by Ruth Rendell
Of course, he was always a joker. And his jokes weren’t even clever or particularly funny. Zillah, Zillah, the rick-stick Stillah, round tail, bobtail, well done, Zillah. Pinch, punch, first of the month, no returns. If he happened to be sleeping with her on the night of the last of the month-it didn’t happen that often-he’d always awakened her with those words and the corresponding gestures. “No returns” meant the rules of the game stopped her pinching and punching him back. There was another one about going into the garden and meeting a great she-bear who said, “What, no soap?” She couldn’t remember the rest of it. Once, long ago, she must have found him funny. And his country singing and his minteating.
They’d not really lived together since Jordan was born and not much before that, and she’d never been such a fool as to think she was the only one. But she had thought she was the preferred one. “All other girls apart, first always in my heart,” as he’d once told her and she, being young, had taken it seriously. It was probably a line from Hank Williams or Boxcar Willie. Disillusionment set in when he was always somewhere else and about as bad a provider as could be. What was the good of setting the Child Support Agency on his track when he never earned anything?
Because they thought he and she were divorced, everyone believed that when Jerry came visiting it was to see his kids and that Jordan bunked in with Eugenie and he slept in Jordan’s room or downstairs on the couch. The truth was, however, and there was never any question about it, that he shared Zillah’s bed. Sex with Jerry was really the only thing about him she still liked as much as she ever had and there had been plenty of it that last weekend he’d spent at Willow Cottage. For a moment, running the children’s bath, she wondered about that remark of Jims’s. Something about he didn’t mind what she did about sex but he drew the line at “that ex-husband of yours.” She’d been too struck with surprise at his proposal to think much about it at the time, but did that mean he wasn’t among those who believed Jerry had been visiting just as the children’s father? Probably. It didn’t matter. Jims, as she very well knew, was no fool.
It showed her something else as well. That Jims took it for granted she and Jerry were divorced. Did her parents? They no longer lived on Jims’s father’s estate but had retired to a bungalow in Bournemouth. Relations between her and them were strained and had been since she moved in with Jerry, got pregnant, and dropped out of the art foundation course she was doing at a north London polytechnic. Strained but, since the original rift was mended, not broken off. It was her parents who’d persuaded Sir Ronald to let her have this house. Still, when she spoke to her mother on the phone, she had the impression they considered her a divorced woman who had only got what she asked for.
The children had to share a bath. It cost too much to keep the immersion heater on for long. Eugenie stared searchingly at her brother until he said, “Stop looking at me. Your eyes are making holes in my tummy.”
“Mummy,” said Eugenie, “did you know his willy is called a penis? Some people call it that. Did you know?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Titus told me when Jordan got his out to do a wee. Are they all called a penis or is it just his?”
“All,” said Zillah.
“You should have told me. Annie said it’s wrong to keep children in the dark. I thought she meant keep them in a dark bedroom but she said, No, she didn’t mean that, she meant it’s wrong to keep them in the Darkness of Ignorance.”
“It’s a willy,” said Jordan.
“No, it isn’t.”
“It is.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is, it is, it’s mine and it’s called a willy.” He began to cry and beat the water with his hands so that splashes went all over the room and Zillah. She dabbed about her with a towel. Every towel had to be washed by hand and dried on the line, as she didn’t need to remind herself.
“Do you have to provoke him, Eugenie? If he wants to call it a willy, why not let him?”
“Annie says it’s wrong to teach children baby words for Parts of the Anatomy.”
Zillah got them to bed. When she had finished reading Harry Potter to them-though Eugenie could read perfectly well herself and had been able to for two years-she thought as she kissed them goodnight that they might not see their father again. It seemed, suddenly, intolerably sad. If he intended never to see her again, he wouldn’t see them either. In Jordan’s rosy face on the pillow she could see Jerry’s nose, the curve of his upper lip, in Eugenie’s his dark blue eyes and strongly marked eyebrows. Neither of them was much like her. Last time Jerry had been at Willow Cottage, when he was sitting at breakfast that final morning, Jordan had taken their two hands, hers and Jerry’s, and laying his over hers on the table, said, “Don’t go, Daddy. Stay here with us.”
Eugenie hadn’t said a word, just looked at her father with cool, penetrating reproach. Zillah had hated Jerry then, even though she hadn’t wanted him to stay, hated him for not being a proper dad to his children. They could have a new one in Jims and everything a good father should provide.
Still, there was no getting away from the fact that she was married already. But Zillah knew it was hopeless to start thinking about divorce now. The children were involved, so it couldn’t just be done by post. There would have to be a court hearing and custody decided. Jims wouldn’t wait. He was notoriously impatient. He had to get married, or at least get himself engaged, before someone outed him and that might happen any day. If she hesitated he’d go after Kate Carew.
So if she married him, was she going to do it as a divorcee or a widow? If as a widow, wouldn’t Jims find it odd that she’d said nothing about Jerry dying in the train crash when it happened? It would have to be as a divorcee. Or, better still, as a single woman. Then she wouldn’t have to produce the decree absolute or whatever it was to show the registrar. Or the vicar. Jims might want to get married in church.
