and the white of the Rosenthal china.
They sat around the table.
‘Alan can’t stand grey beef. He likes it to be red and bloody in the middle. He goes rather far, I think, towards the naked, unashamed flesh. But there we are. Beef is a matter of taste, not absolute values. At least I hope so.’
‘Anyway, Gerry thinks if I cook something it is awful, and if you cook something it’s lovely, Esther, so why bother.’
‘I think you are a superb cook, Phyllis,’ lied Esther.
‘Or we wouldn’t come here,’ said Alan.
‘Personally, in this house I would rather drink than eat any day,’ said Gerry.
‘I wish you would stop being horrid to your wife, Gerry,’ said Esther, finally coming down on Phyllis’s side. ‘It makes her cross and everyone’s gastric juices go sour. Why don’t you just appreciate her?’
‘She’s quite right,’ said Alan. ‘Women are what their husbands expect them to be; no more and no less. The more you flatter them the more they thrive.’
‘On lies?’ enquired Gerry.
‘If need be.’
Esther was disturbed. ‘You are horrible,’ she said. ‘Can’t we just get on with dinner?’
Phyllis passed the mayonnaise, where artichoke hearts, flaked fish, olives and eggs lay immersed. The mayonnaise was perhaps too thin and too salty. They helped themselves, with all the appearance of enthusiasm.
‘It has been a hard day,’ said Gerry mournfully.
‘But rewarding?’
‘A new office block to do, if I’m lucky. A new world to conquer.’
‘And a new secretary,’ said his wife. ‘A luscious child, at least eighteen, and nubile for the last five years. Plump, biteable and ripe.’
‘Alan has a new secretary,’ said Esther. ‘I don’t know what she looks like. What does she look like, Alan? There she sits, day after day, part of your life but not of mine.’ Her voice was wistful.
‘She is slim like a willow. But she has curves here and there.’ The appreciation in her husband’s voice was not at all what Esther had bargained for.
‘Oh dear. And I’m so fat. No thanks, Phyllis darling, no more.’
‘I like you fat. I accept you fat. You are fat.’
‘Not too fat?’
‘Well perhaps,’ said Alan, ‘just a little too fat.’
‘Oh,’ moaned Esther, taken aback.
‘What’s the matter now?’
‘You’ve never said that to me before.’
‘You’ve never been as fat as this before.’
‘I’m so thin,’ complained Phyllis politely, ‘I can’t get fat. Do you like garlic bread?’
‘Superb.’
‘Well you can’t spoil that, at least,’ said Gerry.
‘More, Alan?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you think you should?’ asked Esther. ‘Every time I sew your jacket buttons on I have to use stronger and stronger thread.’
‘I admit your point. I am fat too. We are a horrid gross lot.’
‘Eat, drink and fornicate,’ boomed their host. ‘There is too much abstinence going on.’ His wife made apologetic faces at the guests.
‘If you are fat you die sooner,’ said Alan.
‘Who cares?’ asked his wife, but no one took any notice, so she said, ‘Tell me about your secretary, Alan. Besides being so slim, but curvacious with it, what is she like? Perhaps you wish she was me?’
‘What is the matter with you?’
‘It’s us,’ said Phyllis dismally. ‘Discontent is catching.’
‘I am not discontented. I just hope Alan isn’t. Who am I to compete with a secretary fresh from a charm school, with a light in her eye and life in her loins?’
‘Careful, Esther,’ said Gerry. ‘Those are Phil’s lines, to be spoken in a plaintive female whine and guaranteed to drive a man straight into a mistress’s arms.’
‘One wonders which comes first,’ she said, ‘the mistress or the female whine. It would be interesting to do a study.’
Alan decided to bring the table back to order.
‘You have no cause for concern whatsoever, Esther. To tell you the truth I can’t even remember her name. It is entirely forgettable. I think it is Susan. She can’t type to save herself. She is thin. She is temporary. I think she thinks she is not a typist by nature, but something far more mysterious and significant, but this is a normal delusion of temporary staff. She is in, I imagine, her early twenties. She keeps forgetting that I like plain chocolate biscuits, and dislike milk chocolate biscuits. Now you, Esther, never make mistakes like that. You have a clear notion of what is important in life. Namely money, comfort, food, order and stability.’
‘You make me sound just like my mother. Is that what you really think of me?’
‘No. I am merely trying to publicly affirm my faith in you, marriage and the established order, and to explain that I am content with my lot. I am a married man and I married of my own free will. I am a city man, and live in the city of my own free will. A company man, also of my own volition. So I should not be surprised to find myself, in middle-age, a middle-aged, married, company, city man – with no power in my muscles and precious little in my mind. Here in this sulphurous city I live and die, with as much peace and comfort as I can draw around me. Work, home, wife, child – this is my life and I am not aggrieved by it. I chose it. I know my place. I daresay I shall die as happy and fulfilled as most.’
‘It sounds perfectly horrible to me,’ said Esther. ‘However, I don’t take you seriously because you have just sent your magnum opus to a publisher, and I know you are quite convinced you will spend your declining years in an aura of esteem and respect and creative endeavour. I believe also that somewhere down inside you lurks a rich fantasy life in which you travel to exotic places, conquer mountains, do any number of noble and heroic deeds, save battalions singlehanded, and lay the world’s most beautiful women right and left. There may well be a more perverse and morbid side to this, but I would rather not go into it here. And you, Gerry, tell me, do you not ever wish to do extreme and fearful things? Is your masculinity entirely channelled into lustful thoughts of the opposite sex? Do you not want to burn, savage, torture, kill? Or at any rate, like Alan, failing that, are you not seized with the desire to break all the best glasses, miss the basin when you pee, burn the sheets with cigarette ends, leave smelly socks about for your wife to pick up –’
‘Women
