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

school. We were pleased about that. What about yours?’
    ‘Oh, they’re all right, too. I’ve had some dreadful nights with Laura recently. I must say I thought I was through withall that – I mean, the child’s five now – but she says she can’t sleep and has these dreadful nightmares, so she’s been in my bed every night for the last fortnight. It’s wearing me out. Then in the morning she just laughs. She doesn’t kick; it’s just that I can’t sleep with anyone else in the bed.’
    ‘What does Oliver say?’ he asked, and she said, without thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t sleep with Oliver any more,’ and wondered as she said it how she could have made such a mistake, and wondered how to get out of it. But fortunately at that instant his moussaka arrived, making it unnecessary to pursue the subject. Though once it had become unnecessary, she regretted the subject’s disappearance; she thought of saying what was the truth itself – that she had slept with nobody since she had slept with him, that for three years she had slept alone, and that she was quite prepared to sleep alone forever. But she was not entirely sure that he would want to hear it, and she knew that such a remark, once made, could never be retracted, so she said nothing.
    ‘It looks all right,’ he said, staring at the moussaka. He took a mouthful and chewed it, and then he put his fork down and said, ‘Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, what a Proustian experience. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I’m sitting here with you. It tastes of you, this stuff. Oh, God, it reminds me of you. You look so beautiful, you look so lovely, my darling. Oh, God, I loved you so much. Do you believe me – that I really loved you?’
    ‘I haven’t slept with anyone,’ she said, ‘since I last slept with you.’
    ‘Oh, darling,’ he said. And she could feel herself fainting and sighing away, drifting downward on that fatefully descending, eddying spiral, like Paolo and Francesca in hell, helpless, the mutually entwined drifting fall of all true lovers, unresisting. It was as though three years of solitude had been nothing but a pause, nothing but a long breath before this finalacknowledgement of nature, damnation and destiny. She turned towards him and said, ‘Oh, my darling, I love you. What can I do? I love you.’ And he, with the same breath, said, ‘I love you, I all the time love you, I want you,’ and they kissed there, their faces already so close that they hardly had to move.
    Like many romantics, they habitually connived with fate by remembering the names of restaurants and the streets they had once walked along as lovers. Those who forget forget, he said to her later, and those who do not forget will meet again.
(1968)

4
    A Pyrrhic Victory
    They grew more and more tired as they climbed the hill, and although it was past two o’clock and there was no reason why they should not sit down and eat their lunch, nobody suggested stopping. Anne was exhausted: her head ached with the sun, she felt both sick and hungry, and her feet and ankles were bleeding, scratched by the coarse, twiggy plants that bordered the narrow track. A cloud of insects followed her, biting from time to time. The passion flower that Charles had picked for her so gallantly from the tree outside the grocer’s was wilting in her hot hand: she remembered how Hannah had laughed at him for picking it, and she discreetly let it drop. Charles, who was following, trod on it without noticing. He was carrying the lunch, and his hands were full of paper packages, so that every time she stumbled or scrambled up a steep patch she had to manage for herself, although he reached out chivalrously and ineffectually to help her. It made him look silly, to reach out and achieve nothing but a gesture. She wished he would not do it, she needed not to think him silly.
    She wanted so much to sit down, and to make the others sit down, but she was afraid to suggest it in case they should laugh at