Nip 'N' Tuck (11 page)

I tried talking to him.

I tried
not
talking to him – turning my back on him in bed, serving meals in silence. But after a week I couldn’t bear it any longer and begged him to make it up with me.

He just looked at me blankly. ‘What?’ he asked, perplexed.

He hadn’t noticed
.

In that marital desert I became an emotional camel, able to survive on one kind word for days. One night, as we carried the kids up to bed from the TV room, dreams flitting across their faces like shafts of sunlight, I reached for my husband’s hand and he squeezed mine in return. His face relaxed into a smile and hope pole-vaulted into my heart – until he yawned elaborately. What I’d taken for fondness was merely fatigue.

I tried not to get too emotionally het-up. I avoided all Nora Ephron films on the grounds of emotional stability as well as taste. I tried to stop angsting over breast size – but found myself ordering a D cup of coffee at the café. When I wasn’t sleuthing through Hugo’s private life (and, believe me, I did everything but dust him for fingerprints) I just sat around reading one of the many self-help books entitled
Why Husbands Hate Their Wives and Leave Them and Why It’s all Your Fault, You Fat, Middle-Aged Frump
, volume 26.

When Victoria rang one morning to ask what I felt like doing, I said I wanted to crawl into a cupboard with a martini shaker. I was drinking so much alcohol that if I’d given a urine sample it would have had a swizzle stick in it. Really, under the circumstances, I was coping rather well – apart from the stomach acid condition, fine. But I was obsessed with suspicions of Hugo’s infidelity. I could talk of nothing else, even when Cal confessed that there actually was a woman he felt passionately about. ‘While we’re on the subject of you meeting the love of your life … do you think it’s possible Britney’s better in bed than me?’

‘Would you stop obsessing?’ Cal demanded. ‘I really think I’m in love with her, Lizzie … Hell, I’m so in love I’d eat her pedicure shavings.’

‘Okay, okay … but while we’re on the subject of pedicures, perhaps it’s the elasticity of her pelvic floor? I bet he trampolines off it. After all, Britney hasn’t ruined
her
body having
his
children.’

Though Hugo maintained he wasn’t seeing Britney and I tried to believe him, doubts were constantly slipping into frame, like the tedious relative who sneaks into the background of every family photograph.

During the night when I’d stir to pat his side of the bed – expecting the warm hollow of his broad back – my hand would settle on an Arctic expanse of sheet. It’s common, I know, for insomniacal partners to move to another room, but usually not in another
house
. (Hugo would explain, in a long-suffering voice, that he had been working late setting up the Longevity Clinic.) I tossed so much in bed I could have made myself into a salad. One night when restlessness catapulted me into complete consciousness I rang Victoria – she always stayed up three hours later than everyone else because ‘calories consumed just before bedtime are double calories and have to be burned’. She responded that if I wanted to keep Hugo interested I would have to put in the ‘grooming hours’. She promised to be over first thing in the morning to begin my instruction.

Cal insisted that if anyone needed grooming it was Hugo, as
he
was the one who’d behaved like an animal. ‘The man couldn’t travel to the States without going through quarantine … How
is
he, by the way?’ They’d avoided each other since Cal had thrown a punch at him at the dinner party from hell. ‘I suppose the life-threatening humour of the situation passed him by did it?’ he asked, grinning sheepishly.

Cal was at my place fixing Jamie’s Nintendo. ‘Those instruction manuals are the Japs’ revenge for losing the Second World War,’ he gasped. ‘But what about you, Lizzie? Can I put
you
back together at least? How are you doin’, shug?’

‘I’m fine,’ I replied, ‘apart from chronic Husband Uncertainty Syndrome.’

‘Why don’t you leave him?’

‘
Where?
’ I said, sarcastically. The tone of my voice was mimicked by the whiny snarl of the coffee-grinder. ‘Why on earth would I leave him? I gave up my career as a foreign correspondent for him. Hugo is everything to me.’

Cal, embarrassed, shuffled his frayed trainers along the tiles of my newly refurbished kitchen – the rubber of his soles was Kleenex-thin from scuffing. ‘Hey, it’s perspicacity like that which separates the hack from the Pulitzer Prize-winner,’ he added self-deprecatingly, raking his hands through wiry curls, which erupted chaotically from his cranium.

