Flesh Read online

  What possible similarity could there be between

  the lush women of Rubens and the nervous,

  gangly, unattractive Marcus? None at all, you

  would think, when we first meet him -- tongue-

  tied and impossibly awkward at a party. Yet

  by the end he can make the astonishing

  declaration "I have become a Rubens woman"

  with absolute credibility. The agent who effects

  this miraculous transformation is the self-

  possessed Nancy, who disregards the outer

  shell of agonised self-consciousness and

  immediately picks out the central quality in

  Marcus, his love of beautiful things. In this

  passive attribute she sees the perfect complement

  to her own active talent which is, the author

  tells us, for sexual intercourse.

  Beneath the surface of the ordinary progress of

  a young couple's relationship, from courtship

  to parenthood, the extraordinary metamorphosis

  takes place. The charm of the novel lies in the

  interweaving of the straightforward narrative

  with Marcus's subtly dawning awareness of the

  powers of the senses. Characteristically,

  Brigid Brophy makes her profound and

  universal statements by dwelling with precise

  enjoyment on the detail.

  "An exceptionally taut and funny

  novel. . . . This is a powerful piece of

  sophistication"

  -- Times Literary Supplement

  "Sheer pleasure"

  -- Evening Standard

  FLESH

  By the same author

  Hackenfeller's Ape

  The Snow Ball

  FLESH

  BRIGID BROPHY

  Allison & Busby

  London

  First published in Great Britain 1962

  First published in this edition 1979 by

  Allison and Busby Limited

  6a Noel Street, London W1V 3RB

  Copyright © Brigid Brophy 1962

  ISBN 0 85031 318 X (hardback)

  ISBN 0 85031 319 8 (paperback)

  Set in 11 pt Baskerville

  and printed in Great Britain by

  Villiers publications Ltd

  Ingestre Road, London NW5

  I.M.

  1

  Marcus knew that people must wonder what Nancy saw in him.

  Probably they were wondering even while she held her first conversation with him; and when Nancy took him up finally and avowedly, Marcus's sister actually expressed it. "Honestly, Nancy, I don't see what you see in him, an attractive girl like you . . ." It was merely a heavy joke, licensed by the occasion: disparaging sisterly affection towards Marcus, a just compliment to Nancy. Yet it was what everyone wondered.

  Marcus wondered himself -- but not really in humility. Rather, it gave him a moment's pause of apprehension in the middle of the rapt pleasure he felt because Nancy did see whatever it might be. He was like a derelict property suddenly bought up by a speculator. He was bound to wonder what was to be made of him.

  Surprisingly, he did not doubt that there was something to be made. Few people could have imagined he had this confidence. Outwardly, socially, not only was he a hopeless case, but he had obviously written himself off as one. It was quite an ordinary case -- of over-sensitivity. The only remarkable thing was the acute degree to which he suffered from it.

  His relations with what his parents called other young people consisted in his following, in his empty car, their piled, shouting and erratically-driven cars. In the silence of his car, he lost communication with them, even though he kept their tail lights in view. He could never tell whether they really wanted him to tire, turn off and drive home; or whether they would set him down as more hopeless than ever if he did not presently draw up behind them at whatever house, pub or theatre it was they were being led to by the only one who knew the way.

  Yet even in the solitude of his car, he kept the confidence of the over-sensitive: the confidence that he was sensitive. So far, it had meant only that he suffered more acutely. When he was invited to parties -- at one of which he met Nancy -- he diagnosed with hurtful accuracy that he had been asked only on the strategic maxim that good parties needed more men than women. He had had a distressing amount of opportunity to observe, and in perfect detachment, that the strategy worked. It made the women feel that innumerable men were dancing attendance on them, even though some of the men, like Marcus, never spoke (or danced); and the men who did talk to the women, and would have done so in any case, it made to feel that they had fought their way to the women by overcoming rivals. Marcus knew that he was there as a mere extra courtier, brought on to make the production look lavish.

  Yet he remained confident that if he was sensitive to suffering he must equally be sensitive to delight -- if only the circumstances, by a flick of the wrist, could be turned upside down. Indeed, where it was a question of things which could not be expected to reciprocate his appreciation -- books, paintings, flowers, materials -- he knew that he did experience a deeper delight than other people. He got more out of them -- or put more in; it was the same thing. His delight was intense to the point of agony. He almost suffered it. And by this very token the human relationships which he now suffered could have been turned to delight. His acute sensibility to what other people disparagingly thought of him must be capable of functioning as an acute sensibility to someone's appreciation. If he was so particularly aware of not communicating with most people, he must be capable of precise and minute communication. Only on the question whether there ever would be an appropriate person for him to communicate with did his confidence halt, and he felt himself depressed for ever on to the side of self-depreciation.

