A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (17 page)

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.

The train stopped at a station, started again, continued on its way.

What grieved her most was the thought that her children would never know about the intensity of her love, the depth of her concern. It was impossible to convey to them the nature of her emotion. To a lover, one could explain such things: lovers, ripped asunder by death, at least know that the other, on the point of death, had thought of the terms of love. For a lover, death need not be a rejection and an abandoning. But for a child, it could not be anything else: no child could know how much he was loved, his mind could never encompass the massive adult passion.

She thought, I will write them a letter. In this letter, I will explain how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to abandon and forsake them, and I will give the letter to my solicitor, and he will lock it away in a safe and give them each their copy when they are eighteen.

But she knew that she would not write such a letter. For the writing of it would seal her own death warrant and date it, and it was as yet undated. She could not afford to run a risk of making certain what was at the moment at least open to hope. So she would die, in three weeks’ time, in a year’s time, and the letter would be unwritten and they would never know. She died and left us, they would say, because she didn’t care enough for us, she didn’t care enough to live.

She imagined their faces, their nightmares, their sick and endless deforming resentments, their lonely wakenings, their empty arms, their boarding schools, their substitute consolations.

And this was the price of love.

It did not seem tolerable, it did not seem possible.

She would go out like a light, she would be switched off forever. There would be nothing to grieve with, no ghost to hover anxiously over their heads. She would be forced to default, coerced by death into breaking her contract. She had
contracted herself to her children, for the period of their infancy: she would have to break the contract and she would have no excuse.

The bitterness of it filled her and possessed her, but she was beginning to breathe again, because she knew, now, what it was that she feared. She had faced it, and it was nearly time to get off the train; she could think about it again later. She would store it away, for future consideration. And meanwhile, she would have to think of something to say to the girls. She opened her bag, and took out an old envelope and began to scribble herself some notes for a speech.

The headmistress met her on the station. She had been met by many such people, on many such stations, and had always, at the time, thought to herself how nice they were, these people. It was only afterwards, in retrospect, that she would come to admit to herself that some of them were quite frightful. She wondered, now, as she walked up to the waiting woman in her fur coat, if one of the consequences of her last day of life would be that the dislike would always, now, set in instantly, that the judgement would always, now, be made at once, because there was so little time left for other ways of doing things. The thought crossed her mind, in the instant as she approached, paused, checked that it was the right person with the right look of recognition, and extended her cold hand: and it was so – she knew at once that she did not like this woman at all, that she could have no time for her at all. Afterwards, she thought, if I had not conceived such a motion, it would not have been so: as part of her was to believe, despite the evidence, for the rest of her life, that if she had not gone to the doctor that morning, the thing inside her would not have existed at all. She should never have condoned its existence.

As they drove back to the school, the headmistress in the
fur coat talked about town councillors and local education authority people and how one had to give them sherry. She then started to complain bitterly about the fact that her school had been turned into a comprehensive. As Jenny Jamieson had accepted the invitation because the school was a comprehensive, she was not well inclined towards this line of conversation. Nor did she think much of Miss Trueman’s reasons for despising town councillors and aldermen, nor of her tact in uttering them. She had often received surprises of the same kind and could never decide whether those who spoke to her in such a vein simply mistook her own moderately fashionable and public political views and prejudices – or whether they were utterly indifferent to them and would have uttered them stubbornly, tactlessly, regardless of the nature of the audience.

So she did not have much to say in reply to the small talk of the headmistress, Miss Trueman. However, upon arriving at the school, she managed to make the usual obligatory remarks about the charm of its location, the modernity of its buildings, its handsome array of Speech Day flowers.

They were to have sherry before the ceremony. Jenny Jamieson went to the headmistress’s lavatory and discovered to her alarm that she was losing rather a lot of blood: doubtless the surgeon had prodded whatever was producing the blood rather hard and had disturbed it considerably. She had nothing to stop it with: she had not brought anything, had not thought of it. She disliked the headmistress too much to ask her if she had any Tampax. Anyway, she thought, she is probably too old to need such things, this woman. She had a moment of panic, standing there in the centrally heated lavatory. But she decided to ignore the blood. After all, she said to herself, it takes an awful lot of blood to show. One can feel quite soaked sometimes and when one looks at one’s
clothes it hasn’t even got through one layer, let alone to the surface.

Nevertheless, she declined a glass of sherry. She was not feeling too well, and the room was far too hot. She had a glass of water instead, as there were no soft drinks. So much for gracious living, she thought, as she watched Miss Trueman deftly condescending to the town councillors and the staff, and endured a succession of people who said how wise she was not to drink before speaking and how glad they were that they didn’t have to speak themselves. She felt rather dizzy and was extremely aware of the place where the surgeon had poked her.