The Fat Woman’s Joke

‘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 a herb omelet 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 judgement.’ 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. 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 up 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, of course. I had further work to do.’

‘I think you’re making it all up, talking as if you did it all on purpose. Anyway men aren’t manipulated like that. They either feel things for you or they don’t. It’s men who take the initiative. You keep talking about men the way men talk about women. It’s rather disgusting.’

‘You put things into their heads,’ Susan insisted. ‘You put beddish visions before their eyes.’

‘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 exactly 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, almost of another generation. 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.

‘That 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-à-brac.

‘Juliet,’ said Esther, ‘you’ll never get a good shine if you don’t sweep properly first. You’ll just rub the dirt in and ruin the surface.’

Juliet put down her cloth and straightened up. She was thirty and short, with an hourglass figure and a tendency to backache with which she excused her bad temper.

‘Why aren’t you in the kitchen?’ Juliet’s voice was accusing. ‘You’re always in the kitchen while I polish, cooking.’

‘We are on a diet and there’s nothing to cook.’

‘Well don’t take it out on me,’ said Juliet, resuming her crouching position and the flailing of her arms.

‘I’m not taking anything out on anybody. I’m just observing that if you rub grit into a parquet floor you spoil the surface.’

‘The Hoover needs mending,’ said Juliet. ‘It doesn’t take anything up any more. I told you about it weeks ago.’

‘Well, you can sweep, can’t you? Brooms were made before Hoovers.’

Juliet put down her cloth. ‘What did you have for breakfast? Did you go without, or something?’

‘I had a very good breakfast, thank you. I had eggs. And it’s eggs for lunch, and eggs for dinner, and in two weeks I’ll have lost a stone and a half.’

‘You be careful. You can go too far. A friend of mine went on a diet and lost all appetite for food. They took her in at the hospital but it was too late, she died. Her stomach had shrunk to a dried pea – or was it walnut? One or the other, I do remember that.’

‘This is a very well-tried diet, and very sensible. One should be able to control one’s size, if one is going to control one’s life.’

‘What do you want to do it for? You’re all right as you are. You’ve got a husband and a son and a house, even if it is filled up with all this junk, and someone to do your dirty work for you. What else do you want?’

‘It’s healthier to be thin.’

‘Dieting ruins the health. Men like women nice and cosy. Their wives, anyway.’

‘To tell you the truth I am really going through with it for Mr Sussman’s sake. For my own part, I don’t really worry. But it’s easier for him if I do it too. You know what men are. They haven’t got all that much willpower.’

‘What you need is physical exercise. You ought to get down on your hands and knees more often, instead of just standing about.’

‘When you have gone home, Juliet,’ said Esther clearly, ‘I often find I have to.’

She walked with determination into the kitchen, as if there was something there to busy her. Juliet peered after her, with an expression of quite serious malevolence on her face.

‘You’ll go too far,’ said Juliet. ‘One day you’ll go too far.’

And she continued her manic, useless polishing.

The Sussmans’ kitchen was full of herbs, spices, pestles and mortars and strings of onion and garlic, and jars of olive oil and cut-outs from early editions of Mrs Beeton. There scarcely seemed room in it for human beings, but that evening there they were, the two of them, Alan and Esther, their flesh squeezed between table and dresser, studying their diet sheet, and both bad-tempered.

‘At least we can put herbs in the omelette,’ said Alan. ‘An omelette aux fines herbes. Delicious.’

Esther reached out for eggs and started breaking them into a basin. ‘Oh big deal,’ she said.

‘Someone else said that to me today. I can’t remember who.’

‘Your secretary, I dare say. Since she spends so much time with you.’

‘I think it was, now you come to mention it.’

Esther was suspicious. It did not suit her. Her eyes, usually luminous globes of expression, became smaller and mean. ‘What were you and she talking about?’

‘This diet, I think,’ said Alan, allowing a certain weariness at Esther’s bad behaviour to creep into his tone. ‘I really can’t remember. I’ve got to talk to somebody, haven’t I?’

‘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.

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