  Perhaps what Nancy picked out in him was the potentiality hidden on the reverse side of his sensibility. If so, she must have been extraordinarily alive herself to such potentialities. It would have been hard, the first time she saw his face, to distinguish anything in it except suffering.

  He had got himself hemmed in by other people's backs and jammed in a corner between a bookcase and a table of food, on neither of which was there room for him to set down his glass, which had been empty for half an hour. He picked out one of the books, opening up a black gap on the shelf, and mimed reading. But this solitary pleasure at a party seemed to him as much a solecism and a confession as if he had stood there wiggling a loose tooth in his mouth; and the feeling of being exposed overwhelmed any pleasure the book might have given him. He put it back in the shelf, meticulously aligning it with its neighbours as though it really was a tooth. He used up as much time as he could. But in the end there was no more to be done with the books. He had to turn back to the food table and hover there. His face might have been a Negro mask attached to the wall, a great ruby and white badge of oversensitivity, wearing a look of Noli Me Tangere.

  It was a long, large, terrible face: its size delivered up every quiver of its suffering magnified, like a drop of sweat on a face on the cinema screen. On such a scale the face had room to be both thin and fleshy. Temples, the ridge of the cheeks, the articulation of the jaw, were all bony. But where there was flesh it was blatantly fleshy, hanging, without shape, on the point of becoming tremulous -- or, rather, it always looked as though this was the moment just after it had been flayed, and while it was still quivering.

  The lips, especially, were full and almost fruitily suggestive of suffering. They seemed to have been turned too far out, exposing some of the sensitive, private skin that should have been kept inside the mouth.

  The nose, when it began, was as narrow and brown as the backbone ridge of a roast turkey; but, by th
e time it reached the bottom of a curve that really was shaped like a turkey's backbone, it had lost both definition and colour and had become a great blunt truncheon of boneless flesh, which again suggested knives and suffering -- suggested, indeed, the ritual surgery of Marcus's race, as though the only way the nose flesh could have been left so tender and exposed was by the removal of a protective foreskin.

  He had come to the party wearing a polo-necked sweater with his lounge suit. Even so, no one was deceived into thinking him poor, unconventional or otherwise interesting enough to approach. He emanated the true explanation: that he had sent all his shirts to the laundry at one go and, discovering it too late to buy a new one (he was not in the least short of money), had not known how to ring up his hostess and cry off.

  Not that he could think she would have been distressed if he had stayed away. But again he could not tell if it would be acceptable for him simply to fail to come or whether he was bound to offer an explanation, in which case she would have said. "Come in anything" and he would not have known whether she meant it or not.

  His face, hung above the food, quivering as if in a faint night breeze, might have been a voodoo talisman warning everyone that the food was forbidden, unclean. But as a matter of fact strategy had worked, and the party was going too well for anyone to bother about food yet. Even Marcus ate nothing, though it was not for him the party was going well. It was he, in point of fact, who was troubled by taboo. One of the shallow silver dishes just beside his right hip contained sausage rolls, and he did not know whether the sausages were pork. His host and hostess were Jewish, but not orthodox. The party was mixed Jewish and Gentile: just a party, in fact.

  Marcus was not orthodox himself. His parents went to a reformed synagogue, but extremely rarely. They had made no fuss when Marcus stopped going altogether.

  Marcus did not, as a matter of fact, like meat in general, because be was squeamish about the killing of animals. Only the pig, through its ancient unclearmess, was too low for his sympathy; and the result was that, by a reversal of the taboo, he actually preferred pork to other meats. As a boy he had a lust for fried bacon. He had once asked a Gentile friend to ask his mother to serve bacon accidentally on purpose when Marcus was invited to supper. It was wartime, which had admitted dispensations; and those, added to an already liberal background, would have made it perfectly permissible for Marcus to eat the bacon if it could be truly said that there was nothing else and that his refusal would cause embarrassment. But either the friend had forgotten to ask his mother or the family had already eaten up their bacon ration. Marcus remembered they had all eaten a ritually neutral but very unpleasing cheese pie instead.

  Now he did not know whether he was more distressed because the sausage rolls might or because they might not contain the only meat he really enjoyed eating.

  He did not even feel he could take up one of the paper table napkins which, so many white triangular sails from a watercolour seascape, had been crowded into a smoky Swedish tumbler. It would have relieved him to get rid of his glass, pick out a napkin and fold it into shapes. But the Swedish tumbler had been placed hintingly close to the silver dish: people were obviously meant to wrap a napkin round one end of a sausage roll while they bit the other. Marcus was afraid that a white napkin in his hand might signal to someone to offer him a sausage roll. He would not want his first word to be No. On the other hand he did not want to be seen eating what might be pork, for fear of destroying the last thing he might have in common with about half the people in the room. At the back of many of his motivations was the fear of making himself, if he were not already, unmarriageable.

