A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘You’ve got a cold,’ she said critically.

  ‘Hay fever,’ he said nonchalantly.

  ‘Rubbish, you’re not a hay-fever type. It’s not something you just get, you know.’

  ‘You’ll have to look after me,’ he said, little foreseeing how much she would have to do so.

  ‘I brought some pills, of various sorts. I’ll cure you.’

  ‘I spoke to your sister last night,’ he said, now that conversation had been initiated, willing, even eager, to discuss the outside world and its difficult components.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just wanted to make sure that everything was all right. What a strange woman she is.’

  ‘How do you mean, strange?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She takes it so calmly. My going off with you.’

  ‘Well, it’s nothing to her, is it?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said, and returned to his driving: remembering as he did so her sister’s voice, so uncannily similar, so apparently unmoved by the unfamiliarity of a telephone call from him, so unimpressed by her own sister’s joys and sorrows, so unexceptional even in her willingness to conspire with them. He had expected – he did not know what – an air of alarm, of participatory guilt, perhaps even a moment of shared affection for this woman who sat by his side. But he hadn’t had it: all he’d had was a distracted, preoccupied, off-hand reassurance that she would do what was expected of her, keep their whereabouts quiet, look after the child and the nurse for the child, and not let that dreadful mother know where they had gone. She hadn’t even sounded interested: looking back, he was offended that she hadn’t sounded interested. Surely he and his affairs were obsessively interesting? He at least found them so.

  On the boat, they did all right. He had by then a sore throat, but she gave him some aspirin and some seasickness pills and they even managed to get some sleep. When they woke up, they had breakfast, as the car had not yet been unloaded, and they looked at the map.

  ‘We must be mad to go so far,’ she said, looking at the distances they idly proposed to cross. ‘It’s quite nice here,’ she said, looking out at Le Havre and the blue morning sea.

  ‘We can’t stay here, we’ve got to get off,’ he said, for this too he had planned, knowing that any kind of inactivity would breed regrets.

  ‘It might make you ill,’ she said, though without conviction: she liked the idea of moving as much as he did. Such static lives they led, at their separate homes.

  ‘I won’t be ill,’ he said.

  But by the evening he was feeling, he had to admit it, like death. They had driven all day, it was true, not allowing themselves much time to rest, and the large car was tiring to drive: it felt heavier as the day wore on, and after nightfall it seemed to require a physical effort to propel it. He went on as long as he could, and she assured him that they had gone far enough to reach Yugoslavia the next day, as they had planned: so they stopped at the next town (always so much farther, the next town, than one thinks it will be) in a country he took to be Switzerland. The hotel that she selected (he had given up enough, by then, to leave it to her) was large and German, and he revived slightly at the sight of the vast double bed and the thought of a meal: revived further after a couple of glasses of the duty-free whisky they had bought on the boat, and which he had until that point been too nervous to drink. They sat together on the bed, having kicked off their shoes, touching slightly at the shoulder, thinking of the night ahead, which was what they had come for: but when she spoke, smiling softly to soften the blow, encompassing with her infinite knowingness his slight surprise, what she said was, ‘You know, darling, I think I ought to ring my sister.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he said, in his obliging and all-tolerant role. ‘Of course, should I go or stay?’

  ‘Stay, stay, of course,’ she said, restraining him, and he sat there while she rang England to beg for reassurance. She tried to conceal from him the extent of her suppliance, having been unable to allow him to leave the room in case he suspected worse, and when he heard her speak, he knew (she was right in this) that at least worse was not happening, there were no tears, no moans, no evident regrets. He heard it all, he heard her out, so close that he could touch her – which, when she put down the receiver, he did. She turned to his touch, and her face seemed to respond to his enquiry with the full measure of its possible, indestructible appeal. ‘Oh, they’re all right,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Of course they’re all right. God knows, a week of it won’t kill them, will it?’ She looked at him, and her eyes narrowed and fixed on him. ‘And if it did,’ she added, ‘I wouldn’t much care. Come on, let’s go and eat before everything shuts up.’

