FAY WELDON

THE FAT WOMAN’S JOKE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

1

2

3

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

What Esther Sussman liked about Earls Court was that she didn’t know anyone who lived there. The legs which passed the bars of her basement window, day and night, belonged to nobody she had ever seen or would ever have to see again. Between four and six every morning the street would empty, and then the silence would disturb her, and she would wake, and get up, and make herself a cup of cocoa and eat a piece of chocolate cake, icing first. There is nothing, she would think, more delicious than the icing of bought chocolate cake, eaten in the silence and privacy of the night.

During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.

She ate frozen chips and peas and hamburgers, and sliced bread with bought jam and fishpaste, and baked beans and instant puddings, and tinned porridge and tinned suet pudding, and cakes and biscuits from packets. She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry.

This is the only proper holiday, she thought, that I have had for years; and then she thought, but this is not a holiday, this is my life until I die; and then she would eat a biscuit, or make a piece of toast, and melt some ready-sliced cheese on top of it, remembering that the act of cooking had once been almost as absorbing as the act of eating.

The flat was dark and damp, as was only right and fitting, and the furniture was nailed to the floor in case some passing tenant saw fit to sell or burn it. Esther, in fact, found it pleasant to have her whereabouts controlled by a dozen nails. The less freedom of choice she had the better. She had not felt so secure since she spent her days in a pram.

She lived in this manner for several weeks. From time to time she would put on an old black coat over her old black dress and go to Smith’s for more science fiction paperbacks, and to the supermarket for more food. When the cupboards were full of food she felt pleased. When her stocks ran low she became uneasy.

Phyllis was the last of Esther’s circle to seek her out. She came tripping prettily down the steps one afternoon; thirty-one and finely boned, beautifully dressed in a red tiny-flowered trouser suit with hat to match – neat, sexy and rich; invincibly lively and invincibly stupid.

She dusted off the seat of the armchair before she sat down. She took off her hat and laid it on the table. She stared sadly at Esther with her round silly eyes; Esther kept her own lowered, and sliced a round of hot buttered toast into fingers. When drops of butter fell on to her black dress she rubbed them in with her hand.

‘Oh Esther,’ said Phyllis, ‘why didn’t you tell me? If I had known you’d needed help, I would have been here at once. If you’d left your address –’

‘I don’t need help. What sort of help should I need?’

‘Going off like that without a word to anyone. I thought we were supposed to be friends? Now what are friends for if not for help at times like these?’

‘Times like what?’ Butter ran down Esther’s chin. She salvaged it with her tongue.

‘It took me weeks finding you, and you know how busy I am. I tried to make Alan tell me where you were but he just wouldn’t, and your lawyer didn’t know a thing, and your mother was fantastically evasive, and in the end I ran into Peter and he told me. Do you think that girlfriend of his is suitable? I mean, really suitable? She treats him like dirt. He’s too young to know how to cope. I wish you’d stop eating, Esther, you’ll be like a balloon.’

Esther surveyed her plump hands and wrists and laughed. It was a grimy flat, and the butter mingled with the dirt round her nails.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like some toast, Phyllis? Toast is one of the triumphs of our civilisation. It must be made with very fresh bread, thickly cut; then toasted very quickly and buttered at once, so the butter is half-melted. Unsalted butter, of course; you sprinkle it with salt afterwards. Sea salt, preferably.’

Esther found to her surprise she was crying. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing a streak of oily grime across her cheek, where the white fat lay thickly larded beneath the skin.

‘No thank you. No toast. And that lovely boy Peter. He needs you at this crisis of his life. If ever a boy needed his mother, it’s Peter at this moment. And what about poor Alan? It breaks my heart to see all this senseless misery. I don’t understand any of it. Your lovely marriage, all in ruins.’

‘Marriage is too strong an institution for me,’ said Esther. ‘It is altogether too heavy and powerful.’ And indeed at that moment she felt it to be a single steady crushing weight, on top of which bore down the entire human edifice of city and state, learning and religion, commerce and law; pomp, passion and reproduction besides. Beneath this mighty structure the little needles of feeling which flickered between Alan and her were dreadful in their implication. When she challenged her husband, she challenged her known universe.

‘What an odd thing to say. Marriage to me is a source of strength, not a weight upon me. I’m sure that’s how one ought to look at it. And you are going back to Alan, aren’t you? Please say you are.’

‘No. This is my home now. I like it. Nothing happens here. I know what to expect from one day to the next. I can control everything, and I can eat. I like eating. Were I attracted to men, or indeed attractive to them, I would perhaps find a similar pleasure in some form of sexual activity. But as it is, I just eat. When you eat, you get fat, and that’s all. There are no complications. But husbands, children – no, Phyllis, I am sorry. I am not strong enough for them.’

‘You are behaving so oddly. Have you seen a doctor? I know this divine man in Wimpole Street. He’s done marvels for me.’

‘I wish you would have something to eat, Phyllis. It makes me nervous, to see you just sitting there, not eating, staring, understanding only about a quarter of what I say.

‘I suppose you really do believe that your happiness is consequent upon your size? That an inch or two one way or the other would make you truly loved? Equating prettiness with sexuality, and sexuality with happiness? It is a very debased view of femininity you take, Phyllis. It would be excusable in a sixteen-year-old – if my nose were a different shape, if my bosom were larger, if my freckles were gone, then the whole world would be different. But in a woman of your age it is vulgar.’

‘I am sorry, but I see it differently. It is just common-sense to make the most of oneself. In any case, everything is different for you. You don’t seem to have to follow the rules, as the rest of us do. To be frank, you are an appalling sight at this very moment; you have let yourself go – but I have known you look quite ravishing. I think Gerry always rather fancied you. And I will say this for Gerry, he has good taste. Otherwise the humiliation would be unendurable. Yet it’s odd; they are always women of a totally different type from me. Why do you think that is?’

Esther rose from her chair, her flesh unfolding beneath the loose fabric of her dress. She crossed to the cupboard and presently selected a tin of condensed mushroom soup which she opened, poured into a saucepan, and heated on the stove. Phyllis talked to her friend’s broad back like a humming-bird chirping away at a rhinoceros.

‘I don’t mind about Gerry’s fancies, really. It’s a very small part of marriage, isn’t it? If there’s anything I’ve learned in my life it’s that one comes to terms with this kind of thing in the end.’

‘I come to terms with nothing.’

‘Besides, it’s probably just all talk with him. They do say that the men who talk most, do least.’

‘They’ll say anything to comfort themselves.’

