Flesh (7 page)

“D
ON’T
forget they’ve made Baker Street one way,” said Nancy.

“I hadn’t forgotten. I know all the routes to North London. I’m a Jew.”

“Well, if you want to reach Wigmore Street——”

“I know how to reach Wigmore Street,” he said, turning the car into it. “And I know it’s I who want to reach Wigmore Street, and you who don’t. We’ll have to park in Harley Street or one of those.”

All the same, she had insisted on coming with him.

“On the contrary,” she said while he parked, “I’m glad you’re coming, because then you’ll see straight-away it’s not for you. I only object to the waste of time.”

“It’s not as if I had a great deal to do with my time. In fact, I thought it was
that
you objected to.”

He was ready to get out, but she insisted on sitting still in the halted car.

“I don’t
object
to anything, darling,” she said, “not to anything connected with you. I’d only object if you made yourself unhappy. Or disappointed.”

“Well, I won’t.”

“I want you to have the sort of job you deserve.”

“O well,” he said. “You’ve taken me up. I suppose you’re entitled to make something of me.”

“Marcus.”

“Mm.”

“Marcus, don’t make me out a bullying female.”

He wondered for a moment whether she really meant
make
me
out
—or
make
me.

“Then let’s go and see Uncle Polydore,” he said amicably.

They got out of the car, and Marcus put some money into the parking meter beside it.

“I hope these machines aren’t invariably fatal to my family,” he said.

F
ROM
the far side of the street it appeared that two women in evening dress were reclining, impeccably counterbalanced, one in each side of the double shop front. From half way across the road they clarified and angularised themselves into two silk-covered, imprecisely late-eighteenth-century chaises longues, one of which had gold tasselling hung about its shoulder—the sort of parody of military braiding which a woman might wear at a ball where the dances were to be Highland.

The door between them was set back, surmounted by the name
S. POLYDORE
and surrounded by smooth, newly-washed slabs of a black and dark grey marbled substance which probably was really glass.

It was very posh indeed.

Although the two chaises longues were the only objects actually in the window, where they were raised on shallow, felt-covered platforms, one could see beyond them to the interior of the shop. The prime impression made by the objects inside was that not a speck of dust had been allowed even to float near them; the next that almost all of them consisted of marble supports and gilt sphinxes being supported, interspersed with a few abbreviated runs of leather-and-gilt eighteenth-century volumes. What the eye finally took in was that the clutter of objects, though carefully informal, had been carefully arranged to lead the eye, and no doubt the feet, into the shop, which was rather narrow but deep—like a stage, in fact. There were, though there did not appear to be, two aisles, which
conducted visitors through the objects and insisted that they explore the recession of the shop plane by plane—as though they were walking through a picture by Poussin.

The door liberated a short, pretty
ping
when it was opened.

Nancy and Marcus took the left-hand aisle and discovered it had conducted them to—about two-thirds of the way down the shop—a thin, rather good-looking young English gentlewoman who, wearing a short straight skirt and a twin set, was sitting, with her long, very thin legs crossed, behind a pretty little walnut desk. The writing surface of the desk was covered with leather but above that rose a narrow walnut rampart, edged with a tiny brass rail. From most angles the young woman would have been hidden if she had been sitting properly up to the desk, instead of turned sideways, to accommodate her thin knees, which shewed white even through her stockings.

She rose, made a sketch of pulling her skirt down—it would not really come—and asked if she could help Nancy and Marcus.

They explained their appointment.

“Oh yes. Would you mind waiting here, and I’ll go and tell Mr. Polydore.”

A sort of courtesy, an embarrassment almost, induced by the glossy condition of the objects—and by the inveterate, inculcated in childhood fear of knocking one of them over—prevented Nancy and Marcus from really observing where the young woman went to at the back of the shop, though they were aware that a door had moved, somewhere in the shop’s deepest plane.

Marcus fixed his attention, instead, on the desk that had been vacated. He had an impression Nancy was looking round the place, but without moving.

At one side of the rampart of the desk stood a bright brass lamp in the shape of a snake. In place of a shade it had been fitted with a small glass lustre. On the writing surface
were two piles of large, deckle-edged visiting cards, on which the young woman had been working with a ballpoint pen. The two piles were those she had done and those she had yet to do—though
done
and
to
do,
as the piles themselves announced by being on the point of sliding into fans, were desultory terms. Each card was engraved “
S. POLYDORE
. Objets d’art” and had the address in the bottom left-hand corner. The young woman had been going through them, inking out the telephone number and writing in a new one.

