Shadow Play by Frances Fyfield

the rest of this house, was that fibre suitcase. As it had been, still crooked. The suitcase of a wife who had left with it and who, according to him and everyone else, had never come back.
    Margaret separated Mrs Logo’s letter from the rest and put it in the drawer where she kept knives.
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    H elen West was rummaging in the kitchen. From time to time she eyed the telephone, not quite wishing it to ring, but somehow resenting its silence. She had willed the fridge to yield exciting secrets but after her own time-honoured fashion there was nothing inside but a jar of pickle, one of dead mayonnaise, butter, rock solid, a lettuce which was brown to the point of liquefaction and six suspect eggs. I have no rules, she said to herself, no rules at all. I feed like a soldier on the retreat in some frozen waste and I have grown as thin. I like being a renegade: I forage in shops rather than buy. Is this the life for me? It took ten days without Geoffrey (two phone calls, one too many), for all the old regimes to be reestablished. Through the very thin veneer of her domestication, acquired only through contact with men, the way they were supposed to acquire similar habits from women, she was emerging as an alley cat.
    Though truth to tell, the scrappy eating and total lack of cooking which had featured in the last ten days, during which time she had passed the supermarket with two fingers raised and no potatoes to rub her shins as they strained at polythene bags, owed only as much to retrograde eating behaviour as it did to a strange feeling of nausea. The eggs eaten late were committed to the sewerage system so quickly it was as if they only lived in her digestion on borrowed time. They were unable to pay rent, these eggs, like most other foods except crisps, sharp, artificial, savoury tastes, or items of sickening sweetness. And she was thinner, definitely thinner: the waistband of her skirt that morning had hung loose: halfway through a court case, she had risen to shout some reply and found the skirt had swivelled round, back to front, crumpled and out of shape. That small incident vexed her.
    She stood in her kitchen, admired for its warmth and flair like all her other rooms, the product of a hundred junk shops encouraged into interesting life and a little out of control. ‘I love this old dresser,’ Geoffrey had said. ‘I love your old, cracked, unhealthy enamel sink, your mugs from the wedding of Charles and Di, and I love the ancient carving knives which came from car-boot sales, but, my dear, they do not cut.’
    She was hungry and sick, sick and hungry. Three, four drinks with Dinsdale and the mastication of nibbles with all the nutriment of air, and she ran for the bathroom with its old and beautiful tiles, pictures on the walls even in there, only to be sick. What is this? she thought, raising from the basin to the mirror a face which was horribly pale. What the hell is this?
    Helen West, arrogantly accustomed to health, an avoider of doctors when possible, rummaged in the cupboard beneath the mirror for something to settle this intestinal riot. Bisodol, Rennies, Nurofen, aspirin, every hangover cure under her sun. A pregnancy kit about a thousand years old which her hand nudged and knocked to one side in search of something efficacious enough to allow eating without retribution later, but the fingers stopped of their own accord and dragged out the unopened box as she squatted back on her haunches, rocking with the shock of her own conclusions. When was the last time she’d had the curse? And when last had she and Bailey celebrated the one thing they always seemed to get a hundred per cent right? His house, her house, something usually missing. You weren’t fertility plus at thirty-five, but age was irrelevant to an egg.
    Helen got her coat and made for the street. Dammit: she craved the produce of the Chinese takeaway; she would have it in any event, and she could not stay here with her own