Juliet. ‘It doesn’t take anything up any more. I told you about it weeks ago.’
‘Well, you can sweep, can’t you? Brooms were made before Hoovers.’
Juliet put down her cloth. ‘What did you have for breakfast? Did you go without, or something?’
‘I had a very good breakfast, thank you. I had eggs. And it’s eggs for lunch, and eggs for dinner, and in two weeks I’ll have lost a stone and a half.’
‘You be careful. You can go too far. A friend of mine went on a diet and lost all appetite for food. They took her in at the hospital but it was too late, she died. Her stomach had shrunk to a dried pea – or was it walnut? One or the other, I do remember that.’
‘This is a very well-tried diet, and very sensible. One should be able to control one’s size, if one is going to control one’s life.’
‘What do you want to do it for? You’re all right as you are. You’ve got a husband and a son and a house, even if it is filled up with all this junk, and someone to do your dirty work for you. What else do you want?’
‘It’s healthier to be thin.’
‘Dieting ruins the health. Men like women nice and cosy. Their wives, anyway.’
‘To tell you the truth I am really going through with it for Mr Sussman’s sake. For my own part, I don’t really worry. But it’s easier for him if I do it too. You know what men are. They haven’t got all that much willpower.’
‘What you need is physical exercise. You ought to get down on your hands and knees more often, instead of just standing about.’
‘When you have gone home, Juliet,’ said Esther clearly, ‘I often find I have to.’
She walked with determination into the kitchen, as if there was something there to busy her. Juliet peered after her, with an expression of quite serious malevolence on her face.
‘You’ll go too far,’ said Juliet. ‘One day you’ll go too far.’
And she continued her manic, useless polishing.
The Sussmans’ kitchen was full of herbs, spices, pestles and mortars and strings of onion and garlic, and jars of olive oil and cut-outs from early editions of Mrs Beeton. There scarcely seemed room in it for human beings, but that evening there they were, the two of them, Alan and Esther, their flesh squeezed between table and dresser, studying their diet sheet, and both bad-tempered.
‘At least we can put herbs in the omelette,’ said Alan. ‘An omelette aux fines herbes. Delicious.’
Esther reached out for eggs and started breaking them into a basin. ‘Oh big deal,’ she said.
‘Someone else said that to me today. I can’t remember who.’
‘Your secretary, I dare say. Since she spends so much time with you.’
‘I think it was, now you come to mention it.’
Esther was suspicious. It did not suit her. Her eyes, usually luminous globes of expression, became smaller and mean. ‘What were you and she talking about?’
‘This diet, I think,’ said Alan, allowing a certain weariness at Esther’s bad behaviour to creep into his tone. ‘I really can’t remember. I’ve got to talk to somebody, haven’t I?’
‘This Susan seems to be quite your confidante. Do you discuss all your personal life with her?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Do you discuss me?’ She used her little-girl voice.
He used his angry one. ‘As much, I daresay, as you discuss me with your window cleaner.’
‘My window cleaner appears to be quite a randy man, for your information.’
‘So, if you want to know, does my secretary.’
‘What, a randy man?’
‘No, a randy girl. Now you know.’
She chose not to believe him. She thought she had simply made him angrier than she had meant.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m being silly. It’s because I’m hungry.’
‘Yes you are being silly. Why are you dividing the whites from the yolks?’
‘I’m making a fluffy omelette. It will go further.’
Esther’s head, all of a sudden, felt very full and unpleasant. ‘I feel awful.’
‘I feel fine,’ said Alan, with memories of Susan’s forwardness and hugging to himself the knowledge of his agent’s enthusiasm, which he felt Esther did not yet deserve to know. ‘Lighter and emptier. I think this is what it felt like ten years ago.’ He looked down at his paunch. It seemed to him to have shrunk.
‘I’ve got a headache. I don’t think I can face this omelette.’ She laid her hands on her stomach. It was full and flabby. She was depressed.
‘It says you must not on any account go without any of the food items mentioned. You just wait until spinach day!’ He quoted from the diet sheet. ‘The diet depends for its efficiency on a chemical process the body undergoes during the diet’s course. They may be good doctors but they’re bloody awful writers of the King’s English.’
‘Queen’s.’
‘Why do you have this urge to find fault all the time?’
‘That’s very unfair.’
‘What are you doing with that butter?’ Alan’s hand shot out to restrain Esther’s. They both stared at their touching flesh, as if at something strange. Alan dropped her hand, quickly.
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