Chapter II Serena
II.
Serena
SERENA IS CHEWING. Gazing into space and chewing. Once, twice, three times. Chew. Chew. Chew. The doctor has told her she needs to reach at least fifteen chews before she is permitted to swallow.
‘Or at least until the food is completely fluid,’ Dr Hans said in their first appointment, his Germanic accent lending the words a stentorian tone.
He reminded Serena of her father: handsome, with excellent teeth and a broad, lived-in face that wouldn’t have worked on a woman but which served to elevate Dr Hans’s authority.
‘In normal life’ – he pronounced life as ‘lahf’ – ‘we rush our food in a race to finish our meals. Why? Why do we not seek out the pleasure in each mouthful, each morsel? We think we are so important, yes? That the world will stop if we take a moment too long to get to that meeting or the child pick-up or the coffee with a girlfriend, yes?’
He frequently ended sentences with a question Serena assumed was rhetorical, but she nodded just in case.
Dr Hans was seated behind a mid-century desk, rising vast as a mountain from the elegant lines of walnut.
There was a leather-bound notebook in front of him which he never opened, preferring instead to use it as a prop.
He wore a gold ring with a bulbous green stone on one pinky finger.
All of it gave the impression of masterful confidence.
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.
She wanted 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.
‘Very good. 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 any doubt 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 or rigorously 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.