A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

by Margaret Drabble

  There was no television in Dorset. Apologetically, the owners of the little Mill House had explained that the valley was too deep for good reception, the picture quality too poor to make it worth providing a set. Good, Philip had said, but he had not meant it. If he had lived, if he had been alive to go on this Dorset holiday, he would undoubtedly have found some devious way to complain about its absence. Her lack of conversation, perhaps, would have been trundled out: better a mindless television programme, he would have declared, than your small talk, your silences.

  Dead he was, now, and there would be no complaints. No television, and no complaints. There would be silence.

  The evening before her departure, Elsa Palmer sat alone in the drawing-room with a tray of bread and cheese and pickle, and tomato salad, and milk chocolate digestive biscuits, and a pile of road maps, and her bird book, and her butterfly book, and her flower book, and her Pevsner. The television was on, but she was not watching it. She ate a bit of cheese, and wrote down road numbers in an orderly way. A10, A30, A354. There didn’t seem to be any very obvious way of getting to Dorset from Cambridge, but that made the exercise of plotting a route all the more entertaining. She would pass through towns she did not know, get stuck in high streets she had never seen, drive past hedgerows banked with unfamiliar flowers. Alone, with her car radio. If she took a wrong turning, nobody would reprimand her. If she chose to listen to Radio 2, nobody would know. She could stop for a cup of coffee, she could eat a sandwich from her knee and drop crumbs on her skirt. And, at the end of the journey, there would be the Mill House, where nothing would remind her of Philip. She would lose herself in the deep Dorset countryside, so different from these appalling, over-farmed, open East Anglian wastes. There would be a whole fortnight of walkings and wanderings, of scrambling up coastal paths and rambling through woods, of collecting specimens and identifying them from her books in the long, light, solitary evenings. Unobserved, uncriticized.

  Philip, of late, had taken increasingly strongly against her passion for identifications. ‘What’s in a name?’ he would say, when she tried to remember a variety of sweet pea, or to spot a distant little brown bird at the end of the garden. As he always beat her down in argument by sheer persistence (and anyway, was it fair to argue with an ill man?) she had never been able to defend her own pleasure in looking things up in reference books. It had seemed a harmless pleasure, until Philip attacked it. Harmless, innocent, and proper for the wife of a university lecturer. An interest in flowers and butterflies. What could be wrong with that? By some sleight of reasoning he had made it seem sinister, joyless, life-denying. He had made her feel it to be a weakness, a symptom of a character defect. She would never work out quite how he had managed it.

  The Lulworth Skipper. A local little butterfly, that haunts Lulworth Cove. She looked at its portrait and smiled approvingly. Yes, she would walk along the Dorset Coast Path, with the Ordnance Survey map in her pocket, and go to Lulworth, and search for the Lulworth Skipper. And if she did not find it, nobody would know she had been defeated. Her pleasure would be her own, her disappointment her own.

  Marriage has warped me, thought Elsa Palmer the next day, as she dawdled through Biggleswade. Marriage is unnatural, thought Elsa Palmer, as she stopped at the red light of some roadworks in Aylesbury.

  Marriage and maternity. She thought of her children, her grandchildren. They had all attended the funeral, dutifully. She had found herself bored by them, irritated with them. After years and years of cravenly soliciting their favours, of begging them to telephone more often, of blackmailing them into coming for Christmas (or, lately, into inviting herself and Philip for Christmas), she now, suddenly, had found herself bored, had admitted herself to be bored. Stuart was a slob, Harriet was a pedantic chip off the old block (and always ill, my God, what stories of migraines and backaches, and she was only twenty-nine) and even young Ben had been incredibly tedious about his new car. And the grandchildren – whining, sniffing, poking their noses, kicking the furniture, squabbling, with their awful London accents and their incessant demands for sweets. Spoiled brats, the lot of them. Elsa smiled, comfortably, to herself, as she sailed through the landscape, divinely, enchantingly, rapturously alone. The weather responded to her mood; the sun shone, huge white clouds drifted high, vast shadows fell on the broad trees and the green-gold trees. An Indian summer, in June.

  She had cautioned herself against disappointment at her journey’s end; could the mill really be as charming as it appeared in its photographs? Was there some undisclosed flaw, some blot in the immediate landscape, some pylon or pig farm on its doorstep? Maybe, maybe: but some charm it must surely have, and the description of the little river flowing through the house and the garden, dividing the front garden from the little paddock at the back, could not be wholly fictitious. There were trout in the stream, she was assured. She pictured herself reclining in a deckchair, lying on a rug on the grass, reading a book, sipping a drink, looking up every now and then to gaze at the trout in the shallows, the waving weed. Inexpressibly soothing, she found this image of herself.

