A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble. Part 6.
Watch on KineScope.
On the train, she sat down quietly and began to work out the implications of death.
Her life, luckily, she had heavily insured, some years before. It had seemed a good idea at the time, and she had never regretted it. Her husband, though competent in some ways, was feckless: he was also much hated, as editors often are, and if ever he lost his power to control others, others would not waste time in trying to ruin him. She had thought to herself, some years ago, as soon as she began to earn good money, I should insure myself, for the children’s sake. Well, she had done it, she had not merely thought about it, she had done it. That was the kind of woman she was. So she need not worry about their material future.
But what of their need for her?
She loved them. She had made herself indispensable. That had been her aim.
Would they weep for her?
The rain fell, outside, on the dark countryside. Two men, commuters, were playing cards, as they did every night. She envied their will to brighten their lot. Inside, she was weeping away, she was weeping blood. Whatever should she say to the girls, at the other end of this journey?
A friend of hers, recently, had killed herself. Jenny, with mechanical kindness, had comforted husband and mistress and child, in so much as it was in her to do so. It was the woman who had been her friend, after all, and she was dead. The child did not seem to notice much. So much sympathy had been lavished upon the survivors. But the woman, Jenny’s friend, was dead forever. She was beyond sympathy and love and fear. She was no more. What rage must have possessed her, at the moment of extinction, to know what tenderness would accrue to others from her death, while she lay rotting.
Jenny had a vision of herself dead, and her survivors basking in the warm sun of condolence. So much pleasanter for them than her presence, it would be. They did not much care for her presence, these days.
Though that, of course, was not true of the children. No, they would grieve for her, if she died, as she would, forever, for them, if they were to die.
And as she sat there, she knew that this was it, this was the reckoning. She would have to think about those things that she so much ignored. She would have to contemplate, now, here, her own not-being: would she die under the knife, would she expire in the hands of an incompetent anaesthetist, would she fade slowly from malignant growths, the months running down into weeks, the weeks into days? She had heard recently of a friend’s friend who had died at home: in the morning she had had breakfast, had played cards with her child, had chatted to her friend. Then she had fallen, as it seemed, asleep. But she had been dead, there in her bed, and no gentle shaking, no offers of the already-prepared lunch, had been able to wake her. What a mystery, how devious was death, to creep so wickedly in so many quiet ways. Death was certain: her luck had run out. Death sat with her there in the carriage, but what questions could she put to this unwanted guest? She must decide, here, on the five fifty-eight, about the existence of God, and the power of human love, and the nature of chance.
She had not neglected these subjects entirely. But she had postponed judgement.
Now she would have to decide. Time had run out.
She had always, until this moment, politely supposed that God must exist. At least, she had given him the benefit of the doubt – as she had given it to Fred Jamieson. But it did strike her now, again with a sudden electric sense of shock, that her own premature and sudden death would disprove the existence of God entirely, and that her faith in him had rested only on her belief that he would fulfil his obligations as she would fulfil hers. And if he failed (as the very existence of the hospital suggested he might), then he could not exist at all. How could a God exist who would be so careless of his contracts as to allow her to die and break her own contracts to her own infants?