A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘I’m telling you,’ she said, her hand on the door, staring at him sternly, ‘I’m telling you, I’ve not got you anything.’ And then, magically, delightfully, she allowed herself and him that lovely moment of grace: ‘I’ve not got you anything – yet,’ she said: portentous, conspiratorial, yet very very faintly threatening.

  ‘You’re going to get it today,’ he shrieked, unable to restrain himself, unable to keep the rules: and as though annoyed by his exuberance she marched smartly out of the small back room, and down the narrow stairs to the kitchen, shouting at him in an excessive parade of rigour, ‘Come on, get moving, get your things on, you’ll be late for school, you’re always late’: and she stood over him while he ate his flakes, watching each spoonful disappear, heaving a great sigh of resigned fury when he spilled on the oilcloth, catching his guilty glance as he wiped it with his sleeve, not letting him off, unwilling, unable to relax into a suspect tenderness.

  He went out the back way to school: she saw him through the yard and stood in the doorway watching him disappear, as she always watched him, down the narrow alley separating the two rows of back-to-back cottages, along the ancient industrial cobbles, relics of another age: as he reached the Stephensons’ door she called out to him, ‘Eight tomorrow, then,’ and smiled, and waved, and he smiled back, excited, affectionate, over the ten yards’ gap, grinning, his grey knee socks pulled smartly up, his short cropped hair already standing earnestly on end, resisting the violent flattening of the brush with which she thumped him each morning: he reminded her of a bird, she didn’t know why, she couldn’t have said why, a bird, vulnerable, clumsy, tenacious, touching. Then Bill Stephenson emerged from his back door and joined him, and they went down the alley together, excluding her, leaving her behind, kicking at pebbles and fag packets with their scuffed much-polished shoes.

  She went back through the yard and into the house, and made a pot of tea, and took it up to the man in bed. She dumped it down on the corner of the dressing-table beside him, her lips tight, as though she dared not loosen them: her face had only one expression, and she used it to conceal the two major emotions of her life, resentment and love. They were so violently opposed, these passions, that she could not move from one to the other: she lacked flexibility; so she inhabited a grim inexpressive no-man’s-land between them, feeling in some way that she thus achieved a kind of justice.

  ‘I’m going up town today,’ she said, as the man on the bed rolled over and stared at her.

  He wheezed and stared.

  ‘I’m going to get our Kevin his birthday present,’ she said, her voice cold and neutral, offering justice and no more.

  ‘What’ll I do about me dinner?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she said. ‘And if I’m not, you can get your own. It won’t kill you.’

  He mumbled and coughed, and she left the room. When she got downstairs, she began, at last, to enter upon the day’s true enjoyment: slowly she took possession of it, this day that she had waited for, and which could not now be taken from her. She’d left herself a cup of tea on the table, but before she sat down to drink it she got her zip plastic purse from behind the clock on the dresser, and opened it, and got the money out. There it was, all of it: thirty shillings, three ten-bob notes, folded tightly up in a brown envelope: twenty-nine and eleven, she needed, and a penny over. Thirty shillings, saved, unspoken for, to spend. She’d wondered, from time to time, if she ought to use it to buy him something useful, but she knew now that she wasn’t going to: she was going to get him what he wanted – a grotesque, unjustifiable luxury, a pointless gift. It never occurred to her that the pleasure she took in doing things for Kevin was anything other than selfish: she felt vaguely guilty about it, she would have started furtively, like a miser, had anyone knocked on the door and interrupted her contemplation, she would bitterly have denied the intensity of her anticipation.

