Flesh (12 page)

He went into the bedroom to look for his bathing trunks, which he had not worn for years—not since he had given up holidaying with his sister. He found them under his shirts, under the Jewish cookery book. He could still get into them, because the material gave, but he bulged horribly through them.

He fetched a towel from the cupboard, laid it on the floor as Ilse had done and lay down to sunbathe in the drawing room.

When Nancy came home, which was earlier than he had expected, she found him standing in the corner of the drawing room looking at himself in a Victorian pierglass which Polydore had lately sent them.

“Baby all right?”

“Still sleeping,” he said, still looking at his reflexion.

“You’re disgustingly fat,” said Nancy.

He made no reply.

“Just look at yourself,” she said. “Look at your thighs. Look at your chest. You’ve got great pendulous breasts, like a woman.”

He gave a chuckle. “It’s a process of empathy. I’ve
become
a Rubens woman.”

He repented it instantly and turned, quite quickly for him, away from the glass, meaning to go and put his clothes on.

But Nancy was in his way and she was staring at him in, he supposed, horror.

He stood still for a moment; and what he took to be the most awful, grossest insult to her of all was that her intent gaze at him was provoking the same effect on his flesh as she had once delighted to provoke in Lucca, where he had been thin.

He decided to hurry past her. But as he came up to her he recognised that her look was, in reality, desirous.

He did not know what to do. It was she who reached out to embrace him.

He pulled her down on to the sofa and after the first spasm of their embrace raised himself above her to examine her look. The effect of horror which he had originally expected
was
there, after all. It was simply that desire was there as well. Each caused the other.

The hostile and perhaps dangerous, perverted, situation between them prompted in him images of completely abandoned experience. But he was—because it was so hot, because he was married and at home, because he was so
fat
—too lazy. He began to make love to Nancy in his expert indolent way. She delighted him: and she groaned under the irresistible pleasure he caused her—and also because it
was
pleasure, because it
was
irresistible, where she might have preferred pain.

Perhaps her body was too nice to be pained. Anyway, he was too nice, and too lazy, to pain her.