‘Oh.’ Phyllis abandoned the subject. ‘Esther, I don’t understand what went wrong between you and Alan, so suddenly. Why are you living down here in this horrible place? And why did you leave, not him? I don’t believe he turned you out. He’s such a good man. He’s not impetuous, like Gerry. You always seemed so right for each other, so settled and content. He never even talked about other women, not when you were in the room anyway. Sometimes after I’d been with you both I’d go home and cry because Gerry and I could never be close like you and Alan. The only time Gerry and I are ever close is when we’re in bed, and even then I don’t really enjoy it. It just seems the most important thing in the world. Can you understand that? And now that you two have split up, it just seems like the end of the world to me. Everything has suddenly become frightening. Esther, you’ve made me afraid.’

‘You are right to feel afraid. Are you sure you don’t want some of this soup? It is very good – although perhaps a little salty. That’s the trouble with condensed soups. You have to choose between having them too weak or too salty.’

‘Why am I right to feel afraid, Esther? What is there to be afraid of? I think and think but I can’t make it out. You make me feel all kinds of things are going on underneath which I don’t understand. It can’t be Gerry, because I know he’ll never leave me. He’ll just go on having sordid affairs with sordid women, but they mean nothing to him. He tells me so, all the time. He’s a hot-blooded man, you see, so it’s understandable. It’s just something a woman like me has to learn to put up with. And in a way, I suppose it has its advantages. He couldn’t blame me if I did look round for my amusements, could he?’

‘He would, though.’

‘Well it wouldn’t be reasonable of him – of course he’s not a very reasonable person. That’s why I love him. If only I could find an attractive man I’d have a lovely passionate affair with him. But there aren’t any attractive men left. Why do you think that is? Esther, you haven’t answered my question. Why do you think I am right to feel afraid?’

‘Because you are growing old. Because lurking somewhere beneath the surface of your brain is a vision of loneliness, and it will be a terrible moment when it breaks through, and you realise that your future is not green pastures, but the knackers yard. We are all separate people, and we are all alone. It is a ridiculous thing to say that no man is an island. We are all islands. You can die, and Gerry won’t. Gerry can die, and you won’t. Our lives just go on, separate as they have always been. There are no end of things you can be afraid of, if you put your mind to it. Do have some soup. If I emptied a tin of cream in it might improve matters. And a little tomato sauce would cover up the tinny taste.’

‘You say the most terrible things and then you expect me to eat.’

‘Of course. You can’t put off being useless and old and unwanted for ever. Soon, little Phyllis, you will stop painting your toe-nails. Already I suspect you no longer wear your best knickers to parties. It will all be over for you as it is for me, and love and motherhood and romance will be no more than dreams remembered, and rather bad dreams at that. Your real life will begin as mine has now. This is what it’s like. Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs. None are as effective as sex, but they are calmer and safer. Nuts?’

‘Nuts? Who? Oh – I see.’

Esther was offering Phyllis a bowl of nuts.

‘Nuts are lovely,’ said Esther. ‘Your teeth go through the middle, and they’re white and pure and clean inside, and slightly salty and dirty and sexy outside. They make your mouth just a little sore, so you have to take another mouthful to find out if they really do or not.’

‘Esther, if you eat so much you will make yourself ill. You’ve gone completely to pieces. You must make an effort to pull yourself together. You will have to go on a diet again. You and Alan were on a diet just before all this started. I never thought you’d go through with it, but you did, and I respect you for it. But now you’ve undone all the good you did.’

Esther looked at Phyllis with distaste. ‘Oh go away!’ She loomed over Phyllis, dirty-nailed, dirty-faced, brilliant-eyed and dangerous. ‘Go away! I didn’t want you to come here, asking questions, nagging. I came here to have some peace. I don’t want to see anyone. What do you want from me?’

‘I want to help you.’

‘Don’t be so stupid. You help me? You’re like a mad old woman battering at the prison gates when the hanging’s due. All you really want is just to be in there watching. There’s nothing here to watch. Just a fat woman eating. That’s all. You can see them in any café, any day. They’re all around.’

‘You are very upset, Esther,’ said Phyllis doggedly. ‘I’m your friend. I’m very hurt you didn’t turn to me when you were in trouble.’

Esther beat her head with her hand.

‘That’s what I mean! “I’m very hurt!” I can’t stand it. What am I supposed to do now? Comfort your stupid little worries? What do you think it all is – some kind of game? This is our life, and it’s the only one we’re ever going to get, and it’s a desperate business, and you come bleating to me about your being hurt because I, being near to death and madness, don’t come bleating to you with – oh, he treats me so badly, oh, you know what he said, you know what he did – as if talking can make things different. Phyllis, will you please, for your own sake, go away and leave me alone?’

‘No.’

Esther gave up.

‘Then I will tell you all about it. And when you have drunk your fill of miseries, perhaps then you will feel satisfied and go away. I warn you, it will not be pleasant. You will become upset and angry. It is a story of patterns but no endings, meanings but no answers, and jokes where it would be nice if no jokes were. You have never heard a tale quite like this before and that in itself you will find hard to endure. Are you sitting comfortably?’

‘Yes,’ said Phyllis, putting her hands neatly together in her lap.

‘Then I’ll begin.’

Meanwhile, up in Hampstead, in an attic flat, two other women were talking. There was Susan, who was twenty-four, and Brenda, who was twenty-two. It was Susan’s flat, and Brenda was staying in the absence of Susan’s boyfriend. Just now Susan was painting a picture of Brenda: these days when she came home from the office she would put on a dun-coloured smock and take up her brush at once. She said it gave her life meaning.

Susan was tall, and slim to the point of gauntness. She had straight very thick fair hair, enigmatic slanty green eyes, high cheekbones, a bold nose and an intelligent expression. From time to time, as she worked, she would see herself in the mirror behind Brenda, and would like what she saw.

‘It’s a pity,’ she said to Brenda, ‘that your legs are so heavy. Otherwise you’d stop the traffic in the streets.’

Brenda had long legs and they were, in truth, fairly massive around the thighs. But seen sideways on she was almost as slim as Susan herself. She had a round face and an innocent look. She thought Susan lived a wild, fascinating, exciting life.

‘What can I do about my legs?’

‘Don’t wear trousers,’ said Susan.

‘But trousers are no bother.’

‘You’re supposed to bother. You’ve got to bother if you’re a woman. Otherwise you might as well be a man.’

‘It’s not fair. I didn’t ask to be born with legs like pillars.’

‘I daresay they are good for child-bearing.’

