Size Matters (10 page)

Jay did. Delphine had been, as her mother had boasted, a martyr to her grumbling appendix. Audrey had been dismissive, asking why Delphine couldn't just have indigestion like everyone else, why did she have to dress it up with a fancy name. That complaining appendix had been cosseted and coaxed all through Delphine's childhood. Every morning – and it now came back to Jay as clearly as if it was last week – Win had got up at dawn (or ‘before God' as Audrey had scathingly put it) to make Delphine's muesli for her (nothing so simple as opening a packet) so it was ready on the table before school and with plenty of time for proper digesting after. She remembered the daily refrain from Win: ‘Have you
been
,
Delpheen?
' Jay and her sister April used to sing it at her as a tease.

Whenever Jay had stayed overnight and witnessed the palaver of the process, it had amazed her that anyone could go to so much trouble for a bowl of cereal. Every morning Win would mix up a selection of nuts and and whole oats, carefully measured from glass storage jars (kept out of harmful direct sunlight) with a copper scoop. She'd peel and chop a scarlet apple (never a Granny Smith: too sour) and add dried
fruits and ripe banana and, in summer, strawberries picked from a planter which was kept close to the back door and covered with green net and flapping silver streamers to keep the birds off. Then she'd stir the whole lot together with gluey buttermilk that had been out of the fridge for at least an hour to make sure the chill was off and the state of Delphine's delicate appendix wouldn't be compromised.

‘I've done plenty for you as well, dear,' she'd said to Jay. Now, remembering, Jay felt ashamed at her lack of graciousness at the time. ‘Yuck no!' she'd yelled, backing away, queasy at the sight of the fatty buttermilk. ‘Haven't you got any Weetabix?'

Delphine had looked at her with something too close to scorn. ‘Weetabix?
Bought
cereal?'

‘Yes. It's what I like.
And
with proper milk,' Jay had retaliated, brave for once and defensive that her own family's breakfast habits were being criticized.

‘You should try this, dear, while you're here,' she remembered Win insisting, firmly sitting her at the table in front of a dreaded bowlful of Delphine's concoction. ‘
Especially
with this lovely buttermilk. You could do with a bit of fattening up.'

My, thought Jay, that was a long time ago. How she'd love to hear someone say that about her now.

He hadn't made a very good start, this Charles bloke of Delphine's, Jay decided as she read the brief, typed note that accompanied the keys to his apartment. He could have rung the bell, introduced himself and come in for a chat. That way they could have fixed a date for the as-demanded-by-Delphine lunch. Just pushing the envelope through the letterbox and buggering off without so much as a hello didn't exactly make for the best impression of friendliness. Imperious, that's the word that comes to mind, she thought, im-per-i-ous. Not unlike Delphine herself, come to that, so at least the two of them had something in common. Where her letter had been bossily instructive about party-giving, this one contained a businesslike list of cleaning requirements and a request for a thorough all-areas blitzing to be done on any one of half a dozen possible dates between now and the end of the month, when Delphine would arrive to set up home with him and his immaculately turned-out cupboards. It was probably better done later rather than sooner, Jay decided, giving Delphine less opportunity to run her fingers along radiator edges and scoop up a triumphant smear of dust.

‘Perhaps he doesn't want us to see him till the wedding,' Greg suggested from the far side of the
Sunday Times
Home section, where he was reading a piece on one of his own designs, a semi-subterranean grass-and glass-covered dome for an old rock star, headlined ‘Going Underground'. ‘Perhaps he thinks it's bad luck.'

‘I'm pretty certain that's only the bride's frock,' Jay told him, making notes in her diary for a price quote for Charles's flat.

‘Frock? Surely Delphine will be the one wearing the trousers,' Greg said, laughing.

‘He says he's on his way to Hong Kong,' she read, picturing him stepping out of a cab in full-on pilot kit and tiptoeing up the path to push the note through the door. Perhaps it had been the very early hours, she thought, trying hard to feel inclined to forgive, in which case he'd hardly have liked to bang on the door and bluff his way in for a cup of coffee in the interests of making himself known to his future wife's extended family.

‘Ah well.' Greg murmured, turning to a page of Italianate villas for sale on a man-made Dubai island. ‘There you go. We can't expect to compete with a 747 full of passengers revving up on the Heathrow runway.'

