The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Chapter 17: An Icelandic Poet

Marcia looked at William in frank disbelief. “What?” she asked. “Could you tell me again what you’ve just told me?”

Marcia, who was William’s old friend, former flatmate – for a very brief time – and general confidante, had called in at Corduroy Mansions the same day he had received the visit from Angelica. Marcia was a caterer, and she owned a small company that specialised in cooking for events. In the days when boardroom lunches were more common she had concentrated on those, but now, with companies being encouraged to be slender in every sense, she had been obliged to diversify. Catering for weddings and funerals was now the staple of her business but she had also developed a profitable line in providing canapés for diplomatic cocktail parties and political receptions.

That day she had been prepared a small finger-lunch for the Icelandic ambassador in honour of a visiting Icelandic poet, Sigurlin Valdis Antonsdóttir. The ambassador’s assistant had asked for several varieties of northern fish to feature on the menu, to mark the fact that the guest of honour was the author of Cold Waves, a highly regarded saga of migrating cod, which had won Iceland’s premier literary prize and had recently been translated into Finnish. Marcia had risen to the challenge and had served herring rolls, cod roe, and a great deal of smoked salmon. Some of it had been left uneaten and was not wanted by the embassy, so Marcia dropped round to deliver it to William. He always welcomed the surplus snacks that Marcia brought him, and indeed had once remarked that he could live almost entirely off the scraps from her table. This pleased Marcia. She had been brought up by her very domesticated mother to believe that of all the satisfactions open to women, feeding men was ultimately the most profound. She knew that this was, quite simply, wrong, but the beliefs instilled in childhood and youth are hard to dislodge, and Marcia had eventually stopped fighting the convictions that lay deep within her.

“I know I’m pathetic,” she once said to a friend. “I know that I should be all independent and self-sufficient and so on, but that’s just not me. I want to feed men. I just love putting large plates of food in front of them. I love it.” She paused. “Does that mean there’s something wrong with me?”

Her friend looked at her pityingly. “Yes,” she said. “It makes you inauthentic, Marcia.”

Marcia winced. “Does it really?”

The friend nodded. “Yes, it does. You have to live for yourself, you know. You have to do things that fulfil you, not others. Women are not there to look after men.”

Marcia thought about this. “But who’ll look after them if we don’t?” she asked.

Her friend rolled her eyes. “Marcia, dear …”

Marcia tried another approach. “But what if you’re fulfilled by doing things for other people? Why can’t I feel fulfilled by making food for other people …” She corrected herself. It was not feeding other people that gave her pleasure, it was the feeding of men. “Making food for men, that is.”

The friend’s frustration showed itself. “That’s really sad,” she said. “It’s sad because you don’t know that you’re being used by a system – the old, deep-rooted system of male domination. Of course men want us to feed them. Who wouldn’t?” She looked at Marcia, as if to challenge her to contradict this. But Marcia just listened, and so the friend continued, “Most men, you see, don’t grow up; they’re fed by their mothers when they’re little boys and they realise how satisfactory that is. And being fed by somebody else is really very comfortable. So they manipulate women into carrying on doing it for the rest of their lives.”

“But if women want …”

“No, Marcia, that’s not going to work. Women think they want to make food for men, but that’s false consciousness. You know what that is? No? Well, I’ll explain it to you some other time. The point is that women are made to think that they like doing things, but they don’t really. They want to do their own things, things for themselves.”

The conversation had ended at that point, and Marcia had gone about her business, which was feeding people. Her friend might have been right but she felt that there was not much that she could do about the state of inauthenticity that her friend had diagnosed. And now that she came to think of it, perhaps it was quite pleasant to be inauthentic, and if one was happy in one’s inauthenticity, why should one try to change it? It was an interesting question, but there were canapés to be prepared and that was a more immediate task than the rectification of false consciousness.

Now, as she removed the cover from a dish of rolled herring, she felt a warm glow of satisfaction at William’s obvious pleasure.

“My absolute favourite!” he exclaimed, picking up one of the strips of herring on its cocktail-stick skewer.

Marcia smiled. “Well, I’m glad. The Icelandic poet turned up her nose at these. And yet her poems are all about cod and herring, apparently.”

“Perhaps she couldn’t bring herself to eat the subject of her poems,” suggested William, reaching for another. “Poor woman. It would be like Wordsworth eating daffodils. One just can’t.”

William went on to tell Marcia about Angelica’s visit and the assignation that he had the next day. Marcia put down the plate of herring and listened intently.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, when he had described the incredible conversation for the second time. “I take it you won’t be going.”

William shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, I am going.”

Marcia stared at him incredulously. “But this is a lot of nonsense, William. You can’t get involved in these ridiculous schoolboy games. Get a grip, for heaven’s sake!’

William looked away. He did not like Marcia telling him what to do, and he felt that this really was none of her business. But she was a difficult person to argue with and he had to admit that it was a rather absurd situation.

“But I told them I’d come,” he said. “They’re expecting me.”

“Then stand them up,” she retorted.

He looked at her reproachfully. Marcia might have been a friend but there were times when he realised that there lay between them a gulf of difference in attitudes to things both large and small. One of these was their attitude to obligation: if William said that he was going to do something, he did it. Marcia, although not unreliable, was more flexible. That was the difference between them.

Marcia stared back at William. She knew what he was thinking, which would be something to do with doing what one said one was going to do; she could read him so very easily.

“Don’t go, William,” she said quietly. “You’re going to regret it if you do.”