The Fat Woman’s Joke

‘It sounds perfectly horrible to me,’ said Esther. ‘However, I don’t take you seriously because you have just sent your magnum opus to a publisher, and I know you are quite convinced you will spend your declining years in an aura of esteem and respect and creative endeavour. I believe also that somewhere down inside you lurks a rich fantasy life in which you travel to exotic places, conquer mountains, do any number of noble and heroic deeds, save battalions singlehanded, and lay the world’s most beautiful women right and left. There may well be a more perverse and morbid side to this, but I would rather not go into it here. And you, Gerry, tell me, do you not ever wish to do extreme and fearful things? Is your masculinity entirely channelled into lustful thoughts of the opposite sex? Do you not want to burn, savage, torture, kill? Or at any rate, like Alan, failing that, are you not seized with the desire to break all the best glasses, miss the basin when you pee, burn the sheets with cigarette ends, leave smelly socks about for your wife to pick up –’

‘Women have their revenges too –’ said Alan. ‘They leave old sanitary towels around.’

Abruptly they all stopped talking. Alan crammed more garlic bread into his mouth. He bit upon a garlic clove and was obliged to spit it out. Everyone watched.

‘We all talk too much,’ said Esther to Phyllis in the kitchen a little later. ‘One has to be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts, and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits. Our home isn’t half going to be messy from now on.’

When they returned to the kitchen with the second course, the murmur of men’s voices stopped abruptly.

‘What were you telling Alan to do?’ Phyllis asked her husband. ‘Go off with his secretary? For the sake of his red corpuscles?’

He did not reply, for this indeed had been the essence of his conversation.

‘Esther,’ was all Alan said, ‘we are going on a diet, you and I. We are going to fight back middle-age. Hand in hand, with a stiff upper lip and an aching midriff, we are going to push back the enemy.’

‘When?’ asked Esther in alarm, looking at the mountains of food on the table – the crackling hot pottery dishes of vegetables, the bowls of sauces, the great oval platter on which the bloody beef reposed. ‘Not now?’

‘Of course not,’ said Alan. ‘Tomorrow we start.’

‘New lives always begin tomorrow,’ said Phyllis. ‘Never now. That’s right, isn’t it, Gerry? Will you carve?’

Gerry sharpened the knife. It flashed to and fro under their noses. He carved.

‘We’re going to do it, Esther,’ said Alan, watching the food piling on her plate. ‘Look your last on all things lovely. We’ll take a stone off apiece.’

‘If you say so, darling,’ said Esther. ‘I’m all yours to command.’

‘Oh she’s a lovely woman,’ said Gerry.

‘You’ll never stick it,’ said Phyllis, jealously. ‘You’ll never be able to do it.’

‘Of course we will,’ said Esther. ‘If we want to, we will. And we want to.’

‘Doing without what you want is the hardest thing in the world,’ said Phyllis. ‘Isn’t it, Gerry?’

‘Incidentally,’ said Esther to Phyllis four weeks later, ‘there was too much salt in the mayonnaise that night, and too much in the gravy too. So we had to drink a lot. And the next day Alan and I had hangovers, and were cross and miserable even before we started our régime of abstinence.’

‘You didn’t say anything about too much salt at the time.’

‘One doesn’t. Or nobody would ever ask anyone to dinner any more. The middle classes would grind to a social halt. It wasn’t a bad meal, for once, in fact. Which was just as well, because it was the last we had for some time.’

‘After you two had gone,’ said Phyllis, ‘I went to sleep on the sofa. Gerry wouldn’t stop visiting his ex-wife every Saturday, and I was upset and angry, and I thought he’d been behaving badly all evening, anyway. But in the middle of the night he hauled me into bed – he’s much stronger than I am – and we were happy for a time. Until Saturday came again. Or at least he was happy. I’m not very good at that kind of thing. It’s the gesture I appreciate, not the thing itself. I think.’

‘And Alan and I went home and had cocoa and biscuits and went to sleep. We were tired. We’d been married, after all, for nearly twenty years.’

‘But you and Alan were always touching each other,’ said Phyllis, ‘like young lovers. As if even after all those years you couldn’t keep your hands off each other.’

‘And we meant it,’ said Esther crossly, ‘in public. It was just when we got home we found we were tired. Once you are beyond a certain age sex isn’t an instinct any more – it’s a social convention.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘I am sorry, but you feel sexy because you know it’s nice to feel sexy, not because you really are. Are you sure you wouldn’t like coffee?’

‘No,’ said Phyllis. Then she added, urgently, ‘Esther! Living here, alone, with no husband. No boyfriend. Surely you feel – at night –?’

‘No. I live by myself. Just me. Self-sufficient, wanting no one, no other mind, no other body. I live with the truth. I need no protection from it.’

‘Gerry and I,’ said Phyllis. ‘I am so miserable. We are chained together by our bed.’

‘That is your misfortune,’ said Esther, ‘and why you are so unhappy. Bed is a very difficult habit to break. Now let us continue with my story, because yours is very ordinary and I am not concerned with it. In the morning Alan kissed me goodbye – on the doorstep so the neighbours could see – and went to his office. He had had no breakfast. He was feeling desperate and hungover, but dieting seemed to him to be a rich and positive thing. Perhaps that was why, this particular morning, his secretary made such an impression on him, and he on his secretary.’

Susan and Brenda sat in the pub, conscious of their youth and beauty, which indeed shone like a beacon in a boozy, beery world, and Susan gave Brenda her more detailed account of a morning which Esther could only guess at.

‘The typing agency quite often send me to Norman, Zo-Hailey –’ said Susan, naming a large London advertising agency. ‘They always need temporary staff. Girls never stay long. They think it’s going to be glamorous and all they find is a lot of dull old research people plodding through statistics. Married ones, at that. And the pay’s bad, so they hand in their notice. And then again, if they do get to the livelier departments, it soon transpires that men in advertising agencies hardly count as men. What man worth his salt would spend his life sitting in an office selling other people’s goods, by proxy?’

‘Alan seems to have behaved like a man, from what you say.’

‘Alan was different. He was a creative person. Anyway they’re all quite good at pretending to be men. They know all the rules. Their bodies, even, work as if they were men, but on the whole they’re deceiving themselves and everyone else.’

‘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 the 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 ageing drunken lush only 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, ‘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.’