A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (11 page)

‘The car’s too heavy for you,’ he said.

‘I could drive for a while anyway, but first of all, we’ll buy some things to make you better. You stay here, and wait till I come back.’

‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

So they went together, through the sunny streets of that famous place, looking for whatever the Austrians used as chemists; the chemist would not sell them codeine without a prescription, so they had to make do with some throat mixture and some more aspirins. She led him back to the car, and with a sense of hopeless submission and abandon he allowed himself, for the first time ever, to be put in the passenger’s seat. She didn’t start too well: she reversed smartly into a yellow stone wall, swore, pulled away, set off on the left-hand side of the road, couldn’t find the indicator, and then was away. He opened his bottle of whisky, sat back and gave up. He shut his eyes, and must have fallen asleep, because when he opened them they were driving through acres of flowers and dark-green trees, and there were Alps rising again on the horizon. She was singing to herself: Mozart, inevitably. A passing tribute.

‘Hello, darling,’ he said, and she stopped singing to pay him attention.

‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Lovely. But I don’t like the look of those mountains. Are you going to enjoy being driven through those mountains?’

‘I’ve given up,’ he said. ‘I might as well die here as anywhere, don’t you think?’

‘Have another drink,’ she said, and accelerated towards the snowy backdrop.

‘I’m having such a lovely time,’ she said to him, after a while, as the road began to ascend, sharply and dangerously. ‘What about you?’

He held tight to the whisky, knowing he could not refuse her a drink if she asked for one: and after a little while she did.

‘What I need is a little drink,’ she said, as pine trees and icy torrents fell away from the edge of the car into nothingness.

‘Of course,’ he said, and handed it over. Trust, that was what it was called: mutual trust. He shrank down into his seat until she seemed larger than he was: she seemed to have taken on some extra quality that he could not quite name, and he conceded it to her entirely, slumped as he was, and feverish. He knew that he had a temperature: perhaps he would soon start to have hallucinations. Dusk was falling, and he was also hungry: but how could he, who was supposed to be ill, suggest that they might have something to eat? And even if they stopped, she would only allow him something horrible, like another egg, or a sandwich. He was in her hands.

It was so strange a sensation, after all these many months – years almost – when he had told himself that he had been looking after her, that as he lay back there in his unnatural condition he began to look back over the time they had known each other, and wonder whether it had been as he supposed, or whether it had been, as it now was, quite otherwise. She had seemed so desperate in that first real conversation they had ever had, initiated in a Ministry lift when she had been, in fact, crying: he, who had covertly desired her for months without realizing it, suddenly knew what he was after in his abrupt delight at the sight of this God-sent weakness. Later, when she told him the reason for her tears, he had flinched a
little, not having expected quite such flights of tragedy, despite the brief rumours that, through mutual friends, had already reached him: the dotty mother, the cruelly defective child, the cruelly defected husband. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she had said of this last character, blinking and indeed laughing as she drank up her gin, ‘I mean really, who could have stuck it? And it was so clear that I preferred the child to him, and what man could ever have taken his wife preferring a child like
that
? A nice child maybe, that would be natural, but God, you should see mine …’ And later, he had seen it: and so much of his love for her had overflowed and surrounded her by this time that he too had regarded it with a kind of love. He had taken the part of reason, from time to time, suggesting clinics and suitable schools, advising indulgence, but he so admired her obstinacy and knew she recognized his attempts as merely verbal, noises of encouragement intended to magnify and support her right decisions. Heroic, he thought her: and he could not deny that his entry into her life had been of the utmost simplicity, so avid had she been for company and human touching. The rewards of the touching he had foreseen, and he was not disappointed.