‘Can I look?’ Brenda lived in hope that one day Susan would paint a flattering portrait of her. Susan never did.

The telephone rang.

‘You’d better answer it,’ said Susan. ‘If it’s Alan I’m not at home. I’ve gone away for a month to the country.’

It wasn’t Alan, but a wrong number.

‘Perhaps you should ring him,’ ventured Brenda. ‘Then you wouldn’t be so edgy.’

‘I’m not edgy,’ said Susan. ‘I am upset. So we’re all upset. Loving is upsetting. That’s the point of it.’

‘What about his wife? Is she upset?’

‘I don’t think she feels very much at all. Like fish feel no pain when you catch them. From what Alan says, her emotional extremities are primitive.’

‘If I went out with a married man I’d feel awful,’ said Brenda.

‘Why?’

‘I’d worry about his wife.’

‘You are very different from me. You are fundamentally on the side of wives, and families. I don’t like wives, on principle. I like to feel that any husband would prefer me to his wife. Wives are a dull, dreadful, boring, possessive lot by virtue of their state. I am all for sexual free enterprise. Let the best woman win.’

‘If you were married,’ said Brenda, ‘you would not talk like that.’

‘If I was married,’ said Susan, ‘which heaven forbid, I would make sure I outshone every other woman in the world. I wouldn’t let myself go.’

‘Alan didn’t seem your type at all.’

‘I don’t have a type. You are very vulgar sometimes. You know nothing about sex or art or anything.’

‘I don’t know why you always want to paint me, then. You seem to have such a low opinion of me. It is very tiring.’

‘You have a marvellous face,’ said Susan. ‘If only you would do something with it.’

‘What do you mean, do something with it?’

‘Give it a kind of style, or put an expression on it that suited it.’

‘What would suit it?’ Brenda was worried.

‘I don’t know. I’m getting very bored. Shall we go to the pub?’

‘I don’t like sitting about in pubs. All those smelly people, so full of drink they don’t know what they’re doing. Last time I was in a pub a man pee-ed himself, he was so drunk. How can you talk to anyone in a pub?’

‘You go to pubs to enjoy yourself, not to talk. Communication is on a different level altogether. Sometimes I think you should run home to Mummy. You have no gift for living.’

‘Oh all right, we’ll go to the pub. But will you tell me all about Alan?’

‘What about him? What do you want to know? You are very prurient.’

‘I don’t want to know all about that. I want to know what you felt. You make me feel so outclassed. Your relationships are so major, somehow. Nothing like that ever happens to me.’

‘He was on a diet,’ said Susan. ‘That’s a feminine kind of thing to be, really. On the whole masculine things are boring and feminine things are interesting.’

‘Men don’t bore me,’ said Brenda. ‘Everything else, but I’ve never been bored by a man.’

‘Then you’re lucky. But that wasn’t what I was saying. You are very dim sometimes.’

Susan took off her smock. Brenda put on her shoes.

‘You never know with men,’ said Susan, pulling on an open lace-work dress over a flesh-coloured body stocking. ‘The ones who are most interesting before, are often the most boring afterwards, and vice versa.’

‘In that case,’ said Brenda, ‘it would be absurd for a girl to marry a man she hadn’t been to bed with, wouldn’t it? Think of all those poor lovesick virgins in the past, all going starry-eyed to the altar and all destined for a lifetime’s boredom. How terrible! And to think that my mother would wish to perpetuate such a system for ever!’

‘All human activity,’ remarked Susan, painting a rim of black around her eyes, ‘is fairly absurd.’

Brenda put on her jockey’s cap and they left. They were a ravishing pair. People stared after them.

Esther had a very pretty soft voice. It was one of the things that had first made Alan notice her. Now, as she recounted her tale, it floated so meekly out of her lips that it was quite an effort for Phyllis to catch what she was saying.

‘Alan and I were accustomed to eating a great deal, of course. We all have our cushions against reality: we all have to have our little treats to look forward to. With Gerry it’s looking forward to laying girls, and with you it’s looking forward to enduring it, and with Alan and me it was eating food. So you can imagine how vulnerable a diet made us.’

‘I wish you would stop using the past tense about you and Alan.’

‘I know it is only four weeks ago but it might as well be forty years. My marriage with Alan is over. Please don’t interrupt. I am explaining how food set the pattern of our days. All day in his grand office Alan would sip coffee and nibble biscuits and plan his canteen dockets and organise cold chicken and salad and wine for working lunches, and all day at home I would plan food, and buy food, and cook food, and serve food, and nibble and taste and stir and experiment and make sweeties and goodies and tasties for Alan to try out when he came home. I would feel cheated if we were asked out to dinner. I would spend the entire afternoon making myself as beautiful as my increasing age and girth would allow, but still I felt cheated.’

‘You were a wonderful cook. Gerry used to say you were the best cook in England. When you two came to dinner I would go mad with worry. It would take me the whole day just producing something I wouldn’t be ashamed of. And even then I usually was.’

‘People who can’t cook shouldn’t try. It is a gift which you are either born with or you aren’t. I used to quite enjoy coming to visit you two in spite of the food. You and Gerry would quarrel and bicker, and get at each other in subtle and not so subtle ways, and Alan and I would sit back, lulled by our full bellies into a sense of security, and really believe ourselves to be happy, content and well-matched. This day, four weeks ago, I really think I thought I was happy. There were little grey clouds, here and there, like Alan’s writing, which was distracting him from his job, and Peter’s precocity, and my boredom with the house and simply, I suppose growing older and fatter. In truth of course, they weren’t little clouds at all. They were raging bloody crashing thunderstorms. But there is none so blind as those who are too stuffed full of food to see.’

‘I don’t really know what you are talking about.’

‘You will come to understand, if you pay attention. You are sure you want me to go on with this story?’

‘Yes. Oh Esther, you can’t still be hungry!’ Esther was taking frozen fish fingers from their pack.

‘I have no intention, ever again, of doing without what I want. That was what Alan and I presumed to think we could do, that evening in your house when we decided to go on a diet.’

Phyllis Frazer’s living-room was rich, uncluttered, pale, tidy and serene. Yet its tidiness, when the Sussmans arrived, seemed deceitful, and its serenity a fraud. And the Frazers, like their room, had an air of urbanity which was not quite believable. Phyllis’s cheeks were too pink and Gerry’s smile too wide. The doorbell, Esther assumed, had put a stop to a scene of either passion or rage. Gerry was a vigorous, noisy man, twice Phyllis’s size. He was a successful civil engineer.

