Flesh by Brigid Brophy Page A

this far more exciting and exacting expertise lay beyond, within her power to teach and his to learn. He thought he knew now what potential talent it was in him which had attracted Nancy to him. She had trained him, of course, to her requirements. He was, in a sense, trained and plumped up for her harem. Yet this thought caused him no smart in his self-esteem. He was quite prepared to strut along beside her, to be her plump little protégé. If the thought did not wound and diminish him, it was because some of his excitement still seemed devoted to cherishing his self. It was her body which provoked his sensations, yet it was his which entertained them and brought them out as on a sounding board—he who was the sensitive instrument.
    He felt as though this were a selfishness, a disloyalty even, an impediment in his perfect surrender to Nancy; and so he scrupulously and conscientiously tried to explain it to her.
    “Don’t you know,” she replied, “that one of the things about love is that it enables you to love yourself, too, because it shews you yourself through the other person’s eyes?”
    He and Nancy always spoke of love, not of being in love.
    They planned to go home, without any precise timetable, by way of Vienna and Munich, where the only appointment they had set themselves was that Marcus should convert Nancy to an appreciation of Rubens. But he could not bring himself to break with the spell of Lucca.
    “I want to stay here for ever.”
    “No, you don’t,” she said. “Eventually, you’d want to do something.”
    “What?” he asked lazily. “Anyway, I could do something here. Why shouldn’t we simply stay? I’d like to live in Italy.”
    “No you wouldn’t. Not after a bit.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well for one thing—the first thing that occurs to me—you’d get sick of never being able to hear any decent music.”
    “Yes, that’s true,” he said. “I suppose there could be gramophone records, though. And anyway,” he added, rolling over and touching the soft part of her throat with his tongue, “I make music of my own. I play on you.” And on myself, he added mentally.
    A day or two later she urged him to book their seats for Vienna and Munich.
    “Why? Are you longing to go to a concert?” he asked.
    “I wouldn’t mind, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Would you?”
    “No, if it would come to me, here.”
    “I want us to leave Lucca,” Nancy said, “before we’ve exhausted it.”
    “You’re ruthless,” he said. “You’re an artist in love: I’m just a sensualist. I can’t bear to leave until I’ve exhausted it.”
    “If you’re really such a sensualist, I should have thought you’d be raring to get at all your big blonde Rubens women. You know, don’t you,” she added,“about the man who went round an exhibition of Rubens and came out a vegetarian?”
    “I’m the one who went in virtually a vegetarian and came out a carnivore. But actually, I don’t want Rubens women, if you don’t want to share them.”
    “I can’t share your women,” she said.
    “Why not? I know you’re capable of loving a woman.”
    “What makes you think so? I’m not, as a matter of fact.”
    “If you love me, you must see yourself through my eyes.”
    “O, well, perhaps myself,” Nancy said, “mediated through you. But otherwise—it’s the one perversion I have no sympathy for. I’ve nothing against it. I just don’t want it going on near me.”
    “O my prophetic soul, my unfortunate sister,” said Marcus.
    “Why, is she queer?”
    “I think,” he said, “she’s more than a little sweet on you.”
    “How loathsome,” said Nancy. In the silence which she left to appear, Marcus wondered if he had said that, too—for he really had no evidence of his sister’s feeling any such thing—to tease Nancy.
    As it turned out, they neither exhausted Lucca nor got to see the Rubenses, and it was, in the immediate sense, Marcus’s sister who cut them off. About two-thirds