by Judy Astley
About the Book
Big and beautiful? Or thin and miserable?
Jay has always envied her cousin Delphine. While Jay was brought up in a large, noisy and chaotic family, Delphine was indulged, perfectly dressed with a co-ordinated bedroom, an immaculate wardrobe, dancing lessons and monogrammed silver-backed hairbrushes. Now Jay lives happily with her architect husband and their three teenage children, running a successful cleaning company and trying to keep some kind of order on her disorderly household, while Delphine has long since disappeared to Australia with her second husband. But Jay does sometimes wonder whether she should be more like her cousin – utterly well-organised and with a size ten figure.
So Jay decides to diet. But what should it be? High carb, no protein? High protein, no carb? High fibre? Wheat free? Fat free? Food free? She tries them all, with a variety of successes and failures. But then Delphine reappears, with a third husband in prospect and the same old air of apparently effortless superiority. Jay never considers that perhaps Delphine is the envious one . . .
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
1 Cake
2 Detox
3 Chocolate Hobnobs
4 Grapefruit
5 Skinny Latte (two sugars)
6 Patches
7 Shape-Shakes
8 Yoga
9 Cabbage Soup
10 Nigella’s Strawberry Ice Cream (featuring ten egg yolks and a pint of double cream)
11 Weight Watchers
12 Jogging
13 Chips
14 Dr Atkins
15 Rosemary Conley
16 Magic Pants
17 Swimming
18 Cake
About the Author
Also by Judy Astley
Copyright
Size Matters
Judy Astley
Thanks to Hedy for essential secrets
from the cleaning business.
And to fellow inmates of the Borchester Asylum
for welcome shots of daily lunacy. May Matron’s
gin cupboard never run dry.
ONE
Cake
‘Was it something I said?’
Well of course it was. When men have to ask that, it always is. It was the something Greg had said just seconds before as he’d rolled across back to his side of the bed. It was the something he’d added to his habitual post-coital ‘Ooof!’ (accompanied by tightly closed eyes and grin like a silly spaniel). Out he’d come with it, not a single bit of tactful pre-thought getting in the way.
‘Hey,’ he’d said, nudging Jay hard in the side. ‘This is a first! I’ve just shagged a granny! Yee ha!’
Oh how he’d laughed; such a pleased-with-himself, aren’t-I-witty tee-hee-hee of a cackle. It was all too clear in his jokey delight that he was thinking clichéd Red Riding Hood Grannydom as in cauliflower perm, frilly pinny and the late Dame Thora on a stairlift. Whereas Jay, since daughter Imogen had let them in on why she’d been groaning a lot and looking pale, had been lining herself up, grandmother-wise, alongside Bianca Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Victoria Beckham’s glamorous mum.
‘I’m not a granny yet.’ Jay was huffy and unamused. She turned over on her side, the one that didn’t face him. ‘There’s months to go. The poor girl isn’t even showing yet.’
Poor girl? Where did that come from? Twenty-year-old Imogen had, with the simple words ‘I’m pregnant’ shoved her own still-young and unready mother along life’s bench towards a generation beyond her own – and, you couldn’t help thinking it, closer to where you fell off the end. You need time for being comfortable with that sort of thing. Time to start wondering about whether you’re still allowed in Topshop without feeling you should give the excuse that the pink, lace-front cheesecloth top is for a Seventies theme party. Time to reflect on whether your Desert Island Disc choices should include a token classical number to balance out The Clash and Duran Duran.
‘Isn’t she?’ Greg pummelled his pillows back into shape, propped himself up against the blue suede headboard and picked up the TV remote control from his bedside table. He started flipping through a few channels, searching for the last remnants of some sunny distant test match.
‘I’d have said she was, a bit,’ he said as he settled to suffer England being thrashed by the West Indies (again). ‘But then I suppose, well, she’s quite a big girl our Moggy.’ He knocked a knuckle against Jay’s thigh. ‘Takes after her mum.’ Greg laughed again, cheerily unmindful that this didn’t exactly make her feel better.
‘Don’t forget though Greg, this is going to make you a granddad,’ Jay pointed out. ‘It works both ways.’ Even as she said it she knew it didn’t work both ways. This was another of the many things that were unfairly Different for Men.