  And the mill, when finally she arrived in the late afternoon, was no disappointment. It was smaller than it looked in the photographs, but houses always are, and it was right on the road, but the road was a small road, a country road, a delightful road, and she liked the way the garden gate opened onto a flinty courtyard where she parked her car. Rustic, unpretentious. A little lawn, with a wooden table; creepers growing up the house; a nesting blackbird watching anxiously, boldly, curiously; and beyond the lawn, the little river, the River Cerne itself, which flowed right through what was to be, for a whole fortnight, her own little property. The border was paved, and next to the idle mill wheel was a low stone wall, warm from the day’s sun. She sat on it, and saw the promised trout flicker. It was all that she had hoped. There was a little bridge over the river, leading to the tree-shaded, thickly hedged paddock, part also of her property. You can sit there, the owners had assured her, quite out of sight of the road. If you don’t like to sit down on the lawn at the front, they had said, it’s quite private, through the back.

  Quite private. She savoured the concept of privacy. She would save her exploration of it until she had collected the key and been shown round, until she had unpacked and made herself at home.

  The interior of the house, as displayed to her by Mrs Miller from the village, was perhaps a little too rustic-smart: she was introduced to a shining wooden kitchen table and benches with diamond-shaped holes carved in them, a lot of glossy bright brown woodwork, an open light wooden staircase up to an upper floor and a semi-galleried sitting-room, a brass horseshoe and a brass kettle, and a disconcerting fox’s mask grinning down from a wall. It was all newly decorated, spick and span. But the millstone was still there, and the ancient machinery of the mill could still be seen in the back rooms of the house, and through the heart of the house flowed the noisy, companionable sound of water. Elsa liked it all very much. She even liked the varnished wood and the fox’s mask. Philip would have hated them, would have been full of witticisms about them, but she liked them very much. They were not to her taste, but she felt instantly at home with them. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, brightly, to Mrs Miller, hoping Mrs Miller would take herself off as soon as she had explained the intricacies of the electricity meter and revealed the contents of the kitchen cupboards. ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll find everything I need,’ she said, noting that milk, bread and butter had been provided. She was touched by the thoughtfulness of her absent landlords.

  Mrs Miller vanished, promptly, tactfully. Elsa Palmer was alone. She wandered from room to room, examining the objects that make themselves at home in holiday cottages – an earthenware jug of dried flowers, a songbook open on the piano, a Visitors’ Book, an umbrella-stand, a children’s tricycle under the stairs, a stone hot-water bottle, a clock in a glass case, a print of a hunting scene. They made her feel amazingly irresponsible. She felt that for the first time for years she had no
housekeeping cares in the world. She could live on Kit Kat or KiteKat and no one would comment. She could starve, and no one would care. Contemplating this freedom, she unpacked her clothes and laid them neatly in empty, paper-lined, mothballed, impersonal drawers, and made up the double bed in the low-ceilinged bedroom, and went downstairs. It was early evening. She could hear the sound of the mill stream. She unpacked her groceries: eggs, cheese, long-life milk, tins of tuna fish, onions, potatoes, a little fruit. A bottle of gin, a bottle of white wine, a few bottles of tonic.

  With a sense of bravado, she poured herself a gin and tonic. Philip had always poured the drinks; in his lifetime she would no more have thought of pouring one for herself than she would have expected Philip to make an Irish stew. The thought of Philip struggling with an Irish stew struck her as irresistibly comic; she smiled to herself. Now Philip was dead, she could laugh at him at last. She adorned her gin and tonic with ice cubes and a slice of lemon. A merry widow.

  The evening sun was mellow. It was one of the longest days of the year. She wandered out into the flinty courtyard and over to the little lawn. She sat on the low stone wall and sipped her drink. She watched a flock of long-tailed finches fluttering in a small tree. Tomorrow, if they returned, she would sit here and identify them. She thought they would return.

  The weeds swayed and poured in the stream. Water crowfoot blossomed above the surface, its roots trailing. Trout rippled, stationary yet supple and subtle, motionless yet full of movement.

  She sat and gazed as water and time flowed by. Then she rose and wandered over the little hidden wooden bridge to inspect the unseen paddock on the far side. As she crossed the bridge, a startled moorhen dislodged itself with great noise and splashing and she saw some chicks scrambling clumsily upstream. And there was the paddock – a long, triangular plot of land, planted with fruit trees, bordered on one side by a fence, on another by the stream and on the third by a high, irregular, ancient row of mixed tree and hedge, at the bottom of which ran another little tributary. The paddock, she discovered, was a sort of island. The music of the water was soft and reassuring. The grass was deep, knee-high. The stream was fringed with all sorts of wild flowers, growing in rich profusion and disorder – forget-me-not, valerian, comfrey, buttercup and many other species that she could not at once distinguish. A wild garden, overgrown, secret, mysterious. Nobody could overlook her here.

