The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble

open a whole bottle of wine. The meal was quite pleasant, and she had a table to herself: it was a quiet time of year. She read
The Years
, and ate her eggs in aspic, and her veal, and forgot about her tooth for a second or two while doing it, being an exceptionally greedy person, and then returned seriously, over the fruit and cheese to the subject of pain.
    It was too much. She wanted to cry. The codeines had no effect at all. She took another. It was as bad as typhoid and slightly worse than childbirth, up till then her high-water marks of pain. She tried to remember how awful it had been in the back of the landrover, with the vomiting and the diarrhoea and the appalling cramping and clutching in her guts, and above all that the sickening anxiety about actual death. Nobody ever died of a toothache, though somebody—was it Dr Johnson?—had said that if toothache were mortal, it would be the most dreaded of all illnesses. That was a reassuring thought, and she quoted it to herself several times while waiting for her bill, then went through a speech from Shakespeare and a sonnet or two from Keats and Milton, an Ode from Horace, and a piece of Virgil.
    The train was thumping unnaturally. She wanted to lie down and cry. When the waiter brought her her bill, she went back to her compartment and lay down on the bed and cried, but it didn’t do much good. Desperately, she rang for the attendant and told him she had toothache. He clucked and shook his head and said he was desolated and offered her an aspirin. She declined it. It had been good to speak to somebody, however.
    After another half hour, she took a couple of sleeping pills and got into bed and had another drink. She had ceased to care whether or not she made herself ill, and wished only to knock herself out. She repeated ‘On His Blindness’ and ‘Westminster Bridge’ several times to herself; they had always been a good charm against pain, and she had gone through them many a time while trying to comply with her husband’s desire for sexual intercourse, for instance, and had shouted them aloud very wildly in childbirth, till the nurses told her to shut up.
    Her head felt like a skull. There was no flesh feeling about it at all, the flesh seemed such irrelevance, a silly perishable covering of the serious matter, which was diseased bone. One might as well
be
dead, she found herself thinking. She had seen a statue once, which had weathered so badly that the head had looked like a skull. The rest of it had been all right, it was only the head that had gone. She felt a bit like that herself. She pinched her leg. It was all right, it was still there, it didn’t hurt. She would try and concentrate on how well her legs felt.
    She must have dozed off at some point, because she was woken up by the feeling of the train grinding to a halt. She opened her blind, and found that they were in the middle of high dark mountains, at a tiny station. The pain of returning consciousness was so bad that she felt like leaping off and demanding extraction from a local dentist. She couldn’t see a place name: perhaps it was some kind of frontier. A lot of people were getting down from the train and heading for the buffet, which curiously enough (it was one o’clock in the morning) seemed to be open and doing good business. Just as she was wondering whether or not to join them, the attendant knocked on her door and told her the train had stopped for three-quarters of an hour, and how was she, and would she like to get out and have a drink with him in the bar. Why not, she thought to herself, and pulled her coat on over her nightdress, and pushed her feet into her shoes, and staggered out onto the icy platform.
    Her coat was fur lined. It felt rather good momentarily on her bare arms. The whole of the rest of her body felt numb and weightless: she couldn’t feel her legs move. She followed the attendant to the buffet, where he bought her a brandy.