The Accidental Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

entirely unconnected with the experience of anticipating or recollecting it. She never said to herself, when happy, ‘This is happiness’, and so never recognized it as such when it was taking place. But this did not stop her from thinking, when it was not taking place, that she had a very clear idea of what it was. The truth is that Maria was only really happy when she was thinking of happiness to come, and she was not I think alone in this absurd outlook. It is for some reason far nicer to feel bored, or indifferent, or unexcited, and to think, In a few minutes from now, or a few days, or weeks, I shall be happy, than to be happy and to know, even if not consciously, that the next emotional shift will be away from happiness. Maria had observed many striking examples of this phenomenon. For instance, once, when she and Louise had been friends, they had agreed to go to the theatre together. Maria made the arrangements, and offered to buy the tickets, and when the matter was settled, Louise had said, with a joyful smile (she was easily pleased, it’s no wonder she and Maria never got on that well), ‘I shall look forward to it’. Those were her very words. And to Maria, as she walked back to her room, they suddenly seemed to be quite extraordinary. She realized that Louise had just expressed pleasure at the anticipation of the anticipation of pleasure. And she realized, moreover, that this was by no means uncommon. She had heard people say, ‘I shall look forward to that’, or, ‘I am going to look forward to that’, just as often, if not more often, than she had heard them say, ‘I am looking forward to that’. This could not, in her opinion, be unintentional. In fact, she was fully prepared to believe that what they really looked forward to was not the event itself, the supposed object of the anticipation, such as a visit to the theatre, but the very anticipation, no less, those pleasurable hours, or days, or weeks, of hopeful looking forward, during which the mind’s eye had some cheering goal to set itself on. And it seemed to Maria, once she had realized this, that the scope for perniciousness inherent in this arrangement was infinite.
    So by now Maria was fully aware of what she was doing when, while walking home from a lecture, say, she set her eyes on Sarah’s window and felt a glow of comfort at the thought that in only a few minutes she would be sitting with her friend in the warmth, a mug of tea between her hands, the hiss of the gas fire the only accompaniment to their broken conversation. She knew full well that this glow of comfort was in itself far nicer than anything which her friend’s room held in store for her. She knew this for a fact, but she persisted, and who can blame her.
    Not that Maria’s and Sarah’s friendship comprised nothing more than sitting together in each other’s rooms, or cooking spaghetti bolognese in enormous proportions at midnight, or consuming huge quantities of lasagne at one o’clock in the morning. It was not confined to indoor activities, by any means. For if there was one thing that they both enjoyed, it was the fresh air, provided that it was not too cold outside, or too warm. In particular they favoured the University Parks, since these were not too far from home. It is impossible to analyse the pleasure they derived from these walks, except to say that it was acute, and that because they themselves could never really understand, or picture, this pleasure, then the actual experience of it seemed, for once, far to outweigh any pleasure to be derived from anticipating it. Furthermore, at an hour’s or a day’s distance, Maria would sometimes look back on her most recent walk with pleasure, which is surely little short of miraculous, although implicit in her pleasure, perhaps, was the thought that another equally pleasurable walk was just around the corner. These walks, to sum up, offered pleasure of a different complexion from any that Maria had known before, a