A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble. Part 4.
Watch on KineScope.
She was due for lunch, at one, in a French restaurant in Soho. She was to entertain a clergyman, due for interview. He had outspoken views on violence in Africa and the need for the churches to offer their support. She was hoping for conviction from him, for she herself veered towards pacifism, weakly. She was not looking forward to the lunch. There had been a day when lunches had been her delight: newly released from the burden of cooking unwanted meals for infants, and herself brooding morosely over a boiled egg or a piece of cheese, she had embarked on large meals and wine and shellfish and cigarettes and coffee and chat, with great pleasure. But the pleasure had faded, and now she feared to fall asleep in the afternoons. She was so tired, these days.
Her secretary had booked the table. The clergyman, said her secretary, had seemed delighted at the prospect of lunch. And as Jenny’s programme paid its interviewees badly, in her now sophisticated view, lunch was considered a justifiable expense. She looked at her watch, as she got out of the taxi. Five to one, it was. She was due at the hospital at three, she must make sure she was not late, Africa or no Africa.
She was drinking a glass of tonic when the clergyman arrived. She always ordered tonic if she got there first, because it looked like gin and didn’t put other people off drinking. Other people did hate to be discouraged from drinking, she had found. The clergyman, deceived, ordered a Campari. He was expecting her to twinkle and glitter and glow like something on a Christmas tree: she could see the expectation in his eyes, as he looked at her over the menu. And she thought, Dare I disappoint him? And then she thought, sickened, as she decided on a salad: I treat people like children, and I treat my children like adults.
She thought of her children, with unaccountable yearning. The yearning was mixed, vaguely mixed, with the thought of the hospital. Jenny Jamieson loved her children with a grand passion. Sometimes, looking at them, she thought she would faint with love.
The clergyman ordered soup and poulet grandmère. She joined him with the poulet.
They talked about Mozambique and Angola and Rhodesia and the leadership of the Zulus. They talked about the World Council of Churches. She was able to watch him enjoy the familiar shock of the thoroughness with which she had done her homework. She had a good memory for dates and facts and had found it extremely useful: it commanded instant respect. She knew that he knew more of the realities than she did – he had been there, after all, he had lived with them – but he was not as good at dates.
She had been a good examinee and was now a good examiner.
But she did not like the clergyman. She had wanted to like him, as he had wanted to like her. But they did not like each other. She did not like him, really, because he had agreed to eat lunch with her and appear on her programme. She thought of Groucho Marx this time, not Karl, and his remark that he did not want to belong to any club that admitted him as a member. What were they doing there, both of them, sitting eating an expensive meal, when an agreement had just been made that decided that Africans in Rhodesia could not vote until they had £900 income a year? The average income for an African in Rhodesia was £156 p.a., or so she had read in her morning’s paper.
It occurred to her that the clergyman did not like her for much the same reason. It was not possible for them to like each other, sitting in such a place.
The allowances we have to make, she thought, are just too much for us.
In another mood she might have essayed an ironic hint, a smile, to indicate that she had recognized that this was so, to do him the credit of thinking that he too might have known it. But why should they be let off?
She continued to think, however, that she might feel differently about the whole matter on Wednesday week, when the clergyman was to appear on her programme.
So she asked questions and made notes of answers, as they ate their chicken and declined pudding and drank black coffee. Then the clergyman had to go, and she had just time to arrive comfortably, by taxi, at the hospital.