Flesh (11 page)

T
HE
German girl was called Ilse—which was also the name of Marcus’s sister. Or, rather, it was his sister’s real name, which their mother still used: among her own friends she had long before anglicised it to Elsie. Only Nancy, on discovering the real form of the name by marrying into the family, chose to revert to it sometimes—not in order to annoy Marcus’s sister, though it did annoy her, but in the hope of liking her better under a less displeasing name.

The German Ilse could not move in until a week after Nancy had engaged her. She had to work out the notice she had given at her present job. Marcus spent the week repenting. “I think I’m going to hate having someone living with us.” “You didn’t feel that about the baby.” “No. But
she’s
Jewish.” Nancy spent it getting a room ready for the girl. “We can’t put
her
in with Siegfried’s furniture.”

Because the workmen would have taken too long, they prepared the room themselves and bought a bed, a desk, a chair and a little wall bookcase from Peter Jones’s. Like all au pair girls—so Nancy told Marcus—Ilse was learning English at a school for foreigners and preparing for the Cambridge examination. The whole key to her social position, her character, even how they should treat her, was, Nancy said, contained in the word
student.
Hence the desk and the bookshelf.

Marcus thought it a pity to paper the walls they had originally stripped: but of course it was not their own
taste they were consulting but what they imagined to be student taste. Yet when they finished the room Nancy said:

“In a way, I think it’s the prettiest room in the flat. At least all the stuff is our own.”

“Well tell the girl not to come, and we’ll move in here.”

“It’s too small for a double bed.”

The room, being spare, had housed quite a lot of Polydore’s furniture; and now that that had been moved out Nancy found the rest of the place cluttered.

“I don’t feel it as cluttered,” Marcus said. “It gives me a wonderfully comfortable sense of being
padded.
It’s like living in a quilted dressing-gown.”

“That’s all very well now. How will you feel when the weather gets hot?”

“Then I shall see it two-dimensionally, like a tapestry. It will luxuriate, it will leaf and flower, as the earth luxuriates outside.”

About an hour before Ilse was due to arrive, Marcus found that Nancy had hidden the Jewish cookery book in a drawer under his shirts.

Only when the doorbell actually rang, and as he walked down to help the girl lift her trunk out of the taxi, did he remember that he had meant, at some moment when Nancy was not looking, to take the book out and place it in the empty wall bookshelf in the girl’s room. Once the girl had arrived, it was too late. Her room became out of bounds to Nancy and Marcus. Even when the girl was absent, only the charwoman might go in.

Socially, having the girl was much easier than they had expected. Her English sounded abominable but she understood everything they said. She was excellent with the baby: not squeamish about its nappies; quick to accept the responsibility of deciding when to feed it. She gave it more to eat than Nancy did, because she had no worries about its weight. “I am being a fat baby, too,” she
said with complete self-complacency about her present figure, which was beautiful. The baby cried less. It became extraordinarily placid, smiled whenever it was awake, and grew fatter and fatter.

The three adults ate together in the kitchen. Ilse, although she was thin and tall—she was the tallest person in the house—liked to eat well. They quickly became informal, though not so intimate that either Nancy or Marcus wanted to let the girl know that Marcus was meant to be dieting; so, though he occasionally made token abstentions, Marcus ate well, too. They called each other by first names all round. Ilse laughed at Marcus’s jokes. He made a lazy habit of decorously teasing her, which got them over such awkwardness as they encountered. Nancy could not bring herself to create a personal relationship with the girl, but only Marcus noticed her reserve. If she was not charming to the girl, she was thoroughly nice. She gave her the use of everything in the house, and was flexible and generous about time off.

