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 discussing 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.

When they got back from Waitrose to their house in Holmdale Road, West Hampstead, Michelle set about preparing Matthew’s lunch. It was to include several of the foodstuffs Fiona had suggested and that Matthew found acceptable.

“Peanuts!” Fiona had said. “Very nourishing, are peanuts.”

Matthew managed to utter the word “greasy.”

“Not at all. Dry-roasted peanuts. Delicious. I love them.”

It would be an exaggeration to say that so did he. He loved no kind of food but he tolerated dry-roasted peanuts, as he tolerated her other suggestions: crispbread, Pop Tarts, madeira cake, hard-boiled eggs chopped up with parsley, Parmesan cheese grated to a powder. Baby spinach leaves and arugula, Japanese rice crackers, muesli. Over that year, his health improved a little and he was slightly less emaciated. Since then, though, the Pop Tarts, which were the most caloric on the list, had fallen from favor. He couldn’t help it. With all his heart, he wanted to go on liking them but it was no good. Fiona recommended sponge fingers and short-bread instead.

Michelle put a lettuce leaf on his plate, twelve dry-roasted peanuts, a slice of hard-boiled egg with powdered Parmesan, and a piece of Ryvita. She hoped, too, that he would drink the small wineglassful of pineapple juice but she wasn’t banking on it. While she decorated his plate with these scraps, she ate peanuts herself and the rest of the egg and a hunk of olive bread with butter. Matthew smiled at her. It was his way of not looking at his plate, to turn his head away from it and smile at her as he thanked her.

“I just saw Jeff Leigh go by,” he said, picking up one peanut. “Is he never going to get a job?”

Neither of them much cared for Fiona’s boyfriend. “I’d so much like to think he wasn’t with her for her money,” said Michelle. “I’d like to think he was disinterested, darling, but I don’t. He expects her to keep him and that’s the truth of it.”

“Fiona likes to be in control. I don’t mean to criticize. To some it would be a compliment. She may want him to be dependent on her.”

“I hope you’re right. I want her to be happy. They’re getting married in June.”

Matthew ate another peanut and a fragment of Ryvita. Michelle had long ago mastered the art of not watching him. He sipped the juice. “I’m afraid her friends won’t think much of him if he does nothing and lets her keep him. He seems to have some skills. He’s done a few useful jobs about the house for Fiona, putting in an electric outlet for one, and if you remember, he was something of a wizard on the computer when he came in here to write those letters or whatever it was he did.”

“Job applications, he said. That was in October, nearly five months ago. I can’t eat this lettuce, darling, or any more nuts. I’ve eaten the Ryvita.”

“You’ve done very well,” said Michelle, taking his plate away and bringing in a kiwi fruit, sliced, the core removed, and half a sponge finger.

Matthew ate two slices, then a third to please her, though he nearly choked on it. “I’ll do the dishes,” he said. “You sit down. Put your feet up.”

So Michelle heaved her huge bulk on to one end of the sofa and put her slender legs and dainty feet, in which every delicate bone showed, up on the other end. She had the Daily Telegraph to read and Matthew’s Spectator, but she felt more like just resting there and thinking. Six months ago Matthew wouldn’t have had the strength to carry out the plates and glasses, stand at the sink, and wash them. If he’d insisted on washing up, he’d have had to sit on a stool to do it. The small improvement in his health and weight was due to Fiona. Michelle had come to care for Fiona, who was a real friend, almost like a daughter. Without envy and nearly without longing—for hadn’t she her darling Matthew?—she could look at Fiona’s slender figure, long, straight, blond hair, and sweet, if not classically good-looking, face with nothing but admiration. Their houses were semidetached, but hers and Matthew’s—though now considered a very valuable property more for where it was than for its design or convenience—was greatly inferior to Fiona’s with its rear extension, large conservatory, and loft conversion. Michelle had no envy about that either. She and Matthew had enough space for their wants, and the value of their house had gone up by a dazzling 500 percent since they bought it seventeen years before. No, it was Fiona’s future happiness that concerned her.

Jeff Leigh had first been seen in Holmdale Road in the previous August or September. Fiona introduced him to them as her boyfriend, but he didn’t move in until October. He was handsome, Michelle had to acknowledge, healthy-looking, regular-featured, a little heavy for her taste. Thinking like that made her laugh. It seemed in the worst of taste to say she could fancy only thin men. Jeff had a sincere and almost earnest face. You could say that he looked as if he really cared about you, what you were saying, and who you were; he was a truly concerned human being. This made Michelle think he didn’t care a toss. And when he offered her one of his Polo mints, as he always did, he smiled to himself as she took it as if saying, Aren’t you fat enough? She loathed his jokes. Though he was out a great deal, he earned nothing, while Fiona, a successful banker, earned a lot and had inherited a sizeable sum when her father died last year.

Michelle wished she and Jeff would postpone their marriage for a while. After all, they were living together; it wasn’t as if they were sexually frustrated—she recalled with tenderness how she and Matthew hadn’t been able to wait more than twenty-four hours—so marriage surely wasn’t imperative. Would she have the courage or the impertinence to suggest gently to Fiona that waiting a little might be a good idea?

It was comforting, Michelle thought before she drifted off into sleep, how the worst things that happen to one can sometimes lead to good. For instance, when Matthew had twice fainted in the classroom, when he had to sit down all the time in the science lab and could barely walk the distance to the Senior Staff Room, they had known he would have to resign. What would they live on? He was only thirty-eight. Apart from a little dabbling in journalism, there was nothing he could do but teach. She had long ago given up work to look after him, to occupy herself in the neverending, nearly hopeless, task of attending to his nourishment. Could she go back? After an absence of nine years? She’d never earned much.

Matthew had done some writing for New Scientist and an occasional piece for the Times. Now, because it was the most important thing in his life after her, he settled down to write, in his despair, about what it meant to have his particular kind of anorexia. To hate food. To be made ill by that which was the staff of life. Eating disorders were becoming very fashionable at the time. His article was snapped up. It led to his being asked by a prestigious weekly if he’d contribute a column to be known as “An Anorexic’s Diary.” Matthew, the purist, objected at first and said the word should be “anorectic” but gave in because the money was so good. Michelle often thought how strange it was that though he could barely talk about certain foodstuffs he could write of them, describe his nausea and horror at particular kinds of fat and “slop,” define with a searching precision the items he could just bear to eat and why.

“An Anorexic’s Diary” saved them selling the house and going on benefits. It was immensely popular and inspired a lot of letters. Matthew got a huge postbag from middle-aged women who couldn’t get off diets and starving teenagers and fat men who were addicted to beer and chips. It didn’t make him famous—he and she wouldn’t have liked that—but his name was once mentioned on a TV quiz show and was the answer to a crossword puzzle clue. All this afforded them a little quiet amusement. She hadn’t liked it when Jeff Leigh clapped Matthew on the back and said insinuatingly, “Wouldn’t do for you to gain weight in your position, would it? Mind you keep the rations low, Michelle. I’m sure you can eat for two.”

That had hurt her because it was what you said to pregnant women. She thought of the child she’d never had, the daughter or son who would be sixteen or seventeen by now. Dream children she often dreamed of or saw before her closed eyes when she lay down. When Matthew came back into the room, she was asleep.