‘I hope we’re not early,’ said Esther. ‘We had to come by taxi. We have this new car, you see.’ She was kissed first by Phyllis and then by Gerry, who took longer over the embrace than was necessary. Alan pecked Phyllis discreetly, and not without embarrassment, and shook hands with Gerry. When they sat down for their pre-dinner drinks Gerry could see the flesh of Esther’s thighs swelling over the tops of her stockings. Esther was aware of this but did nothing about it. She looked, this evening, both monumental and magnificent. Her bright eyes flashed and her pale, large face was animated. Beside her, Alan appeared insignificant, although when he was away from her he stood out as a reasonably sized, reasonably endowed man. He had a thin, clever, craggy face and an urbane manner. His paunch sat uneasily on a frame not designed for it. He had worked in the same advertising agency for fifteen years, and was now in a position of trust and accorded much automatic respect. His title was ‘Executive Creative Controller’.

‘I know nothing about the insides of cars,’ he now said, ‘except that whenever I buy a new one it goes for a day and then stops. After that it’s garages and guarantees and trouble until I wish I had bought a bicycle instead. I don’t even know why I buy cars. It just seems to happen. I think perhaps I was sold this one by one of my own advertisements. I am a suggestible person.’

‘You take things calmly,’ said Gerry. ‘If I bought a car which so much as faltered somebody’s head would roll.’

‘But you are a man of passions. I am a cerebral creature.’

‘It’s the British workman,’ said Gerry. ‘No amount of good design these days can counteract the criminal imbecility of the average British worker.’

‘Oh please Gerry darling,’ cried his wife. ‘No! My heart sinks when I hear those terrible words “these days” and “British workman”. I know it is going on for a full hour.’

‘A man buys a new car. It costs a lot of money. If it breaks down it is only courtesy to give the matter a little attention, Phyllis.’

He was pouring everyone extremely large drinks – everyone, that is, except his wife.

‘What about me?’ she piped, trembling. ‘I’se dry.’

Grudgingly he poured her a small drink, as a husband might pour one for an alcoholic wife. Phyllis very rarely drank to excess. For every bottle of Scotch her husband drank she would sip an inch or so of gin, on the principle that it would make her monthly period, which frequently bothered her, easier.

‘All this talk of cars,’ she said, emboldened by his kindness to her, ‘I hate it. Don’t you Esther? It’s such a bore.’

‘If you spend enough money on something, you can’t afford to think it’s a bore.’

‘Your wife,’ said Gerry, with a disparaging look towards his own, ‘is a highly intelligent woman.’

Esther wriggled, showing a little more thigh for his benefit. They all drank rather deeply.

‘Sometimes,’ said Alan, ‘I am afraid that Esther knows everything. At other times I am afraid she doesn’t.’

‘Why? Are you hiding something from her?’ asked Phyllis.

‘I have nothing to hide from my Esther.’

‘You hide your writing from me. Or try to. You lock it away.’

‘Writing?’ they cried. ‘Writing?’

‘Alan has been writing a novel in secret. He sent it off to an agent last week. Now we wait. It makes him bad-tempered. Don’t ask me what it’s about.’

‘What’s it like? Are we in it?’

‘No,’ said Alan shortly. ‘You are not.’

‘He’s the only one who’s in it,’ said Esther.

‘How do you know?’ he turned on her, fiercely.

‘I was only guessing,’ she said. ‘Or working from first principles. Why? Are you?’

He did not reply, and presently they lost interest. Phyllis enquired brightly about Peter.

‘He can’t concentrate on his school work,’ said Esther. ‘His sex life is too complicated. But I don’t think it makes any difference. He was born to pass exams and captain cricket teams. Failure is simply not in his nature.’

‘Peter sails unafraid and uncomplicated through life,’ said Alan. ‘We take little notice of him, and he takes none of us.’

‘Shall we eat,’ said Phyllis, who appreciated Peter as a boy but not as a son.

‘We’re still drinking,’ said her husband. ‘Give us a moment’s peace.’

‘I’m afraid the beef will be overcooked.’

‘Beef is sacred,’ said Alan, so they went in to the dining-room, where the William Morris wallpaper contrasted prettily with the plain black of the tablecloth and the white of the Rosenthal china.

They sat around the table.

‘Alan can’t stand grey beef. He likes it to be red and bloody in the middle. He goes rather far, I think, towards the naked, unashamed flesh. But there we are. Beef is a matter of taste, not absolute values. At least I hope so.’

‘Anyway, Gerry thinks if I cook something it is awful, and if you cook something it’s lovely, Esther, so why bother.’

‘I think you are a superb cook, Phyllis,’ lied Esther.

‘Or we wouldn’t come here,’ said Alan.

‘Personally, in this house I would rather drink than eat any day,’ said Gerry.

‘I wish you would stop being horrid to your wife, Gerry,’ said Esther, finally coming down on Phyllis’s side. ‘It makes her cross and everyone’s gastric juices go sour. Why don’t you just appreciate her?’

‘She’s quite right,’ said Alan. ‘Women are what their husbands expect them to be; no more and no less. The more you flatter them the more they thrive.’

‘On lies?’ enquired Gerry.

‘If need be.’

Esther was disturbed. ‘You are horrible,’ she said. ‘Can’t we just get on with dinner?’

Phyllis passed the mayonnaise, where artichoke hearts, flaked fish, olives and eggs lay immersed. The mayonnaise was perhaps too thin and too salty. They helped themselves, with all the appearance of enthusiasm.

‘It has been a hard day,’ said Gerry mournfully.

‘But rewarding?’

‘A new office block to do, if I’m lucky. A new world to conquer.’

‘And a new secretary,’ said his wife. ‘A luscious child, at least eighteen, and nubile for the last five years. Plump, biteable and ripe.’

‘Alan has a new secretary,’ said Esther. ‘I don’t know what she looks like. What does she look like, Alan? There she sits, day after day, part of your life but not of mine.’ Her voice was wistful.

‘She is slim like a willow. But she has curves here and there.’ The appreciation in her husband’s voice was not at all what Esther had bargained for.

‘Oh dear. And I’m so fat. No thanks, Phyllis darling, no more.’

‘I like you fat. I accept you fat. You are fat.’

‘Not too fat?’

‘Well perhaps,’ said Alan, ‘just a little too fat.’

‘Oh,’ moaned Esther, taken aback.

‘What’s the matter now?’

‘You’ve never said that to me before.’

‘You’ve never been as fat as this before.’

