Flesh (9 page)

That left Marcus’s sister who could be invited to sit in the warm kitchen, under the hams, over prolonged meals: and Polydore. He had arrived one evening after Marcus had spent the day at home, to ask after one of the pieces Marcus was working on; and he had stayed until the smell of cooking was so indecent that they had to invite him to dinner. After that, he began dropping in once a week, and since it was obvious he was going to come in any case they thought they might as well invite him in so many words, which at least prevented him from coming when it was inconvenient. He was gluttonous. He would endure even the deliberate discomfort of Nancy’s welcome to get at her cooking. He ate and ate and ate and remained as thin as ever.

They were awkward evenings. Marcus addressed him as Polly and made jokes with him or talked shop. Nancy said little and addressed him as Siegfried, with the proper German z sound.

Nancy did not, in fact, like either of her guests. With Marcus’s sister, even Marcus did not attempt to talk much. She always brought her knitting, and after coffee she would push her chair back, take out her knitting, shake it clear of the empty cups and sit knitting over the table. In bed after one of her visits Nancy said to Marcus:

“I’ve discovered what it is I dislike about her.”

“What?”

“She’s got breasts.”

“Well,” said Marcus in his new, slow manner, “it would be a little monstrous if she hadn’t.”

“Yes but, don’t you see,” Nancy said, “she looks so like you, darling, in some ways. And then I look at her and suddenly see she’s got woman’s breasts, instead of nice flat strong ones, like yours”—which she kissed.

Polydore she disliked most when he made Marcus talk shop. He bought a length of green silk, figured with a chinoiserie motif, which one of the other shops in Wigmore Street had had copied from an eighteenth-century material to the order of a customer. The customer had backed out but was too influential to sue. Besides, a law suit would have cost more than the loss on the silk, as Polydore knew; so when he heard of it he offered a very small price indeed and held out, and in the end the other shop was glad to let him have the stuff. He brought the bale with him to dinner and asked Marcus’s advice about which of their pieces they should cover with it. When Nancy came back into the drawing room to tell them dinner was ready, she found that Marcus, though offering no advice, was on his knees in front of the chair over which he had opened out the silk and was, as Nancy later told him she thought of it, with his body worshipping the silk. His head was immersed. When he heard her come in he—without looking up—held out a fold to her between his fingers, like an oriental offering a morsel from his own plate. “Come and
f
ee
l
it, darling.”

“Get up,” she said, in the traditional manner of a Victorian lady receiving a proposal of marriage from a physically repugnant suitor; but adding: “You look like an old Jew merchant.”

“I
am
an old Jew merchant,” Marcus slowly said.

“Aren’t we all, dear,” Polydore fluttered at her, “if you scratch us, I mean.”

Again Nancy kept her comment for bed. “I hate him when he pretends not to be Jewish.”

“But don’t
we
?”

“No, of course not. I mean, obviously we can’t practise the Jewish
religion
,
because we don’t believe in religion.”

“I don’t see there’s much else to it,” Marcus said. “The whole business was religious in the first place. If we’ve dropped
that
…”

“There’s plenty else to it.”

“Well, I suppose I could get a plastic surgeon to alter my nose.”

She caressed him. “I wouldn’t have a surgeon touch you.”

“A surgeon did touch me. When I was a baby.”

“He wouldn’t, if I’d been there to stop him,” said Nancy. “I resent any diminution of you. Particularly, darling,
there.
”

He wondered again, and quite explicitly this time, how she could have such a satirically affectionate sense of amusement in bed and none whatever out of bed. But since he was
in
bed when he wondered, he did not pursue the answer.

They did not go abroad that summer, although it was hot. They slept under a sheet and often woke spontaneously in the small hours because the temperature had dropped; but instead of pulling up a blanket to cover them they applied to one another. Marcus could plunge himself into Nancy with all the delicious casualness of a man lying on a river bank and lazily inserting his bare leg in the warm stream, sensitive to, delighted by, the pulsing of the vigorous current against it.

I
N
the autumn Nancy took a part-time job, offered her by someone she knew, and Marcus took up smoking.

“But why
now
?”
Nancy asked. “You’ve gone so many years without.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it’s calming.”

“You don’t need calming. You’re almost worryingly calm these days.”

“Well, it’s easy somehow. I suppose because Polly does it.”

He smoked the same short thin ones—too loosely packed to be called slender—as Polydore, and got them into the same browned stumps.

