A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

by Margaret Drabble

  Once she talked of this preoccupation of hers to a much-travelled old man, and he said that she felt this way because whenever she went to a new place she hoped to fall in love. He had been the same, he said; restless, expectant; and she knew that he was telling the truth, for his life illustrated his explanation. ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘I thought there was a woman waiting for me in every railway compartment, on every airplane, in every hotel. How can one not think this? One thinks the plane will crash, and that one will die, and that one must die in the arms of the woman in the next seat. Isn’t that so?’

  And she had, in a way, thought that it was so, though the truth was that she herself would never fall in love in any of these temporary places, for she could not speak to strangers. Though that in itself proved nothing, for she supposed that nevertheless she might one day do so, and that it might be for this one moment of sudden communication that she so persistently sought. People spoke to her, from time to time, but always the wrong people, always the motherly women and the fatherly men and the dull irrepressible youths. Her own kind did not speak to her, nor she to them. She travelled once overnight from Milan, alone in a compartment with a girl who was reading the same book she herself was reading; a book both of them might have been proud to acknowledge and not a word did they exchange. Another time, in a crowded train from Edinburgh, she sat opposite a woman who started to weep as the train left the station; she wept silently and effortlessly for hours, great tears rolling down her white cheeks into the neck of her emerald-green sweater, and at York Helen offered her a cigarette, and she declined it, and ceased weeping. On another occasion a man kissed her in a corridor as they drew into Oxford; she liked him, he was a lovely man, but he was drunk and she turned away her face and turned up the collar of her coat.

  And yet despite these wasted opportunities she continued to expect. Truly, she thought to herself, as she got onto the London train at Reading Station late one cold night, truly, it is a proof of madness that the prospect of this journey should not appal. It is cold, the train is half an hour late, I am hungry; this is the kind of situation about which I hear my friends most tirelessly and tiresomely complain. And yet I am looking forward to it. I shall sit here in the dark and the cold, with nothing to watch but the reflection of my own face in the cold pane, and I shall not care. As soon as the train moves, I shall sit back, and feel it move with me, and feel that I am moving, although I know quite well that all I am doing is going back home again to an empty flat. There will be rain and steam on the glass of this window by my face, and I shall look at it, and that will be all. What a hardened case I am, that such dull mileage should recall those other landscapes, those snowy precipices, those sunny plains, those fields of corn, those gritty swaying breakfasts in the pale light of transient Switzerland or angel-watched Marseilles. I am a child, I like to rock and dream, I dream as if I were in a cradle.

  And she shut her eyes, waiting for the whistle and the metallic connections of machinery; so with her eyes shut she did not see the man come into the compartment, and could never know for certain whether he had seen her, whether he had joined her because he had wanted to join her. All she knew was that when she opened her eyes, aware of the intrusion, aware of the draught from the opened door, he was already there, putting his overcoat up on the rack, arranging his books and papers on the seat next to him, settling himself in the empty compartment as far away from her as he could, on the corridor side, diagonally opposite, where she could not fail to watch him. She turned her fur collar up defensively against her face, and arranged her legs more tidily together, and opened her book upon her knee, disclaiming all threat of human contact, coldly repelling any acknowledgement of her presence, and all the time she watched him discreetly through her half-shut eyes. Because the truth was that not since she was seventeen, more years ago than she cared to think, had she sat on a train so near to such a man. When she was seventeen she had sat in a compartment with an actor, on the late-night train to Brighton, and he had talked to her all the way, and amused her by imitating Laurence Olivier for her and other famous men whom she did not recognize, and when they had parted on the station he had kissed her soft and girlish and impressionable cheek, and murmured, ‘Bless you, bless you,’ as though he had a right to bless. She had subsequently followed his unremarkable career, catching sight of his name in the Radio Times, admiring him once on the television, glimpsing him as he passed on the cinema screen; she felt quietly possessive about him, quietly amused by her sense of intimacy with one who must so long ago have forgotten her, and who would hardly now recognize her from what she then had been. Sometimes she wondered idly whether her preoccupation with journeys might not date from this experi-ence; but chronologically this was not so, for her preoccupation had long preceded it. She had been this way since childhood, when she had shrunk and trembled at the sight of the huge pistons, when she had stopped her ears in delighted terror as she heard the roar of the approaching seaside train.

