Free Flesh by Brigid Brophy

as to be illegible.
    Marcus found himself with even more, and even more complex, business to do. It was not very hard to arrange his mother’s tenancy of the Kensington flat, which was on only a seven-year lease, and the previous leaseholders wanted the small premium handed over in cash. But the purchase of the sixty-nine-year lease in Chelsea and the sale of the house, which would entail a readjustment of the death duties on his father’s estate, took time. He was irritated to find that title deeds had to be searched and leases engrossed even though he and the Chelsea couple were quite willing to believe in one another’s honesty. He had imagined it could all be accomplished, as in some dignified primitive community, by the exchange of a solemn word. He had imagined himself making love to Nancy on the bare floorboards of their new home that very night.
    Instead, they had all four to stay on in the Ken Wood house half packed to go, through several miserable weeks during which even the summer failed them and turned cold and rainy. Nancy began to talk about finding Marcus a job.
    Every evening, while the mother cooked dinner, the three younger people sat in the drawing room, where it was sometimes necessary to light a fire; and every evening it seemed that the conversation was about Marcus’s job.
    One evening, when Nancy came into the room, where Marcus was already sitting with his sister, he said:
    “Here comes the careers mistress.”
    Nancy did not know how to take the remark.
    The next evening, he thought of something that would tease her further still. He suggested that, instead of selling the partnership in his father’s business, he should take it up: that would be his job.
    “O don’t be silly,” Nancy said. “You can’t be a business man.”
    “I don’t know whether you mean business is unworthy of me or I’m unworthy of business.”
    “Both—neither,” Nancy said. “It’s mutual incompatibility . One’s only got to look at you to see you couldn’t be a dried fruit importer.”
    “It’s just a question of what I should be instead.”
    “The first time I ever met you, you said you wanted to work with something beautiful.”
    “Well,” he said, pretending to consider, “prunes, raisins—they have a resemblance, you know, to certain faces of Rembrandt.”
    “You’re a Rubens man, not a Rembrandt man,” Nancy said, but fiercely, not with amusement.
    “I think Marcus ought to do something with his hands,” his sister said. “Marcus is good with his hands.” She herself was knitting away. Perhaps being good with their hands ran in their family.
    “I know he’s good with his hands,” said Nancy, as though jealously; and her tone made Marcus wonder if she had invested his dexterity with a sexual connotation. “But he can’t make a career out of tearing paper kangaroos.”
    “Toys, perhaps,” Marcus murmured mildly. “Or Christmas decorations—in Australia, perhaps. No doubt there’s a market.”
    “You don’t want a market,” Nancy replied. “You talk as though we were all still living in the bazaar.”
    “Life,” said Marcus, pretending to give an affected sigh, “is one enormous bazaar.” But it didn’t amuse Nancy.
    In the end, since he had been only teasing, he sold the partnership; and at about the same time they at last moved into their Chelsea flat.
    His mother and sister were already living in Kensington. It seemed to Marcus that his mother really had taken to a different furniture polish, but it was hard to be sure, because she overlaid the newness of her new flat with the same old smell—or, really, sense—of things being steamed, by relays, in the kitchen. His sister had without difficulty reorientated herself—re-routed her daily steps—from John Barnes to John Barker.

8
    I T astonished Nancy and Marcus that moving in could cause them such—and so many days’—confusion, and that it could yet turn out, when the confusion began to lift, that they had