The Fat Woman's Joke (16 page)

“I am not worried about myself, so I see no reason for you to be worried.”

“Look at you! You're in a terrible state. You've got soup all down your front. You always were a messy child. I don't know who you got it from. It wasn't me. I did all I could to train you, but you were very stubborn. You were too clever, that was the trouble. You could read when you were three, and type when you were four.”

“A pity it all came to nothing.”

“It made me uneasy at the time, and I was right. None of my side of the family had brains. You got them from your father. And your body became overgrown in its attempt to keep up with your brain. Your father would stimulate you, that was the trouble. He encouraged you to think, when what you needed was the exact opposite.”

“I don't think you ever really gave the matter two thoughts, Mother, you were too busy.”

“I know you have this view of me as a frivolous party-going woman, goodness knows why. If I went to parties when you were a child it was simply to help your father. Giving parties was an expensive and tiring occupation. But his business depended on his social contacts.”

“You were good at those.”

“Now what do you mean? Esther, what is the matter with you? Come home with me. What you need is a rest, and some proper looking after, and then you will go back to Alan. You are in one of your states, and it's no use taking any notice of the things you say or do. I shan't let them hurt me. I know you too well. You are my daughter, when all is said and done.”

“What is the matter, Mother? What is all this talk of daughter? Have you decided you are lonely, after all these years? I prefer it down here, thank you very much. And I am not going back to Alan.”

“Now you are being ridiculous. Now listen, Esther. You remember the doctor you saw last time, who did you so much good—”

“I am not mad. I know you want to think I am, but I'm not. I had a nervous breakdown fifteen years ago, from which I am quite recovered. At least I suppose it was a nervous breakdown. That's what people said. It seems, in retrospect, more like a fit of sanity, from which happy state you and your doctors wrenched me, forcibly. By the time you'd drugged me and shocked me, I was in no state to do anything but go back to Alan. Why should one necessarily be mad, just because one prefers not to live with one's husband? I am not mad now.”

“No one is saying you are, darling, just overtired and overstrained. And I'm sorry. I know it's hard for you to admit it, but you were definitely off your head then, the last time. You had no reason for leaving Alan. You couldn't give one. He was earning good money, at last. Your marriage had got off to a shaky start; I can tell you now I cried nightly all that first year when he was living off you, sponging off you, but then all of a sudden he changed, and he was doing marvelously, and we could all see what a wonderful future you both had. It was Peter's birth that did it, of course. It was all Alan needed, a sense of responsibility. I don't know why you had to go to that art school. You should have gone to the University and done something with your brain, instead of hanging around with that extraordinary crowd. But by some miracle, which I will never understand, it all turned out all right in the end, until you suddenly take it into your head to walk out on your child and husband for no reason. If that's not madness, what is?”

“I could see where it would all end, that's all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like this.”

“Like what? And what has happened between you and Alan if it is more than just your neurosis? Is it another woman?”

“Yes and no.”

“I'm sorry, dear, but it's yes
or
no. There are no half ways where these things are concerned.”

“I am afraid there are.”

“No doubt that's very modern of you. But let us try to get at the truth. Is he being unfaithful to you?”

“Mother, will you let me and Alan run our own marriage, or ruin it, as the case may be? I'm a grown girl now.”

“One would hardly think it. Look at it, this room. Look at the state you're living in! It's disgusting.”

“You didn't run your own life any too successfully.”

“Now what can you mean by that? I was a good wife and your father was a good husband. I am lonely now you are all I have in the world. He left me well provided for.”

“You never cared a fig for him. You went away on your holidays leaving him all alone with only me to look after him—”

“I was very delicate. I was never strong. What would you have me do? I'd have been no use to either of you if my health was broken.”

“And I used to dread you coming back and sneering at me, which is what you did, for being ugly and fat, and laugh at the way I tried to look after Father. But it was your fault that I was ugly and fat. And if I wasn't good at looking after Father, I was only a child, wasn't I? Or meant to be.”

“You should have aired the sheets. You were twelve. That's quite big. You knew sheets ought to be aired. It was damp sheets that gave him rheumatic fever. The doctor said so.”

“It's an old wives' tale about damp sheets and rheumatic fever. You held that over me for years. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“And it was his weak heart after the rheumatic fever that killed him. I've never said it as plainly as that before, but it's in my heart, and it ought to come out.”

“Don't you worry, it's been leaking out of your heart for the last fifteen years. I know what you think. But it's your own guilt speaking. Who were you off with on your medically recommended holidays in the south of France? Who? What were you doing, and who with? That's what killed Father, not my damp sheets, but your adulterous ones.”

“You are out of your mind, Esther, don't let's quarrel. We haven't quarreled like this for years. If I'd had a son we wouldn't ever have quarreled. Daughters are possessive about their fathers, that's the trouble. I did what I could in the face of my own nature, which is the best any woman can do. But it's all in the past now. I am getting old. You seem young to me still, a child, but in the eyes of the world I suppose that even you are no longer young. You won't marry again, who would want you? You are too gross. You must stay married to

Alan. I beg of you. You have some money of your own, but it is folly, folly, to throw away your security, and your status, and the respect the world accords you as a married woman and a mother, and your husband's income, and presently his pension, which will be generous. Three-quarters of his salary, I understand.”

“Women of your generation seem to regard men as meal tickets. It's not very nice.”

“It's a great deal less painful than regarding them in any other way. And it is practical. Youth goes so quickly. It is such a short span in one's life. When it is over you recognize that comfort, status and money in the bank are really more important to a woman than anything else. And her family, of course. Esther, you are my family.”

