Free A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble

didn’t I?’
    ‘You mean we did it,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t have done it without my help. If I’d rung you, if I’d written to you, it would have started all over again.’
    ‘Do you really think so?’ she said, sadly, without malice, without recrimination. ‘Yes, I suppose you might be right. It takes two to part, just as it takes two to love.’
    ‘It was corrupt,’ he said, ‘to make ourselves live under that perpetual threat.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but remember how lovely it was, how horribly lovely, each time that one relented. Each time one said, “I’ll never see you again … all right, I’ll meet you tomorrow in the usual place at half-past one.” It was lovely.’
    ‘Lovely, but wicked,’ he said.
    ‘Oh, that sensation,’ she said, ‘that sensation of defeat. That was so lovely, every time, every time you touched me, every time I saw you. And I felt so sure, so entirely sure that what you felt was what I felt. Lord, we were so alike. And to think that when I first knew you I couldn’t think of anything to say to you at all; I thought you came from another world, that we had nothing in common at all, nothing except, well, except you know what; I feel it would be dangerous even to mention it, even now. Oh, darling, what a disaster, our being so alike.’
    ‘I liked it, though,’ he said. ‘I liked breaking up together. Better than having it done to one, better than doing it.’
    ‘Yes, but more seriously incurable,’ she said. And silence threatening to fall once more, she said quickly, ‘Anyway, tell me what you’re doing round here. I mean to say, one has to have some reason for coming to a place like this.’
    ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I was looking for you.’
    ‘You are a liar,’ she said, smiling, amazed that even here she could allow herself to be amused; indeed, could not prevent herself from smiling.
    ‘What are you doing here, then?’
    ‘Oh, I had a perfectly good reason,’ she said. ‘You know that false front tooth? Well, yesterday morning I broke it, and I’ve got to do a programme on television tonight, so I went to my dentist and he made me a temporary new bridge, and I had to come round here to the laboratory to pick it up.’
    ‘Have you got it in?’
    ‘Look,’ she said, and turned to face him, smiling, lifting her upper lip.
    ‘Well, that’s convincing enough, I guess,’ he said.
    ‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,’ she said. ‘I bet you haven’t got as good a reason as me. Mine is entirely convincing, don’t you think? I mean, where else could I have had lunch? I think my reason clears me entirely of suspicion of any kind, don’t you?’
    ‘Any suspicion of sentiment?’
    ‘That’s what I meant.’
    He thought for a moment, and then said, ‘I had to call on a man about my income tax. Look, here’s his address.’ And he got an envelope out of his pocket and showed her.
    ‘Ah,’ she said.
    ‘I came here on purpose,’ he said. ‘To think of you. I could have had lunch at lots of places between London Wall and here.’
    ‘You didn’t come here because of me; you came here because it’s the only place you could think of,’ she said.
    ‘It comes to the same thing,’ he said.
    ‘No, it doesn’t,’ she said firmly. She felt creeping upon her the familiar illusion of control, created as always before by a concentration upon trivialities; she reflected that their conversations had always followed the patterns of their times in bed, and that these idle points of contention were like those frivolous, delaying gestures in which she would turn aside, in which he would lie still and stare at the ceiling, not daring to touch her, thus merely deferring the inevitable. Thinking this, and able to live only in the deferment, for now there was no inevitable outcome that she could see, she said, eating her last chip, ‘And how are your children?’
    ‘They’re fine,’ he said, ‘fine. Saul started grammar