A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

by Margaret Drabble

  She did not take her car into town. She did not like driving in London. How very sensible you are, people would say, and Jenny Jamieson would say yes, it is sensible, and she would chat about the antisocial inconveniences of driving in the West End, and from time to time, she would think, If they knew how very very frightened I am of the traffic, would they continue to think me sensible?

  She arrived at the committee meeting in good time, as usual, and took her place, but as she nodded and smiled at her fellow committee members, she was obliged to recognize that something rather unpleasant had happened, connected no doubt with the shock she had sustained the evening before. The unpleasant thing was that she did not like the look of these people any more. She had never liked them very much, that was not why she had attended the meeting: she attended because she considered it her duty. It was a committee that had been set up to enquire into the reorganization of training schemes for aspiring television producers, directors and interviewers, and it also considered applications and suggestions from some such aspirants. Jenny considered she ought to sit on this committee, because her own entry into the world they desired had been so irregular, and she thought that she, a lucky person, ought to try to be fair to those people who had not had her contacts. Not everybody, after all, had the good fortune of being married to Fred Jamieson. But her colleagues on the committee did not seem to have been moved by such motives.

  The longer she knew them, the more convinced she had become that they were simply there in order to give an appearance of respectability and democracy to a system that functioned perfectly well, that continued to function and which they had no intention of altering. It was a system of nepotism, as she knew from her own experience. Whatever polite recommendations they might make, younger sons and friends of friends and clever young people from fashionable universities would continue to be favoured. She had accepted this, in a way, and had thought her presence useful, even if only because she occasionally managed to make out a case for some course of action or some individual who would otherwise have been considered negligible. She had understood why the others behaved as they did: most of them were older than herself, they had been brought up in a world of patronage, they had done well on it, they were kind, well-meaning, urbane, amusing, cynical, rather timid people, they could not be expected to rock any boat, let alone the one in which they were sitting. She had respected these things in them, she had understood. And now, suddenly, looking round the polished table at their faces – at thin grey beaky Maurice, at tiny old James Hanney, at brisk young smoothy Chris Bailey, at two-faced Tom (son of one of the powers), at all the rest of them – she found that she disliked them fairly intensely.

  This is odd, she said to herself, looking down at her minutes. This is very odd.

  And she thought, What has happened to me is that some little bit of mechanism in me has broken. There used to be, till yesterday, a little knob that one twisted until these people came into focus as nice, harmless, well-meaning people. And it’s broken, it won’t twist any more.

  She tried and tried, she fiddled and fiddled inside her head to make it work, but it wouldn’t work. They stayed as they were, perfectly clear, not a bit blurred by her inability to reduce them to their usual shapes. Horrible, they were.

  The mechanism had broken because it had been expected to do too much work. She had been straining it for years.

  She didn’t think she could bear the look of things without it.

  She kept very quiet during the meeting, because she did not know how to express herself in this new situation. She could hardly remember the kind of things that she used to say, that she would have said if she hadn’t been so filled with horror and disgust. Once or twice a diplomatic phrase occurred to her, she realized how she could have thrown in a small spanner or suggested a different approach, but it didn’t seem worth bothering. And what frightened her most was that she had always known, intellectually, that it wasn’t worth bothering, that her contributions were negligible; and yet she had continued to make them, because she felt that it was worth doing, she felt that she should. And now she didn’t feel it. So it was simply herself that she had been indulging all this time. So there was no point in appealing any more to what she ought to do. It had never been a question of that. The actual situation, unillumined by her own good will and her own desire to make the best of things, was beyond hope.

  Making the best of things, she thought, as the meeting ended, is a terrible thing to do. They must become worse before they become better, as Karl Marx said.

  She did not smile very much as she left the meeting. She put on a preoccupied look instead, which absolved her from the obligation.