‘Yeah. That’s right.’ He smiled, picturing some distant happy scene. ‘It’ll be brilliant. I can just see it, me out in the park in the summer sun, pushing the buggy – we must get the baby one of those fab three-wheel efforts. And there I’ll be, sitting on that bench at the playground with all the gorgeous nannies and slinky Slavic au pairs and bored young mums and they’ll all be looking at me and thinking . . .’
‘Thinking what?’ As if she couldn’t guess.
‘That I’m its dad! They’ll think I’m one of those cool old dude-dads who’s still got a fully revved up turbocharger under his bonnet. And it’s not running on unleaded.’ The gleeful chuckle surfaced once more.
Jay sighed and muttered, ‘Give me strength,’ before burrowing down deep into the duvet, trying, unsuccessfully, to shut out flashes of light from the TV.
She surfaced briefly to ask, ‘Are you actually watching that?’
‘Mmmm.’ Greg turned the volume up, bringing into the room the sound of an exuberant steel band.
Jay yawned. She felt exhausted suddenly, wishing she hadn’t been so greedy with Imogen and Tris’s baby-celebration champagne which had lowered the already feeble diet defences enough for her to pig out on that third slice of chocolate cake. It was lying heavily now inside her, accusing her of gluttony, slack discipline and a reckless disregard for seemly feminine behaviour. The strawberries didn’t count – they were Only Fruit. But not even a token hesitation had she expressed about wolfing down all that sweet crumbly cake, the overrich, creamy filling, so very much thick chocolate and walnut icing. Failing all the rules of proper womanhood, Jay hadn’t so much as murmured a reluctant ‘Ooh I really shouldn’t.’ Now all those calories, enough to keep a polar trekker marching for several days, were getting their revenge, making their presence felt within her as they advanced unstoppably to cosy up alongside the fat deposits on her thighs. And there it would all stay for evermore, bulking up the flab and the inches. On top of all this, Greg’s thoughtless granny-comment was what a social commentator would call ‘not helpful’.
There must be women, Jay mused as she closed her eyes and thought of sleep, in fact she was sure that there actually were women out there in that parallel fantasy realm of long-term coupledom, women who were blessed with a far higher level of after-sex appreciation than this. A hearty slap on the thigh, a jolly confirmation that ‘slim as a wand’ had bypassed ‘gorgeously rounded’ and morphed irrevocably into ‘downright flabby’, and a casual reminder about lost youthfulness couldn’t be any woman’s idea of the best post-coital moments. She’d have hated Greg to be one of those men who nuzzled in a creepily humble way and muttered ‘thank you’ as if they had just been granted a rare and filthy trample through the sacred female temple. And thank all the gods he didn’t do that cringe-making ‘how was it for you?’ begging question that Barbara, her business partner, got from her husband every Friday night without fail. Good gri
ef, if he couldn’t tell by now . . . But just occasionally it would be pleasing if the sexual after-blast could include some close gratifying snuggling, some loving touchy-feely stuff as if there was at least the pretence of reluctance to let the moment go.
On the plus side of course, at least they still did it now and then. Half-joky hints from friends (and far too much nostalgic detail on how it used to be from Cathy next door) told her that several had partners who were not so much running on unleaded, as Greg would so charmingly put it, but whose metaphorical starter motors had rusted to a permanent standstill. Another plus with Greg was that he wouldn’t give her pained glances suggestive of hypersensitivity when, as she did now, she gave up on sleep and reached down to the floor to pick up the book she was eager to finish.
As she was settling herself into a good reading position Jay caught the glint of reflected light through the bit where the huge glass expanse of the bedroom window met the huge glass expanse of the roof. So he was at it again. The Planet Man in the top-floor flat across the road was watching the stars from his homebuilt observatory and ‘accidentally’ doing his best to take in the views afforded by any neighbours careless enough to have far more window than curtain. Blinds. We should do something about getting blinds, she thought, making a mental note. It was time to do something more serious about privacy up in this rooftop fishtank of a bedroom than these flimsy organdie hangings.