  So they went down to the restaurant, and sat and stared at the menu: he had always believed himself the equal of any language, at least on the menu level, but German, amazingly, defeated them both. They thought they recognized the word for eggs, and the word for meat, but as she said, lowering her typed list, raising her eyebrows at him: ‘What meat?’ Dangerous stuff, meat, she said: not in any way a safe bet. Eggs were better, she advised him: she chose eggs, but he, always rather ashamed of his interest in food (particularly when accompanying her Spartan tastes, for his wife at least in this, if not in other things, was more indulgent), rashly ordered a steak tartare. Neither meal, one would have thought, could have required much preparation, and they had expected to be able to eat it quickly and get to bed; but, alas, it did not arrive for three-quarters of an hour, allowing him time to reflect that he had, quite certainly, a temperature, that his throat was getting worse and worse, and that she, for all her apparent fidelity, must, after so long an affair, be sick of the sight of him, and was not waiting, as he fondly imagined, with an anxiety equal to his own, to feel his arms around her yet again. Characteristically, the last of these fears, being the only one from which any amusement could be extracted, was the only one that he voiced, and they filled the time quite agreeably by discussing whether or not she still loved him, whether he even admitted that she had ever loved him, what she had loved him for, and when she had started (supposing that she had) to do so; they embarked upon the theme of how kind they would have been to each other if circumstances had given them half a chance (a safe topic, for the alignment of circumstances against them was so formidable that they would never be expected to take on commitments more serious than those of the heart), and as they were explaining to one another their infinite resources the food, at last, arrived. The highly artistic arrangement of the steak tartare explained in part, he said, the delay: a good five minutes at least it would have taken, she replied, to lay out those enticing little piles of pepper and salt and onion, but what of the remaining forty? She winced at the sight of his raw egg.

  When they finally got to bed, he was tired and aching in every bone. He collapsed and lay flat. She got in after him, having spent more time than usual (she was the least vain of women, punitively careless of her appearance) in combing her hair, and washing her face: and he knew what she was going to say.

  ‘You’re too tired,’ she said, getting in beside him, sitting high up on the round scroll of pillow, looking down at his limp form. ‘You’re too tired, my darling, go to sleep, shall I read to you? I bought a good book for my holiday, look, I’ll read you a bit of it, shall I?’ And she produced her book: it was about old people and kinship patterns in a perishing London working-class community. ‘It’s very interesting,’ she said, smiling at him, mocking him slightly, ‘really very interesting. I’ll read you a page or two and you’ll be asleep in no time, even in this ridiculous bed.’

  She gestured, with one bare foot, at the eiderdown arrangement under which they were expected to sleep. ‘Poor darling,’ she said, with sudden conviction: and he knew as suddenly (such frail knowledge and how dare one ever presume or act upon it?) that it was herself she was pitying, that she was missing him there, cold and away from him, high and perched up, not daring to flatten herself to hi
s level, fearing to expose and make party to the situation both himself and herself. The certainty that she was missing him made him feel so much better that he grabbed at her gesturing ankle, and she let it rest upon his chest, then gradually pulled herself towards him, and then it was all right: though afterwards, as she lay there breathless, soaked in his quite unnaturally cold sweat, she did murmur, ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have let you do it, I meant not to let you, it’s probably killed you and then I’ll be so sorry, but don’t you see, I couldn’t help it? I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help it, you see.’

  ‘Why should you try to help it, when I want you so badly?’ he said, trying to wipe his face on the eiderdown, wishing there were some more conventional sheet available: but his heart was pounding, his chest creaking, his throat ravaged, and he recognized that, of course, though one would still do it if one had to die instantly afterwards, one would nevertheless, instantly afterwards, much prefer not to die.