Nancy lost her weariness, and Marcus lost his, which had been the weariness of feeling all the time that there was something he ought to be doing to help her. She recovered her good looks and her pleasure in making love. Marcus wondered if to feel her looks restored made her more confident in bed. They never made love with the romantic abandon he had once yearned for and failed to find, but he no longer yearned. The presence of the girl in the flat obliged them to take care not to make much noise; but it also released them because they knew that if, in their absorption, they failed to hear the baby cry, the girl would get up and go to it. In early May, Marcus made Nancy jokes, which also had a poetic content, about the phallic shape of chestnut candles; and when the candles had withered and the deep moist green leaves, losing the pleated look of the flesh on a baby’s hands, opened to their fullest like the palms of hundreds of adult, caressing
hands, he recovered his old, sensuously slothful feeling that, lying in bed with Nancy, he was lying roofed, shaded, enmeshed deep in summer greenness and could, with the least exertion but the maximum delighted consciousness, dip himself into what he lay beside, which could be compared to a warm pool or a book of poetry or a bag of chocolates.

By June, Ilse was coping so competently with the baby that Nancy decided to go back to work part-time. At first, ostensibly at least, she was merely replacing someone in the musical firm who was taking her summer holiday.

“How does it feel?” Marcus asked her, after her first day’s work.

“Wonderful. I’ve got my identity back.”

“Had you lost it?”

“Claire stole it, a bit.”

Marcus noticed that the au pair girl, though she was efficient, was lazy. She was very desultory about attending her school. It surprised him in a German; but he supposed it was because she was beautiful as well as German.

She had remarkable auburn hair—deep brown shot with a colour he could only call orange—which she wore piled haphazard, with an effect of tribal aristocracy, on the top of her head, where she carried it as though it were a fine barbaric bit of native metal work. Her complacent appreciation of her whole body was like a primitive’s physical pride.

The person Nancy was substituting for decided not to return to work after her holiday. Nancy decided to stay on.

The weather became hot. Marcus told Polydore that a heat-wave counted as a cold spell: he would stay at home, and the work must come to him.

The au pair girl began turning up her shirt and tucking it into the bottom of her brassière, so as to leave her midriff bare. One afternoon she appeared in the drawing
room wearing a white bathing suit and told Marcus she was going to sunbathe in front of the window. She never asked permission to do things. She had left her hair loose, although, as Marcus told her (he had never seen it loose before), since it covered a good part of her shoulders, it would actually prevent her from getting suntanned.

He was working in the drawing room, sitting over some furniture.

The au pair girl folded a large towel in four, and, in the slightly disdainful way she did all physical actions, spread it on the floor and lay down, carefully disposing her hair at each side of her so that it did not screen her shoulders.

It was one of her afternoons on. Nancy worked a shifting timetable between mornings (in which case she left it to Ilse to give lunch to Marcus as well as the baby) and afternoons, and the girl’s timetable shifted accordingly. The girl did not mind the shifts: they gave her a pretext for not going to school. And she preferred to be on in the afternoons, because then the baby was no trouble at all, sleeping in its big cot—it was not in length but in girth that it had quickly outgrown the carrycot—in front of an open window in the nursery.

“You and I and the baby,” Marcus said to the au pair girl, without looking up from the intaglio he was contemplating, “are all lazy characters.”

“Since I don’t go to school today,” she said, “I better do some homework.”

After a minute or two she actually got up to fetch it.

As she passed Marcus, he put his hand out to her hair. He was careful to pull it, actually to hurt her a little, so that his gesture could still be passed off as a tease. Perhaps it was because of the pain that her head came round so swiftly towards his. Even as he drily brushed the surface of her mouth with his own he was still prepared to pretend, and still believed he could invent some way of maintaining that a kiss on the lips had no meaning; but she opened her
mouth and with an astonishing swift violent voracity drew him in and, after interrupting him for a moment while she obliged him to close the curtains, drew him down on to the towel she had spread on the floor.

Thereafter they often made love in the afternoons.

Marcus felt pleased to be able to put it explicitly to himself that he had a mistress. It was almost as though he had become the sort of person Nancy had so long been urging him to be. Obviously, it was to Nancy that he really wanted to boast. Indeed, he knew he would tell her about it, though he might not word it as a boast, as soon as the au pair girl had gone—which would not be long; her immigration permit expired at the end of July.

He continued to think of his mistress as the au pair girl:
Ilse
continued to be reserved for his sister.