What was it William Morris had said about home furnishings? Something along the lines of every domestic item being either beautiful or functional, preferably both? Close-to-transparent window hangings weren’t anyone’s idea of functional, even in this glorious shade of sandy gold scattered with tiny random pearly stones, so that the effect was a bit like a vertical stretch of beach with the sun glinting onto shimmering shell. They’d looked sensational in Elle Decoration, but you needed a full-time live-in stylist of your own to keep them as artlessly breeze-blown as in the seductive photos. Top of the list of what you definitely didn’t need was a Burmese cat with a low boredom threshold and a crazed conviction that there must be a secret mouse hidden right at the top of any length of claw-sensitive fabric. Sad threads hung like half-fallen hairs, wafting this way and that in the breeze, reminding her of the folly of indulging a costly design whim in a house that was actually used for living in rather than looking at.
As ever, faced with domestic purchasing dilemmas, Jay thought of her cousin Delphine. The name made her visualize a brand of lavatory paper, in quilted lilac perhaps, with little gold fleur-de-lys printed on it. Jay imagined saying exactly that to Delphine herself and to Auntie Win, Delphine’s devoted mama. Neither would find the analogy the slightest bit of a put-down. On the contrary they’d be thrilled at the very idea. If such a thing existed, Auntie Win would seek it out at once to match the purple and gilt Versace tiles in her bungalow boudoir’s en suite. Still, loo-roll or not, there was still that tiny childhood remnant of envy when Jay recalled Aunt Win stroking her infant daughter’s fine blonde hair and cooing ‘Pretty name, a pretty girl.’ When you’re named plain old Jane on the practical basis that, as Jay’s own mother briskly claimed, ‘You can’t shorten that’ only to find even that reduced by all and sundry to the sound of a mere initial, it had been hard not to wish she’d been christened something madly fairylike, such as Philomena-Willow.
Delphine, far away as she was in Western Australia, used to know all that could possibly be known about sourcing domestic solutions. In her first marriage, twenty years before, she’d been the acknowledged Martha Stewart of East Sheen. You’d expect nothing less from a woman who by her early teenage years was saving her pocket money to buy drawn-thread Egyptian cotton sheets to stash away in her bottom drawer like a Victorian bride, and who had won a Blue Peter badge for knitting up a set of doilies, using the string bags that oranges were sold in. Delphine, were she not half a world away, would relish telling Jay exactly where she’d gone wrong with the window furnishings (and also gone wrong in marrying an architect who delighted in conducting his more outré design experiments on his own home. ‘Using home as a showcase – it’ll stun potential clients,’ Greg had explained, jubilant with the early designs for this nearly-all-glass roof conversion.) Delphine would instruct Jay to source a long list of appropriate blind manufacturers for price comparison and she’d tell her exactly which fabric would look best. Unfortunately she wouldn’t just leave it at that. In Delphine’s case, advice always came firmly stapled to opinions, as in: ‘What you should do is, you should . . .’
Also, Jay thought as she stretched first one leg down the bed and then the other, hoping it counted as calorie-burning exercise, Delphine’s taste, interior-decoration-wise, had freeze-dried back in 1991. Or it had according to the photos she sent back for Auntie Win to show around the family. One appalled look-see at this sparkly new, huge, loft-style design-award roof job and she’d be lining up a brickie to replace most of Greg’s much-loved glass and importing swags of floral chintz complete with tasselled tie-backs and gilded rose motifs on a limed curtain pole the diameter of a sturdy sapling.
Jay stared up through the sloped glass roof at the succession of planes making their way across the night sky towards Heathrow. She gave up on the book and switched off her light. It didn’t make much difference, what with the light from the suspended plasma-screen TV and the orange glow from the street lights outside. Greg was still glued to his test match, headphones now considerately clamped to his ears, his hands still making barely conscious movements that indicated he was in there with the batsman, showing him how it should be done.
‘Going to sleep?’ he shouted at her, reaching across and squeezing her hand. ‘Love you!’ he yelled.
‘Me too,’ she told him, certain he couldn’t hear and wondering if he’d have accurately lip-read if she’d said ‘Sod you’ instead. ‘Granny’ indeed, she’d give him bloody Granny.
