The Spa by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2007-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

19

The Manicurist’s Tale

I’m telling Dorleen’s tale for her, since she’s quite right, she’s not all that good with words. Probably because, unlike the rest of us gathered in those days at Castle Spa, who for the most part have had to struggle for a living, and earn success, and still haven’t qualified for our own personal bodyguard, she’s never needed to develop the skills of language to get by. All she has to do is be, as delicate and exquisite as some rare Lalique piece, which you have to be extremely careful not to break. ‘Fucking’ may be her favourite adjective, but it is said in so mild a voice it’s hard to object. The sweetness of the voice quite overwhelms the meaning, or lack of it, of the words she chooses. And that in itself is the odder since the accent is crude Liverpudlian and slightly nasal – and ought by rights to grate on the sensitive ear.

One’s instinct was to look after her. Her eyes were large in proportion to her head, and I am told that’s what triggers the caring response in the adult, so the kitten or the puppy doesn’t get booted aside, but is stroked and cherished. It’s why cats will nurse puppies, and wolves take in human infants, and we give alms to starving children: the larger the eye the more sympathy we feel.

She was very, very pale, almost to the point of being albino: her hair fair, thick and straight, cut short in a bob. She had the whitest and tenderest of skins, pale brows in a perfect arch pencilled in by a steady hand, the hands so small and fragile you could see the tinge of pink as the blood coursed through them. Slender feet, stretching long perfect toes into the bubbles of the Jacuzzi: enough to send any foot fetishist wild with desire. They say if nature’s plan for the harmonious being fails at the very last hurdle, it will be with the toes. The big toe of the supermodel will be out of proportion, the little toe of the Greek god down to earth in some way deformed. But Dorleen’s were just perfect. She had sprung from her mother’s womb the epiphany of symmetry and grace. I thought of my own large hands and legs too short from knee to ankle and thought, unfair! unfair!, but when it comes to female looks what was ever fair?

But we were, I hope, nice to her: in the absence of men the edge of competition is dulled, and as I say, she had these wide, blue, young, trusting eyes.

‘Go on, Dorleen,’ we said. ‘Tell us your tale!’

‘Nothing much to say,’ she said, in the seductive voice. ‘Just fucking happened, dinnit.’

We craned: someone turned the bubble-rate down so we could hear better over the foaming waters. She had a sapphire navel stud, ruby earrings and two rings: white diamond and gold, neither on the third finger of her left hand. If she was a wife she wanted nobody to know it.

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