CHAPTER 8
Five minutes later Mark Dobson turned the car around and headed back to Oxford. Meanwhile:
“So, what are you going to do, Baroness?” Eddie said stuffing the phone back once more. In the past few minutes, it had been used more times than in the past month.
“Are other cosmetics companies affected by these – what shall we call them? – practices?” Isobel asked after a short pause.
“Very likely,” Eddie replied. Too many industries exploit vanity and the human obsession with physical appearance with blatantly untrue claims. In my opinion it’s criminal. But, of course, nothing will ever happen to curb the practice. For one thing the political will to do something is not there. To ban things could cost jobs and people have so much money they spend it on utterly useless and non-essential consumer goods that claim to improve their outward appearance and health. To hell with the effects on the environment. On the other hand, the growth in population is destroying the planet anyway. We’re probably amongst the last of the living before mass extinction, but they are very interesting times. It’s such a pity that there will be no-one left to learn from our mistakes.”
Isobel frowned, trying to keep pace with Eddie’s rapid and ever-changing thought process.
“Nothing that is produced to satisfy the mostly female desire to stop the ageing process in its tracks actually works,” he said. “Indeed, some products may well be the cause of obesity, infertility and depression, not to mention the effect on the environment. Modern medical technology then keeps these sick and unhealthy beings alive until they are buried or cremated with their lipstick and nail varnish on in order to preserve their post mortem dignity. Human vanity and greed are destroying our understanding of life as well as destroying the planet, Baroness.”
“Yes,” Isobel replied and Eddie, thinking he may have touched a nerve, went in for the kill.
“Your company exploits human weakness for achieving body perfection whilst ignoring the fact that there is no such thing,” he said while taking such a huge bite of his baguette that his cheeks extended like a hamster. Then he tried the nigh impossible: to chew it. “Do you hear me?” he asked above the crunching sound inside his own head.
Then, having forgotten the role of the tissue, he wiped away the bread crumbs and yellow curry that had failed to go in with his hand as Isobel watched. and then saw him close his eyes as if remembering something else. He swallowed first and then said: “Slim-line models, white teeth, red lips, bottle-browned bodies with slender hips. Fleeting smiles as cameras click. Strong on fashion, cool and hip. Weak on thoughtful contribution but strong on visual stimulation.”
It was not spoken too clearly but when he’d finished his eyes opened and he swallowed another mouthful.
“Very poetic, Professor.”
“It goes on much longer than that.” he said before pointing a finger at her discarded lunch. “Have you finished?”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like one of those sticky donut things like the two ladies are eating?”
“A lemon yum yum?”
“Is that what they’re called? Or are you saying you’d like one?”.
“I need to watch my weight, Professor.”
“Ah yes. Quite right. You must have regard for your outward appearance, Baroness.”
“Perhaps,” she smiled. “It has become a modern necessity. I can see it doesn’t bother you, though.”
She was quite correct with that observation but Eddie didn’t care. He felt comfortable in his old tweed jacket with the elbow patches and the ancient Bristol City football club jumper underneath. The jacket was still damp and he knew she’d watched him pushing his feet into wet sandals before they’d begun their walk.
“Outward appearances will never match the far greater inner beauty,” he said.
“That sounds like a quotation, Professor. Is it?”
“It’s another of mine,” Eddie said stuffing his unused paper napkin into his jacket pocket alongside the Nokia. “I write poetry in my spare time. It’s part of a poem describing a tragic society where dutifulness is replaced by beautifulness. It took me a week to then find a suitable word that rhymed with disaster.
“How interesting. Did you find one?”
“Yes. Society collapses faster. A perfectly avoidable disaster. No-one cares about each other enough.”
Isobel paused, thinking. “Are you married, Professor?”
Eddie had returned to wondering whether beautifulness had been a good enough word to match with dutifulness. It had bothered him the night he’d first recited the full poem in public but he quickly caught up with Isobel’s question about marriage. Then, of course, he needed to ponder on why the conversation had suddenly become so personal and what on earth marriage had to do with outward appearances. “No,” he said, eventually.
“Do you never look at a beautiful woman?”
Eddie retrieved the tissue and wiped his nose, realising he’d found a secondary use for it sooner than expected. He didn’t want this discussion to get too private, but provocative questions demanded provocative answers. Once primed he couldn’t resist the temptation to fire back.
“What does beautiful mean?” he asked. “One person’s opinion of what constitutes beauty is not necessarily shared by another. In which case beauty is a word that is in need of either redefining or removing from the vocabulary altogether. If I see a woman mincing towards me in high heels, breasts to the forefront, pouting painted lips and flashing long eye lashes at everyone she passes, I usually just let her go by because for some the sight may not be beautiful but downright ugly. Beauty is part of aesthetics, of culture, of philosophy and sociology.”
Isobel raised her black eyebrows as if outraged which meant Eddie was encouraged to expound.
“I would not mentally undress her in a way she probably wants, Baroness. Instead, I would mentally dissect her, anatomically, layer by layer, organ by organ until all that remained was the framework – the bones, the skeleton. I see it walking past, clattering audibly like a specimen from the anatomy department at the university. And what impression are we then left with? Nothing that makes her any different to anyone else. I, no doubt, would look identical apart from my narrower male hip bones.”
“How terribly depressing, Professor.”
“Not at all. It’s enlightening and it proves my point.”
“Which is?”
“That for all the facial make-up, the powders and the creams, the hair styling, the shiny white teeth, the bright red finger nails and the synthetic fabrics that cover the torso, we are all the same. We are flesh and blood and bones. We may have reached a pinnacle of evolution but, for all that, we get sick, we get old and we die. If beauty means anything at all then it should not be the beauty of the body’s exterior but the beauty of the human mind as it strives to make sense of life itself.”
“So speaks a biologist, I suppose,” she replied rather sadly.
“Cosmetics are like wallpaper, Baroness. It covers the cracks and conceals the truth. Just like members of your management team.”