Mutton, page 11
‘Not funny,’ says Gaby. ‘And anyway, the scribes’ tablets are called pikera.’
11
The eyebrows don’t show any sign of moving downwards, which I suppose was only to be expected. I become used to them, sort of. Which is funny, in a way, because it presumably means I could have got used to my frown. Instead I am now a woman with ridiculous eyebrows – galling, because I used to be a woman with really great eyebrows. I am a woman with ridiculous eyebrows and a smooth face, like an egg you’ve drawn on in black marker pen.
However. It’s not actually that bad a look. I mean, I wouldn’t go out of my way to choose it, but it doesn’t seem to be diminishing my charms when it comes to Bel (what is that short for? Beloved?). He doesn’t know my face well enough, unlike my family, to start pointing and laughing at its upper reaches. He’s been scooting about Europe – and Africa, quite thrillingly – but every ten days or so returns to London, and to Claridge’s, and to a succession of dinners with me. We have a lovely time, and eventually it occurs to me that perhaps you can’t base your love life on explosive sex (it occurs to me, but then a voice in my head says, ‘Really? Why not?’ This voice is unhelpful and quite insistent. I will silence it). There is no sex with Bel, possibly because he is called Bel (Babybel?), though there is perma-flirtation. The dinners couldn’t be nicer. He pays charming compliments, he laughs enthusiastically at all my jokes, he says gallant things and listens attentively to my opinions.
He knows his way round a wine list, which is neither here nor there because so do I, but I like it anyway. There are things grown-up men should be able to do: navigate a wine list; navigate a menu without looking thick (not looking thick tout court is itself a winner); speak at least one foreign language passably; change a tyre without appearing toddlerishly puzzled; wear a suit with aplomb; have da sexual skillz; give beautiful, rather than garage, flowers; put up shelves; know the words of the better-known hymns and the subtexts of the better-known pictures; carry your cases or bags without asking; use a drill without making anxious squeaks about self-electrocution; complain about bad service in a charming manner; buy you underwear that a) fits and b) is sexy; make omelettes, so nobody starves; dispose of dead animals, e.g. rodents, without fuss (and catch bird-sized moths and spiders with faces and put them outside); hold a manual driving licence, because an automatic one is unmasculine; play sport with children – not be the mimsy one on the sidelines saying, ‘I don’t play football, actually’; swim properly, i.e. get in and do the crawl; drink alcohol without becoming giggly or tearful; not go to bed before you, so that you find them all tucked up like a nan; be kind to animals but, if he has a dog, never refer to himself as ‘Daddy’. Oh, and go bald gracefully.
A subjective list, obviously, and I do realize it is something of a contrast with the things that some kinds of women want men to be able to do: have sympathy period cramp, express their emotions freely through the medium of interpretative dance, start sentences with ‘As a feminist’. Unfortunately, I find most of these things completely unsexy. I mean, they’re grotesque. I’m not big on men crying, for instance. Obviously, fine in the context of illness or bereavement, though even then, less is more. Not so fine during rom-coms or soaps, or about pets of yore, or with self-pity (instant dumping: nothing more unattractive in either gender). I like a man who can cook – see omelettes – but I wouldn’t love one who was, say, an obsessive and perfectionist baker who sulked all evening because his crème anglaise was too runny. And I only like them metropolitan up to a point. I’m all for the grooming, but it can reach a stage where you think, ‘Oy, why don’t you stick on a frock and be done with it?’ A man preening in the mirror for more than forty-five seconds – no thanks. Also, grown-up men don’t need to preen: they really should have worked out what kind of look works for them by now. And yes, I know I have become sexist and retrograde in my old age. I don’t care. I don’t fancy men who drink herbal teas either, or who enquire anxiously about the components of certain dishes in restaurants. You’re a man: eat a bloody steak.
Bel (Belvidere?) eats steak. Owns cattle too, I shouldn’t wonder. Eats steak straight from the haunches of his cows, probably, crouched on all fours, chewin’. I’m embarrassed to ask, because there’s already something of the television show Dallas about him, and the cattle thing would just start me laughing. I expect he can do all the things on my mental list, with the addition of wrestling bulls and branding them himself (it would be quite funny if Bel lived in a condo with a grand piano and dozens of orchids, but from what he’s told me that seems unlikely). So yes, he ticks all the boxes. And it’s not that he’s unattractive: au contraire. On paper, he’s so weirdly great that if you met him online, you’d think, ‘This can’t be right,’ and suspect him of being a murderer at best.