The ground coffee beans hissed as I scalded them with water. I thrust the cafetière at him in annoyance. The kits whooshed through the kitchen on their Microlite scooters. Cal went cross-eyed and pretended to garrotte himself, making them shriek with laughter. ‘I keep telling you to ignore everythin’ I say. I’m an uneducated yob, yer know that. Although I think there was an F in metallurgy somewhere along the line.’ He hooked his thumbs in the loops of his blue jeans and tilted his head until it rested on the back of his chair. ‘The only thing I know for sure is that if this girl I’m mad about—’

‘Tell me who she is, Cal. Don’t be so cagey.’

‘There’s nothing to tell yet – except,’ he garrotted himself again, ‘if she doesn’t sleep with me soon, I’m gonna contract carpal-tunnel masturbation syndrome.’

‘You’re just going to have to make more effort,’ Victoria said, flicking at my sombre trouser suit. ‘Look on it as a fashion opportunity. A marital crisis gives you
carte blanche
for the kohl-rimmed eyes and austere but sexy short-skirted look. And sunglasses to give the maybe-I’ve-been-crying-maybe-I-haven’t image.’ She’d finally made it over by mid-afternoon (men had been known to get their master’s degrees in engineering while waiting for Vick to get ready to go out). ‘Darling,
must
you slavishly adhere to fashion favoured by Gestapo wardresses?’

Self-consciously I did up the buttons on my crisp white shirt. While my sister was more your feather boa and Manolo Blahnik kind of gal, I sported the minimalist and monochromatic. ‘I am not fashion-deficient, thank you very much.’

‘Elisabeth, look at yourself. You’re wearing a suit the colour of leaf mould. If you fell over in the park, people would think you were compost. Your clothes are a desperate cry for help, darling.’

‘Think so? See, I feel
you’re
always overdressed – being so
wrapped up in yourself
.’

But that night when the kids and I decided to surprise Hugo by collecting him to go ice-skating, the surprise was on us. Britney Amore was in his hospital office. ‘Just for a check-up, darlin’.’ She pouted, looking sultry in a wisp of thigh-high black silk and red satin sling-backs.

‘Really? After hours?’ My heart thudded anxiously against my ribcage. Had she been examined, X-rated, then sent home?

She eyeballed my denim overalls, torn T-shirt and hiking boots. ‘Oh, look, it’s Frontier Woman. Hon, whatever “look” were you going for? Well, hon,
you missed
.’

And so began my medley of self-improvement.

Despite my protestations to Victoria that I would never allow myself to become more than healthily obsessed with triple hydroxyl fruit peels, despite my endless lectures to her that here we were, ninety-three million miles from the sun on a podgy little rock, with a population of six billion people, spinning at the rate of one thousand miles an hour, busily stockpiling enough plutonium to blast us into another galaxy completely and all
she
could worry about was pore-clogging – despite all this – the presence of Britney Amore on the heterosexual horizon had jolted me into a bitter realization.

I was running seriously late for my Pathetic Female Under-achieving Conference.

11

Never Darken My Dior Again

THE HUMILIATIONS BEGAN
sartorially.

‘Do you have anything in my size?’ I timidly asked the louche young woman in the Harvey Nichols tog emporium.

She looked me up and down and emitted a disdainful sigh bordering on disgust, never having seen anything quite so revolting in her department – certainly nothing alive. I was tempted to bow down before her immaculate presence and plead to be deemed fashionable enough to dare to drape some of her precious, horrendously overpriced garments over my unworthy hide. But before she could call the fumigators, my sister floated into view. The shop assistant immediately lit up, piling sequined hand-kerchiefs (oh, my mistake, they were
dresses
) emblazoned with the designer’s name into my sagging arms.

‘Who do these designers think they are, putting
their
names on
our
clothes?’ I whinged. ‘Why can’t we put
our
names on
their
clothes?’

Victoria dragged me into a cubicle and stripped off my jeans. The shop assistant’s guarded amusement soon turned into astonishment and finally full-scale pity as she tried, with gritty determination, to ruche my size twelve body into a size eight outfit. I squeezed my eyes closed. When I dared to peep open a decade or so later, it was to find myself shoved into the plaid-mini-skirt-long-socks-and-satchel-thirteen-year-oldnymphomaniacal look: a curious choice for a
thirty-nine-year-old
.

