The Fat Woman's Joke (17 page)

“Have you seen her, then? Where? How?”

“She called to visit me. To apologize for breaking up my home. I was trying to get on with my homework and waiting for Stephanie to come back from work when there was this knock at the door, and there she was. This vision. So unhappy, so distressed. I think there is a kind of kinship between us. She understands so much. She has so very, very much feeling. Women with feeling are very rare, Mother. But it is all over between them now. She has grown out of the stage of liking older men. She prefers her own generation. That is maturity.”

“I see. What does Stephanie think about this?”

“One of the nice things about Stephanie is that she doesn't really think at all—after school it is such a relief, all this non-thinking. As a schoolboy one has to use one's brain all day; even playing cricket demands great mental concentration. I really do need you at home to talk to, you know. I am fairly grown up for my age, but every now and then I become confused. If girls didn't like me I can see I would lead a narrower life, but it would be more a peaceful one, wouldn't it, and not so alarming. I mean, see how it confused Dad's life, simply fancying a girl as one could fancy a dish of strawberries and cream. Because that is how it was with Dad and her—he saw her as a symbol of delight, not a person. It was most distressing for her. Mother, somebody has to look after her. She is not good at looking after herself.”

“She's older than you. You're the one who needs looking after.”

“You are perfectly right,” he was triumphant. “That is exactly what I have been trying to say. Oh, Mother, come home.”

“There he was, you see,” said Esther to Phyllis, “playing with fire and frightened of getting burned. All set for an affair with suburban Susan, coming to me to be protected from himself, hoping that my outrage would be strong enough to turn his back from the incestuous paths to which he had set his face. Going to bed with Daddy's mistress; it's far too near for comfort to going to bed with Daddy's wife. I used to fancy my mother's rich lover, I remember, being too scared to actually fancy my Dad. But now I refuse to be outraged. I had given him the eighteen years a mother has to give a son. Now he was on his own. I wanted to save my outrage for myself. Not waste it on a child who had youth on his side to save him from the direr penalties of obsessive fornication. I was older than him, and needed my outrage if I was to escape my husband.”

“Perhaps your mother was right, Esther. Please try and think rationally about things. When you talk like this I get upset. Nothing is as I thought it was; you make my whole world rock. You should see a doctor. A real one, I mean, not like mine. Things have gone too far with you. You can have your frontal lobes cut, do you know, and then you never worry about a thing. You're just happy all the time. All the time.”

“Poor Phyllis. Is that next for you? If cutting your breasts open and stuffing them doesn't work, try cutting open the brain? You don't half pursue happiness to extremes. You'll corner it somewhere, won't you? In a little dark corner of your coffin, finally, you'll corner happiness.”

“I assure you I am very happy. It is you I worry about, Esther. You shouldn't think of that lonely boy Peter in those terms, much less reject his pleas for help. He wanted to be saved from Susan Pierce. It was your duty as a mother to save him. You should have packed and gone home there and then.”

“Well, I didn't. If Alan doesn't ask me to return I never will. And even if he does, I won't. I have my pride. Did I tell you Susan Pierce has just been to see me? She brought me a flower-pot.”

“What an odd thing to do.”

“It was a present Alan had given her. She said she couldn't make things grow, but she thought I could, and she couldn't bear to leave that lily to wither up and die. It was just an excuse to see me. It was as if she wanted the entire family. Not content with the father, and then the son, I really think she would have welcomed a Lesbian relationship with me.”

“Oh really, Esther! She's no dyke. She's just sex mad.”

“You mean I have been talking to you all this time and you still see human relationships in terms of sex? It had nothing to do with sex. The sexual urge is concerned with the reproduction of the species. She just wanted to wriggle back, somehow, into a family situation. That she chose a genital method of doing so was merely coincidental. She could have done it more simply by doing our charring for us. It was a great misfortune that Alan had his family pictures on his desk. It was me she had been reaching out for all the time. I realized it when she handed me that flowerpot full of dried-up earth. It was Mummy's and Daddy's bed she wanted to be in. She wanted to know what happened there. She wanted to be included in the mysteries. A pity that the mysteries, when at last discovered, should prove so trivial. A matter of plungings and positions. And yet the very dark that shrouds all sexual intercourse, the dark of spirit and emotion, and the black cloak of love that makes one decent, leads one always to believe that there is something yet to be discovered. It is very aggravating, and responsible for a good deal of domestic confusion.”