  ‘Regretting it?’ she asked him, as he arranged her for sleep: but even as he protested, he knew that in another year he would have admitted it, he would have merely answered, ‘Yes.’ And who knows, she then might merely have held on to him a little tighter, or possibly, not impossibly, laughed. He had faith in such developments. One had to have faith; without it, what should one do? They, those two, he and she, they had nothing else.

  When he woke in the morning, he could hardly open his eyes, and he could not speak. She was awake first: she always was, the rigorous routine of home never allowed her to sleep late. For too many years now she had risen early to get the child off to the Centre, the beds made and herself off to work. He lay there with his eyes shut, listening to her brush her teeth. He felt so dreadful that he half wished they were back in London, back in the comfortable, boring, frustrating grind of the average week, smiling at one another in the canteen, sharing a cigarette at the end of a corridor when they met by chance, parting at the doorway as they returned to their respective obligations. At least they had known where they were, and a certain melancholy gaiety had become so natural to them that he knew they had both enjoyed it: they had enjoyed their meetings and their partings, their resentments, their odd outcries of despair. He felt too ill to deal with the notion of a holiday. He groaned and turned restlessly, and she said to him, ‘How are you, darling? Wishing us safe back at home?’ He moaned again. ‘If we weren’t here,’ she said, approaching him – as he was dimly aware through the shut hot red lids of his eyes – ‘if we were back there, you’d just be looking in at the office to make sure I was there. And I would be. I always am.’

  ‘I feel ill,’ he said, ‘and it can’t be after ten, can it?’

  ‘I’ve been up for hours,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  Then she brought him a glass of water and he drank it, but still felt no better: she suggested, feebly and unpersuasively, that he stay in bed for the day, but fully acknowledged his horror when he looked frantically round the hotel room and said, ‘What, here?’ She even smiled.

  So he pulled himself together and they got up and paid their bill and left. Salzburg for lunch, they had idly arranged, two weeks ago, sitting over their conspiratorial lunch, looking at an infinitesimal map of Europe that he had on the back of one of his Common Market notebooks: and they got there for lunch, but it wasn’t an early one. They had eggs, again, again defeated by the menu, and wondered what to do with him. He felt in a way better, but rather ominously better: he felt lightheaded and slightly unreal, and his limbs felt vague and weightless. He poured beer over his throat as a kind of penance, and she suddenly said, very clearly and distinctly, as though speaking to him from a great distance, through thin mountain air (which it was, perhaps), ‘I know what you need, you need some strong drink.’

  ‘What about the driving?’ he said, shrinking from the thought of all the as-yet-uncovered miles.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ she said.

  ‘But you don’t drive,’ he protested, hoarsely.

  ‘Oh, yes I do,’ she said, and when he looked at her (what a waste of looking this illness was, he seemed to have been contemplating nothing but the inside of his own head for the last day and night), he saw that she was positively gay, with a kind of defiant satisfaction, as though, despite her undoubted solicitude, she were enjoying this disaster.

  ‘I used to drive quite well,’ she said. ‘I like it. I’ll drive, and we’ll buy you some codeine and you’ll feel better in no time.’

  ‘The car’s too heavy for you,’ he said.

  ‘I could drive for a while anyway, but first of all, we’ll buy some things to make you better. You stay here, and wait till I come back.’

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  So they went together, through the sunny streets of that famous place, looking for whatever the Austrians used as chemists; the chemist would not sell them codeine without a prescription, so they had to make do with some throat mixture and some more aspirins. She led him back to the car, and with a sense of hopeless submission and abandon he allowed himself, for the first time ever, to be put in the passenger’s seat. She didn’t start too well: she reversed smartly into a yellow stone wall, swore, pulled away, set off on the left-hand side of the road, couldn’t find the indicator, and then was away. He opened his bottle of whisky, sat back and gave up. He shut his eyes, and must have fallen asleep, because when he opened them they were driving through acres of flowers and dark-green trees, and there were Alps rising again on the horizon. She was singing to herself: Mozart, inevitably. A passing tribute.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ he said, and she stopped singing to pay him attention.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Lovely. But I don’t like the look of those mountains. Are you going to enjoy being driven through those mountains?’

