‘It’s not much more than a week since I last saw you, Fran. You can’t have put that much weight on!’
‘You wait and see,’ I told her, because it’s truly amazing the way all the calories have bypassed my digestive system and gone straight to my stomach and hips, laying up a fat store for a famine that was never going to happen … unless diets count as famine. But I wouldn’t need a diet if I hadn’t got fat, so if my body decides this is starvation, isn’t it going to be a sort of vicious circle? Or am I hopelessly confused?
Diets must work, or there wouldn’t be any point to people going on them, would there?
I rather gingerly checked for emails before I went out, but there were only impersonal rude ones, easily deleted from both computer and memory.
Five years ago a retired army officer and his wife bought the Druid’s Rest Hotel on the outskirts of the village and bedizened the interior with a tarty modern makeover, though they hadn’t been allowed to do much more to its venerable listed and listing old carcass than add a large conservatory-style restaurant round the back.
Indoors, the only area left more or less untouched was once the back parlour of the inn, Major Forrester realising just in time that, no matter how unwelcome he made them feel, in the absence of any other pub the regulars were still going to adorn his bar. Now he tried to segregate them away in the back room where his hotel guests and the wine-and-dine set wouldn’t need to mingle with them.
Mrs Forrester gave me a chilly smile as I walked through the lounge bar, since I was situated socially somewhere between stairs, like a governess. Sometimes I hung out with the lowlife in the back room, and sometimes Mal took me to dine in the restaurant like a lady.
Nia was already in the back parlour, sitting in a raised wooden box with low panelled walls before a table made from an old beer keg, in the company of a faded, jaded stuffed trout and a moth-eaten one-eyed fox. She was nursing a half of Murphy’s and wearing the dazed expression of one who had spent her entire Christmas and New Year dutifully shut up in a small bungalow with two stone-deaf and TV-addicted parents.
Nia must be the pocket version of the same dark Celtic stock Mal sprang from, for they both have lovely dark blue eyes and near-black, straight, shining hair, in Nia’s case hanging in a neat and rather arty bob. But whatever common ancestry they share has been well diluted over the centuries because they are totally dissimilar in every other way.
She looked up as I put my virtuous glass on the table and said, ‘Call that a spare tyre? It’s not even the size of a bicycle inner tube! And what on earth are you drinking?’
‘Soda water – I thought I’d better start trying to cut down now, and beer is full of calories.’ I sat down and squidged my midriff into a thick welt between my fingers. ‘Look – if that isn’t a spare tyre, I don’t know what is. And when I looked at myself in the mirror this morning I didn’t seem to have any cheekbones any more, but I’d gained two chins.’
‘I hope you aren’t going to get obsessive about your weight – you know what you’re like when you get a bee in your bonnet. I haven’t forgotten the time you were convinced your eyes were so far apart they were practically vanishing round the sides of your head, and everyone thought you were a freak.’
‘That was years ago,’ I protested … though maybe I do still look a little like Sophie Ellis Bextor.
‘Or when you thought your face was asymmetrical?’
‘It is asymmetrical.’
‘Yes, well, everyone’s face is asymmetrical to some extent, only most of us normal people don’t get a thing about it.’
‘You can’t talk. You’ve been on every diet known to woman and you never looked fat to me to start with!’
‘Not any more,’ she said firmly. ‘I reread Fat Is a Feminist Issue over Christmas and decided I will learn to love myself just the way I am.’
How she is is sort of rectangular, and she’s always looked much the same, as far as I recall, though maybe she used to go in at the waist a bit more. She’s always been very attractive in her own rather intense and brooding way, but the divorce seemed to have dented her self-confidence.
‘What does it matter anyway?’ she said now, shrugging philosophically. ‘I’m not going to get Paul back even if I turn into a stick insect, because he’s got a forty-year itch only a giggling twenty-something can scratch.’
She’d been running a pottery at a craft centre in mid-Wales with her husband when he suddenly fell for the young jeweller in the next workshop. He’s now buying her out of the house and business in instalments, so let’s hope the tourist industry stays strong in the valleys.
‘But would you want him back now?’ I asked curiously.
‘Not really. I’ve already wasted nearly twenty years of my life on someone who wasn’t worth it; why would I go back for a second helping?’
‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it,’ I agreed.
Nia and I go way back: we played together in St Ceridwen’s as children when I was staying at Fairy Glen with Ma; we rode Rhodri Gwyn-Whatmire’s roan pony – which he teased me was the same colour as my strawberry-blonde hair – in turns round the paddock of the big house; and both fell in and out of love with him in our early teens over the course of one long, hot summer holiday, without denting our friendship.
We even ended up at the same college together, she studying ceramics and me graphic art, the only difference being that she did her final year and graduated and I went back home and had a baby instead. And she was at the fatal party where I got off with Adam the gardener, only unfortunately she was smashed at the time and has nil recall of the night, except that she had a good time.
Presumably so did I.
I firmly banished the memory and got back down to the practicalities of the here and now. ‘Mal seems more inclined to love me as I was rather than as I am, so I’ll have to give dieting a go, and since he’s away for six weeks I should be able to lose a few pounds before he comes back. So, what sort of diet should I do? What about one of those meal-replacement things, then I wouldn’t have to cook anything tempting?’
‘Well, there’s the Shaker diet and the Bar diet, those are easy. But I’m warning you from bitter experience that even if you lose weight on one of those, you always put it straight back on again, plus an extra bit more.’
‘I wondered about that. But they must work for some people, mustn’t they? I’ll have to try it in the interests of my sex life, but it’s a pity I can’t just slide into comfortable middle age and be loved anyway. Thank God he hasn’t noticed my hair yet.’
What is it with men and long hair? I mean, Mal might love mine but I was beginning to feel like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family, so I’ve had to resort to getting Carrie to lop two inches off the end whenever he is away.
The shorter it gets the curlier it goes, so all that weight must have been pulling it down. It was certainly starting to pull me down.
‘There has to come a point when he will notice,’ Nia said. ‘What then?’
‘I’ll cross that hurdle when I come to it, preferably after I’ve lost my excess baggage. God, the things I do for love!’
‘Wouldn’t you like to borrow Fat Is a Feminist Issue, instead?’ she offered.
‘No, because I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for Mal. Well, I suppose I am doing it a bit for me,