Flesh by Brigid Brophy Page B

of the way through their honeymoon she telegraphed them at their Lucca hotel to say that Marcus’s father was seriously ill.
    They took the telegram with them into Milan, slapped it down on the counter under the nose of an English-speaking booking clerk and hectored him into giving them seats on a flight home.
    When they reached home, they discovered that Marcus’s father was in fact dead. He had never been ill. Abouthalf past two on a hot afternoon he had parked his car in a side street near his office, climbed out and fallen dead on the pavement.
    Nancy told Marcus later that she had known from the moment of seeing the telegram that his father was already dead. Marcus had never suspected it, simply, perhaps, because he had not been able to suspect his sister of doing something so conventional.
    Nancy and he went, of course, to stay with his mother and sister in the house near Ken Wood. As a matter of fact they would have had to go there in any case, as they had still not found a home of their own; Nancy had been reconciled to returning briefly to an N.W. address, while they searched for one in S.W.3, 7 or 10.
    Marcus learned of his father’s death when he telephoned home from the airport—a conversation which he made briefer than it need have been. He kept cutting his mother short and promising to come at once. Only when he had put the receiver down did he realise that there was nothing he could do to bring his father back to life and, therefore, no need to be so urgent. His mother had been implying as much. But he had believed, during the flight, that he must hurry if he was to see his father alive; and the belief survived the news that he was dead. Marcus insisted, though Nancy told him it was unnecessary , on hiring a car to take them straight from the airport home.
    During the drive he become disturbed by the thought that he was now hurrying to see his father dead. He was terrified by what he conjectured would be the social awkwardness of being conducted by his mother to an encounter with the body. He could not confide this terror even to Nancy—and again it was a social awkwardness which prevented him, a touch of nearly comic obscenity in the idea of mentioning his father’s body without the connotation of his father’s personality insideit. He could not ask Nancy where she supposed his father’s body had been put: it would have been like asking where she supposed his father’s left leg had been put. Any reference to his father as a physical presence had become impossible because it was impossible to decide whether the physical presence was still a he or had now turned into an it. Marcus did speak of his father to Nancy while they sat in the car, but he spoke of the whole, living man; his death he treated as though it had been a disappearance into the air.
    So—when they reached the Ken Wood house—it might have been. The body was not there. As Nancy could probably have told him if he had asked her, it had been taken first to a hospital and thence to an undertaker’s.
    Marcus was irritated with himself for his terrors in the car, and also because he had promoted in himself more courage to meet them than he now needed.
    Perhaps because he had unexpectedly been spared seeing the body, he seemed not to feel the shock of the death. That surprised him; he had been sure he would feel at least the selfish reaction that his own life had been unpleasingly interrupted. He was even more surprised to find developing in himself on his first night home—and here again, perhaps it was because he felt he had been let off lightly—a strong, tugging, almost anguishing current of grief. The feeling swelled in the days that followed. At moments his throat constricted as though to choke down a great plait, a whirlpool of tears. He was remorseful that there had been so small a relationship between him and his father. More bitterly still, he felt—which at times he thought grossly egocentric and at other times a tribute to his