Flesh (8 page)

One of the dignified men in overalls passed silently behind them and trod out Polydore’s cigarette as he went.

“Of course, I could have the pattern copied, to fill in the gaps,” said Polydore. “But it always looks glaring,
you know. Or I could get something made. There’s a place out at Fulham that does my metalwork. But you know what they are. They’re not artists, they’re artisans. They’re literal-minded. They do exactly what I tell them. And that’s no good. What I want them to do is improvise on a theme I give them. Now here, I thought—something foliated, or perhaps something with scrolls, or even seashells. But it’s no good telling them that. The trouble is, I can’t visualise. I can buy. I can sell. But I can’t visualise.”

Marcus took his diary out of his pocket and stood for a while looking at the chest of drawers. Then, on a blank page from earlier in the year, he drew—or, rather, made a diagram of—a complicated little rococo frieze, and shewed it to Polydore.

Polydore looked at it as it were in despair, then at the chest of drawers; and at last he transferred his despair directly to Marcus. “I wish I could do without you,” he said.

“Maybe you can,” said Marcus. “Think about it.” He put his diary away.

“I don’t need to,” said Polydore. “I couldn’t pay you much, you know. Something derisory, in fact. Eight hundred.”

He gave it no intonation of a question or proposition; he simply stopped talking after saying it.

Marcus took a moment to reply into the silence. “A thousand.”

“We’ll think about it,” said Polydore, and this time, when Marcus expected a silence, went straight on: “Tell you what, if there was ever anything you wanted in my stock for yourself, you could have it at cost.”

“I couldn’t do that,” said Marcus, ironically. “I’d feel I was taking bread out of your mouth.”

“Well, let’s say cost plus ten per cent,” said Polydore without a second’s pause, “up to the value of five hundred
in any one calendar year, and cost plus twenty thereafter.”

“All right,” Marcus said, “on those terms I think my wife wants that Chinese carpet.”

“I don’t,” said Nancy, like a schoolgirl.

Polydore, already making for the stairs, pretended not to have heard.

At the foot of the stairs he paused, sighed and said, “You can call me anything you like. If you come, I mean. Polydore. Mr Polydore. I’m usually called Uncle Polydore. So ageing. I sometimes think I’ve kept my figure for nothing. Or you can call me by my first name. I can’t get used to saying Christian name, though I
do
try. But I ought to warn you that it’s Siegfried.” He gave the first letter its proper German sound. “I’m not really a Wagnerian. Though often, as I mount these steps”—he flew at them—“I have thoughts of Walhalla.”

“Goodbye,” said Miss Scott-Marmion when they reached the top. And then, specially to Marcus, “I do hope you’re going to come to us.”

M
ARCUS
quickly elected to call Polydore Polly, a choice which displeased Nancy, though she did not say so. Miss Scott-Marmion he could not call anything until he got it clear, which took him several months, that her name was really Davina Heath-Plumpton. He recognised that his original inability to grasp her name was a symptom that he found her attractive and was resisting temptation; but by then temptation had passed. She played no part in his life, though she was always there, upstairs, usually on the telephone to other young women, arranging to meet them for luncheon in Wigmore Street.

Nancy took the whole thing—Marcus was not sure how. He had the impression that she was not so much concealing her real opinion as trying to force her real opinion to conform to his desire to accept the job; as though her most real, deepest opinion of all was that it would be nasty of her to raise objections. It was, it almost seemed, her own character she was trying to alter. Immediately after their interview with Polydore, she had said to Marcus, as soon as they were enclosed in their own car,

“Well, darling, if you want to.”

“There’s no harm in giving it a try.”

“No, quite,” said Nancy. “You’re not obliged to do it for ever. In fact, that’s one of the advantages of his offering so little. He can’t expect you to stick it after you find something that’s more what you want.”

After they reached home she said, in a manner which confessed she had been thinking over not only the interview
but the comment she was now going to make,

“Most of the stuff he’s got there is tripe.”

“Not that Chinese carpet.”

“No, but most of it.”

“O, I don’t know about
tripe
,”
said Marcus. “After all, just because we’ve got an austere flat—I mean, one’s taste shouldn’t get too austere. I think most of his stuff is not so much tripe as
tat.
After all, it’s quite amusing.”

“I don’t think the joke will last you long,” she said.

When he began actually to go out to work, Nancy shewed her goodwill—or, as Marcus interpreted it, her determination to feel goodwill—by building up for him, and cherishing him in, a setting of material comfort which might have been a satire on the Jewish respect for the male and the breadwinner, but which she did not, of course, intend satirically at all. Previously they had lived not only off scrubbed wood but out of tins: but now Marcus found that the kitchen, at least, was suddenly and very pleasantly furnished, and that Nancy had dug out the notebooks in which she had written down recipes and menus during her domestic science course.