Nancy’s job was with a small music publisher whose premises were somewhere off Great Marlborough Street. Marcus usually lost his way when he went to call for her. And when he did come on it, it was a disconcerting place: half office—Nancy worked upstairs—and half shop. The shop window was a large uncoloured space containing some sheet music for the piano, a couple of miniature scores, an ocarina and the smallest available size of the bust of Beethoven. The interior was even more disconcerting: a dim, empty silence, in which Marcus stood uneasily until he was offered help (“I’ve only come to collect my wife”) by one of several slight nervous youths who worked there and who seemed to talk in soft voices to shew their appreciation of serious music.

“It’s not much of a job,” Nancy admitted. “They said it would be useful that I can read music, but it’s never been yet. Still, I do at least meet a few people.”

At first one of the people she sometimes met was Marcus—they lunched together; but they were just beyond easy walking distance from each other; and after a while Nancy began making appointments with other people, and Marcus found it more convenient to go to a nearby pub with Polydore. He never felt he had seen
her
after lunching with her and one of her friends.

Nancy was conveniently placed to shop in Soho; and she had taken only a part-time job expressly so that Marcus’s comfort should not suffer.

“D
ARLING
, you really must get thinner.”

“All my life,” Marcus said, tapping the metal end of his pencil on his teeth and continuing to sit in front of an early Victorian occasional table, “people have been telling me I must get fatter.”

From the way he threw the emphasis on to the front of the sentence and left the end to be taken for granted, Nancy could tell he really had misheard.

“But I didn’t say fatter.”

“O.” He broke his dream and looked down with amusement at his waistband. “O, no, of course not. Yes, I’d noticed. I can hardly get into some of my clothes.”

At first it had been merely a more pronounced look, not even unappealing, to the buttocks. Then a plumpness, still quite becoming, had appeared below his waist. A heaviness had gathered on his hips, all the way round. And now, when he sat closely crouched, as he liked to do when he worked on the furniture, you could see that the upper part of his trouser legs was wholly occupied, was bulging and undulating, with his thighs.

It was all the more noticeable because he so seldom wore a suit but went about in odd trousers and one of his soiled cardigans.

“You must cut down on carbohydrates.”

“All right. But you feed me too well.”

“Then I’ll cut down on them for you. But you must co-operate at lunch time.”

“Look what a lot Polly eats,” Marcus said. “I shall
never believe again that justice is a natural principle.”

“Did you ever?”

“Probably not. I haven’t many principles. I cut down on them some time ago.” He lit a cigarette.

“Your fingers are getting stained,” Nancy said.

“Yes, I know. I’ll try some of my lemon juice on them.” He sometimes used lemon juice to bring up painted furniture.

At first Nancy went on making the same sort of meals as usual, and simply gave Marcus a plate from which carbohydrates had been omitted. But he would open his dog’s eyes at her and plead; and if she did manage to resist him he would prospect round the kitchen after dinner and, without the smallest subterfuge, pick up something and eat it in his fingers.

She had great difficulty persuading him bread was carbohydrate.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” he said. “How do you know?”

“Well,
darling.
When I did that domestic science course we had to go into dietetics quite seriously.”

He cut himself an elbow end from a long loaf. “I’m sure the crust can’t be fattening.”

“I see we shall both have to diet,” Nancy said. “So long as the stuff’s in the house, you’ll be at it.”

“We can’t have a house without bread. I feel rather peasant about it. A house without bread isn’t home.”

“Then you’ll just have to camp out. Even more,” she added, “than we do at present. We
must
get the place furnished some time.”

He could not understand why, since she was in this mood, she did not go on to say he must get a decent job, too.

Nancy began to diet both herself and him at home. But the rules had to be relaxed when Marcus’s sister or Polydore came to dinner; and Marcus took pleasure in helping himself to more bread and more butter in the course of the
meal, knowing that Nancy would not rebuke him while a guest was there. Moreover, even she, who could calculate a quantity of pastry so precisely, could not buy a loaf exactly the size for four unpredictable appetites at one meal. There was always bread left over next morning; and although Marcus did not like to sit down to it at breakfast face to face and alone with Nancy, he seemed to think that what he ate standing up did not count. While she washed up, he would wander round the kitchen nibbling bits of bread. If Nancy looked round at him, she would receive an ironical look; if she turned to face him squarely he would give her what he deliberately made an appealing, urchin grin.

