Flesh (3 page)

Nancy, however, evidently believed she could. She rang up Marcus and told him she had heard of a job he could have: perhaps she felt she owed him a job from their first conversation. This prospective job was, in a sense, literary: no money, but it was a way in: it was in advertising.

Marcus declined instantly. He became almost
aggressive
in explaining that, if he had any literary talent, though he supposed he had not, he would not prostitute it. He was so indignant that he stuttered over the
p
in
prostitute.
Immediately afterwards he felt remorse. He rang Nancy back and arranged to meet her in a teashop in Highgate, where, gazing at her with the passivity of an animal going to ritual slaughter on a frieze, he told her that he would take the job, and would try to do it, if she thought he ought. He put himself in her hands: it was tantamount to a declaration.

Nancy quite accepted the responsibility. But to
Marcus’s
surprise she said that, on thinking it over, she had decided the job was not right for him, and that he should wait for one that was. Marcus had expected her to take the brisk therapeutic line that in a case as bad as his any job was better than no job. Now that she did not, but at the same time did not dismiss him as hopeless, he felt cherished.

When Nancy did at last come to dinner with all Marcus’s family, Marcus’s father was at pains to amuse her by exploiting his comic personality and even his comic roly, rubbery figure. He spent the evening
jumping
round her with small servile middle-eastern attentions, bending almost double and bouncing up again. He looked like Monostatos. It would pass, of course, for his wish
to make his son’s friend welcome; but Marcus knew it was really because Nancy was sexually provocative to him.

It was probably not so much the obvious fact that his family wished him to marry her as the obvious fact that they all—except, presumably, his mother, who in his mind was exempted
ex
officio
—found her sexually
attractive
which persuaded Marcus to welcome her, including her sexual attractiveness, as his own destiny.

H
E
had welcomed it before he properly knew what it was. At first he hardly knew what Nancy even looked like. Because of his diffident habit of always gazing down, he became acquainted with her figure earlier than her face. It was the figure—small, neat, perhaps more correct than beautiful—of a wooden dutch doll. And she was rather the same pretty biscuity colour. Her face was, if not pretty, comely, and small-featured. She had black hair, which she wore short and, although it was quite heavy and thick, kept always neat. The effect of this on top of her trim, straight little figure reminded one of the neat black head of a match. She was energetic: brisk and forthright in movement, yet sharply controlled; she had the ability to move swiftly and directly to her objective and then stop dead without noise or untidiness, like a tropical fish.

She liked organising: liked controlling other people besides herself. That, fundamentally, Marcus had no doubt, was why she wanted to marry him. She did not try to conceal from him that she did. His life had been spent in an agony of trying to conceal things about himself—because everything about him was unworthy of scrutiny—and fearing they shone through. Nancy concealed nothing. It was almost—not quite almost insulting, but almost tactless.

Indeed, she had a sort of emotional tactlessness: and that was her great gift in dealing with Marcus. Socially, intellectually, even artistically, she could never be tactless.
But in direct personal relationships she had a habit not of failing to see nuances but of naming and discussing them—a sort of coarseness of mind sometimes found in nurses, where it is probably the only way that personalities of a certain kind can practise their profession; but in her it was not a response to circumstance but natural. For Marcus, from whose disabilities so many people had flinched, and whose parents had always made too large allowance for them, putting himself in Nancy’s hands was like putting himself, at last, under really competent medical care. To a very, very faint degree, she reminded him of a masseuse.

She was highly intelligent, with a subtle and
penetrating
mind that was nonetheless not capable of
originality
. Neither had Marcus discovered any pronounced talent in her. Perhaps she wanted Marcus because she wanted to draw out and form some originality or talent in him. She played the violin competently, but did not have time to practise as she ought. Judging by what she said and had read, Marcus surmised she understood economics; and it turned out that she had at some period done a year at the London School of Economics.

She had, in fact, done a great many things: which was in contrast to him. His curriculum vitae consisted almost wholly of his
not
being called up for the army—he had varicose veins. Besides her year at L.S.E., Nancy had taken a course in domestic science; she had taught the violin in Kent—at a private school for girls, which could not afford to engage a fully-qualified teacher; she had lived for six months with a family in France—and not a Jewish family, either. Her French was excellent. She had had four lovers. Them, too, she did not conceal from Marcus. All her lovers—one of them was the son of the French family—had been Gentiles, and possibly that was why she had not married one of them. At the moment she had neither a job nor a flat of her own; but she had
plenty to do; she often translated technical pamphlets for a firm which sold cameras, and she occasionally deputised for the French teacher at a commercial school.

