The Fat Woman's Joke (11 page)

“You are shocked, aren't you. The truth is always shocking.”

“You're mad. What happened when Gerry came to see you?”

“What happened? What happened? Sexually? That's the only kind of happening you recognize. No wonder you fear growing old so much. But behaving and feeling as if you were fifteen won't stop your backbone shriveling and your teeth falling out.”

“What happened? I begin to think you have something to hide.”

“Begin? You've been in a state of agitation ever since I said Gerry came to see me. Nothing happened, in the sense you mean.”

“I'm sorry to be silly. It's just he always fancied you. I don't know why. He'd go mad if I put on a pound, yet he liked you.”

“He came to let me know, on the excuse of passing by, that he had seen Alan lunching with Susan in Soho, and to tell me, under guise of denigrating her, just how young, beautiful, slim and intelligent she was.”

“But why would he do a thing like that?”

“Why do you think?”

“He's horrible! He's always fancied you. He thought you'd pay Alan out in his own coin.”

“You might be wrong. Perhaps it was all quite innocent. Perhaps he
was
just passing by. Perhaps he
did
think I knew about Susan having lunch with Alan. Perhaps he hoped for nothing at all. Perhaps it is all just in our minds, and not in his. We must be careful not to mistrust all men, just because they are our enemies.”

“You are so confusing. I know Gerry was after you, but I don't think men are my enemies. I like men.”

“So do I. But I don't think women should have anything more to do with men than they can possibly help. They should not try and ape them, either. I wish you would not wear trousers, Phyllis.”

“I like wearing trousers.”

“Women should aspire to be as different as possible from them. You should wear a skirt as a matter of principle. There must be apartheid between the sexes. Men and women should unite for the purpose of rearing children. Any woman who struggles to be accepted in a man's world makes herself ridiculous. It is a world of folly, fantasy and self-indulgence, and it is not worth aspiring to. We must create our own world. I will lend you a skirt, Phyllis.”

Phyllis shuddered in spite of herself.

“We were talking about your husband,” said Esther, “on whose account you make yourself so wretched. I am not sorry for you on this account, since you married him with the full intention of being wretched. I will tell you the truth. Your husband came round and made a pass at me, although I am all of fourteen stone and five years older than him. Now why did he do a thing like that?”

“What did you do? Esther!” Poor Phyllis was trembling.

“I?” said Esther. “What would a woman like me do when a man like that makes a pass at her? ‘I like,' he said to me, ‘a woman I can get my teeth into.' To which I replied, ‘I am not normally a mass of toothmarks.' That was quite witty, don't you think?”

“You're mad,” said Phyllis. She was standing up, pulling at her wedding ring, with her eyes so bright it was clear she was going to cry. “You shouldn't talk to me about my husband like that. For pity's sake, stop teasing me and tell me what happened. You are so clever and I am very stupid, but it's not my fault. Please tell me!”

“I have already told you. Nothing happened that was of any account.”

“But what do you mean ‘was of any account'? For all I know you'd go to bed with the Prime Minister and still say it was ‘of no account.'”

“Well, you know Gerry. It's all talk with him, isn't it? It's a favorite female myth that the men who talk most do least. Like if people talk about suicide, they won't. They do, of course, but it would be worrying to believe it.”

Phyllis started to cry. Mascara ran down her cheeks.

“Don't get hysterical,” said Esther. “You wanted to hear this story. It's not my fault if it turns out to be something you don't want to hear.”

“Just tell me, Esther. I won't hold it against you.”

“Gerry and I did not make love,” said Esther, allowing Phyllis to see that her fingers were crossed. “That night,” she added for good measure. “Try and calm down, Phyllis. Why should you worry, either way? What possible difference can it make to us, here and now, what happened to me a month or so ago? What matters is that your husband tried to upset me and succeeded.”

“All you can think of is yourself.”

