Flesh (6 page)

By evening, drink and staying indoors had given him a headache, and he went early to bed—making it clear, however, that he was too proud to think of trying to make love again.

Nancy was irritated into saying, as she undressed, “You are an idiot, darling. And anyway, anyone with half an eye could see what’s at the root of it.”

“At the root of what?” said Marcus, choosing at the last moment to pretend it was something else he was sulking about. He was already in the bed, turned on his side, facing away from where she would presently join him. He weakened his pretence by too much fluency of invention when he added, “You mean at the root of my headache?”

“No,” Nancy said, getting into bed. “I mean last night.”

“Well I must lack even half an eye, because I don’t see.”

“Don’t you even know the curse of your own race?” she said. “Filial guilt.”

“If you mean I feel some sort of guilt about my father, you’re wrong. I don’t feel guilty in the least.”

“One doesn’t feel things that are unconscious. That’s what the word means.”

“O well, if you mean I feel something I can’t feel, then you’re safe in attributing anything you like to me. No one can check up on you. But actually it doesn’t seem very likely. Why
should
I feel guilt, conscious or unconscious? I haven’t done anything to make me feel guilt.”

“Where do you suppose you were at the moment your father died?”

“I was in Lucca, of course. So were you.”

“Yes, so was I,” Nancy repeated. “And the chances are, you were inside me.”

Marcus turned over and faced her.

“If you imagine that’s been bothering me, you’re wrong again. I’ve never given it a thought.”

“But you don’t suppose your unconscious is incapable of making such a simple calculation?”

Marcus looked at her in silence for a moment, from the pillow. Then:

“Sigmunda Freud,” he said.

“Well, at least he was a Jew,” said Nancy.

Marcus could see no point in the remark, and he turned over and went to sleep.

He woke very early—perhaps as early as five—next morning and, instantly lucid, said to Nancy:

“When you said at least Freud was Jew, did you mean these guilt feelings only apply to Jews?”

He saw she had to make an effort to come out of her sleep in order to receive his question at all.

“No, of course not,” she answered presently. “Even you can’t be ignorant enough to think Oedipus was a Jew.”

“I’d forgotten Oedipus.”

“You had,” she agreed, and began to go to sleep again.

“What
did
you mean, then?”

“I can’t remember. I suppose I meant it’s more acute in Jews. Phenomena like that are easiest to study in the most extreme cases. It helps to illuminate the milder ones.”

This time she did go back to sleep. Marcus talked on even though he had observed that her consciousness was leaving him behind. “I don’t say you’re wrong about me. I just say I can’t discover a trace of evidence for it in myself. It just doesn’t convince me.”

Then he went back to sleep, too.

They woke again, simultaneously, at eight. Whether
the explanation she had given him was correct or whether he was so suggestible and so much in her power that he accepted it on her authority he did not know; but she had cured him. He demonstrated his cure before they got up. “That’s twice you’ve rescued me,” be said to her, affectionately.

I
T
seemed to Marcus that a number of important actions were begging to be done at the same time: either they were begging or Nancy was expecting him to do them. He had to dispose of the business; to find himself a job; to search S.W.3, 7 and 10 for a flat for himself and Nancy; and to make love to Nancy.

Only the last really engaged his interest, though the question of finding a flat did so slightly, because it was connected with making love. After the weekend in the country Marcus found he could make love to Nancy in the Ken Wood house; but they could not enjoy the
devil-may
-care feeling they had cultivated, now that they were in a borrowed bedroom in a house that was still faintly tainted by bereavement and was in any case a family house: the very fakeness of its beams enjoined the
pretence
that sex did not exist which had been kept up while Marcus and his sister had been children there. Marcus was therefore willing and even active in driving round the estate agents with Nancy, collecting orders to view.

Another result of the weekend in the country was that Marcus’s grief had withdrawn. He tried sometimes to sting it back; and when he failed he tried to lacerate
himself
by accusations that he was growing unfeeling and had lost his capacity for anguish. But he could not really stir anything. Even when he put it to himself that his grief had become impotent, he was not bitten, but only slightly pleased by his irony.

Eventually one of the estate agents sent them to a flat in Chelsea which was held, on a long lease, by a rich young
Jewish couple who, since buying it, had had four children and now needed a house. Marcus could see that Nancy was displeased by the fact that they were Jews. But even she liked the flat. She admitted, outside in the car, after the interview, that she wanted it. It looked, however, as though the choice was not hers. By the time Marcus and Nancy arrived, the couple had already received an offer; so they merely promised to let Marcus know if the sale fell through.

When he and Nancy got back to the Ken Wood house, Marcus put it to his mother and sister that they no longer needed fifteen rooms and a tennis court, which were only a responsibility to keep up. Both of them agreed. Marcus telephoned the couple in Chelsea and offered to swop the house for their flat.

