The Flying Goat (10 page)

For a moment I was so upset that I did not know what to do. Then after a moment or two I took hold of the ship. The girl watched me. I drove the ship across the hearthrug, tossing and pitching her terribly, giving her a great list to port, and then crashed her against the steel fender. I crashed her so hard, almost broadside on, that I cracked her planks on the starboard side and damaged her hull.
When she heeled over I left her there and made great sea noises, washing the sea over her with my hands. Then suddenly I stopped and I just said ‘Ephraim, Ephraim' and shook my head and let my hands fall by my side. Then the girl understood. She just stood still too and began to cry again with the white, gentle ordinary-looking tears that were such a shock to me.

It is almost twenty-five years since all this happened. In six months the girl caught a chill and got pneumonia and died, and three months later my aunt died too. The shop is no longer there, and the ship, which my aunt gave me and which as I grew older I took less and less care of, has gone too.

But what I wanted to emphasise was this: that nothing can change the fact that for one afternoon I knew what it was like to be Ephraim Franklin, first mate and later master of
The Mary Porter
, and sail the seas in that ship, and anchor off the little island of Kimusa in the South Seas, and fall in love with a coloured girl.

It was no use, no use any longer. She must begin to eat less, much less; starve herself, cut out everything. It could not go on like this: public dinner after public dinner, company luncheons, lavish food, eating till she could not breathe, eating for the sake of eating. She must be firm, put a stop to it, now, at once, before the summer got too hot, before Victor got to be the director of any more companies. Two hundred and thirteen pounds. She saw the hands of the bathroom weight-clock revolve again, in imagination, and rest at that awful figure. She felt like weeping. It was something terrible. No woman could bear it. And so she had made up her mind. She was going to starve herself, and see what that would do.

She bounced and dumped along the edge of the lake, in the park, like a distended silk balloon, her feet still quite neat, her ankles incongruously bony still, so that it appeared as if she wore false legs.
Her mind whispered and panted its little humiliations in small gas-escapes of misery.

On the edge of the lake, on the already hot grey concrete, small children were crumbling bread and saffron-yellow buns for the ducks. Mrs. Victor was revolted. Food, always food, eating, didn't the world do anything else? Gulls planed over and clawed the air, to swoop down and up and snatch the thrown bread before it reached the water. Their dismal crying greed set Mrs. Victor's nerves on edge like wire scratching on glass. She bumped and panted past, out of range of gulls and children and the revolting sight of bread thrown and snatched.

She sat down on one of the green public seats. There was another thing. Now it had got so that she couldn't sit on one of the twopenny chairs. They were made only, it seemed, for normal people, the slim and elegant. She remembered the days when she had been slim and elegant: straight as a line-prop, hardly fat enough in fact, her body its own corset.

Like the young woman on the seat. Just like her. Scarcely enough flesh, if anything. Mrs. Victor looked at the young woman who, in turn, was staring across the water: blonde, young, with shadow-pointed
cheeks and small scarlet buttonhole mouth closed tight up. Mrs. Victor, looking to see if she had any stockings on at all, saw the points of stitched ladders where the legs crossed. Stockings meant she had some sort of belt on. Well, that was just for decency. She didn't need support. It was a figure that had stepped straight out of advertisements.

Mrs. Victor looked down at her own squabbed-out thighs, like two vast aerated sausages, and felt like weeping. She could not bear it, and looked back at the girl.

Ask her if she diets. Somehow she looks as if she diets. That sort of thinness can't be natural. There's thinness and thinness. Somehow she looks as if she must diet.

Mrs. Victor hesitated to speak. She had seen the scorn, before now, in the faces of the young. She didn't want to speak and then have it thrown back in her face. Then she looked again at the girl. You could have blown her away with a breath. She had the ethereal lightness you saw spoken of in advertisements. There was nothing on her.

More children had appeared on the lake-edge, with more bread, so that the air was filled with a shrieking storm of gull-wings. Mrs. Victor said:

‘Excuse me. I've been looking at your figure, and wondering – '

‘Eh?' The girl, startled, turned her extraordinarily thin face. ‘I'm sorry. I can't hear for the birds.'

