A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (12 page)

‘I’ll come and see it,’ he said, ‘if I’m not dead by then.’

‘Do you want me to read to you, or are you going to sleep?’ she said: she had actually opened her book at the bookmark.

‘You’re amazing,’ he said.

‘Yes, I am, aren’t I,’ she said, complacently, smiling without looking at him. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing. You’ll never ruin me, because you’ll never have the time to set about it properly. It takes time to ruin another person.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ he said, and shut his eyes, as she started to read her book: images moved through his mind in confusion, pine trees, road signs, passing cars, hillsides, and he could never decide whether he and she were people who had the stature to cope with the disasters that had befallen them, and why it was that she had been asked to deal with that child, and how gloriously it had hardened her nature (perhaps it was stature that he had glimpsed as he sat by her looming above him in the car – she had forgotten to ring London, he would remind her in the morning to ring London), while all that he had to bear (all, why all?) was a chill caught from going to bed with his hair wet and a frigid hysterical wife: but perhaps, after all, it was ridiculous to measure in this way, because both tragedy and love are not human possessions, they are not allocated, and they fill the air, they are the backdrop like the pine trees, and there is nobody alive who does not live in these perpetually ebbing and flowing conditions, so that her sorrows were in a real sense his, and everyone’s, and he was not coldly caring for them or using
them or manipulating them as he had sometimes feared, any more than she was him, because they were all a part of the same thing, joined as this black leather was to those faded frescoes; a mystic sense of the unity of all sorrow filled him as he lay there, delirious with influenza and alcohol, and if this was so then how could he abuse, or ruin her?

In the morning, he could hardly remember what had gone through his mind the night before, but he remembered, solicitously, to remind her to ring London to see how things were: and she thanked him, although she had, of course, remembered herself.

And oddly enough, long after they had returned to England, years after, he had only to think of pine trees and Alpine landscapes to be reminded of something half realized, a revelation of comfort too dim to articulate, a revelation that had lost its words and its fine edges and its meaning, but not its images. He thought of pine trees, and he thought of her, and the memory (why should he not choose, even for himself, a word of some dignity?) – the memory sustained him.

(1969)

6

The Gifts of War

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Aeneid
, Book II, I.49

When she woke in the morning, she could tell at once, as soon as she reached consciousness, that she had some reason to feel pleased with herself, some rare cause for satisfaction. She lay there quietly for a time, enjoying the unfamiliar sensation, not bothering to place it, grateful for its vague comfortable warmth. It protected her from the disagreeable noise of her husband’s snores, from the thought of getting breakfast, from the coldness of the linoleum when she finally dragged herself out of bed. She had to wake Kevin: he always overslept these days, and he took so long to get dressed and get his breakfast, she was surprised he wasn’t always late for school. She never thought of making him go to bed earlier; she hadn’t the heart to stop him watching the telly, and anyway she enjoyed his company, she liked having him around in the evenings, laughing in his silly seven-year-old way at jokes he didn’t understand – jokes she didn’t always understand herself, and which she couldn’t explain when he asked her to. ‘You don’t know
anything
, Mum,’ he would groan, but she didn’t mind his condemnations: she didn’t expect to know anything; it amused her to see him behaving like a man already, affecting superiority, harmlessly, helplessly, in an ignorance that was as yet so much greater than her own – though she would have died rather than have allowed him to suspect her amusement, her
permissiveness. She grumbled at him constantly, even while wanting to keep him there: she snapped at his endless questions, she snubbed him, she repressed him, she provoked him. And she did not suffer from doing this, because she knew that they could not hurt each other: he was a child, he wasn’t a proper man yet, he couldn’t inflict true pain, any more than she could truly repress him, and his teasing, obligatory conventional schoolboy complaints about her cooking and her stupidity seemed to exorcize, in a way, those other crueller onslaughts. It was as though she said to herself: if my little boy doesn’t mean it when he shouts at me, perhaps my husband doesn’t either: perhaps there’s no more serious offence in my bruises and my greying hair than there is in those harmless childish moans. In the child, she found a way of accepting, without too much submission, her lot.

She loved the child: she loved him with so much passion that a little of it spilled over generously onto the man who had misused her: in forgiving the child his dirty blazer and shirts and his dinner-covered tie, she forgave the man for his Friday nights and the childish vomit on the stairs and the bedroom floor. It never occurred to her that a grown man might resent more than hatred such second-hand forgiveness. She never thought of the man’s emotions: she thought of her own, and her feelings for the child redeemed her from bitterness, and shed some light on the dark industrial terraces and the waste lands of the city’s rubble. Her single-minded commitment was a wonder of the neighbourhood: she’s a sour piece, the neighbours said, she keeps herself to herself a bit too much, but you’ve got to hand it to her, she’s been a wonderful mother to that boy, she’s had a hard life, but she’s been a wonderful mother to that boy. And she, tightening her woolly headscarf over her aching ears as she walked down the cold steep windy street to join the queue at the post office or the butcher’s,
would stiffen proudly, her hard lips secretly smiling as she claimed and accepted and nodded to her role, her place, her social dignity.