Jay wasn't in a good mood. Those stupid anti-cellulite patches kept falling off every time she stretched. Barbara had said she was probably not applying them to her skin at the right tension, which made her think of knitting and how her mother had taught her to knit up little sample squares to try to get the stitches even. And then the night before, Greg had run his hand across her thigh, laughed and said it wasn't the hottest form of turn-on, being in bed with someone who brought to mind Rory's old World Cup sticker book. Besides, the patches were a
constant stick-on reminder of her own disgraceful shallowness. What kind of mother, she asked herself in the guilty pre-dawn wakefulness, what kind of self-centred, terrible, worthless mother gives even those few moments of attention to fighting flab at the moment her beloved child is in the middle of a serious operation?

All the same, now Rory was well into recovery, Jay felt she could once more allow herself to feel grumpily certain that acquiring a more streamlined body should be easier than this. She wasn't going to become obsessive about it (no, really, she wasn't, she insisted to herself), but surely it wasn't too much to ask to be back to a flab-free size 12 by the time Delphine and her pert curves, unfurrowed by childbearing, arrived.

She could just imagine her cousin looking her up and down and coming out with the single doomy word ‘matronly'. It brought to mind Win and Audrey, years before over cups of tea and pink wafer biscuits, gossiping that one friend or another had ‘let herself go', somehow a worse crime against feminine propriety than going on the game or running off with the insurance man. Of course, it shouldn't matter – and wasn't it Mick Jagger (or his dad) who said it was all right to let yourself go, as long as you could get yourself back again? – Delphine was going to snigger anyway and call her Granny.

In intellectually rational moments it didn't matter at all. But no-one's existence is made up entirely of such moments, and somewhere on the reel of Jay's Life-So-Far movie there was a scene from when she was fourteen and secretly passionate about her best friend Sandy's older brother Neil. Neil was having a party, a full-scale, parents-out, free-house (if you didn't count the au pair taking care of their seven-year-old sister Emmy), all-teen debauch session. He was a boys'
school pupil and the consequent shortfall of girls in his life meant that Sandy and Jay were invited, in a desultory, if-you-feel-like-it way, to join in and help balance the numbers. Neil had warned them to keep in the background and not get embarrassingly drunk or silly, or they'd be banished upstairs to Emmy's room to watch TV with Birgitte.

Sandy and Jay got the silly bit over with during the afternoon in the cramped and cluttered half of the bedroom Jay shared with her sister April, who generously lent her a new lime green ra-ra skirt and blow-dried their hair for them. Delirious with anticipation of the night's possibilities, they got themselves ready in a riot of shrieks and giggles with an all-stops-out orgy of face packs, manicuring, hair primping, clothes choosing and accessory selection. Neil and his friends were to be gob smacked by their glamour, their sophistication, their hitherto unsuspected sheer
fanciability
. The glorious teen world of snogging and boyfriends was about to begin. Only as they were leaving the house did it start to go wrong: Win turned up in need of a comfort chat with her sister and Delphine was handed over to Jay to keep her out of earshot of sensation-filled adult conversation.

‘But me and Sandy are going out!' Jay had wailed to Audrey.

‘Sandy and
I
,' her mother admonished automatically, then hustled the three girls out of the the door, insisting, ‘Just take her with you. She'll be no trouble.' In the background Jay could catch the sound of Win starting to be tearful. The words ‘other woman' and ‘that bastard' had been murmured more than once between the two sisters, and Delphine's father was away a lot these days. ‘On Business', as Delphine tended to explain, grandly, leaving whoever was listening to assume he was saving a major industrial
conglomerate from certain ruin as he travelled the world on a private Concorde.

‘So at last you're wearing a bra, Flatso,' Delphine observed as they clattered down the road, Jay and Sandy tottering on their uncomfortable and new platform heels and Delphine in her favourite gold dance sandals that weren't supposed to grace any surface other than polished parquet, ‘What is it, a 30 triple-A?' Jay blushed and folded her arms across her body. Her new, first, bra and its embarrassing lack of contents were that night's terrifying chinks in her confidence.

‘Take no notice. Just ignore. We'll send her up to Emmy's room and they can watch
The Generation Game
,' Sandy muttered, furious at the imposed tagalong.