And yet … I don’t think I’ve ever heard him venture a single opinion on a serious subject himself. It’s as if he thinks it would be bad manners to do so. No current affairs, no politics, no religion, no nothing. If I were to think about it properly, I’d find it quite unsettling.
So here we are again, at ‘our’ usual table, and Bel is talking about his daughter Carlice (pronounced Carleece, obviously, not Car-Lice. If you judged the well-being of a country by its names, America would be some way below the Congo. America would probably call its children Congo, come to think of it. Or Togo. ‘Hi, I’m Guinea-Bissau, and this is my sister, Comoros. Our parents named us after, like, poor nations’).
Anyway, Carlice. Carlice is twenty-two and gorgeous – as evidenced by the stream of photographs Bel shows me on his phone. Except for her ankles, with which she has ‘a problem’. In every single photograph, Carlice is wearing boots, which seems incongruous given that many of said photographs have been taken in forty-two-degree heat. And looking at her, I think of how crap this all is, that women’s self-esteem should be so irrevocably tied to their looks. Her ankles! This golden girl, with her golden hair and her golden smile and her Harvard degree, disabled by the fact that her ankles – her ankles! – aren’t the slimmest. It actually does my head in.
‘It does my head in,’ I tell Bel. ‘The way people – well, girls and young women – treat a tiny thing like that as though it were a deformity. She’s twenty-two! She’s perfect! She has no idea of how perfect she is, and by the time she realizes she’ll be fifty-five and filled with regret.’
‘I know,’ Bel (Beluga?) says. ‘It upsets me too.’
‘It’s a confidence trick,’ I say. ‘The whole shebang. You have two choices: you’re either seen to be incredibly vain – I mean, disastrously vain, self-obsessed, and by extension shallow, empty, superficial, incapable of reading a newspaper without your lips moving. That’s if you really care about how you look. Not that many girls want to be viewed that way. Or adult women. It’s why we’re so sniffy about plastic surgery.’
‘Well, no. Or?’
‘Or you think, “No. I don’t want to be the ninny cheerleader; I want to still be seen as an interesting and desirable person if I wear a sack and get fat and don’t bleach my moustache.” Which sounds admirable, but which is complete bullshit too. It’s its own kind of appalling, off-the-scale vanity, for a start: “I’m so special that I need no embellishment; I am not like other women.” Plus, ironically, it’s unsisterly, because the moustache-women despise the ninny-women in ways the ninny-women couldn’t even begin to imagine. Do you see?’
‘Huh,’ says Bel. ‘I’d never thought of it that way. But don’t the ninny-women hate the moustache-women? I don’t think I know any moustache-women.’
‘No. If they think about them at all, they think how they’d like to give them a makeover. They don’t view them with contempt. But they’re both extremes. Those women – well, all women, really – have been sold a pup. There’s no acceptable middle way, in the current set-up. You’re either a vain, shallow ninny or some sort of fembot in dungarees. And the truth is, most women aren’t either.’
‘Well, you’re a woman,’ Bel says. ‘What do you do? To yourself, I mean? What do you tell your daughter?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ I say. ‘The first time we met, I’d recently had Botox and fillers.’
‘Oh, that. Botox and fillers,’ Bel laughs. ‘Who doesn’t have Botox and fillers?’
‘Quite a lot of people,’ I say. ‘I’ve started to feel bad about it. Well, good-bad. Bad-good.’ I sigh. ‘I don’t know. It’s complicated.’
‘I’ve had ’em,’ Bel (Belvyn? Belanie?) says. ‘Right here.’ He taps his face. ‘My wife suggested it years ago, round about the time it was first available.’
‘Good grief,’ I say, almost yelping. ‘Let me see.’
‘Sure,’ says Bel easily, leaning his face closer to mine and obeying my orders – ‘Frown’, ‘Smile’, ‘Do angry face’, ‘Now happy face’ – good-naturedly.
‘Undetectable,’ I say, impressed despite myself.
‘Hell, I’m nearly sixty.’ Bel shrugs. ‘I need all the help I can get.’
‘Do you admit to it? When you’re hanging around doing oil things with a bunch of macho blokes?’
‘I don’t sidle up to folk and give them the details of the doctor, no,’ Bel laughs. ‘But if anyone asked – sure.’
