Free Flesh by Brigid Brophy Page A

virtually no possessions. Marcus’s vision of making love on bare floorboards came almost true. In point of fact, they had bought a bed. They also had the armchairs from Marcus’s old flat; but they sorted ill with the new flat, and were marked down to be replaced. Nancy and Marcus had declined to take anything from the Ken Wood house, even to tide them over. That left them with Nancy’s gramophone records and Marcus’s books and objects of art.
    When he eventually unpacked his objects, he found them faded and diminished by their period inside the crates. And they, too, did not go with the flat; it was too beautiful for them.
    Nancy had spent all her days there before the move, supervising its decoration—which really consisted of de-decorating it. They ripped off all the fashionably up- to-date wallpaper the other people had hung—or, at least, they employed workmen to do it, and expressed their own anger at the desecration of the walls by the energy of the instructions they gave. Nancy had almost to bully the workmen, who kept pointing out that the wallpaper was still in excellent condition and had cost a great deal. Then she had to exert her will again to get the place painted a genuine, matt white instead of the glossy cream the workmen said was more practical.
    The result was that they themselves, who had picked out and revealed its beauty, were more than ever under a moral obligation not to desecrate the place. There was not a wall Marcus would besmirch with his seicento picture—which had, indeed, just the glossy paint surface they had driven out of their temple. The place was, like all eighteenth-century building, a temple: a small and chaste one, where no blood sacrifice had ever been performed. The niche between the long, mannered, exquisite windows in the drawing room (the flat consisted of the first floor of the house) would, Marcus thought, shudder down or fold its wings and brick itself in, if he were to stand his renaissance-Victorian statuette in it.
    The place was, simply, architecture; and the problem, how to live in without obscuring it. Both Marcus and Nancy knew how to answer the problem, but they knew it would take time. They could see in their minds’ eye the pieces of furniture—very few in number—which they must acquire; not necessarily rare things, but difficult to find, because the just right always was difficult to find.
    So, for the time being, they lived in and off scrubbed wood furniture, which pleased them because it announced that it was to be replaced, asserting a mere x or y until the just right quantity should be known.
    Only Marcus’s Chinese bowl looked at all well in its new surroundings. But, strictly speaking, there was nowhere to put even that.
    He was trying it out in various places when Nancy came home, after a teaparty he had excused himself from, and disclosed that she had heard of a job she thought he could have if he wanted it.
    He instantly armed himself against the idea. “We’re not even properly settled in yet. There’s no hurry.”
    Surprisingly, Nancy let the subject drop.
    He thought she must be practising the childishstratagem of making him interested by pretending she was not.
    But by the next day he had decided that that was so uncharacteristic of her as to be impossible. So he asked her what the job was.
    “I don’t think it’s for you,” she said. “It’s in a sort of antique shop.”
    “How very apropos,” said Marcus. “I might pick up some pieces.”
    “You might pick up other things as well.”
    “Such as?”
    “O, I don’t know. Nasty attitudes.”
    “That,” said Marcus, “is the most untypical remark I’ve ever heard you make.” He put down the Chinese bowl so as to turn and look at her face to face.
    “How so?”
    “Well, it’s like saying bad habits when you mean masturbation. And one of your immense virtues is that you never do cloak your thought in the decent obscurity of a middle-class vagueness.”
    “I have to be