"What do you do?"
Marcus unfolded the paper napkin and spread it like a gesture of despair. "Nothing," he said.
He knew what effect these confessions, these despairs, of his made on people. He himself was a person who could not look a cripple -- let alone in the eye -- in the leg; and he knew that his own emotionally, socially, crippled state consisted in his not merely communicating his anguish to others but infecting them with it -- so that in all his social transactions both parties had first to blush, then to look away and finally to move away as quickly as social decency allowed, simply through the other people's awareness of his awareness of their awareness . . . and so on.
But Nancy behaved almost as though she were not a sensitive person. She did not even look down, to where the napkin was stretched between his hands, but went on looking straight at his eyes, which were deep brown, large and -- even now, when smoke from the other guests' cigarettes had brought up one or two capillaries in the whites to a cloudy scarlet -- beautiful.
"Well, if you did do something, what would it be?"
"O, it would be . . .," he said; and seemed to think for a moment he had expressed himself. "If I were creative," he went on, mumbling, "I'd write a novel."
"What would it be like?"
"Like Proust." As though that went without saying.
"And, as you're not creative -- ?"
Marcus took curiously kindly to her stating, in this off-hand way, that he was not, instead of assuring him that he might be, that one could never tell, and moving away. He said, almost firmly,
"I'd like to work with beautiful things."
"What type of things?"
"Anything," he said, making peristaltic movements with his hands to urge the completing word through, "beautiful." He added, in a nearly brisk voice, "I might be an art historian."
"Would you like to work in a museum?"
"Yes," he said, "if I could manage the administrative side that is, yes, I'd love to."
His radiance obliged her to say,
"Not that I've got a museum job to offer you."
He looked down again. "No, I know," he said. "And if you had, you wouldn't offer it to me."
Instead of saying she didn't see why not and that he had as good a chance as the next person, Nancy said,
"No, I don't suppose they'd have you. You're not trained, are you?"
"Trained? No."
"What did you do at the university?"
"Actually, I wasn't at the university." He knew he was making it worse, but he added, "I was at a sort of college -- well, really a sort of glorified school but we were all quite grown-up -- in Oxford. I mean, it wasn't part of . . . But we mixed with the undergraduates quite a lot," he finished, knowing how terrible he sounded -- and perhaps was.
"And you like paintings?"
"O, I love them."
"Who's your favourite painter?"
"Rubens," he said.
He knew that Nancy must be seeing the contrast between Rubens and his admirer.
Her eye suddenly descended to the paper table napkin he was still holding open, and she saw he had made not, as she had half-thinkingly assumed when she saw what he was doing, a lace pattern but a silhouette of a kangaroo.
It was his only conjuring trick, and he had invented it himself.
"You're good with your hands," she said, and immediately afterwards looked at the small round gold watch on her small, bare brown wrist and told him she was going. "No doubt they'll think I only came for the food. And they wouldn't be far wrong. I'm a bit sick of this kind of party. I've met them all -- I've met it -- before."
She smiled and half turned; and he, in an agony to wring from his mind something that should enclose the two of them in a conspiracy against the world, blurted "They're all nothing but materialistic pigs." As she smiled and went, he repeated "Materialistic pigs"; but repetition would not make it either an idiom or a startling metaphor; it was just another of his callownesses.
Yet he felt exhilarated as he drove himself home alone. Even he had not been naďf enough to think she really was offering him a job in a museum: and yet he felt as though he had, for the first time in his life, been canny and worldly, had done himself a bit of good: as though he really had landed a job: or something even better. As he experienced it then, it was the exhilaration of having begun his first business deal rather than his first love affair.
But already he was worrying whether he would be able to bring himself to arrange to meet her again.
2
That worry, however, really had been naďf of him. It was obvious from the fact that Nancy knew everyone at the party that they would meet again: obviously their milieux were intersecting circles. And as a matter of fact it turned out, when she got home from her ski resort, that Marcus's sister knew Nancy slightly. Nancy had not recognised the relationship from Marcus's surname because his sister was known by her married name. (She was, however, divorced.) When Marcus eventually tried to follow the threads back, he discovered that he and Nancy had just missed meeting a hundred times. Now that each was sensitised to a glimpse of the other, the threads were drawing them towards meeting again -- towards meeting increasingly often.
Marcus found this given to him, by society, without his having to bear the embarrassing responsibility of seeking it; and he felt less shy than he would have done because his sister or someone else they both knew was always present, though usually not participating in Marcus's and Nancy's conversation, which was as a rule about the arts. Marcus tried to communicate to Nancy -- indeed, he probably did communicate -- the agonised, ecstatic rapture that was provoked in him, provoked almost like a rash on his skin, by his sensuous, lyrical response to great blonde areas of Rubens flesh. Nancy heard him quite seriously, penetrating through the callowness of his expression to his thought, and nodding as she gave his thought high marks. But she was not won over to his point of view. At the end she said, "It's no good. I just can't see anything in women of that type." Certainly, it was not her type.