Presently Marcus realised that there arose from the desk a slight smell of the furniture polish which had been used in the Ken Wood house.

Then the door at the back moved again, and S. Polydore came to them.

“My dears,” he said.

He was a short little man with a big head, the head made even bigger by a great cowl of brilliantly white hair, the hair made even more brilliantly white by the deep brown of his face—a brown which looked as though he had acquired it from an induced chemical reaction rather than the sun. His big eyes were blue, but blue of the kind which might have had white mixed with it. There was not a wrinkle on his colossal forehead; but his cheeks had fallen in. He must be sixty. In rather the same way, the lower half of his body had fallen in. He was quite plump—or, more probably, plumped out, since it seemed to be his clothes that bulged rather than his chest—down to the middle; but his legs appeared to have wasted, and his putty-coloured cotton trousers, though fashionably and youthfully narrow, hung quite absurdly, as though empty. Presumably, though, he
had
legs, since there were feet at the bottom of his trousers—rather long feet, too; they were wearing lavender suède shoes. Somewhere near his neck, but overshadowed by his big face, was the soft collar of a grey flannel shirt with a scarlet bow tie partly
buried under it. He was wearing a fawn cardigan, which had a zip but hung open, and which had blundered into some cigarette ash half way down. In his left hand was one-third of a small, cheap cigarette, whose paper had turned dark brown along one side; on his right, which he held out to Nancy and Marcus, was a gold signet ring.

The preponderance of chest over legs and the sense that the chest was puffed out rather than substantial made him look like a sparrow; and he moved in little fluttering spurts, suggesting that at the end he was going to take off, instead of which he settled into himself, giving off a tiny dusting of talcum powder. Perhaps his fluttering and subsiding had been induced by living among objects he must take care not to knock over.

To Nancy he said, “We must have met”, to Marcus, “We haven’t.” To Nancy again, “At some awful, Semitic
do
.”
Then, back to Marcus, “You’re probably better at getting out of such things than I am.” Then finally, to them both, “But how sweet of you to come
here
!
I hope this doesn’t count as a Semitic
do
.”

The young woman, who must have followed him through the door, tried to return unobtrusively to her desk, politely making it clear she was not asking to be included in the group. But Polydore, with one of his flutters, included her, meanwhile asking Nancy and Marcus, “Have you met my window dressing?” To Nancy alone, to whose disapprobation of the whole business he was obviously quite alive, he made a swift aside—“Yes, dear, I did say dress
ing
not dress
er
”—before making, to them both, the introduction: “Miss Theodora Watts-Dunton.”

Could
her name be Miss Theodora Watts-Dunton, Marcus wondered: it
must
be a mishearing by his over-literary mind: and meanwhile Pollydore was continuing:

“Absolutely genuine one hundred per cent non-Semitic, and genuine débutante. She’s been genuinely
presented. I mean”—he spread his hands—“the only genuine article in the shop.”

Nancy gave the most skeletal of smiles, to mark her repudiation of the impoliteness to Miss Theodora Watts-Dunton, but everyone else laughed—Miss Theodora-Dunton loudest of all. She leaned across and with one of her long, thin, manicured à merveille fingernails flicked one of the lights of the lustre on the desk, and it briefly added its laughter to hers. Neither sound was particularly pretty. “I’ve
told
you,” she said, “you
must
drop the line about me being presented. Now they’ve stopped presentations, it dates me.”

“But, my dear,” Polydore objected, horrendously stretching all his fingers like Struwwelpeter, “I shall lose half the effect of class if I do. Besides, nothing in this establishment has a precise date.” Waiting for no counter-objection, he went immediately on to hunch his shoulders, thereby drawing Marcus into a huddle with him, where he confided, “And the beauty of it is—I pay her practically nothing. She just likes working with beautiful things.”

Again, it was Theodora Watts-Dunton—if she
was
Theodora Watts-Dunton—who laughed loudest.

Marcus thought that a pulse beat in unison between him and Nancy at the phrase about liking to work with beautiful things.

“So do I,” he said thoughtfully to Polydore. “But
I
’d have to be paid.”

“Ah well,” said Polydore. “One can’t have everything. Though my livelihood depends on people thinking they can.” He stopped fluttering for a moment, in order to consider Marcus carefully, face to face, which meant for Polydore in an upward direction; and Marcus not uncomplacently stared candidly back into Polydore’s eyes, in which he found he could not really look at the pupil or iris but was led aside to consider the extraordinary yellowness, the nicotine colour, of the whites.