“The thing about my mother,” said Esther to Phyllis, “is that she never thought anything was important except her bank balance in her entire life. This lover she had in the South of France, he gave her jewels and money. That was why she went to him, not for love. And my poor father died trying to keep up with her demands—her financial demands, not her sexual ones, she didn't have those. I don't understand how I came to be born, nor, I think, does she. He was such a gentle clever man. All he ever wanted to do was sit in his study reading old law reports, with me to dust and bring him coffee and cook his dinner, but she insisted. She insisted. She made him go out into the world and entertain clients and steer so near the edge of the law he lived in dread of falling over and ending up in prison. I think prison would have been a relief to him, in fact. He could have been the librarian and pottered.”

“Did he like Alan?”

“He liked him at first. When Alan refused to keep me or make a home or do anything but paint. I think he admired him for being so strong. I liked Alan most then, too, except my mother went on and on so about him using up all my money, and saying that he was behaving like a woman, not a man, that I began to wonder if she wasn't right. Then Peter was born, anyway, and everything changed. And Father became ill with his heart, because of the rheumatic fever, and then he died, so I don't know what he was thinking, in the end. I had a feeling he turned against Alan when Alan went respectable, and that's another reason I felt allowed, that time, to leave. This time I have no one's judgment but my own to go by. I used to be terrified I would end up like my mother. Many women do. They turn into their mothers far more easily than sons turn into their fathers.”

“You take these little holidays from your husband, all the same, the way your mother did from your father. Perhaps if you were seven stone lighter you would be more like her than you imagine.”

“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings—”

“I am not as young as all that. I am thirty. That's a terrible age to be. There are wrinkles beginning to show around my eyes. And as for breast-feeding, it fills me with horror, the very thought of it. I don't want to be like a cow, with a baby draining away my strength. That's another reason I don't have a baby. I've never dared to tell anyone that before. Don't let Gerry know.”

“You can always give them bottles.”

“But that's not right. That's failure. Babies should be breast-fed. They force you to, in hospitals.”

“That is only the latest revenge of the doctors. A more subtle torment than just any old birth pains, which have too short a duration for their liking. You are right to fear maternity wards. All the resentments against the fecund female grow rampant there, like weeds, strangling common sense and kindness. Any hospital is a place of myths and legends, and a maternity one is worst of all. When Peter was born, bottles were considered more hygienic than dugs and breast-feeding a damaging habit; but then to compensate one was obliged to underfeed one's child, to keep it perpetually thin and pale and crying, if it was not too weak to cry. You must never pick your child up and cuddle it, was what they said then, that's spoiling, and interrupts its routine. But what they meant was, you shall not enjoy this baby you have had the presumption to have. We shall never, ever, let you.”

“Peter's not thin and weak now. He's a well-built boy. He takes after his father.”

“I took no notice of them. I fed him when I wanted and when he wanted. We were happy. Then my father died. I have been in mourning ever since. He seemed more like Peter's father to me than Alan ever did.”

“You still have not told me why you left Alan. The apples are cooked. Will you try them?”

“Thank you. With sugar and cream. I begin to feel a little better. I hope Peter is all right. But why should he not be? He has his compensations, he does not need me. He is more like Alan than he thinks.”

“I think you should be worrying about your husband.”

“My husband is an attractive man. There will always be women to look after him. He will use them while it suits his purpose, then he will damage them and send them away.”

“He is not like that at all. You wrong him.”

“You seem very possessive of my husband, Phyllis, all of a sudden, and to know a great deal about him. Do you fancy him?”

“What a thing to say.”

“Because you're welcome.”

Phyllis blushed crimson and spilled the sugar.

Esther watched her sweeping up the elusive grains with pleasure.

“Your trousers are too tight,” Esther said, “you're getting fat. Gerry won't like it. He likes his wives to be small and his women to be fat, like me.”

When Phyllis straightened up, there was a look of depression on her face.

“You are awful,” she said, “I just don't know what to think or what to feel any more. There aren't any rules left.”

“Calm down, and I'll go on with this story, which you so rashly wanted to hear. Peter came to visit me a couple of days ago. I was more pleased to see him than I was to see my mother.”

“O
H, MUM,” SAID PETER,
“I wish you would come home. It is very upsetting. Just because I leave home, doesn't mean you have to, too. It is very embarrassing explaining to people, and it's not very nice in this room, is it? Everything is usually so tidy at home, how can you bear to live like this? It makes me think you must be depressed. It is very worrying for me—I shouldn't be hindered with worries at my age. It is bad enough being captain of a cricket team, and having duties and responsibilities toward Stephanie, without having to feel responsible for a miserable mother, too. That should be Father's business. He's taken to cooking. Recipe books everywhere.

“‘Hi there, Mrs. Wells, I presume,' I said to him the other day, when I was home for the weekend, ‘slaving away over a hot stove again, I see,' but he didn't think it was funny. He doesn't think anything is funny, nowadays. Oh Mum, come home. It is all so dreary like this.”

“But you have your own home now, Peter. Choose to use your former home as a weekend hotel, by all means, but kindly do not insist on cheerful chambermaids. Or indeed on resident ones. This is where I live. You live somewhere else. Your father lives in yet another place. How you and your father choose to behave is now entirely your affair. Thank God I am not around to witness it.”

“Mother, you begrudge me any sex life. It isn't fair.”

“I most certainly do not. Have it off with all and sundry, male, female, bald-headed as you will. The pair of you.”

“Dad behaved very foolishly, I know, but don't take it out on me. She is a female fatale, Mother. He couldn't help it. There are these women about, you know. Insatiable and irresistible. It was just bad luck he happened to encounter her when both your spirits were so low. You should never have stopped eating, either of you. In middle-age, food is far less troublesome than sex. There is something terrible, tragic, monumental, in thinking of Father with that beautiful, beautiful girl—”