He had met the husband too, and discovered that, as he had suspected, they had been at school together. He had thought the name familiar. And looking back on him now, as they moved through the baffling darkness, he recalled him with an uneasy clarity: a horribly cheerful man, Derek, extroverted and yet by no means stupid, easy to get on with, in fact almost irresistibly good company, and not at all the kind of person to contemplate a lifetime of clouds and sorrows. He had walked out of it almost immediately, and in that pub where they met he had said gaily, speaking of his own wife, ‘Oh, Christ, Daniel, she doesn’t mind, she likes it, what she couldn’t stand was my not liking it. I wish you all the best with her,’
he said, ‘she’ll get on well with you, you’ve both got a taste for gloom. Look at that woman you married.’ And how could Daniel reply that he did not find Derek’s wife gloomy, that, on the contrary, she seemed to him of a remarkable resilience? But perhaps it was true that she liked a situation of sorrow. Perhaps she was so happy now, driving along really quite competently, because she was able to prove herself against the odds? And himself there, incapable and suffering, like a sick child. Perhaps she felt at home. It was not at all what he had intended. He had intended a holiday.

A little farther on, just as he had dozed off, having decided that she intended to drive all night, she pulled the car up abruptly by the side of the road and got out. She wandered off out of the range of his vision, and he decided that he too should take advantage of the stop, but could hardly find the strength to move. Finally, he did so: then stood by the car waiting for her to return. They were entirely surrounded by the vast presence of mountains: huge, they towered above the dwarfed car and fell away below it, at a gradient so steep that one wondered how the trees could maintain their incredible, defiant, perpendicular grip. It was alarmingly silent: a bird cried, and there was the faint but very distant sighing of a waterfall. He could hear no movement from her, not a sound or a rustle, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the light he saw her standing at the far end of the lay-by, leaning on the low wall and looking downward. He went towards her, and stood by her, and touched her cheek, which was cold from the night air.

‘You shouldn’t be out in the cold,’ she said, softly, not turning to him. ‘You’re ill.’

‘I’m better,’ he said, and indeed he felt so very strange that it was hard to tell if he were better or worse. Certainly, whatever he had was less locally painful.

‘Where are we?’ he said, after a while, and she turned to him and said, ‘We’re going downward, now. We’re through the mountains, really. We can sleep in Yugoslavia. We said we would.’

‘It’s so quiet, here,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

They listened to the silence, and then she said, ‘I can’t understand it, can you, people being comforted by nature? What use is all this to me? It’s nothingness, without people.’ And he agreed, but as he meekly got back into the passenger’s seat, he thought for the first time in his life (and delirious, possibly, through illness or alcohol) that there was more to it than that, and that those vast moving shapes and abrupt inclines and icy summits were, after all, emblems of conditions, in the grip of which, in her frail human presence, he too moved.

They reached Yugoslavia. She had a moment of exaltation and triumph at the frontier, leaping out of the car, talking gaily in lousy Italian to the frontier people, leaving him sitting there stupefied while she went off to buy him a dry ham sandwich and a bottle of slivovitz: animated, gay, swinging her hair about like a person in a film, laughing. ‘Poor, poor darling,’ she said, as she sank down by him again, sinking her teeth into her hunk of bread, ‘I bet you’re too ill even to
think
you love me, aren’t you?’ And, incredibly, she laughed.

‘Why on earth are you so cheerful?’ he managed to mutter, as the dry crumbs lacerated his infinitely delicate throat.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, switching on the engine. ‘A sense of achievement, perhaps? Or because I’ve got you so helpless at last. Come on, we’re off to Ljubljana.’

He had completely forgotten where Ljubljana was, so he did not protest: he had no notion of the time, nor of the distances they had covered or were to cover. From time to time, as he lay there, half asleep, a feeble spasm of resentment would shake him: all that waiting for this. The excursion of
a lifetime, achieved through a sequence of miraculous coincidences (his wife going off to Canada for the week with all the children, who could possibly have foreseen or counted on that?), and all he could do with it was to shrivel up with an aching head and a painful body and wish that she would let him lie down in a comfortable bed. He didn’t even fancy the whisky any more: dutifully, like a good patient, he unscrewed the top of the slivovitz, sniffed it, and tried a sip. It was quite nice, nicer than he had remembered from his last experience with it years before: dry and fruitlike and tasting very strongly of the pale yellow colour that it was. Why not purple, he thought to himself, as he swallowed another mouthful, why is it not purple like plums are, and that was his last conscious thought before he woke up in Ljubljana and found that she was trying to lift him out of the car, assisted by someone who looked like a hotel porter. She and the man in uniform were laughing: at him, no doubt, and angrily he staggered to his feet. ‘Darling,’ she said, as he swayed a little, clutching at the open car door, ‘we’re here.’ And there, indeed, they were, as in some nightmare or vision: vast glass doors and arcades swam before his eyes, for she seemed to have driven the car more or less into the hotel. There was a deadly silence, as there had been in the mountains, and he knew that it must be very late. She pushed open the doors and he staggered, crumpled, after her, and was pushed into a lift. When they arrived at the bedroom he could see that she had already been up there and arranged everything, for her nightdress was laid out on the bed: she had done it all, she, who was incapable of lighting herself a cigarette in a slight draught. And she had done it all, moreover, while he was asleep in the car: she had left him there, in much the same way as he and his wife had been accustomed to leave small sleeping children while they had lunch in country restaurants. She and the porter seemed on
excellent terms, speaking English and Italian and French to one another: they were probably mocking him, but his ears were buzzing and humming so loudly that he could not hear. He sat down on the bed, and finally the porter went away; and when she turned to him from the door, which she had shut and locked, he felt suddenly angry, as though he had been made a fool of behind his back, or derided in his sleep.

