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

Author:Margaret Drabble [Drabble, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2010-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

(1972)

8

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

There was once this woman. She was in her thirties. She was quite famous, in a way. She hadn’t really meant to be famous: it had just happened to her, without very much effort on her part. Sometimes she thought about it, a little bewildered, and said to herself, This is me, Jenny Jamieson, and everybody knows it’s me.

Her husband was quite famous, too, but only to people who knew what he was doing. He was famous in his own world. He was the editor of a weekly, and so he had quite a pull with certain kinds of people. It was through his pull, really, that Jenny had got her job. She was getting bored, the little child was at nursery school and the big ones at big school, so he had looked about for her and asked a few friends and found her a nice little job at a television station. But he hadn’t quite bargained for how she would catch on. Everybody had always thought Jenny was pretty – in fact, she’d been a very recognizable type for years, had Jenny: pretty, a little restless, driven into the odd moment of malice by boredom, loving her children, cooking dinners, flirting a little (or possibly more) with her husband’s friends and old lovers. She deserved a little job. But when she got going, when she got on the screen, she was transformed. She became, very quickly, beautiful. It took a few weeks, while she experimented with hairstyles and clothes and facial expressions. And suddenly, she was a beauty, and total strangers talked of her with yearning. And that wasn’t all, either. She was also extremely efficient. Now, she always had been efficient; she’d always been able to get all the courses of a four-course meal onto the table, perfectly cooked, at the right moment. She was never late to collect children from school, she never forgot their dinner money or their swimming things, she never ran out of sugar or lavatory paper or sellotape. So people shouldn’t have been surprised at the way she settled down to work.

She was never late. She never forgot appointments. She never forgot her briefing. She began quietly, interviewing people about cultural events in a spot in an arts programme, and she always managed to say the right things to everyone; she never offended and yet never made people dull. She was intelligent and quick, she had sympathy for everyone she talked to, and all the time she looked so splendid, sitting there shining and twinkling. Everyone admired her, nobody disliked her. In no time at all, she had her own programme, and she was able to do whatever she fancied on it. She used to invite the strangest people to be interviewed, and she would chat to them, seriously, earnestly, cheerfully. She told everybody that she loved her job, that she was so lucky, that it fitted in so well with the children and her husband, that she didn’t have to be out too much.

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