This morning, as she woke Kevin, he reminded her instantly of her cause for satisfaction, bringing to the surface the pleasant knowledge that had underlain her wakening.

‘Hi, Mum,’ he said, as he opened his eyes to her, ‘how old am I today?’

‘Seven, of course,’ she said, staring dourly at him, pretending to conceal her instant knowledge of the question’s meaning, assuming scorn and dismissal. ‘Come on, get up, child, you’re going to be late as usual.’

‘And how old am I tomorrow, Mum?’ he asked, watching her like a hawk, waiting for that delayed, inevitable break.

‘Come on, come on,’ she said crossly, affecting impatience, stripping the blankets off him, watching him writhe in the cold air, small and bony in his striped pyjamas.

‘Oh, go on, Mum,’ he said.

‘What d’you mean, “go on”,’ she said, ‘don’t be so cheeky, come on, get a move on, you’ll get no breakfast if you don’t get a move on.’

‘Just think, Mum,’ he said, ‘how old am I tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, ripping his pyjama jacket off him, wondering how long to give the game, secure in her sense of her own timing.

‘Yes you do, yes you do,’ he yelled, his nerve beginning, very slightly, to falter. ‘You know what day it is tomorrow.’

‘Why, my goodness me,’ she said, judging that the moment had come, ‘I’d quite forgotten. Eight tomorrow. My goodness me.’

And she watched him grin and wriggle, too big now for embraces, his affection clumsy and knobbly: she avoided the touch of him these days, pushing him irritably away when he
leaned on her chair-arm, twitching when he banged into her in the corridor or the kitchen, pulling her skirt or overall away from him when he tugged at it for attention, regretting sometimes the soft and round docile baby that he had once been, and yet proud at the same time of his gawky growing, happier, more familiar with the hostilities between them (a better cover for love) than she had been with the tender wide smiles of adoring infancy.

‘What you got me for my birthday?’ he asked, as he struggled out of his pyjama trousers: and she turned at the door and looked back at him, and said, ‘What d’you mean, what’ve I got you? I’ve not got you anything. Only good boys get presents.’

‘I
am
good,’ he said, ‘I’ve been ever so good all week.’

‘Not that I noticed, you weren’t,’ she said, knowing that too prompt an acquiescence would ruin the dangerous pleasure of doubtful anticipation.

‘Go on, tell me,’ he said, and she could tell from his whining plea that he was almost sure that she had got what he wanted, almost sure but not quite sure, that he was, in fact, in the grip of an exactly manipulated degree of uncertainty, a torment of hope that would last him for a whole twenty-four hours, until the next birthday morning.

‘I’m telling you,’ she said, her hand on the door, staring at him sternly, ‘I’m telling you, I’ve not got you anything.’ And then, magically, delightfully, she allowed herself and him that lovely moment of grace: ‘I’ve not got you anything –
yet
,’ she said: portentous, conspiratorial, yet very very faintly threatening.

‘You’re going to get it today,’ he shrieked, unable to restrain himself, unable to keep the rules: and as though annoyed by his exuberance she marched smartly out of the small back room, and down the narrow stairs to the kitchen, shouting at
him in an excessive parade of rigour, ‘Come on, get moving, get your things on, you’ll be late for school, you’re always late’: and she stood over him while he ate his flakes, watching each spoonful disappear, heaving a great sigh of resigned fury when he spilled on the oilcloth, catching his guilty glance as he wiped it with his sleeve, not letting him off, unwilling, unable to relax into a suspect tenderness.

He went out the back way to school: she saw him through the yard and stood in the doorway watching him disappear, as she always watched him, down the narrow alley separating the two rows of back-to-back cottages, along the ancient industrial cobbles, relics of another age: as he reached the Stephensons’ door she called out to him, ‘Eight tomorrow, then,’ and smiled, and waved, and he smiled back, excited, affectionate, over the ten yards’ gap, grinning, his grey knee socks pulled smartly up, his short cropped hair already standing earnestly on end, resisting the violent flattening of the brush with which she thumped him each morning: he reminded her of a bird, she didn’t know why, she couldn’t have said why, a bird, vulnerable, clumsy, tenacious, touching. Then Bill Stephenson emerged from his back door and joined him, and they went down the alley together, excluding her, leaving her behind, kicking at pebbles and fag packets with their scuffed much-polished shoes.