‘Where in God’s name are we?’ he said, looking around him with irritation: the hotel was modern and streamlined, and the bed and chairs were upholstered in a kind of black cushioned leather, of the sort that had always figured largely in his erotic fantasies.

‘In Ljubljana, of course,’ she said: she was calmly getting undressed for bed.

‘You must be mad,’ he said. ‘Why ever didn’t you stop before?’

‘Because we planned it this way,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling, now? Better?’

‘I feel dreadful,’ he said, and she was smiling down at him so benignly that he felt himself on the verge of tears.

‘You’d better get some sleep,’ she said, and started to untie his shoes. He let her take them off, and as she knelt there he was possessed by such a lucid sorrow that he reached out for her and held on to her; she put her head on his knees, and he stroked her hair.

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, it’s so hopeless, we haven’t a chance, we’ve never had a chance. We’re so kind to each other, but it’s hopeless, it’s entirely hopeless, we might as well give up. What good does it do, to be so careful, to be so kind and careful?’

He made her cry: she started to cry, and he stroked her hair.

‘I don’t mind, I don’t mind,’ she said into his knees.

‘The thing is,’ he said, seeing it quite clearly at last, ‘that if
I had you, I’d ruin you. You know I would, don’t you? Or if you had me? There isn’t a hope of people doing anything better with one another. Not a hope.’

‘That’s not so,’ she said. ‘But if it were, it wouldn’t matter.’

‘Of course it would matter,’ he said, aching. ‘We’ve told ourselves for so long that we – if we were given the chance, we …’

But he couldn’t say all the things that they would have been able to have, and to be, and to do: love, harmony, absence of pain and cruelty, absence of absence.

‘But darling,’ she said, and he could feel her shaking with some new kind of emotion, ‘don’t you see, my love, that we simply haven’t a
chance
of being given a chance? It’s wonderful, really. It’s miraculous. Even now – ’ and she looked up at him, with great rings under her eyes smeared grey with fatigue – ‘even now, when we did have a bit of a chance, you’ve gone and got this horrible illness, so we’ll never know what it would have been like if you hadn’t. We’ll never have to worry about it, we can just carry on being kind, and making promises. It’s amazing, really. There’ll never be any reason to know that we couldn’t do it.’

‘Couldn’t do what?’ he said, though he knew what she meant: he simply wanted to see if she would say it.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, embarrassed by the simplicity of the sentiment, rising to her feet and pulling back the covers of the bed. ‘I don’t know. Be happy, I suppose I meant.’

‘I am happy,’ he said, watching her as she arranged her things by the bedside: her glass of water, her book on old people, her pack of cigarettes, her bottle of pills.

‘Do you know,’ she said, conversationally, as he got into bed by her, ‘this is the most enormous place, this hotel, and this modern bit is just stuck on the front of it, it’s not like this at all really, there are acres and acres more of it, very old and
faded and peeling, with nineteenth-century murals and dirty mosaic corridors and Art Nouveau windows and God knows what else. They’ve just stuck this black leather bit on for people like you and me. Foreign tourists. You must come and look at the rest of it in the morning. It’s rather frightening, the contrast. But magic. You’ll like it.’