‘I’m so thin,’ complained Phyllis politely, ‘I can’t get fat. Do you like garlic bread?’

‘Superb.’

‘Well you can’t spoil that, at least,’ said Gerry.

‘More, Alan?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Do you think you should?’ asked Esther. ‘Every time I sew your jacket buttons on I have to use stronger and stronger thread.’

‘I admit your point. I am fat too. We are a horrid gross lot.’

‘Eat, drink and fornicate,’ boomed their host. ‘There is too much abstinence going on.’ His wife made apologetic faces at the guests.

‘If you are fat you die sooner,’ said Alan.

‘Who cares?’ asked his wife, but no one took any notice, so she said, ‘Tell me about your secretary, Alan. Besides being so slim, but curvacious with it, what is she like? Perhaps you wish she was me?’

‘What is the matter with you?’

‘It’s us,’ said Phyllis dismally. ‘Discontent is catching.’

‘I am not discontented. I just hope Alan isn’t. Who am I to compete with a secretary fresh from a charm school, with a light in her eye and life in her loins?’

‘Careful, Esther,’ said Gerry. ‘Those are Phil’s lines, to be spoken in a plaintive female whine and guaranteed to drive a man straight into a mistress’s arms.’

‘One wonders which comes first,’ she said, ‘the mistress or the female whine. It would be interesting to do a study.’

Alan decided to bring the table back to order.

‘You have no cause for concern whatsoever, Esther. To tell you the truth I can’t even remember her name. It is entirely forgettable. I think it is Susan. She can’t type to save herself. She is thin. She is temporary. I think she thinks she is not a typist by nature, but something far more mysterious and significant, but this is a normal delusion of temporary staff. She is in, I imagine, her early twenties. She keeps forgetting that I like plain chocolate biscuits, and dislike milk chocolate biscuits. Now you, Esther, never make mistakes like that. You have a clear notion of what is important in life. Namely money, comfort, food, order and stability.’

‘You make me sound just like my mother. Is that what you really think of me?’

‘No. I am merely trying to publicly affirm my faith in you, marriage and the established order, and to explain that I am content with my lot. I am a married man and I married of my own free will. I am a city man, and live in the city of my own free will. A company man, also of my own volition. So I should not be surprised to find myself, in middle-age, a middle-aged, married, company, city man – with no power in my muscles and precious little in my mind. Here in this sulphurous city I live and die, with as much peace and comfort as I can draw around me. Work, home, wife, child – this is my life and I am not aggrieved by it. I chose it. I know my place. I daresay I shall die as happy and fulfilled as most.’

‘It sounds perfectly horrible to me,’ said Esther. ‘However, I don’t take you seriously because you have just sent your magnum opus to a publisher, and I know you are quite convinced you will spend your declining years in an aura of esteem and respect and creative endeavour. I believe also that somewhere down inside you lurks a rich fantasy life in which you travel to exotic places, conquer mountains, do any number of noble and heroic deeds, save battalions singlehanded, and lay the world’s most beautiful women right and left. There may well be a more perverse and morbid side to this, but I would rather not go into it here. And you, Gerry, tell me, do you not ever wish to do extreme and fearful things? Is your masculinity entirely channelled into lustful thoughts of the opposite sex? Do you not want to burn, savage, torture, kill? Or at any rate, like Alan, failing that, are you not seized with the desire to break all the best glasses, miss the basin when you pee, burn the sheets with cigarette ends, leave smelly socks about for your wife to pick up –’

‘Women have their revenges too –’ said Alan. ‘They leave old sanitary towels around.’

Abruptly they all stopped talking. Alan crammed more garlic bread into his mouth. He bit upon a garlic clove and was obliged to spit it out. Everyone watched.

‘We all talk too much,’ said Esther to Phyllis in the kitchen a little later. ‘One has to be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts, and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits. Our home isn’t half going to be messy from now on.’

When they returned to the kitchen with the second course, the murmur of men’s voices stopped abruptly.

‘What were you telling Alan to do?’ Phyllis asked her husband. ‘Go off with his secretary? For the sake of his red corpuscles?’

He did not reply, for this indeed had been the essence of his conversation.

‘Esther,’ was all Alan said, ‘we are going on a diet, you and I. We are going to fight back middle-age. Hand in hand, with a stiff upper lip and an aching midriff, we are going to push back the enemy.’

‘When?’ asked Esther in alarm, looking at the mountains of food on the table – the crackling hot pottery dishes of vegetables, the bowls of sauces, the great oval platter on which the bloody beef reposed. ‘Not now?’

‘Of course not,’ said Alan. ‘Tomorrow we start.’

‘New lives always begin tomorrow,’ said Phyllis. ‘Never now. That’s right, isn’t it, Gerry? Will you carve?’

Gerry sharpened the knife. It flashed to and fro under their noses. He carved.

‘We’re going to do it, Esther,’ said Alan, watching the food piling on her plate. ‘Look your last on all things lovely. We’ll take a stone off apiece.’

‘If you say so, darling,’ said Esther. ‘I’m all yours to command.’

‘Oh she’s a lovely woman,’ said Gerry.

‘You’ll never stick it,’ said Phyllis, jealously. ‘You’ll never be able to do it.’

‘Of course we will,’ said Esther. ‘If we want to, we will. And we want to.’

‘Doing without what you want is the hardest thing in the world,’ said Phyllis. ‘Isn’t it, Gerry?’

‘Incidentally,’ said Esther to Phyllis four weeks later, ‘there was too much salt in the mayonnaise that night, and too much in the gravy too. So we had to drink a lot. And the next day Alan and I had hangovers, and were cross and miserable even before we started our régime of abstinence.’

‘You didn’t say anything about too much salt at the time.’

‘One doesn’t. Or nobody would ever ask anyone to dinner any more. The middle classes would grind to a social halt. It wasn’t a bad meal, for once, in fact. Which was just as well, because it was the last we had for some time.’

‘After you two had gone,’ said Phyllis, ‘I went to sleep on the sofa. Gerry wouldn’t stop visiting his ex-wife every Saturday, and I was upset and angry, and I thought he’d been behaving badly all evening, anyway. But in the middle of the night he hauled me into bed – he’s much stronger than I am – and we were happy for a time. Until Saturday came again. Or at least he was happy. I’m not very good at that kind of thing. It’s the gesture I appreciate, not the thing itself. I think.’

‘And Alan and I went home and had cocoa and biscuits and went to sleep. We were tired. We’d been married, after all, for nearly twenty years.’

