He held forth on the benefits of intermittent fasting for several minutes, nodding his head as if in agreement with himself. Serena, uncomfortable in a hard chair opposite him, tried to be likeable. Shewanted desperately to please him, to be his favourite patient. This was the way she had been taught to be around men: pliable and pleasant and pretty so they would be captivated by her and she could charm them into submission. It was a game in which one never revealed one’s true motivations; a transmutation of female powerlessness into feminine influence.
‘And so we need to retrain the body, hmm?’ Dr Hans continued. ‘We need to remind our digestive enzymes what they are there to do. We chew. That, after all, is what our teeth are for.’ He broke off to give a wolfish smile. ‘And we fast to give our digestive system time to rest. This is what we do here at the Wurttensee Clinic. You understand?’
Dr Hans waited for her to say something – anything – but the words would not form. Her thoughts these days were foggy and distant. She would have a sentence in mind but when she tried to voice it into existence, the phrase would be swept beyond her reach.
Instead she smiled. It was one of her best smiles, reserved for occasions such as these when she needed to disarm. She had deployed it to get out of everything from school detentions to speeding tickets. Until recently, she had known without doubt she was beautiful – known it as incontrovertible fact, the way she knew that 1066 was the date of the Battle of Hastings – and she knew, too, that this particular smile was a bewitching one. Her face tended towards coldness, and the smile warmed it up.
Dr Hans frowned but otherwise there was no flicker to suggest he was responding to her in the way she was used to. Perhaps, Serena thought automatically, he was gay. But he didn’t seem gay. Not like Martin, who used to hang around her husband with such insistence that they had christened him ‘Little Shadow’. But then if Dr Hans wasn’t gay, it meant he wasn’t attracted to Serena and a sliver of panic opened itself up in her solar plexus. Her attractiveness to men was all she had.
‘Good,’ the doctor said, unperturbed by her inability to speak. ‘Verygood. In that case, I will draw up a schedule for you and a diet of three hundred and fifty calories a day. Bouillon in the evenings. You can drink as much tea as you like but, please, no coffee, and please, no sneaking into town to eat a schnitzel or there is no point, yes? I will see you in two days for a full examination. Very good.’
Dr Hans pushed himself out of his seat, revealing considerable bulk beneath his tailored suit and pale blue shirt. He didn’t appear to do much fasting himself. He proffered his hand and Serena shook it, disappointed that he didn’t hold her gaze for longer than necessary; didn’t in any way try to flirt with her. Her Scottish mother would say she was losing her bloom. Had said so, in fact. To Serena’s bloom-absent face.
In the past, Serena had been able to ignore most of her mother’s barbs. Her mother had been a debutante, one of the most feted of her generation, and had never come to terms with the rest of her life failing to live up to this youthful potential. Her resentment was taken out on her daughter, whose extraordinary good looks seemed designed by twisted deities as a personal reproach.
None of it had mattered because Serena’s father had been so obsessed with her. Their closeness was often remarked upon and cloyingly exclusive. She can still recall dinner parties when she would sit on Daddy’s lap as the butlers laid down soup in silver tureens and women with brittle hair and shiny lips would laugh at men’s jokes by candlelight. Serena, in her nightdress, aged seven, would sit on the reassuring heft of her father’s thigh and be patted and praised by him in the gaps between adult conversation.
‘You’re my beautiful favourite,’ he would whisper in her ear. ‘Don’t you forget it, Sissy.’
‘I won’t, Daddy.’
It wasn’t that there was anything sexual to it, of course not. She had friends – more than you’d expect – who had been forced by their paternal figures to perform certain unmentionable acts, but that had not been Serena’s experience. Her father had never left her in anydoubt of her pre-eminence. He had taught Serena that her beauty made her fundamentally worthy of attention.
He had died when she was in her early twenties. She’d married Ben shortly afterwards because his fervent declarations of love had felt so paternal. She hadn’t realised for a long time that fatherly and husbandly love were different.
Serena returns to chewing her buckwheat cracker. It is dry and dense against the tongue. Chew. Chew. Chew. She is up to fifteen now, and chews one more time for luck, good girl that she is, then swallows.
She is sitting at a table laid for one, crowded with pill bottles and powdered supplements that Dr Hans insisted she take before every meal. The food is served with decorous aplomb by two waiters in lederhosen, who make a graceful performance of removing lids and unfurling napkins, even though the portions are so small they barely warrant the effort. Today, there is carrot soup, the cracker and a tiny pot of sheep’s curd. Mindful eating is encouraged, which means no phones or books during mealtimes. It also means no chatting to fellow guests, which Serena finds a relief. No small talk. No need for an exhausting trek through the desert of her brain to try and catch those vanishing specks of sense on the horizon.
She hadn’t realised that menopause would be like this. Her mother had never spoken about it. Serena had had no idea that when she hit her early forties, hormones would rage through her like wildfire. That she would find herself staring at a blank television screen for hours. That she would forget words and objects and once, even her children’s names. That the gallop of horses’ hooves across her chest would be labelled by her GP merely as unspecified ‘anxiety’. That she would blaze like a furnace and break into sweats and that moisture would soak through her silk blouses then vanish, clammily, a few seconds later. That she would want to cry all the time. That this sadness would co-exist with an untrammelled fury at all that was expected of her. That her appetite could no longer be suppressed orrigorously controlled. That she would get fatter and mourn the silhouette she once kept while simultaneously being unable to change the body she now inhabited.
