Flesh (5 page)

H
E
had changed, utterly.

Of course it was not the four weeks of honeymoon which had accomplished the change. That was the result of the whole process of knowing Nancy. But the
honeymoon
made it impossible for him to slide back. It was with incomprehension that he remembered the frame of mind he had brought with him to the hotel, how he had
repented
ever permitting himself to be rescued at all and wished he had remained for ever hemmed in to a corner where no one expected anything from him because everyone saw him as incapable.

Now he did not care what thoughts the hotel clerk nurtured about him. It was like his not caring what people thought when he was dancing with Nancy. He was prepared to hurry her across the hotel foyer into the lift at no matter what improperly suggestive hour of the day. When he went to wash, if Nancy’s dressing gown was nearer than his, he simply thrust himself into it, where his arms protruded a long way further than the sleeves, and swished down the corridor not caring in the least if someone guessed or even glimpsed that beneath its flounced, flowery cotton skirt he was, and very
masculinely,
naked. Sometimes, if Nancy wanted to sleep in the afternoon, he would lie naked on the bedroom floor in front of the window, sunbathing; and though he had tried to arrange the slats of the Venetian blinds in such a way that no one could see in he did not much care if he had failed in that purpose providing he had managed to cut the sunshine down to the temperature he liked.
Once, as he lay there on his back, Nancy crept out of bed, came and lay beside him, but some way apart from him, and, merely by looking intently at him, made his flesh rise. He turned over on to his front not in shame but teasingly, to deny her the satisfaction of reading his confession of her power.

He knew that she had taught him love; just as she had taught him dancing. He knew that he was, now, an excellent, expert lover—at least with her; it did briefly occur to him whether he would fail with another woman, just as he had at dancing. But in any case he quite saw why Nancy had not bothered to persevere with his dancing lessons, when this far more exciting and exacting expertise lay beyond, within her power to teach and his to learn. He thought he knew now what potential talent it was in him which had attracted Nancy to him. She had trained him, of course, to her requirements. He was, in a sense, trained and plumped up for her harem. Yet this thought caused him no smart in his self-esteem. He was quite prepared to strut along beside her, to be her plump little protégé. If the thought did not wound and diminish him, it was because some of his excitement still seemed devoted to cherishing his self. It was her body which provoked his sensations, yet it was his which
entertained
them and brought them out as on a sounding board—he who was the sensitive instrument.

He felt as though this were a selfishness, a disloyalty even, an impediment in his perfect surrender to Nancy; and so he scrupulously and conscientiously tried to explain it to her.

“Don’t you know,” she replied, “that one of the things about love is that it enables you to love yourself, too, because it shews you yourself through the other person’s eyes?”

He and Nancy always spoke of love, not of being in love.

They planned to go home, without any precise
timetable,
by way of Vienna and Munich, where the only appointment they had set themselves was that Marcus should convert Nancy to an appreciation of Rubens. But he could not bring himself to break with the spell of Lucca.

“I want to stay here for ever.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Eventually, you’d want to do something.”

“What?” he asked lazily. “Anyway, I could do
something
here. Why shouldn’t we simply stay? I’d like to live in Italy.”

“No you wouldn’t. Not after a bit.”

“Why not?”

“Well for one thing—the first thing that occurs to me—you’d get sick of never being able to hear any decent music.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he said. “I suppose there could be gramophone records, though. And anyway,” he added, rolling over and touching the soft part of her throat with his tongue, “I make music of my own. I play on you.” And on myself, he added mentally.

A day or two later she urged him to book their seats for Vienna and Munich.

“Why? Are you longing to go to a concert?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t mind, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Would you?”

“No, if it would come to me, here.”

“I want us to leave Lucca,” Nancy said, “before we’ve exhausted it.”

“You’re ruthless,” he said. “You’re an artist in love: I’m just a sensualist. I can’t bear to leave
until
I’ve exhausted it.”

“If you’re really such a sensualist, I should have thought you’d be raring to get at all your big blonde Rubens women. You know, don’t you,” she added,
“about the man who went round an exhibition of Rubens and came out a vegetarian?”

“I’m the one who went in virtually a vegetarian and came out a carnivore. But actually, I don’t want Rubens women, if you don’t want to share them.”

“I can’t share your women,” she said.

“Why not? I know you’re capable of loving a woman.”

“What makes you think so? I’m not, as a matter of fact.”

“If you love me, you must see yourself through my eyes.”

“O, well, perhaps myself,” Nancy said, “mediated through you. But otherwise—it’s the one perversion I have no sympathy for. I’ve nothing against it. I just don’t want it going on near me.”

“O my prophetic soul, my unfortunate sister,” said Marcus.

“Why, is
she
queer?”

“I think,” he said, “she’s more than a little sweet on you.”

“How loathsome,” said Nancy. In the silence which she left to appear, Marcus wondered if he had said that, too—for he really had no evidence of his sister’s feeling any such thing—to tease Nancy.

As it turned out, they neither exhausted Lucca nor got to see the Rubenses, and it was, in the immediate sense, Marcus’s sister who cut them off. About
two-thirds
of the way through their honeymoon she
telegraphed
them at their Lucca hotel to say that Marcus’s father was seriously ill.

They took the telegram with them into Milan, slapped it down on the counter under the nose of an
English-speaking
booking clerk and hectored him into giving them seats on a flight home.

When they reached home, they discovered that
Marcus’s
father was in fact dead. He had never been ill. About
half past two on a hot afternoon he had parked his car in a side street near his office, climbed out and fallen dead on the pavement.

Nancy told Marcus later that she had known from the moment of seeing the telegram that his father was already dead. Marcus had never suspected it, simply, perhaps, because he had not been able to suspect his sister of doing something so conventional.

