The Edible Woman

body was startled, and froze momentarily. When she had overcome its purely muscular surprise enough to turn around, there wasn’t anybody behind her.

She sat through the closing scene of the movie, beginning to be convinced that she was the victim of a complicated hallucination. “So I’m finally going mad,” she thought, “like everybody else. What a nuisance. Though I suppose it will be a change.” But when the lights went on after a brief shot of a waving flag and some tinny music, she took the trouble to examine the floor beneath the seat where he had (possibly) been sitting. She found a little pile of white shells. They were like some primitive signal, a heap of rocks or a sign made with sticks or notches cut in trees, marking a path or indicating something ahead, but though she stared down at them for several minutes while the handful of moviegoers straggled past her up the aisle, she could not interpret them. At any rate, she thought as she left the theatre, this time he left a visible trail.

She took as much time as she could getting home; she did not wish to walk in on the middle of anything. The house, as far as she could tell from the outside, was in darkness, but when she stepped through the door and switched on the hall light, an intercepting form glided out from the dining room. It was the lady down below, still managing to look dignified even in pincurls and a purple Viyella-flannel dressing gown.

“Miss MacAlpin,” she said, her eyebrows severe, “I have been so upset. I’m sure I heard a – some man went upstairs earlier this evening with Miss Tewce, and I’m positive I haven’t heard him come down yet. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that – I know that you are both very nice girls, but still, the child…”

Marian looked at her watch. “Well, I don’t know,” she said doubtfully, “I don’t think anything like that would happen. Perhaps you were mistaken. After all it’s past one, and when she isn’t out somewhere Ainsley usually goes to bed before that.”

“Well, that’s what I thought, I mean I haven’t heard any conversation from up there… not that I mean to say…”

The mangy old eavesdropper, she’s perfectly avid, Marian thought. “Then she must have gone to bed,” she said cheerfully. “And whoever it was probably came downstairs very quietly so as not to disturb you. But I’ll speak to her about it in the morning for you.” She smiled with what she intended to be a reassuring efficiency, and escaped up the stairs.

Ainsley is a whited sepulchre, she thought as she climbed, and I’ve just applied another coat of whitewash. But remember the mote in thy neighbour’s eye and the beam in thine own, etcetera. How on earth are we going to convey him, whatever is left of him, down past that old vulture in the morning?

On the kitchen table she found the scotch bottle, three-quarters empty. A tie with green and blue stripes was dangling victoriously on the closed door of her own room.

That meant she’d have to clear some place that could be slept in, more or less, from the tangled crow’s-nest of sheets, clothing, blankets and paperback books that was Ainsley’s bed.

“Oh rats!” she said to herself as she flung off her coat.

15

At four-thirty the next day Marian was walking along a hospital corridor searching for the right room. She had skipped her lunch hour, substituting a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich – a slice of plastic cheese between two pieces of solidified bubble-bath with several flaps of pallid greenery, brought in a cardboard carton by the restaurant take- out-order boy – for real food, so that she could leave the office an hour early, and had already spent half an hour buying the roses and getting to the hospital. Now she had only thirty minutes of visiting time in which to talk with Clara; she wondered whether they would be able to produce, between them, thirty minutes’ worth of conversation.

The doors of the rooms were standing open, and she had to pause in front of them and step almost into the rooms to read the numbers. From within each came the high-pitched bibblebobble of women talking together. At last she reached the right number, close to the end of the corridor.

Clara was lying diaphanously on a high white hospital bed, its raised back propping her in a half-sitting position. She was wearing a flannelette hospital gown. Her body under the sheet looked to Marian unnaturally thin; her pale hair was falling loosely over her shoulders.

“Well hi,” she said. “Come down to see the old mum at last, eh?”

Marian thrust her flowers forward in place of the guilty apologetic remark she should have made. Clara’s fragile fingers unwrapped the cornucopia of green paper from around them. “They’re lovely,” she said. “I’ll have to get that damn nurse to put them in some decent water. She’s just as likely to stick them in the bedpan if you don’t watch her.”

When selecting them, Marian had been uncertain whether to get deep-red ones, salmon pink, or white; she was a little sorry now that she had chosen the white. In some ways they went almost too well with Clara; in other ways not at all.

“Draw the curtains a bit,” Clara said in a low voice. There were three other women in the room and private conversation was obviously difficult.

When Marian had pulled the heavy canvas curtains that were attached by rings to a curved metal rod suspended like a large oval halo above the bed and had sat down on the visitor’s chair, she asked, “Well, how do you feel?”

“Oh marvellous; really marvellous. I watched the whole thing, it’s messy, all that blood and junk, but I’ve got to admit it’s sort of fascinating. Especially when the little bugger sticks its head out, and you finally know after carrying the damn thing around all that time what it looks like; I get so excited waiting to see, it’s like when you were little and you waited and waited and finally got to open your Christmas presents. Sometimes when I was pregnant I wished like hell we could just hatch them out of eggs, like the birds and so on; but there’s really something to be said for this method.” She picked up one of the white roses, and sniffed at it. “You really ought to try it sometime.”

Marian wondered how she could be so casual about it, as if she was recommending a handy trick for making fluffier pie crust or a new detergent. Of course it was something she had always planned to do, eventually; and Peter had begun to make remarks with paternal undertones. But in this room with these white-sheeted outstretched women the possibility was suddenly much too close. And then there was Ainsley. “Don’t rush me,” she said, smiling.

“Of course it hurts like hell,” Clara said smugly, “and they won’t give you anything till quite far along, because of the baby; but that’s the funny thing about pain. You can never remember it afterwards. I feel just marvellous now – I keep thinking I’ll get post-puerperal depression, like a lot of women do, but I never seem to; I save that till I have to get up and go home. It’s so nice to just lie here; I really feel marvellous.” She hitched herself up a little against the pillows.

Marian sat and smiled at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. More and more, Clara’s life seemed cut off from her, set apart, something she could only gaze at through a window. “What are you going to call her?” she asked, repressing a desire to shout, not quite sure whether Clara would be able to hear her through the glass.

“We don’t really know yet. We’re sort of considering Vivian Lynn, after my grandmother and Joe’s grandmother. Joe wanted to call her after me but I’ve never liked my own name much. It’s really marvellous though to have a man who’s just as pleased with a daughter as a son, so many men aren’t, you know, though maybe Joe wouldn’t be if he didn’t have one son already.”

Marian stared at the wall above Clara’s head, thinking that it was painted the same colour as the office. She almost expected to hear the sound of typewriters from beyond the curtains, but instead there were only the murmuring voices of the three other women and their visitors. When she came in she had noticed that one of them, the young one in the pink-lace bed jacket, had been sitting up working at a paint-by-numbers picture. Maybe she should have brought Clara something to do, instead of just flowers: it must be very tiresome lying around like that all day.

“Would you like me to bring you anything to read?” she asked, thinking as she did so how much she was sounding like the kind of ladies’-club member who makes a part-time career out of visiting the sick.