  ‘I’ve given up,’ he said. ‘I might as well die here as anywhere, don’t you think?’

  ‘Have another drink,’ she said, and accelerated towards the snowy backdrop.

  ‘I’m having such a lovely time,’ she said to him, after a while, as the road began to ascend, sharply and dangerously. ‘What about you?’

  He held tight to the whisky, knowing he could not refuse her a drink if she asked for one: and after a little while she did.

  ‘What I need is a little drink,’ she said, as pine trees and icy torrents fell away from the edge of the car into nothingness.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and handed it over. Trust, that was what it was called: mutual trust. He shrank down into his seat until she seemed larger than he was: she seemed to have taken on some extra quality that he could not quite name, and he conceded it to her entirely, slumped as he was, and feverish. He knew that he had a temperature: perhaps he would soon start to have hallucinations. Dusk was falling, and he was also hungry: but how could he, who was supposed to be ill, suggest that they might have something to eat? And even if they stopped, she would only allow him something horrible, like another egg, or a sandwich. He was in her hands.

  It was so strange a sensation, after all these many months – years almost – when he had told himself that he had been looking after her, that as he lay back there in his unnatural condition he began to look back over the time they had known each other, and wonder whether it had been as he supposed, or whether it had been, as it now was, quite otherwise. She had seemed so desperate in that first real conversation they had ever had, initiated in a Ministry lift when she had been, in fact, crying: he, who had covertly desired her for months without realizing it, suddenly knew what he was after in his abrupt delight at the sight of this God-sent weakness. Later, when she told him the reason for her tears, he had flinched a little, not having expected quite such flights of tragedy, despite the brief rumours that, through mutual friends, had already reached him: the dotty mother, the cruelly defective child, the cruelly defected husband. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she had said of this last character, blinking and indeed laughing as she drank up her gin, ‘I mean r
eally, who could have stuck it? And it was so clear that I preferred the child to him, and what man could ever have taken his wife preferring a child like that? A nice child maybe, that would be natural, but God, you should see mine …’ And later, he had seen it: and so much of his love for her had overflowed and surrounded her by this time that he too had regarded it with a kind of love. He had taken the part of reason, from time to time, suggesting clinics and suitable schools, advising indulgence, but he so admired her obstinacy and knew she recognized his attempts as merely verbal, noises of encouragement intended to magnify and support her right decisions. Heroic, he thought her: and he could not deny that his entry into her life had been of the utmost simplicity, so avid had she been for company and human touching. The rewards of the touching he had foreseen, and he was not disappointed.

  He had met the husband too, and discovered that, as he had suspected, they had been at school together. He had thought the name familiar. And looking back on him now, as they moved through the baffling darkness, he recalled him with an uneasy clarity: a horribly cheerful man, Derek, extroverted and yet by no means stupid, easy to get on with, in fact almost irresistibly good company, and not at all the kind of person to contemplate a lifetime of clouds and sorrows. He had walked out of it almost immediately, and in that pub where they met he had said gaily, speaking of his own wife, ‘Oh, Christ, Daniel, she doesn’t mind, she likes it, what she couldn’t stand was my not liking it. I wish you all the best with her,’ he said, ‘she’ll get on well with you, you’ve both got a taste for gloom. Look at that woman you married.’ And how could Daniel reply that he did not find Derek’s wife gloomy, that, on the contrary, she seemed to him of a remarkable resilience? But perhaps it was true that she liked a situation of sorrow. Perhaps she was so happy now, driving along really quite competently, because she was able to prove herself against the odds? And himself there, incapable and suffering, like a sick child. Perhaps she felt at home. It was not at all what he had intended. He had intended a holiday.