The cooking Nancy had been taught was English and, in principle, not very interesting. Yet Nancy contrived to serve it with a neatness that was in itself a substitute for invention and part of the compliment to Marcus. There was a neatness in the pat of butter and sprinkling of parsley she slid with a palette knife on to the top of his fillet steak; there was a neatness about the shortcrust on her meat pies—and she was the only woman Marcus had known who was able to mix the exact amount of pastry she needed and did not have to use up the scraps in making coarse and untempting little pastry men with raisin eyes. Even so, she knew without his telling her that his tastes had begun to aspire beyond neatness; he would like to try out the exotic and the amusing. So she took a string shopping bag into Soho and began bringing him back
prickly fruits which looked like animals and animals from alien seas that looked like succulent plants, together with multilingual instructions from the shopkeepers about how they should be prepared. Some of the instructions proved impractical and some of the foods dead sea fruits; but for others Marcus developed a gluttonous obsession.

Nancy had read that Italian housewives never bought factory-made
pasta
but made their own as English housewives made pastry. She went to an Italian restaurant and obliged the proprietor to take her into the kitchen and introduce her to his chef, from whom she obtained the recipe. She began to serve Marcus what he called a spaghetti
alla
napolitana
al paradiso.
She also wrote off to the daughter of the family she had stayed with in France, with whom she was still in desultory touch, and found out how the hams were cured in the family’s country house. The curing took three days, and filled Nancy’s and Marcus’s flat with a smell evocative of provincial France, of whitewashed, sundrenched, shuttered, stone farmhouses—or of French films in which Marcus had seen such things—and which made Marcus wonder how he could live through the three days before the ham would be eatable. Sometimes in the middle of an afternoon in Polydore’s basement he would lust for home.

The hams, once cured, were hung from hooks Nancy had had inserted in the ceiling in the kitchen, which was a big, sunny room and the one where Marcus and Nancy ate. It had been ruined by modernisation, its austere proportions demolished; and so it was the only room in the flat which did not present the problem of beauty.

When the winter began, Marcus’s appetite increased and he put on a little weight.

Marcus indulged himself in the contrast between home and work like a sensualist inventing variations on the turkish bath. Work, because he did not need the money he earned, was a sort of play-acting, a daydream only slightly
brisker than the usual kind. The very business of considering Polydore’s furniture and objects from the amused point of view of what he could make of them—or, rather, of what he could, by a hey presto, make somebody else make of them—was like elaborating the details of a fantasy. It was as part of a pretence, or at least of something which did not cost him very much of his real life-energy, that he liked the feeling of his now firmer, more solid figure setting off to the shop, and liked the weariness and the ache for home in the limbs he dragged back through the dark to the light and comfort Nancy kept prepared.

Although the flat was not yet furnished, Nancy took care—it was part of the background to Marcus’s work which she was compiling round them—to keep it warm. That was in contrast to the work itself. The stone, basement under the shop was unheated. Polydore made neither apology nor attempt at a remedy; but in one of the tiny rooms upstairs he had a gas ring, and from time to time he would boil a kettle and—screeching of the perils of the stairs to a man carrying a tray—bring down mugs of Oxo to Marcus and the two men in overalls. Marcus did not think he brought them often enough. He would crouch in front of the piece he was working on and whistle, to himself but loud enough to mount the steps, “Polly put the kettle on.”

But Polydore seemed to have had a childhood without nursery rhymes.

“Well, why don’t you leave?” asked Nancy.

But Marcus preferred to drop Polydore a bigger hint. He asked his sister to knit him a jumper and when it was finished he turned up at work in ski pants, thick-knit jumper and a woolly cap which he kept on all day.

In the end Marcus told Polydore he would no longer come to work; the work must come to him.

Polydore refused. Next day Marcus stayed at home.
The day after, Polydore’s station wagon stopped outside and the two men in overalls carried a drum-shaped card table, a tea chest and a firescreen up the stairs and into Marcus’s and Nancy’s flat.

Nancy watched him work all morning: that is to say, she watched him sit in front of the objects, sometimes getting up and running his hands over them. In the end he drew some diagrams, which he addressed to the firm in Fulham and which Nancy took out to the post.

In the afternoon it began to snow. Nancy and Marcus made love, magically, while the snowflakes pussy-footed down past their window.

“Darling, this is awful,” she said, meaning the opposite. “If you’re going to work at home, I’ll have to get a job to go out to.”

“I wish it snowed every day.”

But, instead, it got warmer, and Marcus went back to work. However, he no longer worked regular hours. He would work, perhaps, three days a week at the shop and the rest at home, where furniture continued to be delivered and collected. He chose his home days in such a way that he was not bothered by the charwoman.

Going out to work, now that it was no longer new, ceased to please him specifically. But the furniture itself was still presenting him with fresh puzzles, which it pleased him to solve, and with fresh pleasures of sight and touch. The craftsmen and cabinet-makers of the past, like a confectioner of inexhaustible invention, poured their sweets into his experience; he preferred home as the place where he might taste them without hurry or formality; and sometimes as he explored a new piece he really did make sucking sounds with his mouth, as though it was only by softening, dissolving and assimilating an idea of the object that he could possess the delight it afforded him.

