When I Was Otherwise by Stephen Benatar Page B

trim. Don’t you?”
    But this seemed to please neither of her hosts.
    â€œNo, Andy, I had not forgotten that we had a visitor! Perhaps it was our visitor who was inspiring me.”
    Then she said a little more placatingly, “Anyway, I thought you had some work you wanted to get on with.”
    â€œSo now I suppose it’s not enough that I slog at the office all week? I’m not even allowed to relax on a Saturday afternoon?”
    â€œWhy don’t you just drink another cup of tea and then set out the chessmen?” put in Daisy, who had suddenly remembered that blessed are the peacemakers—and conveniently forgotten that she herself had drunk the last drop of tea. “I don’t imagine we’ll be long.” She smiled, beatifically.
    â€œWell, just make sure you’re not.”
    She decided—though it was something she had known from the beginning, anyhow—that she was being complimented; only rather more subtly than merely through the lips. Because he was obviously extremely impatient to play chess with her.
    So she made up her mind she would protract their interlude upstairs for as long as she decently could. She turned to Marsha with a merry injunction and a pointing finger.
    â€œLead on, Macduff!”
    Marsha—not quite so merrily—led on.
    â€œLike a lamb to the slaughter!” said Daisy, briefly turning her eyes back to Andrew. If she was supposed to be referring to herself the simile lacked conviction. “When you see me next I hope I shall look like Greta Garbo. Do you think I might look like Greta Garbo?” She threw out her arms and slunk out with a supposedly long-legged stride and moodily sinuous grace.
    Upstairs Marsha led her into the bedroom she shared with Andrew—“the master bedroom!” she sometimes coquettishly called it and not just to her husband. Daisy glanced about her with interest. It wasn’t often you had a look into people’s bedrooms. The room itself was only ordinary but that was the wardrobe door, presumably, before which he posed naked. Threw out his chest, no doubt, and flexed his muscles. Daisy found the thought unsavoury but not unstimulating. Henry had never stood in front of a mirror and flexed his muscles—at least, never to her knowledge—during the short duration of their marriage. Moreover, he wouldn’t have cut a very dashing figure if he had: like his brother Dan—just a bag of skin and bone, and of very white skin at that. Besides, she had neither encouraged nudity in him nor indulged in it herself. Despite her long years as a nurse and a physiotherapist she still thought there was something faintly disgusting about all that. More than faintly disgusting, even. And yet at the same time…
    And there, too, was the bed in which, if he failed to come up to scratch, Marsha had threatened to bite off his head. Once he’d performed his vital function.
    Well, he’d done that by now, hadn’t he? Marsha—who wasn’t yet even twenty—was already pregnant. Daisy quickly turned her face away and experienced an extension of that feeling of disdain, almost of revulsion. In some ways it would certainly be a cleaner world if Nature had provided women with the jaws and the digestive system of a praying mantis.
    Though cleaner , perhaps, wasn’t entirely the right word. No, definitely it wasn’t! Daisy considered all that dripping gore and all the problems of disposal. It would be simpler, she thought more cheerily, if they were to eat their way straight down to the toenails. Far more practical. And besides. How it would save on the meat bills!
    â€œAnd that must be the reason why it prays, of course… ‘Oh, please relieve me of these hiccups!’”
    â€œWhat?”
    Daisy sat down on the stool which Marsha, despite saying, “I’m not really sure if I feel like this any longer,” had just pointed out.
    â€œWell, that’s