After they reached home she said, in a manner which confessed she had been thinking over not only the interview but the comment she was now going to make,
"Most of the stuff he's got there is tripe."
"Not that Chinese carpet."
"No, but most of it."
"O, I don't know about tripe ," said Marcus. "After all, just because we've got an austere flat -- I mean, one's taste shouldn't get too austere. I think most of his stuff is not so much tripe as tat . After all, it's quite amusing."
"I don't think the joke will last you long," she said.
When he began actually to go out to work, Nancy shewed her goodwill -- or, as Marcus interpreted it, her determination to feel goodwill --- by building up for him, and cherishing him in, a setting of material comfort which might have been a satire on the Jewish respect for the male and the breadwinner, but which she did not, of course, intend satirically at all. Previously they had lived not only off scrubbed wood but out of tins: but now Marcus found that the kitchen, at least, was suddenly and very pleasantly furnished, and that Nancy had dug out the notebooks in which she had written down recipes and menus during her domestic science course.
The cooking Nancy had been taught was English and, in principle, not very interesting. Yet Nancy contrived to serve it with a neatness that was in itself a substitute for invention and part of the compliment to Marcus. There was a neatness in the pat of butter and sprinkling of parsley she slid with a palette knife on to the top of his fillet steak; there was a neatness about the shortcrust on her meat pies -- and she was the only woman Marcus had known who was able to mix the exact amount of pastry she needed and did not have to use up the scraps in making coarse and untempting little pastry men with raisin eyes. Even so, she knew without his telling her that his tastes had begun to aspire beyond neatness; he would like to try out the exotic and the amusing. So she took a string shopping bag into Soho and began bringing him back prickly fruits which looked like animals and animals from alien seas that looked like succulent plants, together with multilingual instructions from the shopkeepers about how they should be prepared. Some of the instructions proved impractical and some of the foods dead sea fruits; but for others Marcus developed a gluttonous obsession.
Nancy had read that Italian housewives never bought factory-made pasta but made their own as English housewives made pastry. She went to an Italian restaurant and obliged the proprietor to take her into the kitchen and introduce her to his chef, from whom she obtained the recipe. She began to serve Marcus what he called a spaghetti alla napolitana al paradiso. She also wrote off to the daughter of the family she had stayed with in France, with whom she was still in desultory touch, and found out how the hams were cured in the family's country house. The curing took three days, and filled Nancy's and Marcus's flat with a smell evocative of provincial France, of whitewashed, sundrenched, shuttered, stone farmhouses -- or of French films in which Marcus had seen such things -- and which made Marcus wonder how he could live through the three days before the ham would be eatable. Sometimes in the middle of an afternoon in Polydore's basement he would lust for home.
The hams, once cured, were hung from hooks Nancy had had inserted in the ceiling in the kitchen, which was a big, sunny room and the one where Marcus and Nancy ate. It had been ruined by modernisation, its austere proportions demolished; and so it was the only room in the flat which did not present the problem of beauty.
When the winter began, Marcus's appetite increased and he put on a little weight.
Marcus indulged himself in the contrast between home and work like a sensualist inventing variations on the turkish bath. Work, because he did not need the money he earned, was a sort of play-acting, a daydream only slightly brisker than the usual kind. The very business of considering Polydore's furniture and objects from the amused point of view of what he could make of them -- or, rather, of what he could, by a hey presto, make somebody else make of them -- was like elaborating the details of a fantasy. It was as part of a pretence, or at least of something which did not cost him very much of his real life-energy, that he liked the feeling of his now firmer, more solid figure setting off to the shop, and liked the weariness and the ache for home in the limbs he dragged back through the dark to the light and comfort Nancy kept prepared.
Although the flat was not yet furnished, Nancy took care -- it was part of the background to Marcus's work which she was compiling round them -- to keep it warm. That was in contrast to the work itself. The stone basement under the shop was unheated. Polydore made neither apology nor attempt at a remedy; but in one of the tiny rooms upstairs he had a gas ring, and from time to time he would boil a kettle and -- screeching of the perils of the stairs to a man carrying a tray -- bring down mugs of Oxo to Marcus and the two men in overalls. Marcus did not think he brought them often enough. He would crouch in front of the piece he was working on and whistle, to himself but loud enough to mount the steps, "Polly put the kettle on."
But Polydore seemed to have had a childhood without nursery rhymes.
"Well, why don't you leave?" asked Nancy.
But Marcus preferred to drop Polydore a bigger hint. He asked his sister to knit him a jumper and when it was finished he turned up at work in ski pants, thick-knit jumper and a woolly cap which he kept on all day.
In the end Marcus told Polydore he would no longer come to work; the work must come to him.
Polydore refused. Next day Marcus stayed at home. The day after, Polydore's station wagon stopped outside and the two men in overalls carried a drum-shaped card table, a tea chest and a firescreen up the stairs and into Marcus's and Nancy's flat.
Nancy watched him work all morning: that is to say, she watched him sit in front of the objects, sometimes getting up and running his hands over them. In the end he drew some diagrams, which he addressed to the firm in Fulham and which Nancy took out to the post.
In the afternoon it began to snow. Nancy and Marcus made love, magically, while the snowflakes pussy-footed down past their window.
"Darling, this is awful," she said, meaning the opposite. "If you're going to work at home, I'll have to get a job to go out to."
"I wish it snowed every day."
But, instead, it got warmer, and Marcus went back to work. However, he no longer worked regular hours. He would work, perhaps, three days a week at the shop and the rest at home, where furniture continued to be delivered and collected. He chose his home days in such a way that he was not bothered by the charwoman.