  This man, this night, did not look as though he wished to amuse her with imitations of Laurence Olivier. He looked preoccupied. In fact, the more she watched him, the more she realized that he was almost grotesquely preoccupied. He was restless; he could not sit still: he kept picking up one book from this pile, then another, then turning over the pages of his New Statesman, then staring out into the corridor and onto the dark platform. At first she thought that he might be waiting for someone to come, half expecting somebody to join him, but she decided that this was not so, for she could perceive no augmenting of his anxiety as the time drew on, no sudden start when the loudspeaker apologized for the delay and said that the train would leave in two minutes; nor did his nervousness seem to be directed towards the door and the platform, as it would have been had he been waiting. She recalled that she herself had once developed a dreadful pain in the neck from sitting with her neck to the window through which she knew that she might glimpse the first sign of a long-awaited arrival. But this man’s nervousness was as it were diffused, rather than directed; it attached itself to nothing and to everything. She could not take her eyes off him, and not only because of the nakedness of his condition, which in another might have appeared merely ludicrous; indeed, embarrassment would have turned away her eyes, had it not been for the extreme elegance of his gestures, and the lovely angles into which each struggle against immobility brought him. There was the way he had of clutching his eyebrows with one wide-spanned long nicotine-fingered hand that filled her with an intense delight; the hand covered the eyes, bringing to him no doubt an illusion of concealment, but she could see beneath it the anxious movement of the lips, trembling with some expression that she could not catch, with speech or smiling or perhaps with a sigh. And as he made this gesture, each time, he tossed his head slightly backward, and then again forward, so that his long hair fell tenderly over his fingers. It was the colour of his hair that moved her most. It was a colour that she had always liked, but she had never before seen it adorning such vexed, haggard and experienced features: for it was a dark gold, the colour of health and innocence. It was a dark golden yellow, and it was streaked with grey. It was soft hair, and it fell gently.

  When the train moved off, he flung himself back into his corner, and shut his eyes, with an appearance of resolution, as though his own restlessness had finally begun to irritate him: as though he had decided to sit still. Helen looked out of the window by her face, into the lights and darkness of the disappearing town. In one piece of glass she could see the reflection of his face, and she watched it, quite confidently aware that he would not be able to keep his eyes shut, and after a few minutes he was leaning forward in his seat once more, his elbows on his knees, staring at the ground. Then, even as she watched, she saw a thought strike him: she saw the conception of the idea, she saw him reach into his pocket and take out a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, and abstract a cigarette, and light it, all with the dreamy movements of a habitual smoker, and yet with a kind of surprise, for the truth
was, as she could so clearly see, that he had even in his abstraction forgotten the possibility of such a trivial solace. As he drew on the cigarette she could see his relief, his gratitude towards his own recollection. The smoke consoled him, and she who had rarely in her life smoked a cigarette could feel in her the nature of the consolation: for she herself, when tormented by love, had found comfort in the repetition of small and necessary acts, in washing cups and emptying bins and fastening her stockings and remembering that it was time to have a meal. It seemed clear to her that it was love that was tormenting him: she knew those painful symptoms of disease.

  And indeed, ten minutes later, when the ash of his last activity lay scattered all over the floor and all over his trousers, he stood up and got a packet of letters out of his overcoat pocket, and began to read them. He could not more clearly have indicated his malady if he had turned to her and told her what was in his mind. She watched the reflection of his face as he read, ashamed now to watch him directly, though she knew that he could not know that she so keenly watched him, that she was so expert in the intimate language of his state. She felt that she could tell everything from the way he handled those letters: he was still rapt in the first five minutes of love, that brief and indefinite breathless pause before familiarity, affection, disillusion, rot, decay. The number of letters in his hands supported her divination, as well as the quality of his attention; there were five of them, only five, and the paper of them was new, although they were crumbling wearily at the folds from overuse. She felt such pangs, in his presence, of she knew not what: of envy, of regret, of desire. At his age, with those greying strands and those profound wrinkles, he must surely know the folly of his obsession, and the inevitable tragic close before him; and she found such a wilful confrontation of pain almost unbearably moving. She herself, enduring daily the painful death of such an attitude, the chilly destination of such deliberately romantic embarkations, could hardly prevent the tears from rising to her eyes; and in fact, they rose, warm in the cold skin of her lids, making her nose prick and her eyes ache, yet warm, coming from within her, and chilling only at the touch of the outside air. Absurd, she said to herself, absurd: absurd to weep. His image turned into a blur, and it was like the image of time itself, human, lovely, perishing, intent.

  When he had read and reread his letters, he stood up again, and got a pen out of his coat pocket, and tore a piece of paper off a block of typing paper, and started to write. He wrote slowly, after the first three words, hesitantly, as though what he was saying was of no interest, as though all the interest lay in the way of saying it. She wondered what he was, who he was, what his woman was, and jealously whether she were worth such care. He took a quarter of an hour to write his letter, and when he had finished it he had covered only half a page. She wondered whether he would have an envelope, and saw that he had; it was a brown business envelope. He folded his letter up and put it in the envelope, and then sealed it up. She waited for him to write the address, but he did not write the address: he sat there looking down at the small brown oblong, and as he looked at it she became in some indefinable way aware that he had become aware of her own presence, that he was at last considering her, in some significant way. Later, she wondered how this shadowy and delicate intimation could ever have reached her – for reach her it did, and she was one of those who believe that no intimations are too delicate to exist – and she concluded that it could only have been a sudden stillness on his part, a sudden fading of restlessness, as he returned from whatever other place he had been in to contemplate her in her proximity. She felt his attention: she endured it, for five minutes at least, before he spoke.