  She was due for lunch, at one, in a French restaurant in Soho. She was to entertain a clergyman, due for interview. He had outspoken views on violence in Africa and the need for the churches to offer their support. She was hoping for conviction from him, for she herself veered towards pacifism, weakly. She was not looking forward to the lunch. There had been a day when lunches had been her delight: newly released from the burden of cooking unwanted meals for infants, and herself brooding morosely over a boiled egg or a piece of cheese, she had embarked on large meals and wine and shellfish and cigarettes and coffee and chat, with great pleasure. But the pleasure had faded, and now she feared to fall asleep in the afternoons. She was so tired, these days.

  Her secretary had booked the table. The clergyman, said her secretary, had seemed delighted at the prospect of lunch. And as Jenny’s programme paid its interviewees badly, in her now sophisticated view, lunch was considered a justifiable expense. She looked at her watch, as she got out of the taxi. Five to one, it was. She was due at the hospital at three, she must make sure she was not late, Africa or no Africa.

  She was drinking a glass of tonic when the clergyman arrived. She always ordered tonic if she got there first, because it looked like gin and didn’t put other people off drinking. Other people did hate to be discouraged from drinking, she had found. The clergyman, deceived, ordered a Campari. He was expecting her to twinkle and glitter and glow like something on a Christmas tree: she could see the expectation in his eyes, as he looked at her over the menu. And she thought, Dare I disappoint him? And then she thought, sickened, as she decided on a salad: I treat people like children, and I treat my children like adults.

  She thought of her children, with unaccountable yearning. The yearning was mixed, vaguely mixed, with the thought of the hospital. Jenny Jamieson loved her children with a grand passion. Sometimes, looking at them, she thought she would faint with love.

  The clergyman ordered soup and poulet grandmère. She joined him with the poulet. They talked about Mozambique and Angola and Rhodesia and the leadership of the Zulus. They talked about the World Council of Churches. She was able to watch him enjoy the familiar shock of the thoroughness with which she had done her homework. She had a good memory for dates and facts and had found it extremely useful: it commanded instant respect. She knew that he knew more of the realities than she did – he had been there, after all, he had lived with them – but he was not as good at dates. She had been a good examinee and was now a good examiner.

  But she did not like the clergyman. She had wanted to like him, as he had wanted to like her. But they did not like each other. She did not like him, really, because he had agreed to eat lunch with her and appear on her programme. She thought of Groucho Marx this time, not Karl, and his remark that he did not want to belong to any club that admitted him as a member. What were they doing there, both of them, sitting eating an expensive meal, when an agreement had just been made that decided that Africans in Rhodesia could not vote until they had £900 income a year? The average income for an African in Rhodesia was £156 p.a., or so she had read in her morning’s paper.

  It occurred to her that the clergyman did not like her for much the same reason. It was not possible for them to like each other, sitting in such a place.

  The allowances we have to make, she thought, ar
e just too much for us.

  In another mood she might have essayed an ironic hint, a smile, to indicate that she had recognized that this was so, to do him the credit of thinking that he too might have known it. But why should they be let off?

  She continued to think, however, that she might feel differently about the whole matter on Wednesday week, when the clergyman was to appear on her programme. So she asked questions and made notes of answers, as they ate their chicken and declined pudding and drank black coffee. Then the clergyman had to go, and she had just time to arrive comfortably, by taxi, at the hospital.

