A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (16 page)

She had her bath, as she always did, and while she was in the bath her eldest child brought her the post and the papers and opened her letters for her. She read
The Times
while she got dressed and looked at the
Guardian
while she brushed her hair. Then, before going down to breakfast, she read the lists of things to be done that lay by her bedside table. There were several lists, old and new, and it was never safe to read the newest one only. Some of the words on the lists were about shopping: haricot beans, it said at one point; Polish sausage, at another; then vitamin pills; shoelaces for Mark; raw carrots (?); Clive Jenkins; look up octroi. It would be hard to tell whether these notes were a sign of extreme organization or of panic. She could not tell herself. Carried over from list to
list was a message that said
Hospital Thursday
. This seemed to indicate either that she was so worried about going to the hospital that she kept repeating the message to herself, neurotically, night after night, or that she was so little aware of it that she thought she might forget. But today was the day, so she would not forget.

She went downstairs and made breakfast. Two children wanted bacon sandwiches, and one said she would eat only a slice of leftover melon. She made herself a cup of coffee, and while they ate, she emptied the dishwasher and started to restack it, and took the dry clothes out of the airing cupboard and sorted them into piles to put away in drawers. Then she encouraged the children to put on their coats and shoes, and took them out, and put them in the car and drove them to school. They were all, by now, at the same school, which made life easier, as she would cheerfully remark. She remembered to remind them, as they ran off, that she would not be there to collect them, as she had an appointment, but that Faith would collect them and give them tea and supper. Then she went home and remembered to put a pound note in an envelope in the cupboard for Faith, in case she left before she herself got home in the evening. She would have done this, if her husband were home, but as usual he had not said whether he would be home or not, so she had to provide for every possibility, and one of these was that Faith would want to find a pound note in the cupboard.

Then she made the beds, and put the dry washing away, and stacked the breakfast things and ran down to the shops (which were luckily near) to buy tea and supper for the children, because although Faith was perfectly capable of doing this in theory, in practice she always did something silly, and anyway the women in the shops always shortchanged her with Jenny’s money because she wasn’t English, and Jenny
did not consider herself quite rich enough to be shortchanged every day, though sometimes she let it go. Then, when these things were done (it was now half-past nine), she went up to her bedroom to change, because she couldn’t possibly spend the whole day in the jersey and skirt she was wearing, because she had to go and give the prizes at a School Speech Day that evening and wouldn’t have time to come home to change in between all the other things she had to do. She was due at a committee meeting at ten-thirty; she would make it all right, but only if she made her mind up quickly about what to wear.

She had quite a lot of clothes, as her job demanded that she should, but none of them looked very good this morning. They had buttons missing, or needed cleaning, or were too avant-garde for a Speech Day. She could not find anything suitable. Racked by indecision, sweat standing up in soft beads on her upper lip and running down her arms and thighs, she stood there in front of the wardrobe and thought, Is this it? Is this where I stop?

But no, because she finally decided that her long grey dress, although slightly too smart, would please the children at the school, if not the headmistress, and, after all, they would expect her to look a little colourful or they would not have invited her. So she put it on. It was a little too smart for a committee meeting, too, but the committee wouldn’t mind. She put it on, and then her boots, so she wouldn’t have to change her stockings, which had holes. She did not wear tights. She considered them unhygienic. And then she got her briefcase, and put in it her minutes for the meeting, and some old notes for her speech, and her appointment card for the hospital, and the correspondence with the headmistress of the school, and a book by the man she was supposed to meet for lunch. And then, thinking that she had
got everything, she said goodbye to her husband, who had watched some of her preparations from bed and some from his desk, which stood in the bedroom. And off she went towards the bus stop.

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, are 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.