A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble. Part 7.
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Her children would be ruined by her death. No corrupt adult reassurances, no promises of treats, would buy them off. Any confidence in fate would be ruined by her removal. She had loved them so, and it was her love that would undo them. Her friend who had killed herself had not loved her child, so the child had survived. It was her own love that would undo them.
The apathy of God, the random blows of fate and the force for good and ill of human love: these things, combined, constituted a world so bitter, so dark, so tragic, that she felt her heart weep and die like her body.
They would cry for her and there would be no comfort. She would be dead and gone and powerless, and thus they would know the dreadful truth.
She was parting herself from God, she was leaving and turning her face from him.
Only in leaving him did she realize how much she would have liked him to be there: as she would have liked her husband to like her. But it was not to be. God was too weak, too feeble, she had looked after him too nicely for too long. She had felt sorry for him because of his non-existence. If I give him a chance to behave better, she had thought to herself for years, vaguely, maternally, he might learn how to do it: he might learn better from me and show his face to me.
But he couldn’t show her his face because he didn’t have one. That was why she hadn’t seen it so far. She felt sorry for him, as one for a friend caught out making an empty boast. She didn’t want to question him too closely about his reasons for having lied to so many for so long: she didn’t want to make a fool of him. She was very careful, was Jenny Jamieson: she never made a fool of people on the box, and she was very delicate about doing it even in her own head. She always regretted it when people insisted on condemning themselves out of their own mouths, and she would do her best to prevent them. So now, too, she thought (or could imagine) that she would soon find some means of concealing from God her own violent and utter loss of faith in him: she would find some way of humouring him along. There was no point in getting angry about the matter: he was too weak to withstand anger.
The train stopped at a station, started again, continued on its way.
What grieved her most was the thought that her children would never know about the intensity of her love, the depth of her concern. It was impossible to convey to them the nature of her emotion. To a lover, one could explain such things: lovers, ripped asunder by death, at least know that the other, on the point of death, had thought of the terms of love. For a lover, death need not be a rejection and an abandoning. But for a child, it could not be anything else: no child could know how much he was loved, his mind could never encompass the massive adult passion.
She thought, I will write them a letter. In this letter, I will explain how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to abandon and forsake them, and I will give the letter to my solicitor, and he will lock it away in a safe and give them each their copy when they are eighteen.
But she knew that she would not write such a letter. For the writing of it would seal her own death warrant and date it, and it was as yet undated. She could not afford to run a risk of making certain what was at the moment at least open to hope. So she would die, in three weeks’ time, in a year’s time, and the letter would be unwritten and they would never know. She died and left us, they would say, because she didn’t care enough for us, she didn’t care enough to live.
She imagined their faces, their nightmares, their sick and endless deforming resentments, their lonely wakenings, their empty arms, their boarding schools, their substitute consolations.
And this was the price of love.
It did not seem tolerable, it did not seem possible.
She would go out like a light, she would be switched off forever. There would be nothing to grieve with, no ghost to hover anxiously over their heads. She would be forced to default, coerced by death into breaking her contract. She had contracted herself to her children, for the period of their infancy: she would have to break the contract and she would have no excuse.
The bitterness of it filled her and possessed her, but she was beginning to breathe again, because she knew, now, what it was that she feared. She had faced it, and it was nearly time to get off the train; she could think about it again later. She would store it away, for future consideration. And meanwhile, she would have to think of something to say to the girls. She opened her bag, and took out an old envelope and began to scribble herself some notes for a speech.