A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (18 page)

There were some tropical fish in a tank on a bookshelf. They had some babies, protected by an inner glass tank. They would have eaten their own babies otherwise, the mothers. She commented on the fish and admired them, for want of better things to say, and a woman to whom she had been introduced started to tell a story about her own children’s goldfish and how they kept dying.

Jenny Jamieson did not like this conversation because her own fish had died the year before, and she had been extremely unhappy on the day of their death, when they had floated around keeling over, the two of them, at a sad angle, as though they had lost their sense of watery balance. She had disliked the sense of death in the room, but had been unable to save or kill them and had not moved them out of the room because it would have seemed to her to be graceless, heartless, to make them die in a strange place. Let them die here, she had thought, and had endured their passing. Then she had gently buried them at the end of the garden under the lower branches of the cotoneaster.

But what was this woman saying to her now, interrupting her own memories of funeral? She was saying, in a harsh and
brutal nasal voice, laughing as she said it, ‘And I told the kids I’d buried them. I’d buried them in the garden, I said, but of course I hadn’t. I’d put them in the obvious place …’ And one or two other people laughed, but Jenny had missed her cue, she didn’t know what the other woman was saying. She knew her face had looked momentarily blank and baffled, and she started to speak, to say that where else should one bury them but in the garden, when the other woman said, heartily, ‘
You
know, I flushed them away, well, I mean to say, wouldn’t you?’ and Jenny worked out that this woman had actually put her children’s goldfish down the lavatory and then said that she had buried them in the garden. She did not know which was more unnatural, the woman’s insensitivity, or her own sensitivity, which made her so slow to recognize the meaning of words, the end of life, the obvious places to put dead bodies. She had flushed their little gold bodies down into the sewers, and what was wrong with that? Jenny Jamieson shivered and trembled: heaps of corpses filled her vision. She had buried her fish gently, reluctantly, sorrowfully: they had been in her charge and they had died. Her solicitude had been more than godly, for God left dead dogs on beaches and crushed rabbits on the brows of roads. Gold spectacles, gold fillings, mounds of pilfering and salvage. But flesh is not for salvage: it is not even flotsam or jetsam. It is waste.

And now it was time to go into the School Hall, and there was the platform, and the school orchestra, and the serried ranks of parents and children, and the returning sixth-formers who had left the year before, all dolled up, free of Miss Trueman’s surveillance, all come back to give the old thing a slap in the eye. And there were the prizes, dozens and dozens of them, all to be handed out with a cheerful smile; she would smile till the muscles of her face grew rigid and stiff. And here was a child presenting her with a bouquet; it smelled sickly,
of cemeteries and death; it was already decaying through its cellophane in the intense and human heat. And now the headmistress was about to deliver her report.

Jenny Jamieson sat back on her chair. There was no need to listen to the report. She thought again of the surgeon’s fingers and the white hospital sheet. She thought of the goldfish, wavering and keeling over, slowly gasping, unprotesting, dying in silence, rejected by their element, floating hopelessly upward. She was losing a lot of blood now; she could feel it seeping from her. Her knickers were quite wet. She was glad that she had put on her grey dress: it was of a thick material, though unfortunately it was pale enough to show, if marked. But it would absorb a good deal before it marked.

Miss Trueman talked of the difficulty of adapting to new ways, and the problem of the less gifted, and the marvellous way the school had coped with the upheavals of the last few years, and how it was now a happy unity, where each could find her place, with work fitting to her talents – ‘for we all have talents,’ said Miss Trueman, ‘though we may not all take our A levels.’

The school was rigidly streamed and had managed to segregate all its new nonacademic intake very thoroughly.

‘Our A-level results,’ said Miss Trueman, ‘are still as high as ever, we are proud to say.’

Jenny Jamieson thought, I will never let anyone inside me again. Too often, now, I have politely opened my legs. It shall not happen again. Too many meals I have politely cooked, too many times have I apologized.

‘Unfortunately,’ said Miss Trueman, ‘Mrs Hyams has had to retire this year through ill health, but I am sure we all join in sending her our very good wishes …’

Jenny Jamieson looked at the mothers and fathers, and at the girls. Blank and bored and docile they looked. They sat in
rows, very quietly, and let Miss Trueman (Harrogate and Somerville) look down upon them.