  She was pretending to read when he spoke to her. He said to her, ‘I wonder, I wonder if you would do something for me?’ and she looked up and met his eyes, and found that he was smiling at her with a most peculiar mixture of diffidence and vanity: he was truly nervous at the prospect of speaking to her, and those five silent minutes were a measure of his nervousness, and yet at the same time he had taken the measure of her curiosity and helpless attraction: she knew that he knew that she would like to be addressed. And his tone enchanted her, for it was her own tone: a tone of cool, anxious, irresistible appeal. She knew that he too did not speak often to strangers.

  ‘It depends what it is,’ she said, smiling back at him with his own smile.

  ‘It’s a very simple thing,’ he said, ‘not at all incriminating. Or at least, not for you.’

  ‘It would be, then, for you?’ she said.

  ‘Of course it would,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m making the effort of asking you to do it.’

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘I wondered if you would address this envelope for me,’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any harm in that. I’d do that for you.’

  ‘I thought you would do it,’ he said. ‘If I hadn’t thought that you would, I wouldn’t have asked you. I wouldn’t have liked it if you had said no.’

  ‘I might ask you what it was about me that made you think I would say yes,’ she said, ‘but such a question might embarrass you.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘oh, no,’ rising to his feet and crossing to her with the envelope, ‘oh, no, I don’t mind answering, it was because of that book you’re reading, and the kind of shoes you’re wearing, and the way your hair is. I liked that book when I read it.’

  And then he sat down by her, and handed her the envelope, and said, ‘Look, I’ll write it down for you and you can copy it. It’s hard to hear when people dictate things, isn’t it?’

  And he wrote the name and address on another piece of his block of paper. He wrote:

  Mrs H. Smithson,

  24 Victoria Place,

  London NW1

  And Helen dutifully copied it out, on the brown envelope, then handed it back to him.

  ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘that my handwriting is sufficiently unlike yours.’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ he said, ‘that after all it’s rather similar. But dissimilar enough.’

  Then he said no more, but he remained sitting by her. She would in a way have preferred him to move, because where he now was she could not really see him, either overtly or covertly. And she had nothing to say to him: for she could hardly have said, I was right about you, I guessed right. He said nothing to her, for a while: he got a wallet from his pocket, and took out a sheet of fourpenny stamps, and tore one off, licked it, and stuck it on. She liked watching his hands, and the way they moved. Then, still holding the letter, he said to her, ‘Where do you live?’

  She must have recoiled slightly from the question, because immediately he followed it up with, ‘Only, I was meaning, from the point of view of postmarks.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see. Yes. I live in SW7. You want me to post it, do you?’

  ‘Would you mind posting it?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I would post it for you,’ she said.

  ‘You take my point very quickly,’ he said, then, with some difficulty, looking downward and away from her, hardly able to bring himself to thank her more formally.

  ‘I’ve had to make such points before myself,’ she said.

  ‘I thought, somehow, that you would not mind about such things,’ he said.

  ‘You wouldn’t have asked me if you’d thought I minded. Tell me, do you really trust me to remember to post it?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘One wouldn’t not post a stranger’s letter.’

  And this was so exactly the truth that it silenced her, and they said no more to each other until the train drew into Paddington; and as they walked together off the platform, he said, ‘Thank you, and goodbye.’

  And she said, ‘Goodbye,’ and she carried the letter in her hand all the way home, and dropped it into the letterbox on her block. Then she went down the basement steps to her dark flat, and she knew that the name and the address, written there in her own writing, so strangely, were imprinted upon her memory
forever.

  And indeed, over the next month, she sometimes fancied that she thought of little else. She knew that this was not the truth, that it was merely a fancy, because of course she did think of other things: of her job, of her friends, of her mother, of what to buy for supper, of whether she wanted to go to the cinema on Wednesday night. But she did not think of these other things in the mad, romantic, obsessive way that she thought of Mrs H. Smithson, and the nameless man, and the whole curious, affecting incident: in a sense she resented the incident, because it did so much to vindicate her own crazy expectancy, her foolish faith in revelation. She knew, in her better, saner self, that such faith was foolish, and she suspected that such partial hints of its validity were a delusion, a temptation, and that if she heeded them she would be disabled forever, and disqualified from real life, as Odysseus would have been by the Sirens. And yet at the same time she knew, in her other self, that it was that man she was thinking about, however unreasonably. She looked for him as she walked along the streets of London, and she could not convince herself that it was not for him that she was looking. She speculated about the identity and appearance of Mrs Smithson, and supplied her endlessly with Christian names, until she remembered that the H. might well have stood for her husband’s name, not hers. She speculated about the deceived husband. Although most of her own friends were married and had children, she still found it hard to acknowledge that Mrs Smithson might well be a woman of her own generation, for the prefix Mrs invariably supplied her with a maternal image, the image of her own mother: and she would realize from time to time, with a start, that the women that she thought of as mothers were in fact grandmothers, and that the young girls she saw pushing prams on Saturday mornings and quarrelling with vigorous toddlers on buses were not in fact elder sisters but mothers. Mrs Smithson, Mrs Smithson. She could not give form to a Mrs Smithson.