She had fallen in love with him at first sight. Because it wasn’t the first time she’d felt like that-though her love had never been returned-she expected, with anticipatory bitterness, that once again her feeling would be unrequited. But he had been the same and loved her back with a like ardor. He was a teacher and had two degrees, while she was just a nursery nurse, but he loved her, she didn’t know why, couldn’t account for it. They weren’t very young; both of them were in their late twenties. Passion overtook them. They made love the second time they met, moved in together after a week, got married two months after their first meeting.
Michelle was-well-not thin then, but not plump either, just a normal size. “A perfect figure,” Matthew said. If anyone had asked her the secret of their love and their successful marriage she’d have said it was because they were so kind to one another. He’d have said it was because no one else had ever mattered much to either of them once they’d met.
He was funny about his food even then (Michelle’s way of putting it) but she’d always thought men quite different from women in their attitudes to eating. Really, it was just that, like most men, there were a lot of things he didn’t like. Red meat was on his poison list and all kinds of offal, shellfish, and any fish that wasn’t white-in those days, when she could joke about it, she called him a “fish racist”-sauces and mayonnaise and custards, anything “sloppy.” He was faddy, that was all. But he began to get worse, though she never put it like that. Eating disorders as real illness were just beginning to be recognized, but everyone thought they only applied to young girls who wanted to stay thin. Because they talked about everything, they sometimes discussed, in depth, his problem. How he couldn’t eat things that looked like other things. An example was rice; he’d just got it into his head that rice looked like maggots. Soon he couldn’t eat anything that had once been alive, though-thank God, she said to herself-that didn’t apply to fruit and vegetables, some fruit and vegetables. All pasta was like worms, all sauce-well, anything runny was so bad that he couldn’t utter the words that described what they were like.
Gently she asked him if he knew why. He was such an intelligent man, intellectual, sensible, practical, an excellent science teacher. It frightened her to watch him grow thinner and thinner and see him prematurely aging.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I did. My mother used to encourage me to eat things I didn’t want to, but she never forced me. I was never made to sit at the table until I’d eaten something.”
“Darling,” she said, “don’t you ever feel hungry?” She did and so often.
“I don’t think I ever have. Not that I can remember.”
At that time she had to stop herself envying him. Never to be hungry! What bliss! Only she knew it wasn’t. It was a slow wasting away toward death. Not if she could stop it, she thought then, not if she made it her life’s work to help him. That was when she got him to start taking vitamins. He was quietly acquiescent, for capsules and tablets never look like anything else. They’re hard and firm, and can be swallowed without choking. He stopped drinking milk and eating soft cheeses. Butter had gone long ago. She made him go to the doctor and went with him.
This was in the late eighties and the doctor, an elderly man, wasn’t sympathetic. Afterward Matthew called him a “famine freak” because he’d told him to pull himself together and think of the starving millions in Africa. He prescribed a tonic, which he said was guaranteed to make the patient eat. The first and only time Matthew took it he vomited violently.
Michelle made it her business to discover all the foods he wasn’t positively repelled by. Strawberries were one, provided she took the hulls out, every scrap of green. Oranges and grapefruit were all right. Fool that she was, she told herself, she’d tried him on a pomegranate and when he’d seen its interior he’d actually fainted. The fleshy red seeds looked to him like the inside of a wound. Bread he’d eat, dry plain cake, and most biscuits. Eggs if they were hard-boiled. But all of it had to be in minute quantities. Meanwhile, she piled on the weight. He knew she gorged, though she tried not to eat too much in front of him. At mealtimes, while he sat miserably resigned, picking at half a lettuce leaf, a slice of hard-boiled egg, and one plain-boiled new potato the size of a marble, she ate the same multiplied by five, plus a chicken wing and a bread roll. But when she went back to the kitchen and he returned thankfully to his computer, she filled herself up with the comfort food that consoled her for watching his sufferings: ciabatta with brie, fruit cake, Mars bars, crème brûlée, and crystalized pineapple.
Their love never wavered. She’d have liked children but none came. Sometimes she thought it might be because he was so malnourished that his sperm count had sunk very low. It was no good going to a doctor, though the reactionary old GP had been replaced by a bright young woman who was always trying to put Michelle on a diet. No one really understood Matthew; only she could do that. She had to watch his body slacken and bend, his face wrinkle like an old man’s, his joints protrude through the skin-you couldn’t call it flesh-and that skin assume a grayish pallor. At thirty she had been plump, at thirty-five overweight. Now, at nearly forty-five, she was grossly fat. While she spoke often of his revulsion from food, and they were always discussing what caused it and whether a cure would be discovered one day, he had never once mentioned her obesity. As far as he was concerned, she might still be the hourglass girl of twenty-seven he’d fallen in love with.
She had a sister in Bedford and he a brother in Ireland and another in Hong Kong, but they had no friends. So geared is society to an eating-and-drinking-together ethos, and eating was something they were obliged to avoid in public, that they were unable to keep friends or make new ones. One by one, people they knew drifted away when their invitations were refused and they were never themselves invited. Michelle’s greatest dread had been that somehow they would be obliged to accept a summons to tea or supper and Matthew, confronted by butter or a jug of milk or pot of honey, would turn white and begin that dreadful dry retching. Better repulse people than risk it.
She had only one confidante. And that confidante had become a friend. One day, nearing despair and terrified that he couldn’t go on much longer, she had sat in her kitchen with Fiona, while Matthew worked slowly and feebly at his computer, and told her everything. And instead of laughing at a middle-aged man who couldn’t eat and a middle-aged woman who couldn’t stop eating, Fiona had sympathized, seemed to understand, and even suggested remedies. She’d lived on such a varied diet, such novel and sophisticated food, she had all sorts of ideas for an anorexic who’d like to eat if only he could. A year later, which was last year, Michelle told Fiona that she’d saved Matthew’s life and they would both be eternally grateful.
When they got back from Waitrose to their house in Holmdale Road, West Hampstead, Michelle set about preparing Matthew’s lunch. It was to include several of the foodstuffs Fiona had suggested and that Matthew found acceptable.
“Peanuts!” Fiona had said. “Very nourishing, are peanuts.”
Matthew managed to utter the word “greasy.”
“Not at all. Dry-roasted peanuts. Delicious. I love them.”
It would be an exaggeration to say that so did he. He loved no kind of food but he tolerated dry-roasted peanuts, as he tolerated her other suggestions: crispbread, Pop Tarts, madeira cake, hard-boiled eggs chopped up with parsley, Parmesan cheese grated to a powder. Baby spinach leaves and arugula, Japanese rice crackers, muesli. Over that year, his health improved a little and he was slightly less emaciated. Since then, though, the Pop Tarts, which were the most caloric on the list, had fallen from favor. He couldn’t help it. With all his heart, he wanted to go on liking them but it was no good. Fiona recommended sponge fingers and shortbread instead.