She thought, again, of her own children, and the bland confidence with which she had assumed that she herself would one day sit in such a hall, as a parent, and listen to others make dull and foolish speeches and hand out prizes to her own three. How much she had expected of life. She had expected to see them grow up, to see their long legs and their adult faces and their children. It was impossible that an accident, like death, could separate them from her. And yet it was possible: such things happened, daily.

She felt her spirit tremble, as it prepared to launch itself across this dizzy gulf: had it the power? Would its wings carry it to the other shore or would she fall, here, now, forever, into the darkness?

And she thought to herself: those who do not love, die, and they are forgotten, and it is of no account. But those who love as I have loved cannot perish. The body may perish, but my love could not cease to exist: it does not need me, I am dispensable, I may drop away in that hospital like an old husk, but I am not needed, the years I put in are enough (Freud would say, Klein would say, those mighty saints and heralds) – it is enough, I am released from existence, I am freed, for my love is stronger than the grave.

Her spirit, breathless, reached the other side. With immense excitement, with discovery, with revelation, she said to herself: My love is stronger than the grave.

Later she was to say to herself, All revelations are banal. But even so, it is as hard to receive them as it is to gaze at the sun, which is, after all, a commonplace and daily sight.

Still later she was to say to herself, That was the moment at which it was decided that I should not die, for that was the moment at which I accepted death.

But at the time, she sat there neatly, listening to Miss Trueman, who was by now reciting her own biography: ‘How fortunate we are,’ she was saying, ‘to have with us this evening Mrs Jamieson, who is so well known to all of us. How privileged we are,’ said Miss Trueman, with a most subtle and magnificent note of superiority in her privileged tones, ‘to have with us a woman who has distinguished herself …’

Some of us, of course, thought Jenny Jamieson, are so constructed that we have to end up smiling. She thought this then, even while she was still trembling with the intensity of her conviction. She was quick.

And she rose to her feet and smiled and began her speech on cue. And whether it was a shame or a dignity, she could not tell, she did it well, this kind of thing. But, as has been said already, she did most things well. Even her spiritual crises she endured well. And came up smiling. And stood there smiling, speaking of new opportunities for girls these days and how important it was to think in terms of having careers as well as husbands, ‘for the two, these days,’ said Jenny Jamieson, smiling confidently (shining, confident, a beautiful example), ‘for the two these days, can be so easily combined. We are so fortunate these days,’ said Jenny Jamieson, ‘and we must take every advantage of our opportunities.’

It would be hard to say what she herself thought of this ending. The force of her nature was very strong. She could not act without conviction. So she manufactured conviction. That is one way of looking at it. There are other ways.

What is true is that while she was standing there, and smiling, and speaking with such good cheer about the future of womankind, blood was seeping out of her, and trickling down her thigh, under her stocking and into her boot. There was an awful lot of it. Thank God, she said to herself, as she spoke
to others of other things, thank God I put a long dress and boots on, so it doesn’t show.

For twenty minutes, she spoke and bled.

Looking back, she was to think of this day as both a joke and a victory, but at whose expense, and over whom, she could not have said.

(1973)

9

Homework

I hope I don’t give the impression that I’m complaining about her behaviour. On the contrary, I know she has always been very good to me, very generous with her time, very friendly and sympathetic – and I can’t really expect it, there’s absolutely no reason why she should see me at all. She’s a very busy woman, I know – I’m always telling her that I realize how busy she is, and that she mustn’t let me put her out, that the minute I start boring her with my little worries she must just tell me to pack up and go. And she never does – to do her justice she never does, and even on this last occasion (and I was a little upset) – well, I quite understood how she felt. No, she has always been very generous to me. I always make it perfectly clear to her that all she has to do if she wants to put me off is just give me a ring. I’m always in, I say. You’re the busy one, not me, I’m nobody, I always say: just you give me a ring if you can’t manage Tuesday, we can easily fix another day. I’m
always
free. But she never does.

So you can imagine how uneasy it made me, to see her treat Damie so badly. It’s so unlike her, she’s such a patient, generous, understanding person, and that poor little boy – well, he’s not so little now, he must be about twelve, I suppose – but he certainly does get the rough end of her tongue. And the other day – I was really shocked. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know how to, and it was hardly my place.

