A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

by Margaret Drabble

  He looked at her now, as she sat there, sipping her gin, and eating idly the pricy small squares: her face, as ever, was plain in repose, a little blank and grim, and the fatigue of sightseeing let the coarse dullness of her skin show through her make-up. He was continually amazed by how plain she really was, how featureless, for when he had first known her she had seemed to him beautiful, exotic and obviously to be admired: now, knowing her better, he could see that it was animation only that lent her a certain feverish grace. The grace was real enough, but more rarely bestowed him. When still, she was nothing, and her face, which had once dazzled and frightened him, now merely touched him. One day, months ago, at the beginning of their engagement, she had shown him in a moment of confidence a photograph of herself as a schoolgirl, and the sight of her stolid, blank, fat face peering miserably at the camera from amongst her smaller-featured, more evidently acceptable schoolfriends, had filled him with despair, for she appeared to him for the first time as pathetic, and if there was anything he hated it was the onslaughts of pathos. But by then it was too late, and he was no more able to refuse the temptations of pity than he had been able, earlier, to refuse those of an envious admiration. More and more, as his first clear impressions of her dissolved into a confusing blur of complications, he found himself harking back to what others had said of her, as though their estimate of her value must be more just, as though it could not be possible that he should have married such a woman through a sense of obligation. Others found her beautiful, so beautiful she must be, and it was his fault only if he had ceased to see it.

  When she had finished the gin, and all but one of the little squares (he could not even to himself call them canapés, so deeply did the word offend his sense of style, but then there was no word in his background for such an object, for in his background such objects did not exist, so what was one to call them but canapés?) she leant back in her chair, letting her headsquare fall to the ground, and not even acknowledging it when a hovering uniformed boy handed it back to her. She looked tired, the gin had affected her; she had a weak head. He was not surprised when she said, ‘Let’s have dinner here in the hotel tonight, I haven’t the strength to go out again. Let’s have dinner in their panoramic restaurant, shall we?’

  And he agreed, relieved that he would not have to pass once more that day the grinning familiar boot boy, and they went up to their room and changed, and then they went up to the vast glassy restaurant on the top floor, and looked out over the city as they silently ate, and she complained about her steak, and he got annoyed when the head waiter came and wrenched him from his orange, saying that he would prepare it, as though a man could not peel his own orange (and in fact he disliked peeling oranges, almost as much as he disliked cleaning his own shoes, he disliked the juice in his fingernails, and the pith that he was obliged through laziness to devour) and she got annoyed with him for getting annoyed with the head waiter, and they silently left the restaurant and went silently to bed, disturbed only by the uncontrollable whine of the air-conditioning, which neither of them had been able to subdue. In Marrakesh, oranges had hung upon the trees by the roadside, and thudded warmly from time to time at their feet, and the walls and buildings had been orange too, and beautiful against the distant icy snows of the Atlas mountains, where lions walk, but not beautiful to him, and they had quarrelled there, quarrelled bitterly, because they could not find the Bahia Palace, and because he would not take, not trusting any, a guide, and because they had both been frightened of the mobbing children.

  In the morning they went to Rabat. They did not particularly want to go to Rabat, but it was necessary to go somewhere, and they had heard that Rabat was worth a visit. When they got there, they did not know what to see, so they looked at the tediously modern-looking palace, and wondered at the vast numbers of local sightseers, until they bought a paper and discovered, though imperfectly, that there was some day of national holiday in progress. They sat in a French café, and looked at the paper, and wondered where to have lunch, and he thought once more that money, instead of enlarging prospects, confined them and made choice pointless. There seemed to be an expensive enough restaurant called after something called the Tower of Hassan, so they went and had lunch there and he was foolishly taken in yet again by the charm of the idea of eating horrible semolina, which remained horrible however cooked, and then they wondered what to do next, and she said, ‘Well, let’s go and see Hassan’s tower.’

  ‘Do you really want to go and see Hassan’s tower?’ he asked irritably. ‘You know what it’ll be like, just some crumbly great incomprehensible lump of brickwork, crawling with guides and postcard sellers and pick-pockets. And on a festival too. It’ll be even more horrid than usual.’

  ‘It might be nice,’ she said, ‘you never know, it might be nice.’ Though he could see that she took his point, and that she too quailed.

  ‘It won’t be nice,’ he said, ‘and anyway we’ll never find it.’

  ‘It must be on the map,’ she said, and produced from her handbag the little chart which the hotel had given her, on which all the streets were misnamed, and which was so badly drawn that it was impossible to follow. And it was not on the map.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she said, ‘if we just drive around a little we’re sure to see it. I mean to say, it must be important, or it wouldn’t have restaurants named after it.’