  She sipped her gin and tonic and wandered through the long grasses in the cool of the evening. A deep, healing peace possessed her. She stood on the little triangular point of her island, where the two streams met, and stood on a tree root at the end of her promontory, gazing at a view that could not have altered much in a thousand years. A field of wheat glowed golden to her left, rising steeply to a dark purple wood. Long shadows fell. A small, steep view. The small scale of her little kingdom was peculiarly comforting. A few hundred yards of modest wilderness. She would sit here, perhaps, in the afternoons. Perhaps she would sleep a little, on a rug, under a fruit tree, in the sun, listening to the sound of water. Pleasant plans formed themselves in her imagination as she wandered slowly back and over the little bridge, plucking as she went a spray of blue forget-me-not. She would look it up, after her supper, in the flower book. How impatient Philip would have been with such a plan! It’s obviously a forget-me-not, anyone can see it’s a forget-me-not, Philip would have said, and anyway, who cares what it is? But he would have put it more wittily than that, more hurtfully than that, in words that, thank God, she did not have to invent for him. For he was not here, would never be there again.

  Later, reading her flower book, examining the plant more closely, she discovered that it wasn’t a forget-me-not at all. Its leaves were all wrong, and it was too tall. It was probably a borage, hairy borage – and after a while, she settled for green alkanet. Anchusa sempervirens. ‘Small clusters of flat white-eyed bright blue flowers, rather like a forget-me-not or speedwell …’ Yes, that was it. Rather like. Rather like, but not identical. Similar, but not the same. This distinction delighted her. She would forget it, she knew, but for the moment it delighted her. She was not very good at flowers, and forgot most of the names she so painstakingly established. At her age she found it difficult to retain new information, almost impossible to enlarge her store of certainties from the hundred names she had learned, half a century ago, as a brownie in the Yorkshire Dales. But the inability did not diminish her pleasure, it increased it. Philip had never been able to understand this. The safety, the comfort of the familiar well-thumbed pages; the safety, the comfort of the familiar process of doubt, comparison, temporary certainty. Yes, there it was. Green alkanet.

  Her dreams that night were violent and free. Horses raced through dark fields, waterfalls plunged over crags, clouds heaped ominously in a black sky. But when she woke, the morning was serene and blue and filled with birdsong. She made herself a mug of coffee and sat outside, watching the odd car pass, the village bus, an old woman walking a dog. She planned her day. She would walk the mile and a half into the village, do a little shopping, visit the church, buy a newspaper, wander back, read her novel, eat a little lunch, then go and lie on a rug on the long grass in the paddock. The next day, she would be more ambitious perhaps, she would go for a real walk, a mapped walk. But today, she would be quiet. The luxury of knowing that nothing and no one could interfere with her prospect made her feel momentarily a little tearful. Had she really been so unhappy for so long? She saw the little long-tailed finches fluttering in the tree. They had returned to charm her.

  Philip, she reflected, as she sat on the wall reading, would not have approved her choice of novel. She was reading a Margery Allingham omnibus, nostalgically, pointlessly. Philip had despised detective stories. He had mocked her pleasure in them. And indeed they were a bit silly, but that was the point of them. Yes, that was the point. After lunch, she took Margery Allingham into the paddock, with a rug and her sunhat, and lay under an apple tree. Impossible to explain, to the young, the satisfaction of sleeping in the afternoon. How can you enjoy being asleep, her children used to ask her. Now they too, parents themselves, were glad of a siesta, of an afternoon nap. Elsa lay very still. She could hear the moorhen with its chicks. She lifted her eyes from the page and saw a little brown water rat swimming upstream. A fringe of tall plants and weeds shimmered and blurred before her eyes. Sedges, reeds, cresses … yes, later she would look them all up. She nodded, drooped. She fell asleep.

  After an hour she woke, from dreams of grass and gardens, to find her dream continuing. She was possessed by a great peace. She lay there, gazing at the sky. She could feel her afflictions, her irritations, her impatiences leaving her. They loosened their little hooks and drifted off. She would be redeemed, restored, forgiven.

  The day passed smoothly into the evening, and gin and tonic, and the identification of long-tailed finches, and a reading of Pevsner. She marked churches she might or might not visit, and smiled at Pevsner’s use of the phrase ‘life-size angels’. Who was to know the life size of an angel? Had it not once been thought that millions of them might dance on the point of a pin? Might not an angel be as tall as an oak tree, as vast and powerful as a leviathan?

  She slept like an angel, and woke to another blue uninterrupted day of laziness. She decided not to make a long excursion. She would spend another whole day in the delights of her new terrain. She repeated her walk to the village of the previous morning, she returned to a little lunch, she took herself off again to the paddock with her rug and her Margery Allingham. Already she had established the charm of routine, of familiarity. She felt as though she had been here forever. She read, nodded, dozed, and fell asleep.

  When she woke, half an hour later, she knew at once that she was no longer alone. She sat up hastily, guiltily, rearranging her hat, straightening her cotton skirt over her bare knees, reaching for her glasses, trying to look as though she had never dozed off in an afternoon in her life. Where was the intruder? Who had aroused her? Discreetly, but with m
ounting panic, she surveyed her triangle of paddock – and yes, there, at the far end, she could see another human being. An old man, with a scythe. She relaxed, slightly; a rustic old character, a gardener of some sort, annoying and embarrassing to have been caught asleep by him, but harmless enough, surely? Yes, quite harmless. What was he up to? She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun.

  He appeared to be cutting the long grass. The long grass of her own paddock.