Marcus recognised the distinction that where he was aesthetic Nancy was intelligent. She knew rather than felt about Rubens. But he was not in the least distressed by the difference between them; he was too fully occupied by welcoming the fact that her personality was exactly the complement for want of which his own had limped.
The first time he went out alone with Nancy he scarcely noticed that it was the first time. They both wanted to see the same film. It was rather that they went together than that he took her, though he did as a matter of fact pay, and drove her in his car. On later expeditions, Nancy borrowed her parents' Consul and drove him, because the Consul was more comfortable and better in traffic. It was typical of him, he commented despairingly to her, to have a car which was old but not vintage. "Vintage cars are no good anyway," she said. "They break down if you look at them."
Sometimes he took Nancy back to his flat for coffee after dinner. His flat was in W.1, and the smart address cost him -- or, rather, his father -- four hundred a year. It was really a single room on the ground floor; there was a squalid cupboard where Marcus had his bed, another, with a rusted geyser, that was the kitchen, and another, without daylight or ventilation, that was the bathroom. In the bathroom the basin and all the ledges were spotted with white smears of toothpaste, which Marcus never saw escaping from the tube and which at first passed unnoticed because they were white on white; they forced themselves on his notice only when they had dried to powder like ointment drying round a sore. He could not find a cloth to clear them up with, and he did not know how to ask the charwoman to do it. When he had insisted on the independence of living alone, he had really made himself dependent on the charwoman. His father had given him a vacuum cleaner with attachments, and he shewed that to the charwoman on her first day; but she said at once, though without specifying them, that she must have other cleaning materials. Marcus had given her two pounds to go out and buy them, but he had never discovered where she kept them.
Even the living room was no
t really comfortable. Marcus had some pleasingly old armchairs which one could sink into; but in fact, though they were soft enough, one seemed to sink not into comfort but below the surface. The room itself contributed to the impression. It seemed to be half sunk by the bookshelves Marcus had had built along the lower half of one wall. Although the ground floor of the house was in reality raised above the ground level, the room felt as if it were partly let in to the earth. Perhaps it was because all the walls were divided horizontally by a strip of wooden bolection moulding that was just too high: when you sat down, your head came below it; and you felt that you were in a high, square, echoing, indoor swimming-bath and that, weighted down by books, you were on the point of disappearing under water.
Only a few of Marcus's possessions gave him pleasure and pride: his art books, for which he had had a specially deep shelf made -- few people he knew possessed both the books and a shelf that would accommodate them; a plain, perfect Chinese bowl of the colour and something of the texture of magnolia petals; a renaissance bronze of John the Baptist, which had been his first purchase in the sale room and which he now recognised to be Victorian -- but it was still handsome; a seicento painting which he had picked up for seventy pounds, which shewed a biblical scene by candlelight, and was rather glossy -- but although it could not be satisfactorily attributed to anyone it was authentic. He was hampered in his buying by not liking to bid at the sale. He had to leave his bid with one of the officials beforehand. He suspected by this he had sometimes paid more than he need have done; but more often something he really wanted would be lost to him for a mere five pounds he would willingly have given.
As a matter of fact, he knew quite a lot about painting. He had read wide and deep. He had been to the Prado, to Munich, and to Italy five times -- though he had not seen all the pictures he ought to have done, because of his unconquerable diffidence about obliging caretakers to open palaces and vergers to open churches. All his visits abroad had been made with his sister, who was older than Marcus and had suddenly, by her divorce, been left companionless just at the time when Marcus was beginning to need her company. She was, in fact, indispensable to his going abroad at all; but within the terms of that, which had to be granted, she was more encumbrance than help. She, who could easily have gotten churches and palaces opened, did not feel interested enough to make the effort. The holiday had to be divided scrupulously between Marcus's interests and hers. She sulked through Florence and Rome, longing only to be off to the Dolomites or Lake Garda; and when it was time to be off, Marcus trailed there despairingly with her and then trailed round despairingly after her, while she, according to season, flirted with ski instructors or exposed herself in a two-piece bathing suit to swimming instructors -- none of whom, however, seemed willing to become her second husband.
Marcus's deepest and most private opinion about his sister was that she was really a lesbian. But he was prevented from properly voicing his opinion even to himself by what seemed to him a tacit general belief that Jewish girls never were; the tradition did not make provision for them to be.
He, on the other hand, so abnormal in every other respect, lacked even the sublimated homosexuality which would have made social cohesion possible; and all his holidays petered out in a series of dreadful afternoons, it hardly mattered whether on a beach or in a mountain hut, when one of these sunburnt, physical men whom his sister cultivated would come and lounge beside Marcus and try to chat with him -- which turned out to be as impossible as finding a footing in a sandhill or powdery snow. He had finally refused to accompany his sister skiing this winter.