TWO
Detox
Detox. The word had shimmied into Jay’s head as she and her internal chocolate cake had slid away into sleep the night before. It was still there, waiting, like Daffodil the cat, to pounce on her the moment she woke. Detox, she’d read many a carefree time as the hairdresser snipped or the dentist was drilling the victim ahead of her, was where you started. It was an essential pre-diet body-cleansing in preparation for the ultimate weight-loss experience. If she was going to be a ‘granny’ as Greg so delightedly put it (and was it that hilarious? She didn’t think so), she was bloody well going to be a gorgeous, slender, desirable one. No more would Greg slap her thigh as if she was a lardy pony and call her a Big Girl. Flush away the internal toxins, that was what she had to do, clear out the crap (literally, presumably, though she’d draw the line at colonic interference) and start again.
It was Monday, the ideal day for a fresh start. Now, in the early morning and an empty kitchen-stroke-family-room – if you didn’t count the breakfast debris left by Rory and Ellie as they whirled through and attacked the cereal cupboard on the way out to school – she flicked through a colour supplement that had escaped the recycling box and found what she was looking for. A mug of camomile tea now sat on the big glass table in front of her, cooling fast. It tasted and looked and smelled like wee. Not appetizing, for sure, but virtuous certainly. She’d read somewhere that people actually did drink their own pee as part of a detoxification process. The thought did not appeal in the slightest and surely urine was already a whole lot of rejected toxins? Otherwise, wouldn’t the body have found a use for it? Not to be thought of too deeply, she decided, contemplating the fist-sized heap of chilled white grapes which sat on the wonky pink plate that had almost failed Rory his mock Art GCSE. This was it. The inadequate sum total of detox breakfast. Here was where inner purification started.
‘Mum? Got any Marmite?’ Jay could hear Imogen shouting from halfway up the steps from the basement flat. Jay unlocked the long architecturally arty concertina of folding glass doors and her daughter rushed into the room clutching a pair of fat slices of
toast. Melted butter dripped onto Mog’s fingers and she licked at it, missing a bit that trickled down her chin. Jay inhaled slowly, eyes closed. Oh the smell of that toast. The blissful, sensual, warming gorgeousness of it. She shook her head briskly. Even if she gave into temptation, there surely wasn’t time. She was due at the station in half an hour to pick up Anya and Katinka and drop them at Mrs Ryan’s to do her Regular Clean. A wheel from the Henry vacuum cleaner had rolled to the back of the understairs cupboard and vanished among a pile of Christmas-decoration boxes. The van was only half loaded and it needed petrol. Jay, mindful of her job’s requirements, reached into the cupboard under the sink, feeling for a new pack of J-cloths. At least down here there was only the non-alluring odour of damp and dishwasher tablets, nothing to seduce her tastebuds.
‘Marmite?’ Imogen said again. Jay backed out of the cupboard, hot and muddled. And hungry.
‘For my toast? Me and Tris haven’t got any. We thought you might.’ Imogen was standing in the middle of the room, barefoot and in her droopy black jersey pyjama bottoms teamed with a blue T-shirt emblazoned on the front with ‘Plumber’s Mate’ in rhinestones.
‘You should have put shoes on.’ Jay looked at her daughter’s grubby toes with the chipped lilac varnish. ‘You’ll catch a chill.’
‘God, Mum, it’s only up the steps. So have you got any?’
‘What? Oh the Marmite. I don’t know. Have a look in the fridge, in the cupboards, wherever. I’m in a rush, haven’t got time . . .’
‘Great. Cheers. Thanks a lot,’ Imogen growled, opening the fridge and taking out a can of Coke. ‘Just cos I’ve got a craving, you’d think my own mother would want to spoil me a bit.’
‘A craving? Good grief girl, you’re only a few weeks gone. You wait till you’re . . .’ Jay ran out of steam, suddenly feeling her taste buds being overcome by the scent of Imogen’s breakfast. She would kill to be sitting down for a long slow trawl through the newspaper, a cup of hot strong coffee in front of her along with a heap of lush toast, saturated with marmalade . . . Thick, lustrous peel-strewn marmalade. Sugar-sodden, a hint of bitterness, the tang of utter, utter pleasure.