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

her, or leave her there and go on without her. Once she had admitted she was tired, she would have to give up the climb, in order to preserve an appearance of free-will. She did not want to betray her weakness, and if she spoke, weaknessof some kind would be forced upon her: either she would be the first to give in, or she would have to admit how much she needed their company by going on after confessing that she was exhausted. So she said nothing. She went on walking, and hoped that they would at least stop when they reached the top of the hill.
    Johnny and Hannah were walking on yards ahead, showing no signs of fatigue: remembering the night before, she wondered how on earth they managed to walk so fast. They had all made themselves very sick on a horrid mixture of Vino Aleatico and Liebfraumilch, a mixture in which the crudity of contrast had struck even her innocent palate, as well as her stomach: she had spent the night leaning over the wash-bowl, trying hard to dissuade Charles from holding her hand, and she had gathered from Hannah that she and Johnny had suffered much the same in their room. And yet here they all were now, striding up hillsides as though they were in the best of health and condition. Did the others find this kind of behaviour natural? Was it only she herself, at seventeen and straight out of school, who reacted with such amazement, with such bewildered admiration? And who was it who had set this ridiculously high standard they were all so sternly reaching for?
    She supposed that it must be Johnny. Hannah and Charles both had their lapses from the general level of high, gritty grace, they both had impulses which the other two, and indeed even she herself, in Charles’s case, derided: Charles had his flower-plucking, hand-holding tendencies, and Hannah, for example, an occasional excess of literacy in unfamiliar languages, which the others found for some unrevealed but unsurprising reason ludicrous. And as for Anne herself, what was she but an airy mass of loopholes? So full of holes was she that there seemed at times to be no fabric: she had not been able to take anything without some inner protest, notthe hitch-hiking by night, nor the allocation of bedrooms, nor the rash expenditure of money, nor the excessive mixing of excessive drink, not this high, insurmountable hill. Her whole self rebelled at everything they did, and yet somehow, with immense effort, she managed to keep her mouth shut and do it.
    Her body kept telling her that she could not go on any longer, borne down by sickness, hunger and heat, but she did not listen, though at times she thought that the strain of continuing in all this foreign, unfamiliar landscape would make her simply drop down dead or unconscious in protest. It was an initiation, she knew that, into more than the facts of what she had for the first time done: this emotional state itself would be with her, on and off, forever, this sense that at any moment she would cease to bear it and cease by some stroke of simultaneous dissolution to exist. Throughout her life it would recur, as she would continue to put herself deliberately into situations which were foreign and intolerable, and as she would continue, wearily, without pleasure, but with determination, to tolerate them. These three people here, and the place itself, and the speed, and all those other people and places extending before her, she would accommodate them or die, and sometimes she felt that dying was the easier, the more likely of these alternatives.
    It was Johnny, of course, who demanded the speed, who set the standards, who was himself the foreignness she fought against in person. He was the only one who had never exposed himself: he had got in first, he had been playing this wandering game for two whole years before they had met him, he was the real impregnably negative American thing itself. Everything he spoke of, dollars and railroads and bars and baseball, was so strange to her that her mind ached