  And when she put her overcoat on, and tied on her head-square, and set off down the road, she tried to appear to the neighbours as though she wasn’t going anywhere in particular: she nodded calmly, she stopped to gape at Mrs Phillips’ new baby (all frilled up, poor mite, in ribbons and pink crochet, a dreadful sight, poor little innocent, like something off an iced cake, people should know better than to do such things to their own children); she even called in at the shop for a quarter of tea as a cover for her excursion, so reluctant was she to let anyone know that she was going into town, thus unusually, on a Wednesday morning. And as she walked down the steep hillside, where the abandoned tram-lines still ran, to the next fare stage of the bus, she could not have said whether she was making the extra walk to save two pence, or whether she was more deviously concealing her destination until the last moment from both herself and the neighbourhood.

  Because she hardly ever went into town these days. In the old days she had come this way quite often, going down the hill on the tram with her girl friends, with nothing better in mind than a bit of window-shopping and a bit of a laugh and a cup of tea: penniless then as now, but still hopeful, still endowed with the touching faith that if by some miracle she could buy a pair of nylons or a particular blue lace blouse or a new brand of lipstick, then deliverance would be granted to her in the form of money, marriage, romance, the visiting prince who would glimpse her in the crowd, glorified by that seductive blouse, and carry her off to a better world. She could remember so well how hopeful they had been: even Betty Jones, fat, monstrous, ludicrous Betty Jones had cherished such rosy illusions, had gazed with them in longing at garments many sizes too small and far too expensive, somehow convinced that if she could by chance or good fortune acquire one all her flesh would melt away and reveal the lovely girl within. Time had taught Betty Jones: she shuffled now in shoes cracked and splitting beneath her own weight. Time had taught them all. The visiting prince, whom need and desire had once truly transfigured in her eyes, now lay there at home in bed, stubbly, disgusting, ill, malingering, unkind: she remembered the girl who had seen such other things in him with a contemptuous yet pitying wonder. What fools they all had been, to laugh, to giggle and point and whisper, to spend their small wages to deck themselves for such a sacrifice. When she saw the young girls today, of the age that she had been then, still pointing and giggling with the same knowing ignorance, she was filled with a bitterness so acute that her teeth set against it, and the set lines of her face stiffened to resist and endure and conceal it. Sometimes she was possessed by a rash desire to warn them, to lean forward and tap on their shoulders, to see their astonished vacant faces, topped with their mad over-perfumed mounds of sticky hair, turn upon her in alarm and disbelief. What do you think you’re playing at, she would say to them, what do you think you’re at? Where do you think it leads you, what do you think you’re asking for? And they would blink at her, uncomprehending, like condemned cattle, the sacrificial virgins, not yet made restless by the smell of blood. I could tell you a thing or two, she wanted to say, I could tell you enough to wipe those silly grins off your faces: but she said nothing, and she could not have said that it was envy or a true charitable pity that most possessed and disturbed her when she saw such innocents.

  What withheld her most from envy, pure and straight and voracious, was a sense of her own salvation. Because, amazingly, she had been saved, against all probability: her life, which had seemed after that bridal day of white nylon net and roses to sink deeply and almost instantly into a mire of penury and beer and butchery, had been so redeemed for her by her child that she could afford to smile with a kind of superior wisdom, a higher order of knowledge, at those who had not known her trials and her comforts. They would never attain, the silly teenagers, her own level of consolation; they would never know what it was like to find in an object which had at first seemed painful, ugly, bloody and binding, which had at first appeared to her as a yet more lasting sentence, a deathblow to the panic notions of despair and flight – to find in such a thing love, and identity, and human warmth. When she thought of this – whic
h she did, often, though not clearly, having little else to think of – she felt as though she alone, or she one of the elected few, had been permitted to glimpse something of the very nature of the harsh, mysterious processes of human survival; and she could induce in herself a state of recognition that was almost visionary. It was all she had: and being isolated by pride from more neighbourly and everyday and diminishing attempts at commiseration, she knew it. She fed off it: her maternal role, her joy, her sorrow. She gazed out of the bus window now, as the bus approached the town centre and the shops, and as she thought of the gift she was going to buy him, her eyes lit on the bombed sites, and the rubble and decay of decades, and the exposed walls where dirty fading wallpapers had flapped in the wind for years, and she saw where the willowherb grew, green and purple, fields of it amongst the brick, on such thin soil, on the dust of broken bricks and stones, growing so tall in tenacious aspiration out of such shallow infertile ground. It was significant: she knew, as she looked at it, that it was significant. She herself had grown out of this landscape, she had nourished herself and her child upon it. She knew what it meant.