The furniture—or, rather, the turnover of furniture—was
presumably why the flat did not get furnished in its own right. The Chinese carpet it did acquire. Marcus had intended to forgo it, as a gesture to Nancy. It was she who, lamenting one day their unfurnished state, asked him if it was still in Polydore’s stock. Marcus had it delivered in the van along with the itinerant furniture. Polydore did not charge him the ten per cent above cost because Marcus at the same time compensated Polydore’s stock, by selling him his Chinese bowl for what he had given for it. Nancy had agreed there was no place for it in the flat. Marcus sold his seicento painting in the saleroom, making a profit of two hundred per cent. His statuette was shoved away in a cupboard.

Thanks to Polydore’s furniture, the flat lost its empty look. Polydore would often send fresh consignments without asking for the previous ones back; some largish pieces stayed with Nancy and Marcus for months at a stretch.

“You realise,” Nancy said, “he’s using this place as an extra store?”

“Well, does that matter?” said Marcus. “We have the use of the stuff.”

Having the use of it gave their flat something of the interestingly full quality of Polydore’s real store; and perhaps it was that which made it so comfortable.

“But none of it’s
ours
,”
Nancy objected. They could, of course, have bought any or all of the pieces. But none of them was just right: and that again perhaps contributed to the feeling of comfort. “It’s like living in lodgings,” she said.

“But what classy ones!” Marcus replied. “Our landlady must be—what? At least a white Russian Countess, don’t you think?”

But Nancy did not like sharing the flat even with a white Russian figment and brushed her aside.

Marcus explained that it was useful to him to have
plenty of time to brood over the pieces before working on them. “I like to live with them. Really, I like to sit with them.” He even told her that, with wood furniture in particular, since wood
was
organic,
was
,
indeed, part of a tree, the only way to get the feel of it properly was to sit and watch it grow, like a tree.

Nancy obviously thought the idea factitious if not affected, and she treated it with impatience.

But Marcus really was settling into a domestic version of a rustic slowness. Once he had mentioned sitting with the furniture, Nancy noticed that he sat a great deal. What had been, when she first knew him, the hint of a stammer or splutter in his speech had withdrawn but had left its space behind it, so that there was now a brief silence before each of his phrases. These pauses, which could no longer be construed as hesitancy or self-distrust, but only as a slightly ironic, teasing laziness, had the effect of thickening his speech. His sentences advanced on you deliberately, like a furry caterpillar; and often they intended to tickle. There was even the suspicion of a lisp in his speech. Although the two manners were so utterly different, the one flattering and always on the point of flight, the other thick and padded, Nancy was certain that the lisp had been caught from Polydore.

Another contagion was the habit of comfortable cardigans in colours which, Marcus was persuaded, would not shew any spots that fell on them. But they did shew: a glitter of dried glue; a few freckles of gold leaf rubbed into the ribbing. Nancy was always scrubbing at his clothes, sometimes in the sink, sometimes with her thumbnail while he was wearing them. “Lady Macbeth,” he said.

His fingers—splayed, perhaps, by fitting intricate little bits of wood into place and pressing them firm until the glue set—developed plump little cushions at the tips; they looked like the fingers of one of the frogs which have suckers for clinging to tree trunks or to the back of the
female. They had not lost their sensitive appearance; but it was no longer the sensitivity of avoiding contact with substances; now, they seemed to move deliberately, though still lightly, to any substance which presented itself and to take in its texture through the pores—to appreciate, almost to listen to, textures and consistencies.

Because their dining room, although full of furniture, was not furnished, Nancy and Marcus could not ask people to dinner—at least “not”, as Nancy put it, “
people
: because I’m damned if I’m going to tell my guests they mustn’t spill the wine on the table because the table isn’t ours.” They could entertain only such people as could be invited to eat in the kitchen. That would have included Marcus’s mother, of course, were it not that she had a distrust of food not cooked by herself. She preferred Nancy and Marcus to come to her; when she did visit them in Chelsea, it was for tea, where she ate nothing. Nancy’s parents they did not invite because of the embarrassment about whether to invite them together or separately. They both seemed too weary to sustain a whole dinner and conversation with one another. It was easier for the four of them to go every now and then to a recital at the Wigmore Hall—where Marcus could so simply buy the tickets during his lunch hour. Then he, Nancy and Nancy’s father would wait in the at first crowded and then emptied foyer for Nancy’s mother, who always arrived at the last moment, rushed, hurrying herself in from a rainy night outside, and the four of them would slide into the auditorium one second before the music began; whereupon the separating effect of music would take charge and isolate each of them into a little listening centre, as though each one carried his own receiving set and wore his own earphones, so that they did not have to behave as a group, let alone a family, all evening. Orchestral music, Marcus thought, might have bludgeoned them, by its very beat and brassiness, into a communal
response; but since it was always chamber music, the thin, exact tones, each quite finite and without reverberation, moved drily towards them and enclosed each person in his own linear, unbreakable confine. Marcus remembered how the parents had stolen into the drawing room of their own house to listen to music, like the animals in
The
Magic
Flute.
Now it seemed to him that they all four stole separately into the Wigmore Hall and, when the music was over, stole separately out again.