She went back through the yard and into the house, and made a pot of tea, and took it up to the man in bed. She dumped it down on the corner of the dressing-table beside him, her lips tight, as though she dared not loosen them: her face had only one expression, and she used it to conceal the two major emotions of her life, resentment and love. They were so violently opposed, these passions, that she could not move from one to the other: she lacked flexibility; so she inhabited a grim inexpressive no-man’s-land between
them, feeling in some way that she thus achieved a kind of justice.

‘I’m going up town today,’ she said, as the man on the bed rolled over and stared at her.

He wheezed and stared.

‘I’m going to get our Kevin his birthday present,’ she said, her voice cold and neutral, offering justice and no more.

‘What’ll I do about me dinner?’ he said.

‘I’ll be back,’ she said. ‘And if I’m not, you can get your own. It won’t kill you.’

He mumbled and coughed, and she left the room. When she got downstairs, she began, at last, to enter upon the day’s true enjoyment: slowly she took possession of it, this day that she had waited for, and which could not now be taken from her. She’d left herself a cup of tea on the table, but before she sat down to drink it she got her zip plastic purse from behind the clock on the dresser, and opened it, and got the money out. There it was, all of it: thirty shillings, three ten-bob notes, folded tightly up in a brown envelope: twenty-nine and eleven, she needed, and a penny over. Thirty shillings, saved, unspoken for, to spend. She’d wondered, from time to time, if she ought to use it to buy him something useful, but she knew now that she wasn’t going to: she was going to get him what he wanted – a grotesque, unjustifiable luxury, a pointless gift. It never occurred to her that the pleasure she took in doing things for Kevin was anything other than selfish: she felt vaguely guilty about it, she would have started furtively, like a miser, had anyone knocked on the door and interrupted her contemplation, she would bitterly have denied the intensity of her anticipation.

And when she put her overcoat on, and tied on her head-square, and set off down the road, she tried to appear to the neighbours as though she wasn’t going anywhere in particular:
she nodded calmly, she stopped to gape at Mrs Phillips’ new baby (all frilled up, poor mite, in ribbons and pink crochet, a dreadful sight, poor little innocent, like something off an iced cake, people should know better than to do such things to their own children); she even called in at the shop for a quarter of tea as a cover for her excursion, so reluctant was she to let anyone know that she was going into town, thus unusually, on a Wednesday morning. And as she walked down the steep hillside, where the abandoned tram-lines still ran, to the next fare stage of the bus, she could not have said whether she was making the extra walk to save two pence, or whether she was more deviously concealing her destination until the last moment from both herself and the neighbourhood.

Because she hardly ever went into town these days. In the old days she had come this way quite often, going down the hill on the tram with her girl friends, with nothing better in mind than a bit of window-shopping and a bit of a laugh and a cup of tea: penniless then as now, but still hopeful, still endowed with the touching faith that if by some miracle she could buy a pair of nylons or a particular blue lace blouse or a new brand of lipstick, then deliverance would be granted to her in the form of money, marriage, romance, the visiting prince who would glimpse her in the crowd, glorified by that seductive blouse, and carry her off to a better world. She could remember so well how hopeful they had been: even Betty Jones, fat, monstrous, ludicrous Betty Jones had cherished such rosy illusions, had gazed with them in longing at garments many sizes too small and far too expensive, somehow convinced that if she could by chance or good fortune acquire one all her flesh would melt away and reveal the lovely girl within. Time had taught Betty Jones: she shuffled now in shoes cracked and splitting beneath her own weight. Time had taught them all. The visiting prince, whom need and desire had once truly
transfigured in her eyes, now lay there at home in bed, stubbly, disgusting, ill, malingering, unkind: she remembered the girl who had seen such other things in him with a contemptuous yet pitying wonder. What fools they all had been, to laugh, to giggle and point and whisper, to spend their small wages to deck themselves for such a sacrifice. When she saw the young girls today, of the age that she had been then, still pointing and giggling with the same knowing ignorance, she was filled with a bitterness so acute that her teeth set against it, and the set lines of her face stiffened to resist and endure and conceal it. Sometimes she was possessed by a rash desire to warn them, to lean forward and tap on their shoulders, to see their astonished vacant faces, topped with their mad over-perfumed mounds of sticky hair, turn upon her in alarm and disbelief. What do you think you’re playing at, she would say to them, what do you think you’re at? Where do you think it leads you, what do you think you’re asking for? And they would blink at her, uncomprehending, like condemned cattle, the sacrificial virgins, not yet made restless by the smell of blood. I could tell you a thing or two, she wanted to say, I could tell you enough to wipe those silly grins off your faces: but she said nothing, and she could not have said that it was envy or a true charitable pity that most possessed and disturbed her when she saw such innocents.