Flesh Read Free

untempted by any of them. He felt bound to offer her the sausage rolls after all.
    “Ah, yes,” she said, taking one of the paper napkins,which he had forgotten to offer, and then one of the rolls. Biting into the roll and looking at Marcus, she said: “It seems so silly to let oneself be restricted by an old hygienic precaution that may have had some point in the ancient world, in the middle east….”
    Marcus wanted to say that he believed the theory that it was a hygienic precaution to be a piece of modern middle-class folklore. But he was afraid of sounding supercilious and intellectually aggressive.
    “Not that it is a hygienic precaution,” Nancy went on, on her own account, talking through chews as a gesture of informality, of flirtation even. “It’s perfectly obvious to anyone who’s read Frazer that it’s a straightforward primitive taboo.”
    Marcus made the motions of gasping—his lips dropped apart—at this revelation that she was an intellectual, too. But no answer would come through his lips, and he closed them again. But, since she had done so, he at least dared to draw out one of the paper table napkins. He rid himself of his glass—there was still no room on the table itself, but he balanced it, carefully, in the silver dish, where Nancy had made a space by taking a sausage roll. He began folding the napkin, again carefully, into shapes, expressing anguish by the violence with which he scored the folds with his thumb-nail, while he waited for the one person in the room with whom he had something in common to walk away from him.
    But she did not walk away.
    Marcus wanted to dare to ask her whether she liked Proust. Instead, he said, in a depressed voice.
    “Do you know many people here?”
    “Almost everyone except you.”
    He gave a giggle, which was really the expression of the gasp which had not come out before. Recovering himself—so far as he was ever in possession of himself—he told her his name, and she replied with hers.
    “Do you know many people?” she asked.
    “Almost no one.” His voice did not even pretend that this was unusual with him at parties.
    “Presumably you know our host and hostess?” She helped herself to another sausage roll, Marcus’s bony hands scurrying to offer her one too late, so that he found himself thrusting the silver dish into her breasts, at a time when both her mouth and hands were already occupied and she could not defend herself against him.
    “O yes,” he said hastily, putting the dish down, making a sign of apology and blushing, “O yes, I know them, of course.” And then, fearing he had given an untrue impression and claimed too much intimacy: “But not very well. Actually, she’s more a friend of my sister’s.”
    “Is she here tonight?” asked Nancy.
    “O yes.”
    Both Marcus’s and Nancy’s glance searched the room, hers with purpose, his with none.
    “What does she look like?”
    “But surely—” Marcus began, before he realised that Nancy had been speaking of his sister, he of their hostess.
    In despondency he corrected the misunderstanding. He believed Nancy must think him either witless or insulting to suppose she could have been asking whether their hostess was present at her own party; and he was more pierced by the irony because the whole reason why he had blundered so stupidly was that his thoughts had gone off in pursuit of some sign he might make, some subtle freemasonic code mark he might let fall, that should inform her that he too was intellectual.
    Nancy, he learned a year afterwards, had never for a moment taken him for anything else.
    “My sister would have been here,” he said, painstakingly delivering the full explanation, “only she’s gone skiing.”
    “Do you usually go round with your sister?”
    “Yes. I suppose so. Quite a lot. Except when she goes skiing.”
    Nancy laughed, and Marcus was pleased although he had said it to be truthful, not to be witty.
    “I have been skiing with her,” he