  Frances Janet Ashton Hall also knew what it meant, for she too had been born and bred there; although, being younger, she had not lived there for so long, and, having been born into a different class of society, she knew that she was not sentenced to it for life, and was indeed upon the verge of escape, for the next autumn she was to embark upon a degree in economics at a southern university. Nevertheless, she knew what it meant. She was a post-war child, but it was not for nothing that she had witnessed since infancy the red and smoking skies of the steelworks (making arms for the Arabs, for the South Africans, for all those wicked countries) – it was not for nothing that she had seen the deep scars in the city’s centre, not all disguised quite comfortably as car parks. In fact, she could even claim the distinction of having lost a relative in the air raids: her great-aunt Susan, who had refused to allow herself to be evacuated to the Lake District, had perished from a stray bomb in the midst of a highly residential suburban area. Frances was not yet old enough to speculate upon the effect that this tale, oft-repeated, and with lurid details, had had upon the development of her sensibility; naturally she ascribed her ardent pacifism and her strong political convictions to her own innate radical virtue, and when she did look for ulterior motives for her faith she was far more likely to relate them to her recent passion for a new-found friend, one Michael Swaines, than to any childhood neurosis.

  She admired Michael. She also liked him for reasons that had nothing to do with admiration, and being an intelligent and scrupulous girl she would spend fruitless, anxious and enjoyable hours trying to disentangle and isolate her various emotions, and to assess their respective values. Being very young, she set a high value on disinterest: standing now, for his sake, on a windy street corner in a conspicuous position outside the biggest department store in town, carrying a banner and wearing (no less) a sandwich board, proclaiming the necessity for Peace in Vietnam, and calling for the banning of all armaments, nuclear or otherwise, she was carrying on a highly articulate dialogue with her own conscience, by means of which she was attempting to discover whether she was truly standing there for Michael’s sake alone, or whether she would have stood there anyway, for the sake of the cause itself. What, she asked herself, if she had been solicited to make a fool of herself in this way merely by that disagreeable Nicholas, son of the Head of the Adult Education Centre? Would she have been prepared to oblige? No, she certainly would not, she would have laughed the idea of sandwich-boards to scorn, and would have found all sorts of convincing arguments against the kind of public display that she was now engaged in. But, on the other hand, this did not exactly invalidate her actions, for she did believe, with Michael, that demonstrations were necessary and useful: it was just that her natural reluctance to expose herself would have conquered her, had not Michael himself set about persuading her. So she was doing the right thing but for the wrong reason, like that man in Murder in the Cathedral. And perhaps it was for a very wrong reason, because she could not deny that she even found a sort of corrupt pleasure in doing things she didn’t like doing – accosting strangers, shaking collection-boxes, being stared at – when she knew that it was being appreciated by other people: a kind of yearning for disgrace and martyrdom. Like stripping in public. Though not, surely, quite the same, because stripping didn’t do any good, whereas telling people about the dangers of total war was a useful occupation. So doing the right thing for the wrong reason could at least be said to be better than doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason, couldn’t it? Though her parents, of course, said it was the wrong thing anyway, and that one shouldn’t molest innocent shoppers: Oh Lord, she thought with sudden gloom, perhaps my only reason for doing this is to annoy my parents: and bravely, to distract herself from the dreadful suspicion, she stepped forward and asked a scraggy thin woman in an old red velvet coat what she thought of the American policy in Vietnam.