“That is a charge that can fairly be leveled at every one of us. I wish you didn't have such trivial problems, Phyllis. You must learn to look outside them. Gerry's infidelity is merely a convenient hook on which to hang your anxieties. You would be better off as a peasant woman tilling the soil and trying to keep her family from starvation. Give any woman time to think, and she's miserable at once. It is time you took up good works, Phyllis.”

“But you left Alan because he was unfaithful.”

“That is a gross simplification.”

“Well, you didn't leave him just because he made you go on a diet.”

“He didn't make me go on a diet. We decided to do it. He quite willfully set about depriving me. I quite willfully set about depriving him. We conspired together to break our marriage, in fact. I was less whole-hearted about it than him. I would have retracted if I could. I made peace offerings. I tried to cook his omelettes in butter. He chose to see it as an act of aggression. He was determined not to be married to me any more.”

“I don't understand.”

“I will try and explain tomorrow. Don't worry about me and Gerry, it was all of no significance. You tempt me into being unpleasant to you, that's all. I am very tired. I want to go to sleep. You must go home, Phyllis, or to walk the streets if you are still determined to punish Gerry by staying out. Perhaps, who is to say, he does in fact have to work late in the office? The money you live on must come from somewhere.”

“I will see you tomorrow evening,” said Phyllis forlornly. “You need me. You are going through a great crisis in your life.”

And she left the flat, found her way up the dark, broken steps, hailed a taxi and went home. Gerry was not there. She took four sleeping pills and lost consciousness.

The others slept badly. Esther was very sick at about four in the morning. A great mass of undigested food poured back out of her mouth into the lavatory basin: she could taste the different flavors as it passed. The soup, the toast, the curry, the cake, the nuts, the eggs, the fish sticks, the butter, the jam, the beans, the cake—the whole evening's intake reappeared in a spasmic flow. She had not realized that her stomach could contain so much. On the way back to bed, exhausted from retching to recover the last troublesome chunk of nut, she caught sight of her naked body in the mirror and stopped to stare at the rolls of fat which swathed her body like a sari. She pulled the blankets over her—she had no sheets—and before going to sleep wondered if perhaps she had not gone too far. She had not really meant any of this to happen—as a child may feel who, setting light to a wastepaper basket to draw attention to himself, then has to watch his entire home go up in flames.

Susan woke at about two, afraid. She thought there was someone in the room. Then she was incensed because there wasn't. Somebody had obviously abandoned her. But who? She couldn't remember. She was lying on her back and found it difficult to breathe. She began to think she was immensely pregnant, and even when she moved her hands over her belly and found it flat as ever, she was not reassured. The feeling that there was a mountain beneath her breasts remained. The mountain, moreover, stirred and moved and heaved. William had thus once described his wife's pregnancy in a poem which he read aloud to Susan as they lay communicative after making love, and the image of the moving mountain still pursued her. Now, in the dark, Susan rolled up her eyes in anxiety; they peered into her brain and made her dizzy. She was pregnant. Something had gone wrong. She did not attribute her condition to a man—it had just happened. Or she had caught pregnancy like a disease from some other woman. Probably, through contact with William, from William's wife. She switched on the light, sat up, and felt more reasonable. “I am Susan Pierce,” she told herself. “Nothing is controllable. Everything is controllable. There is nothing for me to be frightened of. I am not pregnant.” Now her reason was working again she felt quite lively. She wondered if perhaps women had a primitive group soul that linked them together. The pregnancy had been real enough; it had just turned out to be someone else's, that was all. Sympathy with her sex, she thought, could go too far. She must struggle against it.

In the next room Brenda slept voluptuously on the sofa dreaming of picnics in the grass, of elegant ruffled ladies and handsome peruked men; water tinkled from a fountain. A fish with her mother's face swam in the pool below. She lay on the grass and the earth moved to accommodate her limbs. She woke; she could not quite remember where she was or who she was. Presently she turned on the light and got out of bed and stood blinking, barefooted, and dressed in a pale-blue checked nightgown with a frill around the neck. The light woke the man on the floor, and he scrambled to his feet. Brenda's body, quite of its own volition, for her mind had not yet caught up with the events of the evening, made a kind of melting move toward him. But he took two pound notes from his pocket, handed them to her, bowed politely, and left. Brenda went and had a bath. She felt too humiliated to so much as cry.