He never invited the au pair girl into his bedroom, and he took it that she understood he could not, since it was Nancy’s bedroom, too. But neither did the au pair girl, although she had no corresponding reason, invite him into
her
bedroom. As her lover, he was admitted to her body; but evidently this made him not a bit the less shut out from her room as her employer.

Occasionally he felt apologetic towards the girl for his obesity: but she would be gone long before the strictest dieting could have made any noticeable difference: and anyway she was prepared to have him as he was.

Sometimes he tried to represent to himself the multifarious betrayals he was committing: of Nancy; of the girl, to whom he presumably stood in some parental, protective relationship; even—since the girl was employed to look after her—of the baby. But the girl was evidently beyond the control of any parent. And the baby was beneath the responsibility of any parent; she was not a personality, knew nothing, smiled and slept deep. She never once disturbed their lovemaking.

He was even less successful in needling his conscience
now than he had been about his father. Even the ultimate and quite artificial torture of putting it to himself that he was betraying his dead father failed to rouse him.

The July weather turned sulky. Marcus went back to work. In the end, when Ilse’s permit expired, it was Nancy who saw her off in a taxi, with her trunk labelled “Hamburg”. Marcus had carried the trunk down for them in the morning, and left it in the porch, then going up again for a moment to shake hands with Ilse.

When he came home again that evening, Nancy asked:

“Does the place feel empty?”

“I suppose so.”

“Do you miss her?” Nancy said.

He thought to astonish and disarm her by going swiftly beyond her suspicions into certainty. “I always miss my bedfellows.”

But she only nodded.

It was quite untrue that he missed Ilse at all: or, as a matter of fact, that they had ever been in a bed together.

Nancy had to take a week off work—it counted as her holiday—while they waited for another au pair girl. It made her irritable to look after the baby herself.

The day the new girl arrived—she was French—the hot weather began again. Marcus was not attracted by her. She had been with them only three days when she suddenly told Nancy she must go. She left that night: a friend would put her up, she said.

Nancy had suddenly to suspend work again. But, although it was so hot, Marcus decided to keep on going to Polydore’s, where the basement was cool: and at home with the baby Nancy was continually impatient. “I get desperate when I’m cooped up with her all day.”

After the French girl’s departure Nancy said to him at dinner:

“When I first knew you, it was Rubens women.”

“If you think I made a pass at the French girl, you’re
wrong. I never looked at her. It must have been something else.”

“What?”

“Perhaps she found out we’re Jewish.”

Towards the end of dinner he said:

“Why did you hide that cookery book in with my shirts? Did you want to impress it on my very clothing that I’m a Jew?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Or are those colour plates your idea of art publishing?”

When he came home the next evening, Nancy said:

“
She’s
been here.”

“Who?”

“Ilse.”

“Ilse?”

“I mean your sister.”

“What did
she
want?”

“It’s hard to say. Whatever she wanted, she didn’t get it. It was absolutely loathsome.”

“Why? I mean, why in particular? You usually find her visits loathsome, don’t you?”

“She came to commiserate. Creeply-crawly. How in hell did
she
know there was anything wrong?”

“Did she? Is there?”

“Oh, she pretended it was because I’d had bad luck in losing my au pair girls.”

“Well I daresay it
was.
She doesn’t know of anything else. Don’t get paranoid.”

“Marcus, she seemed to be offering me herself as a substitute.”

“Well maybe she thinks you’re used to having an Ilse round the house. She only meant to be helpful, like most tiresome people. Actually, she’d make a hopeless au pair girl. She can’t cope with Claire at all.”

“No,” Nancy said, agreeing, turning away, “But I meant, as a substitute for you.”

On Saturday afternoon Nancy said:

“Do you mind if I take the chance to get out for a bit? Can you cope with Claire? She’ll probably sleep anyway.”

He sat for a while in the drawing room. It was too hot to work; and in any case—now that he had bound himself to stay in—the sunshine seemed to suggest that it would be ungrateful, even cruel, of him to let it go unappreciated.