  ‘What’s that?’ said the woman, crossly, annoyed at being stopped in mid-stride, and when Frances repeated her question she gazed at her as though she were an idiot and walked on without replying. Frances, who was becoming used to such responses, was not as hurt as she had been at the beginning of the morning: she was even beginning to think it was quite funny. She wondered if she might knock off for a bit and go and look for Michael: he had gone into the store, to try to persuade the manager of the toy department not to sell toy machine-guns and toy bombs and toy battleships. She thought she would go and join him; and when a horrid man in a cloth cap spat on the pavement very near her left shoe and muttered something about bloody students bugger off ruining the city for decent folk, she made her mind up. So she ditched her sandwich-board and rolled her banner up, and set off through the swing doors into the cosy warmth: although it was Easter the weather was bitterly cold, spring seemed to reach them two months later than anywhere else in England. It was a pity, she thought, that there weren’t any more Easter marches: she would have liked marching, it would have been more sociable; but Michael believed in isolated pockets of resistance. Really, what he meant was, he didn’t like things that he wasn’t organizing himself. She didn’t blame him for that, he was a marvellous organizer, it was amazing the amount of enthusiasm he’d got up in the Students’ Union for what was after all rather a dud project: no, not dud, she hadn’t meant that, what she meant was that it was no fun, and anyone with a lower sense of social responsibility than herself couldn’t have been expected to find it very interesting. Very nice green stockings on the stocking counter, she wondered if she could afford a pair. This thing that Michael had about children and violence, it really was very odd: he had a brother who was writing a thesis on violence on the television and she supposed it must have affected him. She admired his faith. Although at the same time she couldn’t help remembering a short story by Saki that she had read years ago, called ‘The Toys of Peace’, which had been about the impossibility of making children play with anything but soldiers, or something to that effect.

  When she reached the toy department, she located Michael immediately, because she could hear his voice raised in altercation. In fact, as she approached, she could see that quite a scene was going on, and if Michael hadn’t looked quite so impressive when he was making a scene she would have lost nerve and fled: but as it was she approached, discreetly, and hovered on the outskirts of the centre of activity. Michael was arguing with a man in a black suit, some kind of manager figure she guessed (though what managers were or did she had no idea) and a woman in an overall: the man, she could see, was beginning to lose his patience, and was saying things like:

  ‘Now look here, young man, we’re not here to tell our customers what they ought to do, we’re here to sell them what they want,’ and Michael was producing his usual arguments about responsibility and education and having to make a start somewhere and why not here and now; he’d already flashed around his leaflets on violence and delinquency, a
nd was now offering his catalogue of harmless constructive wooden playthings.

  ‘Look,’ he was saying, ‘look how much more attractive these wooden animals are, I’m sure you’d find they’d sell just as well, and they’re far more durable’ – whereat the woman in an overall sniffed and said since when had salesmen dressed themselves up as university students, if he wanted to sell them toys he ought to do it in the proper way; an interjection which Michael ignored, as he proceeded to pick up off the counter in front of him a peculiarly nasty piece of clockwork, a kind of car-cum-aeroplane thing with real bullets and knives in the wheels and hidden bomb-carriers and God knows what, she rather thought it was a model from some television puppet programme, it was called the Desperado Destruction Machine. ‘I mean to say, look at this horrible thing,’ Michael said to the manager, pressing a knob and nearly slicing off his own finger as an extra bit of machinery jumped out at him, ‘whatever do you think can happen to the minds of children who play with things like this?’

