A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble. Part 5.
Watch on KineScope.
She was rather surprised to find herself at the hospital, as she had been rather surprised to find herself at her doctor’s the month before. She was an exceptionally healthy woman, was Jenny Jamieson, and so afraid of hypochondria (an affliction she truly despised) that she never allowed herself to think about her health. She ignored her body. It was not a subject that could be contemplated with much pleasure, for although beautiful now, momentarily, she expected daily the decay of beauty and did not allow herself to dwell too much on pleasure or on fear. She was a sensible woman.
Probably you begin to see by now how sensible she was. But nevertheless, although sensible, on this occasion, she had allowed a splendid ignorance to go on a little too long. For several months now, she had been bleeding when she ought not to have been and had been too busy even to worry about it. Occasionally, she would say to herself, Oh, God (wiping the sheets on the bed, throwing away another pair of paper knickers), oh, God, I must do something about that. And then the phone would ring, or a child would call, or the post would arrive, or it would be time to go to the studio, and she would forget. So she didn’t get round to going to the doctor until one morning, when the company rang her up and said that, unexpectedly, they wouldn’t be wanting her after all, as her guest had been held up by an air-traffic controllers’ strike in Florida. So she had a morning off, and instead of sitting down with the paper and a cup of coffee to enjoy it, she instantly, and, as it seemed, entirely arbitrarily, began to worry about the bleeding, and went up to the doctor’s and sat in his surgery waiting to see him for an hour and a half.
She rather thought (being a healthy person) that he would say not to be so silly, when she described her symptoms. She expected him to say that it was nothing at all. But he didn’t. Instead, he listened gravely and attentively, and didn’t smile once (though she smiled enough for two) and told her she ought to go and see a gynaecologist. ‘Oh, all right’, she said. And so here she found herself, in a gynaecological hospital, waiting patiently for her turn.
She waited for hours. Thank God she had known it would take hours. She kept thinking how demoralizing it would have been, if one hadn’t known. Luckily one was not as young and nervous as one used to be.
The surgeon was a short, nice old man. He dug around inside her with his fingers until she cried out. Does that hurt, he said. No, no, she said. Because it did not hurt. It frightened her, it did not hurt her.
She was still expecting him to smile, as she sat up on the white paper sheet in her beige petticoat, and to tell her that there was nothing there.
And he did smile. But what he said was, ‘You’d better come in for a little operation.’ She didn’t listen very attentively to his answers to her sensible questions, though she forced herself (as though on the screen) to ask them all. She asked about malignant growths, and cervical smears, and polyps and ulcers, but she wasn’t listening.
She remembered, faintly, a dreadful interview with a cabinet minister, when she had been so crumpled up with bellyache that she had hardly been able to hear a word the man was saying. The surgeon seemed to be trying to reassure her: he patted her on the knee. He did not recognize her: probably he was too busy carving women up to watch the television. She had no illusions about the extent of her notoriety. And anyway, women in their petticoats look much the same. She loved him, for patting her knee through the hospital sheet.
‘You go to the appointments lady, my dear’, he said. ‘See when they can fit you in’.
There would be a bed free in three weeks’ time.
I know what beauty is, she thought, as she walked through the front door of the hospital, dreading already her return: beauty is the love that shone through my face.
And it is dying, it has been murdered, and they will see nothing but their own ugliness. Beauty is love, she thought.
She was so dazed by her encounter with the surgeon that she wandered, idly, for half an hour or so. She walked up and down the streets off Oxford Street. She was terrified. She was ill, she was dying. I have wasted my life, she thought. Oh, God, she thought, direct me, please.