‘But you and Alan were always touching each other,’ said Phyllis, ‘like young lovers. As if even after all those years you couldn’t keep your hands off each other.’

‘And we meant it,’ said Esther crossly, ‘in public. It was just when we got home we found we were tired. Once you are beyond a certain age sex isn’t an instinct any more – it’s a social convention.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘I am sorry, but you feel sexy because you know it’s nice to feel sexy, not because you really are. Are you sure you wouldn’t like coffee?’

‘No,’ said Phyllis. Then she added, urgently, ‘Esther! Living here, alone, with no husband. No boyfriend. Surely you feel – at night –?’

‘No. I live by myself. Just me. Self-sufficient, wanting no one, no other mind, no other body. I live with the truth. I need no protection from it.’

‘Gerry and I,’ said Phyllis. ‘I am so miserable. We are chained together by our bed.’

‘That is your misfortune,’ said Esther, ‘and why you are so unhappy. Bed is a very difficult habit to break. Now let us continue with my story, because yours is very ordinary and I am not concerned with it. In the morning Alan kissed me goodbye – on the doorstep so the neighbours could see – and went to his office. He had had no breakfast. He was feeling desperate and hungover, but dieting seemed to him to be a rich and positive thing. Perhaps that was why, this particular morning, his secretary made such an impression on him, and he on his secretary.’

Susan and Brenda sat in the pub, conscious of their youth and beauty, which indeed shone like a beacon in a boozy, beery world, and Susan gave Brenda her more detailed account of a morning which Esther could only guess at.

‘The typing agency quite often send me to Norman, Zo-Hailey –’ said Susan, naming a large London advertising agency. ‘They always need temporary staff. Girls never stay long. They think it’s going to be glamorous and all they find is a lot of dull old research people plodding through statistics. Married ones, at that. And the pay’s bad, so they hand in their notice. And then again, if they do get to the livelier departments, it soon transpires that men in advertising agencies hardly count as men. What man worth his salt would spend his life sitting in an office selling other people’s goods, by proxy?’

‘Alan seems to have behaved like a man, from what you say.’

‘Alan was different. He was a creative person. Anyway they’re all quite good at pretending to be men. They know all the rules. Their bodies, even, work as if they were men, but on the whole they’re deceiving themselves and everyone else.’

‘Perhaps you and I are only pretending to be women. How could we tell?’

‘We are both flat-chested, it is true,’ said Susan, ‘and when I come to think of it, Alan had very pronounced nipples at the beginning of that fortnight. Almost what approached a bosom. It fascinated me. I had never encountered anything like it before. I began to wonder if I perhaps had lesbian tendencies.’

‘It sounds perfectly revolting.’

‘Not in the least. He has this thin face to counteract it. He was an important man at Zo’s. Everyone seemed to think I ought to be pleased to work for him but all I did was make rather more mistakes than usual. He never got irritated. He just used to sigh and raise his eyebrows at me as if I was a naughty child but he would forgive me. In the end I began to feel quite like a daughter to him. And when one’s father turns lascivious eyes upon one, that’s that, isn’t it? You get all stirred up inside. You begin to want to impress. You find yourself putting on make-up just to come to work. And he’d written this novel, and his agent rang up and raved about it, and I listened on the extension when I was getting the coffee in the outer office. I find there is something very erotic about literary men, don’t you?’

‘I really don’t know. I haven’t been in London long enough. Anyway, I thought you were supposed to be in love with William Macklesfield.’ William Macklesfield was the middle-aged poet who had been seen occasionally on the television, and with whom, on and off, Susan had been sleeping for years.

‘William and I are very close. We are best friends. We have a wonderful platonic relationship with sex lying, as it were, on top of it. But we are not in love. Not the kind of lightning love which suddenly flashes out of a clear sky and tumbles you on your back.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Brenda. ‘Things like that never happen to me.’

‘It’s your pillar-like legs,’ said Susan. ‘And your matriarchal destiny. Your time will come when you are sixty, surrounded by your grandchildren and bullying your sons. When I am an ageing drunken lush only fit for a mental home, then I daresay you will be glad that you are you and I am I. In the meantime I can fairly say that of the two of us, I have the more style.’

‘Thank you very much, I’m sure.’

‘Unless of course, I compromise, and marry. I might become a poet’s wife. But poets I find, are often rather dull. They are in the habit of expressing themselves through the written word, and not through their bodies. William is awful in bed.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Brenda. ‘I thought it was the way a girl responded, not what the man did, that mattered. I never have any trouble. I always thought that girls saying men were bad in bed was just a way of making them feel nervous.’

‘Oh you,’ said Susan, ‘you should write a column in a woman’s magazine. I can see it happening yet.’

‘You were talking,’ said Brenda, devastated, ‘about this lightning stroke which flung you back upon your bed with your knees apart.’

‘I didn’t say with my knees apart. Nor did I mention bed.’

‘I thought it was what you meant.’

‘You are not at all open to forces, are you?’ said Susan. ‘You are an artifact. You are not swayed by passions like me. Anyway, there I was, working in this great throbbing organisation, beginning to fancy my boss, and his wife would ring up every day and ask what he wanted for dinner. He would take her so seriously, I couldn’t understand it. He would think and ponder, and sometimes he would ring her back later to give her a considered answer. It bespoke such intimacy. It drove me mad. She had such a soft, possessive voice. I wondered why he took so little notice of me. And why was there no one I could ring up, in the perfect security of knowing they would be home for dinner, come what may, and obliged to eat what I provided? William kept going back home to his wife for dinner and I found this most irritating. And why didn’t Alan’s wife ring up and ask him what did he want to do in bed that night, or something? Why was it always dinner? Poor man, I thought. Poor blind man. Here was I, young, clever and creative, with depths to plumb, able to take a constructive interest in what really interested him, sitting docile and waiting at his elbow, typing and all he’d do was let his eyes stray to my legs and back again. He was too busy telling his wife what he wanted for dinner. It was an insult to me. I wanted to ask about his novel but he seemed to want to keep it secret. He was so clever. Not just with words, but he loved painting, too. He used to be a painter before his wife got hold of him and destroyed him with boredom and responsibilities. Domesticity had him trapped. Can you imagine, he even kept family photographs on his desk!’

‘A commercial artist, do you mean?’

‘No, I do not. He went to art school. He married her very young, on impulse, and had to give up all thought of being a proper painter. She drove him into advertising, and he ended up a kind of co-ordinator of words and pictures. A man with a great deal of power over people of no consequence whatsoever, and a long title on the plate on his door. How bitter! He should never have let her do it to him. Brenda, do stop making eyes at that Siamese gentleman.’

