The Fat Woman's Joke (14 page)

“You've got to give them a good time haven't you,” said Juliet. “You can't grudge them their rights. They've got a right to expect certain things. You-know-what, and a hot meal when they come home from work. That keeps them quiet, and they don't interfere. What more do you want?”

“It's not as easy as that.”

“You haven't got enough to do that's your trouble. You let things get on top of you. I'm sorry for the husbands in all the houses I do for. All these
thoughts
going on around them all the time. I'm never idle, that's what it is. I'm always at it.”

“There doesn't seem anything to do any more, except fill in time. Once I had a garden but I filled it in with concrete because it was neater, and because I just didn't seem able to grow things any more. I'd lost my touch.”

“You're not as young as you were. I mean, who of us is?”

“My world is so small. My body is shriveling. Perhaps that's why I need to be fat.” She held out her arm for Juliet to see. “You see? I am used to seeing my arm firm. Now it is grayer, and flabby. I am going to die, Juliet.”

“Aren't we all? I don't know what the fuss is about. You should do a little more, think a little less. I'm never idle, that's my secret. I'm always busy.”

Esther raised her eyebrows in disbelief, and unfortunately Juliet saw.

“I should eat a biscuit if I was you. It's silly, starving yourself like this.”

“I've lost ten pounds.”

“That's not much, is it. For a person your size. You could never tell. I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you could just never tell.”

“You could do with a bit off yourself, Juliet.”

“The difference between you and me is, of course, that I've never had any trouble with boys. If you start off popular you don't really care ever after. It didn't seem to matter what I looked like, they were always there, queuing up. I don't suppose it was like that for you, what with your size and all.”

“I don't do too badly, thank you, Juliet.”

Juliet held the saucepan under the tap, rubbed at it with Brillo, and talked over her shoulder to Esther.

“I can't seem to shift the stains on this pan. I think it's finished, Mrs. Wells, I really do. It needs throwing out.”

“No,” said Esther, with some passion, “it is not finished.”

“All right. All right.”

“Old things ought to be cherished and looked after.”

“Throw them out. No use to anyone. Old ugly pans are like old ugly people. Once the children are grown up, they're no use to any one.”

“Children always need their parents.”

“What, your Peter? He doesn't need anyone. Except a vicar to get him married. He's off now, anyway.”

“Off? What do you mean?”

“Your Peter. Sharing with Stephanie.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I heard him on the phone. Didn't he tell you? He's going to share that girl's flat. If she is a girl, with that hair. I don't mean to worry you, but I should find out. You can't have him growing up a fag, can you.”

“Of course he told me,” lied Esther, her hands trembling even more. “I don't know that it will come to anything, though. You know what children are, making plans.”

“Children!” said Juliet. “I don't think you've taught him proper respect for women, that's the trouble. You'll be a grandmother any minute if you're not careful, six times over in the same month.”

“You're exaggerating.”

“A big boy like that, it's very unsettling in the house. The sooner he's on his own the better. For you, and Mr. Wells too. It puts ideas in the head, somehow.”

“I daresay.”

“This house is getting like a morgue. You can feel it when you come in through the door. It gives me the shivers.”

“I always used to bake in the mornings. Everything used to smell nice and homey. But it's wrong to cook. It makes us fat. Nothing I do is much use to anyone, is it?”

“Well, you said it, not me.”

Esther's hand crept out to the plate of biscuits which had been put out for Juliet. Then she drew it back.

“You don't even nag much any more,” said Juliet. “You'll lose your standards and then where will you be? What'll you have left then?”

Esther's hand reached for the biscuit again. This time it got there. She put the biscuit to her lips. Juliet whirled round.

“I saw you! I'll tell him! I'll tell him what you've been up to. I saw you!” She was half-joking, half malevolent.

“Get out of my house,” said Esther.

“But I haven't finished yet.”

“Get out of my house and don't come back,” said Esther, who after all had said too much to Juliet and having distorted the balance of the relationship, now had no option but to finish it completely. “I'm sick of you and your insolence and your spying. I'll do the work myself. Coming here, taking advantage of me, day after day, listening to me, mocking me. Taking my money, giving me nothing in return—nothing—”

She was by now pale with anger. Juliet carefully and slowly took off her apron, as someone who has won a long-sought victory, and left. When she had gone, Esther leaned her head on the table and cried. She rang Alan for comfort but was told he had not been in the office that day.

“I don't understand why you have such trouble with your staff,” said Phyllis. “Mine always stay. Yours always get out of hand.”

“It's because I can never see why other people should do my dirty work, and so I am apologetic about it. Or else I talk too much. There are so few people to talk to. When I rang Alan to tell him how horrible Juliet was and found he wasn't there I wished Juliet was back again so I could tell her all about it.”

“Where was he?”

“Well where do you think he was? He was with that silly slut Susan.”

“W
HAT'S THE MATTER WITH
you?” Susan asked Brenda with some impatience. Brenda, back from work, lay on her back on the bed instead of cooking dinner.

“I am in love. I was too tired before to notice, but now I know I am. It is distinguished by a strange breathless feeling under the ribs; a kind of pattering fluttering of feeling. I suppose if one was pregnant and the baby kicked, it would feel like that. It is not a very pleasant feeling, but it is very important. I can see that it would lead one to do all kinds of drastic things, like murder and divorce. It will only ever be still when I lie in a bed with my arms around him.”

“Who do you happen to be in love with?”

“That man who was here last night. Why should I have this feeling about a man I can't even speak to? It is not the union of two minds. Could it be the union of two bodies? Susan, why did he give me two pound notes and not his telephone number?”

“Because that's what they charge. How was he to know the difference? He could only judge you on your actions. You had no words to explain that you do not make a habit of such behavior, if indeed you don't, which I am not in a position to know. Didn't you hand it back?”

