Free Flesh by Brigid Brophy Page B

vague when I don’t really know what I mean myself. I suppose I’m afraid you might pick up commercialism. Or dilettantism.”
    “Well at least not both,” he said. “Aren’t they contradictory?”
    “No,” she said. “Not when the commerce consists of selling things to dilettanti.”
    “Well, at least tell me about the job.”
    “Darling, it isn’t even worth telling you. It’s not your sort of job.”
    “Then tell me just as gossip.”
    “Well,” she said. Evidently she didn’t want even to put words to the images. It was with a hasty distaste that she brought out, “Well, you remember that girl Julia——She was at that dance——?”
    “Vaguely.”
    “Well, she has—she’s always had—a person, a sort of attachment, whom she calls Uncle Polydore. That’s his surname. I don’t know whether he’s really her uncle or not. I’ve met him. He’s a sort of butterfly—but old, you know. I suppose he’s queer, insofar as he’s anything. Anyway, he has this shop in Wigmore Street. Very expensive. I think he does whole decorative schemes, as he no doubt calls them, for fashionable people. Anyway. Well, anyway, he buys pieces and tarts them up. I daresay he fakes them. Anyway, he’s looking for someone with an eye, someone with taste or fake taste, to supervise his restoration work.”
    “Well,” said Marcus. “You’ve always said I was good with my hands.” He looked at them for a moment and then plunged them inside the Chinese bowl, where he made a gesture as though he were using the bowl to knead pastry—or perhaps for some sort of ritual ablution.

9
    “D ON’T forget they’ve made Baker Street one way,” said Nancy.
    “I hadn’t forgotten. I know all the routes to North London. I’m a Jew.”
    “Well, if you want to reach Wigmore Street——”
    “I know how to reach Wigmore Street,” he said, turning the car into it. “And I know it’s I who want to reach Wigmore Street, and you who don’t. We’ll have to park in Harley Street or one of those.”
    All the same, she had insisted on coming with him.
    “On the contrary,” she said while he parked, “I’m glad you’re coming, because then you’ll see straight-away it’s not for you. I only object to the waste of time.”
    “It’s not as if I had a great deal to do with my time. In fact, I thought it was that you objected to.”
    He was ready to get out, but she insisted on sitting still in the halted car.
    “I don’t object to anything, darling,” she said, “not to anything connected with you. I’d only object if you made yourself unhappy. Or disappointed.”
    “Well, I won’t.”
    “I want you to have the sort of job you deserve.”
    “O well,” he said. “You’ve taken me up. I suppose you’re entitled to make something of me.”
    “Marcus.”
    “Mm.”
    “Marcus, don’t make me out a bullying female.”
    He wondered for a moment whether she really meant make me out —or make me.
    “Then let’s go and see Uncle Polydore,” he said amicably.
    They got out of the car, and Marcus put some money into the parking meter beside it.
    “I hope these machines aren’t invariably fatal to my family,” he said.

10
    F ROM the far side of the street it appeared that two women in evening dress were reclining, impeccably counterbalanced, one in each side of the double shop front. From half way across the road they clarified and angularised themselves into two silk-covered, imprecisely late-eighteenth-century chaises longues, one of which had gold tasselling hung about its shoulder—the sort of parody of military braiding which a woman might wear at a ball where the dances were to be Highland.
    The door between them was set back, surmounted by the name S. POLYDORE and surrounded by smooth, newly-washed slabs of a black and dark grey marbled substance which probably was really glass.
    It was very posh indeed.
    Although the two chaises longues were the only objects actually in the window, where they were raised