Flesh (4 page)

“There, you see,” she said. “Providing you don’t look at them, my legs will tell yours what to do. It’s a sort of physiological telepathy.”

They told him more and more complicated things to do; and he followed without a stumble. She danced, as he might have foreseen, excellently.

As they danced past the four parents, Nancy looked at them out of the corner of her eye; and found, of course, that out of the corners of their eye they were watching her and Marcus.

“O God,” she said, tilting her head back so as to speak into Marcus’s ear, “aren’t Jews awful? They’re already visualising the grandchildren.”

But Marcus was wrapped, enchanted, in his discovery of dancing, which felt to him like floating not in the water but in the air. He did not care who was watching or visualising what. This publicly permitted parody of an experience he had never had, sexual intercourse, at last liberated his physical response to Nancy. He was amazed to find it so unlike—and yet so exactly the realisation of—his erotic daydreams. It was easier; the imagination need not be worked, but responded of its own instant accord to the actuality of the thing—a real person, real legs, moving: yet because of the actuality it was also harder, inasmuch as muscles had actually to grip and let go, air to be displaced. And in the same way it was both less and more exciting.

When the import of Nancy’s remark penetrated into his daydream-actuality, he had an urgent sense that he must act at once to make sure the erotic feeling would always be available to him. Diffidently he put it, to the side of Nancy’s hair,

“You wouldn’t marry me, I suppose, would you?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think we ought to get married about May or June.” Yet she did not say it in a matter of fact way, but more as though she had been snatched into
the same urgent moment as he, and could hardly spare breath for more than telegraphese.

When the music stopped, they rejoined the four parents and Marcus’s sister, but they said nothing of their decision.

“You dance awfully well,” Marcus’s sister said to Nancy. “What was that twiddly bit you were doing, sort of outside Marcus?” She held up her arms for Nancy to partner her and demonstrate it.

Dancing instructors, Marcus commented to himself, must now be added to her list.

But Nancy said:

“Marcus will shew you. I can’t bear dancing with women.”

So he was obliged to ask his sister for the next dance. He could not, of course, shew her the step. He could barely get round the floor with her. It was not in the least like dancing with Nancy. In the end they stood more or less on one spot and rocked to and fro; and then he confided to his sister that he was engaged to marry Nancy.

Everyone was delighted.

Next morning he telephoned Nancy and took her for a long hard walk across Hampstead Heath. In the middle of the Heath, he confessed to her that he was a virgin.

“Yes, I know you are,” Nancy said. “That doesn’t matter.”

E
VEN
during the engagement, people remarked how much better Marcus was looking. Obviously they were not talking about his health: varicose veins were not a disease. Even so, the improvement evidently shewed bodily. His mother, like some greedy Gentile pigbreeder, poked him in the ribs and said “Fatter”. His sister said his face had filled out lately. Perhaps some of his hollows really were filling out, but he himself, when he looked at his reflexion, was aware that the true change was in the cast of his face—in the cast of his figure, even. His flesh was beginning to lose that look of instant, reflex withdrawal from everything, like the automatic shrinkage of amoeba substance from a noxious drop introduced into its microscope slide.

His new well being was like an exposure to the spring sun. It made him sluggish; it almost doped him: but he felt that his impression of exhaustion was really caused by processes of germination in his personality which were using up his energies out of sight. He ceased to anticipate what the world was going to present to him, because he was confident that even if it presented
something
noxious Nancy would neutralise it. The period of engagement was a raft on which he waited—quite
comfortable
, actually, quite in the sun—for her to rescue him finally.

He realised that if he had experienced far fewer social agonies than he had expected in meeting and becoming familiar to her parents it was not, as he had at first
assumed, because of any particular freedom in their way of life but because Nancy had been steering him without his knowing. He recognised this in arrears because he now became accustomed to her steering touch through the more remote reaches of her family, to whom she had to introduce her fiancé. He always felt a little dread as he drove with her to one of these meetings, but none while it took place. He even felt, after some of them, that he had made quite a good impression.

He was helped by the fact that it did not matter whether he did or not. Nancy called the whole business dreary.

“I expect, if we bothered to look into it, it would turn out that you and I are ninth cousins‚” she said to him.