In the morning they were all themselves again. Phyllis cooked Gerry's breakfast, with her face carefully made up and composed into careful non-accusing lines. He ate heartily and kissed her goodbye, for which she was grateful. Esther made herself a breakfast of porridge, from a tin, and evaporated milk, kipper from a plastic bag, already buttered, three Heinz tins called “Junior Bacon and Egg Breakfast,” toast, butter, marmalade, and coffee, to strengthen her after her illness. Then she began to feel sick again. Susan ate an apple and some milk, took up her brush and painted. Brenda slept until eleven, and then blamed Susan for not waking her in time for her work as a receptionist in a public relations firm.

“I'm sorry,” said Susan, “but I thought that now you'd started a career as a call-girl you would wish to give up your job.”

Brenda slammed the door and left, breakfastless.

All the same, they all went visiting that morning.

Esther went to visit a doctor; Phyllis went to visit Alan; Susan went to visit Peter; and Brenda rang up her mother and had lunch with her.

The doctor sat behind a bill-strewn desk in a pleasantly furnished room in Wimpole Street, which might have been the living room of a well-bred home had it not been for a smell of anaesthetic and the signed show-biz pictures on the wall.

“I was sick in the night,” said Esther. “I'm ill.”

“You don't say.” He was a tough, thin young man, and handsome.

“Really,” she said, “I'm ill.”

“I can see that,” he said.

“You mean my overweight?”

“Fat,” he said.

“Fat,” she agreed.

“Do you like it?”

“I prefer it to other things, like being hungry. But I did not come here to discuss my size. I came because I feel sick all the time.”

“You make me feel quite sick, too. I sympathize with you. Why don't you do something about it?”

He was also a rude and impertinent young man. She understood why Phyllis had recommended him. He would play the domineering father to Phyllis's little girl.

“If you don't lose weight,” he said, “I don't give twopence for your life. A woman of your age.”

“I'll tell you something,” she said. “I don't give twopence for my life, either.” She gathered up her handbag. “All the same, I don't wish to spend what remains of it in a state of nausea. Do you suggest that I take my problems elsewhere, since they appear to bore you?”

“Who recommended you?” he asked.

“Phyllis Frazer.”

“Oh yes. Plastic surgery on both right and left breasts. Why did
you
come?”

“Because I feel sick.”

“You came because I am a cosmetic doctor and you are fat and you don't want to be fat, otherwise you would have chosen another doctor. You don't have to be fat.”

“I have always been fat. It hasn't troubled me.”

“A fat girl growing up? Untroubled?”

“Well, it's too late now. You live your sex life once. I lived mine fat. And I'll tell you another thing, young man. Recognizing problems doesn't solve them. Some people would have been better never born. I am one of them.”

“That is a silly thing to say.”

“It is what I believe. I should never have been born. I should have lived forever in my mother's womb, where everything was dark and beautiful and timeless, and I had no dimensions, and no one could see me, or judge me, and all there was was existence. My mother put an end to it. She forced me out into the world, and I find it as hard to forgive her for this as she does me for fighting back on the way. Things better should come after things good—this is the whole of my discontent. Since the moment I first found myself in this nasty chilly world, things have gone from bad to worse. Time goes more quickly minute by minute. When I say I should never have been born, don't contradict me. You are too young to perceive how the days quicken.”

“If you are worrying about wrinkles, I can remove those, you know. I can tighten the eyelids. That makes a lot of difference. There is nothing to be ashamed of in a woman wanting to go on looking young and attractive, after all. Why not?”

“How much do I owe you for this consultation?”

“Three guineas.”

“It is not reasonable.”

“What is, on this earth?”

“But you haven't cured my nausea, much less attempted to do so, much less even been interested in it.”