Zillah hadn’t given a thought to religion since she was twelve, but so do old beliefs and habits resonate faintly throughout life that she balked at marrying in church in a false character. Besides, she’d been married to Jerry in church and she knew enough about church weddings to know that the vicar would say something about declaring if you knew any impediment to the marriage. If Jerry being still alive wasn’t an impediment she didn’t know what would be. She was balked but not put off the idea. Now she’d thought of these stumbling blocks she found she really wanted to marry Jims. There was no doubt. She’d say yes on Thursday.
Dragging all those sopping wet and still dirty clothes out of the now cold water in the sink was one of the things that decided her. To get away from that. And the crack behind the outfall pipe from the lavatory where water (or worse) dripped, and the clothesline that fell into the mud when overloaded and the life-threatening electric wiring. And, when Annie didn’t offer her a lift, having to walk two miles to Fredington Episcopi where there was a small, ill-stocked village shop, and two miles back, laden with junk food in plastic carriers. She’d say yes.
But somehow she’d have to get over the question of what, on forms you filled in, they called your marital status. And it was for Jims as well as the registrar or vicar. He was no fool. Why shouldn’t she say she and Jerry had never actually been married at all?
Chapter 5
IN THE FRUIT and vegetable section of Waitrose at Swiss Cottage, Michelle Jarvey was choosing food for her husband. Matthew was with her, pushing the trolley, for it would have been difficult attempting to buy anything if he were absent. Besides, they did everything together. They always had. He’d try kiwi fruit, he was saying, now the Coxes were over. He couldn’t stomach any other sort of apple.
To the other shoppers Mr. and Mrs. Jarvey would have presented a sight almost comic. If to themselves they were a serious, and to some extent tragic, pair, Michelle knew quite well that the rest of the world saw them as a grossly fat, middle-aged woman and a man so thin, worn, wizened, and cadaverous as to resemble someone freed after five years in a prison
camp on a starvation diet. Matthew was too weak to walk far, and when he pushed the trolley, which he insisted on doing, he was forced to double up as if in pain. Michelle’s monstrous bosom rested on a stomach which, with her hips, resembled in shape the lower part of a spinning top, undulating as she walked. Today she wore a tentlike green coat with a fake fur collar in which her still pretty face nestled as if it were peeping out from a mound of clothes bundled up for the charity shop. The huge body balanced on surprisingly good legs with ankles so slender that you wondered why they didn’t crack under the weight.
“I’ll just get two kiwis, then, shall I?” said Michelle. “You won’t want too much. You may not fancy them.”
“I don’t know, darling. I’ll try.” Matthew shuddered a little, not at the kiwi fruit, which were just like bits of a tree, really, or even two small furry animals, but at an overripe banana among the rest, a banana with a brown bruise and squashy tip. He turned his eyes away, remembering to keep them lowered. “I don’t think I want any strawberries today.”
“I know you don’t, darling, and no pears or peaches.”
Michelle didn’t say, Because they bruise easily, they decay fast. She knew that he knew that she knew. They moved on past milk and cream and cheese, she helping herself surreptitiously while he looked the other way. She dared not buy meat or fish; she’d go to the local corner supermarket for that on her own. Once he’d actually vomited. It was the only time they’d ventured together into the meat section and she’d never risk it again. Among the cakes and biscuits, she grabbed the things she knew she shouldn’t eat but had to. To distract herself, to distance herself, to console herself.
“Those,” he said, pointing.
He wouldn’t say “butter puffs.” “Butter” was among the words, along with “cheese” and “mayonnaise” and “cream,” he hadn’t uttered for years. He’d be sick. She took two packets of the dry, flaky biscuits. His face had become even paler than usual. In a surge of love for him she wondered just how much torment being in a food store brought him. He insisted on coming. It was one of the courage-testing tasks he set himself. One of the challenges. Looking at a magazine was another, turning the pages and forcing himself not to skip the ones with the color shots of soufflés and pasta and roast beef. Talking to people who didn’t know, watching them eat, watching her eat. They came to fruit juices. She took a carton of pineapple juice, looked at him, raising her eyebrows. He nodded, managed a death’s-head smile, all skull and teeth. She laid her hand on his arm.
“What would I do without you, my darling?” he said.
“You don’t have to do without me. I’m always here for you, you know that.”
There was no one near to hear them. “My sweetheart,” he said. “My love.”
She had fallen in love with him at first sight. Because it wasn’t the first time she’d felt like that-though her love had never been returned-she expected, with anticipatory bitterness, that once again her feeling would be unrequited. But he had been the same and loved her back with a like ardor. He was a teacher and had two degrees, while she was just a nursery nurse, but he loved her, she didn’t know why, couldn’t account for it. They weren’t very young; both of them were in their late twenties. Passion overtook them. They made love the second time they met, moved in together after a week, got married two months after their first meeting.
Michelle was-well-not thin then, but not plump either, just a normal size. “A perfect figure,” Matthew said. If anyone had asked her the secret of their love and their successful marriage she’d have said it was because they were so kind to one another. He’d have said it was because no one else had ever mattered much to either of them once they’d met.