For a moment the birds quietened. Mrs. Victor said:

‘I hope you'll excuse my speaking to you. I've been looking at your figure. Wondering if you did anything special for it. If you dieted. You see how I am.'

‘No,' the girl said. ‘I don't do anything special.'

‘Oh!'

Mrs. Victor, not knowing how to go on, smiled. The girl's profile looked as though it had been pared down by a knife.

‘I've got so desperate now,' she said, ‘that I'm thinking of seriously starving.' It did not sound right. ‘Starving seriously,' she said.

If she thinks I'm going to sit here, the girl thought, and listen, she's crazy. Not me. I'm going. I'll go straight away. She sat quite still. If I get up, she thought, I think I shall fall down.

‘Really starving.' Mrs. Victor went into an explanation of the word, moving slightly along the seat. ‘You know. Days without food.'

‘I know.'

‘I'm sick of food. Sick of it.' Mrs. Victor began to explain who she was, how, being who she was, she had to attend dinners, functions, eating, always eating, eating until now, at last, she was utterly sick of eating. ‘Take last night. The dinner began at eight and we were still eating at half-past nine. Still eating!'

The girl sat trying to think of something to say. She could think of nothing but her suspender belt. It felt loose on her body. It will fall off, she thought, if I move. I've altered the hooks once already. I shall have to alter them again.

‘First there was some special sort of cheese, Norwegian or something, on rye-biscuit. As if we needed that. Then soup,
consommé
or
crême
, just the usual thing. Then fish. Fish I should have liked, but it was messed up with spaghetti and sauce and egg and I can't think what. All fattening things. And that's how it went on. Duck, pheasant, chicken – and I was so sick of them I tried venison. Have you ever eaten venison? My husband was having it and he said I should try it. I couldn't eat it. I can't explain what it tastes like – but queer, somehow. An acquired taste. You've never tried it?'

‘No,' the girl said, ‘I can't say I have.'

‘Don't.'

I could eat an elephant, the girl thought. I could eat bacon-rind. She sat thinking of bacon-rind. People didn't eat it. They cut it off, but if you did fry it, it jumped in the frying-pan like snakes.

‘If you multiply that by hundreds you'll see what I have to go through in a year,' Mrs. Victor said.

Multiply it by hundreds. Like snakes. Snakes lay eggs, hundreds of eggs. The girl remembered going, long ago, to the zoo, and then giving whole bananas to monkeys. It's not so bad, she thought. I had a banana yesterday. I made it last forty-three minutes. With luck I could make it last an hour.

‘I've tried special baths. I've tried slimming creams and massage. I've tried everything,' Mrs. Victor said. ‘It costs me a fortune.' Children were beginning to come nearer, along the edge of the lake, drawing the gulls with them as though they were kites on invisible strings. Ducks scurried round in brown skirmishing flotillas, quarrelling, diving, tails up. ‘I've done everything, and this morning I went over fifteen. It's terrible. I used to be as thin as you.'

It's no good, the girl thought, I've got to go down
to the post office. If Harry sends the money I shall know it's all right. If he doesn't send it I know I'm done. Whatever happens, I've got to go down to the post office and see. I've got to be logical. I haven't a job. I've got to be logical. During the war we used to eat locust beans. You never see them now. They said they had food value. We used to make them last a long time. That's what I want, something to last a long time.

‘So I think there's nothing for it,' Mrs. Victor said, ‘but to try simple starvation. I shall just starve and starve.' She laughed a little. ‘After all it must be the oldest form of losing weight in the world.'

The children had come very near, the gulls shrieking and wheeling above the flurry of ducks, white bread and yellow bunscraps flashing up in arcs against the bright sunshine.

‘You see, it wears me out. Just sitting here now, I'm so hot I don't know what to do with myself. I'm all perspiration. I shall have to change everything when I get home.'

A small child holding a round sugar-shining bun threw it into the water in one piece.

‘It's so humiliating. You see, don't you? Your friends, people staring at you. When you've been
thin, when you've had a nice figure. You see, don't you?'

‘I see,' the girl said.

‘I envy you,' Mrs. Victor said.

Again the girl thought, if I get up I shall fall down. She stirred slightly, feeling the emptiness of her stomach send out fainting waves of weakness. Her mind slipped into silliness. If A has two shillings between her and the workhouse and there's no letter at the post office how many bananas must A eat before A is dead?