“I won’t be reduced to snatching it out of your hand,” she said, “like a slum mother.”

But she
was
reduced to rolls: when a guest was coming she bought, instead of a loaf, precisely three rolls. If either of their habitual guests had felt meanly treated and had come no more, she would not have minded.

Marcus made up for his own deprivations during his lunch hours in the pub with Polydore. The pub offered a choice between carbohydrates: cold pasty, with a sprinkling of mince and gristle inside; or sandwiches containing a flavour of meat paste. The only other food available was pickled onions. Nancy had told Marcus they were fattening. Marcus suggested to Polydore that they find another pub. But Polydore liked the familiar one, and it was near.

Before Nancy had begun to diet him, Marcus had disliked the sort of food the pub provided and had often eaten nothing at lunch time. Nowadays, however, he was so hungry that he ate it in quantities. He would order three or four large pickled onions to be lifted out of the lumpish glass jar. The pub did not possess a barmaid, which was another reason why Polydore liked it; but when Marcus watched the delicately pink plastic tongs descend into the jar, behind whose thick glass they looked almost pickled
themselves, he felt that in colour, coldness and genteelly fishing fastidiousness they were an apt substitute for a barmaid’s fingers. Moved by imagining this old-fashioned barmaid he one day ordered a glass of stout, which he decided would be her favourite drink, though she would consider port more ladylike. After that he began to drink stout regularly. He found it allayed his appetite better than other drinks: and his sense of irony could not help taking its name as a tiny, harmless weapon against Nancy.

Polydore, content that Marcus’s new taste was in-expensive, became punctilious about paying for rounds and was always urging Marcus to drink another stout.

“I mustn’t. Nancy doesn’t like it.”

“Does she find it working-class of you?” Polydore asked, giggling.

“I suppose she must.” He did not like to tell Polydore the true reason because Polydore himself was so unsightly thin.

These days Marcus told Nancy he smoked because it helped to curb his appetite. But smoking did not curb it at all; and in any case he was satisfying it at lunch time.

In January there was a hard frost, and Marcus, although he had refused to go to work in Polydore’s basement, wanted to wear his ski pants and jumper for working at home. But he could no longer get into them. He kept warm by wearing his bedroom slippers and his dressing gown over his ordinary clothes. But when his sister came she found the flat too hot in any case and could not think why Marcus needed extra clothing. “I should have thought your embonpoint would keep you warm.”

“He’s cold because he never takes any exercise,” Nancy said.

Nancy chose that evening, and seemed to have chosen the presence—as witness? he wondered—of his sister, in which to tell him that some people called the Rosenfelds, whom she sometimes lunched with, were having a man to
stay—a publisher of art books, who was flying over, for a couple of days, from Switzerland, where he had his headquarters; but his business was really a pan-European combine, which specialised in first-class colour work, to which texts were fitted in half a dozen languages.

Marcus, not only interpreting her drift at once but feeling a need to defend himself, replied:

“I don’t want to be an art publisher, and flying about Europe in a plane doesn’t count as exercise.”

Nancy said nothing more about it for a week, when:

“The Rosenfelds have asked us to dinner,” she told him.

“O.”

“While
he’s
there.”

“O.”

“Marcus, I was
awful
.”

“How do you mean?” he asked—affectionately, because she was distressed.

“I was pushing. I virtually squeezed the invitation out of them.”

“Then we’d better tart up,” he said friendly, “so as not to disappoint them. I hope my good suit still fits.”

It just did, all except the waistcoat, which Nancy let out at the back.

The frost relaxed, and Marcus went back to work at the shop. Nancy made him promise to be home early, “in
plenty
of time”, on the night of the dinner party.

He was punctual, and in case this surprised her he explained:

“I’m looking forward to it. I shall be allowed a decent meal for once.” In fact, he had already eaten plenty, while he was out.

Nancy was already dressed and was making up.

“We’ve got ages yet,” he said. “If you put on your eye-shadow now it’ll fade before we get there.”

“Not if I powder over it. I want to give it time to settle.”

“Won’t the powder hide it?”

“Not the quantities I’m putting on.”

“Careful,” he said, looking at her reflexion over her shoulder. “You don’t want to
look
pushing.”

“I may as well,” she said. “
You
never will.”

“Don’t you think he’ll offer me a partnership on the spot?”

She did not answer, but it might have been because she had just started on her mouth.