  ‘That’s a very nice model,’ said the manager, managing to sound personally grieved and hurt, ‘it’s a very nice model, and you’ve no idea how popular it’s been for the price. It’s not a cheap foreign thing, that, you know, it’s a really well-made toy. Look – ’ and he grabbed it back off Michael and pulled another lever, to display the ejector-seat mechanism. The driver figure was promptly ejected with such violence that he shot right across the room, and Michael, who was quite well brought up really, dashed off to retrieve it: and by the time he got back the situation had been increasingly complicated by the arrival of a real live customer who had turned up to buy that very object. Though if it really was as popular as the manager had said, perhaps that wasn’t such a coincidence. Anyway, this customer seemed very set on purchasing one, and the overalled woman detached herself from Michael’s scene and started to demonstrate one for her, trying to pretend as she did so that there was no scene in progress and that nothing had been going on at all: the manager too tried to hush Michael up by engaging him in conversation and backing him away from the counter and the transaction, but Michael wasn’t so easy to silence: he continued to argue in a loud voice, and stood his ground. Frances wished that he would abandon this clearly pointless attempt, and all the more as he had by now noticed her presence, and she knew that at any moment he would appeal for her support. And finally the worst happened, as she had known it might: he turned to the woman who was trying to buy the Desperado Destruction Machine, and started to appeal to her, asking her if she wouldn’t like to buy something less dangerous and destructive. The woman seemed confused at first, and when he asked her for whom she was buying it, she said that it was for her little boy’s birthday, and she hadn’t realized it was a dangerous toy, it was just something he’d set his heart on, he’d break his heart if he didn’t get it, he’d seen it on the telly and he wanted one just like that: whereupon the manager, who had quite lost his grip, intervened and started to explain to her that there was nothing dangerous about the toy at all, on the contrary it was a well-made pure British product, with no lead paint or sharp edges, and that if Michael didn’t shut up he’d call the police: whereupon Michael said that there was no law to stop customers discussing products in shops with one another, and he was himself a bona-fide customer, because look, he’d got a newly purchased pair of socks in his pocket in a Will Baines bag. The woman continued to look confused, so Frances thought that she herself ought to intervene to support Michael, who had momentarily run out of aggression: and she said to the woman, in what she thought was a very friendly and reasonable tone, that nobody was trying to stop her buying her little boy a birthday present, they just wanted to point out that with all the violence in the world today anyway it was silly to add to it by encouraging children to play at killing and exterminating and things like that, and hadn’t everyone seen enough bombing, particularly here (one of Michael’s favourite points, this), and why didn’t she buy her boy something constructive like Meccano or a farmyard set: and as she was saying all this she glanced from time to time at the woman’s face, and there was something in it, she later acknowledged, that should have warned her. She stood there, the woman, her woollen headscarf so tight round her head that it seemed to clamp her jaws together into a violently imposed silence; her face unnaturally drawn, prematurely aged; her thickly veined hands clutching a zip plastic purse and that stupid piece of clockwork machinery: and as she listened to Frances’s voice droning quietly and soothingly and placatingly away her face began to gather a glimmering of expression, from some depths of reaction too obscure to guess at: and as Frances finally ran down to a polite and only very faintly hopeful enquiring standstill, she opened her mouth and spoke. She said only one word, and it was a word that Frances had never heard before, though she had seen it in print in a once-banned book; and by some flash of insight, crossing the immeasurable gap of quality that separated their two lives, she knew that the woman herself had never before allowed it to pass her lips, that to her too it was a shocking syllable, portentous, unforgettable, not a familiar word casually dropped into the dividing spaces. Then the woman, having spoken, started to cry: incredibly, horribly, she started to cry. She dropped the clockwork toy onto the floor, and it fell so heavily that she could almost have been said to have thrown it down, and she stood there, staring at it, as the tears rolled down her face. Then she looked at them, and walked off. Nobody followed her: they stood there and let her go. They did not know how to follow her, nor what appeasement to offer for her unknown wound. So they did nothing. But Frances knew that in their innocence they had done something dreadful to her, in the light of which those long-since ended air raids and even distant Vietnam itself were an irrelevance, a triviality: but she did not know what it was, she could not know. At their feet, the Destruction Machine buzzed and whirred its way to a broken immobility, achieving a mild sensation in its death-throes by shooting a large spring coil out of its complex guts; she and Michael, after lengthy apologies, had to pay for it before they were allowed to leave the store.