‘He is not Siamese, I don’t think. But he is very handsome.’

‘I wonder why he seems to prefer you to me. Perhaps it’s his nationality. Do you want me to go on with this story?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then try and concentrate. The first time he actually laid hands on me was the day he started his diet, the day he heard from his agent.’

On the first morning of the diet pigeons chose to strut about the windowsill and embarrass Alan with their intimacies. There was a red carpet on the office floor; red curtains at the window. The standard lamp was grey, and so was the upholstery of the armchairs. His desk was large, sleek, new and empty, except for a list of the day’s engagements. He earned £6,000 a year and was not quite on the Board. It seemed doubtful, now, that he would ever get there. One younger, more energetic man had already used him as a footstool for a leap to Board level, and once a footstool, in Company terms, nearly always a footstool. And nothing would deter the pigeons.

Susan came in with a tray of coffee and biscuits. She wore a very short white skirt and a skimpy grey jersey.

‘Mr Sussman –’ said Susan, apologetically. She wore an enormous pair of spectacles. Her eyesight was normal, but the glasses combined frailty of flesh with aggression of spirit, and she enjoyed them. Alan sought for her features behind them. He was flushed after his telephone conversation with his agent.

‘I am really very sorry –’

‘Oh my God, what have you done now?’ He spoke amiably, as well may a man who has just achieved, he thinks, a lifelong ambition.

‘It’s just that I forgot about your biscuits again. I took the milk chocolate, not the plain. My gentleman friend always prefers milk, and I become confused.’

‘Your gentleman friend?’

‘How else would you have me describe him? My quasi-husband, my seducer, my lover, my fiancé? Take your pick. He is a poet.’

‘It is too unsettled a relationship that you describe,’ said Alan, ‘for my peace of mind. Secretaries, however temporary, should maintain the illusion of being either virgins or well-married. Otherwise the mind begins to envisage possibilities. The girl takes on flesh and blood. You are a bad secretary.’

‘I’m sorry about the biscuits.’

‘I was not talking about the biscuits, and well you know it. It does not matter about the biscuits. I am not eating the biscuits.’

‘Not eating the biscuits?’

‘No. And no sugar in the coffee.’

‘No sugar in the coffee?’

‘Stop playing the little girl. You are a grown woman. I am on a diet.’

‘Oh no!’

‘Why not? I’m too fat.’

‘People on diets become cross, bad-tempered. And desire fails. You are not too fat. Why do you want to be thin?’

‘I want to be young again.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when I was young I had hopes and aspirations and I liked the feeling.’

‘I think you are foolish. You don’t have to be young to achieve things. I like an older man myself.’

‘You do?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘All the same, take the biscuits away.’

‘I will keep them for William.’

‘The poet? I would rather you didn’t.’

‘Why not?’ She took off her glasses to see him better.

‘The thought confuses me. It is a relief your glasses have gone. Now I can see your face.’

‘It is just a face like any other.’

‘It is not. It is a remarkable face. I would like to paint it.’

‘I do self-portraits, sometimes.’

‘Do you paint?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not really a secretary?’

‘No.’

‘They never are,’ he said. ‘They never are. All summer in the temporary season, they never are. That’s why the typing is so bad. Get on with it.’

Routed, she sat and typed. He sat and read marketing reports and wondered whether to ring Esther and tell her his agent liked the novel. He decided against it. He feared she might prick the bubble of his self-esteem too soon.

‘I am not a foolish girl,’ said his secretary presently. ‘You lead me on in order to make me look silly, but that is easy to do. It’s rather cheap of you.’

‘Oh good heavens,’ Alan said. ‘This is an office not a –’

‘Not a what?’

‘You go too far. You talk like a wife, full of reproaches. I warn you. You are a fantastic creature but you go too far.’

‘Fantastic?’ Her eyes were bright.

‘You are very beautiful, or look so to me this morning.’ He came to look over her shoulder, as if to see what she was typing. ‘What scent are you wearing?’

‘Madam Rochas. It’s not too much?’

‘Not at all. It is nourishing. Do you know what I had for breakfast? Two boiled eggs and some black coffee. Do you know what I shall have for lunch? Two boiled eggs and a grapefruit. And for dinner an omelette, and some black coffee, and guess what. A tomato.’

‘Oh big deal!’ she said. ‘Do you expect me to be sorry for you?’

‘No.’ His hands trembling, slid over her breasts. ‘I am only explaining that I am light-headed and cannot be held responsible for my actions.’

The telephone rang. It was Esther. Did he want a herb omelet and a tomato, separate, or the tomato cooked in with the omelette? The former, he thought.

‘She has a pretty voice,’ said Susan. ‘Is she pretty?’

But Alan was back at his desk. He seemed to have forgotten the past few minutes entirely. He was formal, brisk and cold.

‘Get Andrew to come and see me,’ he said, studying a folder of layouts launching a change in the formula of a dandruff shampoo. ‘I don’t know what is happening to Andrew’s judgement.’ Susan rang through and presently Andrew, a thin, well-born young man with a double first, came in to be chided. He reminded Alan of himself when young. Susan sulked and plotted.

‘It was quite true,’ said Susan to Brenda in the pub. ‘He was already light-headed, otherwise I might never have got him to the point of touching me, from which all else stemmed. He was used at that hour of the morning to having a stomach full of cereal, eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade, tea, topped up by coffee and biscuits. And all of a sudden there was nothing inside him – only the vision of me, and the words I spun around him. If I spoke boldly, it was because that was what he responded to. He would never seduce, he would have to be seduced. But I trembled inside; it took every ounce of courage I had to speak to him the way I did. And when he touched me –’

‘Lightning? You fell back upon the bed?’

‘I was in an office, idiot. Had there been a bed, I would have. But he was not quite ready yet to fall on top of me, of course. I had further work to do.’

‘I think you’re making it all up, talking as if you did it all on purpose. Anyway men aren’t manipulated like that. They either feel things for you or they don’t. It’s men who take the initiative. You keep talking about men the way men talk about women. It’s rather disgusting.’

‘You put things into their heads,’ Susan insisted. ‘You put beddish visions before their eyes.’

‘I think that’s a very old-fashioned view,’ said Brenda. ‘All this talk of seducing and being seduced. It’s not like that at all. Everyone knows exactly what they’re doing these days.’

‘Well he didn’t. He really didn’t. He was too hungry for one thing.’

‘You’re older than me, almost of another generation. I expect that’s why you take such an old-fashioned view.’