“No. It was all too sudden. And I was grateful that he had given me something else. Besides himself, if you see what I mean. And then he was gone and I'm all upset and I want to see him again and if I don't I think I shall die. Tonight I will go to the pub and wait for him. I tried to talk to my mother, but she had one of her mad fits right in the middle of Dickens and Jones, and I nearly died of embarrassment. What I don't understand is why I should feel like this about this man when I haven't about any of the others. Actually there were only two, to tell you the truth, they were both very suitable, chosen by my mother. Perhaps that's why I couldn't fancy them. And they talked too much. The more they talked, the more I saw them for what they were, and I despised them. Isn't that terrible?”

“I expect they were too nice to you. It's easier to love people when they're unpleasant to you. You are coming on, I must say. A little suffering will do you a world of good. Let's have a drink. I saw Alan's son today.” She confided this almost shyly.

“You didn't! You have got a nerve.” They drank their sherry with relish.

“Well, it annoys me the way men will try to get you all totally involved and at the same time try and confine you to a tiny part of their lives. If you're involved, they should be involved, too, it's only reasonable. I don't understand why Peter's turned out so marvelous with such screwball parents.”

“How is he marvelous?”

“He is lovely. He is so simple. He is divine. I always knew he would be. Alan kept his picture on his desk. He's only eighteen and already he lives with this girl. He's much too young for me. Such lack of complication is a bit overpowering, but what a body. What a body. One could become hooked on mere flesh and bones—had you thought of that? I've never related to just a male body before; I begin to think I've been wrong all this time. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps a silent man is the only truly desirable man there is. From now on, everything's going to be different.”

“I think it's horrible. It's like incest. First father, then son.”

“Not at all. I find I do hope he tells his dad, all the same. Is that horrible of me?”

“Yes. What happened between you and Alan to make you so angry?”

“I will tell you. Perhaps if I can get it straight in my mind it will stop me feeling so awful. Except I don't know if I'm feeling awful about Alan or about William. I didn't think I cared about William, but I find I miss him. He was so good to talk to, and we got on so well, and we had so much in common, and I don't understand why that silly stupid cow of a wife of his should have him just because she breeds all the time. What is this magic in reproduction? One gets it all the time. My wife, my child. My child's birthday. My wife's birthday. Someone's ill. Someone's speech day. It's Christmas. It's Whitsun. All the time this bloody fucking father-child husband-wife obsession. Can't men just exist by themselves for more than an hour at a time? Why do they have to have their appendages?”

“Then you shouldn't go with married men, should you?”

“You know what Peter's got? A cricket team. He hasn't got a wife. He hasn't got a child. But already, a cricket team. Sometimes I wish I was a Lesbian.”

“I've told my mother I wasn't a Lesbian. That's the worst fate she could imagine for me. Why do old people feel so strongly about these things?”

“It upsets them to think they may have lived their lives in error. That they could have had fun, and didn't. They had children instead.” She stood in front of the mirror, scraping back her blonde hair against her head, so that her cheekbones appeared bony and strong.

“Sometimes you remind me of a man.”

“Sometimes I feel like a man.”

“I wonder why my mother thinks there's a dumpy little housefrau inside you trying to get out? I think it's more like a footballer.”

“What a horrible thing to say.”

“Which? The housefrau or the footballer?”

“Both. I think such fantasies reflect badly upon both you and your mother. They say nothing about me—it simply indicates that you and your mother have Lesbian tendencies and that you are kinky for brutish men. We already have evidence for both these suppositions, of course.”

“I don't think I like sharing a flat with you. All I want is time to think about how I love this man, and someone to talk to about him, and all I get from you is cynical, complicated, upsetting talk.”

“You needn't think I like sharing a flat with you, either. I wish William was here. William is the only person who has ever understood and appreciated me.”

“Nobody,” said Alan, “has ever really appreciated me.” He lay on his back on the bed on the thirteenth day of the diet; the same bed where later Brenda was to lie and suffer in her headlong flight from reality, the pangs of true love. Susan was in her artist's smock and stood at the easel with a paintbrush in her hand, but felt unsure where to apply the color. “All my life nobody has ever really appreciated me. All my life I have been used. My mother used me; she would dress me up in the same spirit as she dressed her poodle, in a little fur coat and red bootees, and take me out for walks. If you have a dog you never lack friends, she would say. Bloody beast, it nearly bit my nose right off. It's never been the same. It has this bump in the middle. Deformed.”

“It seems a very straight nose to me.”

“Do you think so? It's a funny thing, Peter has this same bump in his nose. What do you think that proves?”

“That he's your son, I suppose.”

“I don't mean that, I meant it would either imply that that bloody animal didn't in fact damage my nose to the degree I have always believed, or that Lysenko was right.”

“Lysenko?”

“Inheritance of acquired characteristics. You are fairly ignorant of facts, if nothing else. You are probably wise to be so. My father used me as a repository for useless information. What is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, he would ask, or how many pennies would you have to put on the top of St. Paul's in order to reach the moon. I don't know, I'd say, thus enabling him to pass the answer on to me and make room in His own brain for some other piece of newer, fresher information he was anxious to acquire. Why, when I have made love to you, do I talk so much?”

“I like listening.”

“Esther doesn't listen. Esther doesn't appreciate me. She doesn't appreciate me in bed or out of it. Then she makes a fuss because I don't make love to her. But it's not love she wants, it's her rights.”

He had never talked about Esther to her before. Susan felt encouraged. It seemed possible that at last a man was going to abandon wife, family, home and all for sheer love of her—and think his world well lost for the sake of Susan Pierce. Then, and only then, she felt, could she begin to live. She began to apply paint and became so interested in the process she almost forgot all about him.