“Really!” My laugh turned a nasty little somersault. “No one has ever slapped corned beef between two slices of bread before?”
Another glass almost went the way of the other, but he caught it. “The rye bread is high density, low cal-”
“Terrific. I’m supposed to feel flattered when you proclaim to the world, in addition to your mother, that I have a weight problem?” A voice deep inside me whispered, stop this, you’re being petty and childish, but I was like a runaway sledge, out of control. It wasn’t just the D’Ellie Delight, it was his leaving that note, luring me down here to be ignored. It was my mildewed stockings. It was my mother being dead when his wasn’t. It was…
“You’re being deliberately thin-skinned, Ellie. I take immense personal and professional pleasure in concocting healthful foods that you can push around on your plate or feed to your cat.”
“How noble of you!” I leaned against the opposite counter, but got my crossed ankles out too far and almost overbalanced. I rallied. “What sort of pleasure did it give you to create the Baked Alaska Angelica? Whatever that may be-other than numero uno dessert in the dinner section!”
His hiss was like a gas jet coming on. “A baked Alaska, decorated with angelica!” Somehow we were nose to nose; the sparks from his eyes could have burned me to a crisp. “If you ever read anything-other than romantic rubbish about soppy-eyed females and Greek gods with their brains in their pants-you would know that, Ellie.” He stepped back, rammed a hand through his hair and smiled compassionately. It was his fatal mistake.
“How soon we do forget, Bentley.” My voice, too, could pulsate with pity. “A year ago you would have given your right… arm to have your name emblazoned on a rubbishy novel.”
“Don’t talk bosh!” He snatched the menus from my clutch and held them against his chest. “I had dreams of writing something of redeeming social value. I had it in me to create the greatest blood-and-guts story ever written, but”-he bit his lip and swung around-“we all make compromises.”
“Marrying me was a compromise?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” He tossed the menus down and pressed his palms against his forehead, pushing hard. “I was talking about the cookery book. You know, Mum was right when she said that-”
An electrician came through the door, spotted us and immediately backed out.
“What did Benny’s mum say?”
He paced away from me, then back. “Only, Ellie, that you are supersensitive.”
“You can’t hurt me.” How dare she! I smiled at a point six inches above Ben’s head. Only the tensing of the facial muscles kept the tears from sloshing down my face. “And I’m not surprised; such is the usual comment of the superinsensitive.”
Ben let his hands fall. He leaned, weary and spent, against the counter. “I wanted you to love my mother! Haven’t I always showered your relations with courtesy and kindness?”
“I suppose you have.”
“And they’re not easy to like, excepting Freddy.”
“I don’t know about that.”
A sigh. “Let’s not try and be funny, Ellie.”
“I’m serious.” A pause, as I realigned the facial muscles. “One of them left you money, didn’t he?”
As soon as I said them, I wanted to draw the words back. I wanted to throw myself into his arms and weep that I was sorry. But when he curled his lips and dusted his hands on a dish towel, as though ridding himself of my touch, I took a step backward instead.
“At last we have it,” Ben said. Every word a knife thrust. “You are suggesting I married you because I wasn’t content with my half of the inheritance. Greedy me wanted yours too.”
“Not at all,” I replied, digging my grave deeper. “I am suggesting I married you for your half.”
And with that I walked, rigid as a tin soldier, from the room.
As I left Abigail’s, I could hear Ben on the phone snarling about a case of goblets which had failed to get delivered. To hear him talk, he would be reduced to serving drinks in jam jars. For some, life went on. I made it back to Merlin’s Court, without coming undone, by means of adding up all the ways I had violated chapter six of A Blow By Blow Approach to Fair Fighting. But it was downhill the minute I entered the kitchen. Magdalene was having a bath, there was no one to save me from myself. I did a disgusting, revolting, unutterably vile thing. Opening up the refrigerator, I piled a plate with every fattening food I could find. When the plate was almost as tall as I, up I went to the bedroom, where I locked the door, climbed into my wardrobe and crouched down with my prey. But are we ever completely alone? Unseen?
As I chewed, my clothes spoke in rustling whispers. She’ll have to let out my waist. My sleeves will be too tight again. Back to a quadruple-D cup.
When the plate was empty, I buried my face in my arms and cried. My clothes weren’t the only ones that knew the truth about me. I knew: I had a fat mind.
Magdalene commented on my red eyes when I went downstairs, but I explained that I had recently had a cold and was given to the occasional relapse. To change the subject, I brought up her marital situation. She was adamant in refusing to contact Poppa or allowing me to do so.
Under normal circumstances, I would have taken the law into my own hands, but I was swept along on a tide of inertia. Besides, I had Freddy on my hands. He arrived at the house midafternoon, murmuring in a weakened voice that his meals would be cold if I had to carry them to the cottage. Once in the door, he slumped in the kitchen rocking chair, and there he remained all that day, defying doctor’s orders that he return to work. Amazingly, Magdalene had taken a fancy to Freddy. Not to bother, she told me, she would get his meals. And she would not listen when I told her she had already elected to do too much. By that evening, the china cabinets had been given a good going through; everything was rearranged so I would never find my egg cups again. The hanging plants were pruned down to stubble. The window ledge was lined with statues. And every flat surface, bar the floor, was covered with doilies. I became convinced that her black holdall contained a false bottom.
When Ben returned from Abigail’s that evening, we were frigidly polite to each other. He made only a token protest when I said his mother was cooking dinner. Later I was to wonder if perhaps one of us might have tried to bridge the row, had the timing not been all wrong. But his mother, Freddy, my binge, and Abigail’s premiere crowded in on us. Immediately after the Welsh rarebit, which he hardly touched, Ben took himself off to the study. When I peeked through the crack in the doorway later, he was asleep in the leather chair.
That night we lay in bed with an imaginary bolster running from pillow to post. Sometimes a foot would brush mine and I would roll away, clinging to the edge of the bed. Sometimes my foot would stray and he wouldn’t move a muscle, compelling me to roll off the bed again to ensure he thought I thought he was the one doing the straying.
Wednesday morning at three o’clock I awoke from the worst nightmare I had experienced since the homicidal hamburgers. This time there had been no visual effects, only a vast blank screen and an offside voice whispering, “Someone’s going to die. Guess who? Guess who?”
Struggling up from the pillow, I found the room thick with shadow and Ben sitting on the edge of the bed rocking a baby-no, his arm. I spoke to him, but he didn’t answer.
Moonlight spilled over his arm. Hand pressed against my mouth, I slid off the bed. Mustn’t cry out and panic Magdalene. I would get to the phone and… The door pounced open and there she was in pink flannel, a scapular around her neck and a rosary in her hands.
“Is something wrong, Giselle? I heard noises.”
Another time I might have asked my mother-in-law if she knew the meaning of the word knock, but who could think over the low moaning sounds Ben was making? Like a tree trying to prop itself against a daisy, I clung to his mother.