‘You’re supposed to bother. You’ve got to bother if you’re a woman. Otherwise you might as well be a man.’
‘It’s not fair. I didn’t ask to be born with legs like pillars.’
‘I daresay they are good for child-bearing.’
‘Can I look?’ Brenda lived in hope that one day Susan would paint a flattering portrait of her. Susan never did.
The telephone rang.
‘You’d better answer it,’ said Susan. ‘If it’s Alan I’m not at home. I’ve gone away for a month to the country.’
It wasn’t Alan, but a wrong number.
‘Perhaps you should ring him,’ ventured Brenda. ‘Then you wouldn’t be so edgy.’
‘I’m not edgy,’ said Susan. ‘I am upset. So we’re all upset. Loving is upsetting. That’s the point of it.’
‘What about his wife? Is she upset?’
‘I don’t think she feels very much at all. Like fish feel no pain when you catch them. From what Alan says, her emotional extremities are primitive.’
‘If I went out with a married man I’d feel awful,’ said Brenda.
‘Why?’
‘I’d worry about his wife.’
‘You are very different from me. You are fundamentally on the side of wives, and families. I don’t like wives, on principle. I like to feel that any husband would prefer me to his wife. Wives are a dull, dreadful, boring, possessive lot by virtue of their state. I am all for sexual free enterprise. Let the best woman win.’
‘If you were married,’ said Brenda, ‘you would not talk like that.’
‘If I was married,’ said Susan, ‘which heaven forbid, I would make sure I outshone every other woman in the world. I wouldn’t let myself go.’
‘Alan didn’t seem your type at all.’
‘I don’t have a type. You are very vulgar sometimes. You know nothing about sex or art or anything.’
‘I don’t know why you always want to paint me, then. You seem to have such a low opinion of me. It is very tiring.’
‘You have a marvellous face,’ said Susan. ‘If only you would do something with it.’
‘What do you mean, do something with it?’
‘Give it a kind of style, or put an expression on it that suited it.’
‘What would suit it?’ Brenda was worried.
‘I don’t know. I’m getting very bored. Shall we go to the pub?’
‘I don’t like sitting about in pubs. All those smelly people, so full of drink they don’t know what they’re doing. Last time I was in a pub a man pee-ed himself, he was so drunk. How can you talk to anyone in a pub?’
‘You go to pubs to enjoy yourself, not to talk. Communication is on a different level altogether. Sometimes I think you should run home to Mummy. You have no gift for living.’
‘Oh all right, we’ll go to the pub. But will you tell me all about Alan?’
‘What about him? What do you want to know? You are very prurient.’
‘I don’t want to know all about that. I want to know what you felt. You make me feel so outclassed. Your relationships are so major, somehow. Nothing like that ever happens to me.’
‘He was on a diet,’ said Susan. ‘That’s a feminine kind of thing to be, really. On the whole masculine things are boring and feminine things are interesting.’
‘Men don’t bore me,’ said Brenda. ‘Everything else, but I’ve never been bored by a man.’
‘Then you’re lucky. But that wasn’t what I was saying. You are very dim sometimes.’
Susan took off her smock. Brenda put on her shoes.
‘You never know with men,’ said Susan, pulling on an open lace-work dress over a flesh-coloured body stocking. ‘The ones who are most interesting before, are often the most boring afterwards, and vice versa.’
‘In that case,’ said Brenda, ‘it would be absurd for a girl to marry a man she hadn’t been to bed with, wouldn’t it? Think of all those poor lovesick virgins in the past, all going starry-eyed to the altar and all destined for a lifetime’s boredom. How terrible! And to think that my mother would wish to perpetuate such a system for ever!’
‘All human activity,’ remarked Susan, painting a rim of black around her eyes, ‘is fairly absurd.’
Brenda put on her jockey’s cap and they left. They were a ravishing pair. People stared after them.
Esther had a very pretty soft voice. It was one of the things that had first made Alan notice her. Now, as she recounted her tale, it floated so meekly out of her lips that it was quite an effort for Phyllis to catch what she was saying.
‘Alan and I were accustomed to eating a great deal, of course. We all have our cushions against reality: we all have to have our little treats to look forward to. With Gerry it’s looking forward to laying girls, and with you it’s looking forward to enduring it, and with Alan and me it was eating food. So you can imagine how vulnerable a diet made us.’
‘I wish you would stop using the past tense about you and Alan.’
‘I know it is only four weeks ago but it might as well be forty years. My marriage with Alan is over. Please don’t interrupt. I am explaining how food set the pattern of our days. All day in his grand office Alan would sip coffee and nibble biscuits and plan his canteen dockets and organise cold chicken and salad and wine for working lunches, and all day at home I would plan food, and buy food, and cook food, and serve food, and nibble and taste and stir and experiment and make sweeties and goodies and tasties for Alan to try out when he came home. I would feel cheated if we were asked out to dinner. I would spend the entire afternoon making myself as beautiful as my increasing age and girth would allow, but still I felt cheated.’
‘You were a wonderful cook. Gerry used to say you were the best cook in England. When you two came to dinner I would go mad with worry. It would take me the whole day just producing something I wouldn’t be ashamed of. And even then I usually was.’
‘People who can’t cook shouldn’t try. It is a gift which you are either born with or you aren’t. I used to quite enjoy coming to visit you two in spite of the food. You and Gerry would quarrel and bicker, and get at each other in subtle and not so subtle ways, and Alan and I would sit back, lulled by our full bellies into a sense of security, and really believe ourselves to be happy, content and well-matched. This day, four weeks ago, I really think I thought I was happy. There were little grey clouds, here and there, like Alan’s writing, which was distracting him from his job, and Peter’s precocity, and my boredom with the house and simply, I suppose growing older and fatter. In truth of course, they weren’t little clouds at all. They were raging bloody crashing thunderstorms. But there is none so blind as those who are too stuffed full of food to see.’
‘I don’t really know what you are talking about.’
‘You will come to understand, if you pay attention. You are sure you want me to go on with this story?’
‘Yes. Oh Esther, you can’t still be hungry!’ Esther was taking frozen fish fingers from their pack.
‘I have no intention, ever again, of doing without what I want. That was what Alan and I presumed to think we could do, that evening in your house when we decided to go on a diet.’
Phyllis