I got there as usual, at about half-past five. She always says, come round as soon as you like – I used to get there at about half-past six, in time for supper, but lately I’ve got into the habit of arriving an hour or so earlier, so we can chat over tea. Once I got there about five, and she was on the telephone, and she stayed on it for hours and hardly looked at me once while she was talking – so, I’ve been careful not to get there before half-past, recently. Once, I got to her street so early I had to walk round and round the block to fill in the time, and I met her on one of the rounds; she was rushing down to the butcher, forgotten to buy the mince for supper – funny, how it’s usually mince when I go, I can’t imagine they have mince every evening – and she said, ‘Whatever are you doing?’ and I said, ‘Oh, just walking round the block, I didn’t want to bother you by getting there too early – ’ and she said not to be silly, to come along in at once, so I did. But I still don’t really like to get there much before half-past five, if I can help it. It doesn’t seem fair on her: she always seems to have so much left to do when she gets back from work. Of course, she says she doesn’t mind me being there while she’s getting supper ready: she likes to have someone to talk to, she says. I always offer to help her, but she says she’s not very good at being helped, she’d rather do things herself.

Anyway, on this particular evening I got there at about twenty past five: she was just clearing away the tea things. I thought she looked a bit tired, and I told her so, but she said it wasn’t anything in particular: she’d had a late night the night before (she tells
me
that she has to be in bed by eleven) and then a long day at the studio: they started work at eight, for some reason. She didn’t tell me much about the programme, so I gathered it wasn’t going too well, and tactfully kept off the subject. She asked me how I was getting on with Mary (that’s the woman I share a flat with), and how my father was,
and I told her about them. (My father’s in an Old People’s Home: I see him at weekends.) I told her about them, while she started chopping up onions and things to go in the mince. (I wish she wouldn’t put green pepper in: I’ve noticed that everyone fishes it out except her.) While I was trying to explain about Mary and how she couldn’t go on an Easter holiday with me after all although she’d said she would be free, the phone went three times: two business calls, and one call that she put down
very
sharply, I thought. ‘Now look,’ she said, in this very odd tone, ‘now look, you’ll have to ring again later. And mind you do. I’ll be very very annoyed with you if you don’t ring later.’ It didn’t sound like her at all: I could tell she was irritable, from her voice. I’m glad she doesn’t use that tone to me. But I suppose it is annoying, the phone going all the time, and the children running in and out. ‘Oh, buzz off, Kate,’ she kept saying to the little girl, who kept coming in to show her things she was making (origami, it was) – ‘oh, buzz off, Kate, go and watch telly, I’m trying to talk to Meg, can’t you see?’ She really was a bit sharp, but nothing like as sharp as she was to Damie later. Anyway, I don’t think Kate is as sensitive as Damie, she just went whistling back to the television, which they seem to watch all day and night, or at least when I’m there.

I was just explaining about the fact that Mary had already talked me into paying a deposit for the cottage for Easter when there was another interruption: the front-door bell, this time, and she gave such a start that she chopped her finger on the chopping knife. ‘
I’ll
answer it,’ I said, and set off down the corridor, but she wouldn’t have that: no, she had to answer it herself, and off she went, dripping blood and sucking her finger. I couldn’t quite see who it was: it was a man, I think, delivering something, but she’d put it down by the time she reached the kitchen. She didn’t tell me who it was. Then we
had ten minutes to ourselves before the phone went again: I knew who it was this time, it was her ex-husband, Tony. She always puts on that special brisk tone when she speaks to him. I know it conceals a lot of pain, but you certainly wouldn’t guess it, unless you knew her well, like I do. Obviously he wanted to discuss something to do with one of the children: I could almost hear what he was saying, he’s got such a loud voice. They talked for a few minutes, with her trying to put him off: I started to read the paper to show I wasn’t listening, and after a while she said firmly, ‘Now look, Tony, I can’t talk now, Meg’s here,’ and he rang off almost at once. I smiled at her as she came back to the chopping block, feeling quite pleased to have fulfilled the humble little function of having helped to get rid of him, but she didn’t look too pleased.