Some constellation in his mind, connected with the fact that he had just been watching Nancy and his sister holding a conversation side by side on the sofa, made him reply.

“That’s one thing in favour of incest. It would at least economise on meeting the relatives.”

Now that he was capable of making quite a good impression, he half wished that some of these meetings
were
important. Or at least he thought he was conscious of Nancy’s wishing so.

She steered him not only through his introduction to her relations but through her introduction to his. His, he thought, must have felt it was a new Marcus they were meeting quite as much as an unknown Nancy. He cared nothing for their opinion, of course; yet it gave him a generous pleasure to know that when all these cousins, aunts and paid companions noticed the improvement in him they must, quite correctly, attribute it to Nancy.

It crossed Marcus’s mind that, since Nancy had had lovers before, she might allow him to become her lover at once. But she made no move in that direction; so neither, of course, did he.

And as a matter of fact there was no opportunity. They had nowhere except their parents’ houses. One of the first things Marcus had done, on their engagement, was to rid himself of the lease of his flat: he had even sold it quite advantageously. He sent his armchairs into store. His books and his objects of art he had crated up
professionally
and sent to his parents’ house, where he did not unpack them. It was quite sensible not to, because they would only have to be moved on again when he and Nancy found somewhere to live. But at the back of his mind he knew that was only a pretext; not to unpack them was a sign of his new sluggishness. He did not feel so much need of his beautiful objects as he had used to—not even of his Chinese bowl. It was as if he did not feel so much need of the agony its beauty caused him.

That, of course, was because a new scale of sensuous experience had come within his range—or, rather, had possessed him, was playing on him, like a rainbow cast on his flesh by a window pane; for he was completely passive towards it. Again, it was part of his feeling of emerging into the sun of an unfolding year; the feeling which kept such step with the fact that the growing spring really was unfolding. He had a half-irritated, half-excited sensation, a prickling in the nostrils and the layers of the skin, as though the air which touched him was a
suspension
of pollen and the creamy scents of particularly rich flowers—which it really was, of course, as well. He knew this was an erotic sensation. He could tell that by
comparing
it with the feeling he had had when he danced with Nancy. That feeling, however, he now judged by the fact that it had come to him in the dark, still frosted days of February. It had been brave for the time of year, no doubt, but it was a mere crocus or snowdrop—and as pure. He was aware now of an impatience for fuller-blown experience. He was passive enough, waiting on his raft; but if he had had to wait much longer he would have felt
discomfort. He signified his impatience by not eating very much; so that the filling out of his face and ribs, which was now undeniable, must have been effected by a redistribution, not an addition, of weight.

All the same, he had been right when he compared the feeling of dancing with Nancy to an erotic daydream; and that element remained even in his new, further opened feeling. It was a feeling in which she figured—in which
of
course
she figured; but in which, rather
puzzlingly,
she was not central, or did not stand alone in the centre. His prickling excitement was inseparable from an excitement about himself, about his new self. His desire for her was equally capable of attaching itself to his own Ego, which he had for so long disparaged, excused, suffered shame for, and which suddenly didn’t need any such thing but could be appreciated and cherished—by himself as well as Nancy. The thin mist of eroticism which now hung over all his days from earliest morning, like the faint hint of an early heat haze, was partly provoked by the fact that his own face, in the morning shaving mirror, was almost good-looking. If he was a spring flower, it must be a narcissus.

They were married on the first of June from Nancy’s parents’ house. Marcus was twenty-eight, Nancy
twenty-nine
. All the guests said that the year’s seniority did not matter in the least.

The honeymoon was to be in Italy. Marcus had imagined that Nancy might suggest Italy for the tactful reason that he knew both Italy and Italian better than she did and would be in a position to shew her round and take care of her. But of course she was not tactful. She had inclined at first towards France, because she knew it. It was he who persuaded her for Italy, which he was longing for. His sister had been a touch sulky about his refusal, for once, to accompany her skiing, and had hinted that, now he had broken the habit of their
holidaying
together, she would make difficulties about resuming it. So, if he had not met Nancy, he might never have seen Italy again. He had long before marked down Lucca as the place where he would like to spend his honeymoon, though in those days he did not really expect ever to have a honeymoon.

