in the same terms of sexual welcome as he did. She saw it as a list of things to be done. She worried in case she failed to do them. “I may be good at
producing
babies, but I’m not much good at following it up.”
He
was worried in case her newly-found talent for giving birth should obscure the earlier one for sexual intercourse.

He had been afraid the embryo was spying on them: she
was afraid the baby was—not eavesdropping, but needing her. He knew she was aware she would feel guilty if, at the moment when she was seeking her own pleasure, the baby should wake up and bawl one of its monotonous two needs. She made love with one ear on it, as though it were an undependable alarm clock, in the next room. “Darling, arr. I very dreary for you at the moment?”

“No, of course not. I’m sorry if I force myself on you.” It was like a moment’s return to his old, hopeless, self disparagement.

“You don’t. Don’t be silly.”

He felt almost a romantic ache towards her, as though she were unattainable. And in truth, although she made herself—almost dutifully, he felt—attainable bodily, he had to be content with satisfactions for his body only. They sent him to sleep, but like an anaesthetic. In the end, he became tired all the time, too.

Nancy had decided the child was to be called Claire. He did not much like the name, but he had nothing against it. In any case he could not really feel the force of giving the child a name at all, while it remained so elementary. It seemed whimsical to give it an attribute of personality, like nicknaming a mollusc.

He bought the child an old-fashioned wooden cradle which Polydore had spotted in the sale room. Although it was connected with Polydore, Nancy thought the cradle pretty; but she kept the child in its carrycot. “I hope you don’t mind, darling. But the cradle seems too nice to spoil. And it would make so much extra work if I had to scrub it out every time she wet her nappy.”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“There’s enough to do as it is. I must get you back on to a diet, darling. But just at the moment it seems too much to work out three separate menus.
With
everything else.”

“You ought to get an au pair girl,” he said. “That’s
what other people do. Though I must say, I don’t know how they go about it.”

Nancy of course did. “You go to an agency and ask for one who’s already had a job over here and didn’t like it. It makes them more grateful for being treated decently. You get one who’s been exploited in Finchley and writes, ‘Not North London’ on the application form.”

“But,” Marcus slowly said, “that obviously means ‘Not Jews’.”

“Well,” Nancy said, “if they’re hypocritical enough to write ‘Not North London’ when they mean ‘Not Jews’, then in their own sense of the word we’re not Jews.”

“But I don’t want an anti-Semite living with us,” he said.

“We needn’t have anyone,” said Nancy.

Two days later, however, he told her she must. “It’s stupid not to. We’ve got the extra room. It’s stupid for you to do it all when you needn’t.”

“All right. I’ll go to the agency. I can take the pram.”

“But not a German girl,” he said.

“We’ll have to see what they’ve got.”

“Not German.”

“Which is worse,” Nancy asked, “‘Not Jews’ or ‘Not Germans’?”

“I know damn well which I think is worse.”

“I think you’re unreasonable,” she said. “The sort of girl we’d get was only five or six in 1945.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“No doubt because it’s true of them all.”

“They’ve got parents, haven’t they? They come here from families. They write home. We might even find ourselves exchanging civilities with the parents.”

“Are you responsible for everything your parents have done?”

“My parents never did anything like that.”

The agency sent three girls to be interviewed.

“The Judgment of Paris,” said Marcus.

Nancy knew he had the Rubens picture in mind.

“We can’t see them all together,” she said, “and I’m afraid you mustn’t ask them to undress.”

“Then I shall leave it to you. I can’t judge in such restricted circumstances.”

Of the French girl, who came first, he said:

“No one would want to ask her to undress.”

The second girl, who was Norwegian, was plump and friendly and looked forty-five.

Only the last girl was German. She was rather remarkably beautiful.

After they had all been, Nancy said:

“Well, Paris?”

“I leave it to you. I never thought I’d make a shepherd anyway.”

“D’you still feel, ‘Not German’?”

“I leave it to you.”

Nancy engaged the beautiful girl, of course. It was part of making Marcus comfortable. Marcus never remembered to ask Nancy whether the girl was one of those who had written “Not North London” on the application form.