‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’ll go barmy for sure,’ she said, ‘like the rest of us.’
She was eating an orange at the time and I noticed suddenly that she was not eating it in the normal way. In the first place she had speared it from the fruit bowl with her fork instead of taking it in her fingers. And now, with knife and fork, she was making a series of neat incisions in the skin all around the orange. Then, very delicately, using the points of her knife and fork, she peeled the skin away in eight separate pieces, leaving the bare fruit beautifully exposed. Still using knife and fork, she separated the juicy segments and began to eat them slowly, one by one, with her fork.
‘Do you always eat an orange like that?’ I said.
‘Of course.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘I never touch anything I eat with my fingers,’ she said.
‘Good Lord, don’t you really?’
‘Never. I haven’t since I was twenty-two.’
‘Is there a reason for that?’ I asked her.
‘Of course there’s a reason. Fingers are filthy.’
‘But you wash your hands.’
‘I don’t sterilize them,’ Miss Trefusis said. ‘Nor do you. They’re full of bugs. Disgusting dirty things, fingers. Just think what you do with them!’
I sat there going through the things I did with my fingers.
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’ Miss Trefusis said. ‘Fingers are just implements. They are the gardening implements of the body, the shovels and the forks. You push them into everything.’
‘We seem to survive,’ I said.
‘Not for long you won’t,’ she said darkly.
I watched her eating her orange, spear
ing the little boats one after the other with her fork. I could have told her that the fork wasn’t sterilized either, but I kept quiet.
‘Toes are even worse,’ she said suddenly.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘They’re the worst of all,’ she said.
‘What’s wrong with toes?’
‘They are the nastiest part of the human body!’ she announced vehemently.
‘Worse than fingers?’
‘There’s no comparison,’ she snapped. ‘Fingers are foul and filthy, but toes! Toes are reptilian and viperish! I don’t wish to talk about them!’
I was getting a bit confused. ‘But one doesn’t eat with one’s toes,’ I said.
‘I never said you did,’ Miss Trefusis snapped.
‘Then what’s so awful about them?’ I persisted.
‘Uck!’ she said. ‘They are like little worms sticking out of your feet. I hate them, I hate them! I can’t bear to look at them!’