“What are you talking about? You are a pagan. You are not decent. You are obscene!”

“Now what have I said to upset you so? I am telling you what you were curious about. About why Susan came to see me.”

“I felt so nervous about coming here,” said Susan to Esther. “But I thought I ought to try and explain things, and make them better. I wouldn't wish you to have hard feelings about me, or about your husband. He is an artist, you see. And artists are not like other people. The ordinary rules of morality do not apply to them.”

“Their immorality appears to me to be as dull and sordid as any ordinary person's. Alan is not, in fact, an artist, he is an advertising man, by profession, and by paucity of soul. That is to say he is talented, and intelligent, plausible and attractive, trivial to the bottom of his heart, and pathetic in his aspirations to a different way of life. That, however, is as may be. I may take a more jaundiced view of my husband, by virtue of my years with him, those chaste and temperate years, than you do by virtue of the couple of weeks, and the varied and various shaggings which no doubt you have shared with him.”

“You are not,” said Susan, sitting down, “what I expected at all. For a wife you are very vocal.”

“I am sure it is most admirable of you, to come visiting to explain things to me. People ought to do it more often. What a coming and going there would be, week in, week out. What a knocking on doors, day and night, up and down the land. But there'd never be a woman at home when the knock came. She'd be out on the town herself—explaining.

“You are taking advantage of me. I have been very upset by your husband.”

“Well, don't come complaining to me.”

“And I am afraid he is unhappy, and it is my fault. And you are unhappy, and it is my fault. And Peter is unhappy because you two aren't together. It is very upsetting for him. Please, Mrs. Wells, go home to your husband. We have all behaved so badly, I know. But there is only one person who can put things right, and that is you, by going home.”

“I would like to make something clear. My leaving Alan is nothing to do with you. You are welcome to him, I promise you. Anyone is. And probably are. When Alan embarked on his manic association with you, he was in a sad psychic state. You were a symptom, not a cause. A chicken-pox spot, if you like, but not the virus. You itched him, so he scratched. Now the spots have subsided, but the virus, I am afraid, remains. It is the unhappiness and discontent attendant on having too much leisure, too much choice, too little pain. And none of it is anything to do with you. Kindly stop indulging yourself, and go away.”

“You are making things very difficult for me. It is not easy, I know, for a non-artist like yourself, to understand and forgive. It must all seem strange to you, if you cannot comprehend the suddenness, the awfulness, of love when it strikes. The helplessness which overcomes one, the misery when it all goes wrong, when one offers so much and is turned away.”

Her face had changed. She looked younger and uglier. She cried. Esther began to feel more kindly toward her. “Mrs. Wells, he didn't want me at all. He wanted you.”

“He didn't have to want either of us, did he? He might have wanted the moon, or the Pope, or the Queen. I am afraid the intensity of your rivalry with me prevented you from noticing anything of the kind. This knowledge might, perhaps, make you feel better. It is not that I have vanquished you. It is that we have both been wounded in a battle which we should never have embarked upon. What is it that you are carrying in your hand and watering, so sweetly, with your tears?”

“A present.”

“A pot of earth. For me? How delightful.”

“Don't laugh at me. It is not a pot of earth. It is a pot plant. There
is
a lily down there. Alan gave it to me.”

“How sweet!” Esther peered at it elaborately. “Alan's and your baby, as it were. It's not very advanced for its age, though, is it?”

“Stop being so nasty. You were being nice before. I wish we could be friends. There is so much I don't know about things, and the more that happens to me the less I know. I only want to love someone and be loved back. Nothing I do goes right. It's like the lily; it won't grow for me. That's why I brought it to you. I thought you could make it grow. Something has to come out of all this. It must. If only a bloody pot plant.”