  She was rather surprised to find herself at the hospital, as she had been rather surprised to find herself at her doctor’s the month before. She was an exceptionally healthy woman, was Jenny Jamieson, and so afraid of hypochondria (an affliction she truly despised) that she never allowed herself to think about her health. She ignored her body. It was not a subject that could be contemplated with much pleasure, for although beautiful now, momentarily, she expected daily the decay of beauty and did not allow herself to dwell too much on pleasure or on fear. She was a sensible woman. Probably you begin to see by now how sensible she was. But nevertheless, although sensible, on this occasion, she had allowed a splendid ignorance to go on a little too long. For several months now, she had been bleeding when she ought not to have been and had been too busy even to worry about it. Occasionally, she would say to herself, Oh, God (wiping the sheets on the bed, throwing away another pair of paper knickers), oh, God, I must do something about that. And then the phone would ring, or a child would call, or the post would arrive, or it would be time to go to the studio, and she would forget. So she didn’t get round to going to the doctor until one morning, when the company rang her up and said that, unexpectedly, they wouldn’t be wanting her after all, as her guest had been held up by an air strike in Florida. So she had a morning off, and instead of sitting down with the paper and a cup of coffee to enjoy it, she instantly, and, as it seemed, entirely arbitrarily, began to worry about the bleeding, and went up to the doctor’s and sat in his surgery waiting to see him for an hour and a half. She rather thought (being a healthy person) that he would say not to be so silly, when she described her symptoms. She expected him to say that it was nothing at all. But he didn’t. Instead, he listened gravely and attentively, and didn’t smile once (though she smiled enough for two) and told her she ought to go and see a gynaecologist. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. And so here she found herself, in a gynaecological hospital, waiting patiently for her turn.

  She waited for hours. Thank God she had known it would take hours. She kept thinking how demoralizing it would have been, if one hadn’t known. Luckily one was not as young and nervous as one used to be.

  The surgeon was a short, nice old man. He dug around inside her with his fingers until she cried out. Does that hurt, he said. No, no, she said. Because it did not hurt. It frightened her, it did not hurt her.

  She was still expecting him to smile, as she sat up on the white paper sheet in her beige petticoat, and to tell her that there was nothing there.

  And he did smile. But what he said was, ‘You’d better come in for a little operation.’

  She didn’t listen very attentively to his answers to her sensible questions, though she forced herself (as though on the screen) to ask them all. She asked about malignant growths, and cervical smears, and polyps and ulcers, but she wasn’t listening. She remembered, faintly, a dreadful interview with a cabinet minister, when she had been so crumpled up with bellyache that she had hardly been able to hear a word the man was saying. The surgeon seemed to be trying to reassure her: he patted her on the knee. He did not recognize her: probably he was too busy carving women up to watch the television. She had no illusions about the extent of her notoriety. And anyway, women in their petticoats look much the same. She loved him, for patting her knee through the hospital sheet.

  ‘You go to the appointments lady, my dear,’ he said. ‘See when they can fit you in.’ There would be a bed free in three weeks’ time.

  I know what beauty is, she thought, as she walked through the front door of the hospital, dreading already her return: beauty is the love that shone through my face. And it is dying, it has been murdered, and they will see nothing but their own ugliness. Beauty is love, she thought.

  She was so dazed by her encounter with the surgeon that she wandered, idly, for half an hour or so. She walked up and down the streets off Oxford Street, looking in pornographic bookshop windows.

  She was terrified. She was ill, she was dying. She was looking her last on the Loves of Lesbos, the ABC of Flagellation. I have wasted my life, she thought. Oh, God, she thought, direct me, please.

  On the train, she sat down quietly and began to work out the implications of death. Her life, luckily, she had heavily insured, some years before. It had seemed a good idea at the time, and she had never regretted it. Her husband, though competent in some ways, was feckless: he was also much hated, as editors often are, and if ever he lost his power to control others, others would not waste time in trying to ruin him. She had thought to herself, some years ago, as soon as she began to earn good money, I should insure myself, for the children’s sake. Well, she had done it, she had not merely thought about it, she had done it. That was the kind of woman she was. So she need not worry about their material future.

  But what of their need for her?

  She loved them. She had made herself indispensable. That had been her aim.

  Would they weep for her?

  The rain fell, outside, on the dark countryside. Two men, commuters, were playing cards, as they did every night. She envied their will to brighten their lot. Inside, she was weeping away, she was weeping blood. Whatever should she say to the girls, at the other end of this journey?