He wandered round the bedroom for a bit, smelling the cosmetics she had got out for the occasion.

“If you’ve nothing else to do, you might try that lemon juice on your hands.”

“I tried it,” he said. “Weeks ago. It didn’t work.”

She did her hair.

“You ought to start to get ready, Marcus.”

“I’m afraid I feel awful.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. No one could think
you
were angling for a job.”

“I mean I feel ill.”

“Where?”

“Head. And rather faint.”

“Lie down for ten minutes. We’re in plenty of time.”

He lay on the bed, his hands behind his head, and watched her giving an extra smoothing to the foundation on her neck.

“How do you feel?”

“Bloody, I’m afraid.”

She came and stood beside him, looking at him hard, and then walked into the bathroom and came back with the thermometer.

“This used to be——” he began, with the thermometer under his tongue; but she told him not to talk.

She took the thermometer out and read it.

“What does it say?”

“A hundred and two.”

He just lay, looking up at her. She just stood.

“I must wash the thermometer,” she said eventually. “You get undressed and get into bed.”

“O no, I’m coming,” he answered, beginning to struggle up, and putting more energy than he need into the struggle for fear of being thought feigning.

“Don’t be silly.”

“I can take a couple of aspirins.”

“Don’t be silly. It might
be
something. I must wash the thermometer and ring the Rosenfelds. Is it all right if I go? They may think it odd if I don’t, after I made such a fuss to get asked.”

“Yes of course it’s all right. If you don’t mind going alone.”

She took his temperature twice more before she left, as though she could not believe the thermometer. At the last reading, his temperature had risen by half a degree.

She offered to bring him some food to eat while she was out; but for once he genuinely did not want food.

When she saw him actually snuggled down under a hump of blankets she shewed a spasm of tenderness and, so well as she could while preserving her make-up, kissed him.

He gave her, over the foldback of the sheet, the urchin grin he had perfected.

“I was telling you, this used to be one of my daydreams when I was at school. It was a daydream for gym days. ‘Nonsense’ says matron, and slips the thermometer briskly under my tongue. She takes it out and reads it, while I look up at her with listless eyes from my pillow. ‘My God,’ she cries, ‘call the doctor and the headmaster. A hundred and twelve point five.’”

“A thermometer only goes to a hundred and ten,” Nancy said as she left the flat.

She came home early, disappointed, and worried about Marcus, whose temperature she took at once. It was still a hundred and two point five.

“Didn’t he take one look and say, ‘I can tell from a glance at you that your enterprising young husband is just the man for me’?”

“You’re too good at daydreams. It’s the fever. No, he didn’t.”

She made herself a bed of cushions on the floor so as not to disturb his night.

In the morning his temperature was normal.

But he stayed in bed for another two days, in case it had been something. Nancy temporarily relaxed his diet and brought him trays of the sort of food he liked. His view of her from the bed, as she carried away the emptied trays, was all of neat hips and bottom in a neat suit, neat dark brown seam down the back of her legs, neat dark blue back to the not foolishly high-heeled court shoes. It put him in mind of an air hostess. On the last day of his convalescence he said to her, slyly:

“Of course, one never knows how far these things are psycho-somatic.’’

“No. One doesn’t.”

“I expect I just wanted to give myself the illusion of being a disgustingly fat old high-pressure publisher, flying round Europe with a cigar in my mouth, and making a pass at the air hostess.” He put out the cigarette which was what had really been in his mouth and, when Nancy next approached him—to straighten the sheets—did make a pass at her, and drew her down into the bed with him.

When he was up and about again, back on his diet and back at work (he began going to the shop more regularly, because it made it easier for him to satisfy his appetite in the lunch hour), he said to Nancy:

“Don’t be too disgruntled about old whatsit.” He
meant the publisher. “Surely he’ll have to come to England again quite soon?”

“I can’t force another invitation out of the Rosenfelds.”

“There are other approaches.”

“You don’t seem to realise we can’t ask people to dinner here, while we’re not furnished.”

Her tone seemed to signal that she had given up trying to make him an art publisher. Accepting this, he made arrangements, a day or two later, to put some of his capital into Polydore’s business.

“But
why
?” Nancy asked.

“It’s a good business.”

“No better than hundreds of others.”

“We’re lucky to have the chance,” Marcus said. “He’s not a public company. Where the money was, it was making four and a half per cent. With Polly it’ll make ten or twelve.”