Laundered, shaved and after-shaved, Marcus looked very well at his wedding. He was, now that he held himself better, quite a well-built man, with quite a handsome face, if you liked—if you could take—fleshy, high-featured, rather Wellingtonian faces.

His sister, whose age also entered the discussion (it was thirty-three), wept when the couple departed.

N
ANCY
did have a talent. It was for sexual intercourse.

However, Marcus did not discover this on his first married night, which was spent on the night flight to Milan. He had chosen to take that flight not because it was cheaper but because he felt they must get out of England at once, and he would not consent to a night in France on the way. At Milan they had to spend several cold and colourless dawn hours waiting about in the air terminal before they could catch the train to Lucca. The agent in England had misinformed them about both the time the train left and how long it took. They did not reach Lucca until well after midday, when they were grittily and rather irritably fatigued without having taken enough physical exercise to be tired.

For Marcus fatigue was exacerbated by anxiety, which would not allow him to doze off or even settle into silence. He was terrified of making love to Nancy and also terrified of failing to. He believed his knowledge of the Italian language to be on trial whenever a ticket inspector or coffee-vendor pulled open the door of their
compartment.
He was afraid the charm of Lucca might not exercise itself on Nancy. He kept jumping up to look for Lucca out of the window long before it could be due, meanwhile explaining to her that it might have changed since he had last been there, that the station was miles from the real town, that she was not to judge the town by the area round the station, which was designed merely for tourists—instead of taxis, for example, there were
horse-drawn carriages; and that, since one could do nothing to help them, it was better not to look at the horses as one passed, though as a matter of fact they were probably thin as much through the climate as through
ill-treatment.

Nancy did nothing towards calming him. It would have been impossible anyway. She merely sat very still in her corner of the carriage, looking unusually pretty: but that, instead of calming Marcus, worried him, because, he was distressed to find, it did not provoke him in the least.

At the hotel, they decided they did not want luncheon but did want sleep. Marcus left their passports with the clerk at the reception desk and received in exchange another source of worry: Nancy had had, of course, to apply for a new passport in her married name; it had been held in custody by the rabbi and handed to her only after the wedding; and now Marcus could not get it out of his mind that if the clerk noticed that her passport was only one day old the whole staff of the hotel would quickly know that they were newly married and that he was anxious.

He managed to get them and their luggage into the bedroom, though it was Nancy who tipped the porter. Marcus had not forgotten to; it was merely that he failed to see his opportunity. There were two beds, one double, one single. Nancy slipped out of her shoes and lay down on her back, with her ankles crossed, on the single bed. She offered Marcus no caresses; not even an endearment. He lay down, on his side, on the double bed, his cheek in the pillow but his eyes open, watching Nancy. He camouflaged his discontent under a profession of being immensely tired. In his heart he did not believe either of them would sleep. But the afternoon heat had begun, and they both slept soundly, though rather sweatily, till six.

He took her for a walk round the ramparts. Then they had a Cinzano. After strolling about for a while, they had dinner, in the open air, at the restaurant attached to their hotel. A pre-dusk descended as they drank their coffee, and one or two bats came out but stayed far away from the people.

Finishing her coffee, Nancy said:

“Darling, you’re scared stiff, aren’t you?”

Although he knew it so well, Marcus was astounded by her tactlessness. He was astounded into saying:

“No. No, not at all, not in the least.”

She gathered her handbag from the extra chair which the waiter had placed specially for it, and stood up. “Come on.”

As stiffly as though he were trying to conceal
intoxication
, he followed her into the hotel, across the hall, up to the desk. He was ashamed to be asking for their key when it was still not more than nine o’clock, and he stumbled over the number, confusing
sei
with
sette,
a thing he was at all times careful not to do. But the clerk recognised them and gave them the right key in any case. Marcus was ashamed of his mistake and of the clerk’s condescension, which seemed to brush aside Marcus’s Italian and imply that it would have made no difference if Marcus had not known any. He dreaded the
implications
in the fact that the clerk had recognised them. As he folded back the gilt grille and ushered Nancy in, he was ashamed of the bedroom farce associations of lifts. As the lift rose, he was ashamed in retrospect of the perfection of the evening, the warmth of the air round their table, the romantic dusk, the latin dinner à deux…. It was like something in an illustrated travel brochure. And for him it was a parody of the romantic. He was convinced he would never be able to behave with the vulgar normality of the men illustrated in travel brochures.

