Flesh by Brigid Brophy Read Free Book Online Page B

for their key when it was still not more than nine o’clock, and he stumbled over the number, confusing sei with sette, a thing he was at all times careful not to do. But the clerk recognised them and gave them the right key in any case. Marcus was ashamed of his mistake and of the clerk’s condescension, which seemed to brush aside Marcus’s Italian and imply that it would have made no difference if Marcus had not known any. He dreaded the implications in the fact that the clerk had recognised them. As he folded back the gilt grille and ushered Nancy in, he was ashamed of the bedroom farce associations of lifts. As the lift rose, he was ashamed in retrospect of the perfection of the evening, the warmth of the air round their table, the romantic dusk, the latin dinner à deux…. It was like something in an illustrated travel brochure. And for him it was a parody of the romantic. He was convinced he would never be able to behave with the vulgar normality of the men illustrated in travel brochures.
    But Nancy appealed to his body, and roused it, witha couple of caresses. She had small, swift, soft, brown, cool hands. She also had her—as it was in relation to him—gift of tactlessness. She talked to him. Marcus had always imagined that when he did at last make love to a woman it would be in terrible silence, interrupted only by such noises as their bodies might involuntarily make, which he had already conceived might be embarrassing. But Nancy talked to him about what he was to do, about what he was doing, in a low, rather deep, swift voice which provoked in his skin almost the same sensation as her hands. When he entered her body, he felt he was following her voice.
    Where she led him was a strange world that was not new to him, since he had always known it existed, subterraneanly: a grotto, with whose confines and geographical dispositions he at once made himself quite familiar, as with the world of inside his own mouth: but a magic grotto, limitless, infinitely receding and enticing, because every sensation he experienced there carried on its back an endless multiplication of overtones, with the result that the sensation, though more than complete, was never finished, and every experience conducted him to the next; a world where he pleasurably lost himself in a confusion of the senses not in the least malapropos but as appropriate and precise as poetry—a world where one really did see sounds and hear scents, where doves might well have roared and. given suck, where perfectly defined, delightful local tactile sensations dissolved into apperceptions of light or darkness, of colour, of thickness, of temperature….
    Sensuousness and passion, which his imagination had apprehended to be antithetical, were in Nancy’s world plaited into such a perfect interpenetration of opposites that the one could grow as a climax out of the other. Her face would lie for a slow moment above his, her eyes piercing his, until gradually her lips would descend onhis full lips, slowly enclosing and enfolding them into a tender intensity of such sensuousness that it comprehended the sensations not only to taste and of texture, but of gentle, exhausting exploration. And yet, even as he felt drained, a climax would gather out of his pebbly dryness like a wave re-forming in its moment of being sucked back, and he would heave himself up, curling above her like a wave, and would snatch, rape, her into an embrace of bitter, muscular, desperate, violence, that could only, he felt, be resolved by a death agony…. Yet in reality even this crisis opened, as if on the clash of a pair of cymbals, into a sunlit, flowering landscape, in which one of the flowers proved, subtly, surprisingly, to be his left ear, into which Nancy’s finger was inserted—making an effect of wit, to which his response of a sharply indrawn breath made an effect of repartee.
    It was a grotto, a private, underground, enchanted folly, of which neither of them could have enough.