On the edge of the lake a nurse stood on tip-toe and tried to regain the lost bun with the ferrule of a sunshade, regained it, and gave it back to the child. ‘Of course it's all right. Of course they'll eat it. They'll eat anything.'

‘I know my husband won't like it,' Mrs. Victor said. ‘But I can't help it. He'll say think of my position and so on. But it's no use. I've got my own pride – I can't look at myself in the glass.'

Now the small child had himself begun to eat the water-soaked bun, liking it. The nurse, grey-capped, swooped down on him like a gull herself, snatching it away, startling him to tears.

‘Why does she make that child cry? I can't stand
children crying,' Mrs. Victor said. ‘It gets on my nerves. People think because you're fat and easy going you've got no nerves. My nerves are all on edge.'

The crying of the small child against the crying of the gulls made wire-shrill discords. Nerves, the the girl thought. Nerves. Somebody had said that to her. Nerve. She remembered, saw herself mooning slowly along the street, intentionless, her mind dead. You've got a nerve, a voice said. Beginners on the other side of the street. When you went to the cinema this was what happened. This, as you knew, was the thing that the heroine had to face, and yet it was never mentioned. It was the most terrible thing, and in the end, by some awful irony, it was the director who saved her both from it and from herself.

‘That child,' Mrs. Victor said. ‘I can't stand it. Why does she make it cry like that?'

The child, holding his breath, had gone from crimson to faint purple in the face, in the fury of his frustration. The waves of torturing sound beat against the great cushion of Mrs. Victor's body and shook her nerves. She got up.

‘It's no use, I shall have to go.'

At that moment the nurse snatched up the child, put him into a large white perambulator, snatched the bun from his hands and threw it into the lake again. In a moment, as the perambulator moved off, the screams of the child began to die away.

‘Well, that's better,' Mrs. Victor said. ‘Even so, I think I must go.'

I must go too, the girl thought. But if I get up I shall faint.

‘Good-bye,' Mrs. Victor held out her hand. ‘Think of me starving.' She held in her large moist hand the girl's thin one. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again.'

‘Good-bye,' the girl said.

Mrs. Victor walked away along the edge of the lake. The girl sat staring at the water. Ducks and birds and light and bread revolved like a lucky wheel against the sun.

Every evening, up at the farm, we saw the same men go past, out towards the villages, at the same time. They were coming home from the factories down in the valley: men escaping from the machine.

And though we got to know them well by sight, first the young chaps, racing hard, with flying mufflers, then the old stagers, the old tough shoe-finishers still wearing polish-blackened aprons, then the man with the black cork-leg and only one pedal to his bicycle, there was one we knew really well. His name was Simmons. We called him Waddo.

When Waddo went past we lifted hands from hoes or rakes, or even waved a cabbage that we might be cutting, and hailed him. ‘Way up!' we called.

‘Waddo!' he shouted, and sailed on.

But three times a year, at hay-time, harvest and threshing, when we needed extra hands, he stopped to help us. He rode his pink-tyred semi-racing bike into the stack yard, unstrapped his dinner-basket, rolled up his sleeves and looked
round at us, as we stood stacking corn or unloading hay, with a look of tolerant contempt. As though to say, ‘You poor miserable devils. Bin here since morning and all you done is stack up three ha'porth o' hay. Well, spit on me big toe, spit on it. If you ain't a bleedin' limit.' It was the look of a giant for a degenerate collection of pitch-fork pygmies. Waddo himself stood five feet three.

But when he came into that yard we were transformed. He flung himself to work with an almost daemonic fury of strength. The muscles of his small arms were tight as clock-work springs under the white factory-blanched flesh. His little head, with thin wire-brush hair worn bald at the temples, was like a bullet that might have gone off at any moment with an explosive bang of enthusiasm or disgust. He worked swiftly, with the slight puffed swagger of a man of mountainous physique, incessantly talking, always comic, spitting mouthsful of patient disgust for us who worked so hard all day and did nothing. There was some extra volcanic force in Waddo, who never tired, never gave up, and was never beaten. Coming from the machines, he was like a machine himself. ‘Waddo,' we'd say to him, ‘blowed if you don't go on wheels.'