But Nancy appealed to his body, and roused it, with
a couple of caresses. She had small, swift, soft, brown, cool hands. She also had her—as it was in relation to him—gift of tactlessness. She talked to him. Marcus had always imagined that when he did at last make love to a woman it would be in terrible silence, interrupted only by such noises as their bodies might involuntarily make, which he had already conceived might be embarrassing. But Nancy talked to him about what he was to do, about what he was doing, in a low, rather deep, swift voice which provoked in his skin almost the same sensation as her hands. When he entered her body, he felt he was following her voice.

Where she led him was a strange world that was not new to him, since he had always known it existed,
subterraneanly:
a grotto, with whose confines and
geographical
dispositions he at once made himself quite familiar, as with the world of inside his own mouth: but a magic grotto, limitless, infinitely receding and enticing, because every sensation he experienced there carried on its back an endless multiplication of overtones, with the result that the sensation, though more than complete, was never finished, and every experience conducted him to the next; a world where he pleasurably lost himself in a confusion of the senses not in the least malapropos but as appropriate and precise as poetry—a world where one really did see sounds and hear scents, where doves might well have roared and. given suck, where perfectly defined, delightful local tactile sensations dissolved into apperceptions of light or darkness, of colour, of thickness, of temperature….

Sensuousness and passion, which his imagination had apprehended to be antithetical, were in Nancy’s world plaited into such a perfect interpenetration of opposites that the one could grow as a climax out of the other. Her face would lie for a slow moment above his, her eyes piercing his, until gradually her lips would descend on
his full lips, slowly enclosing and enfolding them into a tender intensity of such sensuousness that it
comprehended
the sensations not only to taste and of texture, but of gentle, exhausting exploration. And yet, even as he felt drained, a climax would gather out of his pebbly dryness like a wave re-forming in its moment of being sucked back, and he would heave himself up, curling above her like a wave, and would snatch, rape, her into an embrace of bitter, muscular, desperate, violence, that could only, he felt, be resolved by a death agony…. Yet in reality even this crisis opened, as if on the clash of a pair of cymbals, into a sunlit, flowering landscape, in which one of the flowers proved, subtly, surprisingly, to be his left ear, into which Nancy’s finger was inserted—making an effect of wit, to which his response of a sharply indrawn breath made an effect of repartee.

It was a grotto, a private, underground, enchanted folly, of which neither of them could have enough. It became unnecessary for Nancy to guide him into it by talking to him—at least with her voice; he became capable of following the commentary of the very pulsations, the sudden constrictions, the watery unloosenings, of her body’s response to the pleasure his body gave her. They made love at night, at dawn, during the siesta—and at half past eleven in the morning, after a certain look
exchanged
between them, while they were taking a walk on the outskirts of Lucca, had sent them with a single accord racing back to the hotel and up to their room, where the maid was finishing the vacuum cleaning and they stood over her, urging her out, with a silent but nonetheless quite shameless impatience. “Honestly,” Marcus said, “if she hadn’t gone
then
,
if she’d stayed a moment longer, I’d have said she must just take the consequences. Perhaps I’m an exhibitionist as well.”

“As well?” Nancy’s voice queried, softly,
insinuatingly
, smilingly curling its way like smoke into the hair
on the back of his head, which she was kissing. In bed she had an almost sly, provocative sense of mockery. It was only in mentally defining it that Marcus caught himself recognising that out of bed she had none.

“What do you mean, as well?” she teasingly insisted, whispering.

“Well….” he explained, burying himself deliciously deeper in the bed, and presently deeper in her, as though to answer by demonstration and at the same time hide his blushes, though really he felt no blushes at all; and she sustained his shamelessness by telling him, again in a whisper,

“Nothing is perverse. Nothing at all, if you really want to do it.”

They acted on her apophthegm.

But presently Marcus reversed it and whispered, in an appreciative voice,

“Everything is perverse. If you really want to do it.”