In winter Marcus's flat, though not actually cold, became blackened and frost-bitten. Perhaps the electric bulbs were not strong enough. Often, as the evening settled, he would ring up his parents and invite himself to dinner with them, and then drive out through the dusk to their enormous house near Ken Wood. It seemed hardly smaller than Ken Wood itself; but it was fake Tudor. It had fifteen rooms and a tennis court. Marcus would run his car off the gravelled drive into the laurel bushes, so as to leave room for his father's much larger car to get to the garage. There was always some orange light shewing, through the curtains, at the low, latticed casement windows at the front of the house; and an iron-framed lantern with red, faceted glass hung in the tiled porch. Marcus still had his own latch-key. As he let himself into the hall, he always welcomed the warmth, even though the central heating made an oily smell. But he could not welcome or feel welcomed by the red tiled floor, the oaken settle whose seat lifted to reveal a chest, where no one needed to keep anything, or the discreet door, almost disguised as part of the wall, of the downstairs lavatory. It was all hideous. It was home, it was meant to make him comfortable, and it was over-furnished: yet it was empty. Everything removed itself, vacated space, asserted nothing -- it was too willing to accommodate him.
The whole place was overcast by some relic of the twenties' belief that orange was a jazzy colour. The rooms could be seen only through an orange filter: dilute orange juice on the walls, metallic orange worked into the square light switches, glowing orange in the curtains, russet on the three-piece suite, auburn in the mahogany of the console T.V. Or perhaps here the electric bulbs, behind their square, stitched parchment shades, were too bright. The orange light sought out the emptiness and illuminated the terrible pitch of cleanliness at which Marcus's mother kept all fifteen rooms.
Soon after his key made its noise, a door at the back of the big hall would open and his mother would come to greet him while he was hanging up his coat and scarf. Some of the steam and the smell of boiling would come with her from the kitchen. She had always insisted on doing the cooking herself. She was a big, mumbling hippopotamus figure in an apron, a woman with very little English -- with, in fact, no language in common with her son.
When she murmured to him and returned to the kitchen, he would go into the drawing room where, in one of the three pieces, he would find his sister, shewing her nylon knees beneath a tight skirt and reading a magazine. Quite often she knitted as well. She made herself jumpers and woolly caps for skiing.
Here, too, there seemed to him too much polished space. Throughout the house there was too much -- parquet, linoleum, sideboards -- that could be polished; and so long as it could, his mother would. In winter above the smell of the central heating (which made the linoleum smell oily too), and in summer above the scent of the standard roses outside the casements, he was always aware of furniture polish: a smell so dry that after he had inhaled it for half an hour it caused a soreness at the back of his throat.
At a quarter to eight his funny little father came home, and they dined.
After dinner Marcus often felt it was too late and cold for him to go back to his own flat, and so he would stay the night, in the little bedroom his mother kept ready -- and of course clean -- for him at any time. It was like a bedroom in some hostel for well to do, comfort-loving youth: a plump little divan bed, as neat as something in a ship, covered with a folk-weave bedspread; a radiator under the leaded window; a hideous polished wardrobe and dressing table en suite, the dressing table bearing up a triptych of naked looking-glass, the wardrobe gestating in its thigh a set of drawers labelled "Socks", "Studs", "Handkerchiefs". Marcus's sister had a similar bedroom (though he had never discovered whether her wardrobe had a space for Studs); and, although this had been her permanent home since her divorce, she had done little to distinguish it from Marcus's or a room in a hostel. She had created nothing except a sub-baroque jumble of cosmetic pots, with costly carved lids which annulled what small pretensions the dressing table could make to classical bareness; and she had stuck Jean-Paul Belmondo to her wall, on a page torn from a French brown and white illustrated paper.
Through staying the night at his parents', Marcus often was not at his own flat when the charwoman or the laundry man called the next morning, and the result was that his flat became more squalid than ever. He almost gave up trying to live there. Nancy did not like being there, and he took
to entertaining her at his parents' house, which was in any case more convenient than dragging her into town. She was living at the moment in Belsize Park, with her parents, though she had at various times lived all round the place.
At first, because she only came to tea, she met only Marcus's sister and mother. His mother gave open signs, even to tears in the eyes, of her joy that Marcus had a girl friend at last. Nancy accepted her joy. Marcus's mother made special cakes for Nancy and at tea would remark, in her bad English, that she had just realised she was still wearing her overall; and she would stand up and remove it. After the first couple of meetings she took to kissing Nancy on the cheek when she entered the house. Nancy accepted that, too.
Marcus's sister, who said she had always liked Nancy, began to make a special friend of her. She took care to stay at home when Nancy was coming, and engaged her in conversations which almost excluded Marcus and in which she shewed more animation than Marcus had ever expected to see provoked in her by someone unconnected with outdoor sports. Marcus even began to wonder if his sister were a touch in love with Nancy.
Marcus's father accepted Nancy as his destined daughter-in-law, and with humble gratitude, even before he had met her. In all matters of taste he deferred to, he indulged, Marcus. He was himself without the ghost of aesthetic awareness. He had not even bad taste: hideous objects came to his possession by magnetism. He had once consulted Marcus about the furnishing of the house, but Marcus had only flinched away from the question, unbearably impaled on the impossibility of telling the humble comic little man at his elbow that the only thing to do was to burn the place down and start again.
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