“I don’t think, you know,” said Polydore, “I’d put you in my shop front. You’re not as decorative as Miss Scott-Marmion” (or whatever the name—Marcus knew he had still not caught it—really was). “I think I’d keep you out of sight downstairs.”

“Well, hadn’t you better shew me the shades of the prison house,” Marcus said rather awkwardly, “to see if I take to them?”

He could tell, as he stood back for her to follow Polydore first, that Nancy was resisting his liking for the place and the man. She would have preferred to walk behind Marcus, as though that would have given her greater control.

The whole party paused before going through the door at the depth of the shop and turned back for an instant while Nancy and Marcus exchanged a mimed gasp and a smiling nod, meant to indicate temporary leave-taking, with Miss Scott-Marmion, who was preparing to sit down to her cards again.

They did not much notice the dark tucked-away little rooms or offices Polydore led them through: it was a brief, unrealised little journey, anyway, and they were quickly on the verge of a dark steep drop of stone steps. “
Do
take care—I’ll go first—O dear, I do hope you’re not wearing
too
high heels—there
is
a sort of cord at the side, if you can find it in this light, but I shouldn’t place any sort of
reliance
on it—it makes you feel” (Polydore almost stumbled himself) “there must be a Minotaur waiting at the bottom.”

Instead of which there was—a sort of enchanted lumber-room, Marcus thought, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs looking it over and wishing he had had it as a place to play in when he was a child. It was a great, informal stone cavern. It must extend, he realised, under the pavement, perhaps under the street, in front of the shop; and it was crammed with battered old bits of furniture.
Broken-winged cupids, tables elegant in line but lacking a leg, amputated chairs: they made it into a derelicts’ hospital, but without connotations of suffering—more like a collection of old woollen toys, their disfigurements made endearing by the fact they had always been known and were accepted like the deficiencies of one’s own face. Here and there clay-coloured dust sheets had been thrown over some objects, but without enough enthusiasm to get them properly on. An oblong gilt mirror, upended, had lost half its glass, which had prompted someone to shroud it, as though brokenness made it indecent like a naked dummy in a clothes shop; but the shroud was slipping off, listing like candlegrease and dripping onto the floor, where it had already received dusty shoe-prints.

At the far end of the cavern two tall dignified men in dark grey woven overalls were silently shifting some of the furniture about, with the appearance of carrying a sedan chair—or even a bier, in some world where death did not bring sadness.

The place was lit by two long sodium strips on the ceiling, one of which shone directly and blanchingly down on a Chinese carpet, which was in any case white, though with a few figures as sparingly inserted as words in a Chinese poem, and which was draped over the back of a mahogany bookcase lacking shelves. Marcus knew at once, and sensed that Nancy did, that they wanted the carpet for their drawing room.

Because the floor was only stone or because the objects had so obviously been knocked into already, Marcus lost his fear of moving round. He squeezed his way between pieces, touching here, peering under the corner of dust sheets there; and Polydore, himself a trifle less nervous in movement down here, followed him round, like a dwarf displaying his treasury.

“I’ve gone out,” said Polydore, suddenly holding up the tarry stump of cigarette in his hand. “Must be that
dreadful draught on the stairs. Where——” He began searching the pocket of his trousers, which, even when pulled taut, still did not suggest there was anything inside. “—I’m so sorry, how dreadful of me, will you——” Evidently, he kept his cigarettes in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Nancy and Marcus declined while he was still flapping his hand at the pocket to get them, so he went back to the pocket in his trousers, fetched out his matches and re-lit the remaining inch of his own cigarette, which was as difficult to get going as a pipe.

“I’ve made a ‘no smoking’ rule down here. Which is why I compromise by only smoking tiny ones. The workmen think it’s so
working-class
of me. But, really, it’s
too
dangerous. I mean”—he shrugged—“one spark, and my entire capital would go up. Such as it is. I’m insured, of course,” he added, and used his thumb and middle finger to take the cigarette out of his mouth while he began to tug at a dust sheet. “Now here——”

There could hardly be two puffs left in the cigarette, and in any case the dust sheet required both hands, so Polydore threw the cigarette behind him, on to the stone floor. With Marcus’s help, he raised the dust sheet and bundled it aside, revealing the wreck of an eighteenth-century French chest of drawers—one of those with bulges near the bottom, looking as though breeches were slipping down and almost off its legs. It had lost its shine; a good deal of the surface had gone milky white, and it was pitted in several places. “You see, what we’ve got to do is make good the veneer—here, for example, and here—fill in the bits of this marquetry that have come away, bring up the surface, and find something to replace these metal facings.”