‘You’re drunk and you’re jealous,’ said Susan correctly. ‘Let’s go home.’

They rose to go. The man who came from the East rose too and followed them out into the street. He was following Brenda, not Susan.

‘That morning when I rang and asked about the omelette,’ said Esther to Phyllis in the basement, ‘his voice sounded odd, and I had this sudden vision of his temporary secretary sitting there exhibiting her legs to him under the desk. He had described her the evening before at your place in altogether too detailed terms for my peace of mind. I was hungry and faint – what with the hangover and the black coffee – quarts of it – and cigarette after cigarette, and I was just standing looking out of the window, which was foolish because Juliet – that’s the daily help – was polishing the floor and one shouldn’t stand about being idle when other people are working hard. Especially when they’re Juliet. Day One of the diet was a horrible day for me; although no doubt it was a delight to my husband.’

Esther’s living-room was filled to the point of obsession with Victoriana. Sofas and chairs were buttoned and plump; walls were covered with pictures from ceiling to floor; occasional tables were almost hidden by lamps, clocks, figurines and vases. There was an embroidery frame where it was Esther’s habit to sit in the evening, working minute stitches with her puffy hands. Everything in the room was dusted, polished and neat; but this was no thanks to Juliet, who this morning wildly and inefficiently polished the floor. Esther moved away from the window, steering her bulk with grace through the fragile bric-à-brac.

‘Juliet,’ said Esther, ‘you’ll never get a good shine if you don’t sweep properly first. You’ll just rub the dirt in and ruin the surface.’

Juliet put down her cloth and straightened up. She was thirty and short, with an hourglass figure and a tendency to backache with which she excused her bad temper.

‘Why aren’t you in the kitchen?’ Juliet’s voice was accusing. ‘You’re always in the kitchen while I polish, cooking.’

‘We are on a diet and there’s nothing to cook.’

‘Well don’t take it out on me,’ said Juliet, resuming her crouching position and the flailing of her arms.

‘I’m not taking anything out on anybody. I’m just observing that if you rub grit into a parquet floor you spoil the surface.’

‘The Hoover needs mending,’ said Juliet. ‘It doesn’t take anything up any more. I told you about it weeks ago.’

‘Well, you can sweep, can’t you? Brooms were made before Hoovers.’

Juliet put down her cloth. ‘What did you have for breakfast? Did you go without, or something?’

‘I had a very good breakfast, thank you. I had eggs. And it’s eggs for lunch, and eggs for dinner, and in two weeks I’ll have lost a stone and a half.’

‘You be careful. You can go too far. A friend of mine went on a diet and lost all appetite for food. They took her in at the hospital but it was too late, she died. Her stomach had shrunk to a dried pea – or was it walnut? One or the other, I do remember that.’

‘This is a very well-tried diet, and very sensible. One should be able to control one’s size, if one is going to control one’s life.’

‘What do you want to do it for? You’re all right as you are. You’ve got a husband and a son and a house, even if it is filled up with all this junk, and someone to do your dirty work for you. What else do you want?’

‘It’s healthier to be thin.’

‘Dieting ruins the health. Men like women nice and cosy. Their wives, anyway.’

‘To tell you the truth I am really going through with it for Mr Sussman’s sake. For my own part, I don’t really worry. But it’s easier for him if I do it too. You know what men are. They haven’t got all that much willpower.’

‘What you need is physical exercise. You ought to get down on your hands and knees more often, instead of just standing about.’

‘When you have gone home, Juliet,’ said Esther clearly, ‘I often find I have to.’

She walked with determination into the kitchen, as if there was something there to busy her. Juliet peered after her, with an expression of quite serious malevolence on her face.

‘You’ll go too far,’ said Juliet. ‘One day you’ll go too far.’

And she continued her manic, useless polishing.

The Sussmans’ kitchen was full of herbs, spices, pestles and mortars and strings of onion and garlic, and jars of olive oil and cut-outs from early editions of Mrs Beeton. There scarcely seemed room in it for human beings, but that evening there they were, the two of them, Alan and Esther, their flesh squeezed between table and dresser, studying their diet sheet, and both bad-tempered.

‘At least we can put herbs in the omelette,’ said Alan. ‘An omelette aux fines herbes. Delicious.’

Esther reached out for eggs and started breaking them into a basin. ‘Oh big deal,’ she said.

‘Someone else said that to me today. I can’t remember who.’

‘Your secretary, I dare say. Since she spends so much time with you.’

‘I think it was, now you come to mention it.’

Esther was suspicious. It did not suit her. Her eyes, usually luminous globes of expression, became smaller and mean. ‘What were you and she talking about?’

‘This diet, I think,’ said Alan, allowing a certain weariness at Esther’s bad behaviour to creep into his tone. ‘I really can’t remember. I’ve got to talk to somebody, haven’t I?’

‘This Susan seems to be quite your confidante. Do you discuss all your personal life with her?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Do you discuss me?’ She used her little-girl voice.

He used his angry one. ‘As much, I daresay, as you discuss me with your window cleaner.’

‘My window cleaner appears to be quite a randy man, for your information.’

‘So, if you want to know, does my secretary.’

‘What, a randy man?’

‘No, a randy girl. Now you know.’

She chose not to believe him. She thought she had simply made him angrier than she had meant.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m being silly. It’s because I’m hungry.’

‘Yes you are being silly. Why are you dividing the whites from the yolks?’

‘I’m making a fluffy omelette. It will go further.’

Esther’s head, all of a sudden, felt very full and unpleasant. ‘I feel awful.’

‘I feel fine,’ said Alan, with memories of Susan’s forwardness and hugging to himself the knowledge of his agent’s enthusiasm, which he felt Esther did not yet deserve to know. ‘Lighter and emptier. I think this is what it felt like ten years ago.’ He looked down at his paunch. It seemed to him to have shrunk.

‘I’ve got a headache. I don’t think I can face this omelette.’ She laid her hands on her stomach. It was full and flabby. She was depressed.

‘It says you must not on any account go without any of the food items mentioned. You just wait until spinach day!’ He quoted from the diet sheet. ‘The diet depends for its efficiency on a chemical process the body undergoes during the diet’s course. They may be good doctors but they’re bloody awful writers of the King’s English.’

‘Queen’s.’

‘Why do you have this urge to find fault all the time?’

‘That’s very unfair.’

‘What are you doing with that butter?’ Alan’s hand shot out to restrain Esther’s. They both stared at their touching flesh, as if at something strange. Alan dropped her hand, quickly.

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