Under My Skin Read Online Free PDF

still as yet no sign of my mermaid, Patricia. I had to admit to a certain disappointment.
    The atmosphere in the atrium was relaxed and sleepy. I watched a group of middle-aged women enjoying the Jacuzzi, chattering away to each other like young girls. After a while one of them got out and made her way to the pool. I recognized her from lunch. She smiled and nodded at me. She was a museum administrator from Oxford, due to retire in a few years’ time. Over the fruit course she had been great company—funny, intelligent, with a quiet confidence about who she was and what life had meant to her. But some of that confidence seemed to have come off with the clothes. She hurried across the tiles, aware of my gaze, a little less graceful in the way she carried herself. Of course a health farm isn’t the world’s most compassionate place to show off one’s body, but even so … I thought of my nightswimmer with her perfect body silhouetted in the moonlight and found myself guiltily fascinated by the contrast: the older woman’s arms, the way the loose flesh underneath wrinkled and sagged into her armpits, the lumpy body and the weight of her thighs pitted by mini moon craters with purple veins running like mineral deposits under the surface. I tried to see it all as a testament to a life well lived: to children, husband, job, all those years when she had just been too busy to care for herself. That and the inexorable pull of gravity on older flesh. I understood the process, but the deterioration still made me a little sad, like visiting a handsome old house where the effects of age and neglect have combined.
    I tried to imagine myself at her age. Would I mind? Or would I just accept it? Maybe age would bring its own surrender from the burdens of image and sexual attraction. Or maybe it just altered the threshold. Just as I no longer fancied twenty-two-year-olds, finding them too baby-smooth and unlived, maybe she only got the hots for men with double chins and crepe paper round the eyes. Could be I was mourning my own loss of youth. I tried to see it all as sexual politics, the tyranny of an aesthetic based on young flesh and beauty, but underneath there was a harsher, more democratic truth. Everybody sags, everybody wrinkles. Everybody dies. Of course, nobody ever said nature was kind, or even fair. But given the havoc it wreaks, no wonder we’re so scared of it.
    Across the atrium, Katherine, last night’s city broker, was flicking through a copy of the
Financial Times
. From the treatment area Martha came out and called her name. “Miss Cadwell, G five.” I looked at my watch. It was 2:25. Lucky Katherine. She would get an extra five minutes under the sponge. I felt almost jealous.
    She folded up her newspaper and walked to where Martha was waiting. And as they entered the corridor, I sawthe beautician put her hand lightly on the woman’s sleeve and say something. Katherine laughed and then they were gone. I could just picture another thank-you card on the wall. Did they say it with flowers? In the pool, my museum director was half-submerged, playing with the pleasures of reduced gravity, while the Jacuzzi was filling up with other bodies. Outside, real life was no doubt still in progress. But stay here long enough and you could be forgiven for forgetting it.
    The wax strips brought it all back to me. Poor legs. They’d never had so much attention in one day. First the pleasure, then the pain. On the other hand, I would have been hard-pressed to say which was more excruciating—the waxing or the conversation.
    Julie was nineteen, newly plucked from the suburbs of Southampton and a born-again beautician. She had nothing but praise for Castle Dean, which she saw as some kind of high temple to beauty and self-improvement, with herself presumably as vestal virgin. And marketing manager. By the time the first leg was finished she’d told me of three separate beauty products to prevent new hair growth and recommended a