She took Marcus, of course, to her parents’ house, which to begin with seemed to him wonderful. On his first visit, both Nancy’s parents were out, and he felt free to look at the place scrupulously. The first great relief was that it was underfurnished; and nothing was en suite. The drawing room was occupied simply by a few
contemporary
-style armchairs which seemed to have been merely left standing about at whatever angle the last occupant had pushed them into when he got up. At Marcus’s parents’ house, the armchairs were too
earthbound
to push. The curtains in Nancy’s house were tweed. Even upstairs they did not become floral. Neither did the cushions, which were covered only in rep, in strong, pure colours. The floors were either left to themselves or covered with some sort of coarse, ribbed matting. Books lapsed all over the place, as naturally as uncultivated flowers: some in piles on the floor, besides an armchair, some inclining spaciously in the segments of what was not so much a bookcase as a room divider.
His
parents had had no books in their house since he had moved out. Looking round, he thought that the biggest single difference was that in his parents’ house all the rooms had a picture rail, even though no pictures hung from it: here the picture rails had been torn out and the walls whitewashed, and the pictures were nailed straight to the wall.

He told Nancy that he thought the house wonderful.

“I think it’s awful,” she said.

He commended the absence of picture rail.

“But have you looked at the
pictures
?”
she asked.

He had to admit those were awful: he had been trying not to see them. They were without individual personality and yet without the discipline of any style: merely
“modern”; not naturalistic, but with some sort of
blameless
subject, landscape or still life—so incompetently blobbed on that it was hard to tell which. They might or might not all be by the same hand. Most of them had thick bluish-black signatures, strictly illegible but not suggesting a name that was or expected to be known. They were framed in wide, slightly bevelled strips of creamish pebble-dash—and unglazed, of course: indeed, it would have been hard to get a glass on over the high, impassioned but purposeless impasto.

After he had walked round and examined them all, he became aware that they shewed the same predilection for orange as his parents’ furnishings.

Even so, he was not immediately disenchanted with the house. It still spoke to him of a freedom of life not to be found at his home: even though, he had to admit, he could not honestly say there was anything he had ever wanted to do and had not been allowed to.

At least in Nancy’s home there was neither T.V. set nor radio; only what she called a record-player. In his home it was called the gramophone, was in fact part of the radio and was in any case never used. At Nancy’s home
The
Radio
Times
did not occupy an almost liturgical position—the scripture for the week—at the heart of the drawing room.

Probably her parents were no richer than his. Yet he felt they belonged to a much higher—and freer—social class.

This was confirmed by what she told him about them. Though they had never divorced, they did not get on: “which is presumably why,” Nancy said, “I am an only child.” They lived separate lives. Indeed, each of the three people occupying the house seemed to do so quite independently. This again appeared to Marcus to denote a freedom. If he rang up Nancy and one of her parents answered, it was never known to them whether she was
in or out, or—if, for instance, they knew she was out because she had borrowed one of the cars—when she would be back.

He met the mother first, when she came home
unexpectedly
early one afternoon to change for something she had to go to that evening. She was in a hurry, of course, her thoughts already in the bath, and she received Marcus’s presence with rather preoccupied kindness. Yet it seemed to him that she treated the meeting as
important,
something she had for some time meant to attend to, though she had not foreseen it would take place on this particular day. Evidently she knew he was going to marry her daughter. He noticed later that she always was rather worried and tired; and that she always wore a shaped felt hat, resembling a fondant, beneath which she shewed precisely four brown sausage curls; he sometimes wondered if hat and curls were part of a single, sub-legal headdress. She really had been a
magistrate
for a while. Now she did social work and engaged in local Labour politics; she often talked, in a tired voice, about the difficulties of getting East End families to use contraceptives.

The father had nothing in common with her except kindness and perpetual tiredness. But with him the
tiredness
was more elegant, more yawning. He was a rather elegant man: tall, thin and with a handsome face to which he gave a look of ageing sleekness by wearing a line of moustache that followed the curve of his mouth. This moustache, however, which at first suggested the seducer, still competent if out-of-date, took on quite another and disconcerting, Asiatic character once you realised that his handsome face was in reality quite flat—that he had, like an oriental, no profile. Once noticed, the absence had the power to obsess the noticer: Marcus spent the whole of one evening dodging about to get a side view of him, in pursuit of a profile that had never existed.