  Yet he could not seriously think he had anything in common with anyone in the room, Jew or Gentile.

  As though to mark the very point on which he differed from them all, casting Jew or Gentile alike into the wider class of philistines, he considered plunging back across his tiny corner of space which no one else wanted and looking at another book. His hesitation was acted out bodily. For a moment it was as though the night breeze had produced a gust and the voodoo scarecrow was flapping and spinning.

  During that moment Nancy approached him: as though to take him down from the wall or lift him off the stake he was so agonisingly and insecurely impaled on, for ever.

  "I knew there must be food," she said. "I'm so hungry."

  He had no idea it was more than a moment's rescue.

  Profusely he offered her, so well as he could with his glass in his hand (but at least it did not have to be kept upright), the cheese biscuits, the canapes, the olives. He did not offer the sausage rolls because he could see she was Jewish. But she seemed, although she had said she was hungry, untempted by any of them. He felt bound to offer her the sausage rolls after all.

  "Ah, yes," she said, taking one of the paper napkins, which he had forgotten to offer, and then one of the rolls. Biting into the roll and looking at Marcus, she said: "It seems so silly to let oneself be restricted by an old hygienic precaution that may have had some point in the ancient world, in the middle east . . . "

  Marcus wanted to say that he believed the theory that it was a hygienic precaution to be a piece of modern middle-class folklore. But he was afraid of sounding supercilious and intellectually aggressive.

  "Not that it's a hygienic precaution," Nancy went on, on her own account, talking through chews as a gesture of informality, of flirtation even. "It's perfectly obvious to anyone who's read Frazer that it's a straightforward primitive taboo."

  Marcus made the motions of gasping -- his lips dropped apart -- at this revelation that she was an intellectual, too. But no answer would come through his lips, and he closed them again. But, since she had done so, he at least dared to draw out one of the paper table napkins. He rid himself of his glass -- there was still no room on the table itself, but he balanced it, carefully, in the silver dish, where Nancy had made a space by taking a sausage roll. He began folding the napkin, again carefully, into shapes, expressing anguish by the violence with which he scored the folds with his thumb-nail, while he waited for the one person in the room with whom he had something in common to walk away from him.

  But she did not walk away.

  Marcus wanted to dare to ask her whether she liked Proust. Instead, he said, in a depressed voice,

  "Do you know many people here?"

  "Almost everyone except you."

  He gave a giggle, which was really the expression of the gasp which had not come out before. Recovering himself -- so far as he was ever in possession of himself -- he told her his name, and she replied with hers.

  "Do you know many people?" she asked.

  "Almost no one." His voice did not even pretend that this was unusual with him at parties.

  "Presumably you know our host and hostess?" She helped herself to another sausage roll, Marcus's bony hands scurrying to offer her one too late, so that he found himself thrusting the silver dish into her breasts, at a time when both her mouth and hands were already occupied and she could not defend herself against him.

  "O yes," he said hastily, putting the dish down, making a sign of apology and blushing, "O yes, I know them , of course." And then, fearing he had given an untrue impression and claimed too much intimacy: "But not very well. Actually, she's more a friend of my sister's."

  "Is she here tonight?" asked Nancy.

  "O yes."

  Both Marcus's and Nancy's glance searched the room, hers with purpose, his with none.

  "What does she look like?"

  "But surely -- " Marcus began, before he realised that Nancy had been speaking of his sister, he of their hostess.

  In despondency he corrected the misunderstanding. He believed Nancy must think him either witless or insulting to suppose she could have been asking whether their hostess was present at her own party; and he was more pierced by the irony because the whole reason why he had blundered so stupidly was that his thoughts had gone off in pursuit of some sign he might make, some subtle freemasonic code ma
rk he might let fall, that should inform her that he too was intellectual.

  Nancy, he learned a year afterwards, had never for a moment taken him for anything else.

  "My sister would have been here," he said, painstakingly delivering the full explanation, "only she's gone skiing."

  "Do you usually go round with your sister?"

  "Yes. I suppose so. Quite a lot. Except when she goes skiing."

  Nancy laughed, and Marcus was pleased although he had said it to be truthful, not to be witty.

  "I have been skiing with her," he scrupulously appended, "but I didn't like it. I mean, I wasn't any good at it."

  He had finished folding his paper table napkin and began carefully tearing tiny holes in it.

  "Do you live with your sister?"

  "No, actually."

  "With your parents?"

  "No. No, actually, I live on my own."