She could sense Ben’s distance. He had always been so turned on by the jut of her hip-bones, had enjoyed the girlish tightness of her, the tiny breasts and concave stomach. They still fucked, but she knew Ben was thinking of something or – even worse – someone else. She would spread her legs, the flesh on her thighs jiggling and dimpled, and she would look into his face and see his eyes were closed and that he was biting his lip in concentration, as if the only way he could orgasm was a concerted focus of thought away from her face. He was always preoccupied with work. Politics. The art of changing nothing while pretending to change it all.
He was becoming panicked about money, too, which she found distinctly unappealing. When they had got married, Ben promised Serena she would never have to concern herself with bank balances or bottom lines. He wanted to ‘take care of her’, to ‘treat her like a princess’ and so on. Stupidly, she had believed him. The aristocratic pedigree and country pile gave a convincing impression of wealth, but of course those ancient houses with their creaking pipes and draughty windows and hastily retrofitted central heating systems cost millions in upkeep. After her father-in-law died, leaving Ben as sole heir to his debts, Denby Hall had chewed through their marital savings like rats gnawing through electric cable. Her mother-in-law, Lady Katherine, still resided there in queenly splendour, but contributed nothing. A politician’s salary was never going to move the dial. Ben’s annual stipend as Member of Parliament for Tipworth was a fraction of what he used to make in bonuses in the city. It didn’t even cover the school fees.
Andrew Jarvis had been a great help, of course. Ben’s old school friend had left politics at just the right time and had subsequently risen through the ranks of various financial corporations. He now ran his own hedge fund, Dark Rock, just as Ben had once done. They’dessentially just swapped careers, which rankled. Serena couldn’t help but wish Ben still brought home a salary slip with multiple zeroes attached. It would make things so much easier. Money always did.
Last year, Jarvis had offered the Fitzmaurices a generous loan for an overdue refurbishment of the Tipworth Priory bedrooms. Serena would never have been able to push for the Espalier Square wallpaper she wanted for the master were it not for him. For this, alone, she owes Jarvis a great deal. Every morning on waking, she experiences a shiver of delight at the delicate emerald trellis effect that surrounds her – an effect that, according to the interiors expert they’d hired, ‘gives the all-encompassing atmosphere of fruit trees trained to form tunnels or pergolas in nineteenth-century gardens’.
She had texted Jarvis to say how grateful she was and he had replied immediately in rather a flirtatious tone that had both shocked and flattered her. They’d kept up their sporadic texting over the months that followed. It felt illicit, even though there was – Serena kept telling herself – absolutely nothing untoward about it. Jarvis was one of Ben’s closest friends! She was simply being polite! He was married to loyal old Bitsy! And yet, when she saw his name ping on her phone, it stirred a certain fluttering. She found she was disappointed if she didn’t hear from him on any given day and she didn’t like this version of herself – the one that was weak and dependent on the attentions of a man who was absolutely not in her league. Jarvis was bloated and red in both face and hair. His fingers were perpetually swollen. She didn’t fancy him at all. So why did she care about his fancying her?
Partly it was because it felt nice to be noticed – not just for her looks, but for her opinions, too. Jarvis actually took the time to ask her what she thought about things. At first, he asked for advice about superficial preoccupations – what tie he should wear, whether she preferred tortoiseshell or black-rimmed spectacle frames – and these enquiries would be accompanied by a selfie he’d taken in the clothes shop or the optician’s, his face serious, awaiting her verdict. She was always clear on matters of style.
‘The knitted tie,’ she’d text back, without hesitation and enjoying the feeling of being in charge of his choices. ‘Black frames. Better for your colouring.’
Then Jarvis had started sending her links to news articles he thought she might find interesting. Serena was surprised by how much this meant to her. Ben never spoke to her about current affairs but over the last year or so, opinions have taken root in the soil of her mind and started sprouting with alarming insistence.
Women, for instance. Growing up, she had considered feminism an embarrassing ailment one didn’t admit to in polite company. In her twenties, she had been grateful for reproductive rights and maternity leave inasmuch as these pertained to her own existence. She had taken it for granted that men were in charge and that women were lucky to be invited along. When #MeToo happened, Serena’s initial reaction had been defensiveness. She felt the younger generation didn’t know how good they had it. After all, she’d had a lifetime of public groping and bottom-pinching and sexual innuendo but she had never considered such antics harassment. They were simply the price of admission, the tax you had to pay for being female. Everyone knew that, didn’t they? But the #MeToo movement kept growing and the tweets kept coming and the Hollywood actresses kept ‘opening up’ in magazine interviews and the more women shared their stories, the more Serena realised that maybe the category error had been hers all along. Just because she didn’t believe she’d been sexually assaulted didn’t mean that she hadn’t been. Perhaps it was that she hadn’t been given the language to name it.
#MeToo had been a radicalising experience. She wasn’t marching in the streets in a knitted pink pussy hat or anything (perish the thought) but she was beginning to realise that women, as a whole, are underestimated and overlooked and exploited and abused and that nothing has really changed since she was in her teens. And it was making her very cross.
She had recently driven her almost twelve-year-old son, Hector, back to his boarding school after a weekend at home and he had toldher with great confidence from the passenger seat that ‘women are more emotional than men. They’re not suited for leadership roles’.
Gripping the steering wheel more firmly, Serena asked as calmly as she could: ‘Where did you get that idea from?’
‘YouTube. This guy I watch.’
He spoke with no guardedness. As far as Hector was concerned, he was just stating the obvious.