When they came to look at the house, they were plainly cast down by the thought of accepting it in place of their flat, which was beautiful. But they were won over: by the easiness of selling and buying at the same time, which removed the worry of having nowhere to go and meant they need realise a smaller amount of capital than they had expected, since they need put down only the
difference
between the two prices; by the usefulness of the tennis court for keeping four children entertained; and, Marcus thought, by a twitch on an atavistic cord drawing them back to North London.

What Marcus had in mind was to settle his mother and sister in a flat in or near Hampstead, the part of the world they were used to. But his sister suddenly wanted to get out of that part of the world. The mother had no
preferences
: she rarely went out of doors in any case. Since they were neither poor nor particular, it should not be hard to find something for them. Nancy did most of the looking, because she wanted to keep control. She concentrated on W.8. They did not want to be too far from Chelsea and she did not want them to be too near.

She quickly discovered an empty flat in a street off the south side of High Street, Kensington. It had big, high, yellowing rooms, which would accommodate a good deal of the furniture from the Ken Wood house, and was three floors up in a mansion block of crimson brick with cream stone dressings. There was a porter, whose uniform matched the brick, a hall tiled to resemble mosaic, and a 1910-ish lift which appeared to be, though it was not really, worked by the manual effort of heaving on the crimson cord which was threaded through one side. The name of the block was outlandish but unmemorable and presumably borrowed from some overseas victory; the name was worked into a terracotta plate over the porch and woven or dyed into the doormat at the main door, in both cases in a script so wiltingly art nouveau as to be illegible.

Marcus found himself with even more, and even more complex, business to do. It was not very hard to arrange his mother’s tenancy of the Kensington flat, which was on only a seven-year lease, and the previous leaseholders wanted the small premium handed over in cash. But the purchase of the sixty-nine-year lease in Chelsea and the sale of the house, which would entail a readjustment of the death duties on his father’s estate, took time. He was
irritated
to find that title deeds had to be searched and leases engrossed even though he and the Chelsea couple were quite willing to believe in one another’s honesty. He had imagined it could all be accomplished, as in some
dignified
primitive community, by the exchange of a solemn word. He had imagined himself making love to Nancy on the bare floorboards of their new home that very night.

Instead, they had all four to stay on in the Ken Wood house half packed to go, through several miserable weeks during which even the summer failed them and turned cold and rainy. Nancy began to talk about finding Marcus a job.

Every evening, while the mother cooked dinner, the three younger people sat in the drawing room, where it was sometimes necessary to light a fire; and every evening it seemed that the conversation was about Marcus’s job.

One evening, when Nancy came into the room, where Marcus was already sitting with his sister, he said:

“Here comes the careers mistress.”

Nancy did not know how to take the remark.

The next evening, he thought of something that would tease her further still. He suggested that, instead of selling the partnership in his father’s business, he should take it up: that would be his job.

“O don’t be silly,” Nancy said. “You can’t be a business man.”

“I don’t know whether you mean business is unworthy of me or I’m unworthy of business.”

“Both—neither,” Nancy said. “It’s mutual
incompatibility
. One’s only got to look at you to see you couldn’t be a dried fruit importer.”

“It’s just a question of what I should be instead.”

“The first time I ever met you, you said you wanted to work with something beautiful.”

“Well,” he said, pretending to consider, “prunes, raisins—they have a resemblance, you know, to certain faces of Rembrandt.”

“You’re a Rubens man, not a Rembrandt man,” Nancy said, but fiercely, not with amusement.

“I think Marcus ought to do something with his hands,” his sister said. “Marcus is good with his hands.” She herself was knitting away. Perhaps being good with their hands ran in their family.

“I
know
he’s good with his hands,” said Nancy, as though jealously; and her tone made Marcus wonder if she had invested his dexterity with a sexual connotation. “But he can’t make a career out of tearing paper kangaroos.”

“Toys, perhaps,” Marcus murmured mildly. “Or Christmas decorations—in Australia, perhaps. No doubt there’s a market.”

“You don’t want a market,” Nancy replied. “You talk as though we were all still living in the bazaar.”

“Life,” said Marcus, pretending to give an affected sigh, “is one enormous bazaar.” But it didn’t amuse Nancy.

In the end, since he
had
been only teasing, he sold the partnership; and at about the same time they at last moved into their Chelsea flat.

His mother and sister were already living in
Kensington.
It seemed to Marcus that his mother really had taken to a different furniture polish, but it was hard to be sure, because she overlaid the newness of her new flat with the same old smell—or, really, sense—of things being steamed, by relays, in the kitchen. His sister had without difficulty reorientated herself—re-routed her daily steps—from John Barnes to John Barker.

