A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (10 page)

‘That, too, I get,’ she said: speaking of the child. And she had picked up again, from where she had put it down, the usual burden: able, even, with her amazing capacity, to make him feel wanted, to give him happiness, to make him forget, as they talked and lay together and pursued their circumscribed excursions, the sad terms of their contract. They had a good time together, in practice: never failing to enjoy one another’s company. He had thought that all they needed for entire felicity was a few days away together, with light and air, away from that depressing flat and child, away from her depressing work, away from his own depressing wife. He drove carefully along the wide summer road towards Southampton and freedom, and waited for her to start to repent, so that he could embark on consolation.

But she did not repent. She sat there, and slowly, by his side, she started to soften. She liked being there, he could tell it
from the way she lit herself a cigarette and began to smile at the passing hedges. She had arrived completely: whatever remorse she had felt about her departure and her elaborate abandoning of the child had already been endured and done with – done with on the train, perhaps, or even before. She had alighted with nothing more than an ordinary nervousness. It was made, he said to himself: a whole week, and the weather, and the journey, and the hotel bedrooms. He reached for her hand, and once more, he sneezed.

‘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 his 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.’