  A friend of hers, recently, had killed herself. Jenny, with mechanical kindness, had comforted husband and mistress and child, in so much as it was in her to do so. It was the woman who had been her friend, after all, and she was dead. The child did not seem to notice much. So much sympathy had been lavished upon the survivors. But the woman, Jenny’s friend, was dead forever. She was beyond sympathy and love and fear. She was no more. What rage must have possessed her, at the moment of extinction, to know what tenderness would accrue to others from her death, while she lay rotting.

  Jenny had a vision of herself dead, and her survivors basking in the warm sun of condolence. So much pleasanter for them than her presence, it would be. They did not much care for her presence, these days.

  Though that, of course, was not true of the children. No, they would grieve for her, if she died, as she would, forever, for them, if they were to die.

  And as she sat there, she knew that this was it, this was the reckoning. She would have to think about those things that she so much ignored. She would have to contemplate, now, here, her own not-being: would she die under the knife, would she expire in the hands of an incompetent anaesthetist, would she fade slowly from malignant growths, the months running down into weeks, the weeks into days? She had heard recently of a friend’s friend who had died at home: in the morning she had had breakfast, had played cards with her child, had chatted to her friend. Then she had fallen, as it seemed, asleep. But she had been dead, there in her bed, and no gentle shaking, no offers of the already-prepared lunch, had been able to wake her. What a mystery, how devious was death, to creep so wickedly in so many quiet ways. Death was certain: her luck had run out. Death sat with her there in the carriage, but what questions could she put to this unwanted guest? She must decide, here, on the five fifty-eight, about the existence of God, and the power of human love, and the nature of chance.

  She had not neglected these subjects entirely. But she had postponed judgement. Now she would have to decide. Time had run out.

  She had always, until this moment, politely supposed that God must exist. At least, she had given him the benefit of the doubt – as she had given it to Fred Jamieson. But it did strike her
now, again with a sudden electric sense of shock, that her own premature and sudden death would disprove the existence of God entirely, and that her faith in him had rested only on her belief that he would fulfil his obligations as she would fulfil hers. And if he failed (as the very existence of the hospital suggested he might), then he could not exist at all. How could a God exist who would be so careless of his contracts as to allow her to die and break her own contracts to her own infants?

  Her children would be ruined by her death. No corrupt adult reassurances, no promises of treats, would buy them off. Any confidence in fate would be ruined by her removal. She had loved them so, and it was her love that would undo them. Her friend who had killed herself had not loved her child, so the child had survived. It was her own love that would undo them.

  The apathy of God, the random blows of fate and the force for good and ill of human love: these things, combined, constituted a world so bitter, so dark, so tragic, that she felt her heart weep and die like her body.

  They would cry for her and there would be no comfort. She would be dead and gone and powerless, and thus they would know the dreadful truth.

  She was parting herself from God, she was leaving and turning her face from him. Only in leaving him did she realize how much she would have liked him to be there: as she would have liked her husband to like her. But it was not to be. God was too weak, too feeble, she had looked after him too nicely for too long. She had felt sorry for him because of his non-existence. If I give him a chance to behave better, she had thought to herself for years, vaguely, maternally, he might learn how to do it: he might learn better from me and show his face to me.

  But he couldn’t show her his face because he didn’t have one. That was why she hadn’t seen it so far. She felt sorry for him, as one for a friend caught out making an empty boast. She didn’t want to question him too closely about his reasons for having lied to so many for so long: she didn’t want to make a fool of him. She was very careful, was Jenny Jamieson: she never made a fool of people on the box, and she was very delicate about doing it even in her own head. She always regretted it when people insisted on condemning themselves out of their own mouths, and she would do her best to prevent them. So now, too, she thought (or could imagine) that she would soon find some means of concealing from God her own violent and utter loss of faith in him: she would find some way of humouring him along. There was no point in getting angry about the matter: he was too weak to withstand anger.