“Peter quite fancies you.”

A look of horror appeared on Susan's face.

“You know about that? I don't know how it happened, I really don't.”

“He wants to look after you.”

“Does he really? You don't mind?”

“Stop behaving like a little girl. You go all to pieces in the face of your elders, don't you? You become infantile at once. If I was you I should go and throw myself on Peter's mercy and ask him to explain everything. He has a very neat version of the world, my son, far placider and tidier than mine. You can sop up his little-boy helplessness when the dregs of it trickle out of his ears. And he can sop up your little-girlishness when it flows and pours out of your every orifice. Play at mummies and daddies and daughters and sons and in every conceivable combination you can imagine, but just leave me in peace.”

“I had no idea you were so clever. I wish my mother had been like you.”

Esther heaved herself out of her chair and turned Susan out, first snatching the flower-pot. She watered it tenderly with lukewarm water from a milk bottle and sang it a little lullaby. But the earth didn't stir.

“T
HAT TERRIBLE WOMAN,
” said Susan, ungratefully, to Brenda. “She more or less pushed me into bed with her son. Any decent woman would have been shocked and scandalized at the very idea. She is very, very odd. No wonder Alan looked elsewhere.”

“Perhaps,” said Brenda, “she wanted to be revenged on Alan. I mean to say, what an uncomfortable position for him. Supposing you and Peter got married. You having a former lover for a father-in-law. He a mistress for a daughter-in-law, and everyone knowing.”

“It would all be rather cozy,” said Susan. “And companionable. I think I should like that. I'll walk down with you to the pub, and while you lie in wait for that silent man I'll go and call on Peter. It's Wednesday, and crop-haired Stephanie has a boyfriend she visits on Wednesdays.”

“W
HAT ARE THOSE BRUISES
on your neck?” Phyllis asked Esther. Esther, having told Phyllis about Susan's visit, had been violently sick into the lavatory. She returned to lie upon her bed and opened her collar so that the old yellowing bruises on her neck could be seen.

“It's where Alan tried to strangle me.”

“He didn't. He never did!”

Phyllis put her hands to her own neck, grateful for a lucky escape. “I am sure Gerry would never try to strangle me. I am sure he wouldn't.
How
did he try to strangle you?”

“He put his hands around my neck and he pressed and he squeezed and he tried to kill me. To put an end to me altogether. As if that would have solved his problems. I think, mind you, that I would strangle me if I was him. It must be a fearful thing to be a man and have a wife. Never to be able to do what you want without feeling guilty. Always feeling in the wrong, because wives are always in the right. I feel quite sorry for men sometimes.”

“But to try and strangle you!”

“I did call him an impotent old man. An impotent balding old man.”

“Perhaps you were angry.”

“But you see, it was the truth. He was spiritually impotent, totally, and physically impotent, partially. Once I had told him the truth, I had to go. There could be nothing left between us. Lies are never dangerous, not by comparison with the truth.”

“Esther, Esther,” cried Alan on the evening of the final day of the diet, “I've lost another pound!” The weighing machine now had a permanent position in the living room. It was eleven o'clock at night, and the diet ended at twelve. Alan was in his dressing-gown, which now had an appreciably greater overlap than before.

“Esther, Esther!” he called in the direction of the kitchen, but no one answered. “Another pound. Think of that! Of course I've been taking a lot of exercise. I'm sure that helps. But twelve whole pounds.”

There came a small rustling furtive noise from the kitchen. He leaped from the scales, so that the dial swung wildly, and flung the kitchen door open. Esther crouched in a corner, like a woman taken in adultery. She was eating a biscuit. Rage overwhelmed Alan.

“You cheat!” he cried. “You cheat! You're eating.

“You're the one who cheats,” she hissed. She seemed half mad. “You always cheat me.”

“What are you talking about?” He tried to snatch the biscuit from her. She resisted.