Nancy and he went, of course, to stay with his mother and sister in the house near Ken Wood. As a matter of fact they would have had to go there in any case, as they had still not found a home of their own; Nancy had been reconciled to returning briefly to an N.W. address, while they searched for one in S.W.3, 7 or 10.

Marcus learned of his father’s death when he
telephoned
home from the airport—a conversation which he made briefer than it need have been. He kept cutting his mother short and promising to come at once. Only when he had put the receiver down did he realise that there was nothing he could do to bring his father back to life and, therefore, no need to be so urgent. His mother had been implying as much. But he had believed, during the flight, that he must hurry if he was to see his father alive; and the belief survived the news that he was dead. Marcus insisted, though Nancy told him it was
unnecessary
, on hiring a car to take them straight from the airport home.

During the drive he become disturbed by the thought that he was now hurrying to see his father dead. He was terrified by what he conjectured would be the social awkwardness of being conducted by his mother to an encounter with the body. He could not confide this terror even to Nancy—and again it was a social
awkwardness
which prevented him, a touch of nearly comic obscenity in the idea of mentioning his father’s body without the connotation of his father’s personality inside
it. He could not ask Nancy where she supposed his father’s body had been put: it would have been like asking where she supposed his father’s left leg had been put. Any reference to his father as a physical presence had become impossible because it was impossible to decide whether the physical presence was still a
he
or had now turned into an
it.
Marcus did speak of his father to Nancy while they sat in the car, but he spoke of the whole, living man; his death he treated as though it had been a
disappearance
into the air.

So—when they reached the Ken Wood house—it might have been. The body was not there. As Nancy could probably have told him if he had asked her, it had been taken first to a hospital and thence to an undertaker’s.

Marcus was irritated with himself for his terrors in the car, and also because he had promoted in himself more courage to meet them than he now needed.

Perhaps because he had unexpectedly been spared seeing the body, he seemed not to feel the shock of the death. That surprised him; he had been sure he would feel at least the selfish reaction that his own life had been unpleasingly interrupted. He was even more surprised to find developing in himself on his first night home—and here again, perhaps it was because he felt he had been let off lightly—a strong, tugging, almost anguishing current of grief. The feeling swelled in the days that followed. At moments his throat constricted as though to choke down a great plait, a whirlpool of tears. He was remorseful that there had been so small a relationship between him and his father. More bitterly still, he felt—which at times he thought grossly egocentric and at other times a tribute to his knowledge and acceptance of his father’s love for him—a tragic regret that his father had not lived to see the completion of the improvement Nancy had wrought in his son.

Nancy and Marcus would have nothing to do with the
ritual mourning. Marcus’s mother, half-heartedly borne out by his sister, tried to keep it up, but they fell away the moment the rabbi’s eye was removed from them.

To judge by the mumbled answers she made to
neighbours
and relations who came to sit with her, Marcus’s mother believed her husband’s death to be yet another aspect of the dreadful parking situation in London.

Because Marcus’s father had not been in the care of a doctor, there had to be an inquest. Marcus attended it. It was swift, not quite perfunctory but unritualistic. Marcus was more moved by it than he was by the actual funeral which followed it.

Nancy’s father had begun to make the funeral
arrangements
while Nancy and Marcus were still in Italy. When the funeral itself was over, the surface of the situation in the Ken Wood house improved. Marcus was no longer worried that there might be a wild expression of his mother’s grief. But he knew quite well that she must be still agonised; as, indeed, he was himself.

He did not make love to Nancy while they stayed in the Ken Wood house. She asked for no explanations and made him no invitations: but he believed himself obliged to mention it, though simply saying he did not feel he could.

He had to make the arrangements for Probate, and try to discover the value of the estate. His father’s share in the business had been left to him. He had to go down to the office, where he had not been since his father had taken him, as a small boy, for a treat—a bare one, Marcus thought now, since the office was a cramped little wood and leather compartment, all paper, cardboard box-files and piercing brass paper clips left lying about—and
interview
the other partner.

The other partner insisted on taking him through the side streets to see the exact spot where his father had dropped dead.

When Marcus returned and reported that it was beside a parking meter, both he and his sister dared, though not within their mother’s hearing, to make the Jewish joke that their father had dropped dead when he saw how much it was going to cost him.

Privately, to Nancy, Marcus improved on that by
saying
his father must have pulled in just there in pursuit of some girl. Nancy was not pleased by the remark, and he was surprised that she did not understand it to have generated by an attempt on his part to pick out points of sympathy between him and his father.

After he had settled most of the estate, though he had still not discovered how best to dispose of what was now his interest in the business, his mother told him that he was looking tired. His sister, taking perhaps a feminist line against this Jewish solicitude for the son—or perhaps simply taking a pro-Nancy line—added that Nancy was evidently suffering from the strain, too. Marcus almost credited her with guessing that he had not made love to Nancy since they had come home. So he and Nancy went away for a weekend to an hotel in the country. Although it was, in its Englishness, only a travesty of an Italian hotel, hotels were home ground for their married life, and after dinner they hurried upstairs with a sense of resuming their honeymoon. But Marcus was impotent.

He was furious with himself. His rage was comically—if he had been prepared to find anything comic in the subject—a contrast to the despair and self-depreciation with which he had been ready to accept failure on the first night of their marriage. Now he was behaving like a champion athlete who had unaccountably proved out of form. He made no apology to Nancy; he seemed to think it was only he who had been deprived. He segregated
himself
strictly in his half of the bed, and went sulkily to sleep.

Next morning he sulked round their bedroom in his dressing gown, looking more than ever like a rich, famous
boxer who had been unexpectedly beaten. At eleven o’clock, when the importunate chambermaids could be put off no longer, Marcus grudgingly got dressed, but he went no further than the hotel lounge and, when it opened, the bar, and sulked there.