He was funny about his food even then (Michelle’s way of putting it) but she’d always thought men quite different from women in their attitudes to eating. Really, it was just that, like most men, there were a lot of things he didn’t like. Red meat was on his poison list and all kinds of offal, shellfish, and any fish that wasn’t white-in those days, when she could joke about it, she called him a “fish racist”-sauces and mayonnaise and custards, anything “sloppy.” He was faddy, that was all. But he began to get worse, though she never put it like that. Eating disorders as real illness were just beginning to be recognized, but everyone thought they only applied to young girls who wanted to stay thin. Because they talked about everything, they sometimes discussed, in depth, his problem. How he couldn’t eat things that looked like other things. An example was rice; he’d just got it into his head that rice looked like maggots. Soon he couldn’t eat anything that had once been alive, though-thank God, she said to herself-that didn’t apply to fruit and vegetables, some fruit and vegetables. All pasta was like worms, all sauce-well, anything runny was so bad that he couldn’t utter the words that described what they were like.
Gently she asked him if he knew why. He was such an intelligent man, intellectual, sensible, practical, an excellent science teacher. It frightened her to watch him grow thinner and thinner and see him prematurely aging.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I did. My mother used to encourage me to eat things I didn’t want to, but she never forced me. I was never made to sit at the table until I’d eaten something.”
“Darling,” she said, “don’t you ever feel hungry?” She did and so often.
“I don’t think I ever have. Not that I can remember.”
At that time she had to stop herself envying him. Never to be hungry! What bliss! Only she knew it wasn’t. It was a slow wasting away toward death. Not if she could stop it, she thought then, not if she made it her life’s work to help him. That was when she got him to start taking vitamins. He was quietly acquiescent, for capsules and tablets never look like anything else. They’re hard and firm, and can be swallowed without choking. He stopped drinking milk and eating soft cheeses. Butter had gone long ago. She made him go to the doctor and went with him.
This was in the late eighties and the doctor, an elderly man, wasn’t sympathetic. Afterward Matthew called him a “famine freak” because he’d told him to pull himself together and think of the starving millions in Africa. He prescribed a tonic, which he said was guaranteed to make the patient eat. The first and only time Matthew took it he vomited violently.
Michelle made it her business to discover all the foods he wasn’t positively repelled by. Strawberries were one, provided she took the hulls out, every scrap of green. Oranges and grapefruit were all right. Fool that she was, she told herself, she’d tried him on a pomegranate and when he’d seen its interior he’d actually fainted. The fleshy red seeds looked to him like the inside of a wound. Bread he’d eat, dry plain cake, and most biscuits. Eggs if they were hard-boiled. But all of it had to be in minute quantities. Meanwhile, she piled on the weight. He knew she gorged, though she tried not to eat too much in front of him. At mealtimes, while he sat miserably resigned, picking at half a lettuce leaf, a slice of hard-boiled egg, and one plain-boiled new potato the size of a marble, she ate the same multiplied by five, plus a chicken wing and a bread roll. But when she went back to the kitchen and he returned thankfully to his computer, she filled herself up with the comfort food that consoled her for watching his sufferings: ciabatta with brie, fruit cake, Mars bars, crème brûlée, and crystalized pineapple.
Their love never wavered. She’d have liked children but none came. Sometimes she thought it might be because he was so malnourished that his sperm count had sunk very low. It was no good going to a doctor, though the reactionary old GP had been replaced by a bright young woman who was always trying to put Michelle on a diet. No one really understood Matthew; only she could do that. She had to watch his body slacken and bend, his face wrinkle like an old man’s, his joints protrude through the skin-you couldn’t call it flesh-and that skin assume a grayish pallor. At thirty she had been plump, at thirty-five overweight. Now, at nearly forty-five, she was grossly fat. While she spoke often of his revulsion from food, and they were always discussi
ng what caused it and whether a cure would be discovered one day, he had never once mentioned her obesity. As far as he was concerned, she might still be the hourglass girl of twenty-seven he’d fallen in love with.
She had a sister in Bedford and he a brother in Ireland and another in Hong Kong, but they had no friends. So geared is society to an eating-and-drinking-together ethos, and eating was something they were obliged to avoid in public, that they were unable to keep friends or make new ones. One by one, people they knew drifted away when their invitations were refused and they were never themselves invited. Michelle’s greatest dread had been that somehow they would be obliged to accept a summons to tea or supper and Matthew, confronted by butter or a jug of milk or pot of honey, would turn white and begin that dreadful dry retching. Better repulse people than risk it.
She had only one confidante. And that confidante had become a friend. One day, nearing despair and terrified that he couldn’t go on much longer, she had sat in her kitchen with Fiona, while Matthew worked slowly and feebly at his computer, and told her everything. And instead of laughing at a middle-aged man who couldn’t eat and a middle-aged woman who couldn’t stop eating, Fiona had sympathized, seemed to understand, and even suggested remedies. She’d lived on such a varied diet, such novel and sophisticated food, she had all sorts of ideas for an anorexic who’d like to eat if only he could. A year later, which was last year, Michelle told Fiona that she’d saved Matthew’s life and they would both be eternally grateful.