‘And who's this?' Neil leered at the interloper as soon as they arrived. Delphine, taller and precociously curvier than the two older girls, simpered at him and asked for a cigarette.

‘Definitely
not
, Delph,' Jay said, then turned to Neil. ‘It's OK, this is my very much
younger
cousin, only
just
thirteen. I'm babysitting her so she's to go upstairs and hang out in Emmy's playroom.'

‘I'll get you for this.' Delphine glowered as she was bundled up the stairs by Austrian Birgitte with a bottle of Coke and a monster bag of crisps. Jay took no notice – she was already caught up in the music and the possibilities. She soon forgot about Delphine and about the bra.

Much later, Jay was in the midsummer-warm candlelit garden sitting on a bench by the fish pond, satisfyingly spoilt for choice, boy-wise, being thigh to thigh between Neil and someone called Aaron who was stroking her bare arm from wrist to elbow. Around her were the heady mixed scents of cannabis and
carnations and the sounds of couples groping their way into each other's clothes beneath the rhododendrons. Jay grinned across at Sandy who sat on the grass entwined with her own quarry for the night, and wondered if the summer could get any better than this.

‘
Jay
. I'm
bored
, can we go now?' Delphine appeared at her side, hands on hips and an expression of petulance on her face.

‘A bit later Delph, just half an hour, OK?' Jay was feeling mellow and almost inclined to be generous. ‘Would you like a proper drink? Just the one? I promise I won't tell Auntie Win.' But it was too late for generosity – the earlier damage still told and Delphine glowered, distrusting. Then she sneezed ‘I've got hay fever,' she whined. ‘I want to go
now
.'

‘
Look
, Delphine, I know it's past your bedtime . . .' Not a kind thing to say, Jay would be the first to admit, but she hadn't asked to be lumbered with her cousin.

‘Any tissues out here? I keep sneezing!' Delphine interrupted her. She was almost shouting, making a big play of searching around, picking up glasses from the table, putting them down again, sneezing with loud, exaggerated drama and generally making sure everyone was looking at her.

‘Be quiet, Delph, you're being . . .' Jay hissed.

‘Oh I know where there's some!' shrieked Delphine, ‘Look everyone!' Too late, Jay clutched her hands to her skinny-strapped low-cut top. Delphine, like a conjuror executing his grand finale trick, delved her hand down her cousin's front and pulled out a wad of tissues. She then blew her nose loudly and pocketed Jay's shaming bra stuffing, squealing in triumph, ‘So
now
can we go home?' through the waves of surrounding laughter.

Well at least that was one thing that had changed, Jay thought now as she adjusted a cutting-in strap; these
days it was genuine D-cup flesh that spilled over the top of her gorgeous lacy underwear, not Kleenex.

The grapefruit diet had been abandoned on grounds of paltry results and a growing certainty that it contained no magic calorie-zapping ingredient waiting to be discovered by the obese Western world. Instead, the Shape-Shake Jay had had in place of breakfast was lying heavily on her stomach. She felt as if she'd drunk a vat of wallpaper paste, vanilla-flavoured. It had been horribly sickly too, cloyed up with artificial sweetener as if all slimmers had such a deep-seated cake and chocolate habit that they could only be weaned away from it by a replacement that brought to mind the stickiest childhood sweets. This must be, she was sure, the dieter's equivalent of methadone. She was supposed to have another one for lunch as well, and then something ‘proper' in the evening, by which time the food would be fallen upon and scoffed down greedily as a well-deserved reward. Tonight's ‘proper' was going to be lamb roasted over shallots and rosemary-scattered potato slices, julienne carrots glazed in tarragon butter and courgettes pan-fried in olive oil with garlic, tomatoes and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. There would be a sauce made from the lamb juices, deglazed with port and with a smidgen of redcurrant jelly added. She knew this because she had bought all the ingredients the day before, just as the grapefruit was wavering out of favour and an hour before she'd stocked up on a bargain special offer of twenty-four assorted-flavour cans of Shape-Shake. It would be all right; she wouldn't eat the pudding, even though it was a lush and sticky lemon tart, bought from Maison Blanc by Richmond station, and would take Olympic levels of will power to resist.