Going out to work, now that it was no longer new, ceased to please him specifically. But the furniture itself was still presenting him with fresh puzzles, which it pleased him to solve, and with fresh pleasures of sight and touch. The craftsmen and cabinet-makers of the past, like a confectioner of inexhaustible invention, poured their sweets into his experience; he preferred home as the place where he might taste them without hurry or formality; and sometimes as he explored a new piece he really did make sucking sounds with his mouth, as though it was only by softening, dissolving and assimilating an idea of the object that he could possess the delight it afforded him.
The furniture -- or, rather, the turnover of furnture -- was presumably why the flat did not get furnished in its own right. The Chinese carpet it did acquire. Marcus had intended to forgo it, as a gesture to Nancy. It was she who, lamenting one day their unfurnished state, asked him if it was still in Polydore's stock. Marcus had it delivered in the van along with the itinerant furniture. Polydore did not charge him the ten per cent above cost because Marcus at the same time compensated Polydore's stock, by selling him his Chinese bowl for what he had given for it. Nancy had agreed there was no place for it in the flat. Marcus sold his seicento painting in the saleroom, making a profit of two hundred per cent. His statuette was shoved away in a cupboard.
Thanks to Polydore's furniture, the flat lost its empty look. Polydore would often send fresh consignments without asking for the previous ones back; some largish pieces stayed with N
ancy and Marcus for months at a stretch.
"You realise," Nancy said, "he's using this place as an extra store?"
"Well, does that matter?" said Marcus. "We have the use of the stuff."
Having the use of it gave their flat something of the interestingly full quality of Polydore's real store; and perhaps it was that which made it so comfortable.
"But none of it's ours ," Nancy objected. They could, of course, have bought any or all of the pieces. But none of them was just right: and that again perhaps contributed to the feeling of comfort. "It's like living in lodgings," she said.
"But what classy ones!" Marcus replied. "Our landlady must be -- what? At least a white Russian Countess, don't you think?"
But Nancy did not like sharing the flat even with a white Russian figment and brushed her aside.
Marcus explained that it was useful to him to have plenty of time to brood over the pieces before working on them. "I like to live with them. Really, I like to sit with them." He even told her that, with wood furniture in particular, since wood was organic, was, indeed, part of a tree, the only way to get the feel of it properly was to sit and watch it grow, like a tree.
Nancy obviously thought the idea factitious if not affected, and she treated it with impatience.
But Marcus really was settling into a domestic version of a rustic slowness. Once he had mentioned sitting with the furniture, Nancy noticed that he sat a great deal. What had been, when she first knew him, the hint of a stammer or splutter in his speech had withdrawn but had left its space behind it, so that there was now a brief silence before each of his phrases. These pauses, which could no longer be construed as hesitancy or self-distrust, but only as a slightly ironic, teasing laziness, had the effect of thickening his speech. His sentences advanced on you deliberately, like a furry caterpillar; and often they intended to tickle. There was even the suspicion of a lisp in his speech. Although the two manners were so utterly different, the one fluttering and always on the point of flight, the other thick and padded, Nancy was certain that the lisp had been caught from Polydore.
Another contagion was the habit of comfortable cardigans in colours which, Marcus was persuaded, would not shew any spots that fell on them. But they did shew: a glitter of dried glue; a few freckles of gold leaf rubbed into the ribbing. Nancy was always scrubbing at his clothes, sometimes in the sink, sometimes with her thumbnail while he was wearing them. "Lady Macbeth," he said.
His fingers -- splayed, perhaps, by fitting intricate little bits of wood into place and pressing them firm until the glue set -- developed plump little cushions at the tips; they looked like the fingers of one of the frogs which have suckers for clinging to tree trunks or to the back of the female. They had not lost their sensitive appearance; but it was no longer the sensitivity of avoiding contact with substances; now, they seemed to move deliberately, though still lightly, to any substance which presented itself and to take in its texture through the pores -- to appreciate, almost to listen to, textures and consistencies.
Because their dining room, although full of furniture, was not furnished, Nancy and Marcus could not ask people to dinner -- at least "not", as Nancy put it, " people : because I'm damned if I'm going to tell my guests they mustn't spill the wine on the table because the table isn't ours." They could entertain only such people as could be invited to eat in the kitchen. That would have included Marcus's mother, of course, were it not that she had a distrust of food not cooked by herself. She preferred Nancy and Marcus to come to her; when she did visit them in Chelsea, it was for tea, where she ate nothing. Nancy's parents they did not invite because of the embarrassment about whether to invite them together or separately. They both seemed too weary to sustain a whole dinner and conversation with one another. It was easier for the four of them to go every now and then to a recital at the Wigmore Hall -- where Marcus could so simply buy the tickets during his lunch hour. Then he, Nancy and Nancy's father would wait in the at first crowded and then emptied foyer for Nancy's mother, who always arrived at the last moment, rushed, hurrying herself in from a rainy night outside, and the four of them would slide into the auditorium one second before the music began; whereupon the separating effect of music would take charge and isolate each of them into a little listening centre, as though each one carried his own receiving set and wore his own earphones, so that they did not have to behave as a group, let alone a family, all evening. Orchestral music, Marcus thought, might have bludgeoned them, by its very beat and brassiness, into a communal response; but since it was always chamber music, the thin, exact tones, each quite finite and without reverberation, moved drily towards them and enclosed each person in his own linear, unbreakable confine. Marcus remembered how the parents had stolen into the drawing room of their own house to listen to music, like the animals in The Magic Flute . Now it seemed to him that they all four stole separately into the Wigmore Hall and, when the music was over, stole separately out again.
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 feel 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, became 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 delirious 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.
Flesh Page 8