  ‘That’s what you said about the Bahia Palace,’ he said.

  ‘But this is different,’ she said. ‘It’s a tower. It must, well, it must kind of stick up. One ought to be able to see it over the top of things.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do, then?’ he asked. ‘Just get in the car and drive around until I see something that might be the Tower of Hassan? Eh?’

  This, it turned out, was just what she did expect, so, with a suspension of disbelief, of much the same order as when he would embark, at home, so continually to drive through the London rush hour, he got into the car and they started to drive around looking for a tower. Driving was hazardous, because he had not grasped the principle that those making right-hand turns have the right of way, and consequently his estimate of the Moroccan character could not but be lowered by his experiences at junctions. However, somewhat to his surprise, they did very shortly locate something that could only be the tower after which their restaurant had been named, and so they parked the car and got out to look at it. It was, as he had foretold, incomprehensible: a square red block, decorated in some system which they did not understand, and baffling in its solid lack of beauty.

  ‘Well,’ she said, after they had stared at it in silence for some time from the safety of the road, ‘I suppose it must be very old.’

  ‘It looks old,’ he conceded.

  ‘There must be a good view from the top,’ she ventured. ‘Look, there are people on top.’

  And there were, indeed, people on top.

  ‘We could go up,’ was the next thing she said.

  ‘What?’ he exclaimed, with a violence that was only half assumed. ‘What? All the way up that thing? And I bet there isn’t even a lift. I’m not climbing all the way up there just to get my pocket picked. And I bet it’d cost us a fortune even to get in.’

  She did not answer, but wandered slowly forward onto the short scrubby turf of the surrounding open space. He followed her, watching her movements with a grudging pleasure: she was wearing a navy wool skirt and jersey, and in the bright light they had a heavy absorbent matt dull warmth that curiously suited her skin. On the turf, she stopped, without turning to him, and said, ‘I should like to go up.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said, but he followed her to the foot of the tower, nonetheless. He knew that she had made her mind up, and he was too alarmed by the country to let her go alone, and also ashamed that she, though afraid, had the bravado to continue. It annoyed him to know that although she was wholly impelled by timidity, her actions would belie her motives: she would climb the tower, though trembling in every limb through fear of rape, whereas he, a
lone, and afraid only for his pocket and his sensibilities, would probably not venture.

  There was no lift, and no doorkeeper or entrance fee either; access was free. She stepped first out of the sunlight and into the gloom of the doorway: there was just a broad, square, mounting path, without steps.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll be a long way,’ he said, ‘and probably smelly.’

  ‘I don’t mind the smells,’ she said. ‘If you wait for me here, I’ll go up by myself. I want to see what it’s like.’

  ‘There won’t be anything to see,’ he said, but he started to follow her just the same, being genuinely unable to let her go alone; and moreover, having got so far, there was something irresistible about the idea of ascent. So, with a sense of humiliating risk, he began to climb. They had made several turns of the tower, and had already risen a good few yards above ground level, before he became nervously aware that none of the other people either ascending or descending were tourists: they were all Arabs, and there was not a guide book in sight. It was worse than he had expected. He closed his hand tightly in his pocket over his passport and his wad of traveller’s cheques, and wondered whether he should draw Chloe’s attention to the situation, but she was a yard or two ahead of him, walking slowly and evenly, and not apparently suffering from the breathlessness that threatened him. So, not wishing to make himself conspicuous by calling out in his foreign tongue, he was obliged to follow. None of the Arabs so far, it was fair to say, seemed to be paying him much attention, and nobody had so much as offered him a packet of postcards, so he relaxed a little, as much as the rigour of climbing would allow, and concentrated on watching the glimpses of gradually increasing panorama through the arrow slits on each side of the wall. He wondered if there might, after all, be a view from the top. There were certainly enough people coming and going, and they must be coming and going for something, he assumed: they all seemed to be in a happy holiday mood. He began, gradually, to feel pleased that there had been no lift, no rich man’s way up, no European approach. His pleasure was marred at one point by sudden panic, as he heard above and ahead of him a great deal of high-pitched screaming: he looked anxiously for Chloe, but she was out of sight, round the next bend, and he started to run up the absurdly high incline after her when the source of the screaming hurled itself harmlessly down the tower, and proved to be nothing but a group of very small children, who had climbed to the top simply in order to run breathlessly and hilariously down. Down they rushed, banging into people as they came, losing their footing, falling, rolling, scrambling up again, to be met by amused indulgence from the ascending adults. The men shook their heads and smiled, the women laughed behind their veils. It was clearly a well-established pastime, such usage of Hassan’s tower, and welcomed in the dearth of parks, fairs and playgrounds.