‘Have you ever been tempted to do anything else? Oh – and hey, your teeth. Are they actually your teeth?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says. ‘All mine. All-American teeth. And no. Nothing else. I’m not …’
‘A woman,’ I sigh. ‘You’re not a woman.’
‘Your fish is going cold,’ Bel says.
‘OK, so – cards on the table. Do you think a face full of work is attractive? Because I know some men do. I have a male friend who actively prefers plastic tits, for example.’
‘Homosexual, right?’
‘Not as far as I know, no,’ I say. ‘Quite robustly heterosexual, I’d say.’
‘Hm,’ says Bel. ‘That’s kind of unusual. In my experience. I mean, they don’t move properly. They feel hard.’
‘Have you met many plastic tits?’
‘More than my fair share, ma’am,’ Bel says. ‘My recollection is that they aren’t especially, uh, responsive. And also, you know …’
‘This is a weird conversation,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s interesting,’ Bel says. ‘I was going to say, you want a breast to behave like a breast. To, er, feel like a breast.’
‘You want wobble,’ I say. ‘I think I’d want wobble too, if I were a man. Otherwise it’d just feel like massive pecs, I imagine. Which have their place. But not necessarily on a woman who isn’t a professional bodybuilder.’
‘I think so,’ Bel says easily. See, that’s another nice thing about him: he doesn’t say anything saucy after discussing wobble, or segue into some sort of clumsy attempt at sexy-talk. He just takes a mouthful of steak and gestures again to my bream. ‘Eat,’ he says for the second time. Maybe Bel is a feeder, I think to myself, intent on making women immobilized with obesity, which while not being as bad as being a murderer would not be ideal. I saw a documentary about them – feeders, not murderers – once: one of those times when you realize you’re not as broad-minded as you think (see also adult babies).
I wonder what Bel (Belladonna?) wants. Maybe: nothing. Maybe: just company during this extended European sojourn, light, undemanding, borderline vacuous conversation, someone outside his world to amuse and entertain him, like a geisha without the other thing. On the other hand, we must be realistic: Bel is a man in possession of a penis. And unless his penis is broken or absent – if not a murderer or a feeder, perhaps a eunuch? – then the whole question of snogging/shagging is going to raise its head imminently, like – in fact – a penis. And then what will happen?
It’s not like I think Bel (Belmondo?) wants to marry me. But he’s so easy to be with – so civil and civilized, so elegant and sane – that I wish I would hurry up and find him sexually attractive. He is a grown-up, and that is good. Good, grown-up Bel. We’ve moved on from breasts to basketball, about which I know next to nothing, but I’m happy to be enlightened. Well, up to a point. The problem, clearly, lies with me. Here I am, with a technically attractive and attentive adult male, and all I can think is Slight Yawn. Slight Yawn is the bane of my life – as in ‘Oh yes, very nice, Slight Yawn’. I think it more often than I’d like, about anything from human beings to people’s new kittens to TV programmes to certain forms of political protests to organic vegetables. It’s a by-product of age, like Interesting But Very Long and Bored Now, Bye.
The reason I am thinking Slight Yawn about Bel is that I evidently do not value maturity enough. I totally value it in cheese, obviously. In cheese, it’s a must, which is why I am about to order it for pudding (‘Lord,’ says Bel, when my Stilton arrives. ‘I can’t believe you Brits eat that stuff’).
It occurs to me that I could do a lot worse than to start thinking of myself as a cheese, and of ageing as ripening. This cheers me immensely. Of course! Cheese is the solution, here as elsewhere in life. Do I want to be a Brie, all seductive and oozing, the cracks on top denoting especial deliciousness, or a Kraft slice, plastic and flavourless? Do I want to be, to extend the metaphor, a piece of spongy, mass-produced white bread, or some delicious hand-made sourdough number? Do I want to be a can of Heinz soup, or the home-made roasted tomato version, with herbs? Oh. Confusion. I want to be the Heinz, because Cream of Tomato is the food of the gods, and sometimes cheap and unmysterious and downright delicious is best.
Why is nothing simple?
