The Fat Woman's Joke (4 page)

“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 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 aging drunken lush 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 and humbled by this insult, “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 organization, 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, too. 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 coordinator 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 window sill and embarrass Alan with their copulations. There was a red carpet on the office floor, red curtains at the window. The standard lamp was gray, 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 gray jersey.

“Mr. Wells—” 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 he 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 life-long 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 and 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 an herb omelette 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 judgment.” 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. Andrew's mother had died giving birth to him—his father being, at the time, a Roman Catholic convert. 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 off 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, anyway. I had further work to do.”

“I think you're making it all up, talking as if you did it all on purpose. But men aren't manipulated like that. They either feel things for you or they don't. It's men who take the initiative.”

“You put things into their heads,” Susan insisted, “You put beddish visions into their heads.”

“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 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, 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.

“T
HAT 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-a-brac.