A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble. Part 9.
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Go back to Part 8
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 non-academic 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 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.
Go back to Part 8