I should really try and be more encouraging to Bel. I should not get a taxi home. I should accept his offer of a nightcap, and see where that takes us. Nude Bel. Nood Bel. Bel in the mood. All nood. I start smiling to myself as I imagine the noodness, and inevitably the smile is misinterpreted. Bel (clothed) pats my hand and smiles warmly back at me. Here’s my chance: I could wiggle my fingers suggestively, or wrap them around his (I could also grab his balls, obviously), which would encourage Bel, which – as we have seen – would probably have perfectly manageable consequences, possibly even downright pleasant ones. Good Bel (Bellatrix?), all nood and matoore, with his pats. (My mother, Kate, one summer long ago, face convulsed with repulsion: ‘Clara! Look out! There’s a, a … a dog-pat.’ My sisters and I still call things pats: birds-pats – ‘Sorry I’m late, a bird patted on my coat’; cat-pats; the horror of cleaning the children’s aquariums – ‘Urgh, fish-pats’; even, on one traumatic occasion, ‘And afterwards he LAID A PAT in my loo.’)
But I can’t do it, with Bel. I just can’t. ‘I was thinking about cheese,’ I say, slowly withdrawing my hand. If you want a romance-killer, cheese – O useful cheese! O best of foods! – is your friend, especially with Americans, who fear it because many of them believe that proper, non-plastic cheese – cheese with veins, cheese with mould, full-on cheese – is dirty. The Man From The Connaught loved cheese, as it happens. (I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’d be perfectly happy with the Man From The Premier Inn, and to be having dinner at the Travelodge. It’s just, happily, that for some reason we’ve gone all five-star here. It’s hardly indicative of any other aspect of my life.)
(Maybe not the Travelodge. You’d want a sense that the person had made a tiny effort.)
In the cab home – no nightcap, a kiss on the cheek due to ingenious, last-minute angling of my face, for Bel, post-hand clasp, is ramping up – I chastise myself for having invented this faintly ridiculous Bel, who is cheese-fearing and to me by extension sexually unadventurous. Plus I’ve somehow – it might have been the wine – conflated him with pats in my head, an unattractive link that I can neither explain nor shake off. I have broken Bel in my mind, and I’m annoyed about it because now I can’t unbreak him. First of all, this is unkind. Second of all, Bel is not remotely ridiculous. Bel is what my grandmother would have called A Catch – mind you, she was from the generation that called their dogs Nigger, so let’s not get too misty-eyed about ancient wisdoms. But, having had Nood Bel (Belly pork?) pop into my head – disporting himself erotically among Claridge’s’ fine period furnishings, all bare, all frisky, not in urgent need of a pat – I can no longer seriously contemplate any Bel-action. Nood Bel’s rood is out of bounds to me. It’s actual mental retardation on my part, all of this, or emotional retardation at the very least. And it’s incredibly unfair to heap ridicule on a person when you yourself are a person that is currently practically obsessed with ridicule-through-mutton.
Like I said, it’s because I’m immature. At least, I think I am. I’m either chronically immature or incredibly wise, and I can’t tell which it is, even though at this late stage you’d think I might have worked it out. For example – well, not for example: this is the crux of the whole thing. So, in full: I think that the more time marches on, the more important it is to seize the day and have a laugh, and not be cross or sad or mean. I believe, quasi-religiously, in a dirty, tears-of-laughter laugh, as often as possible and ideally all the time. A perma-laugh. I don’t mean a laugh in the Gaby ‘take ketamine and shag children’ sense, because that seems like extraordinarily hard work and, I’m starting to realize, not that funny, what with the knives and needles and hair-tails and the frantic pedalling underwater. We all pedal quite hard enough, I feel, without suddenly having to acquire some sort of submerged outboard motor.
But, a laugh. Less stress. More joy. More shagging, more wine, more jokes. More fun. You know? It’s so incredibly exhausting having small children, and we all wander about knackered and half broken, and then one day they’re big, or biggish, and all of that stuff suddenly starts looking after itself. Well, more or less. And so you’re free (well, more or less). No wonder it’s called your prime. And it seems to me that this is the point at which you want the laughs, the naughtiness, the excitement and the risk and the second teenagehood – except a million times better because the crap bits have been removed. You’re a beacon of confidence compared to your teenage self. You have more (which is to say, some) money. You’re better dressed, better educated, cleverer, funnier, more assured. It’s better than being a young woman too: you’re not getting up three times a night or panicking about the PTA or staying at home for a bit with the babies, wondering a) what happened to your career and b) whether you could get away with doing the school drop-off in your nightie with a mac on top. Either you’re still deliriously in love with your husband, or you’ve addressed the fact that, one day, you’re suddenly not. But you’ve done the things – got married, had children – and you’re out the other side. Surely it is time to let your hair down and – well, if not quite party, have a little band following you about in your head, honk honk, toot toot, time for a high kick or two, a little joyful conga?
