A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble. Part 3.
Watch on KineScope.
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.