I
T
astonished Nancy and Marcus that moving in could cause them such—and so many days’—confusion, and that it could yet turn out, when the confusion began to lift, that they had virtually no possessions. Marcus’s vision of making love on bare floorboards came almost true. In point of fact, they
had
bought a bed. They also had the armchairs from Marcus’s old flat; but they sorted ill with the new flat, and were marked down to be replaced. Nancy and Marcus had declined to take anything from the Ken Wood house, even to tide them over. That left them with Nancy’s gramophone records and Marcus’s books and objects of art.

When he eventually unpacked his objects, he found them faded and diminished by their period inside the crates. And they, too, did not go with the flat; it was too beautiful for them.

Nancy had spent all her days there before the move, supervising its decoration—which really consisted of
de-decorating
it. They ripped off all the fashionably up-
to-date
wallpaper the other people had hung—or, at least, they employed workmen to do it, and expressed their own anger at the desecration of the walls by the energy of the instructions they gave. Nancy had almost to bully the workmen, who kept pointing out that the wallpaper was still in excellent condition and had cost a great deal. Then she had to exert her will again to get the place painted a genuine, matt white instead of the glossy cream the
workmen
said was more practical.

The result was that they themselves, who had picked out and revealed its beauty, were more than ever under a moral obligation not to desecrate the place. There was not a wall Marcus would besmirch with his seicento picture—which had, indeed, just the glossy paint surface they had driven out of their temple. The place
was,
like all eighteenth-century building, a temple: a small and chaste one, where no blood sacrifice had ever been performed. The niche between the long, mannered, exquisite
windows
in the drawing room (the flat consisted of the first floor of the house) would, Marcus thought, shudder down or fold its wings and brick itself in, if he were to stand his renaissance-Victorian statuette in it.

The place was, simply, architecture; and the problem, how to live in without obscuring it. Both Marcus and Nancy knew how to answer the problem, but they knew it would take time. They could see in their minds’ eye the pieces of furniture—very few in number—which they must acquire; not necessarily rare things, but difficult to find, because the just right always was difficult to find.

So, for the time being, they lived in and off scrubbed wood furniture, which pleased them because it announced that it was to be replaced, asserting a mere
x
or
y
until the just right quantity should be known.

Only Marcus’s Chinese bowl looked at all well in its new surroundings. But, strictly speaking, there was nowhere to
put
even that.

He was trying it out in various places when Nancy came home, after a teaparty he had excused himself from, and disclosed that she had heard of a job she thought he could have if he wanted it.

He instantly armed himself against the idea. “We’re not even properly settled in yet. There’s no hurry.”

Surprisingly, Nancy let the subject drop.

He thought she must be practising the childish
stratagem of making him interested by pretending she was not.

But by the next day he had decided that that was so uncharacteristic of her as to be impossible. So he asked her what the job was.

“I don’t think it’s for you,” she said. “It’s in a sort of antique shop.”

“How very apropos,” said Marcus. “I might pick up some pieces.”

“You might pick up other things as well.”

“Such as?”

“O, I don’t know. Nasty attitudes.”

“That,” said Marcus, “is the most untypical remark I’ve ever heard you make.” He put down the Chinese bowl so as to turn and look at her face to face.

“How so?”

“Well, it’s like saying
bad
habits
when you mean masturbation. And one of your immense virtues is that you never do cloak your thought in the decent obscurity of a middle-class vagueness.”

“I have to be vague when I don’t really know what I mean myself. I suppose I’m afraid you might pick up commercialism. Or dilettantism.”

“Well at least not both,” he said. “Aren’t they contradictory?”

“No,” she said. “Not when the commerce consists of selling things to dilettanti.”

“Well, at least tell me about the job.”

“Darling, it isn’t even worth telling you. It’s not your sort of job.”

“Then tell me just as gossip.”

“Well,” she said. Evidently she didn’t want even to put words to the images. It was with a hasty distaste that she brought out, “Well, you remember that girl Julia——She was at that dance——?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, she has—she’s always had—a person, a sort of attachment, whom she calls Uncle Polydore. That’s his surname. I don’t know whether he’s really her uncle or not. I’ve met him. He’s a sort of butterfly—but
old,
you know. I suppose he’s queer, insofar as he’s anything. Anyway, he has this shop in Wigmore Street. Very expensive. I think he does whole decorative schemes, as he no doubt calls them, for fashionable people. Anyway. Well, anyway, he buys pieces and tarts them up. I daresay he fakes them. Anyway, he’s looking for someone with an eye, someone with taste or fake taste, to supervise his restoration work.”

“Well,” said Marcus. “You’ve always said I was good with my hands.” He looked at them for a moment and then plunged them inside the Chinese bowl, where he made a gesture as though he were using the bowl to knead pastry—or perhaps for some sort of ritual ablution.