  When he reached the top, the sudden glare of the sun dazzled him, and he could not at first see Chloe. She was standing at one corner of the wide square block, gazing out over the estuary towards the sea: the view was, as she had foreseen, breathtaking. In silence they stared at it, and he thought that it was very beautiful but somehow depressing because totally, totally unimportant, and pointless in a way that beautiful landscapes somehow are, and yet there was Chloe staring at it in exaggerated affected passion as though it mattered, as though it meant something, staring in fact as he had stared at early-morning Tangier ten years ago, and after a moment or two he could stand the sight of her rapture no longer, and he went and sat down on one of the stone parapets, his knees weak from the climb, his breath short, and his spirits unbelievably low from some dreadful bleak sightless premonition of middle age. And as he sat there, at first seeing nothing, his eyes gradually began to take in the other people on top of the tower, who were, in their own way, astonishing enough as a view. The whole of the top of the tower was covered with people: small children were crawling about, mothers were feeding babies, young men were holding the hands of girls and indeed the hands of other young men, boys were sitting on the very edge and dangling their feet into space, and old women who would need a day to recover from the climb were lying back in the sun, for all the world as though they were grandmothers on a beach in England. And a beach in England was what the scene most of all resembled: he saw there the very groups and attitudes that he had seen years ago as a child at Mablethorpe, and as he gazed he felt growing within him a sense of extraordinary familiarity that was in its own way a kind of illumination, for he saw all these foreign people keenly lit with a visionary gleam of meaning, as startling and as breathtaking in its own way as Tangier had once been. He saw these people, quite suddenly, for what they were, for people, for nothing but or other than people; their clothes filled out with bodies, their faces took on expression, their relations became dazzlingly clear, as though the details of their strangeness had dropped away, as though the terms of common humanity (always before credited in principle, but never before perceived) had become facts before his eyes. It was as though he had for a few moments seen through the smoky blur of fear that convinces people that foreigners are all alike, and had focused beyond it upon the true features and distinctions of separate life: there they stood, all of them, alive and separate as people on a London street, brothers and sisters, cousins, the maiden aunt with the two small children, the pretty fast girl with nylons under her long gown and pale green lace veil, the fat woman with her many operations, the student with his Arabic Dostoyevsky. Even their garments, hitherto indistinguishably strange, took upon themselves distinctions. And with the vision, a sense of overwhelming relief settled heavily upon him, for he had been afraid, afraid for years that he had come to the end of the new and the interesting in life: he sat there and watched, watched all those people being, and took pleasure in their being, and as he watched he suddenly became aware that one of the young men at whom he was staring was none other than the boot boy from the hotel. And he stared at the boot boy, and the boot boy stared at him, and their eyes met with recognition, but with no acknowledgement: neither of them smiled, neither of them moved, for there was no way, in that place, of expressing their mutual knowledge. And he saw, too, that the boot boy was with a small woman who was his mother, and that by one hand he held his little brother, who was wearing a best red shiny holiday shirt, and who was about four years old.

  (1966)

  2

  A Voyage to Cythera

  Beloved,

  lost to begin with, never greeted,

  I do not know what tones most please you.

  No more when the future’s wave hangs poised is it you

  I try to discern there. All the greatest

  images in me, far-off experienced landscape,

  towers and towns and bridges and unsuspected

  turns of the way,

  and the power of those lands once intertwined

  with the life of the gods:

  mount up within me to mean

  you, who forever elude.

  Oh, you are the gardens … 1

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul. Helen was so much this way, and with so little lasting justification, that she was continually surprising herself by the intensity of her expectation; she could get excited by the prospect of any journey longer than thirty miles, and the thought of travel to the Continent was enough to reduce her to a state of feverish anticipation. The mere mention of the names of certain places would make her tremble, and she was addicted to railway stations, air terminals, ports, motorways, travel brochures, and all other points and emblems of departure. A phrase in a novel could make her feel weak with desire, and when once at the Gare de l’Est in Paris she saw a train with Budapest written on it, she felt her skin tighten and her hair stand on end. Her most erotic dream
s were not of men but of places; she would dream of piazzas and marble fountains, of mountains and terraces with great lumps of baroque statuary, of great buildings abandoned in green fields, and she would wake from these dreams cold with the sweat of fading passion. There was a certain angle of road that never failed to affect her, whenever she approached it: a rising angle, with a bare empty curve breasting infinity, the blue-sky space of infinity. She always felt that the sea might lie beyond such rising nothingness, and sometimes it was the sea, but more often it was the Caledonian Market or a row of Hampstead houses; though whatever it was was somehow irrelevant, for it was that tense moment of expectation before revelation that she so much cherished.