Free Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell Page B

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