On a Sunday afternoon when Marcus and Nancy were playing Bach on the record-player, both her parents—whom they had not known to be in the house—came severally into the room, nodded, sat down and heard the music out. Then, after a little tired polite conversation, as much with each other and Nancy as with their guest, they severally departed. Attracted by the music, they seemed to have crept dumbly on stage, sat transfixed till it was over and then pointlessly departed, like the animals in
The
Magic
Flute.

Marcus began to conclude that what he had taken for the freedom of Nancy’s home was only another version of the emptiness he found in his own.

Marcus had only one more fact to learn about Nancy’s father. One mild evening which already shewed signs of spring, he walked along the road with Nancy to buy some extra milk at the half-timbered dairy on the corner; and a neighbour, digging her front garden, called out to Nancy to ask if the Commander’s cold was better. Nancy’s father
had
had a cold recently; so as soon as they were out of earshot Marcus asked why, if it was her father who was meant, he was called Commander.

“Well, I suppose because he
is
one—or was,” Nancy said. Marcus knew him only as a partner in an import and export firm, where he worked very long hours. “He retired after the war. He seems to have spent the war being brave. He won a number of medals. It was
desperation
, I expect.” Marcus never received any other insight into her father’s personality, and Nancy did not know any more about it to tell him.

As the year progressed towards spring, his judgment turned definitely against her parents’ house. With the windows open to fresh air and stronger natural light, it seemed more open to criticism. One day, when sunshine was falling through the drawing room windows and its warmth was perhaps bringing out the scents of the house,
he actually detected the smell which permeated his parents’ home. He had already told Nancy that he had come round to her opinion of the house; and now he said:

“D’you know, I think your mother uses the same furniture polish as mine.”

“It wouldn’t be surprising,” Nancy said. “I expect all the retailers in North West London stock the same brands. It’s the North West London smell. It stretches as far as Hendon.”

She seemed to sniff the air for a minute, and then gazed through the windows into the sunshine.

“When I’m married,” she said presently, “I shall never set foot in an N.W. postal district again.”

Marcus did not take up the mention of marriage, because his thoughts were still pursuing the scent. Hatred lending him almost inspiration, “I think they must make a kosher furniture polish,” he said.

In early spring, one of the girls whom Marcus, his sister and Nancy all knew held a dance. It was being given for her, by her parents, at a roadhouse outside London and was to be a large affair, to which the parental generation was invited, too; and so the two sets of parents met—after the two cars had trailed one another through a rainy night all the way out there; Marcus was driving his father’s car and it seemed natural to him to follow Nancy.

They encountered one another, Marcus thought, definitely as the parents of an engaged couple—though, of course, the engagement could not be official, because he had not yet proposed. In a way, he liked testing his acceptability without an official announcement. It gave him great pleasure that people would think of him as a possible, a plausible, and not inherently absurd and to be dismissed out of hand fiancé.

Nancy’s mother, hatless for once but her hair still shewing the shape of where the hat had been until an
hour before, like a pudding turned out of the mould, was kind to Marcus’s mother, now a hippopotamus in navy blue, with openwork sprays of flowers—edged by navy blue sequins—let into the material above the bust. On her it was an overall which seemed to have left its shape after being removed at the last moment. There were smiles but little communication between Nancy’s mother and Marcus’s, because of Marcus’s mother’s bad English. The two fathers were also kind to one another; but conversation was impossible between their heights. The four parents stood at the edge of the dance floor, watching the young people—but not their own young people, an awkward little knot because there were three of them—dance. Whenever Marcus’s father saw a pretty girl dance by, he nudged the Commander’s hip, which was as high as he could reach in comfort; and the Commander, not understanding in the least what his attention was being called to, smiled down, distinguished, withdrawn, kind.

“O God,” Nancy said. She said to Marcus’s sister, “Do you mind if I take Marcus away? I can’t stand it a moment longer.”

“Where can you take him to?”

“To dance.”

“Marcus can’t dance,” his sister said.

“No, I’m afraid I can’t,” said Marcus.

“That doesn’t matter,” Nancy said. “I’ll teach you.”

His first step on the dance floor seemed to him more terrifying than the first yard a car had moved under his hand. That had happened when he was very young and perhaps more robust, and neither had it happened in public. But, he was amazed to find, Nancy did teach him. At first he could not bring himself to obey her instruction not to look down, which was as impossible-seeming as the instruction to take one’s feet off the bottom of the swimming bath. But as soon as he did obey, it really was as if he had suddenly discovered how to float.