The Fat Woman’s Joke

‘This Susan seems to be quite your confidante. Do you discuss all your personal life with her?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Do you discuss me?’ She used her little-girl voice.

He used his angry one. ‘As much, I daresay, as you discuss me with your window cleaner.’

‘My window cleaner appears to be quite a randy man, for your information.’

‘So, if you want to know, does my secretary.’

‘What, a randy man?’

‘No, a randy girl. Now you know.’

She chose not to believe him. She thought she had simply made him angrier than she had meant.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m being silly. It’s because I’m hungry.’

‘Yes you are being silly. Why are you dividing the whites from the yolks?’

‘I’m making a fluffy omelette. It will go further.’

Esther’s head, all of a sudden, felt very full and unpleasant. ‘I feel awful.’

‘I feel fine,’ said Alan, with memories of Susan’s forwardness and hugging to himself the knowledge of his agent’s enthusiasm, which he felt Esther did not yet deserve to know. ‘Lighter and emptier. I think this is what it felt like ten years ago.’ He looked down at his paunch. It seemed to him to have shrunk.

‘I’ve got a headache. I don’t think I can face this omelette.’ She laid her hands on her stomach. It was full and flabby. She was depressed.

‘It says you must not on any account go without any of the food items mentioned. You just wait until spinach day!’ He quoted from the diet sheet. ‘The diet depends for its efficiency on a chemical process the body undergoes during the diet’s course. They may be good doctors but they’re bloody awful writers of the King’s English.’

‘Queen’s.’

‘Why do you have this urge to find fault all the time?’

‘That’s very unfair.’

‘What are you doing with that butter?’ Alan’s hand shot out to restrain Esther’s. They both stared at their touching flesh, as if at something strange. Alan dropped her hand, quickly.