The shop assistant’s eyes widened in horror. For
her
, someone like
me
dressing in Christian Lacroix was obviously the equivalent of putting caviar on a Colonel Sanders.

Next came a diamanté cocktail frock, with a split from ankle to ass and a low dip in the back more commonly associated with ‘builder’s bum’.

I shivered. ‘It’s October. How will I keep warm? A flannel tampon?’

The assistant now turned her pitying gaze upon my sister.

‘You’re right,’ Victoria adjudicated. ‘It’s definitely not you.’

But a fringed leather bikini ensemble apparently
was
. The pale, pudgy woman in the mirror looked a lot like me, only sadder. The sadistic fluorescence highlighted every blemish. The sensible panties I’d been ordered to leave on poked above the bikini bottoms – not exactly adding to my seductiveness. Nor did the fact that when I re-dressed and stormed out of the cubicle, the plastic crotch hygiene strip had adhered to the seat of my trousers (a fact I didn’t discover until I was halfway through a job interview with
Sky News
some hours later.)

I fossicked in my bag for a Bounty bar and devoured it whole.

‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ my sister caught up with me on the down escalator, ‘if height was like weight and you just stopped. And stayed there. For ever. But it’s not. You’re just going to have to diet, darling. So, what shall it be? The Grapefruit? The Israeli? The Protein Only?’

‘Find a diet that doesn’t actually involve eating less and we’ll talk, okay?’

I had always refused to become like my sister, constantly on the bathroom scales, her day ruined if the wrong numbers came up. But that night, when we got home from the school play and were undressing for bed, I noticed a bruise on Hugo’s inner thigh that couldn’t be explained away as a golf-related accident. And when we made love later, he insisted upon turning out the light. I knew then, as we went through the motions in the dark, that in Hugo’s mind it was Britney Amore with whom he was having sex … And she was getting many more orgasms than
I
was! The next day it was straight on to starvation rations.

12

Having Your Cake and Not Eating It Too

THE RESTAURANT TO
which Victoria took me for lunch was Ethiopian. ‘I’m too guilty to eat here! I’ll just have a grain of United Nations-supplied rice, please, and a fried fruit-fly.’

‘That’s the whole
point
, darling. When it comes to guilt trips, I’m your travel agent. The lentil salad is excellent.’

I glared at the menu, my stomach growling with irritation. ‘Victoria, only yogis who’ve been fasting for five years are ever hungry at the sight of a lentil.’

‘What about soya bean and tofu roll?’

‘Um … no, thanks. And not because it looks like a long-dead dog turd either.’

Victoria ordered for us. In due course, the plate of fat-free tofu burgers arrived. They had the appearance and texture of melted bowling balls. The dish was accompanied by an organic salad. After two bites I realized that ‘organic’ is a scientific term for ‘ferociously chewed by things with many legs’, some of which – judging by the crunch against my teeth – had actually made their home in what I was attempting to digest.

‘A slim, attractive wife means a happy husband …’

‘The trouble is,’ I snapped back, ‘like most women I know, I’m a meaty size twelve, and there’s nothing worth wearing in more than a two.’

‘Well, the good news is that if you throw up four times a day for a week, you could easily fit into a size six. If you only throw up twice a day, it’s going to be a ten,’ my sister elaborated, straight-faced. ‘It’s vital that you lose weight. Lizzie … I could go on about it …’

‘You
do
, actually,’ I said, extracting a Mars bar from my bag and inhaling it.

‘If you won’t start eating sensibly, then it’s time for the gym. If you don’t want to lose him, you’ve got to get down to your fighting weight.’

‘Exercise!’ I scoffed. ‘The only exercise
you
ever do is skipping – skipping breakfast, skipping lunch, skipping dinner.’

‘You must get in touch with your body.’

‘Mine’s not all that communicative. If I
do
hear from it, I’ll let you know, OK?’

‘All it takes is a little cycling on the stationary bike.’

‘Stationary bike? What am I? A giant gerbil?’

‘Don’t knock it, Lizzie,’ my sister said airily. ‘The Thigh-master is one of the best dates I ever had!’