The Fat Woman’s Joke. Fay Weldon

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      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