A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble. Part 8.
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The headmistress met her on the station. She had been met by many such people, on many such stations, and had always, at the time, thought to herself how nice they were, these people. It was only afterwards, in retrospect, that she would come to admit to herself that some of them were quite frightful. She wondered, now, as she walked up to the waiting woman in her fur coat, if one of the consequences of her last day of life would be that the dislike would always, now, set in instantly, that the judgement would always, now, be made at once, because there was so little time left for other ways of doing things. The thought crossed her mind, in the instant as she approached, paused, checked that it was the right person with the right look of recognition, and extended her cold hand: and it was so – she knew at once that she did not like this woman at all, that she could have no time for her at all. Afterwards, she thought, if I had not conceived such a motion, it would not have been so: as part of her was to believe, despite the evidence, for the rest of her life, that if she had not gone to the doctor that morning, the thing inside her would not have existed at all. She should never have condoned its existence.
As they drove back to the school, the headmistress in the fur coat talked about town councillors and local education authority people and how one had to give them sherry. She then started to complain bitterly about the fact that her school had been turned into a comprehensive. As Jenny Jamieson had accepted the invitation because the school was a comprehensive, she was not well inclined towards this line of conversation. Nor did she think much of Miss Trueman’s reasons for despising town councillors and aldermen, nor of her tact in uttering them. She had often received surprises of the same kind and could never decide whether those who spoke to her in such a vein simply mistook her own moderately fashionable and public political views and prejudices – or whether they were utterly indifferent to them and would have uttered them stubbornly, tactlessly, regardless of the nature of the audience.
So she did not have much to say in reply to the small talk of the headmistress, Miss Trueman. However, upon arriving at the school, she managed to make the usual obligatory remarks about the charm of its location, the modernity of its buildings, its handsome array of Speech Day flowers.
They were to have sherry before the ceremony. Jenny Jamieson went to the headmistress’s lavatory and discovered to her alarm that she was losing rather a lot of blood: doubtless the surgeon had prodded whatever was producing the blood rather hard and had disturbed it considerably. She had nothing to stop it with: she had not brought anything, had not thought of it. She disliked the headmistress too much to ask her if she had any Tampax. Anyway, she thought, she is probably too old to need such things, this woman. She had a moment of panic, standing there in the centrally heated lavatory. But she decided to ignore the blood. After all, she said to herself, it takes an awful lot of blood to show. One can feel quite soaked sometimes and when one looks at one’s clothes it hasn’t even got through one layer, let alone to the surface.
Nevertheless, she declined a glass of sherry. She was not feeling too well, and the room was far too hot. She had a glass of water instead, as there were no soft drinks. So much for gracious living, she thought, as she watched Miss Trueman deftly condescending to the town councillors and the staff, and endured a succession of people who said how wise she was not to drink before speaking and how glad they were that they didn’t have to speak themselves. She felt rather dizzy and was extremely aware of the place where the surgeon had poked her.
There were some tropical fish in a tank on a bookshelf. They had some babies, protected by an inner glass tank. They would have eaten their own babies otherwise, the mothers. She commented on the fish and admired them, for want of better things to say, and a woman to whom she had been introduced started to tell a story about her own children’s goldfish and how they kept dying.
Jenny Jamieson did not like this conversation because her own fish had died the year before, and she had been extremely unhappy on the day of their death, when they had floated around keeling over, the two of them, at a sad angle, as though they had lost their sense of watery balance. She had disliked the sense of death in the room, but had been unable to save or kill them and had not moved them out of the room because it would have seemed to her to be graceless, heartless, to make them die in a strange place. Let them die here, she had thought, and had endured their passing.
Then she had gently buried them at the end of the garden under the lower branches of the cotoneaster.
But what was this woman saying to her now, interrupting her own memories of funeral? She was saying, in a harsh and brutal nasal voice, laughing as she said it,
‘And I told the kids I’d buried them. I’d buried them in the garden, I said, but of course I hadn’t. I’d put them in the obvious place..’ And one or two other people laughed, but Jenny had missed her cue, she didn’t know what the other woman was saying.
She knew her face had looked momentarily blank and baffled, and she started to speak, to say that where else should one bury them but in the garden, when the other woman said, heartily, ‘You know, I flushed them away, well, I mean to say, wouldn’t you?’ and Jenny worked out that this woman had actually put her children’s goldfish down the lavatory and then said that she had buried them in the garden. She did not know which was more unnatural, the woman’s insensitivity, or her own sensitivity, which made her so slow to recognize the meaning of words, the end of life, the obvious places to put dead bodies. She had flushed their little gold bodies down into the sewers, and what was wrong with that? Jenny Jamieson shivered and trembled: heaps of corpses filled her vision. She had buried her fish gently, reluctantly, sorrowfully: they had been in her charge and they had died. Her solicitude had been more than godly, for God left dead dogs on beaches and crushed rabbits on the brows of roads.
Gold spectacles, gold fillings, mounds of pilfering and salvage. But flesh is not for salvage: it is not even flotsam or jetsam. It is waste.